Black, Indigenous, and people of color are far more likely to get sick and die from the 10 leading causes of death due to a range of factors. Among these is lack of access and the cascading effects of racism, prejudice, stereotyping, and unconscious bias on minority health. And unfortunately, this is a historic problem, with injustices such as the Tuskegee syphilis experiment that started in the 1930s leading to a deep mistrust of the medical system that still lingers in the Black community today.
Dr. Hyman recently explored this history and current practices in the medical system in conversations with Dr. Charles Modlin and Harriet Washington. He also spoke with Dr. Modlin and Tawny Jones about the importance of creating culturally competent healthcare initiatives to remove many of the barriers that perpetuate racial health disparities.
Dr. Charles Modlin is a Kidney Transplant Surgeon, Urologist, Executive Director of Minority Health, and the Cleveland Clinic Physician Lead for Public Health. He is the past President of Cleveland Clinic Medical Staff, Member Board of Governors and Board of Trustees. He founded and directs Cleveland Clinic’s Minority Men’s Health Center (MMHC) and in 2003 established Cleveland Clinic’s Annual Minority Men’s Health Fair. In 2011, he was named by The Atlanta Post as one of the Top 21 Black Doctors in America. He graduated from Northwestern University and Northwestern University Medical School, completed a six-year residency in Urology at New York University, a three-year fellowship in kidney transplantation surgery at Cleveland Clinic and joined the Cleveland Clinic Staff in 1996. He is a noted national leader for eliminating health disparities. Honors include appointment to the Ohio Commission on Minority Health by two Ohio Governors, Northwestern University Presidential Alumni Medal, 2007 MLK Community Service Award, Call & Post 100 Top Influential Leaders, Cleveland Magazine Best Doctors, Cleveland Clinic Bruce Hubbard Stewart Humanitarianism Award, and 2015 Black Professional Association Professional of the Year recognition.
Harriet A. Washington has been the Shearing Fellow at the University of Nevada's Black Mountain Institute, a Research Fellow in Medical Ethics at Harvard Medical School, a senior research scholar at the National Center for Bioethics at Tuskegee University, and a visiting scholar at DePaul University College of Law. She has held fellowships at the Harvard T.H. Chan School of Public Health and Stanford University. She is the author of Deadly Monopolies, Infectious Madness, and Medical Apartheid, which won a National Book Critics Circle Award, the PEN/Oakland Award, and the American Library Association Black Caucus Nonfiction Award.
Tawny Jones is an accomplished Administrator at the Cleveland Clinic. For 19 years, she has served as a well-respected leader, managing patient concentric care initiatives, creating value, and delivering results in quality improvement, efficient resource management, and health system optimization for various clinical departments. Currently, Tawny leads clinical operations at the Cleveland Clinic Center for Functional Medicine where the goal is to establish the efficacy of Functional Medicine and demonstrate its cost effectiveness and its ability to improve health. Her passion for the promotion of preventative health services and community-based interventions gave impetus to the development of several clinical programs. The Functioning for LifeTM shared medical program for chronic disease management is her brainchild and has proven to be a successful model for addressing lifestyle and behavior change. Tawny is also on the African Employee Resource Group Steering Committee and is committed to helping minorities achieve their career goals.
Find Dr. Hyman’s full-length conversation, “Why We Have The Worst Health Outcomes Of All Industrialized Nations,” with Dr. Charles Modlin, Dr. Leonor Osorio, and Tawny Jones here:
Find Dr. Hyman’s full-length conversation, “How We Are Poisoning Our Children,” with Harriet Washington here:
This episode is brought to you by Four Sigmatic. Right now Four Sigmatic has an exclusive deal only for Doctor’s Farmacy listeners. Receive up to 39% off on their bestselling Lion’s Mane Coffee bundles. To get this deal, just go to foursigmatic.com/hyman
1st -Lorain Ohio USA
0:45
your-gilrs-here.online
They absolutely were used and it wasn’t just in America, in Africa too.
No bottle water. All bad especially for women. As far as diet …African Americans suffer from diabetes, heart disease and obesity…because this diet is not the diet their bodies were designed to eat. Genetically they are designed to eat foods from their geographical origin. I’m positive before being brought to America they weren’t allowed to pack a bag with great grandmother’s receipe cards. I know people have been experimenting on humans from almost the beginning of the birth of modern medicine…and let’s not forget, please do not forget, what Hitler and his followers did to the Jews and others in their horrid camps. Not just African Americans but other cultural groups suffer from westernization diets. Unfortunately. My son researched his genetic geographic origin…he eats as close to how they ate before being Americanized…he’s never been healthier or happier. God designed us to live a certain way to be healthy…not commanded….but designed. SAD is not it! We are the human race designed by God to glorify Him. The way we treat one another does not glorify God.
I would also add poorer seniors to this list, no matter their color.
Were these interviews recent? No masks? No social distancing? — no explanation why?
Hey Doc, great to show health disparities in different groups and communities. Can I expect you to do a show on the health disparity among white people? Do you know white people in the US , outside of the people living in Russia during the fall of communism are the only group of people in the developed world since we started keeping statistics that actually show a decrease in their life expectancies? Are you going to be talking about that? Are you going to be talking about how the two scientists who discovered this and wrote a paper on it sent it to JAMA, and this report that showed millions of white people who are dying years before they should had the study refused by JAMA, not in months or weeks or days, but almost immediately?
I think it is great you bring up the government’s involvement with the Tuskeegee experiment that claimed the lives of hundreds of black men close to 100 years ago. Maybe one day we will have people talk about the involvement of the government in ignoring the waterfall of Fentanyl that has been coming from China via the USPS and which has in the last 10 year killed hundreds of thousands of Americans from overdose and abuse, the majority of which have been white.