As the Medical Director of the Kansas Business Group on Health I’m sometimes asked to weigh in on topics that might affect employers or employees. This is a reprint of a blog post from KBGH:

The stark differences in health outcomes

We should never reduce any population of people to a set of statistics. Every one of those “statistics” has a story. But here are a few numbers that should get our attention:

African-Americans have a rate of COVID-19 that is three times higher than the infection rate of the population as a whole. Even worse, the risk of death of an African-American person with COVID-19 far exceeds that of other racial groups. While people of white, Latinx, and Asian descent have death rates that all fall between 20 and 23 deaths per 100,000 people, African-Americans have suffered a death rate more than twice as high: 50.3 deaths per 100,000 people. About one out of every 2,000 black people in America have already died of COVID-19. Let me repeat that: one two-thousandth of African Americans are already dead. From one disease. A similar death rate among white people would have resulted in almost 100,000 deaths just in that ethnic group so far. And sadly, Kansas has the highest racial disparity of any of the 41 states reporting such data.

But the damage is not limited to viral illnesses. Americans in general have lives about three years shorter than citizens of peer countries like those in Western Europe.

African-American men have a life expectancy that is, in turn, almost five years shorter than the American average. This means that an African-American man loses the better part of a decade in life expectancy compared to an average western European citizen.

And almost all of this difference is due to heart disease deaths, the risk of which is readily modifiable with solid, basic medical care.

What are the reasons for this disparity?

The basic medical care of black people is neglected for multiple reasons in our country, including a well-deserved historic lack of trust in the medical system by black people. Remember that in the Tuskegee Syphilis Experiment the U.S. Public Health Service intentionally and secretly withheld treatment from a group of black men with syphilis from 1932 to 1972 to study the “natural history” of the disease, jeopardizing the health of the men and any future partners. 1972!

A second problem is a dearth of black physicians, starting in training. African-Americans are tragically underrepresented in medical school. While African-Americans make up 13.4% of the American population, they make up only 7.3% of medical students. This disparity, while slowly shrinking over time, has real consequences. Patients may do better when cared for by someone who looks like they do. A 2018 randomized trial found that black men had far better outcomes when cared for by black doctors: rates of screening for hypertension, diabetes, high cholesterol, and obesity went up markedly in men with black doctors, by more than 25% in some cases. The difference appeared to be due to improved communication. Patients were simply more likely to bring up other health problems when assigned to a black doctor. Interestingly, uptake of “invasive” screenings—tests involving probing or a blood draw–increased only for the group assigned a black doctor. This would seem to reinforce the idea that trust, long missing with the medical establishment, is a vital part of the doctor-patient relationship. And the cultural knowledge imparted by someone from your own community can be priceless, something we have found in our CDC work on community health workers.

The increased rate of screening demonstrated in this study could have huge health implications. The investigators tried to estimate the effect of having more black doctors in the population as a whole and found that even a modest increase could reduce the black-white gap in heart disease mortality by 19%, and the and the overall black-white gap in male life expectancy by 8%.

Efforts are being made to attack this problem from the start. After all, the lack of black trainees isn’t simply the result of fewer black kids wanting to be doctors. Quite the contrary. Locally, the Medical Society of Sedgwick County sends member physicians every year to talk to high school students about the process of applying for and completing medical training. Nationally, the American Medical Association has a program called “Doctors Back to School” to facilitate physicians of color visiting grade schools to encourage minority students to consider careers in medicine. Kids cannot be what they cannot see, as the platitude goes.

But the real impediment to getting more black doctors probably lies in greater systemic reform of the type that is being aggressively advocated for nationwide. We need to see this as a failure of the system, not a failure of individual people. As you watch protests unfold nationally and locally, I hope your view of them changes when you see them through this lens.