According to a recent study looking at the Medicare population, the answer appears to be yes.
MedPage Today reports a study showing that elderly white patients had colon cancer screening rates ranging from 39 to 47 percent, compared to 29 to 38 percent in blacks and 23 to 33 percent in Hispanics.
First off, all those rates are dismally low. There should be no reason that colon cancer screening rates are below 50 percent.
Next, access to care shouldn’t be an issue, as this study looked at patients who were on Medicare. Like treatment for heart disease, where the numbers show a similar disparity, physicians need to be vigilant in offering the same treatment options and screening tests to minority patients.
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- 15 cancer screening posts you may have missed
- A missed colon cancer after four doctor visits
- Should you be screened for oral cancer, and are companies profiting from the uncertainty?
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I am prepared to be clearly in the minority on this view but I believe that these kinds of disparities are essentially irrelevant to my practice. Who knows why they exist? Social scients and public policy experts get paid lots of money to figure these things out – doctors get paid very well to do things that have nothing to do with figuring out why these disparities exist.
If it does turn out that doctors are giving sub-standard care to their minority patients, the solution is for doctors to STOP doing that. But the simple existence of a disparity doesn’t show that this is the case at all. Our goal as providers should not be equal rates of screening across all races, our goal should be simply to give everyone excellent care regardless of race. The two are not the same.
I’ve come to resent this kind of study. A researcher demonstrates a racial or gender disparity in some area of life, and leaves the strong implication that the disparity is due to racism or sexism.
Concerning colonoscopy, every middle-aged man I know who’s had one, had it after lengthy nagging by his wife and daughters.
No family structure — no colonoscopy.
This is a cultural issue. In many cultures, preventative care is seen as just asking for problems and people think it’s a waste of time and money. Sometimes there’s a stigma against getting such care. For example, in minority-rich southern California and Arizona, many doctors are required to speak Spanish. Not for psychiatrists. Their patients are mostly white. It follows that people who were more Americanized (including Hispanics) are more likely to believe in psychiatry. Perhaps whites are more receptive to preventative screening due to influence of peers, family, and other cultural aspects od their lives. This is an outreach issue, not a physician issue.
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