Black cancer matters: Time’s up for medicine’s race problem

Natasha Pszenicki
WEST END FINAL

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A new study has found that Black women in the US with the most common forms of breast cancer are 42 per cent more likely to die of the disease than white women. This is partly due to differences in the way DNA repair genes express themselves in white and black women

Despite being familiar with disparities in healthcare black women face, reading this felt like a gut punch. The key thing to note is that these differences have been historically under-examined due to decades of exclusion of black women from medical research.

In recent years, thanks to writers like Caroline Criado-Perez exposing the gender bias that affects our everyday lives, we have become statistically certain of what has become known as the “one-size-fits-men” approach – how men have often been the default when it comes to both research and the design of just about everything.

These disparities range from the slightly irritating – the average smartphone is too big for most women’s hands – to the fatal. Women in Britain are 50 per cent more likely to be misdiagnosed following a heart attack because heart failure trials generally use male participants.

We are also now starting to realise, all too slowly, the staggering extent to which the same is true for whiteness. In 2020, when London medical student Malone Mukwende noticed he was only taught about clinical signs and symptoms on white skin, he decided that this pace of change was too slow for him. So he created Mind the Gap, a handbook for black and brown skin.

When she was 38 weeks pregnant, my mum was taken into hospital and told she had pre-eclampsia, a potentially fatal condition. Lying in a quiet ward with her blood pressure skyrocketing, she couldn’t understand why the doctors wouldn’t induce labour, something she, a medical negligence lawyer, knew was standard procedure.

As a black woman, her words are hauntingly accurate: “I could easily have become just a statistic.” All of this begs the uncomfortable question: is medicine systemically racist?

This was 24 years ago. Since then, strides have been made in medical and racial progress. But stories like this among black women, who still face huge disparities in healthcare, remain all too common.

This historic colour-blindness and gender-blindness in medical research which takes white masculinity as the default puts black women at an often-fatal disadvantage. Many are familiar now with the host of depressing statics surrounding black women in healthcare: how we are at a higher risk of dying during pregnancy and childbirth in the UK, we are more likely to get Covid, we are more likely to have miscarriages.

During my first year of university, when I started suffering from chronic stomach pains, I was repeatedly sent on my way from GP appointment after GP appointment, paracetamol in hand, asked to “just double-check” I wasn’t pregnant. After flogging down to London for a (very painful) scan, one doctor even suggested the problem might be psychosomatic. Of course, I encountered many conscientious and caring medical professionals. But I started to doubt myself, I felt guilty, as if I was wasting precious NHS time.

It wasn’t until I was eventually taken to A&E in agony and hospitalised after enduring the pain for five months that I considered a question that I’m sure many other black women have asked themselves while lying on a hospital bed - why wasn’t I taken more seriously in the first place?

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