I have tackled a new beat on health disparities reporting by trying to demonstrate what structural racism looks like on the ground: Who is not getting chosen for medical school or elite medical training; who is not getting their work published in top medical journals; who is not getting access to the best care, drugs, and clinical trials; and who is dismissing that racism is a problem within medicine?
Rather than simply reporting on existing data or new studies, I tried to go beyond the numbers to look at what is driving these health disparities and what it may take to fix them. In my story on why orthopedic surgery remains medicine’s whitest specialty, I showed that systematic racism at every level, from medical school admissions to faculty hiring in orthopedics, is excluding Black and brown physicians and pushing out those who do manage to overcome numerous barriers to enter the field. In my story on colonizing health equity, I showed that now that the field is receiving attention, acclaim, and funding, well-funded white researchers are jumping into the field, taking resources from and not citing the previous work of researchers from marginalized communities who have lacked funding and attention from top medical journals for decades. In advance of the FDA’s major Aduhelm decision last summer, I looked at how such cutting-edge treatments for Alzheimer’s disease are not getting to communities of color that have much higher rates of the disease and described how one Hispanic patient managed to defeat the odds and enter a clinical trial for a new Alzheimer’s drug, but only after the disease had ravaged her entire family. In a story examining why the enrollment of Black medical students has dropped precipitously in recent years despite continued attention to diversity, I contacted medical schools with the lowest enrollments of Black and Hispanic students to ask why their numbers were so poor and described innovative programs that were starting to improve diversity. In my story about the firestorm about JAMA’s now-infamous podcast stating that doctors can’t be racist, I showed how the podcast was a merely a visible symptom of much deeper problems within the network of journals, and demonstrated how the network of journals and its editors had routinely excluded, minimized, and mishandled issues of race and had published numerous articles advancing racist ideas.