Pg. 213 Text Response

According to Rahul K. Parikh in his article titled "Race and the White Coat", racial bias in doctors and health care works is doing great harm. Studies in the year 2000 have shown that doctors rated black patients as less intelligent, less educated, and more likely to abuse drugs and alcohol. It was shown that they subconsciously qualified blacks to negative traits. What this article explicitly presented was that even though doctors swear by oath to treat all patients equally, there’s still a lot of bias present. The article demonstrated that it all lies in the root of the doctor’s thought process. Racial biases exist and are affecting the quality of health care. I don’t think we can ever get rid of prejudice or racism, consciously or subconsciously. I believe it’s rooted in our brains to stereotype and generalize. We learn this from a very small age, and it’s basically embedded into our heads. Children are not born with a hatred for people who look different. Their parents instilled hatred in them, and they will probably do the same with their children, and so on. There are exceptions, but for the most part this is what happens. Everyone judges one by their race, clothes, age, gender, etc. We evolved that way. Judging other humans to see if they could do harm, was a means of survival. I think education is the way to begin the elimination process.