Distrust of Systemic Healthcare

Consider this thought again:

Each person’s experience is real, valid, and we will not know that it even exists when we interact at a veterinary capacity. Contemplate how you might interact if you knew differently.

The history of slavery and its aftermath of systemic racism have led many African Americans to distrust the health care system.  Let’s look at the Tuskegee Syphilis Experiment: 600 African American men, including sharecroppers wholly unfamiliar with doctors, were recruited by the promise of free medical care, which aimed to study the full progression of the disease known as syphilis.

The participants, who were primarily sharecroppers, as well as others who had never before visited a doctor, were told they were being treated for bad blood, a term commonly used in the area at the time to refer to a variety of ailments.

In order to track the disease’s full progression, researchers provided no effective care as the men died, went blind or insane, or experienced other severe health problems due to their untreated syphilis.

Being an African American and knowing the government withheld treatment, would cause anyone to distrust White medical institutions; this carries over to veterinary medical institutions because they are also predominantly White: what are they doing to my dog in ‘the back’?

Native American/Alaskan Natives have documented levels of high mistrust of the medical profession and still die at greater rates than all other races in America, and most often from preventable diseases.

Almost all non-Caucasian races in America have been subject to atrocities at some point in American history. Many have been exploited for medical research, fetishized, and experimented on. Many are disengaged with the notion that the “normal” parameters in the medical profession are based in White, mostly male data points. 

Years of discrimination and lack of trust in medical institutions may also have led some people to be sensitive and assume prejudice and discrimination where it does not exist. This does not stop at the medical profession–cultural distrust of the human medical profession extends to our veterinary profession as it is associated as another predominantly White medical profession.

Veterinary professionals should be sensitive to this and assure that their words and actions do not unintentionally break the veterinary-client trust.