As a medical student, Damon Tweedy noticed that many of the diseases he learned about in class were more prevalent among black people than white people, and that the black patients often fared worse than their white counterparts.
Tweedy, now a psychiatrist and the author of the memoir Black Man in a White Coat, theorizes that those differences spring from the fact that many black patients feel shut out and distrustful of a health care system that has a history of mistreating them.
"The Tuskegee Study ended in 1972; that's over 40 years ago ā but a lot of the people are still living from back then," Tweedy tells Fresh Air's Terry Gross. "I'll see patients now [who] have diabetes and high blood pressure and they're wondering [if they] are getting the right treatment, [or] they feel they're getting some lower level care, when in fact, often times, they're not."
When he treats black patients, Tweedy says he sometimes feels like a translator whose job it is to bridge the gap between his patients and a medical establishment that can sometimes be alienating. "I think many black doctors find themselves in that same situation," he says.
[For more of this story, written by Damon Tweedy, go to http://www.npr.org/sections/co...-bad-for-your-health]
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