In research published in 2020, one of the themes was that minority patients were viewed as more challenging by physicians, their leaders, and the research staff. There’s a lot to unpack here. More
Ignorance is neither neutral nor benign, especially when it cloaks evidence of harm. And when ignorance is produced and entrenched by gatekeeper medical institutions, as has been the case with obfuscation of at least 200 years of knowledge about racism and health, the damage is compounded. More
Of 51 editors at NEJM, just one was Black and one was Hispanic as of October. Of 49 editors at JAMA, two were Black and two were Hispanic. More
I will no longer censor myself. More
Several prominent publishers said they did not track the race and ethnicity of the researchers contributing to their platforms. More
UC Berkeley disavowed a research fund for eugenics it had kept for decades after a campus bioethicist and others protested. But eugenic ideology remains embedded in science today. More
Lack of gender diversity among panelists in medicine has many detrimental effects. More
People of African ancestry have been excluded from many studies of brain disorders. In Baltimore, scientists, doctors and community leaders are working to make neuroscience research more diverse. More
"That was the title of a seminar presentation I made for the Georgetown University Health and the Public Interest program last week. It was delivered via Zoom for the graduate students in the program and for a broader Zoom audience beyond the University." More
Hala Borno, who has been studying the gap between real-world demographics and clinical trial enrollment, discusses how Covid-19 studies are falling short. More
An administration shift is putting a burden on hospitals and undercutting the integrity of data on the pandemic, current and former members of a federal advisory panel said. More
As the world races to find a vaccine and a treatment for COVID-19, there is seemingly no antidote in sight for the burgeoning outbreak of coronavirus conspiracy theories, hoaxes, anti-mask myths and sham cures. More
Two major study retractions in one month have left researchers wondering if the peer review process is broken. More
“My major piece of advice to anyone encountering preliminary studies is to be skeptical,” said journalism professor Sharon Dunwoody. More
Urgency demands patience, because advancement is always a product of missteps. More
Preprint servers and peer-reviewed journals are seeing surging audiences, with many new readers not well versed in the limitations of the latest research findings. More
For 20 years, the U.S. government has urged companies, universities, and other institutions that conduct clinical trials to record their results in a federal database, so doctors and patients can see whether new treatments are safe and effective. Few trial sponsors have consistently done so, even after a 2007 law made posting mandatory for many trials registered in the database. More
Millions of Americans are receiving medical treatments, tests, and procedures that are either wasteful or ineffective every single year. These services, dubbed as “low-value health care,” are defined as services for which the potential for harm outweighs the potential for benefit, and they have critical consequences for patients and the health system at large, as they are estimated to cost $300 billion nationally each year. More
U.S. racial and ethnic diversity is ever increasing, but the medical representation of minority groups is not. A recent review of government-funded cancer research studies found that participants were disproportionately white, and fewer than 2 percent of these clinical trials focused on minorities specifically. More
Eight years ago, a study published in Science found that black researchers were 10 percentage points less likely than white ones to receive funding from the National Institutes of Health, even after controlling for factors like educational background, previous research awards and publication record. Its authors theorized that the difference might reflect an accumulation of slight advantages over the course of white scientists’ careers. That study, which the N.I.H. itself commissioned, prompted the agency to put $500 million toward a 10-year initiative to improve the situation, for example by increased mentoring of minority researchers and efforts to address possible bias in peer review. But new research suggests racial disparity in grant funding persists, and offers a fresh theory about a source of some of it: research topic choice.