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Mortality rate for Black babies plummets when they’re delivered by Black doctors

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Re: Mortality rate for Black babies plummets when they’re delivered by Black doctors

#91

Just speculating here but could it be that, in neighborhoods where a black person is more likely to become a doctor, those neighborhoods have a better healthcare system in place? The cities/neighborhoods with higher black poverty probably have less black doctors in general.

This was my conclusion as well. Maybe because I (naively) have trouble imagining that white doctors would reliably care less about black babies than white babies. Regardless, it should be simple to test for: just compare the outcome of all medical care administered in hospitals with relatively high amounts of black doctors to those with low amounts of black doctors.

Caring less does not have to be the only reason. I find it very possible that white doctors are less attuned to the small social and even physical differences (higher risk of certain things) for Black patients. For example, there are studies showing that white doctors are less likely to prescribe pain medication to Black women because they think they are overreacting. Part of that could be overt racism. But lack of time spent around Black people could be another culprit. One being individual racism, the other more a result of systemic racism.

Re: Mortality rate for Black babies plummets when they’re delivered by Black doctors

#92

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> I mean the dataset is so small, one off can derail any conclusion What do you mean? Per the Supplement, their data comes from a pool of ~4k white doctors and ~500 black doctors, with hundreds of thousands of observations/patients. This dataset doesn't seem "so small"? [1] https://www.pnas.org/content/pnas/suppl/2020/08/12/191340511...

Thanks for posting this, I must have misread the original article. The samples are x10 larger than I understood at first. However, please keep in mind that the subset of white ph/patients is almost 4 times larger than black ph/black patient. Data fitting seem questionable from there on. 4x is not that large of a scale but still analyses should have been more nuanced from here. For example, hospitals are not considere…

Are you sure you don't just have some unconscious bias that is keeping you from objectively seeing this study for what it is?

There are about 4x more white people in America than Black. So it makes perfect sense that you would have 4x as many white patients as Black in the study.

Re: Mortality rate for Black babies plummets when they’re delivered by Black doctors

#93
post #82

Curious, in many other studies we see that minorities are somewhat equally biased. Maybe, seeing a tiny reflection of yourself helps mitigate cultural bias.. Or could it be that black doctors are just overall better? Assuming it's harder for a black person to become a doctor, it could stand to reason that those that do are among the very best. (Or skews that way statistically)

Or that they were raised with the idea that if they want to get what a white person has, they will need to work twice as hard.

Re: Mortality rate for Black babies plummets when they’re delivered by Black doctors

#95
post #92

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Thanks for posting this, I must have misread the original article. The samples are x10 larger than I understood at first. However, please keep in mind that the subset of white ph/patients is almost 4 times larger than black ph/black patient. Data fitting seem questionable from there on. 4x is not that large of a scale but still analyses should have been more nuanced from here. For example, hospitals are not considere…

Are you sure you don't just have some unconscious bias that is keeping you from objectively seeing this study for what it is? There are about 4x more white people in America than Black. So it makes perfect sense that you would have 4x as many white patients as Black in the study.

I am saying that in order to be accurate the report needs to be tied to specific doctors or at the very latest least specific hospitals.

Re: Mortality rate for Black babies plummets when they’re delivered by Black doctors

#96
post #69

Earlier quoted context omitted.

But like, whenever there is positive study about computer games, HN is not critical at all. Instead, it is completely non critical, extrapolates findings, even if the n is like 5 and study weak. My point is, some studies are knee jerkly believed and others are knee jerkly doubted.

The set of studies accepted or rejected out-of-hand varies depending upon the individual or group. A fact of life, since individuals come to a proposition with different life experiences, both educational and directly experiential. If you are saying that HN as a community has commonality in beliefs about what is “generally accepted as true” and “generally accepted as false”, you are basically saying the HN community…

Yes, just like any other group, HN tends to have commonalities in opinions. And common biases.

Those are not just result of experience, but also result of "what you really really want to be true" and "what you really prefer to be false".

Re: Mortality rate for Black babies plummets when they’re delivered by Black doctors

#97
post #85

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Since what grandparent is actually encoding in there statement is the implication that the Black hires aren't deserving of their hire rather than desirable Black hires aren't selected for

I have no idea what you are trying to say. (I am not even sure if you are on my side or not. I'm not accusing you of anything at all.) But "Last hired, first fired" is not and has never been exclusively about "Hiring managers are just racist assholes who look for bullshit reasons to not hire Blacks." It's an observation about general trends that result in worse unemployment for Blacks. Some ways that can play out wit…

No disagreement, just a comment on what the person you were replying to seemed to be implying

Re: Mortality rate for Black babies plummets when they’re delivered by Black doctors

#98

Doctors care about the welfare of all of their patients. If the study is valid, we should learn what the black doctors are doing differently that reduces infant mortality, so that other doctors can follow suit.

I would be interested to know why my comment was downvoted to -1. I did not think it was controversial.

Re: Mortality rate for Black babies plummets when they’re delivered by Black doctors

#99

Even though there are only 3 comments in the thread, they are still rife with dismissive and bad-faith arguments. It's extremely telling how when black America mentions something about systemic racism in the context of the US, the response is "what's the p-value", "I don't like that sample size", "correlation != causation". The article has studies with authors from the BIG 10 and with Ivy League heritage, but it's th…

My comment wasn't meant to be 'dismissive'. The idea that Black doctors provide a better standard of care for Black babies is a reasonable explanation for the data - perhaps even the most likely. I just thought other explanations should also be considered.
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