Keep researching till we get the answer we want

Oh, my goodness, I hadn't seen this issue for what seems like a few years.  It pops its head up and gets some attention and then seems to go dormant.  But that is simply an outsider's perspective.  Perhaps among medical doctors and public health officials it has been ever-present since I first heard the argument made some four decades ago.  The core claim is that African American's receive inferior health treatment owing to racial animus by white health professionals.

It is both a perfectly logical claim to make and a difficult one to prove.

On the logic side, we have the fact that there is a deep history of disparate medical access, treatment and outcomes.  We still have some areas where there are disparate outcomes.  Of course, still on the side of logic but against the argument, we have the fact that disparate racial treatment has been consequentially illegal for nearly sixty years and you rarely (or never) see doctors or medical establishments being sued for disparate treatment.  Further, it is not uncommon for medical practitioners and establishments to support charity or mission type services or trips to Haiti or Africa or similar destinations.  Accusations of racial animus are not necessarily incompatible with such behavior but are certainly inconsistent with such behavior.

While proving racial animus would be exceptionally difficult, one might think that proving inferior treatment due to animus might be easier.

One might think, but as is usual with complex systems (and health is certainly a complex system) nothing is ever obvious.

If we are going to focus on Race as a subordinate attribute, then there are all sorts of other variables which we need to control.  Income, class, occupation, morbidity, age, education attainment,  diet, etc.  All need to be controlled in order to demonstrate that the differences in outcome might arise from the racial variable.  

Since I first became aware of this argument in the late seventies or early eighties, income, class, morbidity, and diet have all been the confounding variables which have made it difficult to prove that African Americans are receiving the inferior health care owing to racial animus owing to white practitioners.  

Perhaps the claim is true but it certainly feels like there is a huge victim advocacy industry sector to support for whom the claim needs to be true rather than obvious and clear empirical evidence that it is in fact a true argument.

Prescription for Failure by Stanley Goldfarb is merely the most recent update I occasionally come across.  In this case the evidence is against the argument.  The subheading is Researchers are ignoring studies on race and medicine that yield ideologically inconvenient results.