How structural medical racism perpetuates Asian American cancer disparities
When Susan Shinagawa found a pea-sized lump in her right breast, she said her doctor refused to diagnose her with cancer because, she recalled him saying, “Asia
When Susan Shinagawa found a pea-sized lump in her right breast, she said her doctor refused to diagnose her with cancer because, she recalled him saying, “Asian women don’t get breast cancer.” She said a second doctor told her, without performing a biopsy, that he could say with “99.9 percent certainty” that she did not have breast cancer.
The doctors’ biases were fueled by aggregated research data that obscured alarming gaps in health outcomes between different Asian subgroups. The National Cancer Institute, for instance, had reported that Asian Americans and Pacific Islanders, as an umbrella group, had the lowest breast cancer incidence and mortality rates. Shinagawa, then 34, said both doctors initially dismissed her request for a biopsy, but when one acquiesced, the results showed that she did in fact have cancer.
According to a new article in the Journal of the National Cancer Institute, Shinagawa isn’t alone. The commentary, published in April, reveals how structural racism and aggregated data perpetuates cancer disparities among Asian Americans, who are the first racial group to experience cancer as the leading cause of death. (Heart disease is the leading cause of death for all Americans, according to the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention.)
Aggregated data is just one issue.
“There’s a conspicuous omission of Asian Americans in clinical trials and scholarship funding is a reflection of institutional racism,” Moon Chen, the paper’s lead author and a professor of hematology and oncology at UC Davis Comprehensive Cancer Center, told NBC Asian America.
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