Health Disparities: Article Analysis

If I had the opportunity to revise the readings, my proposed new article would be “Implicit bias and its relation to health disparities: a teaching program and survey of medical students” by Christina Gonzalez, Mimi Kim and Paul Marantz, published in 2014. I believe this article fits will with the overall goal of Sociology 146 to study health differences between social groups through thorough examination of the extent to which health is unevenly distributed across groups and potential pathways that link factors to health status.
The paper seeks to elucidate provider disparities which is when a physician has varying treatment of different patients, an act that contributes to health disparities. This practice is thought to stem from implicit bias from unintentional and unconscious assumptions. The authors implemented an educational intervention targeting physician …show more content…
It would also be valuable to address that the class consists of many prospective medical professionals and carry a debate in section whether students agree or disagree with the authors of the paper that a class on health disparities and physician implicit bias should be part of compulsory undergraduate education for pre-med students. This could also be related to the McKinlay and McKinlay article that reveals that up to 3.5% of the mortality decline in the U.S. from 1900-1970 can be attributed to medical care which opens another dimension to what extent medical care is significant to health and how the influence of bias can exacerbate health disparities due to medical care. These discussions could lead to dialogue as to what drew students to the class and emphasize the importance of Sociology 146 and extend to how the class and course materials connect to future