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The Patient's Role in Reducing Disparities
- Sherrie H. Kaplan, PhD, MPH; and
- Sheldon Greenfield, MD
- From the University of California, Irvine, Irvine, California.
When the world's largest medical specialty society articulates 8 laudable and compelling position statements for reducing disparities in health care in the United States (1), the call for action must not get lost in niggling debates over the details of implementation. Yet the details are precisely where the difficulties lie. In dealing with these difficulties, the leadership of U.S. medicine must question whether some of the proposed solutions will actually produce better health care for minorities.
Although some patients may prefer to see a physician of the same race, ethnicity, or sex, empirical evidence that this form of concordance alone improves the quality of interpersonal or technical care is, at best, mixed (2-7). In a carefully designed, multimethod study, for example, Cooper and colleagues (2) found that although patients were more satisfied when seen by physicians of the same race, actual …
