Just Medicine

A Cure for Racial Inequality in American Health Care

By: Dayna Bowen Matthew

Narrated by: Diana Blue

Health disparities have remained stubbornly entrenched in the American health care system - and in Just Medicine Dayna Bowen Matthew finds that they principally arise from unconscious racial and ethnic biases held by physicians, institutional providers, and their patients.

Implicit bias is the single most important determinant of health and health care disparities. Because we have missed this fact, the money we spend on training providers to become culturally competent, expanding wellness education programs and community health centers, and even expanding access to health insurance will have only a modest effect on reducing health disparities. We will continue to utterly fail in the effort to eradicate health disparities unless we enact strong, evidence-based legal remedies that accurately address implicit and unintentional forms of discrimination, to replace the weak, tepid, and largely irrelevant legal remedies currently available.

Our continued failure to fashion an effective response that purges the effects of implicit bias from American health care, Matthew argues, is unjust and morally untenable. In a time when the health of the entire nation is at risk, it is essential to confront the issues keeping the health care system from providing equal treatment to all.

©2015 New York University (P)2020 Tantor

Should have gotten the book

This is an important and impactful book. But it is very difficult to listen to. There were several mispronounced words. And lots of long sentences about laws that are difficult to follow. Also there is no accompanying PDF of the diagrams - which many audio books have- so you miss out on content.

Narrator Mispronounces Words

I was so excited when this book finally was available at Audible. I have had a hard time listening to it, however. The narrator routinely mispronounces words when the two pronunciations indicate different meanings (e.g., the word "multiply"). The thing that driving me the craziest, though, is that every time the text has the word "causal", the narrator pronounces it as "casual". Two things having a causal relationship is very different from two things having a casual relationship. This wouldn't be so bad, except that the entire book is about the causal relationship between race and health outcomes. It's very distracting.

Great book, important science, narration was ok.

Excellent work on this book. As other reviewers mentioned, the narrator did mispronounce words, but that did not take away from the experience. This is an important topic, and very thoroughly covered from many angles here. I especially appreciate Dr Matthew’s discussion of generalizability for each study and statistical significance.