The data indicated racism among white doctors. Then the scientists looked again

forLack of children In America they are more than twice as likely to die before their first birthday as white children. This shocking statistic has barely changed for many decades, and even after controlling for socioeconomic differences, the mortality gap remains wide. However, in 2020, researchers discovered a factor that appears to significantly reduce a black child’s risk. In their study, published in the Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences (With people), they wrote, “when black children are cared for by black doctors, the death penalty they suffer, compared with white children, is halved.”

This astonishing discovery quickly captured national and international headlines, generating nearly 700 Google Scholar citations. The study was widely interpreted — incorrectly, the authors say — as evidence that newborns should be matched with doctors of the same race, or that white doctors harbor racial animosity against black babies. It even entered the Supreme Court records as an argument in favor of affirmative action, where Justice Ketanji Brown Jackson erred in citing the findings. A supporting brief by the Association of American Medical Colleges and 45 other organizations cited the study as evidence that “for high-risk black newborns, having a black doctor is a miracle drug.”

Now a new study appears to have debunked this finding, but with much less fanfare. A research paper by George Borjas and Robert Verbruggen, published last month in With peopleIt looked at the same data set of 1.8 million births in Florida between 1992 and 2015 and concluded that it was not the color of a doctor’s skin that best explained the death gap between races, but rather the baby’s birth weight. Although the authors of the original 2020 study controlled for various factors, they did not include very low birth weight (that is, babies born weighing less than 1,500 grams, which account for about half of infant deaths). Once this was taken into account as well, there was no measurable difference in the results.

The new study is striking for three reasons. First, and most importantly, the report suggests that the primary focus for saving young (black) lives should be preventing premature births and underweight babies. Second, this raises questions about why the issue of birth weight control was not addressed during the peer review process. Third, the failure of my findings to attract much attention, at least so far, suggests that scientists, medical institutions, and members of the media apply a double standard to such studies. Both studies show correlation rather than causation, meaning that the implications of the findings should be treated with caution. However, while the first study was quickly accepted as “fact,” the new evidence has been largely ignored.

The reason white doctors initially seemed like a “lethal” mix with black children, the authors of the latest paper say, is that a disproportionately high percentage of underweight black children were treated by white doctors, while a disproportionately high percentage of Healthy children were treated by white doctors. Overweight black children were treated by black doctors. Being born extremely underweight is one of the biggest predictors of infant death. Just over 1% of babies in America are born weighing less than 1,500 grams, but among black babies the rate is nearly 3%.

The fact that the original authors share their data and work with their competitors is commendable, as it should be With peopleThe decision to publish this second paper and guest comment. In this report, Theodore Joyce of the City University of New York gives several reasons why the authors and reviewers missed this crucial factor, including that it was technically difficult to extract data from the data. However, as a final possible reason, he points out that the original article was published two months after the killing of George Floyd. “Reviewers are only human, and these events may have influenced how the results were interpreted,” he concludes.

It is understandable that a flawed finding of the social sciences, which fit so well with the zeitgeist, was widely accepted. What is less understandable is that few people now seem keen to correct the record. The new study received only one citation from Google Scholar and no mainstream news coverage. This suggests that opinion makers, at best, did not notice the new article (it was published a month ago; The Economist She only discovered this when the Manhattan Institute, a conservative think tank, last week issued an explanatory memo.) At worst, they deliberately ignored it.

None of this is to say that a doctor’s race — or gender — is completely irrelevant. Several studies have shown that a shared identity between physician and patient can improve communication, trust, patient experience, and compliance with physicians’ orders. A 2018 study of black men in Oakland found that those who were treated by a black doctor were more likely to raise specific health concerns and undergo an invasive exam than those who were treated by a white doctor. It would be particularly useful to consider whether the obstetrician’s race had any impact on her child’s outcomes.

Borjas and Verbruggen concluded on an optimistic note, noting that science has “the ability to self-correct, and scientists can facilitate this by being open about their methods and data.” Science journalists can help too. ■

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