Racial and ethnic disparities in health care are known to reflect access to care and other issues that arise from differing socioeconomic conditions. There is, however, increasing evidence that even after such differences are accounted for, race and ethnicity remain significant predictors of the quality of health care received. In Unequal Treatment, a panel of experts documents this evidence and explores how persons of color experience the health care environment. The book examines how disparities in treatment may arise in health care systems and looks at aspects of the clinical encounter that may contribute to such disparities. Patients' and providers' attitudes, expectations, and behavior are analyzed. How to intervene? Unequal Treatment offers recommendations for improvements in medical care financing, allocation of care, availability of language translation, community-based care, and other arenas. The committee highlights the potential of cross-cultural education to improve provider-patient communication and offers a detailed look at how to integrate cross-cultural learning within the health professions. The book concludes with recommendations for data collection and research initiatives. Unequal Treatment will be vitally important to health care policymakers, administrators, providers, educators, and students as well as advocates for people of color.

NATIONAL BOOK CRITICS CIRCLE AWARD WINNER • The first full history of Black America’s shocking mistreatment as unwilling and unwitting experimental subjects at the hands of the medical establishment. No one concerned with issues of public health and racial justice can afford not to read this masterful book. "[Washington] has unearthed a shocking amount of information and shaped it into a riveting, carefully documented book." —New York Times From the era of slavery to the present day, starting with the earliest encounters between Black Americans and Western medical researchers and the racist pseudoscience that resulted, Medical Apartheid details the ways both slaves and freedmen were used in hospitals for experiments conducted without their knowledge—a tradition that continues today within some black populations. It reveals how Blacks have historically been prey to grave-robbing as well as unauthorized autopsies and dissections. Moving into the twentieth century, it shows how the pseudoscience of eugenics and social Darwinism was used to justify experimental exploitation and shoddy medical treatment of Blacks. Shocking new details about the government’s notorious Tuskegee experiment are revealed, as are similar, less-well-known medical atrocities conducted by the government, the armed forces, prisons, and private institutions. The product of years of prodigious research into medical journals and experimental reports long undisturbed, Medical Apartheid reveals the hidden underbelly of scientific research and makes possible, for the first time, an understanding of the roots of the African American health deficit. At last, it provides the fullest possible context for comprehending the behavioral fallout that has caused Black Americans to view researchers—and indeed the whole medical establishment—with such deep distrust.

In the United States, some populations suffer from far greater disparities in health than others. Those disparities are caused not only by fundamental differences in health status across segments of the population, but also because of inequities in factors that impact health status, so-called determinants of health. Only part of an individual's health status depends on his or her behavior and choice; community-wide problems like poverty, unemployment, poor education, inadequate housing, poor public transportation, interpersonal violence, and decaying neighborhoods also contribute to health inequities, as well as the historic and ongoing interplay of structures, policies, and norms that shape lives. When these factors are not optimal in a community, it does not mean they are intractable: such inequities can be mitigated by social policies that can shape health in powerful ways. Communities in Action: Pathways to Health Equity seeks to delineate the causes of and the solutions to health inequities in the United States. This report focuses on what communities can do to promote health equity, what actions are needed by the many and varied stakeholders that are part of communities or support them, as well as the root causes and structural barriers that need to be overcome.

Imaging and Technology: Principles and Clinical Applications is a practical and user-friendly consolidated source book for urologists, and urologists in training, regarding the basic science of imaging modalities used on a day-to-day basis in urological practice. Similarly, the intention is to provide an introduction to the technology that is used in the practice of urological surgery and the management of urological patients in the clinical setting. This knowledge level is appropriate for certification for independent consultant practice in urology in the UK. The book is also valuable to urologists and urological trainees outside of the UK and in other surgical specialities.

This seventh book in the series of Success in Academic Surgery look to sustain the field and facilitate the next generation of leaders in Academic Global Surgery. It brings together a catalogue of current knowledge, needs, and pathways to a career in the field. Academic Global Surgery involves educational, research and clinical collaborations between academic humanitarian surgeons in high-income countries (HIC), their low and middle-income country (LMIC) partners and their respective academic institutions. The goal of these collaborations is improving understanding of surgical disease, and increasing access to and capacity for surgical care in resource-poor regions. In the last few years, the rapid exchange of ideas through social media and other technologies has combined with an increasing appreciation of worldwide health disparities to put the issue of global health at the forefront of our consciousness. Although traditionally neglected within public health initiatives, surgical disease is now recognized as a major contributor to death and disability worldwide, while surgical therapy in resource-poor areas is increasingly being shown to be cost-effective. In response to this growing recognition, what began as mission trips and short-term clinical volunteerism in the developing world has evolved into a burgeoning new field with a broader scope. While the tremendous recent interest from medical students and residents in Globa l Surgery has stimulated an exponential growth of interest in this field, current surgical literature has highlighted the need for further development and delineation of this new discipline within academic surgery.