By LINDSEY TANNER – AP طبي Medical Writer
For years, pediatricians followed flawed guidelines linking sweat to risks of urinary tract infections and jaundice in newborns. In a new policy announced Monday, the American Academy of Pediatrics said it is putting all of its guidance under a microscope to eliminate “race-based” medicine and the resulting health disparities.
Joseph Wright, lead author of the new policy and the center’s chief health equity officer, said the re-examination of AAP treatment recommendations that began before George Floyd’s death in 2020 and intensified after doctors became concerned that black children were being treated and neglected. University of Maryland Medical System.
The influential academy began scrapping outdated advice. Wright said she is committed to checking “the entire catalog,” including guidelines, educational materials, textbooks and newsletter articles.
“We’re really much stricter about the ways we assess disease risk and health outcomes,” Wright said. “We have to hold ourselves accountable that way. It’s going to take a lot of effort.”
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The academy is making a pivotal step, said Dr. Brittany James, a family medicine physician and medical director of a Chicago health center.
“What makes this so phenomenal is the fact that this is a medical institution and not just words,” James said.
In recent years, other large groups of physicians, including the American Medical Association, have made similar pledges. It is driven in part by the civil rights and social justice movements, but also by science that shows the powerful roles that social conditions, genetics, and other biological factors play in determining health.
Last year, the Academy pulled an indicative account based on the unproven idea that black children face lower risks than white children for urinary tract infections. Wright said the review showed that the strongest risk factors were previous urinary tract infections and fever lasting more than 48 hours, not race.
Wright said a revision of its guidelines for newborn jaundice — which currently indicate that some races have a higher and lower risk — is planned this summer.
Dr. Nia Heard-Garris, chair of an academic group on minority health and equality and a pediatrician at Chicago’s Lurie Children’s Hospital, noted that the new policy includes a brief history of “how some of our repeated clinical aid came about — via pseudoscience and racism.”
Whatever the intent, she said, this aid hurt patients.
“This is in violation of our oath as physicians – to do no harm – and as such it should not be used,” Heard-Garris said.
Dr. Valerie Walker, a specialist in newborn care and health equity at Nationwide Children’s Hospital in Columbus, Ohio, called the new policy a “critical step” toward reducing racial disparities in health.
The Academy urges medical institutions and other specialist groups to take a similar approach in working to eliminate racism in medicine.
“We can’t plug a single leak in a tube full of holes and expect to fix it,” Heard Garris said. “This statement highlights pediatricians and other health care providers to find and correct those perforations.”
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