Opinion: Health equity research is evidence-based, helps everyone thrive
In recent months, the federal government has terminated grants for scientific research it considers to be focused on DEI (diversity, equity, and inclusion), calling it ideological and unscientific. In a Sept. 20 New England Journal of Medicine Perspective piece, Harvard T.H. Chan School of Public Health’s Nancy Krieger, professor of social epidemiology, and Mary Bassett, François-Xavier Bagnoud Professor of the Practice of Health and Human Rights, outlined how decades of high-quality research has documented the harmful effects of structural racism on health, and how health equity research can help everyone thrive.
They wrote that there is a burgeoning body of evidence on the health impacts of exposure to interpersonal discrimination and on the ways in which segregation contributes to health inequities.
Research in this area shouldn’t be dismissed as ideology, Krieger said in a Sept. 25 NEJM Interviews podcast about the Perspective piece. Rather, arguments against health equity research represent “an ideology saying that looking at how injustice harms health doesn’t matter.”
Policies rooted in legacies of legal discrimination affect people’s living conditions, the jobs they have, and the quality of the air they breathe, she said. “All these things are connected and not looking at that misses a huge part of understanding why population health is patterned as it is,” she said.
She added that while health equity research is important for the populations directly bearing the brunt of injustice, the information gleaned from these studies is important for understanding obstacles to health more broadly. For example, the Perspective piece described a National Cancer Institute-funded intervention study aimed at improving rates of cancer treatment completion. It led to increases for both Black and white patients and closed a racial gap that had previously existed in treatment completion.
Read the NEJM Perspective piece: Structural and Scientific Racism, Science, and Health—Evidence versus Ideology
Listen to the NEJM Interviews podcast: Interview with Nancy Krieger on the effects of structural racism on health and health care and the conflation of research on health equity with DEI work.
