An article at the always interesting Spiked-online.com, discusses the paper "Physician-Patient Racial Concordance and Disparities in Birthing Mortality for Newborns," by B. Greenwood et al., Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences (PNAS), 2020 Sep 1;117(35):21194-21200.doi: 10.1073/pnas.1913405117. The paper allegedly showed that Black newborns died more frequently when cared for by White doctors than when cared for by Black doctors. Bingo, systemic racism! The only problem is that the study was flawed and did not account for lower birth weights in Blacks, which was a key factor in infant mortality. This was shown by another research group who attempted to replicate the results. The details are below.
The larger question is why such a basic factor got through the peer review process, which academics salivate over at the very mention? The journal was a top rate one and should have picked up the flaw and rejected the paper. As suggested below, "such an obvious omission raises the suspicion that they wanted to obtain a desired result – that is, they wanted to demonstrate systemic racism in American healthcare."
Trust the science? After the Covid plandemic and the climate change scam, no thanks. Distrust the science is a much better principle. In general, science has been not only corrupted by woke, as the article says, but also by corporate interests who are behind the funding of research. He who pays the piper, calls the tune.
https://www.spiked-online.com/2024/10/01/the-woke-corruption-of-science/
"Calls to 'trust the science' need to be treated with severe scepticism. This was brought home by the recent debunking of a widely cited 2020 study in the prestigious journal, Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences (PNAS). The article and the attention it attracted illustrate how the authority of science can be used to mislead the public.
The study at issue – entitled 'Physician-patient racial concordance and disparities in birthing mortality for newborns' – examined 1.8million childbirths in Florida between 1992 and 2015. It purported to show that black newborns died more frequently when cared for by white doctors than they do when cared for by black doctors. This led the researchers to conclude that 'black physicians systemically outperform their colleagues when caring for black newborns'.
Most major media outlets interpreted this as a prime example of systemic racism in American healthcare. Some even wondered if perhaps white doctors were sabotaging the treatment of black infants. The findings were so shocking that Justice Ketanji Brown Jackson quoted the research in her dissent from the 2023 US Supreme Court ruling that ended affirmative action in higher education. Also in the affirmative-action case, several prestigious medical groups, including the American Medical Association and the American Academy of Pediatrics, filed an amicus brief containing the following conclusion: 'For high-risk black newborns, having a black physician is tantamount to a miracle drug.'
The only problem is that the findings of the study were completely untrue.
The reason for the disparity in newborn deaths was not due to the race of the physicians or to systemic racism, but to a flawed study design. After four years, a second group of researchers finally revisited the study data and found the original researchers did not account for difference in birth weight, a key determinant of mortality in neonates. While uncommon, low birth weight occurs more frequently in black newborns and accounts for a disproportionate number of neonatal deaths.
Because these infants were usually treated at major medical centres, where most of the physicians are white, deaths in the original study attributed to white physicians were actually the result of their caring for sicker patients. After controlling for low birth weight, the difference in care between black and white physicians effectively disappeared.
This study was fundamentally flawed. When studying mortality in neonates, low birth weight is a key determinant. This is paediatrics 101. It is essential that low birth weight be factored in. Yet at every stage of the scientific publication process for this study, the role of low birth weight was ignored.
The problem began with the original authors. Before cause-and-effect conclusions can be drawn, any study of the relationship between mortality and care must account for severity of illness – in this case, low birth weight. For example, emergency-room patients with head trauma who receive CT scans have higher mortality than those patients who don't have CT scans. This is because only those with more severe trauma are referred for scans. The higher mortality among CT-scanned patients has nothing to do with the CT scan itself.
In this case, the authors never even mentioned low birth weight in the article's section on the limitations of the findings. One could give them the benefit of the doubt. After all, every researcher at one time or another has neglected an obvious variable. But such an obvious omission raises the suspicion that they wanted to obtain a desired result – that is, they wanted to demonstrate systemic racism in American healthcare. As Nobel laureate Richard Feynman once cautioned, 'you must not fool yourself, and you are the easiest person to fool'."