Studies show that minority patients generally receive a lower quality of health care compared to white patients. How can these disparities be reduced? A supplement to the October 2007 issue of Medical Care Research and Review, published by SAGE, thoroughly explores the effectiveness of health care interventions to answer that question.

Black Caribbeans living in America enjoy better health, higher incomes and less discrimination at work than both their English counterparts and black Americans, according to the first international comparative study of these populations.

Patients with asthma who are black appear more likely to visit the emergency department or be hospitalized for the condition than those who are white, even in a managed care setting that provides uniform access to care, according to a report in the Sept. 24 issue of Archives of Internal Medicine, one of the JAMA/Archives journals.

A University of Minnesota study of prostate cancer tumors from Caucasian and African-American men has shown no evidence that the cancer is more aggressive in black men.

In one of the first studies to focus on the relationship between racial discrimination and health risk behaviors, researchers at the Columbia University Mailman School of Public Health with colleagues from the Universities of Minnesota, Alabama (Birmingham), and California (San Francisco), and Harvard University found African Americans experiencing racial discrimination were more likely to report current tobacco use or recent alcohol consumption and lifetime use of marijuana and cocaine.

Doctors’ unconscious racial biases may influence their decisions to treat patients and explain racial and ethnic disparities in the use of certain medical procedures, according to Alexander Green from Harvard Medical School and his team. Their study1, published in Springer’s Journal of General Internal Medicine, is the first evidence of how unconscious race bias among doctors affects their clinical decisions.

Providing minority patients a “medical home” in which they have a regular doctor or health professional who oversees and coordinates their care would help eliminate racial and ethnic health disparities and promote more health care equity, says a new report from The Commonwealth Fund.

Medical research scientists in public health and other areas routinely make ethical value judgments, even if they're not aware of it, according to a new Weill Cornell Medical College research study. And not only do these judgments not lead to bias necessarily, but they can make for better research.