The National Institutes of Health has awarded grants to researchers examining the relationship between health and a variety of societal ills: "powerlessness," "racism," "discrimination," and "classism." Rodney Clark of Wayne State University's psychology department says that emphasizing personal responsibility in controlling disease represents a "subtler form of racism." Psychiatrists at San Francisco General Hospital routinely group inpatients according to race and sexual orientation in order to organize treatment around psychological needs supposedly specific to those groups. Satel notes that some practitioners and critics of involuntary mental treatment even question whether notions of mental disorders and substance abuse represent anything more than instruments of social control.
Astonishingly, Sally Zierler of
Brown University's
Department of Public Health explained AIDS as "a biological
expression of social inequality." Her five recommendations for
curbing the AIDS epidemic, delivered during a lecture to the annual
meeting of the
American Public Health Association
in 1998, were: Limit the power of corporations, cap salaries of CEOs,
eliminate corporate subsidies, prohibit corporate contributions to
politicians, and strengthen labor unions. Dr. Paula Braverman of the
medical school at the
University of California at San Francisco
says, "illness is caused by the power imbalance that characterizes a
capitalist society."
Satel also documents a series of widely believed but false claims of discrimination against women: that women were not included in clinical trials until 1993, that female researchers do not receive grants at rates equal to men, and that breast cancer research is underfunded. She also condemns other spurious studies claiming to show that racism contributes to high blood pressure and that blacks are less likely to be recommended for referrals for a specific kind of treatment for their strokes.
Finally, Satel notes that the quality of nursing education has declined, embracing not only resentment towards the hierarchical authority represented by doctors, but a host of alternative-medicine fads such as "therapeutic touch," by which nurses supposedly heal patients by laying their hands on them. The University of Texas School of Nursing now offers the following courses:
- Using Energy to Enhance Nuring Practice: Use of Color, Music, Touch, and Movement
- Holistic Nursing: Strategies that Transform and Heal
- Aromatherapy for Nursing Practice
- Reflexology: Stimulating Healing in the Body
- Spirituality in Nursing
- Using the Power of Our Thought for Healing
