The Maryland Center for Health Equity has launched an educational campaign aimed at bridging a longtime gap between health researchers and minority communities. The campaign, known as the “Building Trust Between Minorities and Researchers” program, represents the latest of many efforts the U.S. health care establishment has undertaken in recent years to reduce and eliminate disparities that saddle minorities with disproportionate health burdens and poor outcomes.
The rationale of “Building Trust Between Minorities and Researchers” largely seeks to overcome the history of neglect and abuse members of ethnic and racial minorities endured when few regulations governed medical research practices. Currently, few ethnic and racial minorities participate in clinical trials designed to investigate and discover treatments for diseases and other negative health conditions, according to center officials.
Clinical trials function as a fundamental step in research undertaken to bring about medical advances. The participation of individuals in clinical trials enables researchers to investigate new ways to prevent, detect or treat disease. Building Trust will encourage racial and ethnic minorities to participate in clinical trials, as well as encourage researchers to include minorities in research.
“As we have explored why African-Americans and other minorities are not involved in research, the literature makes very clear some of these barriers are that minorities don’t trust researchers,” said Dr. Stephen B. Thomas, director of the Maryland Center for Health Equity (M-CHE), which is based in the School of Public Health at the University of Maryland, College Park.
“And what you get underneath as to why don’t they trust these health professionals [there are] very disturbing stories that in many minority communities – African-American, Native American and Latino – have been passed down by word of mouth from the elders,” continued Thomas. “And that is the history of research abuse – the history of abusing our people in the name of science.”
Thomas noted that prominent examples of research abuse, such as what occurred in the Tuskegee Syphilis Study, still loom in the minds of Americans in part because of popular media and books.
