Black bladder cancer patients experience disparities, but what can be done to overcome them? Expert Dr. Shaakir Hasan from Beth Israel Lahey Health discusses factors that contribute to disparities and proactive patient advice to help ensure optimal care and to self-advocate.
Related Resources
Cáncer de Vejiga: Por Qué Importan los Chequeos Tempranos y Alzar la Voz
Transcript
Dr. Shaakir Hasan:
It starts with care, starts with preventive care and just seeing a physician, even when you’re healthy. I think we’ve got other studies that show that Black patients and lower socioeconomic demographics are less likely to have a primary care provider, a general practitioner, less likely to go in for routine checkups. And a lot of times these abnormalities, they can be very slight but they’re detected in these routine checkups.
So the first and foremost thing is please make sure that you have that again, even if you feel good, even if you feel like there’s nothing wrong, you just want to check that out, a lot of things can go wrong as we age, as you hit like 40 and later, for example, there’s a lot of things that can go wrong that you’ll never notice, and so it’s really important that that gets addressed.
The other aspect of this is, unfortunately, we have evidence that healthcare providers just can be dismissive of certain ethnic groups. So we just might see it as, not as the priority that’s obviously inappropriate and hopefully that’s changing. I think we’ll see that change for the better, but historically that has been true, unfortunately.
And so, I’d say again, to be your own advocate, if there is something abnormal, please have your clinician address it, please bring this up and you’re not going to offend anybody. Even if you do, it’s not, that’s not the biggest problem here, right? If you feel like you’re not being taken care of, if you’re not being taken seriously, that’s going to be the biggest issue. So number one, prioritize preventive care number two, advocate for yourself if you feel like you’re not getting the appropriate care.