By: Destiny Kombe-Kajue
Black people’s mistrust of the medical establishment is no rumor, myth, or paranoia. It is a matter of historical fact authenticated by lived experience and passed on from generation to generation via narrative, scar, and silence.
To many African Americans, the doctor’s office is not merely a place of healing but a site of betrayal. That mistrust isn’t unwarranted, It’s deserved.
A Brutal History of Medical Abuse
Blacks were often subjected to anesthetic-free operations, used for medical dissection, and experimented against their will during and after slavery.
These atrocities bred a chilling piece of folklore, the “Night Doctors,” doctors who supposedly burglarized Black bodies in the interest of medical experimentation. The horror, however, wasn’t unfounded. Black cemeteries were often desecrated by medical schools seeking corpses throughout the 18th and 19th centuries.
Perhaps the most malevolent example of medical racism was the Tuskegee Syphilis Study, which started in 1932. Conducted by the U.S. Public Health Service, the experiment involved approximately 400 Black Alabama men with syphilis.
They were told they would be treated for “bad blood,” but in fact received no effective treatment even after penicillin became the standard cure during the 1940s.
The goal was not to heal them, but to observe how the disease grew without receiving any treatment. The test only ended in 1972 when a whistleblower brought the story to the press, which brought on an outburst nationwide.
A 2016 National Bureau of Economic Research paper found that when the Tuskegee study was revealed, older Black men significantly reduced doctor visits. The reduction in medical care use caused measurable loss of life expectancy, by up to 1.4 years.
Racism Didn’t End with Tuskegee
Medical mistreatment did not cease in the 1970s, it shifted. In 2016, a study published by the Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences found that nearly half of white medical students and residents still retained at least one inaccurate and racist notion about biological differences in pain perception, such as the idea that Black skin is thicker or that Black people don’t feel pain as much as white people.
Those beliefs have a direct effect on treatment. Black patients are about 22 percent less likely to receive any type of pain medication when being treated in emergency rooms, and when they do get treated, they’re usually given smaller doses than whites. The disparities also extend to treating chronic pain, cancer treatment, and even birth.
Racial profiling is also seen in emergency treatment. In a report by TIME, a Black man who had been shot was treated more as a criminal than as a trauma victim. Police officers interrogated him before treatment.
Systemic Barriers Still Shape Outcomes
Structural issues continue to limit access and trust. Less than 5% of Black U.S. doctors, an estimate derived from institutional deficits that date back over a century. After the 1910 Flexner Report reimagining of American medical education, several historically Black medical schools were shuttered, drastically cutting off the pipeline of Black doctors.
This lack of representation perpetuates health disparities. Black patients commonly report being ignored, dismissed, or misconstrued in the clinical setting. Frequently, in most cases, they feel as though they have to dramatize their symptoms just to be listened to.
This deficit in trust was especially seen during the COVID-19 pandemic. Black adults were far more vaccine-leery, with over 70% citing knowledge of the Tuskegee experiment as a worry, according to Pew Research Center studies.
The Psychological and Physical Cost
Mistrust of medicine is not only an attitude; it has serious physical consequences. Studies reveal that elderly Black individuals report more disabling and severe chronic pain than their white counterparts, but are still less likely to receive adequate treatment or referral to specialists.
For others, the trip is personal. Some patients depart from hospital visits with the sense of being stereotyped and overlooked. Others forgo care altogether, for fear of being labeled as “drug seekers” or “difficult.” Such occurrences create a vicious cycle in which mistrust discourages participation, resulting in an even worse degradation of health outcomes.
Healing Requires More Than Medicine
So when Black Americans are distrustful of medical providers or facilities, it’s not out of nowhere; it’s because of a documented, repeated cycle of harm.
That trust isn’t going to be restored overnight. It will take structural change, explicit accountability, better representation on the healthcare workforce, and a willingness to center and affirm Black patients’ experiences.
Until then, history will continue to loudly whisper in exam rooms and emergency bays, echoing in each dubious stare and each voice that says: “They won’t believe me anyway.”
Destiny Kombe-Kajue is an intern for Texas Metro News through the
Scripps Howard Foundation with the University of North Texas Mayborn
School of Journalism. In her free time she enjoys going to the movies and
studying biology.
