Dr. Fitzroy Dawkins’ love letter to African Americans | Top News

The history of racially motivated experiments on black people in the US health care system – often carried out without their knowledge or consent – ​​has had a detrimental impact on black health care in the country, claims Jamaican-American oncologist Dr. Fitzroy Dawkins.

In an interview with The Sunday Gleaner Last week, he said that denial, distrust and fear — of the disease itself and of being used as a guinea pig — play a large role in African-American cancer culture, and during his active practice he has sought to change these deeply rooted beliefs.

“So much has changed in medical protocols in the last half century that these fears are no longer justified. Yet African-American cancer patients have essentially excluded themselves from the search for a cure. There is no doubt that medicine has made incredible advances in treating and even curing cancer. But there is a segment of the population that is missing out on these medical advances. Despite the advances, the story of African-Americans in the health care sector is still very poignant today,” he said.

In his book Fighting for survival – The fight against cancer and the experiences of African Americanshe said that black Americans were persecuted not only by the Tuskegee Experiment, but also by that of Henrietta Lacks.

In 1951, while Lacks was receiving treatment for cervical cancer at Johns Hopkins Hospital in Maryland, her cells were cultured without her consent. This resulted in the cell line called HeLa, which is still used for medical research today.

But the biggest bogeyman is the Tuskegee Experiment, which was conducted in the United States for 40 years, in which hundreds of black men were experimented on to observe the natural course of syphilis without treatment until a whistleblower blew the whistle. The men, impoverished sharecroppers from racist Alabama, were part of a research project that was supposed to last six months but lasted four decades. They never consented to take part in the experiment and were never offered treatment, even though antibiotics became widely available 15 years after the experiment began. Left untreated, they suffered serious health problems, including blindness, mental retardation and death.

Dawkins says that experiments on blacks took place years before Tuskegee and Lacks, but the two exposed the evils of institutional racism.

Deep-seated distrust of the sector and its offerings has resulted in African Americans being disproportionately excluded from research that could detect and treat all types of cancer at an early stage, particularly prostate cancer, Dr. Dawkins said.

He says the book is his love letter to African-American cancer patients and his appeal to them to embrace everything that research and medicine have to offer so that they can fight and cure their cancer.

“It (the distrust) is still there when we see the whole COVID-19 experience and what people have said and it’s like, ‘I don’t trust the government.’ ‘If they say that’s the case, I don’t trust them.’ ‘They just want to use me for their purposes.’ There are African Americans who disagree on this point, so I don’t think it’s a monolithic reaction, but in my view, Tuskegee was always present in my practice at Howard University when I talked about clinical trials,” he said. The Sunday Gleaner.

The path to medicine

But how did this Jamaican man gain such a huge impact on the black healthcare community in the United States?

Dawkins told the story of a mysterious illness that prevented him from taking his high school entrance exams at the same time as hundreds of other students and forced him to spend months in the University Hospital of the West Indies in a cast from chest to toe. He was not told the cause of his illness, but he recalled numerous surgeries and procedures and countless hospital stays. Years later, he believed he had an infection of the hip bone.

After about six months he was released to live with his aunt in Newport, Manchester.

But years before his illness, Dawkins had decided he wanted to be a doctor, and during his hospital stay, medical intervention by orthopaedic surgeon Professor Sir John Golding reinforced his decision. Dawkins praised Golding for “his care in treating the patient as a whole, both mind and body” and for intervening to enable him to take his exams.

Dawkins recalled the burden that was placed on his shoulders to pass the exams he sat alone at the Department of Education with flying colours. He did well enough to gain a place at Manchester High School. He later transferred to Wolmer’s Boys’ School at the end of the first term of third form to complete high school.

Born and raised in St. James, he grew up in various parts of Jamaica, living among relatives, including his mother, who was a trained nurse and midwife but served in multiple capacities in the communities in which she worked.

Dawkins recalled that when his mother was called to the hilly countryside to deliver babies, she would disappear for days at a time, as the babies sometimes took days to be born. His mother had to wait until the birth before she could return to her children.

“My mother’s devotion as a nurse working in remote areas had a huge impact on me. Becoming a Christian at 14 had a huge impact on my worldview. Dr Golding was more than just an orthopaedic surgeon to me. I remember him clearly being in my room in the hospital with his team and asking someone if I should take the entrance exams. They said yes, but the time was up. And he told someone to see what he could do to get me to take the exams before the results came out,” Dawkins said, describing the event as something he was eternally grateful for.

Golding, he said, embodied everything he wanted in a doctor and was his motivation when he practiced in the United States.

The history of immigrants

After they left Wolmer’s, Dawkins’ mother told him of the life-changing decision that had been made for him: he would board a plane for the first time and fly to New York alone. He was given only an address – which he was not allowed to change – when he moved in with strangers and was told to “figure out” what he should do to become a doctor.

Thousands of immigrants in the United States experienced the same thing as her: they were unwelcome in their communities and where they studied.

The young Dawkins worked in many odd jobs – in the fashion industry, in a factory that made plastic tableware, as a potter and as a waiter. He was also tempted to become a criminal, but the values ​​he had brought with him in Jamaica gave him strength.

Almost a year after his arrival, he had saved enough to finance part of his college education and applied to study biology at the City University of New York, which he saw as a step toward medicine.

Since the 35 cent train fare was too expensive for him, he rode his bicycle every day and went home after work to study, sleep and then go back to school – a routine he maintained for four years.

After graduating in 1979, he worked for an insurance company for a year before studying medicine and starting to work as a janitor in a bank.

Studying medicine was brutal as he was confronted with racism that was openly displayed by students and some teachers.

“I went to school in a town called Buffalo in upstate New York. The town itself was hostile to blacks. You were seen as ‘the other.’ And that wasn’t just for blacks. If you weren’t from the area – even if you were from New York and especially if you were from New York City – they weren’t particularly happy about your being there.

“So here comes this black boy in a class of 145, 10 of us are black, and he feels like, ‘We don’t want you here, you don’t belong here, we don’t want you in our neighborhood, and we really don’t care about you.’ That was the city, and the medical school was equally hostile,” he said.

Dawkins said the expected camaraderie was lacking, particularly because it became clear that, unlike other students, he did not come from a generation of doctors.

The memories are still painful and he doesn’t want to dwell on them, but they have been included in the book as a learning experience and will hopefully serve as a beacon for others facing oppression and exclusion.

“I’ve been through deep water. I’ve been verbally abused. My car has been painted (with racial slurs). I’ve been mugged and threatened with death, and I survived. I’ve been through this, you’re going through this, so take a leaf out of my book and realize that you don’t have to accept this. status quo and despite the perception people have of you,” he said.

Cancer diagnosis, treatment

In addition to exceeding expectations, Dawkins has dedicated his active years to researching and treating cancer in African Americans. He acknowledged some bias, but said there is a great disparity in the field of oncology. He wants them to fight for what they deserve.

“I think part of what holds us back is fear. Not just distrust of the system, but fear of even mentioning the word cancer. Some people don’t even share the information with their families… There’s so much genetics in cancer. We don’t like to talk about it because we hope the disease will go away. We hope God will heal us and that if we just pray hard enough, everything will be OK. My motivation is, ‘You should do what you can. The system may be against you, but you should do what you can,'” he pleaded.

On the issue of prostate cancer in black men, he said there are significant problems, including homosexual innuendo when a finger is inserted into their rectum to detect an enlarged prostate.

“The idea of ​​someone sticking a finger up your rectum, I mean, who would allow that? There are crude jokes among patients about not sticking anything up your butt, so a colonoscopy or a sigmoidoscopy – the minimally invasive medical examination of the large intestine from the rectum through the nearest part of the sigmoid colon – (is grumbled at) because it could mean this or that…” he explained.

Much of the fear, he said, is that their sexual performance will be affected if part of their rectum is removed as part of the treatment. Masculinity, he said, is largely defined in the black community as the ability to have sex, a mindset that works to the detriment of many.

Local oncologists expressed the same concerns about the men.

Dawkins said many discoveries have been made in cancer treatment, and while he is not asking blacks to forget Tuskegee, he wants them to use the experience to seek treatment. He stressed that many miss out on the chance for clinical trials that could change the course of their lives for the better because too many cancers are diagnosed in the third or final stages when early diagnosis could have made a difference.

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