My mother is a retired nurse, so I’m a little embarrassed that it took me this long to publish in a nursing journal. Thanks to fantastic collaborators Michelle Cardel and Faith Newsome for making it happen!
In this new paper in Nursing Clinics of North America, we review environmental contributors to obesity inequities among racialized groups in the U.S. and suggest questions clinicians can ask to elicit information about how social context shapes obesity risk.
I really like how the paper starts:
Health inequities are preventable, unjust differences in disease burden that adversely impact oppressed, stigmatized, or medically underserved groups, such as people with lower socioeconomic status, people with disabilities, members of the LGBTQ community, individuals in rural areas, and marginalized racial and ethnic groups. Racial and ethnic health inequities in the United States are pervasive, because of the harms of structural racism. These harms include higher rates of heart disease, cancer, diabetes, HIV/AIDS, and other leading causes of death among marginalized racial and ethnic groups, as compared with White patients. In the United States, these inequities are attributed largely to long-standing, systemic inequalities in health care, interpersonal discrimination, and structural racism in housing, education, banking, law enforcement, and other policy domains. We recognize race and ethnicity as social classifications rooted in a political system of racialized oppression, not as proxies for genetic differences among people or populations.
Check it out or let me know if you need a copy. Constructive feedback is always welcome.
