By Kristina Goetz
The Cincinnati Enquirer

One in five African-Americans say they prefer a health-care provider of the same race because of unfair treatment they've experienced as patients, according to a new University of Cincinnati study.

"I think this will be an uncomfortable paper for people to hear," said UC sociology professor Jennifer Malat, who will present her findings today at the 98th annual meeting of the American Sociological Association in Atlanta.

Until this study, conventional wisdom was that black patients chose black doctors based on knowledge of racial disparities in medical treatment against African-Americans as a group. Or because of incidents of past discrimination, like the Tuskegee, Ala., syphilis experiments.

During the 40-year Tuskegee experiments, the U.S. Public Health Service conducted research on 399 black men in the late stages of syphilis. But they weren't told that they had the disease or how serious the disease was.

"Part of what is going on is that it has been a lot easier for people working on the front lines of health care to say that this tendency was based on past problems with racist behavior," Malat said. "My study suggests that is not a valid argument. The only predictor for African-Americans preferring a same-race doctor or nurse is unfair treatment experienced personally or by a family member."

Malat's study used national telephone survey data funded by the Kaiser Family Foundation and conducted by Princeton Survey Research Associates. It included information from 1,189 African-Americans surveyed in 1999 for another study published that year.

Using this data, Malat discovered that knowledge of disparities in health care to African-Americans as a group, or of the Tuskegee experiments, had no relationship to a black person's preference for a same-race health-care provider.

But those who said they or a family member had experienced unfair treatment were twice as likely to want same-race doctors and nurses.

"This research shows that unfair treatment of African-Americans is not just in the past, but happens today and that it affects how African-Americans think about health care," Malat said. "It's easy for some people to overlook that unfair racial treatment, whether intentional or not, does happen."

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E-mail kgoetz@enquirer.com