4 - Medical Mistrust

Summary

Distrust of health care system or providers can affect a patient’s decisions concerning whether to seek medical care, how openly to share health concerns, and how closely to follow a provider’s advice. A person’s health literacy and understanding of disease can also shape their interactions with medical professionals. Some analyses of racial health disparities have considered how patient “preferences” and behavior might contribute to those disparities or provide a basis for doctors’ stereotypes of Black patients as “noncompliant.”¹ Various initiatives have sought to increase the trust that Black people or those from other marginalized communities place in medicine, approaching patients’ low trust levels as if they were a vitamin deficiency that needed correcting.