A recent study of 4,214 cancer patients facing lung and colorectal cancers in the U.S. discovered that 80% of black patients said they would spend all of their financial resources to prolong life. Whereas only 54% of white patients responded similarly.
The study should help clinicians understand treatment preferences for future patients.
The study did not consider factors such as the respondent’s trust in the healtcare system, experiences of discrimination, religiosity, etc.
So why do you think that black Americans are more quickly to spend all they have to prolong their lives than white Americans?
Without controlling for other variables, this study is useless. If someone has children or parents to support, then they would probably want to do everything they can to stick around longer. If someone believes in certain religions, they may not like to think of betraying the will of god that they die. How should we know?
I don’t disagree with you that other variables do come into play considering people’s decisions, but the issues you listed may actually be reasons that black Americans valued prolonging their lives over whites by a 26% margin.
Do black Americans facing cancer treatments tend to have others that they are supporting over whites, generally?
How does the religious experience of blacks generally differ from whites, that could possibly explain this phenomona?
I too would love to know what treatment options are suddenly going to be available to white vs. black patients with this otherwise useless information.
“Mr. black dude, we have this treatment option that will cure your cancer and let you live”. “Sorry, Mr. white dude. Even though you have the same cancer, you can go ahead and check your ass straight into a mortuary because we determined you don’t want to live that badly according to this random uncontrolled research study…”
I’d want to see how much “financial resources” we’re talking about here. I think that the present-day situation where white people are typically better off financially makes a big difference in this context. If you don’t have much, you’re not going to be able to pass anything much down to your kids, so you may as well spend it.
OTOH, if you have real assets, you may not want to sell your house, cash in your entire retirement, etc… if you think you might be able to benefit your spouse’s and/or children’s situations by NOT spending that money.
In fact according to the article, that is a variable they examined, and if someone has three or more dependents or is currently married, they are LESS likely to be willing to expend all their resources to prolong their life.
Pure speculation: if blacks as a group have historically not received the best or most aggressive medical care, then perhaps in answering this question, their concept of what “prolonging life” means (i.e., prolonging PRODUCTIVE life) is different from those who have watched a loved one artificially kept alive on machines and have decided that isn’t something they’d want (prolonging life unnecessarily).
I don’t think it’s been established that “blacks value life significantly more than whites” at all. All that can be said is that in this particular study, whatever-whatever. For all we know the reason could be they are less likely to want their kids to get anything. Or the blacks could have been significantly younger. Or many other reasons.
A big generalization, but I suspect it is close to the reason the results are skewed this way.
In fact both the black patients and the white patients could be answering the question the same way, with different expectations. The responses may fall along the lines of do you *expect *to spend all you have to be cured. And that is a different question related to resources.
Black family: We are going to spend whatever it takes to get mom cured. And it will take everything we’ve got.
White family: We are going to spend whatever it takes to get mom cured. But we do not expect to spend all we have.
The study is flawed because there is no mention of the effect of income level upon the answer. Yes, I read the whole cite. Now if you had a survey showing the same results among different people with the same resources, oblligations, and income level, then there might be something to talk about.
Did the survey get into quality of life? Once a cancer patient reaches a certain point, the suffering they’re already experiencing and the suffering they can expect from continued treatment may cause them to decline aggressive measures.
The black cancer patient probably has fewer assets compared to the white patient. Why not expend it all and then continue spending everybody else’s? Sounds like a plan. Maybe the whites are more concerned with passing something on to their offspring. The study doesn’t seem comprehensive enough to control for these factors.