I received an e-mail today from Lambda Legal announcing that the California Supreme Court ruled today that doctor’s cannot deny treatment to patients based on their religious views about gays and lesbians. The ruling is the result of a lawsuit brought by Guadalupe Benitez, a California woman, in 2001 who says that, after 11 months of preparatory treatments, doctors at a women’s medical group denied her a certain type of artificial insemination because their religious beliefs would not allow them to inseminate a lesbian.
Benitez says, “Anyone could be the next target if doctors are allowed to pick and choose their …read more

To add another word to our recent posts about the regulation of tobacco products by the FDA, let’s not forget the discussions that are taking place about how this regulation may be perpetuating racial health disparities. The legislation as it now stands includes an exemption for mentholated tobacco products which, according to this week’s Kaiser Health Disparities Report, are used by 75% of black smokers. The inclusion for regulation of flavored tobaccos with the exception of menthol says to the public, in my opinion, that mentholated products are not as harmful as other tobacco products and users are not provided …read more

That many racial health disparities exist is not news. What might be news, though, is that a new diabetes study found that disparities in treatment and outcomes may be due to physicians treating everyone the same rather than treating patients differently.
The study, published yesterday in the The Archives of Internal Medicine, looked at the treatment of 6,814 patients with diabetes. Adjusting for socioeconomic and other factors, the study found that the larger racial disparities (66%-75%) in the measured outcomes (LDL levels, blood pressure, and hemoglobin A1C) were found among patients receiving the same treatment from the same physician. Providing the …read more