This statement is saying that so many more things that result in poor access to healthcare, not just skin color. In the book "The Immortal Life of Henrietta Lacks", skin color played a big part in Henrietta's availability of healthcare, but there were a lot of other things that I think played an even bigger role. Henrietta and her family did experience health disparities. During the lifetime of Henrietta colored people may have still been looked down on and had limited treatment, having to travel all the way to Hopkin. Henrietta may have had to travel further to seek treatment, but she had no lack of people willing to take her there for appointments. However, her lack of any type of medical knowledge hindered her greatly. Health literacy itself was not a priority for a majority of people. That lack wasn't completely because she was colored. There was a lack because she was female, a lack because she was poor, a lack because she was from the south, a lack because she didn't finish school, etc. So many things lead to her not understanding what was going on.
In that time, no matter what your skin color was, doctors knew best and you didn't question them. There were no Informed Consent laws like there are now, so even though Henrietta consented to treatment, she had know idea what the outcome would be.
Ethically, there were no laws or about taking cells and using them, or even using biomedical waste how you wanted as a doctor and researcher. Because of that many felt there was no need to inform patients of what was going on, or what they were doing.
Going through the book here are just a few of the times there were health literacy issues, consent issues, etc:
Page 47- "Toward the end of her treatments, Henrietta asked her doctor when she'd be better so she could have another child. Until that moment, Henrietta didn't know that the treatments had left her infertile."
Page 184- "When Henrietta died, Day had agreed to let her doctors do an autopsy because they'd told him it might help his children someday. They must have been telling the truth, Day thought."
Page 29- "Like many doctors of his era, TeLinde often used patients from the public wards for research, usually without their knowledge."
Page 167- "In 1969, a Hopkins researcher used blood samples from more than 7,000 neighborhood children-most of them from poor black families-to look for a genetic predisposition to criminal behavior. The researcher didn't get consent."
Page 192- "It was so clear they hadn't been treated well, Rogers told me. They truly had no idea what was going on, and they really wanted to understand. But doctors just took blood samples without explaining anything and left the family worrying."
Page 16- "It was no surprise that she hadn't come back all those times for follow-up. For Henrietta, walking into Hopkins was like entering a foreign country where she didn't speak the language."
Page 128- "He told them he was testing their immune systems; he said nothing about injecting them with someone else's malignant cells."
Page 130- "Southam wrote, he didn't tell patients they cells were cancerous because he didn't want to cause any unnecessary fear."
The we get to all the pages where Deborah read things about her mother. "Scientists do all kinds of experiments and you never know what they doin. I still wonder how many people they got in London walkin around look just like my mother." Her lack of health literacy, leads her to believe that actually cloned her mother, not just her cells. Deborah grew up in a time where colored people could go to school, could attend college, etc. The family's lack of money and education is what lead to her and her family's lack of health literacy, not their skin color.
A study done by Dubay and Lebrun has come to this exact conclusion. Regardless of race, the low income of the Lacks family had a bigger effect on their healthcare and that problem still exists today.
"While important, the race/ethnicity disparities among adults of similar incomes identified in this article were dwarfed by the magnitude of the disparities identified between high- and low-income groups for those of the same race. For each outcome examined, except overweight and obesity, high-income adults were found to be in better health, to engage in healthier behaviors, to have greater use of general health and dental services, and to receive more timely screening for cancer and other health conditions, compared to low-income adults of the same race/ethnicity."2
"As long as societal factors result in minorities disproportionately having low incomes, an exclusive focus on reducing race disparities will be ineffective. The economic, environmental, and social factors that put low-income populations at much greater risk for poor health outcomes than their higher-income counterparts, regardless of race, must be addressed to eliminate both race-based and income-based disparities in population health."2
References
1. Skloot R. The immortal life of Henrietta lacks. New York: Crown Publishing Group (NY); February 2, 2010.
2. Dubay LC, Lebrun LA. Heath, Behavior, and Health Care Disparities: Disentangling the Effects of Income and Race in the United States. October 2012. http://citeseerx.ist.psu.edu/viewdoc/download?doi=10.1.1.817.5720&rep=rep1&type=pdf. Accessed Nov 5, 2017.
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