The Media Research Center’s Clay Waters spent a June 18 post complaining it was pointed out that discrimination can cause illnesses in the targets of that discrimination, calling it a “niche lefty issue” in his headline:
The lead story on Saturday’s PBS News Weekend was based on an American Cancer Society study on how bias and stigma can make LGBTQ people get cancer. At least that’s what Yang seemed to be suggesting to his Cancer Society-representing guest. The bizarre, pseudo-scientific angle is more evidence that the tax-funded ostensibly objective news network of PBS has become a niche market for left-wing obsessions like the gender alphabet, as shown by a NewsBusters study from Fall 2023.
Waters claimed it was an “arcane take” for a study to conclude that, in the words of anchor John Yang, “how bias affects the detection and treatment of some types of cancer in the LGBTQ community,” adding that “LGBTQ people continue to face barriers to high quality health care, including discrimination.” Waters then whined: “PBS posed those same sort of pseudo-scientific questions regarding black Americans, asking if unequal health outcomes were due to the ‘chronic stress’ blacks suffer from society’s ‘systemic racism.'”
In fact, there’s nothing “pseudo-scientific” about it — researchers agree that discrimination can cause illness. The U.S. Office of Disease Prevention and Health Promotion reports that “individual discrimination may have high physical and emotional health costs. Some examples of individual discrimination include being treated with less courtesy or respect than other people, receiving poorer service than other people at restaurants or stores, or being threatened or harassed. Research suggests that repeated experiences of discrimination may cause the body to be more physically sensitive in stressful or potentially stressful social situations. Routine discrimination can be a chronic stressor and increase vulnerability to physical illness. As with other forms of sustained stress, discrimination “may lead to wear and tear on the body.” Another study found that “experiences of discrimination reported by adults are adversely related to mental health and indicators of physical health, including preclinical indicators of disease, health behaviors, utilization of care, and adherence to medical regimens.”
A UCLA study found even more evidence of how racial discrimination can induce health issues:
Participants of all ethnic and racial backgrounds self-reported experiences of racism and discrimination, says Tien Dong, MD, PhD, assistant professor in the Division of Digestive Diseases, Department of Medicine, at the David Geffen School of Medicine at UCLA.
Most intriguing, he says, was how these experiences presented differently in the brain, body and gut for each race. Patterns in the research suggest that for Black and Hispanic individuals, discrimination leads to changes that include increased systemic inflammation. For Asian individuals, the patterns suggest possible responses to discrimination include somatization, or the production of multiple medical symptoms with no discernible known cause. Among white individuals, discrimination is related to anxiety but not inflammation.
Without stratifying the data by race, researchers observed that people who had experienced discrimination also had an increase in the emotional arousal regions of the brain. The limbic regions of the brain, which are associated with the stress response of fight or flight, showed increased connectivity.
Participants who self-reported experiences of discrimination also showed decreased connectivity in the frontal regions of the brain, the areas responsible for things such as cognitive reasoning, thinking, memory and executive function.
This is what Waters thinks is a “niche lefty issue.” But rather than tell his readers the truth, he remained stuck in partisan-parrot mode, complaining that one PBS guest who talked about the issue “was in full “woke” mode, as demonstrated by his terminology (‘transgender men with a cervix’ are known by normal people as ‘women’).”