Speakers discuss cultural barriers to end-of-life care for minorities

Published: 2007-03-05

CHICAGO (CNS) -- Cultural differences and trust issues are adversely impacting end-of-life care for the African-American and Latino populations, two speakers told a gathering of Catholic ethicists. Dr. Richard Payne, director of the Institute on Care at the End of Life at Duke University Divinity School in Durham, N.C., and Dr. Teresa Ramos, director of the internal medicine residency program at Advocate Illinois Masonic Medical Center in Chicago, outlined those differences and ways to overcome them in separate talks March 1 to a conference on "Catholic Health Care Ethics: The Tradition and Contemporary Culture." Payne opened his talk by noting that some feelings about death and dying "cut across race, gender and socioeconomic class." These include a desire not to die alone, to be free of physical symptoms, to experience a death in accordance with spiritual and other personal preferences and to not be a burden on one's family, he said. Payne added African-Americans have a fundamental ambivalence toward death, seeing it on the one hand as a "welcomed friend, bringing the decedent 'home' to a better life" while at the same time as "a struggle to overcome, given all the unfairness of treatment of the living." Ramos, in her talk, also cited the strong influence of religious factors in how Latinos view end-of-life care. She said, for example, that pain and suffering are viewed by many Hispanics as "a test of faith" and thus not something for which relief would immediately be sought.

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