Poor women get lower dosages of chemo.

This is just horrible:

Researchers found that doctors were more likely to reduce the chemotherapy dose for heavier [breast cancer] patients and those who were less educated, and lived in zip codes with lower median household income and higher levels of poverty. Severely obese patients were four times more likely to receive a reduced dose, and women with less than a high school education were three times as likely to have a dose reduction.

And the reason behind this?

‘We speculate that physicians have concerns about a patient’s ability to tolerate the side effects of chemotherapy and that the physician’s uncertainty about a patient’s tolerance increases with increasing social distance. One might just as well ask why we are willing to give full doses to someone with more education. It may be that negotiating side effects and continued doses of treatment is easier when there is more shared culture,’ says lead study author Jennifer Griggs, M.D., MPH, associate professor of internal medicine at the U-M Medical School. Griggs was at the University of Rochester in Rochester, N.Y., when she completed this research.

How exactly does their educational background or income level factor into medical treatment again? ‘Cause I’m not getting it. The doctors, more or less, can’t relate to these women as well, so therefore they give them an inadequate dosage of treatment? The fact that this may be one reason behind why women of lower income and education have a lower survival rate of breast cancer should be a call for some serious looking-into. Because this is just fucked.