New initiative seeks to battle disparities in treatment of Black women with cancer

CHICAGO - Access to high-quality healthcare could be the difference between life and death. Black women have the highest death rates in the U.S. for most cancers.

"Anyone can get cancer, right? But the people who are dying are specifically those that happen to be black individuals," said Dr. Paris Thomas, executive director of Equal Hope. "So it does discriminate."

By the numbers:

According to the American Cancer Society, Black women under age 50 are twice as likely to die of breast cancer than white women. The goal of Equal Hope is to achieve equal patient care and empower patients to speak up for themselves.

"Women are taking on a lot of responsibilities," Thomas said. "They're moms, they're businesswomen, they hold the house down. And particularly in our case, what we commonly see in our organization is that women are literally the center of their families, right? They hold everybody down, they support everyone, and they're taking on the burden of everyone."

That burden often leads to the detriment of their own health.

"Before I found out I had cancer, it was a moment where I was feeling excessive pain. But black woman, you're powering through. I got two daughters, I have a husband, I have a ministry, I have a career. So it was like, okay, I'll just get through it," Thomas said.

Shortly after a vacation with her sisters, the pain was too much for Nicole Reed to bear.

"They said I had a mass, the size of a stick of butter, right here in my chest," said Reed. "Three weeks later, I had 10 more tumors come down my spine. So they told me at first I had mediastinum lymphoma, 3B, which is really aggressive lymphoma. At that point, I'm like, ‘okay, what do I do?’"

Reed has been in remission for four years. She didn’t have any issue with quality of care in her fight against cancer, but what she feels was missing was empathy from doctors. 

What they're saying:

"There wasn't anyone who was giving me more than medical care," Reed said. "There wasn’t anyone trying to build up my mental or my emotional, because cancer doesn't just hit your body, it hits every part of a woman and I feel like that part was totally not taken care of."

Thomas has seen several stories very similar to what Reed experienced. She said advocacy plays a huge role in beating cancer, because many women of color are missing out depending on the facilities that they go to. 

"They maybe work a traditional 9-to-5 job, they're a mom, and they're just going about life, and they're diagnosed with a cancer," Thomas said. "But they're diagnosed with that cancer after advocating for themselves several times because that cancer was missed, but they're still in pain or they're having some type of nipple discharge, it's irregular, but people keep saying, oh, you're fine, it's just, it's nothing."

Voices of Black Women

What you can do:

Voices of Black Women is a new push by the American Cancer Society to fill in those gaps in the healthcare system. Their goal is to recruit 100,000 Black women for the largest study of cancer risk and outcomes among Black women in the United States. The study will also help Black women learn about preventive care. Something Nicole Reed wasn’t aware of. 

"I didn't go for any kind of testing," Reed said. "I didn't go for any kind of screening. I'm young, I was 39, I eat well, I work out, and for me, I wish it was a moment where I took more time to believe that, ‘hey, Nicole, check that out.’ But for most Black women, we don't do that. We just push through and just get through it."