TY - JOUR T1 - Rasing the ivory tower: the production of knowledge and distrust of medicine among African Americans JF - Journal of Medical Ethics JO - J Med Ethics SP - 177 LP - 180 DO - 10.1136/jme.2006.016329 VL - 33 IS - 3 AU - J Wasserman AU - M A Flannery AU - J M Clair Y1 - 2007/03/01 UR - http://jme.bmj.com/content/33/3/177.abstract N2 - African American distrust of medicine has consequences for treatment seeking and healthcare behaviour. Much work has been done to examine acute events (eg, Tuskegee Syphilis Study) that have contributed to this phenomenon and a sophisticated bioethics discipline keeps watch on current practices by medicine. But physicians and clinicians are not the only actors in the medical arena, particularly when it comes to health beliefs and distrust of medicine. The purpose of this paper is to call attention not just to ethical shortcomings of the past, but to the structural contexts of those events and the contributions and responsibilities of popular media and academic disciplines in the production of (often mythic) knowledge. We argue that ignoring context and producing inaccurate work has real impacts on health and healthcare, particularly for African Americans, and thus engenders ethical obligations incumbent on disciplines traditionally recognised as purely academic. ER -