Did Infamous Tuskegee Study Cause Lasting Mistrust of Doctors Among Blacks?

There is no question that the Tuskegee study is one of the most horrific examples of unethical research in recent history. For 40 years, ending in 1972, members of the United States Public Health Service followed African-American men infected with syphilis and didn’t treat them (although they told some men they did) so that they could see the disease take its course.

There’s also no question that this experiment shook the foundations of trust between Americans, especially black Americans, and the medical establishment. A new paper argues that this wound was so severe that it led older African-American men to avoid care, leading to a decrease in life expectancy of 1.4 years, accounting for about a third of the discrepancy in life expectancy between black and white men by 1980.

While few question that there are racial disparities in life expectancy or health care, and no one questions the utter lapse in ethics of the Tuskegee experiment, we should still be wary in connecting the two without a clear causal link. To do so compounds mistrust in the health care...