YET IT MATTERS UTTERLY:

If you needed urgent heart surgery to save your life, would you care about the racial background of your doctor? While you as a prospective patient in need of treatment may not care, Florida State University cares a great deal and recently received a grant worth $14.5 million from the National Institute of Health to promote diversity.

FSU's "Florida-First Brigade" initiative is to "build a research community committed to diversity and inclusive excellence". Diversity of medical professionals is the end-goal of the funds, not the provision or development of better medical care. Therein lies the problem.

The human body operates the same way across individuals regardless of racial background. Theoretically, no patient, doctor or onlooker should care about the racial background of those giving or receiving care.

Black patients hospitalized for heart attacks continue to receive different medical treatment than white patients, according to a new study that explored whether previously reported racial differences in care have faded.

Researchers found that black heart attack patients were less likely than white patients to undergo aggressive medical procedures or be given certain types of medications normally prescribed under common treatment guidelines.

Although racial differences in medical care "are well documented," according to the study published Thursday in the Journal of the American Heart Association(link opens in new window), researchers were investigating whether those disparities had gotten better or worse over time.

In the 15-year snapshot examined by researchers, not much changed.

"Over the years, because of the standardization of evidence-based therapies, we thought the differences would have narrowed, but trends stayed consistent between black and white patients," said the study's lead author, Dr. Sameer Arora, a cardiology fellow at the University of North Carolina.

The study examined data on 17,755 patients hospitalized between 2000 to 2014 in four regions in Maryland, North Carolina, Mississippi and Minnesota. It found that black patients were 24 percent less likely than white patients to receive an antiplatelet drug that wasn't aspirin. They were 9 percent less likely to get medication to reduce their level of lipids, fats in the blood.

Black patients also had a 29 percent lower chance of getting an angiogram, an imaging technique used to see inside the heart's blood vessels, and were 45 percent less likely to undergo more aggressive therapy such as bypass surgery or angioplasty.

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