Medicine Now Diagnoses the Non-White ‘Oppressed’ With an Oppressive Case of ‘Weathering
This story originally was published by Real Clear Wire
By John Murawski
Real Clear Wire
In 1986, an upstart public health researcher named Arline Geronimus challenged the conventional wisdom that condemned the alarming rise of inner-city teen pregnancies. While the crisis was decried as a ghetto pathology, Geronimus contended that teenage pregnancy was a rational response to urban poverty where low-income black people have fewer healthy years before the onset of heart problems, diabetes, and other chronic conditions.
Though it got little traction then, the concept that Geronimus pioneered – “weathering” – has become a foundation for the social justice ideology now upending medicine and social policy. The term “weathering,” she says,
