Indigenous patients faced abuse, experimental treatments and other harms in Canada’s health system, which still has disparities.
The medical researchers poked and prodded their unwitting patients. Using sharp instruments, they removed skin from some and grafted the bits onto others in the group of Inuit patients in Igloolik, a hamlet in the Canadian high Arctic.
The Inuit people were exposed to the extreme cold and to pain inflicted by doctors, who were testing their sensory responses in a six-year study that ended in 1973. Fifty years later, the patients, who include a man who went on to be the premier of Nunavut, have mounted a legal fight but are still awaiting answers.
Medical experiments are among the more extreme examples of the mistreatment of Indigenous people in Canada at the hands of physicians. But the ways that the country’s health care system fails Indigenous patients isn’t just in history books.
Indigenous people today have worse health outcomes when it comes to illnesses like diabetes and asthma. They are more likely to die from preventable causes and have shorter life expectancies than other Canadians. Infant mortality rates in Indigenous communities are at least twice as high as in most of Canada, and numerous reports have found evidence of racism and prejudice affecting their care.
An organization representing more than 100,000 physicians and medical trainees in Canada formally apologized this week for the role that doctors had played in those disparities.
“The racism and discrimination that Indigenous peoples and health care providers face is deplorable, and we are deeply ashamed,” Dr. Joss Reimer, president of the Canadian Medical Association, said during a ceremony in Victoria.
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