What Role Should Race Play in Medicine? Scientific American
Rather than a risk factor, it’s better conceptualized as a risk marker of vulnerability, bias, or systemic disadvantage
- in 1988 US hypertension guidelines added a BLACK designation – without giving any information about blackness.
“. . . the U.K. inserted an addendum: Biracial patients do not differ from whites, Asian or Chinese patients, and therefore should be treated as non-blacks.” - “The FRAX tool, an instrument used to predict the risk of osteoporotic fracture, utilizes various metrics based on different global populations. Among 72 national iterations, only the U.S. model is subdivided into four races: “Caucasian,” “Black,” “Hispanic,” and “Asian.” “
“And if there are 11 standards (for osteoporotic fracture) for countries in Asia, why and how are these measures collapsed into a single instrument for “Asians” who live in the United States?” - “In nephrology, measures of kidney function are automatically multiplied by a factor of 1.212 if the patient is “African-American.” ”
- “Other questions arise. Are all Europeans white? Are Arab people “Caucasian”? Are Africans the same as African-Americans? As “black”?”
- “A sampling of over 300 genetic studies published between 2001 and 2004 found that not one article explicitly defined its use of the term”
- “Racial categories in the U.S. census, for example, have changed every decade since 1790”
- “Research demonstrates that genetic differences are higher within racial groups than between racial groups —that two black patients sitting in the waiting room will have less genetic overlap with each other than with their white, Asian, or Hispanic neighbors.”
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Race changes the risk of various health problems, but many questions remain – Sept 20187581 visitors, last modified 25 Dec, 2019, This page is in the following categories (# of items in each category)
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