Racial medicine

Racial identity is a biological nonsense. Where in medicine is race used to make medical practices and discoveries? Well... everywhere.

Diagnoses, illnesses and the very same definition of disease. Medical anthropology teaches us that race is a social construct. Doctors are supposed to practice evidence-based medicine but happen to treat patients by race. One example is the GFR (glomerular filtration rate) estimate in kidneys. African Americans, Whites, and others are all treated differently.

Why? Doctors use race as a shortcut because scientific literature suggests that people of different races have different GFR estimates, and therefore different medications are needed. Drugs for the whites and drugs for the blacks.

However, race is often just a distraction as it has little if not zero impact on human health. It blinds doctors from the true cure. The GRF case shows that physicians categorically use race to treat blacks, whites, asians and so on. Moreover, race is stigmatizing. Black and brown people are less likely to get treatment for the same condition white people are suffering from (e.g. broken bone because of injury) just because it is believed that black and brown people are less likely to feel pain and more likely to fall into addiction. If you find race-specific medicine surprising, be ready to learn that a considerable percentage of the doctors in the US still use a diagnostic manual that was written by a physician during the slave era. In the 50s, it was argued that forced labour was incredibly beneficial for black people because of limited lung capacity and therefore slavery would help the body of African Americans to adapt and improve itself.

Today, some machines to measure lung capacity are built with a button with "race" written on it so that it can adapt to the actual physiology of the patient to measure. This is called race-correction.

Racial medicine is bad medicine and it is poor science.
That's all.