Racial Categories in Medical Practice How Useful Are They 英文参考文献.docVIP

Essay Racial Categories in Medical Practice: How Useful Are They? Lundy Braun, Anne Fausto-Sterling , Duana Fullwiley, Evelynn M. Hammonds, Alondra Nelson, William Quivers, * Susan M. Reverby, Alexandra E. Shields The Trouble with Race can lead to serious medical errors. Assessing risk through race is more problematic than its typical depiction in the media and in scholarly literature [3]. Some argue that race can stand in for human genetic variance until individualized genetic medicine is fully developed. But such a position produces a critical paradox: the rates of morbidity and death from particular diseases are not uniformly distributed among socially de?ned racial and ethnic groups throughout the world [4–6]. In order to monitor the success of attempts to address these health inequalities, we need to keep health records based on racial and ethnic categories. This is a descriptive use of ethnoracial categories. Descriptive statistics derived from population surveys using racial de?nitions based on self-identity, however, are not biological or attributive categories appropriate for individual treatment [7]. How should physicians treat individuals who present with a perceived race but who may not bear the average characteristics of a studied population, even while collecting data based on perceived race or ethnicity and qualifying individuals for clinical research trials [8,9]? This problem is illustrated in Box 1, which describes an “on the ground” dilemma of administering a drug to individuals who do not ?t “standard” racial are relatively homogenous with respect to biologic inheritance” [18]. One survey of medical and epidemiological Is it good medical practice for physicians to “eyeball” a patient’s race when assessing their medical status or even to ask them to identify their race? This question was captured in a 2005 episode of “House M.D.,” Fox television’s medical drama. In the episode, a black patient with heart disease refuses a hospital physician’s pr