Apropos of a previous post on race, PLoS Medicine has just published two (opinion) articles on the use of racial categories in medicine. There’s only a cursory treatment of genetics (and the treatment that’s there is pretty bad), but it’s sometimes useful to see another take on the issue. The message I get is that, well, doctors aren’t trained in genetics, so any “race-based” medicine (which is necessarily based on probabilites) is likely to become a sort of “black = medicine X, white = medicine Y” dogma.
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