Contemporary Views On Race - Political and Practical Uses - Biomedicine

Biomedicine

Main articles: Population groups in biomedicine and Ancestry and health See also: Pharmacogenomics, Race and health, and Ethnicity and health

In the United States, policy makers use racially categorized data to identify and address health disparities between racial or ethnic groups. In clinical settings, race has long been considered in the diagnosis and treatment of medical conditions, because some medical conditions are more prevalent in certain racial or ethnic groups than in others. Recent interest in race-based medicine, or race-targeted pharmacogenomics, has been fueled by the proliferation of human genetic data which followed the decoding of the human genome in the early 2000s. There is an active debate among biomedical researchers about the meaning and importance of race in their research. Some researchers strongly support the continued use of racial categorizations in biomedical research and clinical practice. They argue that race may correlate, albeit imperfectly, with the presence of specific genetic variants associated with disease: Insofar as race "provides a sufficiently precise proxy for human genetic variation", the concept may be medically viable. In addition, knowledge of a person's race may provide a cost-effective way to assess susceptibility to genetically influenced medical conditions.

Detractors of race-based medicine acknowledge that race is sometimes useful in clinical medicine, but encourage minimizing its use. They suggest that medical practices should maintain their focus on the individual rather than an individual's membership to any group. They argue that overemphasizing genetic contributions to health disparities carries various risks such as reinforcing stereotypes, promoting racism or ignoring the contribution of non-genetic factors to health disparities. Some researchers in the field have been accused "of using race as a placeholder during the 'meantime' of pharmacogenomic development". Conversely, it is argued that in the early stages of the field's development, researchers must consider race-related factors if they are to ascertain the clinical potentials of ongoing scholarship.