Mixed Race Studies

MSU scholar says medical recommendations should go beyond race

Michigan State University News
2012-10-23

Andy McGlashen, Media Communications

Sean Valles, assistant professor in Lyman Briggs College and the Department of Philosophy, says race-based medical advice is often misleading and harmful. Photo by G.L. Kohuth.

EAST LANSING, Mich. — Medical organizations that make race-based recommendations are misleading some patients about health risks while reinforcing harmful notions about race, argues a Michigan State University professor in a new paper published in the journal Preventive Medicine.
 
While some racial groups are on average more prone to certain diseases than the general population, they contain “islands” of lower risk that medical professionals should acknowledge, said Sean Valles, assistant professor in MSU’s Lyman Briggs College and the Department of Philosophy…

…By glossing over the varying degrees of health risk within a racial group, medical recommendations imply that all members of each race are biologically the same as one another and different from others – a view that promotes prejudice and discrimination, according to Valles…

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Should people’s ethnicity matter in their medical treatment?

OnCentral
Southern California Public Radio
2012-10-24

José Martinez

Chances are, medical research has found that your ethnicity makes you more likely to have certain conditions or diseases.

For Latinos, it’s diabetes. For black folks, it’s high blood pressure. For white people, it’s cystic fibrosis. For Asian women, it’s osteoporosis.

But one scholar says race-based medical recommendations to patients potentially mislead them about their health risks – and reinforce harmful notions about race at the same time.

That scholar is Sean Valles, an assistant professor of philosophy at Michigan State University in a new paper appearing in Preventive Medicine.

In his paper, Valles agrees that some racial groups are, on average, more prone to certain diseases and conditions than other ethnic groups. But, he says, within each ethnic group are what he calls “islands” of lower risk that shouldn’t go unacknowledged.

He gave a couple of examples. The government recommends that black people eat less salt than other ethnic groups, due to their predisposition for high blood pressure. But Valles notes that foreign-born black people tend to have different lifestyles, and as such have substantially lower rates of heart disease, for which high blood pressure is a risk factor…

…It can be tempting, though, for medical professionals to use any information they have to get an edge on their patients’ ailments. But still, said Dr. Felix Aguilar, the chief medical officer at South Central Family Health Center, “we have to be careful when we use race.”

Aguilar said oftentimes, when people point to ethnicity as a factor in medicine, they’re often conflating it with socioeconomic status.

“Yes, there definitely are genetics involved in a lot of these procedures, but that’s not the whole story,” he said, adding that health providers should ask themselves: “Are we using [ethnicity] for the genetic aspects or are we using it for the socioeconomic aspects?”

If the answer is the latter, said Aguilar, then ethnicity probably doesn’t need to be part of the discussion.

“Our position in society many times tells us how long we’re going to live, how healthy we’re going to be and whether we have access to clean water, clean air and good food,” he said.

“Why do Latina women have the highest rate of cervical cancer in the U.S.?” Aguilar continued. “You can say, ‘Alright, it’s genetic.’ And maybe there’s a genetic element. But most likely it’s access to care.“…

Read the entire article here.

Heterogeneity of risk within racial groups, a challenge for public health programs

Preventive Medicine
Volume 55, Issue 5, November 2012
Pages 405–408
DOI: 10.1016/j.ypmed.2012.08.022

Sean A. Valles, Assistant Professor
Lyman Briggs College, Michigan State University

Targeting high-risk populations for public health interventions is a classic tool of public health promotion programs. This practice becomes thornier when racial groups are identified as the at-risk populations. I present the particular ethical and epistemic challenges that arise when there are low-risk subpopulations within racial groups that have been identified as high-risk for a particular health concern. I focus on two examples. The black immigrant population does not have the same hypertension risk as US-born African Americans. Similarly, Finnish descendants have a far lower rate of cystic fibrosis than other Caucasians. In both cases the exceptional nature of these subpopulations has been largely ignored by the designers of important public health efforts, including the recent US government dietary recommendations. I argue that amending the publicly-disseminated risk information to acknowledge these exceptions would be desirable for several reasons. First, recognizing low-risk subpopulations would allow more efficient use of limited resources. Communicating this valuable information to the subpopulations would also promote truth-telling. Finally, presenting a more nuanced empirically-supported representation of which groups are at known risk of diseases (not focusing on mere racial categories) would combat harmful biological race essentialist views held by the public.

Read or purchase the article here.