{"id":45992,"date":"2016-03-11T22:58:32","date_gmt":"2016-03-11T22:58:32","guid":{"rendered":"http:\/\/www.mixedracestudies.org\/?p=45992"},"modified":"2016-11-28T21:07:02","modified_gmt":"2016-11-28T21:07:02","slug":"teaching-medical-students-to-challenge-unscientific-racial-categories","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/mixedracestudies.org\/wp\/?p=45992","title":{"rendered":"Teaching medical students to challenge \u2018unscientific\u2019 racial categories"},"content":{"rendered":"

Teaching medical students to challenge \u2018unscientific\u2019 racial categories<\/a><\/strong><\/em><\/p>\n

STAT: Reporting from the frontiers of health and medicine<\/a>
\n2016-03-10<\/p>\n

Ike Swetlitz<\/a><\/strong><\/p>\n\n\n\n
\"\"<\/a>
\nDr. Brooke Cunningham<\/a> talks about race to medical students at the University of Minnesota.
\nJenn Ackerman<\/a> for Stat<\/small><\/td>\n<\/tr>\n<\/tbody>\n<\/table>\n

MINNEAPOLIS, Minn.<\/a> \u2014 Medical students looking to score high on their board exams sometimes get a bit of uncomfortable advice: Embrace racial stereotypes.<\/p>\n

\u201cYou see \u2018African American,\u2019 automatically just circle \u2018sickle cell<\/a>,\u2019\u201d said Nermine Abdelwahab, a first-year student at the University of Minnesota Medical School, recounting tips she\u2019s heard from older classmates describing the \u201csad reality\u201d of the tests.<\/p>\n

Medical school curricula traditionally leave little room for nuanced discussions about the impact of race and racism on health, physicians and sociologists say. Instead, students learn to see race as a diagnostic shortcut, as lectures, textbooks, and scientific journal articles divide patients by racial categories, reinforcing the idea that race is biological. That mind-set can lead to misdiagnoses, such as treating sickle cell anemia<\/a> as a largely \u201cblack\u201d disease.<\/p>\n

\u201cRight now, students are learning an inaccurate and unscientific definition of race,\u201d said Dorothy Roberts<\/a>, a law and sociology professor at the University of Pennsylvania, who coauthored a recent paper in Science<\/em><\/a> arguing for an end to the use of biological concepts of race in human genetics research.<\/p>\n

\u201cIt\u2019s simply not true that human beings are naturally divided into genetically distinct races,\u201d Roberts said. \u201cSo it is not good medical practice to treat patients that way.\u201d<\/p>\n

Change is starting to come, but slowly…<\/p>\n

……Cunningham also traced racial stereotypes through centuries of medical science, from an 1850s medical definition of drapetomania \u2014 \u201cthe disease causing Negroes to run away\u201d \u2014 to the modern day, when a mainstream formula to measure kidney function and a common test of lung capacity differ for \u201cwhites\u201d and \u201cblacks.\u201d<\/p>\n

\u201cI think it\u2019s revolutionary to be teaching that way to first-year medical students,\u201d said Dr. Helena Hansen<\/a>, a professor with dual appointments in both New York University\u2019s anthropology department and the medical school\u2019s psychiatry department. She said Cunningham is one of a small but growing number of faculty members challenging the status quo.<\/p>\n

Hansen said Cunningham\u2019s lecture \u201cfundamentally challenges\u201d a central premise in clinical medicine: that racial categories are well-defined and universally applicable…<\/p>\n

Read the entire article here<\/a>.<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"

Teaching medical students to challenge \u2018unscientific\u2019 racial categories STAT: Reporting from the frontiers of health and medicine 2016-03-10 Ike Swetlitz Dr. Brooke Cunningham talks about race to medical students at the University of Minnesota. Jenn Ackerman for Stat MINNEAPOLIS, Minn. \u2014 Medical students looking to score high on their board exams sometimes get a bit […]<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":1,"featured_media":0,"comment_status":"closed","ping_status":"closed","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"footnotes":""},"categories":[12,2039,8],"tags":[23207,15408,23208,23209,23206,23205],"class_list":["post-45992","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","hentry","category-articles","category-health-medicine","category-media-archive","tag-brooke-cunningham","tag-helena-hansen","tag-ike-swetlitz","tag-nermine-abdelwahab","tag-stat","tag-stat-reporting-from-the-frontiers-of-health-and-medicine"],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/mixedracestudies.org\/wp\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts\/45992","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/mixedracestudies.org\/wp\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/mixedracestudies.org\/wp\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/mixedracestudies.org\/wp\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/users\/1"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/mixedracestudies.org\/wp\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fcomments&post=45992"}],"version-history":[{"count":3,"href":"https:\/\/mixedracestudies.org\/wp\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts\/45992\/revisions"}],"predecessor-version":[{"id":45997,"href":"https:\/\/mixedracestudies.org\/wp\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts\/45992\/revisions\/45997"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/mixedracestudies.org\/wp\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fmedia&parent=45992"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/mixedracestudies.org\/wp\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fcategories&post=45992"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/mixedracestudies.org\/wp\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Ftags&post=45992"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}