AOTW: How Racism Creeps into Medicine
Posted on: September 9, 2014, by : Shilpa Patel
By Shilpa Patel
For this week, I chose an interview of Lundy Braun on her book Breathing Race into the Machine. This book explores the history behind ‘race correction’ in the assessment of lung function. It is a reminder of how our social environment informs our hypotheses and how we interpret data.
It’s a quick read and thought provoking. How do we identify/assign race? Do we “correct for” race elsewhere? How do we use race when we interpret our research findings?
I have also included a link to her most recent research paper on this subject published in the European Respiratory Journal.
“…the history of the debate around race and science needs to be part of the curriculum in medicine as well as graduate education so that scientists and physicians have a deeper sense of that history, that science is informed by the social and that the social in turn is informed by the scientific.”
Defining Race and Ethnicity and Explaining Differences in Research Studies on Lung Function
Thank you for this article. It is so important for us to examine and reexamine our assumptions and practices. Very though-provoking.