REPLY
Medicalization of Race
Ritchie Witzig, MD, MPH
15 April 1997 | Volume 126 Issue 8 | Pages 669-670
IN RESPONSE:
I am encouraged by Dr. Parker's experiences with first-year medical students in that they did not mention the so-called race of their patients. But they have plenty of time to pick up the bad and unscientific habits of their elders in labeling persons by "race." In my article, I tried to show that "race" is an unscientific social construct that is dangerous when used clinically. Further, I do not believe that the concept of "race" is medically or socially valid. The usage of the word and the concept of "race" have no future in medicine, and after "race" is eliminated from medical usage the credibility of social usage will diminish.
In this vein, I was not advocating a racial descriptor but rather an open mind to elicit from patients their ethnic background when that might be clinically relevant. Similarly, the phase "people of color" is meaningless in medicine; as I stated in my article, everybody in the world has a hue or color. I have found that in trying to create a useful scientific description of patients, the more careful one has to be of the exact terms. This is not for political correctness but because of the heuristic nature of clinical medicine.
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