For background, I’m coming from Germany, where our liberals protest when they ask asylum seekers for their ethnic identity to find out whether they are discriminated in their homeland for their ethnic identity, because we believe treating people different based on ethnic identity is wrong.
Obese people show different effects to all sorts of clinical interventions compared to people that are underweight. Yet, the FDA makes no attempt to have a representative sample of obese people and underweight people in their clinical trials. When Big Pharma companies recruit patients for clinical trials, they don’t try to a representative population when it comes to weight. In many cases they have a hypothesis that their drug will be more effective if the trial population is based to have less preconditions and then they recruit a clinical trial population that’s biased by design.
Clinical trials have trial populations that are sized to find clinically significant effects in the total trial population. If you have a clinical trial that sized to find an effect in the general population but only have that effect on Native Americans or on Black people, you are unlikely to find a statistical significant effect if you have Native Americans and Black people at their normal representation of the population.
The way doses for antidepressants and antipsychotics are chosen in clinical practice is often that you start with the lowest dose and change the dose for a single patient till the dose is good for the patient.
It’s also worth noting that genetic differences between different populations in Africa itself are higher than genetic differences between Whites and Asians. When people like Elizabeth Warren identify as Native Americans even when they are genetically mostly White, it’s not very safe that you have a good idea of someone genetics from their racial self-identification. There’s a reason why self-studies don’t ask whether someone is gay but asks for whether they belong to the group of men-who-have-sex-with-men.
If you wanted a new science of how to build racial categories about how to guide medical decisions, there’s research you could fund do gene sequencing and do a lot of work, nobody really wants that or at least I have seen nobody who advocates it.
The motivation for using the standard racial categories is equity. It was a policy to fight distrust of minorities in mainstream medicine. While the decision might be older then the term DEI but it still seems to be the principle of DEI.
For background, I’m coming from Germany, where our liberals protest when they ask asylum seekers for their ethnic identity to find out whether they are discriminated in their homeland for their ethnic identity, because we believe treating people different based on ethnic identity is wrong.
Obese people show different effects to all sorts of clinical interventions compared to people that are underweight. Yet, the FDA makes no attempt to have a representative sample of obese people and underweight people in their clinical trials. When Big Pharma companies recruit patients for clinical trials, they don’t try to a representative population when it comes to weight. In many cases they have a hypothesis that their drug will be more effective if the trial population is based to have less preconditions and then they recruit a clinical trial population that’s biased by design.
Clinical trials have trial populations that are sized to find clinically significant effects in the total trial population. If you have a clinical trial that sized to find an effect in the general population but only have that effect on Native Americans or on Black people, you are unlikely to find a statistical significant effect if you have Native Americans and Black people at their normal representation of the population.
The way doses for antidepressants and antipsychotics are chosen in clinical practice is often that you start with the lowest dose and change the dose for a single patient till the dose is good for the patient.
It’s also worth noting that genetic differences between different populations in Africa itself are higher than genetic differences between Whites and Asians. When people like Elizabeth Warren identify as Native Americans even when they are genetically mostly White, it’s not very safe that you have a good idea of someone genetics from their racial self-identification. There’s a reason why self-studies don’t ask whether someone is gay but asks for whether they belong to the group of men-who-have-sex-with-men.
If you wanted a new science of how to build racial categories about how to guide medical decisions, there’s research you could fund do gene sequencing and do a lot of work, nobody really wants that or at least I have seen nobody who advocates it.
The motivation for using the standard racial categories is equity. It was a policy to fight distrust of minorities in mainstream medicine. While the decision might be older then the term DEI but it still seems to be the principle of DEI.