I clicked on the heart disease algorithm link, and it was just a tweet of screenshots, with no link to the article. I typed in the name of the article into my search bar so that I could read it.
Your commentary about this headline may be correct, but I find it questionable after reading the whole article. The article includes the following paragraph:
Two years ago, a scientific task force of the National Kidney Foundation and American Society of Nephrology called for jettisoning a measure of kidney function that adjusted results by race, often making Black patients seem less ill than they are and leading to delays in treatment.
I find that claim questionable as well, but not in a way that increases my credence in your summary. I clicked through again to an NEJM article mentioned in the NYT article, and it went into detail about how the racial corrections are made. My current belief is now, “this stuff is controversial for seemingly real reasons. Benefits & harms may both be present, and I do not know which way the scales tip.” Hardly a slam dunk against the woke menace, which is the impression I had when I first clicked your link.
Am I wrong? Do you stand by your summary? Did you read the article? Do contend that you didn’t need to read it?
Perhaps ironically, I didn’t read your whole post before commenting. It’s possible that you have some appropriate disclaimer somewhere in it, which I missed in my skim. If not though, I want to at least flag this, because I see potential for misinformation cascades if I don’t :/
The American Heart Association (AHA) Get with the Guidelines–Heart Failure Risk Score predicts the risk of death in patients admitted to the hospital.9 It assigns three additional points to any patient identified as “nonblack,” thereby categorizing all black patients as being at lower risk. The AHA does not provide a rationale for this adjustment. Clinicians are advised to use this risk score to guide decisions about referral to cardiology and allocation of health care resources. Since “black” is equated with lower risk, following the guidelines could direct care away from black patients.
From the NEJM article. This is the exact opposite of Zvi’s conclusions (“Not factoring this in means [blacks] will get less care”).
Is Zvi/NYT referring to a different risk calculator? There are a lot of them out there. The NEJM also discuses a surgical risk score that has the opposite directionality, so maybe that one? Though there the conclusion is also about less care for blacks: “When used preoperatively to assess risk, these calculations could steer minority patients, deemed to be at higher risk, away from surgery.” Of course, less care could be a good thing here!
I clicked on the heart disease algorithm link, and it was just a tweet of screenshots, with no link to the article. I typed in the name of the article into my search bar so that I could read it.
Your commentary about this headline may be correct, but I find it questionable after reading the whole article. The article includes the following paragraph:
I find that claim questionable as well, but not in a way that increases my credence in your summary. I clicked through again to an NEJM article mentioned in the NYT article, and it went into detail about how the racial corrections are made. My current belief is now, “this stuff is controversial for seemingly real reasons. Benefits & harms may both be present, and I do not know which way the scales tip.” Hardly a slam dunk against the woke menace, which is the impression I had when I first clicked your link.
Am I wrong? Do you stand by your summary? Did you read the article? Do contend that you didn’t need to read it?
Perhaps ironically, I didn’t read your whole post before commenting. It’s possible that you have some appropriate disclaimer somewhere in it, which I missed in my skim. If not though, I want to at least flag this, because I see potential for misinformation cascades if I don’t :/
From the NEJM article. This is the exact opposite of Zvi’s conclusions (“Not factoring this in means [blacks] will get less care”).
I confirmed the NEJM’s account by using an online calculator for that score. https://www.mdcalc.com/calc/3829/gwtg-heart-failure-risk-score Setting a patient with black=No gives higher risk than black=yes. Similarly so for a risk score from the AHA,: https://static.heart.org/riskcalc/app/index.html#!/baseline-risk
Is Zvi/NYT referring to a different risk calculator? There are a lot of them out there. The NEJM also discuses a surgical risk score that has the opposite directionality, so maybe that one? Though there the conclusion is also about less care for blacks: “When used preoperatively to assess risk, these calculations could steer minority patients, deemed to be at higher risk, away from surgery.” Of course, less care could be a good thing here!
I agree that this looks complicated.