Teaching medical students to challenge ‘unscientific’ racial categories
By Ike Swetlitz,
STAT
| 03. 10. 2016
Untitled Document
Medical students looking to score high on their board exams sometimes get a bit of uncomfortable advice: Embrace racial stereotypes.
“You see ‘African American,’ automatically just circle ‘sickle cell,’” said Nermine Abdelwahab, a first-year student at the University of Minnesota Medical School, recounting tips she’s heard from older classmates describing the “sad reality” of the tests.
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 as a largely “black” disease.
Read more...
Image via Wikimedia.
Related Articles
By Nicholas Wade, The New York Times | 04.30.2026
“J. Craig Venter” via Wikimedia Commons licensed under CC by 2.5
J. Craig Venter, a scientist and entrepreneur who raced to decode the human genome, died on Wednesday in San Diego. He was 79.
His death was announced by...
By Jonathan Basile, Los Ángeles Review of Books | 04.29.2026
WILLIAM BATESON, a foundational figure in the science of genetics at the turn of the last century, once recounted the response of a Scottish soldier to one of his public lectures: “Sir, what ye’re telling us is nothing but Scientific...
By Alex Aylward, Daniel J. Fairbanks, Maria Kiladi, and Gregory Radick , Heredity | 04.20.2026
Genetics and eugenics co-evolved at the beginning of the twentieth century and remained associated through the 1940s and beyond. Early geneticists were far from unanimous in their views on eugenics; some avidly supported the movement, whereas others openly opposed it...
By Staff, GMWatch | 03.28.2026
Following a recent podcast interview we were asked whether there is any solid scientific research looking at how gene expression or molecular composition in genetically modified (GM) plants differs from conventionally bred plants. As this is an interesting and important...
