Catherine Elton, Time, August 22, 2009
{snip} Experts within the research community say a small but stubborn streak of racial profiling has long persisted in the medical literature, borne out in studies that attribute health disparities between blacks and whites not to socioeconomics or access to health care alone but also to genetic differences between the races—a concept that implies that a biological category of race exists.
The controversy resurfaced in July with the publication of a study in the Journal of the National Cancer Institute (JNCI) in which researchers analyzed more than 19,000 patients who participated in clinical trials involving treatments for a variety of cancers. The paper found that all other factors being equal, black patients had on average a significantly lower cancer survival rate than whites. Given that all patients were participating in the same clinical trials, the authors said, there was no difference in terms of access to care. Researchers said also that even after adjusting for patients’ socioeconomic status, the survival gap between black and white patients remained for three of the cancers studied: breast, ovarian and prostate. “There is a considerable difference in the statistics. Something big is going on among people who are getting equal care,” says lead author Kathy Albain, a breast and lung cancer specialist at Loyola University’s cancer center. That something, the authors concluded, must be some unknown biological or genetic factor that differs by race.
That conclusion, critics quickly responded, was flawed. “Race is a sociological concept, not a biological category,” says Otis Brawley, the chief medical officer for the American Cancer Society, who wrote an editorial accompanying the study. “But this study brings race into medicine as a biological categorization.” {snip}
{snip} Lisa Carey, a breast cancer specialist at the University of North Carolina, believes that biological differences may well contribute to differences in health, such as the one Albain found, but that any discussion of race turns automatically contentious. “The idea of differences between races has been fraught with misuse over the years, and not just in medicine. Everyone is leery that it could be misused again,” she says. “So we have to be careful how we interpret it, but that doesn’t mean we should ignore it.”
Every few years, in fact, a new study like Albain’s materializes, each following a remarkably similar logic: Researchers identify a disparity in health outcomes (cancer survival or response to treatment, for example) that falls along racial fault lines; investigators then adjust for socioeconomic status, and, when the disparity persists, conclude it must be genetic. That consistent failure of reasoning bemuses Jay Kaufman, a McGill University professor of epidemiology who studies health disparities. “Why are we still doing this study?” he says. “If you are trying to make the argument that [different health outcomes] must be genetic by exhausting other possibilities and saying what is left over must be genes, well, that’s never going to work. There are a million things that affect people’s lives. If you think it’s genes, then measure genes.”
For Albain’s part, she says race is a surrogate for unknown genes—which, scientists agree, play a significant role in health outcomes. “When we find out what the [genetic] ‘it’ is, we will be able to test everyone for ‘it’ and we will find some Caucasians who have it and some blacks who don’t and we won’t be talking about black and white anymore,” she says. Still, geneticists point out that hereditary traits follow ancestral lines, not racial ones. And race in America, as it is socially defined, constitutes such broad categories that it is a crude—arguably useless—proxy for genetics.
Yet such studies insistently conclude that, having controlled for socioeconomics, there must be some unknown biological factor (as opposed to some unknown social or cultural factor) at play, says David Williams, a Harvard professor of public health and African American studies. “The biology is a fall-back black box that many researchers use when they find racial differences,” he says. “It is knee-jerk reaction. It is not based on science, but on a deeply held, cultural belief about race that the medical field has a hard time giving up.”
This is a uniquely American phenomenon, experts say. In other countries, information about race is usually not available to medical researchers, as it isn’t collected in census data or in birth and death certificates. In some countries, such as Canada, medical researchers can choose to ask about race, but in other places—France, for example—researchers have a hard time winning approval for any study that specifically involves participants’ race. {snip}
{snip}
Fundamentally researchers do not dispute the fact that biology—namely genetics—helps determine individual health outcomes. But the practice of categorizing patients by race has yet to further the discovery of significant gene mutations. What’s more, say critics, it promotes racial thinking while dismissing the more germane issue of socioeconomics. Indeed, Albain and her coauthors used a single, widely disputed metric in their study—patients’ zip codes linked to census tract data—to “adjust” for socioeconomic status. Yet researchers know that people living within one zip code can include the city’s wealthiest and poorest residents. And even if zip codes were a trustworthy indicator of income and education, they would still be insufficient to level the socioeconomic playing field. As previous studies have shown, whites have more wealth than blacks at every level of income, and at every level of education whites get more returns on their studies. To close the gap in health outcomes, thus, the key is perhaps not to control for socioeconomic disparities but to try to eliminate them altogether.
Original article
(Posted on August 28, 2009)
Comments
Amazing, an entire article of people quoted saying the biological race reason is wrong even though socioeconomic and healthcare are both controlled, and not one of them giving a reason why.
The Times has an impressive amount of chutzpah.
studies that attribute health disparities between blacks and whites not to socioeconomics or access to health care alone but also to genetic differences between the races—a concept that implies that a biological category of race exists.
Why do medical professionals of any level of professionalism tolerate this sort of absurdly obsolete Lysenkoism? It seems to me self-evident that not race, but race denial is a “sociological concept” rather than a biological one, not to mention “culturally conditioned,” and that as such the latter should have absolutely no place in studies or discussions of medicine.
Quote: “But the practice of categorizing patients by race has yet to further the discovery of significant gene mutations.”
Sickle cell? Salt retention? Melanoma rates? Are they all faking it?
Quote: “…studies insistently conclude…” With that kind of writing, I’d bet a buck that author Catherine Elton is a quota who is neither White nor Asian.
What a stupid piece.
Reading this article inspired me to consider a new business venture. The manfacture and sale of horse-type blinders for journalists, reporters, and other arbiters of popular opinion. Truly, they are an easily frightened lot.
Seriously though, this piece is an excercise in denying the value of Occam’s razor, while hewing to arcane doctrines worthy of Lysenko. And we all know the who, what, where, when, and why, of that story.
Their minds are as closed as the ‘racists’ they condemn.
Let’s take a peek at one Otis Brawley, shall we:
http://chhs.gsu.edu/2071.html
Not much more need be said, but that the so-called “medical community” of this nation are a disgrace for engaging in such an egregious conspiracy of deceit!
That article has many stupid and ignorant statements in it that I think stem from the problem of the ill defined word “race” and I would recommend that people who want to indicate valid genetic based differences should just talk about human groups. For instance, one can say there are well known genetic differences between the descendants of sub-Saharan Africans (DSSAs)and those of European descent, between ethnic groups like Jews, Japanese and the Irish, between the African Zulu tribe and the Bushmen, and so on. Some of these genetic based differences are important in medicine and in social science. Why get in arguments around the unnecessary word race with all it’s problematic baggage?
If you control for socioeconomic factors, and there are still differences that fall along racial lines, then of course it’s race. An idiot could figure that out.
Liberals like the author of this article try to claim that there is no such thing as race, on the one hand; and that African-Americans are the victims of racism and discrimination, on the other. Well, folks, you can’t have it both ways. It’s either one or the other. Either there IS such a thing as race; or there is no such thing as an African-American.
“There are a million things that affect people’s lives. If you think it’s genes, then measure genes.”
Well, then I guess we have to abandon group studies, because it would be near-impossible to correct for “a million things that affect people’s lives.”
“To close the gap in health outcomes, thus, the key is perhaps not to control for socioeconomic disparities but to try to eliminate them altogether.”
In other words, more socialism. We’ll have few “socioeconomic disparities” when almost everyone is equally poor, and receives the same low-quality medical care.
I suppose Time & friends think their behavior isn’t malfeasant because the negative outcomes are manifested across degrees of separation. In other words, they’re not harming anyone, they’re just taking action likely to elicit medical malpractice.
I don’t think right-thinking people should accept Time & friends’ tacit logic; they’re malfeasant.
These people bend over backwards to deny any human racial differences. But skin color is a difference in the varying races. Only a liberal would insist that THAT is the only difference in the differing human races. Especially with all the evidence pointing in the opposite direction. Crime rates, sickle cell, intelligence testing results, the list of inventor’s and innovator’s race, a comparison of differing nation’s success and advancement, etc. The list is practically endless. Me thinks these deniers of racial differences know better, but must toe the leftist line or risk being shunned by their “esteemed” colleagues.
ONLY 20 % of the persons on the planet can digest milk and milk products. And those 20 % just so happen to be whitey. Whitey has the enzyme that can break down the milk product. NON-whitey cannot do so. It IS racial. This is just a well-known fact and yet is ignored? As is so much other stuff too.
Keep in mind too that 2 % of the whitey population has the natural immunity to the “black death”, the bubonic plague [whitey has the immunity to the “black death”, how about that!!]. Orientals and blacks do not have such an immunity. A world-wide epidemic where everyone got the illness without treatment would result in? Race does not exist? Everything tell us it DOES exist and we all know it. “I know it when I see it but I’ll be damned if I can’t define it!! - - Potter Stewart.
People will tie themselves into knots to avoid admitting that there is a difference in races. Even to the detriment of people’s health. The treatment of something may depend on a scientist’s aknowledgement of differences between races. There are a few arguements I use when on lefty race difference deniers. When it comes to science I ask them rhetorically, “if race is merely a social construct, why, then, can anthropologists tell racial differences between skulls and have seperate racial categories to put skull and dental remains into?”
Magazine articles such as this one are either designed to comfort fellow barking mad liberals or infuriate WN’s to commit heinous acts of violence so that police can quickly filter them out of society.It appears to even the most casual reader that all of the people quoted are mentally unstable. I fear the reporter, Ms. Elton, may be the most advanced case.
Of course, most people put paramount priority on their health.
Otis Brawley, “chief medical officer” for the American Cancer Society, thinks race is a sociological construct?
This dolt is associated with the medical profession? Given his name I also suspect he’s black. And no doubt Otis thinks that sickle cell anemia is also a sociological construct. And of course “everyone knows” that markedly lower black IQs are sociological constructs as well. And black skin, African facial features, and uniquely African hair are all optical and psychological illusions. Likewise the smaller average stature of East Asians, the prevalence of blue eyes among northern Europeans, the higher average IQs among Ashkenazi Jews, all psychological and sociological inventions!
To HH:
The profile of Otis Brawley you linked to states that he chaired a committe in charge of investigating sickle cell diseases.
Wait a minute! Is he claiming sickle cell anemia affects racial groups differently? So much for his “race is a social construct” theory.
“Race is a sociological concept, not a biological category,” says Otis Brawley, the chief medical officer for the American Cancer Society”
That would be news to Charles Darwin, author of “On the Origin of Species by Means of Natural Selection, or the Preservation of Favoured Races in the Struggle for Life”. But then, what did Darwin know about biology?
Note to self: Never donate money to the American Cancer Society. Given that their chief medical officer is ignorant of biology, any money given them would likely be wasted.
This ‘scholarly’ report reminded me of something put out by the Flat Earth Society or the medieval church insisting that the earth is the center of the universe. I doubt even one of the researchers believes for one second that what the Pope—I mean the black chief medical officer for the American Cancer Society— says is true: “Race is a sociological concept, not a biological category.”
The researchers must play along with this fantasy lest they end up as Galileo did:
“…he was tried by the Inquisition, found ‘vehemently suspect of heresy,’ forced to recant, and spent the rest of his life under house arrest…”
Legend has it that Galileo said, “E pur si muove”, which means, “And Yet It Moves” before the Inquisition.
Modern heresy means severe punishment as in an immediate end to one’s life career, possibly a public show trial and ostracism after one’s reputation is destroyed. To continue to overtly support such falsities as ‘race is a sociological conceit’ merits great rewards—respect, a large salary, prestigious job, research grants, honors and recognition for one’s work.
How much longer can this House of Cards stand?
Bon
You’re from LA aren’t you Bon? A couple of years ago I read an article in the LA Times that said, “Contrary to popular opinion, genetic researchers are finding more and more evidence for the validity of race as a biological reality”. Most of that quote is a loose paraphrase, but the part I remember clearly is “Contrary to popular opinion…” Whose popular opinion? The MSM has been pimping that particular lie for years, and it has never caught on except among the terminally deluded. Now they know that it’s passed its “best by” date, and are trying to ease away from it. Apparently the editors at Time magazine didn’t read the memo and have yet to adopt the new party line, “contrary to popular opinion”. Kind of like disowning your children, it’s hard to do.
“Still, geneticists point out that hereditary traits follow ancestral lines, not racial ones.”
This is probably the stupidest sentence in the whole article. Race IS ancestry. If you are White, your ancestors came from Europe. If you are Black, your ancestors came from sub-Saharan Africa. Race is nothing more than shared ancestry. Why is this so hard for some to wrap their heads around? Oh, I forgot. They’re liberals.
Race denial can be medically dangerous. There are racial differences in risk factor for certain types of diseases, early detection, reaction to drugs and so forth. It is therefore imperative for the patient’s sake that medical professionals exercise racial profiling.
The very fact that there are significant differences between identifiable groups of people demonstrates that such distinction - race - is not an illusion, aka social construct.
‘Race is a sociological concept, not a biological category…’
This coming from a scientist??? So skin pigmentation & bone structure is imagined by society? It’s actually NOT real? That’s like saying blonde vs brown hair is not real, curly vs straight hair is all in the mind, & sickle cell doesn’t exist. If there weren’t any obvious physical differences, we wouldn’t be talking about race.
And to think how much money was spent on his edumacation…
Anon #20 writes:
“…You’re from LA aren’t you Bon?…”
I live outside of LA but close enough that I am aware of its backwards politics, punitive taxes, onerous regulations, low g-loaded mayor and other stupid, specious policies that favor illegal immigrants over native born citizens, especially White citizens.
LA is an anti-White mexican city, make no mistake.
I quit reading the LA Times 10 years ago because I was sick of the leftist tripe, as you mentioned in your post. I am not surprised that the LA Times would bury an article supporting race as a biological reality—just as they bury black- and hispanic-on-White crime. I’m sure one of their lefty editors deconstructed the race/biology link and immediately published a screed stating that ‘Race is a Social Construct’—at the same time screeching that any White who disagrees with this theory is longing for a rise of the Fourth Reich and a return of Nazis racial strategy.
Time Magazine is just as bad.
As the media’s pet social theories crash down around them, they’re looking more and more foolish and losing subscribers as well. The Emperor has no Clothes and more of us are finding this out thanks to the Internet and talk radio. Hopefully, the tea parties and righteous fury at the town hall meetings are a sign of this recognition and the start of a larger movement among Whites.
Too bad—I love the newspaper. But I won’t return until papers print editorials and articles by MM Taylor and McDonald and Pofessors Ruston, Lynn and Jensen.
Is it any wonder the government is targeting talk radio and the Internet specifically for control and regulation?
Newsmax.com reports:
“…Newspapers are collapsing — and fast.
Circulation is plunging. Ad revenue is dropping precipitously. Staffs are being slashed. Papers are folding. Others are declaring bankruptcy…. Ad revenues have plunged 29 percent in one year…”
Why would Whites subscribe to any newspaper that daily insults them and calls them racists?
Again, Brimelow is correct: The Inernet is the most important creation since the written word. But we will have a fight on our hands as the socialist government moves to grab control of it, as they’ve taken control of banks and the car industry.
Bon
“Race is a sociological concept, not a biological category,” says Otis Brawley, the chief medical officer
Unbelievable—I thought I actually had gotten to the point where I no longer could be surprised by lefty pretzel-logic and frantic denial of reality via semantics, and now this!
They’ve topped themselves again. Wonders never cease!
” “There is a considerable difference in the statistics. Something big is going on among people who are getting equal care,” says lead author Kathy Albain, a breast and lung cancer specialist at Loyola University’s cancer center. That something, the authors concluded, must be some unknown biological or genetic factor that differs by race. “
Is this honestly news? The medical community has known that medical differences amongst races exist since at LEAST the 40s, just take a look at the books dealing with blood types and diseases from the time!
” Race is a sociological concept, not a biological category,” says Otis Brawley, the chief medical officer for the American Cancer Society, who wrote an editorial accompanying the study. “But this study brings race into medicine as a biological categorization.” “
Mr. Brawley has given absolutely no logical argument to support this absurd theory of race denial. It is a bare assertion, plain and simple. The fact that Mr. Brawley just so happens to be black comes as no surprise either.
“Lisa Carey, a breast cancer specialist at the University of North Carolina, believes that biological differences may well contribute to differences in health, such as the one Albain found, but that any discussion of race turns automatically contentious. “The idea of differences between races has been fraught with misuse over the years, and not just in medicine. Everyone is leery that it could be misused again,” she says. “So we have to be careful how we interpret it, but that doesn’t mean we should ignore it.” “
Misuse over the years in what ways? Having more available medical procedures to help different patients because of previously discovered racial differences is considered “misuse”? Devoting specialized care to patients with varying needs is “misuse”? Give me a break. Apparently it’s considered “misuse” to acknowledge that races are not the same in every single way, and that these glaring racial disparities must be “interpreted” according to our PC standards. It seems that Ms. Carey thinks like a good little media sheep should.
This proves the liberal intellgensia(hahahaha) are nothing but a brainwashed cult. They deny what we all see with our own eyes everyday. I’ll bet the idiot who wrote this article would not walk in certain areas of town at night. Just stroll around the projects at midnight for a while, there are only other humans just like you strolling around. The crime s no higher there either.Every thing the liberal thinks proves wrong. Men and women are just a like. Men are only needed to impregnate women not raise children. Homosexuality is natural and good. You are born a blank slate. There is no God. To lose weight eat a high carb diet. Look see method in reading instead of phonetics.All races are just alike.We evolved even through cro-magnon man, neandertahl java man etc. All, I mean all have proven to be hoaxes.Socialism, communism. The list goes on and on. Liberalism is a cult.
“Race is a sociological concept, not a biological category,” says Otis Brawley, the chief medical officer.
Statements like this demonstrate why acceptance into universities, medical schools, and law schools should be based on intelligence, instead of skin color. Would you want this guy, using his “logic” to treat you?
Let’s flood Time magazine with all the articles that have been on Amren that tell of genetic differences in so many health conditions. Maybe they haven’t seen them.
“a concept that implies that a biological category of race exists.”
To where do I send my medical bill? My jaw just dropped to the floor, you see, where it fractured. The abject stupidity of the above quoted phrase was the direct cause of the incredulity whose reaction, like collapsing due to excrutiating pain, I was unable to prevent.
It’s stunning to me that out of one side of their mouths blacks are constantly harping about how they’re different from whites, they’re not the same, they’re a specific group with a separate culture, separate needs, separate desires, blah, blah. Yet at the same time they spout nonsense like ‘race is a sociological concept; not a biological category’. They conveniently pick and choose which particular argument will net them what they want, yet no one is allowed to call attention to that. There is absolutely no appeasing these people, and there is absolutely no way to get such instances of this classic double talk pointed out in the msm.
To deny ethnic or racial susceptability to disease is stupid and misleading. Pemphigus and Gaucher’s disease are found almost exclusively in Ashkenaze Jews. G6HD haemolytic anaemia is found in people of African origin, as is sickle cell anaemia.What the article is saying is: there are no different races, only the human race. Anyone who disagrees is a racist.
O brave new world!
— S.L. Cain wrote —
……………………………..
“An acknowledged global leader in the field of health disparities research, Dr. Brawley is principal in the Society’s work to eliminate disparities in access to quality cancer care.”
It’s appalling to think that such an organization can appoint an ignoramus like this to such a high position. But they’ll be getting no money from me.
