Breast cancer and racialized medicinePosted in Articles, Health/Medicine/Genetics, Media Archive, United States on 2015-04-16 22:17Z by Steven |
Breast cancer and racialized medicine
Race, Racism & Human Genetics IDS 243: Race, Racism, and Human Genetics
Willamette University
Salem, Oregon
2014-11-28
Stephanie Matsuura
Katie Herr
Camille Debreczeny
Race, Racism & Human Genetics IDS 243: Race, Racism, and Human Genetics is an interdisciplinary course taught at Willamette University by Emily Drew and Chris Smith. This blog represents the work of students enrolled in the course, and their reactions to current scholarly and popular work relating to the biology of human difference.
Racial disparities in breast cancer are often attributed to biology uncritically, without considering social factors. In many genetic studies, rhetorical framing of human diversity conflates differences between populations with racial categories. An unconscious complicity in the racial worldview informs these studies, which are then used to justify racialized explanations for disparities in breast cancer. Many researchers recognize that individualized, complete genome analysis would provide better care for patients, but lack the technological and economic resources to make this a realistic goal. Instead they rely on racialized medicine, which has serious consequences for women of color with breast cancer.
Racialized medicine occurs when the U.S. racial worldview goes unchallenged in the way it shapes medical research, health care practices, and public health policy. It is a way of making inequalities in health and illness seem natural by erroneously linking them to “innate” and “biological” differences between racial groups. In the U.S., women of color are disproportionately affected by breast cancer. Black women in particular have higher breast cancer mortality rates than any other racial/ethnic group in the country (Happe 2006). In this blog we aim to cover the main possible explanations for observed racial disparities in both incidence and prognosis of breast cancer. Studies have attributed racial disparities in both incidence and prognosis to the genetics underlying breast cancer as well as to social factors…
Read the entire article here.