"Not only do minorities get asthma at a higher rate, but [UCSF] pulmonologist Dr. Esteban Burchard ... has found that ethnicity is the most important factor in determining if a patient will respond to asthma therapy. Unfortunately, for the most most commonly prescribed asthma medication, Albuterol, 67 percent of Puerto Ricans and 47 percent of African-Americans show no improvement when taking it, yet Albuterol works therapeutically for the vast majority of Caucasian patients."
It sounds horrifying, but actually is kind of meaningless as written.
Imagine two worlds:
World #1 (the horrible world): medical research neglects black people. They only bothered to develop an asthma treatment that works on white people.
World #2 (the reasonable world): medical research is careful to make sure they cover all groups. They developed several asthma drugs. None works well across all ethnic groups, but there is a good one available for each ethnic group.
In both of these worlds the most commonly prescribed asthma drug will be one that works on the vast majority of white people and does not work well on black people.
What they need to include to make the point they are trying to make is how the less commonly prescribed asthma drugs do on different ethnic groups.
Your assumption in #2 is incorrect. What actually happens often is the doctor doesn't know what to prescribe the patient and the patients quality of life suffers. As well as stated in my article, one of those alternative treatments "For another type of asthma treatment, long-acting bronchodilators, blacks are 4 times more likely than whites to die or experience serious complications when using them."
Cytochrome P450 is a family of closely related enzymes that are involved in drug metabolism. There are certain isoforms that have variants with wildly different activity in certain populations. In drug discovery we screen for their involvement and do not like to develop compounds that are metabolized by one of these isoforms because the variation in pharmacokinetics would be too huge. This is kind of the opposite of personalized medicine, making response uniform across the population.
Well you’d have to do basic research, come up with a hypothesis, then run a clinical trial to test that hypothesis. And hopefully find useful information although clinical trials do fail.
In more social/cultural discussions of genetics and race, there are often different assertions on various sides that race does or does not imply a specific definable genetic makeup. How might that contrast with the more medically focused approach and use of the term minorities with work of HDP Health?
Actually environmental factors are a big portion of clinical research. Most people think of just the precision medicine approach, but often taking in environmental factors and developing treatment plans that take that into account are a big part of clinical research, and most of the envioronmental/cultural focus on this has been toward white american culture.
While we "focus on medical" clinical research isn't just testing new drugs, it's determining if one diet is better than other, it's finding prevention mechanisms and much much more. We work with any center that is running any type of research. And while we focus mostly on cancer treatments (70% of research dollars are spent here) we're building technology and want to expand to cover all types of clinical research as we grow.
Honestly I have no idea which would have a better outcome, but I know both would have a great impact. My assumption would be the second one if I had to pick though, for example as an African American I have a sickle-cell trait and thus I shouldn't have kids with someone who also has that trait, and African American's in general have a higher likelihood of that trait. This is fortunately one of the well understood minority cases and therefore I can take action on it, but for many other genetic/ethnic dispositions to harm, they are quite unknown.
If I ever figure out which would be better I'll let you know! Or if someone else chimes in.
Since development of medications is such a heavily regulated industry, it seems to me the correct course of action is through regulation. Require a testament of some sort of the drugs' tested effects on different races. Or maybe require that test groups be representative of the population.
110% agree. The government has actually had a mandate out for publicly funded research since 1993, but only have enforcement rules been enacted and we have yet to see if they will be followed through on.
For research done by private institutions (Pharma, Biotech, etc.) there is no mandate and it's on the researcher to make it a thing.
* All Minorities, not one minority, and technically I believe all funded research should reflect the populations that exist rather than focusing on one, and take the various genetic backgrounds into account when developing treatments.
Do you find the opening statement "With more than 50 percent of the population estimated to be a minority by 2044" ridiculous? When did we start ignoring what words mean? That's not what the word "minority" means.
There's many ways you can rephrase it and still be correct, mind you.
No single group that is currently a "minority" would overtake the white population, therefore every other population in the US would still be considered a Minority until there is an equal or more number of a single minority than there are white Americans.
Mathematically, if no population is a majority, then the country is 100 percent minority.
You might be hang up on the additional narrative attached to the word “minority”. Consider using “underpriviledged ethnic group", as a. not even today all ethnic groups are equal and b. it is entirely possible some other ethnic group to raise to demographic majority status, and still exhibit the socioeconomic characteristics of a poor population.
Or maybe words are imprecise and fluid and the majority of people understand the intended message even if it's "technically incorrect".
>You might be hang up on the additional narrative attached to the word “minority”.
You can't separate words from their "additional narratives" and expect all people to understand what you're attempting to convey. The context and connotation around words is absolutely necessary for communication, and to eschew it leads to poorer communication.
All of these semantic games miss the point of the term "minority". It's not meant to mean "numerical minority"; it's meant as a euphemism for "non-white person". When you read it that way, all of these terms make sense.
It’s not ridiculous. It means that by 2044, estimates are that over 50% of the population will be part of a minority group, and the largest single group (whites) will no longer be a majority of the population. The minority groups will individually still be smaller than the largest group.
This is a very US-centric view of things. Worldwide, whites are the smallest minority, and they are the only group to be shrinking. The largest group is of course Asian.
Incorrect, the actual definition is "Majority minority" https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Majority_minority and yes those of us that are currently Minorities, would still be considered minorities in such a case.
This reminds me of a man in the UK, or African ancestry, but who had never been to Africa (or to the US). Americans repeatedly insisted on calling him an "African American".
>When you're main concern is "What is a minority" rather than "minorities are dying" that is very indicative of the problem still existing
You have just demonstrated what is called "attribution of intention" (as in you attributed an intention to the other person), which is a good indicator of a conversation going south.
(More general bias is "attribution bias")
HN guideline:
>Please respond to the strongest plausible interpretation of what someone says, not a weaker one that's easier to criticize. Assume good faith.
I'm a machine learning researcher, currently working on robust models (i.e. models that handle outliers properly). More traditional statistics has good techniques for making models robust, but current machine learning techniques do not.
Do you have any thoughts on how improvements in these sorts of machine learning algorithms could make clinical trials more fair? I ask because you specifically mention that HDP uses AI in the article.
Actually the AI portion of our product is mostly for making clinical trial recruitment more efficient, although we consciously add demographic tweaks to our algorithms to help identify specific patient populations that many researchers simply don't think about.
What we are also working on to make things more fair is helping open critical clinical trials in areas where there is a higher density of minority populations, as well as using demographic data in identifying where minority patients exist that match up to the latest clinical trials to prove to pharma companies that opening them in those areas is not only a moral improvement, but a financial one as well. (Disclaimer we do all of this de-identified).
Would definitely be great to have a larger discussion on this topic!
Are you also planning to include pregnant women in your trials?
I'm not in the health field, so I don't know where the regulations stand, but I recall talking to someone who was advocating for this a couple of decades ago to avoid future cases like Thalidomide.
I could write a whole other article on this as well. The pregnant women part actually fits extremely well in this context even more so, they aren't neglected, they are specifically left out because researchers don't want to have to explain their outliers. I'm a proponent of that, but the sponsors have to front the costs to make it happen, without a government mandate that gets very tricky.
More minority volunteers, and having clinical trials where minorities go to for care. Great example is most of the well funded academic institutions that run research are in affluent, mostly white neighborhoods, so if a (for assumption) poor minority wanted to participate, its not likely that the clinical trial would be available near them.
Acknowledged. I actually have a few (of those books). More so raised the points to be objective and for those who don't know any better.
Serious question though, is there much (U.S.) interest (define it as you wish) in this subject? Or is this more a passion project and attempt to raise awareness. (I'll understand if you duck the question for various reasons.)
* Bonus historical example... Department of Energy (along w/ various universities et al.) and the radioactivity 'experiments' on unwilling/unknowing citizens of 'little importance'. Clinton issued an 'apology' at some point. Don't remember the specifics and don't feel like looking them up now.
There is actually a push here (ignoring mandated public funded trials) because the Minority populations are becoming large enough that if a diabetes drug that was better in black people existed there’s a massive underserved customer base. Follow the money...
I suppose I shouldn't be surprised, but I assumed that this sort of thing would have more traction outside of the U.S, which would then sort of (maybe) jump on the bandwagon.
What outcome is a feature? You seem to be saying that the outcome that minorities are dying is a feature, but I strongly suspect that the comment just needs clarification.
Your ambiguity implies you are indeed saying that minorities dying is feature.
> inconvenient 'problems'
Calling people dying "inconvenient" implies that at best you don't think it's serious. Putting "'problems'" in quotes, implies that you don't really think it's a problem.
Do you really want to say that deaths of people who are members of minorities is desirable, or at least not a problem?
You're not being circumspect, because what you said initially was clear. I gave you a chance to take it back, and you went further. Also, anyone who equivocates on something like that rather than simply condemning clearly is promoting the idea; for example, if a public figure spoke like you, nobody would doubt what they mean and they would lose their job.
The OP seemed to understand what I was saying. We engaged in civil discourse and I learned something. Seriously, did you digest our dialogue before you drew your conclusion about my post(s)?
Frankly, you jumped to a conclusion, and having read some of your other posts, I decided to respond as I did thinking that you might realize that your interpretation was wrong. Guess not.
Honestly, anyone familiar w/even a smattering of (past or present) American approaches to science/medicine involving "minorities" shouldn't be responding the way that you are.
> or example, if a public figure spoke like you, nobody would doubt what they mean and they would lose their job.
Guess, we'll be talking about President Pence any day now, right? Suppose, Woodrow Wilson's name will be taken off of all those schools and other buildings currently named after him, right? No more reverence for "Indian Killer" Andrew Jackson?
You are entitled to your opinion, but your opinion is not automatically fact.
Please don't: (1) troll HN by making veiled references to outrageous things; (2) post unsubstantive comments, such as ones that go on about how you do or don't like to comment and how other people fail to appreciate this; (3) use HN for political or ideological battle, or for flamewars.
Would a drug proven effective for whites and ineffective for blacks in the US suddenly become effective for blacks and ineffective for whites if administered in Zimbabwe?
Or do you mean "minorities" in the "there are too many minorities in my waterpark" sense?
The article mentions in the first sentence that it is about North America. So presumably it is talking about specific apparent population groups that are minorities in North America? With this in mind, you can probably imagine some examples. But the first sentence does include some, if you're unfamiliar with America.
It would mean that if a drug was inefficient on an African American of Zimbabwe descent, the same drug would be unlikely to be efficient on the black people Zimbabwe. There are measurable genetic traits these can be attributed to, although unfortunately they are less understood for minority populations.
Part of it is a lack of financial incentives on the part of the drug companies. Most pharmaceutical research is aimed at marketing drugs.
Take the example of hypertension, which is more prevalent among blacks than whites. At the moment, all of the major antihypertensive families are available as generic drugs. The best way to help black people quickly is to do a comparative study of drugs already on the market. No drug company is going to do that because they won't be able to capture the value if the drugs are generic.
Maybe a drug company could try to develop a drug which is particularly good for blacks, but it will take a decade, may not work, won't sell as well (fewer people), and then it will be an expensive new drug and people will complain about the cost.
That's 100% true, I'm not saying we have to create a new drug, but define what is the best treatments available, as well as take that into account when the treatments are being made. Especially as there become more black people if there is a treatment just for that minority it may be a quite profitable route for them.
Further down in the comments somewhere I posted another comment where it's as simple as certain chemo's cause toxicity levels in Asians where they don't in white Americans. So simply lowering the dosage would fix the problem but because that wasn't involved in the original research it wasn't known for quite sometime and Asian populations suffered.
When I say "focus on minorities for research" working any solution is fine, simple or not.
At least on the commercial side the FDA requires that your approval population (“treatment group”) be “representative” of the population who will receive the drug if it’s approved. So you can’t get away with, say, doing your study solely in Chad or Norway as their population distribution (except perhaps by sex) won’t match that of the USA.
I did find the line at the top "With more than 50 percent of the population estimated to be a minority by 2044..." funny - doesn't that make them a majority?
Suppose this wasn't the case. The news headlines would of course be "Experimental drugs being tested on minorities". That would be a PR disaster. It's safer to steer clear of minorities.
Essentially, the drug companies can't win. People will find something to complain about. Either minorities are getting neglected, or they are being abused as lab subjects.
Life is full of these catch 22s and we've cultivated a society where being offended gets more utility than actally getting helped in some cases. People don't always know why they act, but coi bono examinations show that outrage wins for invisible people. 15 minutes of twitter fame vs forming an opinion and having to defend it hmmmmmmm
I 100% disagree with everything you say here. For one, that is not a PR disaster as the headline you're using is one no one would ever use as it is insensitive. In fact what would happen is "New cancer treatment found to be more effective for minorities than previous treatments being test" would be a fabulous headline that would garner tons of support.
Saying "steer clear of minorities" shows complete "superiority" complex and is indicative of why the problem exists.
> Suppose this wasn't the case. The news headlines would of course be "Experimental drugs being tested on minorities". That would be a PR disaster.
Interesting. When you say suppose "this" wasn't the case, what do you mean by "this?" Do you mean the neglecting minorities in medical research leading to numerous negative consequences?
From what I understand correctly, you are trying to state the negation of OP's headline. If so, it's unclear how you arrived at that specific headline. Can you walk me through your line of reasoning?
> Essentially, the drug companies can't win. People will find something to complain about.
That's quite a bleak forecast. Can you clarify what it means for drug companies to win?
From my frame of reference, the game is the political arena, and a participant (or political entity) is "winning" if they can ensure they're interests and concerns are considered and upheld. Between 1998 and 2017, Pharmaceutical/Health product industry spent 3.7 billion dollars lobbying on capitol hill [0]. Interestingly, this was the highest amount spent by any industry. Moreover, it was 1.2 billion dollars more than the next highest industry, the insurance industry. If we examine just 2016 (and 2015), we see that Pharmaceutical Research & Manufacturers of America (PRMA) spent 19 million on lobbying [1], up about 1 million from the prior year. PRMA represents companies in the pharmaceutical industry, i.e. Big Pharma.
It was surpassed in spending by the Blue Cross, American Hospital Association, Chamber of Commerce, and National Association of Realtors.
Further down that list, we see Pfizer chipped in 9.7 million (up from 7 million in 2015), and the Biotechnology innovation organization chipped 9.2 million (up from 8.3 million in 2015).
At least to me, this doesn't seem like the behavior of someone that is eliminated from a competition. If things weren't going right, I would likely cut losses and try alternative routes, not spend more. So it suggests they are satisfied with the influence they're dollar buys. Presumably, they are able to clearly communicate their interests and concerns to the decision makers on Capitol Hill. Moreover, they are able to communicate these interests and concerns _behind closed doors_ to receptive members of _both parties._
Perhaps my thinking is faulty, but to me, it seems like they're winning, i.e. influencing policy in their favor.
> Either minorities are getting neglected, or they are being abused as lab subjects.
Can you explain why these are the only two options?
This is a longer article on the subject of poorer health outcomes for minorities, covering the situation for black women and one family's experience, which is very much worth reading, but here are the key points:
Statistics:
* A black woman is 22% more likely to die from heart disease than a white woman
* ...71 percent more likely to perish from cervical cancer
* ...243 percent more likely to die from pregnancy- or childbirth-related causes
Reasons:
* Black women are more likely to be uninsured outside of pregnancy, when Medicaid kicks in, and thus more likely to start prenatal care later and to lose coverage in the postpartum period.
* The hospitals where they give birth are often the products of historical segregation, lower in quality than those where white mothers deliver, with significantly higher rates of life-threatening complications.
* [Black women] are more likely to have chronic conditions such as obesity, diabetes, and hypertension that make having a baby more dangerous.
* Black expectant and new mothers frequently told us that doctors and nurses didn’t take their pain seriously [...] numerous studies that show pain is often undertreated in black patients for conditions from appendicitis to cancer.
* An expanding field of research shows that the stress of being a black woman in American society can take a significant physical toll during pregnancy and childbirth.
* Black women are 49 percent more likely than whites to deliver prematurely (and, closely related, black infants are twice as likely as white babies to die before their first birthday).
But this seems to be different situation from what the article is talking about which is the inadequate involvement of minorities in drug trials. You are highlighting the lack of adequate health coverage which is a different issue in the US. But this bring up a question if blacks and other minorities have the poorer health outcomes in other countries? Japan, China, South Korea for example does their own drug testing and development so would they find that a particular drug doesn't work on their population at all? What about the black population in UK or France? Do they also have poorer health outcomes?
Or generally if historically oppressed minorities get poorer health outcomes.
It seems a complex question that has many facets. Two tickets that come to mind:
1. When US sociologists and political scientists talk about “systemic and structural racism” this is one of the manifestations.
That in general the well being of Native peoples in the US, of African Americans is devalued. It is witnessed in the exclusion in drug trials, in the diseases that pharma considers worthwhile to address, in the staffing of hospitals, in the access to healthcare,etc.
2. The unique inefficiency of the US healthcare system among those of wealthy countries has been documented in depth so I don’t know if is possible to do an adequate comparison of progressive health systems (e.g. Japan, UK, Finland) against that of the US.
It might be worthwhile to pull in progressive health systems that focus primarily upon Black people —- Botswana comes to mind —- as a point of comparison.
>When US sociologists and political scientists talk about “systemic and structural racism” this is one of the manifestations.
Which has always bothered me, since there are other explanations (lifestyle habits, genetics, poverty) that would explain the difference, in whole or in part. It's a politically convenient assumption that goes contrary to Occam's Razor.
I'm going to quote what someone said below because this is blatantly false
"This is not only false, but dangerously false. We are in the process of discovering that certain classes of popularly-prescribed drugs (eg ACE inhibitors for blacks, certain chemotherapy drugs for Asians) are ineffective or even toxic for populations not represented in the relevant drug development research cohorts. It's not identity politics to note that pharmacokinetics can differ between individuals and populations. These differences do not explain all of the population-level morbidity and mortality differences between ethnicities, but they are significant when investigating differences between groups on the same course of treatment."
Nothing you've said seems wrong to me, but the tone of how you write is too dismissive.
> since there are other explanations (lifestyle habits, genetics, poverty) that would explain the difference, in whole or in part.
This doesn't contradict the meaning of "structural, systemic racism", but it explains it. When pharmacies are making drugs that are only effective for white people, and not researching effectiveness on black people, that's structural racism almost by definition.
Obviously pharma companies are responding to financial incentives, and if it's not profitable for a company to research treatments specifically helping a minority group then they're probably not going to. Less availability of pharmaceuticals makes treatment harder, causing what is available more expensive or leading to complications that require more further medical treatment (and cost more money); and those who choose not to get treatment will find themselves with further medical conditions later. In the end it would cost the minority more money, which they likely cannot pay for other systemic reasons, so more often they would be denied access to a hospital outright. Everyone involved is responding to natural incentives, but the net result still becomes [minority group] is neglected because of the color of their skin.
> Did you read the whole comment?
When you write like this it feels like you're attacking the character of the person you're talking to, which makes the whole conversation more toxic to follow.
I just finished reading "Color of Law", which, while not the best formatted book, gives a really really good overview of the systematic, government led, programs designed and enforced explicitly against african americans from the late 1870s until the 1980s. It's a pretty quick read and well worth it for anyone who thinks that "systematic racism" isn't real.
Black people have worse health outcomes controlling for obesity and poverty.
Blaming genetics for such a wide range of negative outcomes is silly if you're looking for a simple explanation. Consider this[1] paper on cervical cancer. There are nine different genes linked to it. Now do that for every relatively worse health outcome. That's the opposite of simple.
Lifestyle is even more nebulous. It encompasses so much that suggesting it's a kind of verbal jujitsu to suggest it's an adequate use of Occam's Razor. There are hundreds of lifestyle factors and you can weight them however you want to get the result you want.
All of those are about as broad and as simple as racism, which you appear to categorically disregard as a plausible explanation.
>You dismissed one assumption and named three more. Please explain which applies to Occam's razor.
Because there is a direct correlation between observable characteristics like obesity and poverty to health outcomes for people of all races. If a fat, poor white woman in Appalachia has heart problems in her 40s and receives low quality care, is that a result of systemic racism?
And as others have pointed out, we don't know the entire scope of genetic effects, but we know they exist to some degree (which was the whole point of the article).
The centuries-long existence of slavery, segregation (which was brutal oppression, including lynching), and racism isn't an "assumption", but indisputable fact. Occam's Razor is not a real arbiter of truth, but in this case it cuts the other way: Racism is the simpler and blazingly obvious explanation, backed by endless reearch and even the most casual observation. You really have to work to contrive explanations that don't include systemic and structural racism.
>Racism is the simpler and blazingly obvious explanation, backed by endless reearch and even the most casual observation.
Things that are wrong can be obvious to individuals and groups of people. It's certainly not obvious to half the country, and that "endless research" is tainted. How long do you get to keep your job in academia if you point out the primary drivers of black misery in the US (out of wedlock births, drugs, and violence) are self inflicted?
> How long do you get to keep your job in academia if you point out the primary drivers of black misery in the US (out of wedlock births, drugs, and violence) are self inflicted?
To "point out" something (in academia or elsewhere), that something must be a fact.
It's certainly obvious to the most of the U.S., and facts are not subject to a popularity vote regardless.
> "endless research" is tainted
Easily said, but completely unsubstantiated
> How long do you get to keep your job in academia if you point out ...
Can you substantiate that such a thing is true, and then answer your question? One thing that will lose you your job in academia is making intellectually weak, baseless claims. Academia doesn't run an affirmative action program to include all political ideologies; you have to actually have evidence and good arguments.
> How long do you get to keep your job in academia if you point out the primary drivers of black misery in the US (out of wedlock births, drugs, and violence) are self inflicted?
It's almost as if the sins of the past affects the lives of people in the present somehow.
It's almost as if people like to use the sins of others long dead to excuse their own shortcomings.
In any event, if free will isn't a thing, there's no point in trying to make the world a better place, right, so we should just leave things as they are?
You've been using HN primarily for political and ideological battle. That's an abuse of the site which destroys its main purpose, so we ban accounts that do it. Would you please read https://news.ycombinator.com/newsguidelines.html, take its spirit to heart, and use HN as intended from now on?
You are suggesting that there isn't widespread racism now? What knowledge or basis do you have for all this?
> if free will isn't a thing
So either there is no free will or there are no systemic problems? Are poverty in Somalia and Kirghistan systemic issues, or is it just a failure of the people there that they don't live like people in the Bay Area? In the U.S., is poverty on Native American reservations, and among almost every group that isn't white men, just due to laziness? Society, health care, schools, the economy, racism, etc. - all have no effect?
Something like the negative effects of concentrated poverty seems to fit Occam's Razor well enough. "The most obviously-shared attribute amongst clusters of extremely poor minorities across the country is the clustering of poverty, and here are some potential causal ways this can lead to different lifestyle habits, different levels of education, different access to health care, etc."
That seems way more likely to me than oft-hinted-at-by-the-"politically-incorrect" "here's a cluster of people who all made the same bad decisions or were victims of the same bad luck in the same way, for no underlying reason other than genetic factors also associated with the color of their skin." That's pretty damn "politically convenient" if you're not in the minority population, too - "hey guys, it's not our fault! They just suck!" Hard to imagine something more politically convenient to the lucky than that.
>That in general the well being of Native peoples in the US, of African Americans is devalued. It is witnessed in the exclusion in drug trials, in the diseases that pharma considers worthwhile to address...
Speaking about medical research specifically:
You seem to say these outcomes are because of white racists "devaluing" black and native peoples' well-being in an evil act of collective racism.
A simpler explanation would be: There are far fewer blacks and natives than whites in America, which means fewer sick people to help and fewer customers, which means their unique illnesses get less research focus.
The same effect happens between common diseases and rare diseases irrespective of race. Common diseases get studied first, because that's where the most good can be done. This isn't because the well-being of people with rare diseases is "devalued".
Frankly I'm concerned you jump so quickly to a mass accusation of collective racial evil (which echoes historic hatred against other high-performing ethnic groups) when a simpler explanation is so obvious.
When people try to explain why you're coming to broken conclusions due to broken reasoning, they get attacked as radical leftists for using the straightforward terminology we have for describing the phenomenon we're discussing.
Here, you've provided a perfect illustration of why we have the term "structural racism". Structural racism is the emergent discrimination arising from the circumstances that created our status quo. You'd think an audience of computer scientists would have an especially good intuition for emergent systems properties.
Here's a simple explanation for how African Americans can be discriminated against in health care without any of the doctors or nurses involved having overtly racist impulses:
Until the nineteen seventies --- within many of our conscious lifespans! --- African Americans were actively, overtly, deliberately discriminated against in real estate. They were redlined out of white neighborhoods and into low-income neighborhoods. Naturally, once real estate lenders would allow them to buy houses in any neighborhood they wanted, African Americans of means began buying houses anywhere they wanted. Unlike low-income "white" people, low-income "black" people were stuffed into neighborhoods that were first deliberately underfunded, and then further disinvested by the vicious cycle of neighborhood flight ---- like a run on a bank.
The hospitals, doctors offices, pharmacies, and medical service providers available in those neighborhoods are poorer than those in white neighborhoods due to disinvestment.
The unbelievably awful people who designed and executed on redlining are probably long retired by now. Many of them are no doubt deceased. Most of us would recoil from racial barriers in real estate lending. We all believe ourselves to be well-intentioned. Samuel L. Jackson has a retort our best intentions.
Grandparent has been deleted and I can't see it, so I'm not sure what their post was, so I'm aiming this response in more at the terms being used and their underlying meaning.
>When people try to explain why you're coming to broken conclusions due to broken reasoning, they get attacked as radical leftists for using the straightforward terminology we have for describing the phenomenon we're discussing.
How much of this is caused by people have past experience with selective application of different lines of reasoning.
For example, use the legal's systems racial and sex based discrimination. If we look at racial discrimination, it should be pretty clear that minorities have it much worse than whites. And there is a lot of research on this. If you then look at it based on gender, it appears there is even stronger discrimination based on gender than on race, with males much worse off than females (and a minority male receiving the worst of each). But the treatment of this online seems quite different. While it is a personal anecdote, on multiple occasions I've been told the racial discrimination is caused by structural racism against minorities that treats them worse than whites at every step on the system (from being more likely to be stopped and searched, to being more likely to be convicted given equal evidence, to receiving harsher sentences), and then being told that the gender discrimination is caused by sexism against women, resulting from the legal system treating women as children every step of the way (meaning they are less likely to be stopped and searched, less likely to be convicted, and receive less time). These seem like polar opposite lines of reasoning, yet I've seen both used as the same time.
I think it is at this point you get people who become opposed to the underlying reasoning because it appears that the group using the reasoning is starting with an assumption and then picking the logic that best fits their assumption. And I think many of the people you encounter online who use this reasoning are doing just that. People of every political and other leaning like to manipulate data to fit their world view. Combined with a lack of exposure to the actual scientists who work on this it can paint people's view of the language. To say nothing of scientist being humans and thus there being examples of scientist being very non-scientific about some issue (while I don't know of any examples on this particular issue, I did read through case of correspondences published in a scientific journal dealing with classification of certain behaviors as mental illnesses where some scientist were making some very indefensible arguments concerning evolution of which numerous counter examples were available that basically boiled down to "there is no way trait X evolved because it isn't reproductively advantageous in our environment").
And to be clear on my own stance, I do think that systematic racism exists in our current system, including in sub-systems where there are no racist members. There are agent models that show with even a small in-group bias, completely devoid of any out-group bias, you can have a system where out-group bias is apparent. For example, a system of entities of type A and B where A's has a certain preference for grouping with other A's, but no preference for not grouping with B's, ends up behaving similar to a system where A's have a preference for not grouping with B's.
> These seem like polar opposite lines of reasoning,
The problem is you are viewing them as reasoning about the cause from the effect alone rather than reasoning about the cause from a combination of the effect and masses of historical evidence.
This is a question in response to the GPs post that:
>>masses of historical evidence
>The ones that show that being a male has long been a major disadvantage in a legal system?
This is a purposed answer to the previous question, making the claim that there is plenty of historical evidence that males have been strongly discriminated against by the legal system, even if we went back in time. Need I source a claim showing that men were more likely than women to be charged, convicted, and receive longer sentences? This has been the case for at as far back as I've looked.
The reason for this is because GP acted as if I was ignoring some evidence that would justify the argument that the legal system is biased against women because it goes easier on them and make it somehow compatible with the second argument that the legal system is biased against racial minorities because it treats them harsher. It shouldn't be hard to see that these things still appear to be in contradiction.
>Yes, going back into the past being a minority was even worse than it is today, to a point where there was absolutely no justice at all
This is to preempt a response that if you went back in time, the legal system was even more biased against minorities than it is today. Instead of waiting for that response to be potentially made, I made it myself. I preempt this based on past experiences of seeing the point made in counter to my point.
> but that doesn't have an impact on the line of reasoning used to try to say the legal system discriminates against women.
I then follow up saying that I don't see this as a counter, because it doesn't impact the half of the two statements I have a problem with. One can try to explain why racial minorities being treated worse in the past by the legal system supports the statement that the legal system going easier on women is discriminating against women, only that the claim that I made in the first half of this sentence is not enough.
>This type of response only further reinforces the notion that the underlying reasoning and terminology is created ad-hoc to justify existing notions.
I then finish by saying the type of response from GP, which does not explain their argument to any degree other than a claim of forgetting to take historical evidence into account, makes people more dismissive of the original line of reasoning and the terminology associated with it, that of systematic discrimination, because the historical evidence appears to support my claim, not theirs. In short, an unsatisfactory defense strengthens the opposition's argument.
From what I can tell, the person who introduced the (unrelated) gender discrimination issue to this thread is you. As to the rest of your comment: I didn't doubt that any of what you had to say was important to you. I just don't think it has anything to do with what I said upthread.
You completely missed the point. I specifically put statistics in my article to refute this.
In many clinical trials African Americans that contract various conditions at the same rate or higher than White Americans represent only 1% of the clinical trial versus 15% of the population. While 95% of the trial are White Americans but they are only 60% of the population. There is clearly a disparity here.
I also use the word "Neglect" they haven't recently purposefully ignored minorities (although in the past they did), But the people that want to run the trials put the trials in the neighborhoods (read mostly white populations) that they have worked with before and want to cover. Therefore trials aren't being run where Minorities live.
This is where the "systemic racism" comes into play.
> Frankly I'm concerned you jump so quickly to a mass accusation of collective racial evil (which echoes historic hatred against other high-performing ethnic groups) when a simpler explanation is so obvious.
Do you live in America? Are you familiar with US history? If both of these are true then I dont understand why its so hard for you to grasp the fact that much of this was done out of malice.
> Japan, China, South Korea for example does their own drug testing and development so would they find that a particular drug doesn't work on their population at all?
Yes, it happens sometimes that certains drugs approved in the US fail to make it in Japanese clinical trials. Recent one I can think of is Prozac:
We haven't done extensive research in populations outside of the United States, but for the last 50-100 years the US (and Europe) has been leading the charge, but in both these locations, Minorities have been a low percentage participation in research.
As well, many of these outcomes he mentioned are the indirect result of years of research. Think of diabetes, 100 years of research was 99% spent on a white population and that contains prevention, diagnosis, and treatment. Populations that aren't white begin to see detrimental effects that add up over time.
> We haven't done extensive research in populations outside of the United States, but for the last 50-100 years the US (and Europe) has been leading the charge
I'm confused, I thought that over the last ten years a lot of the medical research formerly conducted by U.S. pharma companies has been outsourced to SROs, who in turn test their drugs on poor people in India or whatever. Is that not actually the case?
That only happens for certain drugs, typically treatment naive diabetes, IBD and other chronic disease patients where in the US there’s a standard treatment the patients receive right away so they have to go overseas to find untreated patients. That being said often those treatments will still have to come back to the US to run trials later on for approval on the population here.
There is a much longer answer to that question. SK and Japan only make up 5% of the asian population, many parts of asia are not well tested for these drugs. We're actually in the process of working with a large pharmaceutical company on a multi-country diabetes prevention trial in Asia because traditionally they have not been tested on as much as necessary. As well the companies there will run many of their trials in the US as well as Asia but our larger population (as well as running the trials in mostly white continents such as Australia and Europe) still causes quite a large discrepancy. We could do a whole other article on this topic.
Japan retests, and interestingly recreates the same problems in a local way.
Taking medical checks for foreigners or minorities in japan means the guidance numbers are mostly irrelevant. Doctors might not know very well how to deal with you, a lot of advice for common but non critical illness can be summed up to “you do you”
That was a fascinating, and heartbreaking, read. The statistics are astounding. I'm disappointed though that the author completely omitted any discussion of single-parent families. 66% of black families are single-parent vs. only 25% of white families. I would think that would have a huge impact on well-being and health of the mother, in general. Even just in terms of making time for doctor's visits, etc.
Sure, tons. A simple Google search turns up reams of sources (and articles about sources). A few random readings show studies on single-mother families having highest rates of poverty, increased rates of smoking, lower health, etc.
The fully explored answer to that is an article (or book) in and of itself, I can't cover every single outcome but highlight some prominent ones in a 2000 word article.
I was actually referring to the ProPublica article linked in the parent comment of mine. I believe it's much longer than yours so I was surprised it skipped such an alarming fact. I can certainly appreciate the tradeoffs of what to mention in only 2,000 words!
Then why is asthma medication less effective on Latino's and African Americans? And why did my friend have to visit 5 doctors and it wasn't until he found the Black doctor that his skin condition (which is common to only African Americans regardless of weight) was properly diagnosed and treated?
I'm not saying weight is not a problem, I come from a black family where unhealthy diets are a tradition (but that leads back to the fact that traditional african american diets come from the slave food which was unhealthy but taken in as cultural meals, much longer discussion there), but that does not mean that taking out weight in this discussion solves all or even most of the issues at hand.
As well using your same logic, why do Asians who typically have a lower BMI than white individuals have higher incidences of Diabetes? It's not one size fits all
> that leads back to the fact that traditional african american diets come from the slave food which was unhealthy but taken in as cultural meals
Is this really true? What foods did slaves in the US eat that are still regularly eaten today? What about black Americans that didn’t descend from slaves, are they not affected?
Is it not more likely that this effect is due to economic reasons (ie in recent years low quality food is significantly cheaper to obtain)
It is an indirect correlation. BMI is a factor related to the likelihood of having diabetes, and what's considered a safe range for white people is an unsafe range for Asians. Thus if you have a white person at a 25 BMI and an Asian person at 25 BMI, the Asian person has a higher likelihood of getting diabetes.
"The educated [Asian] population knows that they're getting diabetes and hypertension and all these things at a much lower BMI, but if you're in a culture where everybody's really fat and you're thin, you tend to go around and think, 'Well, I'm protected,'"
> However, the impact of increasing BMI on risk of hypertension and diabetes was significantly greater in Asians. For each one unit increase in BMI, Asians were significantly more likely to have hypertension (OR 1.15; 95 % CI 1.13–1.18) compared to non-Hispanic whites, blacks, and Hispanics.
>Remove any notions of race and compare the stats based entirely on equivalent weight/BMI I you will find nearly all differences would disappear.
This is not only false, but dangerously false. We are in the process of discovering that certain classes of popularly-prescribed drugs (eg ACE inhibitors for blacks, certain chemotherapy drugs for Asians) are ineffective or even toxic for populations not represented in the relevant drug development research cohorts. It's not identity politics to note that pharmacokinetics can differ between individuals and populations. These differences do not explain all of the population-level morbidity and mortality differences between ethnicities, but they are significant when investigating differences between groups on the same course of treatment.
The same is true for men and women. The narrative we like to repeat is that men and women are the same except for the shapes of their genitals but there are numerous biochemical and metabolic differences that should affect dosages for several classes of medication [1]. The real tragedy is that many drug trials were never done with women so we may not even be sure of what the doses should should be [2]. The same problem exists with children. These are not simple body weight issues.
I feel like the problem is worse with children due to them having a developing brain, where the impacts of medication can have impacts into changing the very person taking them. I am especially concerned with medication for mental illnesses that are prescribed to children, often times off label, but the risk exists for most any medication.
There's a lot of baggage with "race related medical research."
At least within the US, it is currently deemed wrong think for a number of reasons.
First, how are you defining race? The current American definitions of race are imprecise and sociologically constructed. Since the founding of America, the definition of white has expanded to include various groups that were previously excluded (e.g. Polish, Irish, Jewish people, Italians, Greek) [0].
As far as black/African Americans, the current definition (one drop rule) has its limitations. Sub-saharan Africa is not a monolith. It has been found that the genetic diversity between Sub-saharan African ethnicity groups exceeds other regions of the world [1]. Even as far as physical differences, there is a noticeable physical difference between a Tutsi from Rwanda, a Luhya from Kenya, an Amhara from Ethiopia, and a Yoruba from Nigeria. A very noticeable difference. I can't speak for their "genetic difference." However, it's large enough to warrant further investigation on what categories are used. This distinction is important moving forward. Since 1970, voluntary immigration from Africa has surged from the aforementioned regions [2], with many becoming first, and second generation Americans [3], the current racial assumptions and definitions are a tad archaic.
This is just one racial group within the US. I didn't really even mention how ludicrous bucketing 60% of the world's population as "Asian" is.
Second, and most importantly, the US does not have a great track record with biological research targeting black people, Native Americans, and other minority groups. There is a long history of medical abuse where researchers conduct experiments without the knowledge or consent of black patients. A few notable examples in recent history are the Tuskagee Syphilis Experiments between 1932 and 1972 [3] and DoD's non-consensual whole body radiation experiments on black cancer patients between 1960 and 1971 [4][5]. Even today, this sort of non-consensual racial medical experimentation has not stopped. As recently as 2013, Ethiopian Jews (immigrating from Ethiopia) in Israel were coerced into agreeing to injections of long acting birth control drugs by Israeli medical officials [6]. The apprehension is very much justified.
> If everyone is the same, why bother with diverse studies?
You're tone suggests that you don't understand why people are "dancing" around the subject and trying to be politically correct or whatever. I am under the impression that the American medical research community has, through its actions, fostered distrust in "racial" based medical research. Now, it's stuck in a bind, as a direct consequence of its actions.
Totally agree, "bucketing" is certainly hard, but to define every possible bucket would have me writing an entire book. This piece is meant to get the discussion started and open peoples eyes to the existing problem and consciously start to work on solutions. My African ancestry is all sub-saharan African (at least according to my 23andMe) so I'm quite familiar with those statistics you're providing.
I brought this up in passing and was summarily ejected into oblivion.
Thank you for posting in detail what I didn't have the patience and energy to. (shrug)
I did not know that. It's horrifying.