Shopuld Dr. Provide Drugs Based on Race

Should Doctors prescribe drug based on race?

A recent study on the effects of a hypertension drug in African Americans has shone the spotlight on the value of single race studies in medicine. While some praise such studies for reaching out to groups disproportionately affected by a disease, others say grouping trial participants by race attributes health disparities to the wrong cause.

Race-based studies offer "a window of opportunity to understand nuances in medicine," Keith Ferdinand, the chief science officer of the Association of Black Cardiologists, told The Scientist. In addition to a weaker response to beta blockers, African Americans have a higher prevalence and a more severe pathophysiology of heart disease than do white Americans. While medical outcomes might be due to factors such as access to care, economic stress, or diet, they tend to segregate by race, which therefore provides a useful marker for testing the efficacy of drugs, Ferdinand said. (F1000)

Sally Satel a doctor at Yale, talks about how there should be racial based prescription drugs. She explains that when the sequence of the human genome was mapped, that 99.9 percent of the genome in humans are identical leaving only .1 percent. Now that we think only .1 percent isn’t that much take in to consideration the idea that of the 3 billion nucleotides are the same about 3 million of those are completely different, regardless of race. It only takes a hand full, maybe even 1 nucleotides to mutate, to change the code of what the cell does.

Dr. Satel goes on to talk about studies done to show how certain drugs work in different races and how some process slower, and then how a certain race has low amounts of potassium produced in the body and creates a paralyzing affect. This is all done by racial profiling.

Then we come to Greg Dorr and David Jones, they conclude that by racially profiling we are discriminating against all man, and that by not treating each person the same sets back the...