A few months ago I was watching Grey’s Anatomy, and one of the storylines was about one of the doctors misdiagnosing a patient. The doctor thought the patient had appendicitis, but he was suffering from right-sided diverticulitis. The misdiagnosis happened because right-sided diverticulitis is more prominent in Asian patients, but the protocols do not account for this fact and lead doctors to classify these symptoms as appendicitis.
While not everything that happens in medical shows is trustworthy, this is a common reality. On one side, doctors misdiagnose patients because the patients do not show the physical traits associated with the population for which the disease is the most common. On the other side, patients are misdiagnosed because the protocols are made for white people, and do not account for the genetic, ethnic, cultural, or geographical variables. This is what the article “The Misuse of Race in Medical Diagnosis”, by the pediatrician and an assistant professor of pediatrics Richard S. Garcia, talks about. The Mexican doctor brings two examples of misdiagnosis: a girl with cystic fibrosis, and a man with a cyst inside his skull. Both of them were misdiagnosed because of incorrect assumptions based on race.
The main argument of the text is that, if a patient’s ancestry can narrow the range of possible diagnoses, we must be careful to describe the variables accurately. Additionally, we cannot assume that, just because the diagnosis is not common for certain backgrounds, it will never happen. And, finally, the writer asks that when “race” cannot possibly matter, we should omit it.