I remember when watching the film Race: The Power of Illusion that there was one example of a kid with sickle cell disease–a kid who was not Black. Sickle cell disease, often generalized as a Black disease, is common for being of several geographic origins and is dependent more on whether ancestors lived in places where malaria is prevalent than the color of one’s skin. Richard Garcia’s article, The Misuse of Race in Medical Diagnosis, adds onto this. One example that he gives is how a little Black girl was not properly diagnosed with cystic fibrosis until she was eight years old because doctors did not even think to check because of her race. This is dangerous. This fixation on race during preliminary health screenings is harmful, especially when race is assumed via physical appearance without looking closely at genetic and geographic ancestry, and can lead to misdiagnoses or people of all races with chronic illnesses not getting the support they need. When race is conflated with an individual’s genetic makeup, medicine perpetuates stereotypes and begins to base care on social constructs rather than accurate medical assessment. It is important to examine the symptoms before looking at skin color when deciding how best to assess and treat a patient.<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"
I remember when watching the film Race: The Power of Illusion that there was one example of a kid with sickle cell disease–a kid who was not Black. Sickle cell disease, often generalized as a Black disease, is common for being of several geographic origins and is dependent more on whether ancestors lived in places … Read more<\/a><\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":11671,"featured_media":0,"comment_status":"closed","ping_status":"closed","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"ngg_post_thumbnail":0,"footnotes":""},"categories":[1],"tags":[],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/web.colby.edu\/pulversciencescholars\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/739"}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/web.colby.edu\/pulversciencescholars\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/web.colby.edu\/pulversciencescholars\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/web.colby.edu\/pulversciencescholars\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/11671"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/web.colby.edu\/pulversciencescholars\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=739"}],"version-history":[{"count":1,"href":"https:\/\/web.colby.edu\/pulversciencescholars\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/739\/revisions"}],"predecessor-version":[{"id":789,"href":"https:\/\/web.colby.edu\/pulversciencescholars\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/739\/revisions\/789"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/web.colby.edu\/pulversciencescholars\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=739"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/web.colby.edu\/pulversciencescholars\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=739"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/web.colby.edu\/pulversciencescholars\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=739"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}