Over the last ten years, a lot of the American healthcare system has started leaving out the factor of race when trying to predict and diagnose diseases. This is seen as a way to make sure everyone gets fair treatment and to fight against racial biases in healthcare.
But here’s the question: Should doctors ignore a patient’s race when thinking about their health risks and how to treat them? For example, certain illnesses like breast cancer or sickle cell anemia are more common in certain ethnic groups.
Race matters
A new study from Northwestern University is the first of its kind. It’s trying to make the ongoing debate about whether race matters in predicting diseases more clear.
This study is supposed to help doctors, patients, and people who make healthcare policies understand what they should aim for when it comes to preventing and treating diseases. It gives them a basic idea to figure out the best way to use models to predict diseases and decide on treatment.
The researchers say that doctors need to be clear about what they want to achieve when they see a patient. When a patient is sick, the doctor’s main goal should be to make that patient better. And sometimes, taking the patient’s race into account might help achieve that goal.
Smarter decisions
“Presuming the role of medicine is to help the patient, doctors and patients alike should both want the best decision made regarding illness and response. If race has predictive power, it should be used,” the authors explain.
In the course of their investigation, the researchers applied a standard economic viewpoint focused on societal well-being to determine the most effective strategy for a doctor when devising the best possible care plan for an unwell patient.
Subsequently, the researchers employed an expanded framework that takes into account all the events leading up to a patient’s arrival at a medical practitioner’s office with an ailment. This comprehensive view considers factors like education, nutrition, socioeconomic background, and the like, which can impact a doctor’s approach to treating a specific patient.
Optimal care
The examination of both models yielded a consistent result: a clinician’s duty should always revolve around offering optimal care to an ailing patient. Recognizing that certain diseases exhibit higher statistical prevalence in specific ethnic and racial groups, physicians should aim to utilize all pertinent information, including racial background, to enhance their clinical predictions and deliver the utmost care to the patient.
“Until genetic information or other robust individual data is readily available, it may be better to use some race information, although less specific, than to leave it out of prediction models. Otherwise, patients of all races will be worse off,” the authors conclude.
“Our study underscores the need for the medical community to think carefully about all the tradeoffs involved in removing considerations of race from clinical decision-making. Otherwise, we risk harming the very groups we are trying to help.”
