4 ms·
I don't think the burden is on us to prove a negative. It'd be way better to think of it in terms of genetic markers instead of races. Race in general practice
by JimTheMan 6y ago
I don't think the burden is on us to prove a negative.
It'd be way better to think of it in terms of genetic markers instead of races. Race in general practice is a social construct based on colour, appearance and culture. It's a level of abstraction away from the actual genetic data that we don't need with our level of technology.
We could dig right into the genes and throw away our outdated notions. That's where the actual useful detail is. Who cares about the color of the person if they have the same amount huntington repeats you know?
- dnautics 6y ago"Race in general practice is a social construct based on colour, appearance and culture" That is a very dangerous lie. If you are a doctor I pray for your patients that you are not taking a colorblind approach because their lives could be at stake. It just so happens that the way people look correlates with the diseases they get and sometimes don't get. Sometimes you can't sequence the person's genome because it's too time consuming. Sometimes we don't even fucking know which genes are responsible. Your example of huntington's is quite frankly the outlier, and a facile example (you know it is because that's what they teach in 8th grade biology class). And even that's a shitty example because the severity only roughly correlates with number of tandem repeats. Any given person can tolerate a load of misfolded huntingtin, and their tolerance is probably governed by a raft of other conditions, that are familial and do track with race (venezuelans are for some reason more sensitive to huntingtin repeats). Other conditions, too, transthyretin amyloidosis is more common among japanese and finns and really rare among africans (except for one variant that causes congestive heart failure; but in finns and japanese it presents as liver failure), etc etc etc.
- JimTheMan 6y agoI agree with you, we shouldn't ignore the very real strong correlation for use in medicine right now and in the future. I reckon I've thrown you with the general practice comment, which I intended to mean "everyday use" and not as a "general practitioner of medicine". Clearly this is something you feel very strongly about but I think you'd get further with less belligerence. I feel like I've unknowingly wandered into the office of reviewer #2 and he's flown off the handle at something I am unwilling to match the level of aggression on.
- dnautics 6y agoThe aggression is not to convince you. It's to help point out how dangerous your naive reading is to other people. Don't take it personally.