Philosopher's Zone Race, biology and medicine
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Oct 25, 2023 This podcast explores how outdated ideas about race and biology continue to influence medicine, leading to harmful effects on racialized people. It discusses the racial bias in medical education, the impact of racial classification on EGFR calculation, the problematic science behind spirometry and other algorithms, and the historical experimentation on slaves in the US medical system.
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Race Is Social, Not Biological
- Race as a biological category is false but remains powerful in shaping social life and racism.
- Agustin Fuentes argues race is produced by racism, not biology, and enables hierarchical ranking of humans.
Physical Traits Don’t Define Races
- Many visible human traits (skin, hair, face shape) vary but do not define biological races.
- Fuentes stresses these morphological differences fail to map onto discrete biological groups.
Kidney Algorithm Penalised Black Patients
- Fuentes describes how the EGFR kidney algorithm subtracted points for people classified as Black, lowering their assessed kidney function.
- He links this adjustment to poor foundational studies and centuries of racist assumptions in medicine.