YOU WANNA BE P.C. OR GET WELL? (via Tom Morin):

Race-Based Medicine Arrives (Matthew Herper, 05.10.05, Forbes)

In November, a tiny company called NitroMed unveiled results showing that its drug combo, BiDil, reduced deaths due to heart failure by half.

The results were astounding, but there was a catch. The drug was only tested on African-Americans and had previously failed to show a benefit in a broader population. An editorial in The New England Journal of Medicine by M. Gregg Bloche, a Georgetown University medical ethicist, warned of the need to manage the downside of "race-based therapeutics"--and predicted that it was only a matter of time before race was linked to the effects of other drugs.

Only six months later, Bloche seems prescient. A flood of studies has emerged showing racial differences in how patients suffer from disease--or benefit from drugs--in ailments ranging from osteoporosis to cancer. And several more have looked at the effects of drugs on particular racial groups. Many of the doctors conducting the studies are African-American.

There is even evidence that some drugs work differently in women than in men. For instance, aspirin seems to prevent heart attacks and cause strokes in low-risk medicine, but a controversial study showed it did the opposite in women. "There is nothing in evolutionary biology more based on genetics than whether the embryo develops into a man or into woman. But people generally haven't studied drugs this way," says Harvard researcher Paul Ridker.

Biology bears a terrible burden for the support it lent to racist theories, but to pretend that race doesn't exist is an unhealthy overreaction.

Posted by Orrin Judd at May 17, 2005 12:00 AM