Reasons for banishing the concept of race from Brazilian medicine

Abstract

As part of medicine's canonical framework, the concept of race has been associated with the idea that color and/or biological ancestry are relevant indicators of a predisposition to a certain disease or reaction to drugs. This stance derives from a typological view of human races. The low level of genetic variability and of structuring of the human species is incompatible with the existence of races as biological entities and tells us that color and/or geographical ancestry have little or nothing useful to contribute to medical practice, particularly when it comes to caring for an individual patient. We show that even so-called racial diseases like sickle cell anemia are really the product of evolutionary strategies used by populations exposed to specific infectious agents, whose territories have no unequivocal relation with either color or continental origin. Furthermore, in the words of sociologist Paul Gilroy, the social concept of race is "toxic," contaminating society as a whole, and it has been used to oppress and to foster injustice, even within a medical context.