How medicine discriminates against non-white people and women | Hacker News Reader

How medicine discriminates against non-white people and women

economist.com

16 pointscolinprince16 comments

I was reading that testing often happens on men for medications because their biochemistry is fairly constant in a month. Fluctuating hormones complicated drug testing.

This seemed to me to miss testing a scenario that affects about half the population.

It's not a single scenario; that seems to minimise the complexity.

There are many scenarios because there are variations in our genetics.

I was reading (I think it was the book The Innovator's Prescription) that a lot of medical R&D happens in the US. I wonder how that impacts this sort of testing. I bet that medical R&D happening in a more distributed nature around the world would engage more diversity for testing.

> I bet that medical R&D happening in a more distributed nature around the world would engage more diversity for testing.

Sure. Distributing the research and testing internationally would be the best case. But if you're only testing in one single place then not many locations are as ethnically diverse as US metropolitan areas.

I mean this as a sincere question and I get that their might not be an answer readily available but I've always wondered:

How onerous is it really? What an I missing here?

Not that pfizer is on trial here (maybe they do a good job, I don't know) but they have presence in diverse metropolitan cities[1]? I'm sure many others must too.

There must be something more to this.

[1] : https://www.pfizer.com/science/research-development/centers

A dermatologist friend of mine trained in a virtually all-white area and then got a job in a place that wasn't. Apparently it was a significant adjustment caring for patients with darker skin.

There's also a false belief, common among doctors and other medical professionals, that darker skin is thicker/tougher. (to be 100% clear, it only differs from lighter skin in pigment and no other characteristics).

Your comment and the one you replied to don't make sense to me. How can skin only differ in pigment, but it also require additional training to care for skin of different color?

Because it is a different colour, meaning that all the training you received learning focussed on different shades of pink no longer applies. Darker skin means the symptoms you are looking for are lower contrast and a different colour. It’s a simple case of repeating all that training against different skin colours.

It’s often difficult for someone trained exclusively with pale skin to recognise something as obvious as sunburn on darker skin, for example.

I'm guessing that identification of different skin conditions on skin of much higher pigmentation that what a dermatologist has been trained on is an obstacle.

https://archive.is/T5eae

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