Racialization 253 problems with

Although the reader may intuitively understand what race is and how to measure it, as it is used ubiquitously throughout the medical literature, there are clear measurement and conceptual issues that must first be resolved before it can be used in an analysis. One problem with race is that many people believe they can define it, usually based on a person s skin color. It s crazy to believe that a person s skin color is a predictor for complex physiological differences, yet this is what scientists do. Further, racial classification is a categorical decision based on a continuous scale. Skin color varies from light to dark. Where is the break-point and who decides Clearly, race is a surrogate for some other factor socioeconomic, dietary, genetic, etc. There must be a better way to measure such differences. 

Across cohorts, women reported problems of balancing family and work lives. Women tended to cite additional challenges associated with gender-regardless of the employment sector and racial composition of employing institution. In fact, some women believed that they, shouldered a disproportionate share of service courses and committee work in their departments. 

By the end of the 19th century, however, it had already become clear that cocaine was quite addictive. (In later experiments, monkeys allowed to self-administer cocaine will do so to the exclusion of all other activities, including eating.) Cocaine addiction began to be feamred as a social problem—it was often associated with ugly racial stereotypes in the assertion that it made Negroes crazy and prone to robbery and rape. 

In a Wesleyan University study of binge eating disorder (BED) published in 2000, researchers found that African-American women with the disorder reported laxative and diuretic abuse more frequently than white women. However, BED was considered a significant health problem in both racial groups. 

How race will be used in clinical practice raises some interesting problems in their own right. For instance, if a racial difference is identified, its use in clinical practice requires a physician to be aware of the racial difference, make an external assessment of the patient s race, and then identify whether the patient falls into an at-risk category. Further, a patient may not agree with the physician s racial assessment and hence may refuse the differential treatment guidelines. These problems are fortunately outside the modelers realm. 

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