Our Conclusions

1. Medicine has willfully ignored its racist history in spite of ongoing calls from scholars and activists to rectify its violent and oppressive history. This has resulted in medicine continuing to inflict and perpetuate racism that harms communities of color.

2. Using race as a heuristic for diagnosis of disease and interpretation of symptoms masks racism.

3. Because of the biological use of race in clinical guidelines and education, patients of color are being systematically misdiagnosed and undertreated and are at risk for bad health outcomes.

4. Race-based medicine teaches people of color that their bodies and communities are abnormal, deficient, and broken, increasing stress and the burden of racist stigma.

5. As medicine fails to confront and rectify its origins of violence against vulnerable communities, it will continue to perpetuate an agenda that is an unwelcoming, hostile space for people of color.

If we don’t dismantle race-based medicine, it will be perpetuated.

Our Vision Forward

As physicians-in-training, we envision a world where the social construct of race is not conflated with biology and where the health consequences of racism are acknowledged, addressed, and cared for in all their forms.

To make this a reality, medicine must adopt anti-racist institutional practices regarding research, practice, and education.

1. Medicine must unveil and teach how racism has shaped scientific advancements, tools, and diagnoses.

2. In order to account for the health consequences of racism, clinicians should prioritize social history intake and be aware of how social and structural stressors perpetuate racial health inequities.

3. We must adopt the same standards and guidelines for diagnosis and treatment of  all patients regardless of race. Race cannot and should not be used as a biological determinant in clinical guidelines nor the research informing them. Rather, clinical guidelines on racial health outcomes must take into account the consequences of racism in racial health disparities. Racial differences are not the cause of disparities; they are the result of multilevel racism.

4. Healthcare providers play a key role in combating racism. In order to support their patients in feeling happy, healthy, and strong, clinicians must seek to affirm the strengths their patients bring, not assume they are a collection of risk factors. Clinicians need a paradigm shift to approaching patients of color as whole, rather than broken.

5. Medicine must break down its own intellectual silos and hierarchy to build interdisciplinary alliances with thought leaders who have built foundations on the intersections of racism and health. Rather than using race as a differential diagnosis shortcut, elimination of race-based medicine presents an opportunity to call for interdisciplinary dialogue and action in solidarity with those from affected communities, critical race theorists, community-based organizations, and racial justice initiatives.