The problem with race based medicine HW
The problem with race based medicine HW
The following two TED Talks examine the ways that race & gender issues can impact medical care – both how it is prescribed & received.
Please watch the following videos:
Videos:
Dorothy Roberts: “The Problem with Race-Based Medicine” – Social justice advocate and law scholar Dorothy Roberts has a precise and powerful message: Race-based medicine is bad medicine. Even today, many doctors still use race as a medical shortcut; they make important decisions about things like pain tolerance based on a patient’s skin color instead of medical observation and measurement. In this searing talk, Roberts lays out the lingering traces of race-based medicine — and invites us to be a part of ending it. “It is more urgent than ever to finally abandon this backward legacy,” she says, “and to affirm our common humanity by ending the social inequalities that truly divide us.”
Alyson McGregor: “Why Medicine Often Has Dangerous Side Effects for Women” – You might not know this: Many of the medicines we take — common drugs like Ambien and everyday aspirin — were only ever tested on men. And the unknown side effects for women can be dangerous, even deadly. Alyson McGregor studies the differences between male and female patients; in this fascinating talk she explains how the male model became our framework for medical research … and what women and men need to ask their doctors to get the right care for their bodies.
After watching the videos, please write a paragraph (150-300 words) in which you respond to the material of the videos. You may wish to use the following questions/prompts to form your response (but you are not required to):
What other impacts might gender bias or sexism have on men’s & women’s health?
What are some of the reasons why women’s health is so stigmatized or overlooked?
Think about the history of eugenics from the lectures you read – the history of medicine in the ways it has treated women/people of color – why is are we still treating people so differently based on these characteristics?
What are some ways we can work to change theses backward practices/beliefs?
You must proofread your paper. But do not strictly rely on your computer’s spell-checker and grammar-checker; failure to do so indicates a lack of effort on your part and you can expect your grade to suffer accordingly. Papers with numerous misspelled words and grammatical mistakes will be penalized. Read over your paper – in silence and then aloud – before handing it in and make corrections as necessary. Often it is advantageous to have a friend proofread your paper for obvious errors. Handwritten corrections are preferable to uncorrected mistakes.
Use a standard 10 to 12 point (10 to 12 characters per inch) typeface. Smaller or compressed type and papers with small margins or single-spacing are hard to read. It is better to let your essay run over the recommended number of pages than to try to compress it into fewer pages.
Likewise, large type, large margins, large indentations, triple-spacing, increased leading (space between lines), increased kerning (space between letters), and any other such attempts at “padding” to increase the length of a paper are unacceptable, wasteful of trees, and will not fool your professor.
The paper must be neatly formatted, double-spaced with a one-inch margin on the top, bottom, and sides of each page. When submitting hard copy, be sure to use white paper and print out using dark ink. If it is hard to read your essay, it will also be hard to follow your argument.
