By Tara Gu, Fervent "House" Fanatic

I'm going to blog about the Sally Satel article, "I am a Racially Profiling Doctor," because it was a much more interesting article to read than the one we were actually assigned (although, like Amy said, some of the folk remedies in Welch were eclectic enough to raise a few eyebrows and arouse my interest).

Satel begins with a bold statement: "In practicing medicine, I am not colorblind. I always take note of my patient's race. So do many of my colleagues. We do it because certain disease and treatment responses cluster by ethnicity."

To give an example -- "Kassirer, the former editor of The New England Journal of Medicine, is a renowned diagnostician. He is legendary among trainees for what he can tell about a case from just a few facts. He gave an example from a recent morning report, the daily session in which young doctors describe to senior physicians the most vexing cases admitted to the hospital the previous night. During one report, the resident began: "The patient is a 45-year-old Asian male who came to the emergency room complaining of 'feeling weak and wobbly in my legs' after drinking two bottles of beer." Kassirer stopped her right there. "Here's what I infer from that information," he said. "First, we know that sudden weakness can be caused by a low concentration of potassium in the blood, and we know that Asian males have an unusual propensity for a rare condition in which low potassium causes temporary paralysis. We know that these paralytic attacks are sometimes brought on by alcohol." Of course, the patient could have been suffering from some other muscular or neurological disease, and Kassirer instructed the trainees to consider those as well. But in this case the patient's potassium was low, and the diagnosis was correct -- and confirmed within 24 hours by simply observing the patient. Thanks to racial profiling, the Asian patient was spared an uncomfortable and costly work-up -- not to mention the worry that he might have something like Lou Gehrig's disease."

Now before all those PC activists out there get all ants-in-the-pants to make a tirade about racial equality, let's consider the purpose of a physician. A doctor, like a good detective, tries to solve a mystery based on the clues that they can gather from the symptomps of the illness. However, they consider both the obvious physical signs of disease as well as other potential clues by deduction. To me, Dr. Kassirer's diagnosis sounds a lot like those of Dr. Gregory House, who is named after Sherlock Holmes.

What is the difference between using racial data and other factors of a patient, such as his history or genetics? If racial profiling, in this case, is a form of discrimination, then isn't patient history also a form of discrimination? Can we execute any type of "judgment" or dicernment of the illness without discrimination? When we infer that something is caused by one disease, we are discriminating against all other illnesses that could have caused the same symptoms.

We split medical research into women-only and men-only studies because some treatments respond differently to gender. Current research centers on finding more female-friendly approaches to treating heart attacks. Are we now all sexist doctors as well, because we treat men and women differently?