The Wayne State University School of Medicine’s End Race-Based Medicine Taskforce will conduct a “Call to Action Community Report” town hall meeting May 27 to report the outcomes of its conversation with the community.

The meeting, scheduled for 5:30 to 7 p.m., will take place via Zoom. Register for the meeting here.

The taskforce will report the findings of a community conversation on ending race-based medicine and share the organization’s current activities. Attendees can gain additional information about the effort, learn how to get involved, and determine steps they can take for their own health and the health of their community.

Established in early 2024, the taskforce is working to dispel the belief that individual races are biologically distinct groups determined by genes, and terminate medical practices and research that adhere to that concept.

Co-created by Ijeoma Nnodim Opara, M.D., assistant professor of Internal Medicine and Pediatrics, and Latonya Riddle-Jones, M.D., M.P.H., assistant professor of Internal Medicine and Pediatrics, the taskforce includes representation from institutional leadership, students, residents, faculty, and community members and leaders, including those from the School of Medicine, Wayne Health, the Detroit Medical Center, the Barbara Ann Karmanos Cancer Institute, the Detroit Health Department and the Michigan State Medical Society.

Drs. Opara and Riddle-Jones will host the meeting.

"Race-based medicine is the practice of medicine – and other forms of health care – grounded in racial essentialism, which is the false belief that races are biologically distinct groups determined by genes," Dr. Opara said at the time of the taskforce’s founding. "It is a key component of structural and systemic racism in medicine and has perpetuated multiple generations of harm to Black, as well as other minoritized and structurally excluded communities."

The group delineated three primary goals to accomplish within its two-year mission:

• Discontinue and de-adopt race-based medicine, including “race correction” in practice, teaching and research.

• Lead the adoption and institutionalization of racism-conscious medicine in practice, education, policy and research, and provide support for clinicians and health care workers.

• Organize stakeholder community roundtables and symposia on ending race-based medicine.

The taskforce is supported by Dean Wael Sakr, M.D.; the Michigan State Medical Society Taskforce to Advance Health Equity; the Health Equity and Justice in Medicine initiative at the School of Medicine and the Detroit Medical Center; and the WSU Department of Internal Medicine.

The taskforce will consider its work successful by the measurement of several factors, including:

Removal of racialized reporting from electronic health records in areas such as Glomerular Filtration Rate, or eGFR, a test of renal function.

The discontinuation of the “race corrective” function of pulmonary function tests.

The discontinuation of employing race as a risk factor in the atherosclerotic cardiovascular disease calculator.

The discontinuation of relying upon race as a reason for offering varying treatments.

A partial impetus for the taskforce lies in the publication of a paper calling for the end of race-based medicine. In 2021, Dr. Opara, Dr. Riddle Jones and Nakia Allen, M.D., FAAP, clinical associate professor of Pediatrics, published an article calling upon the medical and scientific communities to confront and end a legacy of racism in research, medical education, clinical practice and health policies by “de-pathologizing and humanizing” American Black bodies.

In “Modern Day Drapetomania: Calling Out Scientific Racism,” published in the Journal of General Medicine, the physicians noted that racism in medicine has “deep historical roots in white supremacy and anti-Blackness, particularly the pathologizing of Black bodies through pseudoscientific claims of the biological significance of the sociopolitical construct that is ‘race,’ which is often incorrectly conflated with ‘genetic ancestry.’” Those roots, they wrote, developed branches that continue to reach into medical science, particularly in the ways science frames racial health disparities because of biological differences among racial categories.

“Racism, not race, is the vector of disease and health disparities. Racist policies, such as redlining and the ‘war on drugs’ and ‘war on crime,’ inform systems of housing, education, criminal justice, health and the economy, and determine a community’s exposure to the social and environmental factors that drive health disparities through direct effects, chronic toxic stress and epigenetic mechanisms,” the physicians wrote. “This is the contemporary version of pathologizing Blackness and normal responses to chronic intergenerational trauma, oppression and exploitation. It reinforces the bogus theory of supposed Black inferiority. It is the modern Drapetomania.”

Now recognized as pseudoscience nonsense, Drapetomania was concocted by Dr. Samuel Cartwright in 1851 to pathologize runaway enslaved Blacks. He claimed enslaved Blacks had inherently smaller brains and blood vessels that accounted for “indolence” and “barbarism.” His prescribed “cure” and prophylactic treatment for the faux condition was “whipping the devil out of them.” The condition continued to be cited in some medical texts into the early 1900s.

To eliminate scientific racism, the physicians called for identifying and excising it from clinical algorithms and medical decision-making equations; expunging it from the publication process through anti-racist peer review and editorship; transforming medical, health care professions and scientific education in both clinical and social sciences, from undergraduate studies through faculty development and curricular revision; and advocacy among academic partnerships with patients, marginalized communities and policymakers that prioritizes social and structural determinants of health.

“Our oath as clinicians is to first do no harm,” Dr. Riddle-Jones said at the formation of the taskforce. “When we practice race-based medicine, knowingly or unknowingly, we are performing harm on our beloved patients and communities. The time to end race-based medicine is past due. The time is now. Many clinicians are already on board for the change. They just need support and guidance to de-adopt these established practices and adopt better ones.”

A presentation on the taskforce is available here. 

For more information, email robyn.sapico@wayne.edu.