CNN's Elizabeth Landau says that "as technology improves and researchers explore new implications of the human genome," medicine continues to advance "beyond race." But while the emergence of personalized medicine may make treatment more about a person's As, Ts, Cs, and Gs more than the ethnic group he or she identifies with, "doctors say a patient's culture — the collection of norms, goals, attitudes, values and beliefs — will always be important to health care, no matter how sophisticated genetic technology gets," she adds. In discussing "how genetics reduces the importance of race," Landau says "given the imperfect association between race and specific diseases, it makes sense that race would become less important to clinical medicine if your doctor could just look at your entire genome and pinpoint genetic variants that carry risk." But, she adds, "genes aren't the whole story." For that reason, the cultural aspects associated with race may still be important in health care, she says, particularly as "each patient has deeply ingrained habits, attitudes, and beliefs that no genetic test can identify but which are very much a part of health and wellness."
Race/Ethnicity: Other — See Genome Sequence, Attached
Jul 11, 2011