Have you ever researched medicine in this capacity?
http://www.the-scien...e-and-Medicine/
The role of race in medicine
These and related findings clearly support the presence of race-related variations in disease risk, disease progression, treatment response, and treatment-related side effects. As such, there remains an important role for race/ethnicity, as a marker for ancestry and often for culture, as well as other sociodemographic traits, in characterizing patients with respect to medical care. These variables can be helpful in understanding key aspects of health beliefs, health behaviors, access to care, and likely response to therapeutic interventions.
For example, persons of African descent in the United States who self-identify as black or African American are more likely to have certain biologic traits that were ancestrally protective in Africa, such as heterozygosity for sickle cell disease, which helps to protect against malaria, or the newly described APOL1 gene, which protects against trypanosomiasis (Science, 329:841-45, 2010). Of course, the allele that conveys malaria protection in heterozygotes causes sickle cell disease in those carrying two copies, and persons homozygous for the protective form of APOL1 are at increased risk for kidney failure. Thus, in settings where malaria and trypanosomiasis are rare, these biological traits are disadvantageous and may impart adverse health consequences.
The dogma, race is a social construct is actually dangerous to human beings who want to receive appropriate medical treatment.
The confusion and answer is best stated here-
Is race, then, purely a social construct? The fact that racial categories change from one society to another might suggest it is. But now, says Fullwiley, assistant professor of anthropology and of African and African American studies, genetic methods, with their precision and implied accuracy, are being used in the same way that physical appearance has historically been used: “to build—to literally construct—certain ideas about why race matters.”
Genetic science has revolutionized biology and medicine, and even rewritten our understanding of human history. But the fact that human beings are 99.9 percent identical genetically, as Francis Collins and Craig Venter jointly announced at the White House on June 26, 2000, when the rough draft of the human genome was released, risks being lost, some scholars fear, in an emphasis on human genetic difference. Both in federally funded scientific research and in increasingly popular practice—such as ancestry testing, which often purports to prove or disprove membership in a particular race, group, or tribe—genetic testing has appeared to lend scientific credence to the idea that there is a biological basis for racial categories.
In fact, “There is no genetic basis for race,” says Fullwiley, who has studied the ethical, legal, and social implications of the human genome project with sociologist Troy Duster at UC, Berkeley. She sometimes quotes Richard Lewontin, now professor of biology and Agassiz professor of zoology emeritus, who said much the same thing in 1972, when he discovered that of all human genetic variation (which we now know to be just 0.1 percent of all genetic material), 85 percent occurs within geographically distinct groups, while 15 percent or less occurs between them. The issue today, Fullwiley says, is that many scientists are mining that 15 percent in search of human differences by continent....
...Lost in the discussion about genes, she fears, are “epigenetic” influences: factors that affect gene expression but are not part of one’s genetic code, such as prenatal nutrition (which may influence rates of heart disease late in life). Such biosocial factors—environmental, cultural, and economic—can sometimes be more influential than genes. Fullwiley questions, for example, if the prevalence of diabetes among Native Americans on reservations, or of asthma among U.S. Latinos, is only genetic. Her research in Senegal has reinforced that doubt. Scientists have long searched for a genetic difference that would explain why many Senegalese experience a relatively mild form of sickle cell disease. Fullwiley’s work suggests that many of them may instead be mitigating their symptoms with a widespread cultural practice: phytotherapy—the ingestion of roots from a plant that, preliminary studies suggest, triggers production of fetal hemoglobin, a blood-cell type that doesn’t sickle. “When environmental history, or evolutionary history, gets reduced to racial or ethnic difference,” she says, “that’s a big mistake.”
http://harvardmagazi...etic-world-html
What a doctor should be looking for is what region of the world your ancestors came from. What type of long term environmental exposure may have put certain pressures on their biology such that they had to develop certain adaptations to survive and that can become life threatening. Your example, Sickle-cell in Africa, is similar to what happens in another part of the world such that in Southeast Asia some Asians have ovalocytosis, a sickle-cell like environmental adaptation to malarias.
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I always fail at CC in mass effect and previous DA games.
