Nederlands tijdschrift voor geneeskunde
-
'The more my patient looks like a real patient, the more I will look like a real doctor.' Certain young medical professionals may think that way, as they widen the gap between themselves as 'trained professionals' and their patients as 'ignorant laymen'. Medical doctors and patients have a relationship with each other. ⋯ First, a young neurologist in training seemed to push him into a template of her idea of a typical patient, apparently in order to reinforce her role as a doctor. The second situation is an example of a trained specialist who acted in such a way that he adopted the role of an authentic doctor independently.
-
From experiments by the Nazis in Germany, to the infamous American Tuskegee study, controversies surround racialized medical science and clinical practice. However, although 'race' is a social construct, disease patterns may cluster in groups with a common ethno-cultural ancestry. In this journal, Buckle and Achterbergh et al. discuss the use of race and ethnicity in a medical context in the Netherlands. ⋯ A comment on these papers states that the term 'race' is controversial and biologically invalid, and should not be used in medical practice in the Netherlands. A client's self-described ethnic origin or ancestry may be taken into account when relevant for diagnosis and treatment, without equating European ancestry with 'normalcy', as opposed to other ethnic groups. It is concluded that more research should be directed towards defining biomarkers that transcend racialized human categorization based on presumed external characteristics.