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Similarly, when a small child brings an AIDS needle to school and purposefully goes about methodically pricking as many kids as she can with it, the "Community" calls out for more legislature.

It's kinda like "If you build it, they will come"-- if you insist that your sorry-ass lot in life is the result of, oh say, discrimination, rather than your own personal failure to ever lift so much as a fucking finger on your own behalf at any stage of your life, then I'm not surprised you can also will your stupid self sick...

Duhhh...I meant "Legislation".

http://www.nbc10.com/news/4434876/detail.html

Let me get this straight, if a person perceives they are the target of such feeligns and start to worry about it excessively then there is a slight chance of this increasing that person's illness quotient.

Can I go stare at the researchers while thinking they are idiots? Please? With sugar on top?

What junk science. These people need to get a real job, like in law enforcement.

Nawwww. Really, VH. This is an April Fools gag. Has to be.


Right?


Oh, MAY Fools.

Crying "Racism" at every opportunity is the only political weapon the left has left so they are playing it for all it's worth. Their economic ideas produced poverty and totalitarian tyranny; their "progressive" educational ideologies produced a generation of illiterates; their "progressive" ideas on criminology unleashed a vicious unprecedented holocaust of murder, violence and theft on an unsuspecting public.

With a record like that, you can almost not blame 'em for grasping at ideological straws. Almost.

Jesus H Christ..............thats about all I can say really.

Agree that most of this is victocratic posturing, but I used to work on the marketing of blood pressure medicines, all of which were required to bear the warning, "Efficacy is less in blacks than nonblacks." Curiously, that clinical finding applied only to American blacks. The drugs work exactly as well on Caribbean or African blacks as they do on American whites. Therefore, the logical conclusion is, something about the societal fabric they live in causes hypertension among American blacks. Though the racism may not be overt, their internalizing it, and it affecting their self-image, seems to be objectively proven.

seems to be objectively proven

The operative word here being seems, no?

I guess all blacks must be the same, eh? It couldn't be that oh, say, Carribean blacks have a different diet from those blacks in the US for many generations, or any other simple factor, no? Have you ever ridden a bus through a major metro area in the morning? Have you seen what black American kids eat for breakfast?

Sorry, but the simple fact of medicinal efficacy doesn't address the issue, and attributing it immediately to their "internalizing" the effects of racism is alittle, how to put it...reactionary of you...

Wordwarp, let me make sure I'm understanding you. Because hypertension drugs are less effective on American than Caribbean blacks, that proves that white racism is real and it causes hypertension? Are you serious?

Yes, that's exactly what I'm saying. Well, I'm not saying it, I'm just restating the conclusions of numerous double-blind, multimodal clinical studies that have been done over the years, and with which I had to be familiar when I did the advertising launches of the ACE inhibitor, Univasc, and the calcium-channel-blocker, Norvasc. It's less so in the CCB, but the "racism-effect" on efficacy in American blacks versus Caribbean, African, and European blacks is still there. There are numerous articles about it in the various medical journals, but almost none of them are available free online. Go to your library if you want to know more.

I am anti-victocracy, but I am also pro-empiricism.

LC - diet was the first thing the studies tried to control for, since it is the most obvious.

Okay, I've done some googling to bring myself up to date (I've been out of pharma advertising for eight years, making the well-worn career path jump from ACE inhibitors to TV cartoons in 1997).

Some interesting stuff out there.

First of all, the drug companies do NOT like to have to put warnings re black v. non-black efficacy like you will find here:

http://www.druginfonet.com/vasotec.htm#WARNINGS

They would prefer a study saying, "it works great on everyone!" And in fact, they were trying quite hard to find a study that would definitively say, "eh, it's just diet or lack of exercise, or something." But couldn't.

However, a lot has changed in that business since I left, and since the human genome got sequenced.

Most significant were the findings of Yancy et al. regarding the GlaxoSmithKline's beta-blocker, Carvedilol (brand name, "Coreg")...

Carvedilol;Yancy et al., NEJM 344: 18)

...which was launched in 1998, a year after I left the business.

What I had heard about recently, but had forgotten, was that the Carvedilol study outlined in the New England Journal of Medicine article showed that blacks actually responded significantly (48% to 30%) better to Carvedilol than nonblacks.

This would indicate that not racism, but some sort of genetic interaction with the various chemistries, was the reason for the disparities in efficacies in the black v. nonblack studies of the ACE inhibitors, the CCBs, and the other Beta-blockers.

The authors of this study:

http://64.233.161.104/search?q=cache:es_FNvFolB0J:www.biomed.uga.edu/RaceBasedMedicine2.pdf+&hl=en&start=1&ie=UTF-8

...go to great lengths to assert, even in the face of the Carvedilol findings by Yancy, that genetic racial differences either 1) don't exist or 2) if they do, they should be ignored, since even acknowledging that racial differences exist can *itself* cause racism in a society, and thus is against the social good; and 3) that therefore, studies should focus on individual DNA profiles versus "group profiles" i.e. race.

To me, this is somewhat tortured logic, since you would think reducing people's hypertension problems, which lead to many other more serious health problems, would be the main social good to be strived for. Given that a geneticist can tell you, just by looking at your DNA, not only what race you are but where, WITHIN A 37 MILE RADIUS your ancestors hailed from (cf. the "iceman" found in the Italian Alps a decade ago...)

http://news.nationalgeographic.com/news/2003/10/1030_031030_icemanorigins.html

So, I appear to have been wrong, or at least, not up to date. My apologies.

Interesting. This would be a good place to plug my summary of Thomas Sowell's recent WSJ column. He argues cultural differences, rather than race itself or racism, are the primary determinant of the disproportionately poor socio-economic outcomes in American Blacks.

If we assume for the purpose of argument, that the observations of the researchers are accurate, the conclusion is still not supported. One could more easily argue that it is the perception of white racism by the minority patient that is the cause.

Moreover, even if it were possible to reduce the real incidence of white racism to zero (from its current, low level), it would not solve the problem, because the perception would still remain.