SOCI 325 Lecture Notes - Lecture 16: Biomedicine, Ableism, Neocolonialism
Document Summary
Historically, biomedical research has focused on white men. The types of questions asked and the kinds of treatments developed show consistent bias. The doing of biomedicine has long been dominated by white men. Many argue that this leads to more and better knowledge about some problems. Changes in legislation and norms of research since the late 1980s have altered the role of race and gender for biomedicine. Inclusion: research should explicitly seek to include members of under represented groups (ex: women, racialized categories) Difference: research should seek out differences between those groups (ex: incidence rate, mortality rate, treatment effectiveness, etc. ) The paradigm was championed by practitioners and activist groups seeking to make biomedical research more inclusive. Currently enforce by law or by the policies of funding agencies. Categories of inclusion (gender, race, socioeconomic status, etc. ) have become an a priori assumption of research design. "successful" research depends on finding inherent differences between ex: indigenous and settler populations.
