The indispensability of race in medicine

A movement asking to take race out of medicine is growing in the US. While we agree with the necessity to get rid of flawed assumptions about biological race that pervade automatic race correction in medical algorithms, we urge caution about insisting on a blanket eliminativism about race in medicine. If we look at racism as a fundamental cause, in the sense that this notion has been introduced in epidemiological studies by Bruce Link and Jo Phelan, we must conclude that race is indispensable to consider, investigate, and denounce the health effects of multilevel racism, and cannot be eliminated by addressing more specific risk factors in socially responsible epidemiology and clinical medicine. This does not mean that realism about human races is vindicated. While maintaining that there are no human races, we show how it is that a non-referring concept can nonetheless turn out indispensable for explaining real phenomena.