I could just about die this very serious news article was so funny to me. I say with all sarcasm intended, if you can’t hear my tone. The general theory of article is there is a lab test that measures kidney failure correctly in white people (surprise) and is inaccurate for black people. It’s been causing black people to be overlooked for kidney transplants for years! So once the scientists did a little recalculating, we have a formula for both sets of people that reflects their kidney failure more accurately!
Wired: “How an Algorithm Blocked Kidney Transplants to Black Patients”
You wouldn’t think this would be so hard to figure out, except medicine has been a white man’s game since its inception. Most research on procedures and drugs, even today, is still done primarily on–you guessed it! Men!!! Of the white variety. But other things struck me funny (?) about the article as well. Let me run down my giggle list:
- Wired Magazine a quite prestigious news organization for science and technology (and I must admit, must I?, a former employer of mine) is covering this topic. This topic is not new or groundbreaking or pushing forward the field of medicine in any way. I find this interesting.
- I literally had no idea that other hospitals (geographic areas? States etc?) did not use the recalculated eGFR to determine the severity of black people’s kidney failure. We’ve been doing this at my facility for at least 10 years… I remember when it changed, but time flies when you’re wiping ass. Our chemistry reports show both values automatically, actually.
- Last but not least, I want to mention that getting selected and then listed for an organ transplant is a crazy process, one mainly shrouded in mystery to the average American. But it is not a joke. There are not nearly enough organs for people that need them. Surgeons that do these procedures are in competition to get the organs for their patients, to perform the surgeries at their hospitals. They often have quotas they have to hit to stay certified as a transplant center (both for the doctors and the nurses), and for some organs like livers and hearts and lungs, the patients may be in the hospital for months waiting… not even at home. Also, as this article notes, the process can be burdened by institutional racism. Sometimes it even looks a lot like real racism– for instance the young black men in our advanced heart failure service do not usually succeed in getting a heart transplant. They certainly qualify and are listed. But we had one (and he is a sort of amalgam if patients that serves as an example), we’ll call him Kevin. Kevin was so tall, like 6’4″ and he was like a brick house, weighed maybe almost 300 when he came in the hospital and last 50-60 pounds in the 3 months he stayed in. We waited and waited but we couldn’t find him a heart. There were (per the doctor) about 3 other guys if his size on the transplant list ahead of him. I used to joke that we would need a bus of NFL players to get into an accident for these guys. Typing that now, I realize that is some really dark stuff, but Kevin and I needed a laugh of any kind in those long days where he couldn’t sleep and was stuck in his 12 by 20 hospital room for weeks on end. In the end, he got an LVAD (left ventricular assist device) because it had enough power to help his heart–and it meant he could finally go home and live some life.
Some day I’ll write more about transplants, even though I worry that I’ll be breaking some secret code to just keep quiet.