It is very very crude. So crude that it is pretty much useless in this modern age of diverse populations and plentiful information. If I’m alerting my friend to look for a special disease that I’ve only noticed in bushmen, I’m not going to say “black people”, especially if he works in a country as diverse as the United States. Just like I wouldn’t tell someone to look out for Tay Sachs showing up in white people. It just doesn’t make sense to do this. It’s a very inefficient way of screening patients to use such broad terms.
This conversation reminds me of the time I spent in Miami. Prior to that experience, “black American” connoted something specific to me. An AAVE-fluent person descended from American slaves , possessing a European surname. But in Miami, that’s not the only kind of black American. You’ve got the brown-skinned folks who are immigrants from the Caribbean and their offspring. You’ve got the brown-skinned folks from Latin American countries and their offspring. Then there are the brown-skilled folks straight outta Africa and their offspring. These groups are quite distinct from one another and their members do not necessarily want to be lumped together all willy-nilly and crazy-like.
A doctor working in Miami who only sees the “blackness” of his or her patient is likely to overlook a lot of useful information. It wouldn’t do a Miami doctor any good to rely on race as a patient descriptor. They need to be encouraged to see past race labels completely, since even the definition of “white” varies so much when there are a gazillion different nationalities/ethnicities crammed into one metropolitan area. Maybe a doctor working in rural Appalachia can afford to be less conscientious. But they are also a whole lot less likely to need to use race to mine their patient database.
So sorry, I still don’t understand why race should be used at all in medicine.
