Racialised prescribing: enacting race/ethnicity in clinical practice guidelines and in accounts of clinical practice

This paper examines the articulation and enactment of racialised classifications in clinical practice guidelines and in accounts of clinical practice. It contributes to debates about racialisation in medicine and its consequences. The research centred on the case study of prescribing guidelines for hypertension in England and Wales, drawing on documentary sources and semi-structured expert interviews. We found that conceptual and socio-political uncertainties existed about how to interpret the designation ‘black patients’ and about the practices for identifying patients’ race/ethnicity. To ‘close’ uncertainties, and thus produce the guidelines and treat patients, respondents drew authority from disparate elements of the ‘topologies of race’. This has implications for understanding processes of racialisation and for the future use of racialised clinical practice guidelines. We argue that clinical practice guidelines play a ‘nodal’ role in racialisation by forming an authoritative material connection that creates a path for translating racialised research into racialised healthcare practice, and that they carry with them implicit conceptual and socio-political uncertainties that are liable to create inconsistencies in healthcare practice

The non-uniform, dynamic atmosphere of Betelgeuse observed at mid-infrared wavelengths

We present an interferometric study of the continuum surface of the red supergiant star Betelgeuse at 11.15 microns wavelength, using data obtained with the Berkeley Infrared Spatial Interferometer each year between 2006 and 2010. These data allow an investigation of an optically thick layer within 1.4 stellar radii of the photosphere. The layer has an optical depth of ~1 at 11.15 microns, and varies in temperature between 1900 K and 2800 K and in outer radius between 1.16 and 1.36 stellar radii. Electron-hydrogen atom collisions contribute significantly to the opacity of the layer. The layer has a non-uniform intensity distribution that changes between observing epochs. These results indicate that large-scale surface convective activity strongly influences the dynamics of the inner atmosphere of Betelgeuse, and mass-loss processes.Comment: 13 pages, 5 figures, in press (ApJ