Race-based medicine has been used and defended in therapeutic intervention to treat minorities that have diseases or illnesses that are prevalent in their specific group. This development cannot be solely explained by scientific medicine, but rather participates in a long history of racial discourse in cardiology. Race-based medicine is not a ground breaking concept but a recycled idea founded out of the American Eugenics Movement (AEM), from the mid-nineteenth century to the mid-twentieth century.

The FDA's approval of BiDil has sparked controversy in the use of race-based medicine. Race-based medicine can stigmatize racial groups by attributing and imposing certain diseases and behavioral traits. It can also exploit racial groups, in a market-based pharmaceutical culture, by capitalizing on racial identity. It misconstrues the distinctions of race, ancestry and genetics by promoting assumptions that race alone is the marker of disease, which inaccurately influence scientific studies and research. Race-based medicine is not the way to solve prevalent diseases in racial groups but the awareness and acknowledgement of the predispositions and socioeconomic inequities existing in minority groups. Furthermore, one needs to acknowledge human ancestral groups and geographical conditions can contribute to specific diseases that affect racial groups. This dissertation will examine the ways in which race is not an accurate proxy for basing therapeutic intervention and will examine various applications of race-based medicine that undermine minority communities' health with clinical and theological solutions as a response.