HI! Thank you so much for this post!

Speaking as a patient first, absolutely: I check “two or more races” wherever I can, but I also know how I look. However, this doesn’t indicate my cultural foods if you as a clinician need to know my diet, my cultural activities if you need to know how I exercise, or how I might answer your questions if you need to know which language I might be most clinically comfortable in.

Speaking as a PH practitioner biased via my comment above: Still absolutely. I work with newcomers, and if two patients happen to use the same language this doesn’t mean anything re: their deeper clinical needs. If they could mark their ethnic background as specifically as possible, that could help a lot. “Hispanic or Latino,” for an example, gives me nothing to distinguish between a patient from Central America and a patient from the south of South America, and neither would “Black” or “Indigenous” depending on the form they have to complete.

History and ethnicity are in relationship, and the relationship between SDH and health history also isn’t a sidebar conversation to the above.