What Does Racial Bias in Medicine Look Like?

Social media is awash in health mis- and disinformation. The issue impacts everyone, but is particularly acute for people of color. “Medical mythbuster” Joel Bervell, himself an M.D., consistently documents this phenomenon for all to see, demonstrating the real bias against people of color shown by doctors, nurses, hospitals, and medical science. In short videos posted to Instagram and TikTok, Bervell offers well-researched and clearly communicated insights about the many ways medical scientists and practitioners have used race to make arbitrary adjustments to care. Over the course of hundreds of videos, we see how racial bias affects everything from pain assessment, kidney transplants, X-ray treatments, and lung capacity tests, to cognitive tests for chronic traumatic encephalopathy (CTE) experienced by professional football players. Bervell shows how, even before AI, medicine used “race algorithms”; race, in fact, became a variable in studies that scientists would tweak, purely based on bias. Incorrect information then showed up in medical textbooks, misinforming doctors and nurses and causing real harm. Bervell’s mythbusting of what he saw in medical school not only informs doctors, it also arms current and future patients with critical data. By empowering social media users with lifesaving, accurate information, What Does Racial Bias in Medicine Look Like? wins a Peabody Award.