The world is far from a perfect place, but people such as medical student Joel Bervell are working hard to make it a more equitable one. Joel is studying and researching orthopedics at Johns Hopkins Medicine in Baltimore, Maryland. During the COVID-19 pandemic, he came to the realization that some commonly used medical practices were full of racial bias and did not take into account differences in race.
Joel took to TikTok to educate others about this. His first video dealt with pulse oximeters, which were widely being used to measure people’s oxygen levels to inform them if they needed to go to a hospital. Unfortunately, these had a tendency to overestimate oxygen levels in people of color, causing them to not seek out the medical treatment they needed.
Joel explains how his desire to help set him on a bigger path. “It ended up going viral, getting over a half million views. It had hundreds of thousands of comments from people saying either, as a physician, they didn’t know about it, or as patients saying, ‘I actually noticed this on myself,’” Joel explained. “From there, I started looking into other ways that medicine unfortunately overlooks communities of color.”
Joel found other racial biases in medicine, such as the GFR equation, used to measure kidney function, and spirometry, used to measure lung function.
“There are literally equations that embed racism (in medicine), and depending on your race, it will impact your care,” Joel explains. “Not because of the doctor per se, but because it’s literally built into an algorithm.”
Joel considers himself fortunate to be able to help his community. He approaches each video as if he is giving advice to a loved one. “By posting these videos and having this impact, I’m helping people that are like my family. They may look like me, but they may not have access to physicians who can talk them through this,” he said. “I feel very humbled to have this position and have a platform.”
He is hopeful for the future and is happy to be a part of the needed change. “When you look at the timeline, a lot of the changes in medicine have been happening the past three years,” he explained. “It’s partly from the COVID pandemic. It’s probably from the George Floyd protests, which opened up a lot of people to talk about these discussions on a national stage. A lot is being done right now in order to make sure that we reflect these sins in medicine.”
To learn more about racial bias in medicine, watch this video.
