Today we had our cohort meeting and Daniel suggested that I narrowed my focus on what I wanted to research. I had the general idea that I wanted to learn about medical ethics, but hadn’t thought specifically about which areas specifically. After the meeting, I spent the rest of the day doing some research about different topics and considering how I wanted to spend each week of the project. I decided that I wanted to focus on medical bias and discrimination. For my first week, I decided that I was going to consider bias.

I began by listening to a podcast, by Dr. Asha Shajahan, MD and social justice advocate, Howard Ross, about implicit bias. Some people are explicitly biased towards certain groups (knowingly racist) but most people are not. Bias is just a natural function of the body that develops unconsciously. Throughout our lives, we unconsciously develop associations between different groups of people and different traits; These associations can come from stereotypes, the media, pop culture, etc. A vast majority of the work that our brain does is unconscious; we process 11 million bits (computer measurement) of information every second when we can only consciously process 16 to 40 bits. Our brain categorizes things in our brain, from experiences, or things that we’ve heard, in an attempt to create shortcuts. So when you see a person, the brain immediately goes to the hippocampus (memory center of the brain) and you consider who this person reminds you of, as travelling to the frontal lobe (in charge of decision making and reasoning) takes longer. This can create an automatic reaction to seeing a certain person that may not be consistent with our values. 

Implicit bias can be reflected in the medical field in both the doctor and patient perspective. For example, there is the well known history of doctors assuming black people have a higher resistance to pain, and prescribing lower levels of medication. There are also times when women are listened to differently than men with symptoms. There is also bias towards providers. Dr. Shajahan reflects on her time working as a female physician; when she walks into a room with her residence, the patient looks towards the male in the room. There are even studies that show that there is more trust (from both sides, doctors and patients) with certain weight groups. 

Implicit bias is something that everyone has. It is a natural reaction so it is not a matter of “fixing” or “shaming”; it is not a corrective behavior. It is important to be aware of these tendencies so that we can stop ourselves before allowing our minds to act on these biases. Once we acknowledge that these ideas are running our lives, we’ll have a tendency to look for them and be less defensive. We can then become more aware and have more of an ability to impact them.