JOEL BERVELL

UNITED STATES, 26

Project: Medical Mythbusting: Using Social Media To Educate about Racial Biases in Medicin
Pronouns: He/Him

Known on social media as the “Medical Mythbuster”, Joel Bervell is committed to fighting health disparities in medicine. He regularly shares topics about racial disparities and biases in healthcare on his TikTok and Instagram, which have over 560,000 combined followers and 100 million impressions. Through his educational videos such as "Racial Biases in Medicine" series, he illuminates why medical professionals often hold false beliefs that Black patients feel less pain and how “racial-corrections” in spirometry algorithms falsely assume that BIPOC patients have lower lung capacities.

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What are the factors that your work has identified as contributing to medical racial bias?

For too long, the field of medicine has lacked diversity. Without diverse voices at the table, we miss out on opportunities to see how medical education currently perpetuates racial biases. For example, in my Dermatology l classes I realized that all the images we were learning about showed pathologies on lighter skin tones, not darker skin. Studies have shown that some conditions such as Lyme Disease are often diagnosed late due to both clinicians and patients not recognizing skin findings like the “bulls-eye rash” on darker skin.

“I had the opportunity to meet the late John Lewis three times. And each time he reminded me to ‘Get in good trouble, necessary trouble, and help redeem the soul of America.’”

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