Should Doctors Wear Body Cameras?
How biases and political views can affect medical care.
Imagine a profession designed to serve the public and protect individuals from harm. But then it comes to light that its members are riddled with biases and political beliefs that prevent them from doing their job equitably and that these faulty thoughts lead them to harm defenseless people whom they are serving. But, rather than wearing blue uniforms and being armed with weapons, members of this profession wear white lab coats and carry stethoscopes.
That’s right, even though we don’t see their wrongs captured on video and they haven’t been subject to protests throughout the nation, physicians are not immune to the negative repercussions of their beliefs.
Physicians do not always practice objective, evidence-based medicine but are impacted by their beliefs.
Physicians’ implicit racial biases have been shown to affect patient treatment and satisfaction.
In one study, physicians’ political beliefs affected evaluations of drugs promoted by their party.
About 50 percent of physicians admit to being biased against certain groups. But demonstrating a self-serving bias, more than 90 percent claim that their biases don’t affect patient care. Is that true?
There is growing evidence that involuntary and unintentional beliefs about social groups affect the quality of patient care and patient satisfaction. In one experiment, about 300 emergency room (ER) and internal medicine doctors from Atlanta and Boston read a description of a 50-year-old man who presented to the ER with chest pain and an electrocardiogram suggestive of a heart attack. The man’s face was visually altered to appear either Black or white. Those doctors who scored the highest on several tests of implicit bias against Blacks were much more likely to recommend the optimal treatment—thrombolytic drugs—for a white patient but not a Black patient. Their automatic and unintentional beliefs about the worth and cooperativeness of Black patients led to substandard and potentially life-damaging care...Read more
How can physicians stop their unconscious bias from affecting quality of patient care?
