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So, I can often be found posting on here complaining about bias in medicine (although I disagree about some of the kinds of bias with quite a few posters here).
We do have something of an update to a long running story that’s worth sharing.
Meddit link for more discussion and detail: https://old.reddit.com/r/medicine/comments/1jotpzz/follow_up_on_the_study_showing_discrepancies_in/
Basically, awhile back there was a headline about how black babies received worse outcomes when care for by white doctors. Apparently, this went so far as to get cited in the supreme court.
Sometime later someone on Meddit (which is still quite pro-woke) noticed that they forgot to control for birth weight, which would likely completely kill the effect size (explanation: white physicians have more training and take care of sicker babies who have worse outcomes). At the time there was a significant amount of speculation essentially going “how do you miss this? That would be the first you would control for.”
Well, it turns out that someone filed a FOIA request and well, to quote Reddit:
“A reporter filed a FOIA request for correspondence between authors and reviewers of the article and found that the study did see a survival benefit with racial concordance between physician and patient, however it was only with white infants and physicians. They removed lines in the paper *stating that it does not fit the narrative that they sought to publish with the study.” *
While I often criticize medicine for being political, I’m often found here telling people to trust the experts when it comes to (certain aspects) of COVID or whatever, and well this kinda stuff makes it very very hard.
The initial findings were passed around very uncritically and sent up all the way to the supreme court.
How can people trust with this level of malfeasance? How do we get the trust back? How do we stop people from doing this kind of thing? I just don’t know.
I don't know how to fix it either and I have been losing sleep about it for a while, but I am glad to know you can see it now too. In the broadest scope @faceh nails it with consequences, but enacting consequences is going to be a real challenge. It does seem like we're going to need a significant numbers of lives lost in an actual disaster to occur before we can snap enough people out of the fog of complacency, because until lives are lost the buck is too easy to pass, it's too easy to downplay and dismiss it as 'misinformation'.
Nah this problem is why I first started posting way back in the days where some of our most reasonable contributors didn't see that the news and "science" was biased. I think pretty much everyone still here gets that at this point, so I've spent more time arguing about overreaction lately, but my views haven't changed.
This is a particularly good example for everyone to toss into their brain for later though.
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