We Won’t Sign an ‘Implicit Bias’ Pledge

This puts our certification as physicians at risk

By Aida Cerundolo and Jared L. Ross. Drs. Cerundolo and Ross are emergency medicine physicians and senior fellows at Do No Harm. Excerpt:

"We’re comfortable signing a pledge to fight bias. Any doctor who refuses to treat a patient or provides a lower quality of care to members of particular identity groups should be barred from the profession.

But implicit bias, unlike explicit bias, can’t be measured. Popular tools that claim to identify such bias have been roundly disproven. So have activists’ claims that implicit bias leads to health disparities. If implicit bias can’t be measured, how can it be shown to hurt some patients over others?

Our job is to use measurable facts to treat patients and save lives. But extirpating “implicit bias” would require physicians to note patients’ skin color, sexual preferences and so on and place them in a hierarchy of grievances during treatment. In other words, physicians would need to engage in bias to end bias—an Orwellian threat to the equal treatment that’s supposed to define the medical profession."