I walked into the urgent care center. My throat was burning, and I had a fever. It had been three days, and I was pretty sure I had strep throat. 

As I approached the front desk, the intake nurse started yelling something at me. It sounded like she said, “You might as well leave because we won’t give you… “ then she named what I thought sounded like a painkiller.

Then it hit me, “This lady thinks I’m a drug addict coming in to beg the clinic for drugs.” I actually laughed to myself. I mean, granted, I wasn’t feeling well. I wasn’t wearing my best clothes, and my hair wasn’t exactly perfect. But dangggg…a drug addict?? For her to be so bold to yell that out to me as I entered? In front of everyone? This was strange. Then she said it again even louder, “We won’t give you the “opioids” so you better leave now.

That’s when I decided I should probably say something.

I said, “Well, I’m thinking antibiotics for Strep Throat might really be a better choice, anyway. Yes, I was trying to be a little funny, but I also subtly used sarcasm to point out what a jerk thing that was to say to someone!

So why am I telling you about this?

Well, for one, because I’m not a drug addict. In fact, I’ve never smoked a cigarette, used marijuana, or taken any illicit drug in my entire life.

But none of that mattered to these people. Clearly, I looked like one to the people here at my local health clinic.

The experience got me thinking.

I wonder if this is how Black people are treated every single time they seek healthcare in the United States?

Do Black people walk into a medical clinic wondering if they will be verbally degraded based on their mere existence? Do they have to worry that they won’t be taken seriously? Whether they will get the best care like a “white” person would?

With the Supreme Court ending affirmative action, there’s been a big push to end Supreme Court , exclude Black history in the curriculum, ban books, stop advanced African American studies courses, and replace them with lies or nothing at all. Think about what the health implications will be for the Black community now?

We are denying important historical and cultural truths that directly harm Black communities and individuals. It is now illegal to teach the truth!

Then there’s the artificial intelligence… it’s become a whole other tier of trauma to layer over a system wrought with inequity because of systemic racism in the United States.   

True confessions here:

My first thought was that AI would be amazing because it wouldn’t have the systemic racial bias that humans have. It could be the key to making a monumental breakthrough in the racial health outcome disparity we have in the United States for Black people and other non-“white” folks. It could be the solution to racial health inequity! It could thwart, improve, or even reverse the unnecessary deaths, pain, and suffering of Black people…

But with a little research, it became clear, I couldn’t have been more wrong.

Sadly, experts are not convinced. In fact, preliminary studies seem to show the opposite impact. “If you mess this up, you can really, really harm people by entrenching systemic racism further into the health system,” said Dr. Mark Sendak, a lead data scientist at the Duke Institute for Health Innovation. He’s talking about his research on using AI to solve racial healthcare disparities. Disparities that choose who dies and who gets treatment and when…

After looking into this topic, the bottom line is this: Attempts to build clinical tools for AI to be used in treating healthcare boils down to the data. When the data is racially biased, then the results will be biased.

The following specific examples are critical in understanding the damage that may occur when using AI in medical treatment:

The most basic and obvious example points to the simple fact that in many of the studies, a very small number of Black people’s data is actually used to train artificial intelligence algorithms. The result is that Black patients are being discriminated against through the algorithms, causing even more biased care!

One example inadvertently trained the AI to wait to diagnose Hispanic children with sepsis, a fast-paced and deadly disorder. This happened because many of the parents needed translators to communicate with doctors. The program used this information to incorrectly determine that these children were slower to get sepsis. The impact was that doctors took longer to order blood tests for the Hispanic children, who were eventually diagnosed with sepsis. AI had it all wrong. Imagine the impact on children in real life. AI essentially exacerbated medical racism.

Another example of how AI technology can cause harm is because it is not well-regulated yet. A study done that interviewed thirteen academic medical centers in 2022 showed that only four of them had even considered racial bias when determining if the AI algorithms were going well! This meant that unless someone specifically took it upon themselves to consider racial inequity, it could be completely overlooked! Medical institutions could use artificial intelligence algorithms to help, only to increase or perpetuate discriminatory treatment and care for non-white people.

AI is not a benign tool. It appears to be as susceptible to racial discrimination as the data collected and the people inputting the data. So, as it turns out, even artificial intelligence racially discriminates when used in a culture where “white” supremacy is the norm. Artificial Intelligence, in its current form, will not be the savior of the unconscionable systemic racism that plagues every area of medical care in the USA.

Most of my information was attained from these articles:

https://www.npr.org/sections/health-shots/2023/06/06/1180314219/artificial-intelligence-racial-bias-health-care#:~:text=The%20algorithm%20relied%20on%20health,extra%20care%20under%20the%20algorithm.

https://apnews.com/article/ai-chatbots-racist-medicine-chatgpt-bard-6f2a330086acd0a1f8955ac995bdde4d