A review by margaret_adams
Just Medicine: A Cure for Racial Inequality in American Health Care by Dayna Bowen Matthew

Required reading for healthcare professionals and civil rights lawyers. Dayna Bowen Matthew lays out 1) the realities of implicit racial bias/unconscious racism in the provision of healthcare, 2) the enormous impact that has on health outcomes even after accounting for all other confounders, and 3) her proposal to reduce health disparities with new laws against implicit bias. At once kind and unyielding, Professor Matthew tracks society's progression from explicit to implicit racism and dismisses the current laws against explicit racism as no longer useful. "Laws effectively influence social norms by reflecting underlying social values that exist but about which there is incomplete information or uncertainty," Matthew writes. Making a clear differentiation between socially-maligned explicit racism and unconscious implicit racism, Matthew nonetheless is unwilling to let anyone off the hook, supporting her proposals with studies showing evidence of physicians' ability to correct unconscious racism.

I especially appreciated the way she unpacked how our medical training encourages performing "sorting patterns," the use of familiar patterns and generalizations about people and their maladies to correctly identify, understand, and address illness in relatively short periods of time--an integral part of the differential diagnostic process that also makes us especially susceptible to being swayed by implicit bias.

Very densely written, but worth your time.