Joel Bervell, also known as the “Medical Mythbuster,” is tackling misinformation and systemic racism in medicine to create a more equitable healthcare system for all.
What inspired you to pursue a career in healthcare and medicine?
For much of my childhood, my parents were gone at work and my grandma was the main caretaker for my siblings and me. When we were finally old enough to take care of ourselves, my grandma ended up going back to her home in Ghana, since she was literally only here to take care of us. Unfortunately, within a year, she passed away from malaria, and I remember hearing that part of the reason she passed away was because there were delays in her care caused by a lack of access to hospital resources. That was my first time ever seeing healthcare disparities on a global scale, and it made me wonder, “How could something like this happen to my own family member? If she’d been in the United States, would she have been alive today?”
During my third summer in college, I got to work with orthopedic surgeons at Howard University Hospital, and that was the first time I saw doctors who looked like me — who were Black. In the United States, less than 6% of all physicians are Black, and seeing those physicians really inspired me to have an impact in the Black community.
What led you to share your medical expertise on social media?
A big part of my motivation to start sharing my medical expertise on social media was the belief that “you can’t be what you can’t see.” When I started medical school, I was one of the first two Black medical students in my program — despite there having been three previous classes. I found myself wondering, “Why is that the case? What can I do to change it?” This led me to start sharing my journey on TikTok.
What are the root causes of the most pressing health disparities?
The science of medicine is built on the knowledge of the past, but unfortunately, that foundation hasn’t always been objective. Racism was deeply woven into early medical science, especially during the era of slavery, to uphold economic, social, and political systems designed to benefit a select population. Many of those biases became ingrained in healthcare practices, passed down through generations, and eventually turned into systemic issues that we often overlook today.
When examining the root causes of health inequities in the United States, I see strong connections to historical, social, political, and economic structures that favor certain communities. Much of my work is focused on helping people unlearn these inherited biases. My goal is to transition from a race-based system to a race-conscious one — no longer using race as a reason to treat patients differently, but instead recognizing how social, political, and economic forces have shaped health outcomes across generations and continue to drive health inequities.
In your opinion, what is the most important thing we need to change in the healthcare system today?
Moving from a race-based system to a race-conscious system. I think it starts at the education level, making sure that we’re infusing this content in all aspects of what we’re talking about in medical school. It might seem like there’s too much information to know – physicians often think that these are soft skills and that learning about race and ancestry doesn’t matter in medicine. Why do we need to be talking about biases, implicit or systemic? My big change would be to make sure that every single unit in medical school discusses how race, gender, and ethnicity are still used in healthcare today. It’s not just about the healthcare aspect of it, it’s also about pharma and insurance companies and all of these other things that play a role. These different disparities exist in different ways. It’ll take a lot of different stakeholders coming together to figure out how we can make a better healthcare system for all.
