When the Act of Being Black Results in Worse Health Outcomes

Imagine this:

You walk into an urgent care center or an emergency room and get seen by a healthcare professional. You explain your symptoms as well as you can, the healthcare professional does some tests and comes back with a diagnosis, and you go home with the prescriptions or treatment plan you need to solve your issue.

For most White and Asian Americans, this is the normal order of operations. For Black Americans, however, extra steps may be required to receive the same quality of healthcare services afforded their peers without any additional hurdles.

This was the premise of a recent report published in PLOS One in August 2025 (HER; Beach et al., 2025):

Black patients disproportionately report feeling disbelieved or having concerns dismissed in medical encounters, suggesting potential racial bias in clinicians’ assessment of patient credibility. Because this bias may be evident in the language used by clinicians when writing notes about patients, we sought to assess racial differences in the use of language either undermining or supporting patient credibility within the electronic health record.

Using electronic medical records, Beach and her team examined over 13 million clinical notes written about patients during their medical appointments using a language processing model that identified terms and phrases commonly used in clinical notes to discredit the patient, including those that undermine credibility based upon a patient’s sincerity—whether the patient was being honest (e.g., “claiming that Tylenol does not work for her”)—or their competence—whether the patient was capable of relaying valuable information or understanding of their issue (e.g., “The patient is a poor historian of their ailment”).

Once applied, the language model identified discrediting language in fewer than 1% of the 13 million notes examined (n = 106,523), of which 62,480 (0.48%) contained language that undermined a patient’s sincerity, and 52,243 (0.40%) contained language that undermined a patient’s competence.

This finding, on its face, sounds good: Out of more than 13 million clinical notes, just 106,523 contained discrediting language.

When broken down by race, however, more details emerged:

• Of the over 13 million clinical notes examined, 7,439,604 (56.9%) were about White patients, 4,162,957 (31.9%) about Black patients, 814,542 (6.2%) about Hispanic patients, and 647,978 (~5%) about Asian patients.

• Of the 7,439,604 clinical notes about White patients, 53,616 (0.72%) contained discrediting language.

• Of the 4,162,957 clinical notes about Black patients, 45,536 (1.1%) contained discrediting language.

Essentially, while discrediting notes about any patient were extremely rare, Black patients were discredited in these notes at a statistically significant rate compared to White patients.

Beach et al.’s findings reflect those of a study published in Health Affairs, which also found that Black patients were significantly more likely to have negative notes on their Electronic Health Records (EHRs) than White patients.

Sun et al. found that, of the 18,459 patients whose EHR notes were examined, 1,521 patients’ files (8.2%) contained negative notes about the patient. Of those 1,521 patients, 1,264 (83.1%) were Black (Sun et al., 2022).

These are, of course, not the only studies documenting bias against Black patients. Dozens of quantitative and qualitative studies have examined how both explicit and implicit biases negatively impact the health of Black and minority patients, almost all of which have reached the conclusion that bias against Black patients both occurs and negatively impacts the health of Black patients.

Beach et al. comes at a time when the Trump Regime is openly attempting to stifle any conversations about racism that don’t include the myth that White people are the most discriminated against population on the planet. Some might consider this statement to be hyperbolic, but the numerous actions of and statements from members of this administration openly stating that White people (and White Men, in particular) face more discrimination than Black people make this a statement that is objectively true. 

PlusInc is dedicated to identifying, exploring, and reporting on biases and disparities regardless of whether doing so is popular with the regime. We hope that medical journals continue to do so, as well, rather than capitulating to the whims of capricious, supercredulous fools.