175: The Medical Mythbuster explains why you should attend Movement Is Life’s Annual Summit
Movement Is Life’s annual summit brings together stakeholders from diverse backgrounds to discuss healthy equity challenges and actionable solutions.
This year’s theme is: "Health Equity: Solutions from Healthcare Leaders.” The summit will take place in Atlanta, Georgia, from November 14 to 15.
Movement Is Life is honored to have Joel Bervell as a plenary speaker at our upcoming 2024 annual summit. Bervell is a Ghanaian American medical student and science communicator known online as the “Medical Mythbuster.” Through viral social media content, Bervell addresses racial disparities, the hidden history of medicine, and biases in healthcare.
Bervell says he appreciates Movement Is Life’s emphasis on community-based programs, clinician education about health disparities, and health policy. He’s excited to attend the summit and meet other like-minded people who are passionate about health equity.
“By breaking that cycle of understanding that disparities exist and talking about it, we can start to reach equity,” Bervell says.
Bervell speaks with Health Disparities podcast host Dr. Mary O’Connor about the 2024 Movement Is Life summit and the exciting slate of hands-on workshops and plenary speakers, including Dr. Arline Geronimus, Dr. Louis Sullivan, and Dr. Valerie Montgomery Rice.
Registration is now open for Movement Is Life’s annual summit – find all the details at our website, and get signed up today!
Never miss an episode – be sure to subscribe to The Health Disparities podcast from Movement Is Life on Apple Podcasts, YouTube, or wherever you get your podcasts.
The transcript from today’s episode has been lightly edited for clarity.
Joel Bervell: Really for me, what I'm excited about is just the mission of Movement Is Life. It seeks to eliminate racial, ethnic, and gender disparities through community-based programs. And for me, I think community-based programs, meeting people where they're at, is important. Through clinician education, people like us that are in the field and actually need to understand about these issues, so when we see patients, we can do our best to help them. And then health policy, of course, we can't make any changes if we don't actually have policies that are changing as well. And by breaking that cycle of understanding that disparities exist and talking about it, we can start to reach equity.
Mary O'Connor: You're listening to the Health Disparities podcast from Movement Is Life. I'm Dr Mary O'Connor, chair of the Board of Movement is Life, and cofounder and chief medical officer at Vori Health. I'm thrilled to introduce our podcast listeners and viewers to our guest today, Joel Bervell. Joel is a Ghanaian American medical student and host of The Dose podcast with the Commonwealth Fund. He's a science communicator, widely recognized as the Medical Mythbuster. Through viral social media content, he addresses racial disparities, the hidden history of medicine and biases in healthcare. We're honored that Joel will be speaking at our upcoming Movement Is Life annual summit. This year's theme is "Health equity solutions from healthcare leaders." The conference will take place in Atlanta on Thursday, November 14 and Friday, November 15. And it is an incredible event, bringing together stakeholders from diverse backgrounds to discuss health equity challenges and actionable solutions. We do hope you can join us. Visit our website, MovementisLifecommunity.org, for all the details. So Joel, welcome to the Health Disparities podcast, and thanks for being here.
Bervell: Thank you so much for having me. I'm excited to be here, Dr O'Connor.
O'Connor: So for our listeners who may not be among your 1 million followers on social media, tell us a bit about yourself.
Bervell: Absolutely. So my name is Joel Bervell. I'm a fourth year medical student right now at Washington State University, but recently had become better known as the Medical Mythbuster, and that was a title that was kind of given to me by my followers for creating content about healthcare disparities in medicine. But I grew up in Seattle, Washington, originally a little bit north of Seattle, ended up going to Yale University for undergrad, and then coming back to Washington State University for medical school so I could be closer to home and near family. But really, my passions have always been about healthcare, about understanding the disparities that exist in the healthcare field and understanding how we can mitigate it more.
O'Connor: And how did you get started using social media to bring attention to these issues?
Bervell: Yeah, so I started medical school in 2019 and if you think about a year later, 2020 something pretty big happened, and that was the Covid pandemic. And so during my medical school career, I and my and one other student were the first two Black students at Washington State University. And I have to caveat that by saying that WSU is a relatively new medical school. I think I was originally part of the third class we've only school's only been around for about six years, but I was still surprised that myself and another student were the first two Black students. And so when I came to Washington State University, I already knew I wanted to create a legacy. I wanted to leave something behind that I thought would improve the school when it came to racial diversity, when it came to equity, and so I did things like start a student National Medical Association, and I served as student body president.
And during that time, I remember, during my medical school classes, the way we talked about race never really made sense to me. We learned often that race is a social construct, meaning that you can't look at someone's genes and choose what race they are. You can look at things like ancestry, ethnicity. But then how we actually presented it, whether it was with equations or whether it was with the way that we discussed different races, we acted as if there was a biological component to it. But what made me really start creating videos was December 2020, the Covid pandemic had hit. All my classes had gone virtually online. And I remember when I was home for winter break, I was scrolling through Instagram, and I came across an Instagram story by just someone I was following that was about this device called a pulse oximeter, which measures a blood oxygen saturation. It's used everywhere, in hospitals. It's during the Covid pandemic, the FDA was helpful to have one at home so could check their own oxygen saturation at home. And the study showed that in patients with darker skin tones, pulse oximeters can overestimate oxygen saturation by up to three times, meaning it was more likely to be inaccurate and overestimated in people with darker skin tones.
And I remember seeing that, and I was shocked, and I was also surprised that I hadn't learned about this anywhere in my education, even though I was a year in. And I wondered whether other people knew about it. And so I joke, I did what any Millennial / Gen Z, I call myself a Zillennial, would do, and I took to Tiktok and made a video. At that point, it was only 30 seconds that you could have and I posted a video saying, What does racial bias in medicine look like? This is a pulse oximeter. And I explained the disparity that existed with the pulse oximeter and why it mattered, given the Covid pandemic. In 24 hours, that video got over half a million views and thousands of comments, and most of the comments were from people saying I didn't know this existed, and I'm a doctor, or I'm a nurse, I use every single day. And there's patients saying I never knew about this. I wonder if this is why my loved one was sent home when they should have actually been kept at the hospital. And so that really began what I call my racial bias in medicine series, and I started creating different videos about disparities like these that aren't necessarily the healthcare disparities that we think about. It's not necessarily the social determinants of health, but it's ways that systemic biases get built into systems and then are passed down. And so that's for the past few years, that's what I've been doing, making hundreds of videos about that. I think I've made over 700 videos, probably, and have reached a lot of people in terms of talking about, what are the ways that race should and shouldn't be used in medicine?
O'Connor: Yes, that is so important. You know, just yesterday, I was reviewing a paper for a major orthopedic publication, and it was looking at, it was a systematic review of hip fracture trials looking at social determinants of health, and race is included as a social determinant of health, which it's not. You know, race is used as this proxy for actual social determinants of health, and it's so wrong. And I basically said to the editor like this, it's not the fault of the authors, given that that's what's in the literature, but this paper needs to come out and specifically state this is not appropriate. It will create bias. And what should the social determinants of health be that orthopedic researchers taking care of hip fracture patients should use, right? So it's so in, embedded, ingrained in the literature, that it's, it's frightening, actually, when you think about it.
Bervell: Absolutely. And like you said, it's a proxy, like when we say someone's race in the literature where, like you said, we're thinking about so many other things. Are we looking at socioeconomic status? Are we thinking about insurance access? Are we thinking about access in terms of like, family, access to even like be able to drive to a hospital? All those things are separate, but we often use race as the catch all to understand these other terms that are within it.
And unfortunately, race does matter because of the way our system has worked specifically against specific populations, whether thinking about things like redlining and how that disproportionately impacted communities to maybe be in places that have higher pollution, right? But at the same time, it's like, how do we make sure that when we do this research, that we're, exactly what you said, calling out the disparity and then making sure that we dive deeper into understanding why it exists. And the example I think about a lot is about the GFR equation.
A long time, and for those who don't know, the GFR equation is essentially a measure of how well our kidneys are working. If you have a high GFR number, your kidneys work well. If you have a low GFR number, your kidneys aren't working very well. It's basically a function. It's a indirect measure of how well our kidneys are working to filter out toxins. But for a long time, there's a racial correction for Black patients, and only for Black patients, no other race, that said, if you were black, we're going to add a multiplier onto your GFR equation to essentially overestimate it. And what that ended up doing was it meant that more Black people weren't getting kidney transplants, weren't getting referred to kidney specialists, weren't getting diagnosed with chronic kidney disease. And it wasn't until 2021 that that equation was changed, because researchers started to say, we've been using this as a proxy for something else, and in this case, they were saying that all Black people had higher muscle mass, had more of a muscle breakdown protein called creatinine, and so had adjusted it for that reason. And so I think it's funny, because it is actually supposed to be a way to reach equity, to make sure we weren't over diagnosing people, but we actually did the opposite. And so that's why, just to your point of why it's so important to make sure we understand: What is it that we're using race as a proxy for? And now there's a more accurate equation that uses cystatin C in addition to creatinine, which is more accurate.
O’Connor: Exactly. So I want to ask you about why? Um. You're excited about this summit. You will be our closing speaker on Friday, and we're very excited to have you so so tell us about your excitement.
Bervell: Yeah, really, for me, what I'm excited about is just a mission of Movement Is Life. It seeks to eliminate racial, ethnic, and gender disparities right through community based programs. And for me, I think community based programs, meeting people where they're at is important, through clinical clinician education, people like us that are in the field and actually need to understand about these issues, so when we see patients, we can do our best to help them. And then health policy, of course, like we can't make any changes if we don't actually have policies that are changing as well, and by breaking that cycle of understanding that disparities exist, and talking about it, we can start to reach equity.
And I think, really, what I love about Movement Is Life, though, is the idea that I think so often, especially people, think about orthopedics as this separate field, and we don't often connect healthcare disparities with the field of orthopedics, or even just movement in general. And Mary, I know when we first talked, we kind of went through kind of the vicious cycle that happens of movement from things like obesity, right? And how lack of physical exercise can lead to obesity, can lead to increased pressure on knee joints, can lead to joint pain, can lead to limited mobility. But then those are all related to other things too, like heart disease and depression and type two diabetes, and how within this ecosystem of medicine, it's all connected, right? And remembering that it's all connected is key to making sure that we look at our patients as holistic people that have vast individual lives that are changing based on the circumstances around them.
And I think what is beautiful about this conference is it focuses on that. It makes sure that we remember and keep the humanity of patients, and that we see how it connects to the other systems of medicine as well. I've been telling a lot of people that I'm going to this conference, and they're always like, Oh, interesting. Health Equity, like movement, like, explain that connection. And as soon as you explain it, it makes sense. But I think sometimes it's not so obvious to people. So really, what I'm excited for this conference is to kind of highlight kind of these connections within the broader field of medicine when it comes to movement and how it relates to healthcare, and really elucidating why it matters for us to think about healthcare disparities in the different fields, whatever type of practitioner we are. So, yeah, very excited for this conference.
O'Connor: Well, we are so excited to have you. So now we're going to turn the tables a little bit, and I'm going to ask you to interview me about some of our plenary speakers and highlights of our some Summit.
Bervell: Yes. Well, I've had a chance to look through a little bit, but I was hoping that you can maybe talk about some of the speakers. I've heard their names before, but don't know all their stories. Can you share a little bit about who's going to be there, the impact of their work, and why you think their story's going to be powerful at this conference?
O'Connor: We have just an amazing group of plenary speakers and some amazing workshops. So we will have Dr. Arline Geronimus, and Dr. Geronimus is a researcher who coined the term weathering, and she's written a book, Weathering, the extraordinary stress of ordinary life in an unjust society. And she talks about the physical toll that the stresses of social injustice take on marginalized populations. And I thought that concept of weathering is something that is so easy for everyone to get, right?, it's just all these little things that happen over time. And so I'm super excited for her to join us. We also have some I'll call legends. Dr. Louis Sullivan will be joining us, and for anyone in the health equity space, particularly the medical education space, they'll recognize that name. Dr Sullivan was instrumental in highlighting the need for bringing systemic change to address the scarcity of underrepresented minorities in health professions. So really it was his initial work, 2003, the Sullivan commission on diversity in the healthcare workforce, that started the conversation, in my mind, or at least, highlighted the start of the conversation about how we needed to really look at diversity of the healthcare workforce as an important element of improving health outcomes for patients. I have had the pleasure of meeting Dr. Sullivan in the past, and he's really, not just an amazing person, but he's a funny guy and very engaging, and he's just going to be wonderful.
We have Dr. Valerie Montgomery Rice. She is the president and CEO of Morehouse School of Medicine, and of course, she has been a healthcare leader for decades. And Morehouse School of Medicine, which is in Atlanta, which is where our conference is, our summit is this year, is just a committed institution for advancing health equity. And you know, education of diverse students, and so I think it's going to be wonderful to have her perspective on how healthcare leaders can really drive equitable change.
Bervell: Absolutely. And each of those people that you just talked about are so, are doing different work within this field of healthcare disparities, whether it's like you said, weathering a concept I think we've heard a lot about recently in terms of thinking about, what could be other factors that are leading to predispositions for minoritized communities to experience specific harms or increased health problems when it comes to stress and chronic stress within families that can be passed down perhaps. That's honestly a concept that I have been so fascinated by, and so I'm internally geeking out because I'm like, Oh my gosh, I gotta, I'm gonna get to, like, meet these individuals. And Dr. Sullivan as well, has been a hero of mine for a long time, and just knowing his story and his how he's pioneered and served as Health Secretary of Health and Human Services as well. And I think his story is so phenomenal and that he's going to do an incredible job of just highlighting that. And then Dr. Montgomery Rice, I've met her once in the past, in passing, and so excited to talk to her more about the incredible work she's doing at Morehouse right now. But Mary, I know there's other speakers as well through some of the panels and the workshops specifically. Could you highlight some of the workshop speakers?
O'Connor: Absolutely, and, you know, I'll just make a comment. You know, we could spend this entire podcast just talking about Dr. Sullivan's background and all of his accomplishments. So, I mean, it is such an honor that he's going to join us. We have a couple other amazing speakers that are, I would say, a little bit more focused in certain specific areas. Dr. Rita Hamad, she is a social epidemiologist at Harvard, and her research focuses on linking social factors like poverty and education with racial and socioeconomic disparities in health. So it's really looking, which I'm fascinated because I always go back to its poverty. It's poverty that is an underlying uniting core of health disparities, not that there aren't bias issues and other factors that come into play. You know, it's obviously not one, just one thing, but poverty is such a huge factor. So I am so excited that she's going to join us. We also have Dr. Karen Hacker, who's the Director of the CDC National Center for Chronic Disease Prevention and Health Promotion, and what you just described, Joel, with what we call that medical vicious cycle, that the lack of movement, joint pain, obesity, fueling the development of diabetes, hypertension, heart disease and depression, which is often underappreciated, right? We get individuals that are suffering from these chronic diseases. So I think it will be amazing to have her this is, you know, that is a very important center. Their annual budget's about one and a half billion with a B dollars. So really wonderful to have her.
We're going to have four workshops, and in the past, we've had more workshops, and the participants couldn't go to each one, they would basically have to choose, and we always had a lot of feedback about, why are you making me choose? I want to go to all the workshops. So this year, that's what we're going to do, so everyone will attend each of these workshops. We will have one that focuses on our community-based program called Operation Change, and for people that are interested in effective community programs, I mean, I am so proud of our community-based program, and we'll talk about the results and our outcomes and the structure. We're going to have a workshop on community health needs assessment, which is an underappreciated tool. So a lot of people don't know that all healthcare systems are required to perform a community needs assessment, and so understanding how those are performed and the information that's obtained right can be an incredible resource for people looking to improve health equity in their communities. We're also going to have a workshop on fostering tomorrow's healthcare workforce, which speaks to the need for diversity in multiple healthcare professions, but particularly in the orthopedic and musculoskeletal space. And then finally a workshop on seeing clinicians through the patient's eyes, which I'm really excited about, because I think that sometimes we just are not sensitive enough to the perspectives of our patients and the more that we can do that, the better we'll be able to deliver empathetic, compassionate care and engage patients. And engaged patients are patients that are going to be more adherent to a treatment plan and have better outcomes. So, it's a really, if I do say so myself, amazing summit agenda.
Bervell: Absolutely, I think that is just an incredible list of individuals that you just mentioned. And I think it's just, once again, going to hit on so many different aspects of health, health equity that are important for clinicians to understand important for our future patients, to be able to experience that knowledge from us about and it'll just increase empathy, as you mentioned, overall, so that we can make sure that patients are getting the entire spectrum of care that they deserve.
O'Connor: Yes, yes. So we're going to close out this podcast. I will remind our listeners and viewers that Joel will be doing a separate podcast after the summit that will highlight his presentation and materials at the summit, but we really wanted to get together to have a chance to chat about about the actual summit, so that you would have a better understanding of our amazing agenda and speakers and workshops. And remember, it is Thursday and Friday, November 14 and 15th in Atlanta, Georgia, at the Whitley Hotel. You can go on our website. MovementisLifecommunity.org, to register and please reach out. If you have any questions about the summit, you can reach us through the website as well. So Joel, again, we're super excited to have you, and I'll let you. I'll let you make the closing statement.
Bervell: Thank you. Well, all I'll say is, Movement is Life is incredible, and I think summits like this are what give me hope for the future of health equity and understanding and addressing racial disparities at all aspects of society. I think we've finally begun seeing a shift in conversations with more people recognizing systemic issues that contribute to inequities, and finally, demanding change too. I think there's a whole new generation of young leaders and activists who are tirelessly working to push policy reform equitable access to resources and really justice for marginalized communities. And so if you're listening to this and you're one of those people, I highly, highly, highly encourage you to come to this conference. It's not just about the idea of getting information, but it's also the networking with other people, with who are like minded, the professional development, the mentorship, the advocacy and leadership, the career development and the awareness and education. So I'm so excited for this, and I really hope to see so many of you there.
O'Connor: Joel, I couldn't have closed better. So thank you very much to our listeners and viewers. Thank you. We look forward to seeing you on our next Health Disparities podcast.
Registration is now open for Movement Is Life’s annual summit – find all the details at our website, and get signed up today!