Who Was Medicine Designed For?: Dr. Joel Bervell, Internal Medicine Resident and “The Medical Mythbuster”

Lindsey Smith

Hi, I'm Lindsey Smith welcoming you to Raise the Line from Elsevier, an ongoing exploration about how to improve health and healthcare. Today, I'm delighted to welcome Dr. Joel Bervell, a Ghanaian-American physician perhaps best known as “The Medical Mythbuster.” 

His effective use of short form videos to educate the public about bias in medicine has earned him two million followers on social media and a monthly reach of tens of millions. He is also the host of The Dose podcast with the Commonwealth Fund and the creator of the YouTube animated series The Doctor Is In. In 2025, he received a Peabody Award for his body of social media work on racial bias, and was named to TIME magazine’s 100 most influential digital voices.

Today we'll talk about the intersection of storytelling and health equity, the challenge of fighting misinformation at scale, and what it actually takes to rebuild trust in medicine online. 

Thanks so much for joining us today, Dr. Bervell. 

Dr. Joel Bervell

Thank you for having me.

Lindsey Smith

Let's go ahead and start from the very beginning. What first got you interested in medicine?

Joel

Yeah, I love that question because it always takes me back to the first reason that I even got into the field of medicine in the first place. I always have to start the story with my family. Both my parents are from Ghana, West Africa. Both were born there, immigrated first to Canada, where I was born, and then to Seattle, Washington, where I grew up for most of my life.  

I always joke that my parents said I could be one of three things, because that's all they really knew that was out there as a job when they came to the United States. They said I could be a doctor, a lawyer, or an engineer. I didn't want to be an engineer because my dad was an engineer and I thought it was cool, but I didn't want to follow in his footsteps. A lawyer...I did like to argue, and so that was almost something on my radar, and I was always doing speech and debate throughout high school. But really it was medicine that my heart was drawn to, partly through family situations where I had family members that were in and out of the hospital. But also I think, particularly with my grandma. 

My grandma, when I was growing up, was my main caretaker while my parents were out working, trying to make a better life for my siblings and I. And when I was in sixth grade, we were old enough at that point where my parents said, hey, you, Rachel, and Michael, you guys can take care of yourself. Grandma really wants to go back to Ghana. She didn't speak any English. The only reason she could came to the United States was for us. 

Unfortunately, within a year of her going back, she passed away. We found out later that she passed away from malaria and that when she'd gone to the hospital, they told her to bring her own tubing, her own IVs, her own medications that she needed for her own care. And I remember thinking about the fact that if she'd been here in the United States, would that have happened? Would she have been able to get the care that she needed? Would she have even gotten malaria in the first place? 

That really was my first encounter with the healthcare system, realizing that it had failed someone that I loved so much and realizing that I could be a part of one, actually helping that not happen to other people, but then also wanting to make sure that I was understanding kind of what care looked like here in the United States. As I got older, I realized that the story of what happened to my grandma thousands of miles away in Ghana wasn't unique. That every single day, even here in the United States, families are going to the emergency department or they're having to ration medications. Those are things that families are having to deal with every single day in terms of not having adequate access to health. So that's really what got me interested in the field of medicine. I think hopefully I'm making my grandma proud with what I'm doing today.

Lindsey Smith

I am sure you are and I love that you selected being a doctor over an engineer and lawyer. And thank you so much for sharing that really wonderful story about your grandmother serving as a caregiver and inspiration on why you entered medicine in the first place. So let's go back to your childhood a little bit. What was your exposure to medical careers growing up and were there any role models that you looked up to along the way?

Joel

Yeah. So growing up, I didn't have a ton of people that I knew in healthcare. But my older sister, who's two years older than me, wanted to go into medicine and so she was actually my first, I'd say, role model in my life. Eventually, as I was going through high school, my cousin actually became a doctor too. So she was kind of the second person that I was able to look up to.

But my first experience in the healthcare space was as a freshman in high school. I did this program at Seattle Children's Hospital, and it was through an organization called Teens in Public Service. Their whole purpose was to try and give high school students internships somewhere in the greater Seattle area. I had mentioned that I was interested in medicine and they matched me up at Seattle Children's Hospital in what's called the Child Life Department, meaning that I was mostly following shadowing doctors, but also getting to hang out with kids, both in the outpatient side and inpatient side. 

So for inpatient, I would actually go to the dialysis ward and I would be talking with kids as they were just getting that dialysis. And so you're imagining a nine-year-old kid having to get a dialysis. For those don't know, that's where you're literally having a machine basically filter out your blood because your kidneys aren't working very well. That was my first experience really seeing the healthcare system up close, especially when it came to chronic illnesses and realizing that there are kids that are young having to go to the hospital two, three times a week because they were born with a genetic condition that didn't allow their own kidneys to work. 

I think that experience was life-changing for me. I left that summer saying, wow, medicine is absolutely what I want to do, not just from the perspective of, wow, this is cool to be able to heal someone, but look at what opportunity you have to get to know someone's story and actually be able to be a part of their story and just make their day a little bit brighter.

And so after that, I ended up actually doing some other kind of excursions. I worked in a nonprofit space for a summer at a place called Housing Hope, and they actually provided housing for low income families. That was an incredible experience to see what the social determinants of health look like. How does someone's location, where they live, impact the health that the healthcare that they're able to get? Another summer I worked at Nordstrom, which is very different, but in some aspects, I think of customer service in the same way as healthcare in the way that doctors were really seeing people from all walks of life. You never know who's coming in and it's all about how do you communicate with someone, to understand what they're going through at that moment?.

I ended up going to Yale for undergrad and I got a degree in molecular biology. That was just an incredible experience where I was really going to dive deeper into research and health and really cementing the decision to go to medical school and become a doctor.

Lindsey Smith

Wow, those are all incredible and very different experiences that you shared. I think experiences like that shape what we think is possible for ourselves in our future. So in addition to being in residency, you're also a very successful content creator, among many other projects that you have in the works. But let's kind of talk about the social platform that you've built. Did you always picture yourself having a big social media presence and being a medical communicator, or did that kind of catch you by surprise?

Joel

The answer is I never could have predicted this. Never thought I was gonna become a social media influencer or content creator, whatever it's called nowadays. I really started making content online just because I want to talk about things that we weren't learning in my medical school classes that I thought would be interesting. So just for some background, I'm an internal medicine resident physician right now. I'm just about to finish up my intern year actually in two weeks, which is insane to think about. I'll be a senior soon. And internal medicine residency is three years overall, and so I'll be about halfway through, which is amazing. 

But I'm better known online now as “The Medical Mythbuster” for creating content about health, medicine, and then the hidden biases that shape the field of health. My goal was always to make medicine more accessible while also helping people understand how the system of medicine was built, who it was built for, and where it actually still falls short. 

Even beyond that, as you mentioned, I have a lot of different projects. Outside of social media, I host a podcast called The Dose with the Commonwealth Fund. I have a YouTube TV show called The Doctor Is In. And then I also recently announced my first book, The Default Body, which I know we'll talk about a little bit later. But as I mentioned, I couldn't have predicted any of this at all. 

I entered into medical school in 2019, and if you remember that year, if it sounds familiar, that's because really closely afterward came the COVID pandemic in 2020. And so most of my first two and a half years of medical school were all online, actually. I came in, we were in person, and then about halfway through my first year of medical school, it went entirely online and so I had a lot more time to kind of sit around and think to myself. 

One of the things I kept hearing during the COVID pandemic was that black patients were more likely to get COVID, or that black patients are more likely to get diabetes, black patients were more likely to have asthma, but we never were diving into the reasons why, or the socio-political reasons that actually created that -- whether it was a history of redlining that's put communities closer to pollutants, or whether it's the fact that many of the individuals that were getting COVID were frontline workers and couldn't afford to take off work – or for a whole bunch of historical reasons. 

So, I started posting videos on TikTok, of all places, just talking about the things that I was seeing. Like, why don't we talk about this more in our medical school classes? But one of the videos that really popped off for me was about this device called a pulse oximeter. It goes on your finger and it measures what's called your blood oxygen saturation, how much oxygen is bound to your red blood cells. We use it all the time. And during the COVID pandemic, the FDA and the HHS were all recommending that people get this device at home so they could understand if they're getting hypoxemic, meaning people weren't having enough oxygen on their blood cells. 

I think that was in my second year of medical school. December comes around, I'm home on winter break, I'm scrolling on Instagram, and I come across this study that says that pulse oximeters don't work well in darker skin tones. I'd already finished my cardiovascular unit. I'd finished my pulmonary unit. I had never heard about this in any of my classes. And so I read it, and the study said that in patients with darker skin, pulse oximeters were three times as likely to lead to inaccurate, overestimated oxygen saturation levels when compared to non-black patients and I was shocked. So, I did what any millennial/Gen Z would do -- I call myself a zilennial because I'm right at the cusp -- I took to TikTok. 

At the time I could only make a thirty second video. I started the video off by saying, what does racial bias in medicine look like? And I explained this disparity with the pulse oximeter and how it could actually be leading to patients not getting the care that they need because it wasn't reading accurately. Within twenty-four hours, that video had over half a million views. There were doctors and nurses and PAs and NPs and respiratory therapists saying I've used this device every single day, but I actually had no idea that this disparity existed. 

It really made me realize that there's all these things within medicine that are related to race, gender, ethnicity, identities that we don't talk about that directly impact the care that patients receive. So that became my first episode of a video series called What Does Racial Bias in Medicine Look Like? In every thirty second episode, I would break down a racial bias in healthcare that didn't make sense to me and that should change. I've talked about things like the GFR equation and the DMI and spirometry and dermatology, Lyme disease...all these different places where disparities exist, not because of an inherent flaw in genetics or individuals, but because of the system that was built around a specific type of person.

Lindsey Smith

First of all, congratulations on entering your senior year soon. I think it's really fascinating how often the things that end up defining us aren't really what we set out to do. And you mentioned in this case there was that very specific spark, that video that kind of changed your trajectory. So you post this video, you go to bed, and then you wake up the next morning, was it to like a half a million views overnight?

Joel

Yeah, half a million views overnight and thousands and thousands of comments and people messaging me saying like, what about this? What about this? And I'm like, I'm a med student, I don't know the answer to any of this. I just saw this study and thought it was interesting.

Lindsey Smith

That must have been such a surreal moment for you. Let's come back to something you mentioned earlier, bias in medicine. So biases are built into devices like you just mentioned, sometimes into teaching and even into clinical guidelines. How do they get into medicine in the first place? And why are they so hard to root out once they're there?

Joel

Yeah. I love that question because I think that was one of the most surprising things I learned as I started diving into this research is that bias isn't often the result of bad intentions. Right? Many disparities were built into systems, into algorithms, into devices, into assumptions that were then inherited over decades. Some of the most impactful biases in medicine exist today because no one stopped to ask who was included in the original data and who was left out. 

I mentioned the pulse oximeter, for example, and that's I think now one of the most well-known examples because of that study that re-ignited this in the New England Journal of Medicine. But what's really fascinating is if you go back to the research to when the pulse oximeter was originally created, we've known about this disparity. We've known that skin color actually impacts the how accurate a pulse oximeter is. Hewlett-Packard, back in the '90s, actually had a pulse oximeter that did work well on darker skin tones, but it was expensive. 

Then, this new pulse oximeter was created in Japan and it became all the rage because it was small, light enough to fit on your finger, and it was easy. But even in that original study, the researchers indicated that skin tone can impact the reading of this device. So showing that even when you go back all the way to the beginning, we knew about it, but it got built into it and forgotten about when it was actually used all the time. I think that's just a perfect example of how these biases get built into a system. 

I think one that's just as insidious is about the GFR equation that I quickly mentioned before. GFR stands for glomerular filtration rate. It's essentially a function of how well our kidneys are able to filter out blood from our bodies. For a long time though, for the GFR equation, there was an African American, then a non-African American GFR equation. Meaning that if you were black, there was a separate equation that would treat you differently. 

In the African American GFR equation, it actually had a multiplier that overestimated what your kidney functioning was, meaning that if you were black and only if you were black, this equation assumed you had better kidney functioning than any other race, and only because of your race. What that meant was for decades, black patients were less likely to get diagnosed with chronic kidney disease, less likely to be referred to kidney specialists, and the GFR equation is used for kidney transplants, so black patients were also less likely to be referred to get a kidney transplant. 

Right now we know that chronic kidney disease disproportionately impacts the black community for a whole host of reasons -- both when it comes to ancestry and genetics -- but also when it comes to just some of the social factors I talked about in terms of food deserts, access to care, all these types of things. But the reason this disparity existed is ironic. The reason why they added this multiplier, was they wanted to try and be equitable. The reasoning came from research that said that black patients had higher levels of muscle mass, and this GFR equation uses this protein marker called creatinine, and so they were trying to adjust for that to help prevent overdiagnosing. But what it ended up doing was underdiagnosing patients. 

Thankfully, in 2021, there was a new equation that was created that uses something called cystatin C. It's a more accurate marker, and that essentially led to a new equation that made it more equitable for black patients to get kidney transplants. And then in 2023, the organ procurement and transplantation network went back and said, if you've ever had this equation used, we're gonna actually, retrospectively adjust your kidney wait times.So, to date, about eleven thousand black Americans have had their kidney transplant wait times moved up because of that change to that equation. 

And what was actually kind of crazy for me was I was posting videos about this all the way from 2020 when I learned about it in my classes and was like, why do we have these African American & non-African American tests? A woman reached out to me in about 2021, when they were changing the equation, and then again in 2023, and she let me know that she would send all my videos about kidney functioning to her sister because she had chronic kidney disease. 

Fast forward, I'm invited on the Kelly Clarkson Show in 2024 to kind of talk about all these biases that I'd encountered and seen, and they surprised me by bringing on Anise. She's the woman who had seen that video and was sending it to her sister. And the reason why Anise's sister wasn't there was she had actually moved up five years on the kidney transplant list after taking the video I had made to her doctor, realizing that she could adjust her wait times and had her kidney transplant wait time adjusted. So, it just to goes to show that you never know who's listening to videos that you make, but also that education is so powerful. I truly think that social media is this new forum to reach patients in a way that we never had before.

Lindsey Smith

That's a really important point and great story. Thank you for sharing that GFR example with us. So kind of to wrap that up, bias in medicine explains why this isn't about maybe one bad actor, but something structural, which is exactly why it makes it so hard to undo. Let's move into your social media audience specifically. A big part of your audience is communities of color, people who have historically been underserved or outright harmed by the healthcare system. Can you tell us what it takes to build a genuine trust with that audience and then hold on to it?

Joel

Yeah. I think people are hungry for context. We often hear about disparities, that they exist, but we rarely hear how they happened. So, what I try and do to get people to build trust and understand is one, I storytell, because storytelling allows people to understand the historical decisions, assumptions, and the systems that produced the outcomes we see today. Two, I'm not shy about talking about what medicine has done wrong. Actually, whenever I talk about the COVID pandemic -- I go back to this all the time -- I think we should have been more upfront with the American public about what the scientific process means, which is that we move forward, but then we move back sometimes when we realize that research is wrong. 

I am very upfront with how the medical system has historically hurt marginalized communities especially. I talk about things like the Tuskegee syphilis experiment. I talk about Henrietta Lacks and how it was that she had her cells taken from her and how lawsuits only even today are now recognizing that right. I talk about how there was something called the Mississippi appendectomy, where black women would go into the hospital thinking that they were gonna be getting an appendectomy, and instead they got hysterectomies. 

These are all parts of medicine and they were built into our system today. I talk about J. Marion Sims, who even today is still called the father of gynecology. Yet the way he became the father of gynecology was he experimented in the 1800s on black women and children without any anesthesia. We still have things like the Sims speculum that are named after him. 

So, I think the more I'm able to be honest about the way that healthcare was built -- which is on the backs of black and brown communities without giving them the full credit -- the more I'm able to build trust because I also talk about the things that we're changing now too. So I think even going back to the pulse oximeter, I talk about the flaw, but I talk about what's happening right now. How are we changing this in real time? And so my goal is never to mince the truth. It's never to shy away from hard conversations. I openly talk about racism, sexism, fat phobia, all these things are built into the healthcare system because they're natural in our world right now. I think that's really why so many people want to resonate with the things I say and trust what I say, is because I will always tell people the truth. 

Lindsey Smith

Your approach of storytelling and being so honest and upfront and not shying away from those maybe difficult topics on how healthcare was built really does resonate. I also follow you on social media and really enjoy all of your content. Of course, you're working against another kind of tide in social media, of bad information that's getting maybe louder and not quieter. So building on that question of trust and then diving into misinformation, what do you think the medical and public health establishments could be doing better to counter misinformation and disinformation?

Joel

Yeah. I love that question. So I always have to define for people that may not know misinformation versus disinformation. Misinformation is information that's out there that's wrong but isn't purposefully wrong. Disinformation is bad actors out there trying to actually put out wrong information for some personal gain in some way. Social media has changed healthcare communication overall. For the first time in history, physicians can speak directly to millions of people without a traditional gatekeeper. That's incredible and incredibly powerful. But as you mentioned, at the same time, it also allows misinformation to proliferate, especially when people can pretend to have that background. And misinformation spreads much faster than correct information. 

So the challenge isn't simply just providing information anymore, it's earning trust and then putting out that accurate information. I always say that facts matter, but facts alone cannot change minds. People respond to the stories, relationships, and trust. And I think that's what institutions haven't been doing well. The most effective communication has to meet people where they are; has to understand why people believe something and then guide them towards the evidence. Because you can't shame an individual into learning. 

So, for example, whenever I talk about vaccines, I always start from the reason why someone may mistrust a vaccine. At the heart of everything, if someone says, hey, I don't trust this vaccine, it's not because they don't want their family to be healthy. It's actually the exact opposite. Their goal is to make their family the healthiest, but they think vaccines may be harming that and not making them healthier. And so I always try and think, okay, we are coming from this at the same approach. We both want our families to be healthy. I want you to be healthy. I know you want your family to healthy. 

What's the missing gap? How do we bridge that information? Is it that you don't have enough research? Is it that you're looking at the wrong research? Is it that you have maybe someone in your life or some someone that you trust more than myself in order to give you that information. What can I do to give you the correct information and show you that this is what, based on medical guidelines, is the best for your health right now. 

I think institutions have often played the shame game instead of actually really leaning in and coming and meeting people with empathy where they're at, understanding why they believe something and then changing it. But it's getting harder, as you mentioned, with these ecosystems. I think part of it will have to be working with trusted voices on the ground. And then two, also working with these with the platforms. I think one of the coolest social media platforms would be, what if a platform was built on the quality of the information as opposed to the quantity of it, right? Right now, if you look at Facebook and TikTok and Instagram, what gets the most likes is that what's most inflammatory. But what if what rose to the top by the algorithm was what was most accurate? That would create a whole different world.

Lindsey Smith

That's a really great overview. And I think your approach to finding the missing gap and meeting people where they are is so important. I want to come back to another one of your projects. You have animated a YouTube series, The Doctor Is In, aimed at younger viewers, and you've talked about representation being a real driver behind it. Can you tell us about this series?

Joel

Yeah. So The Doctor Is In is an educational children series that I created to help kids understand how their bodies work and how to make health information fun, accessible, and trustworthy from an early age. I always like to say you can't be what you can't see. And for myself, I mentioned that my sister was going into medicine, but I didn't have direct role models for myself to really be able to follow along and see that it looked like me. In the United States right now, less than six percent of all physicians are black and we know that matters because racial diversity leads to better outcomes, especially in communities where they don't have doctors. 

So this show in particular is a mix between animation and live action. It follows a curious young boy named Leland alongside myself, Dr. Joel, the pediatrician, and my talking stethoscope Sammy, my handbag Otto, and then Zeta the X-ray. Together we really explore questions about health, science, and medicine. Things like why is it that our we get hungry? Or what is it that doctors actually do? We still try and ground it in evidence but make it an interesting way that kids want to actually follow along and perhaps say, hey, I might want to be a doctor one day too.

Lindsey Smith

We certainly need more healthcare professionals. Thank you for sharing that with us. We'll be sure to link to The Doctor Is In in the show notes for our listeners to check out. So at Elsevier, we are an education company at heart and we're always looking for gaps to fill. So I'd like to ask you, if we were to make a video for the medical learners and professionals we reach, what would you want us to take on?

Joel

That a great question. I think one thing that people are still trying to figure out how to educate around is how do we move from race-based medicine to race-conscious medicine? One part of that is how do we really make sure that when we talk about race in medicine, we're doing it in an equitable way. But then even taking a bigger kind of lens to everything, thinking more about how were systems designed, you know, and how are things changing?

I think if we have a better baseline as healthcare professionals of understanding that, we'll be able to better look at how the system's changing with things like private equity today or artificial intelligence and how that could actually negatively or positively impact algorithms, assumptions in healthcare, all these types of things. My work started with looking at race at the forefront, but now it's really expanded into systems and understanding how systems were built in the first place. 

So I think if Elsevier was to tackle something really complex that doesn't have an answer yet, it'd be have the systems that we've been built been grounded in historical context that still hasn't been addressed. I think the New England Journal of Medicine actually has a great series right now that they're posting on their podcast called Intention to Treat. And it really goes into how did these intentions to treat something get built into our system and then perhaps lead the wrong or the right way.

Lindsey Smith
That's a fantastic suggestion. Thank you so much for sharing that. I want to shift gears to our audience now. We have a lot of students and early career health professionals. What would your advice be to them as they enter the field today?

Joel

This is gonna sound very strange, but years ago, I was at my sister's graduation -- she went to Harvard for undergrad -- and Oprah was a speaker. And hearing Oprah was incredible. She gave this piece of advice I've never been able to forget: the job you're gonna have in the future probably doesn't exist today. And when I say that, it doesn't mean that you can't be a doctor or healthcare professional but what it looks like to be a doctor is going to be very different in the future than it looks like today. It's rapidly changing. 

If you talk to any doctor right now, they will say that. Whether it's from the ways that the Affordable Care Act changed healthcare to the ways that artificial intelligence is coming into play, to the ways that private equity is changing the rules about places, or even new roles like nurse practitioners and PAs that are taking on different roles. 

So my answer to that would be, stay curious, especially about the things that seem settled already. Some of the biggest advances in medicine have come from people just asking why things are done in a certain way. Medicine isn't just about memorizing facts. I think that's what people often hang on to. It's about learning how to think critically, challenging assumptions, and then continuing to learn throughout your career. So just remember that the job you're gonna have in the future probably doesn't exist today, so stay curious.

Lindsey Smith

That is a great note to leave with them and I think exactly what a lot of people need to hear today. Before we wrap up today's episode, is there anything we didn't cover that we should have? I know you've got a lot going on, whether it's the book you're working on or that you were up to on Capitol Hill a few weeks back, so the floor is yours.

Joel

Yeah. Goodness. I've had so much fun really just blending my different interests. What I didn't mention was while I always knew I wanted to be a doctor, there were rocks along the way where I said, do I actually want to do this? Because I could have seen myself in more policy roles or I could have seen myself in tech, so I've really tried to blend my career into a level of all of that. 

Just a few weeks ago I was on the Hill with Figs, the medical scrubs company. I was alongside Noah Wiley, which is really cool, and Senator Elizabeth Warren talking about the need increase mental health services for healthcare professionals, to have a tax credit that could really say thank you especially for those working in rural areas, and also thinking about mental health and still talking about suicide specifically and protecting physicians from retaliation when they speak up and tell the truth. 

As you mentioned, I also have a book. I actually just announced this at the at the beginning of June. The book is called The Default Body and it explores a simple but really profound question, which is who was medicine designed around? Throughout history, many of the standards, the tools, the textbooks, the algorithms, the assumptions in healthcare were developed using a pretty narrow vision of a patient. It was often a white male, and someone that's able-bodied. 

So this book examines how it happened, how those assumptions still shape the care today, and what it would look like to build a healthcare system that works for everyone. And so I'm so excited to have just a built-up platform that's really about education, that's about informing other people and about really making us question the world around us in a way that makes us push it forward and make it more equitable for everyone.

Lindsey Smith

You are working on so many impactful projects that we are sure will continue to drive positive change, and we're grateful for you sharing them with us today. Thank you so much, Dr. Bervell, for being on the podcast with us today.

Joel

Thank you for having me. This was a great time.

Lindsey Smith

And that does it for today's show. Dr. Bervell, you've shown that good storytelling isn't the opposite of good science. It's how good science finally reaches the people the system has too often overlooked and how trust gets rebuilt into one clear, honest conversation at a time. We look forward to continuing to watch you build your community online, educate, and ultimately create change. 

I'm Lindsey Smith. Thanks for checking out today's show. Remember to do your part to raise the line and strengthen the healthcare system. We're all in this together.