Dismissed: Tackling the Biases That Undermine our Health Care

Summary

Health-care providers and their patients are human, and all humans have unconscious biases that affect how we listen, observe, and act. Bias impacts patients when they are at their most vulnerable. Health-care bias can mean the difference not just between suffering and relief, but between life and death.

For the first time, an author with the unique perspective of being one of America's top doctors, a woman, and Black, candidly addresses the issue of bias in health care, sharing personal and patient stories and pragmatic solutions. Dr. Angela Marshall, repeatedly named a "Top Doctor" by Washingtonian magazine, draws on extensive research, poignant stories from some of the thousands of patients she has treated, and her own compelling personal experience, to examine the bias from both patients' and health-care providers' points of view. She offers a bold blueprint for change, filled with fresh solutions that can help everyone in our health-care system.

Dismissed not only explains what so many people feel so profoundly—that the system is working against them. It also reveals what health-care practitioners, patients, and society in general can do to make it right.