I ended the call and pointed the car toward the highway. The dark road ahead was empty, the dashboard glowing blue against my hands. I have spent my life believing in medicine, not in the naïve way laypeople sometimes imagine doctors do, but in the hard, earned way that comes from seeing what good medicine can save and what bad medicine can destroy. I have operated in the middle of the night on ruptured aneurysms, bowel perforations, gallbladders gone septic, appendixes that should have come out six hours earlier but did not because someone hesitated, someone missed a sign, someone assumed instead of examined. One of the things that had always made my blood boil was when physicians let bias override clinical judgment. I had seen it more often than I liked to admit. Young men with tattoos were more likely to be labeled drug seekers. Women with pain were more likely to be told they were anxious. Black patients were more likely to have their symptoms minimized. Poor patients were more likely to be judged before a single lab was drawn. Hospitals rarely liked to say this aloud, but medicine was not immune to arrogance, laziness, or prejudice. Sometimes it rewarded them.