“And in your medical training,” the attorney asked, her voice calm enough to be lethal, “were you taught that tattoos and piercings are contraindications for serious medical illness?”
The room went perfectly still.
“No,” Vance said.
“Were you taught that tattoos and piercings are predictive of malingering?”
“No.”
“Were you taught that they diminish the likelihood of appendicitis?”
“No.”
“Then why did they matter?”
He flushed. “Emergency physicians develop instincts.”
“Instincts based on appearance rather than clinical presentation?”
“That’s not what I said.”
“But that is what you did, isn’t it, Dr. Vance? You saw a young man whose appearance activated an assumption in your mind, and you treated the assumption instead of the patient.”
He denied it, of course. But by then denial sounded like theater. The problem with bias is not merely that it exists; it is that, once exposed under proper scrutiny, it often reveals itself in places where the person exhibiting it never bothered to build a stronger lie.