FWIS3

Well. This is fucking grim.

https://bostonreview.net/science-nature ... acial-bias

TL;DR pulse oximeters are mostly calibrated for and tested on people with light skin, so very dark skin can cause them to have falsely high readings of up to 8% - enough to impact triage a whole lot, even before considering medical workers' own racial biases.

sad, but hopefully this will be good intel for recalibration going forward

Yeah, no kidding.

One of my medically inclined friends says the article isn't quite accurate, because a lot of nurses know to manually compensate for the inaccuracy (and will treat sustained readings below 90 the same regardless, i.e. as a dire emergency). But it sounds like there's still a huge possibility for bias. And also honestly (from experience) I wouldn't trust most docs to correct the measurements manually as nurses tend to do.

lady_*nix wrote:Yeah, no kidding.

One of my medically inclined friends says the article isn't quite accurate, because a lot of nurses know to manually compensate for the inaccuracy (and will treat sustained readings below 90 the same regardless, i.e. as a dire emergency). But it sounds like there's still a huge possibility for bias. And also honestly (from experience) I wouldn't trust most docs to correct the measurements manually as nurses tend to do.

the docs rarely look at the devices. The nurses do. So, when the doc asks for a pulse ox reading he will get it from the nurse who will do the correction.