Commercial spirometers still correct for an unproven assumption that Black lungs hold less air

Evidence

Yet fallacies about Black immunity to pain, extra-thick skin, and weakened lung function that were introduced into the scientific literature by these and other racist doctors continue to show up in medical education today. Even Cartwright’s footprint remains. Today most commercially available spirometers, used around the world to diagnose and monitor respiratory illness, have a “race correction” built into the software, to control for the assumption that Black people have less lung capacity than white people. In her 2014 book Breathing Race into the Machine: The Surprising Career of the Spirometer from Plantation to Genetics, Lundy Braun, a Brown University professor of pathology and laboratory medicine and Africana studies, as well as a professor of medical science at Brown’s Warren Alpert Medical School, notes that the “race correction” is conventional practice, treated as fact in textbooks and still taught in many medical schools. — Nikole Hannah-Jones et al., The 1619 Project, 975

Categorization

• QUESTION: Worth chasing a current citation on whether any major respiratory society has dropped the race correction since 2014.
• XREF: Connects to the reader’s interest in how contested scientific assumptions persist institutionally, similar to noise exposure being ‘unrecognized’ in medical practice. — connects to: Human lungs make bodies continuous with atmospheric air quality — Robin Wall Kimmerer, Gathering Moss: A Natural and Cultural…, 401