What happens when medicine gets race wrong?

That's the question Rachel Gottbaum sets out to answer in the new series of Intention to Treat from the New England Journal of Medicine.

Intention to treat confronts harmful assumptions about race in clinical medicine, why they endure, and what it will take to change.

In this episode, Gottbaum investigates how a race correction used to determine which patients receive work-related medical disability benefits

has prevented countless black workers, including war veterans, from receiving benefits owed to them.

She also interviews Dr. Peter Sporn and Dr. Cheryl Connor, who are leading efforts to remove race correction from lung function testing at VA hospitals.

Listen here and then head over to Intention to Treat, wherever you're listening to podcasts, to get all eight episodes in this season.

My name is Marcus. I served in the United States Army. I'm a desert storm veteran.

Marcus is 61 years old, and he's a patient at a Veterans Affairs Hospital in the Midwest.

He's asked that we only use his first name and not reveal the VA where he gets his medical care.

I was serving the country. It was over in the African continent.

I really can't go into much detail with that.

Like a lot of Gulf War veterans, Marcus was exposed to toxic smoke from burn pits during

his deployment. Picture massive open-air fires, some as large as a football field.

It's how the military disposed of its trash. Mounds of plastic, chemicals, munitions, and even amputated limbs were burned. Shortly after

leaving the army, Marcus started to feel sick. He went to his local VA to get checked out.

It was harder to breathe. I was doing the coughing, the fatigue. They basically told me, yeah, you had sarcoidosis.

Sarcoidosis is a condition that causes the immune system to overreact and can form lumps in the lungs.

Many patients have difficulty breathing and can also have vision problems, chest pain, and skin rashes.

The U.S. military acknowledges that there's a connection between exposure to the burn pits and various cancers and lung diseases,

including sarcoidosis.

I enter the military healthy.

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