Healthcare disparities persist despite decades of evidence-based medicine initiatives and explicit
commitments to equitable care. While unconscious bias among healthcare providers has been extensively
documented as a contributing factor to these disparities, the role of interoception—the perception of
internal bodily signals—in shaping clinical judgment and perpetuating bias remains underexplored.
This essay examines the neuroscience of interoception, its relationship to embodied cognition, and
its profound implications for understanding and mitigating unconscious bias in clinical practice. By
integrating research from neuroscience, clinical psychology, and healthcare equity, we argue that
physicians' interoceptive awareness directly influences their capacity for empathy, clinical decision making,
and susceptibility to bias. We propose that cultivating interoceptive awareness in medical
education and clinical practice represents a novel, evidence-based approach to reducing healthcare
disparities and improving patient care quality.
