It is very true that a lot of medical knowledge is gained empirically, and there is also an additional aspect to it. The history of Medical research is generally studied on the demographics where such testing is cultural acceptable, and where the gains of such research has been mostly sought, which is young men drafted into wars. The second common demographic are medical students, which historically was biased towards men but are today biased towards women.
So while access to medicine indeed one demographic, I would say that studies are more likely to target demographics which are convenient to test on.
> The history of Medical research is generally studied on the demographics where such testing is cultural acceptable, and where the gains of such research has been mostly sought, which is young men drafted into wars.
Though in this study, the AI models were also biased against people under the age of 40.
It is interesting that we're also seeing a lot of bias in the reporting and discussion of these results. The results tested three groups for bias, and found a bias in all three. Yet the headline only mentions the bias against two of the groups, and almost the entirety of the discussion here only talks about bias against two of the groups while ignoring the third group.
If I test a system for bias, select three different groups to test for, and all three have a bias against them, my first reaction would be "there's a good chance that it's also biased against many other groups, I should test for those as well." It wouldn't be to pretend that there's only bias against the only three groups I actually bothered checking for. It definitely wouldn't be two ignore one of those groups, and pretend that there's only a bias against the other two.
I think we're really talking about different aspects of the same issue. Everything you've described basically agrees with "those who have more access to medicine" because those are also the ones inherently more convenient to test/observe.
Like how the ones with the most access to medicine are mice, because they're convenient to experiment on.
And this is absolutely something one needs to consider when reading medical studies -- if they only use animal (usually mice) models, there's a decent chance the conclusions are not directly transferable to humans.