Physicians Melanie Tervalon and Jann Murray-García introduced the term in a 1998 article in the Journal of Health Care for the Poor and Underserved. They offered it as an alternative to cultural competence, which can suggest that a provider can learn a fixed set of facts about a group and be done. Cultural humility treats learning as lifelong.
The framework has three parts: continuous self-reflection about one's own biases, a commitment to fixing the power imbalance between provider and patient, and building partnerships with communities. It is now taught in medicine, social work, education and nonprofit work.
It matters because health care has a long record of racial harm, from the Tuskegee syphilis study to modern disparities in pain treatment. Research has found that some medical students and residents held false beliefs about biological differences between Black and white patients, such as thicker skin, and that those beliefs were linked to undertreating Black patients' pain. Cultural humility asks providers to question assumptions like these rather than rely on them.