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NYT: The Psychological Subtexts of Hospital Emergency Rooms Are Rife with Microaggressions

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From the New York Times news section:

For Doctors of Color, Microaggressions Are All Too Familiar

By Emma Goldberg
Aug. 11, 2020, 2:30 a.m. ET

When Dr. Onyeka Otugo was doing her training in emergency medicine, in Cleveland and Chicago, she was often mistaken for a janitor or food services worker even after introducing herself as a doctor. She realized early on that her white male counterparts were not experiencing similar mix-ups.

… After years of training in predominantly white emergency departments, Dr. Otugo has experienced many such microaggressions. The term, coined in the 1970s by Dr. Chester Pierce, a psychiatrist, refers to “subtle, stunning, often automatic, and nonverbal exchanges which are ‘put downs’” of Black people and members of other minority groups; “micro” refers to their routine frequency, not the scale of their impact.

They’re mega-aggressions!

Dr. Otugo said the encounters sometimes made her wonder whether she was a qualified and competent medical practitioner, because others did not see her that way.

Other Black women doctors, across specialties, said that such experiences were all too common. Dr. Kimberly Manning, an internal medicine doctor at Grady Memorial Hospital in Atlanta, recalled countless microaggressions in clinical settings. “People might not realize you’re offended, but it’s like death by a thousand paper cuts,” Dr. Manning said. “It can cause you to shrink.”

As I’ve been mentioning, America’s highest priority has become boosting the self-esteem of blacks, even thought studies suggest that blacks average higher self-esteem than anybody else.

The field of medicine has long skewed white and male.

Assuming you count Asian women as white men.

If only white males had not had the impertinence to invent scientific medicine in Europe in the later 19th Century. Think how much better the self-esteem of black women would be.

Only 5 percent of the American physician work force is African-American, and roughly 2 percent are Black women. Emergency medicine is even more predominantly white, with just 3 percent of physicians identifying as Black. The pipeline is also part of the problem; at American medical schools, just 7 percent of the student population is now Black.

But for Black female physicians, making it into the field is only the first of many challenges. More than a dozen Black women interviewed said that they frequently heard comments from colleagues and patients questioning their credibility and undermining their authority while on the job. These experiences damaged their sense of confidence and sometimes hampered teamwork, they said, creating tensions that cost precious time during emergency procedures.

Some physicians said they found the microaggressions particularly frustrating knowing that, as Black doctors, they brought an invaluable perspective to the care they offer.

Science Proves that they bring an invaluable perspective to the care they offer.

A 2018 study showed that Black patients had improved outcomes when seen by Black doctors, and were more likely to agree to preventive care measures like diabetes screenings and cholesterol tests.

In May, four female physicians of color published a paper in Annals of Emergency Medicine on microaggressions. The authors, Dr. Melanie Molina, Dr. Adaira Landry, Dr. Anita Chary and Dr. Sherri-Ann Burnett-Bowie, said they hoped that, by shining a spotlight on the problem, they might reduce the sense of isolation that Black female physicians experience and compel their white colleagues to take specific steps toward eliminating conscious and unconscious bias.

Discussions about lack of diversity in medicine resurfaced in early August, when the Journal of the American Heart Association retracted a paper that argued against affirmative action initiatives in the field and said that Black and Hispanic trainees were less qualified than their white and Asian counterparts.

The Asian-American doctor who wrote it got demoted and his paper retracted, but you can still read it online, just with “Retracted Article” stamped on every Page:

Dr. Phindile Chowa, 33, an assistant professor of emergency medicine at Emory University, was in her second year of an emergency-medicine residency when an attending in her department mistook her for an electrocardiogram technician, even though she had previously worked with him on rotations. She approached him to give a report on her patients, and he wordlessly put out his hand, expecting her to hand over an electrocardiogram scan.

“He never apologized,” Dr. Chowa said. “He did not think he did a single thing wrong that day. I was the only Black resident in my class. How could he not know who I am?”

The derogatory encounters continued from there. Colleagues have referred to her as “sweetie” or “honey.” She recalled one patient who asked repeatedly who she was over the course of a hospital visit, while quickly learning the name of her white male attending physician.

Confused patients are racist and deserve to die. There should be no mercy for patients who commit microaggressions: just wheel them out onto the sidewalk and leave them there.

When she was first admitted to her residency, at Harvard, a medical school classmate suggested that she had had an “edge” in the selection process because of her race.

Well, she did, a big one, but you aren’t supposed to mention that.

Such comments can create an environment of fear for Black women. Dr. Otugo recalled overhearing her Black female colleagues in Chicago discuss how they were going to style their hair for their clerkships. Many of them worried that if they wore their hair naturally, instead of straightening it or even changing it to lighter colors, their grades and performance evaluations from white physicians might suffer.

Dr. Sheryl Heron, a Black professor of emergency medicine at Emory University School of Medicine, who has worked in the field for more than two decades, said microaggressions can exact a long-lasting toll. “After the twelve-thousandth time, it starts to impede your ability to be successful,” she said. “You start to go into scenarios about your self-worth. It’s a head trip.”

This comes on top of the stresses that are already pervasive in emergency departments. A 2018 survey of more than 1,500 early-career doctors in emergency medicine found that 76 percent were experiencing symptoms of burnout.

I’m not an expert on emergency care, but my impression from watching MASH is that it helps to have a rather callous personality that is not easily bruised.

 
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  1. We’ve reached the point in U.S. Globocap English where the word “microaggressions” is problematically disrespectful to the, for sooth, non-microness of the violation denoted. Mind your manners, everybody.

    • Replies: @TammyR
    @Anonymous

    In our city, nonwhite doctors predominate, and my mother, while having a heart attack, was manhandled by some of them in an Emergency Room. Those "aggressions," however, don't matter; I filed complaints, all of which were dismissed.

    Do not go to a hospital alone, if you can avoid it. Do not stay in a hospital without an advocate. Beware of nonwhite doctors; many are Affirmative Action mediocrities.

    The level of the racial hostility my mother encountered caused me to discontinue my relationships with nonwhites. I no longer believe in any of the diversity or integrationist crap peddled throughout my lifetime. I no longer believe those things are anything except frauds that will ultimately erase the society and culture our ancestors bequeathed to us.

  2. The field of medicine has long skewed white and male.

    I wonder how accurate this stereotype is today. My wife has numerous health problems, so I’ve had the opportunity to interact heavily with the health-care industry in recent years. Here in Florida, I don’t think I’m exaggerating when I say at least half of the many, many doctors we’ve dealt with are either South Asian or Middle Eastern. I’ve dealt with only two white male doctors in the past decade, and both looked like they were nearing retirement age.

    • Replies: @Haole2
    @Mr. Blank

    If you call Jews white then there are still white doctors. Others wise, almost no white doctors
    Move to Mexico for Spanish Doctors.

    Replies: @Dissident, @Hans

    , @B36
    @Mr. Blank

    Same in Texas. Indian, Pakistani, Middle Eastern. Remarkably very few Jewish doctors. Where did they go?

    Replies: @Mike Pierson, Davenport Rector, Midfielder, @Old Prude

    , @stillCARealist
    @Mr. Blank

    I haven't had a white, male primary since the early 90's. Right now we have a Filipino lady. She's totally right wing.... hates Kamala Harris with a passion.

  3. Snowflakes gonna snowflake.

    This only reinforces everyone’s secret opinion that they only want to be serviced by white, Jewish, or Asian doctors.

    I mean, if this doctor were worth her salt, she would take this as a challenge to do better, not as an excuse to whine and complain about it and make herself the victim.

    This woman will DEFINITELY break her hippocratic oath if a patient pisses her off or she’s having a bad day.

    • Agree: Gordo
  4. Anonymous[186] • Disclaimer says:

    As a patient, I would prefer not to have a black doctor, because placement in medical school has as much to do with race as it does achievement. I’d prefer not to have an asian doctor, because I’ve worked side by side with asians myself, and I’ve found they have a strong predilection to tunnel vision. The majority of whom either cannot or will not seriously consider variables outside of what’s obvious. In the practice of medicine, they can tunnel-vision, and do the right thing, while propelling you into an early grave.

    I even have a female asian ophthalmologist who fills in when my regular ophthalmologist is on vacation, and the decisions she tries to make are always “by the book” types of conclusions that would ensure my prescriptions would be less than optimal, though “correct.” When I’d try to tell her why her decisions wouldnt work well for me, she responds as not fully convinced, even though the outcome has already been established. It’s like if a range of choices are outside of her tunnel-vision, it can’t be valid.

    I had an asian veterinarian who did the exact same thing. When I introduce variables related to a problem that would lend to a certain solution, it’s like he becomes autistic. He would be somewhat against it, but could never explain why. Because he didn’t know.

    Anyway, black professionals where my life is on the line is out of the question if I have a say in it. Asians I will resist if possible, but will acquiesce if I must. Certainly there are competent professionals who are black and asian, and if convinced, I’d certainly and easily make exceptions. It’s just not the norm.

    • Replies: @Reg Cæsar
    @Anonymous


    I had an Asian veterinarian...
     
    Never a good idea.
  5. The media and medical establishments are lying about hydroxychloroquine so as to maximize remdesivir profits. Doctors not bound by contracts spoke out at a press conference in DC. Social media censored the video and suspended anyone who shared it, including the president. Lyingpress urinalists called the doctors “people in white lab coats” to imply (not not say, and thereby get sued) that they weren’t doctors. But for the Nigerian one they went a step further and talked about how she communes with spirits.
    Leftists believe in nothing and are always guilty of whatever they accuse someone else of.

  6. If affirmative action admissions to higher education, medical schools, internships, residencies, and fellowships did not exist then significant numbers of these problems would likely disappear.

    • Replies: @Jim Don Bob
    @Jus' Sayin'...

    Let me get this straight. These AAs were let into medical school ahead of more qualified whites, then "coached" along until they got their MD, which is a certain ticket to a comfortable life, and they are still unhappy?

    Paging Michelle Obama.

  7. She recalled one patient who asked repeatedly who she was over the course of a hospital visit, while quickly learning the name of her white male attending physician.

    In the 21st century white people (and only whites) are required to know the gender and how to pronounce every single name in the world, no matter how rare and exotic the name. Otherwise should you mispronounce a name, even if you’ve never encountered it before, you’re racist!

    • Replies: @stillCARealist
    @jcd1974

    Jeepers, this is so true it's sad.

    I have friends from other countries who've been in the US 20 years, and they still cannot pronounce my simple English name without mangling the vowel sound. But God forbid I should pronounce a Spanish name with an English R sound and not the Spanish one. Get over yourselves, people!

  8. A 2018 study showed that Black patients had improved outcomes when seen by Black doctors…

    Once again proving the wisdom of the famous sociologist Jim Crow.

  9. “Microaggression” means any failure of demeanor no matter how trivial, is to be treated the same as if it were genocide.

  10. A 2018 study showed that Black patients had improved outcomes when seen by Black doctors, and were more likely to agree to preventive care measures like diabetes screenings and cholesterol tests.

    The obvious takehome from this study–if ture–and all the hurt feelings in the article …

    black physicians should be doing primary care with black patients.

    (By extension black cliental might even be a good idea for black school teachers, black cops, blacklawyers, black politicians … and if we extend this to white liberals … our problems are solved! Separate nations.)

    • Agree: MBlanc46
    • Replies: @Hernan Pizzaro del Blanco
    @AnotherDad

    Did they also study the outcomes of white patients ? Do white patients have better outcomes when they are seen by a white doctor ?

    Why are blacks more likely to agree to have medical tests when prescribed by a black doctor ? Are black patients racist against non-Black doctors ?

  11. anonymous[400] • Disclaimer says:

    A black doctor working in the emergency room of a major hospital told me some inaccurate nonsense some years ago when I went there for a sports injury. Even I, a non-doctor, knew he was dead wrong and connected with a white orthopedic surgeon who took care of it as a matter of routine. I wondered how a supposed doctor would know so little. Stay away from affirmative action doctors, they’ll end up killing you.

    • Agree: 3g4me
    • Replies: @vhrm
    @anonymous


    A black doctor working in the emergency room of a major hospital told me some inaccurate nonsense some years ago
    ... I wondered how a supposed doctor would know so little. Stay away from affirmative action doctors, they’ll end up killing you.

     

    I've had this experience with white and asian doctors as well as have friends and family. You've got to take all of them with a grain of salt, verify everything, get second opinions and hit google to understand the options no matter what their ethnicity.
    , @jsm
    @anonymous

    My daughter was told by a black primary care physician at Kaiser (who "trained" in Nigeria and did her internship sewing up gunshot wounds of black gangbangers in Detroit) that celiac disease -- an autoimmune disease that left untreated can result in 2x the rate of early death (due to increased risk of lymphoma, or malnutrition) and has an illness burden approximately equal to Type I diabetes -- was not "serious."

    Replies: @obwandiyag

    , @anon
    @anonymous

    I had a similar experience with a young, white doctor. Something else in the way of incorrect prescribing from a middle aged institutional doctor ("company doc"). NO excuse for not checking stuff on your phone while waiting in the ER or wherever, including medication interactions. But to be honest...stuff like this is why any family in the hospital has someone to sit with them as much as possible. All day, maybe all night if needed.

    D'ya know what they call the lowest ranked / last of the class in med school? Do ya?

    "Doctor".

    Replies: @Anonymousse

  12. The field of medicine has long skewed white and male.

    View post on imgur.com

    View post on imgur.com

    https://www.aamc.org/news-insights/press-releases/majority-us-medical-students-are-women-new-data-show

    The Majority of U.S. Medical Students Are Women, New Data Show
    DECEMBER 9, 2019

    Women comprise the majority of enrolled U.S. medical students for the first time, according to 2019 data released today by the AAMC (Association of American Medical Colleges). This progress builds on the milestone reached in 2017, when, for the first time, women comprised the majority of first-year medical students.

    The proportion of women students has been rising over recent years, from 46.9% in 2015 to 49.5% in 2018. In 2019, women comprise 50.5% of all medical school students.

    In the medical profession overall, male doctors still outnumber female doctors, 64 percent to 36 percent, according to 2019 data from the Kaiser Family Foundation.

    If you’ve been into a hospital at any point in the last 3 decades, you’d be surprised at the diversity of the physician workforce.

    Lots of Subcons, Asians, Persians, African migrants, Muslims, Hispanics (usually not Mexican), etc.

    Within the younger ranks, a lot fewer Jews than you might think. Even when you do see young Jews, a lot seem to be the children of Eastern Euro or Middle Eastern migrants. Not American Jews.
    I suppose American Jews have lost the taste for academics and hard work.

    Medicine is becoming heavily foreignized these days.

    By the way, foreign-origin physicians seem heavily over represented in medical billing fraud.

    Here’s an article about Armenians involved with medical fraud.

    https://www.csmonitor.com/Business/Latest-News-Wires/2010/1014/Medicare-fraud-Dozens-charged-in-record-scam

    • Replies: @Dan Hayes
    @JohnnyWalker123

    With the numerical takeover of American medicine by women, it's back to the future with Soviet medicine!

    , @Paul Mendez
    @JohnnyWalker123


    Among the younger ranks, a lot fewer Jews than you might think.
     
    The field of medicine is a lot less lucrative and a lot less prestigious than it once was. Hospital administrators, government bureaucrats and insurance companies limit your earnings and micromanage what you can and cannot do.

    Hi-IQ people can make more money and enjoy more autonomy in other fields, like finance, entertainment, journalism, politics, real estate etc.

    (My retirement-age lawyer friends say the same thing: practicing law is a lot less fun/profitable than it was in the 90’s)

    Replies: @Anonymous

    , @obwandiyag
    @JohnnyWalker123

    Foreigners are cheaper. As usual. And US healthcare institutions don't have to subsidize their education either. And having a nice diverse variety prevents unified labor action.

    , @Pop Warner
    @JohnnyWalker123

    The children of Jewish doctors go into politics or non-lucrative fields like the arts. Or, as others have stated, they go into fields that pay more than doctors. For the amount of training and work it takes just to make a "doctor's salary," It's not as attractive option for those who have endless options

    , @Anonymous
    @JohnnyWalker123


    By the way, foreign-origin physicians seem heavily over represented in medical billing fraud.
     
    Foreign-born physicians are HUGELY over-represented in the area of sexual abuse of patients.
  13. I’m not an expert on emergency care, but my impression from watching MASH is that it helps to have a rather callous personality that is not easily bruised.

    Well, I’m no doctor, and I don’t play one on TV, and I don’t figure I can assume for sure that TV is like reality. However, maybe you mean the M*A*S*H* movie, which to me seemed more realistic than the TV show by far.

    I agree with you that the docs are somewhat callous. It’s that or be depressed all the time from all the ways our bodies can let us down. My doc friends have some great doctor jokes, but there’s nothing better than the original doctor joke:

    [Guy bends his left elbow all the way] “Doc, it hurts when I do this.”

    “Don’t do that.”

    OK, and I can tell you that this one surgeon was taking out a tube leading out from my torso one time. It could have been done by a nurse, but the guy was there and trying to be helpful. There were stitches and he just whaled on the whole knot and then tore it apart. “Owww!” I was really close to saying “hey man, I know you’re used to working on people who are out cold, but take it easy, man!”, but I thought of that, who knows, maybe 2 days later, maybe 5 minutes. Time goes very slowly in the hospital.

    • Replies: @Giancarlo M. Kumquat
    @Achmed E. Newman

    ER docs are dealing with patients who are often scared to death. The callous doctor thing is way overrated. Above all,be very competent and caring. If you got that,then the rest will work itself out.

    I would never trust a black doctor. A friend with some serious problems casually mentioned that a doctor he saw once was an African.
    "An African??," says I, "you're lucky to be alive!"
    He is a liberal,teaches at Northwestern,but he seemed to have trouble grasping the idea that an African doctor could be "problematic."

  14. @Mr. Blank

    The field of medicine has long skewed white and male.
     
    I wonder how accurate this stereotype is today. My wife has numerous health problems, so I've had the opportunity to interact heavily with the health-care industry in recent years. Here in Florida, I don't think I'm exaggerating when I say at least half of the many, many doctors we've dealt with are either South Asian or Middle Eastern. I've dealt with only two white male doctors in the past decade, and both looked like they were nearing retirement age.

    Replies: @Haole2, @B36, @stillCARealist

    If you call Jews white then there are still white doctors. Others wise, almost no white doctors
    Move to Mexico for Spanish Doctors.

    • Replies: @Dissident
    @Haole2


    Move to Mexico for Spanish Doctors.
     
    If the images of Mexican political and business elites I've seen are any indication, I would assume the doctors there also tend to be quite white. Oh, right, you said Spanish, not Hispanic or Latino...
    , @Hans
    @Haole2

    I know 5 white doctors off the top of my head, classmates and acquaintances. I'm sure they can name multiples more. But excellent effort, Shlomo.

  15. @JohnnyWalker123

    The field of medicine has long skewed white and male.

     

    https://imgur.com/a/jzvClup

    https://imgur.com/a/or4N1wY

    https://www.aamc.org/news-insights/press-releases/majority-us-medical-students-are-women-new-data-show

    The Majority of U.S. Medical Students Are Women, New Data Show
    DECEMBER 9, 2019

    Women comprise the majority of enrolled U.S. medical students for the first time, according to 2019 data released today by the AAMC (Association of American Medical Colleges). This progress builds on the milestone reached in 2017, when, for the first time, women comprised the majority of first-year medical students.

    The proportion of women students has been rising over recent years, from 46.9% in 2015 to 49.5% in 2018. In 2019, women comprise 50.5% of all medical school students.
     

    In the medical profession overall, male doctors still outnumber female doctors, 64 percent to 36 percent, according to 2019 data from the Kaiser Family Foundation.

     

    If you've been into a hospital at any point in the last 3 decades, you'd be surprised at the diversity of the physician workforce.

    Lots of Subcons, Asians, Persians, African migrants, Muslims, Hispanics (usually not Mexican), etc.

    Within the younger ranks, a lot fewer Jews than you might think. Even when you do see young Jews, a lot seem to be the children of Eastern Euro or Middle Eastern migrants. Not American Jews.
    I suppose American Jews have lost the taste for academics and hard work.

    Medicine is becoming heavily foreignized these days.

    By the way, foreign-origin physicians seem heavily over represented in medical billing fraud.

    Here's an article about Armenians involved with medical fraud.

    https://www.csmonitor.com/Business/Latest-News-Wires/2010/1014/Medicare-fraud-Dozens-charged-in-record-scam

    Replies: @Dan Hayes, @Paul Mendez, @obwandiyag, @Pop Warner, @Anonymous

    With the numerical takeover of American medicine by women, it’s back to the future with Soviet medicine!

    • Agree: utu
  16. More on doctors: They DO need to have confidence. After that many years, if you don’t have confidence, you shouldn’t be there anymore. What goes on in China* is that the docs don’t get near the amount of scientific training, but they get much more experience quicker. They see easily 5 times as many patients in the non-hospital-room setting as American doctors do. That does likely mean more mistakes in the short run, but lots of confidence from observations of their patients outcomes in the long run.

    More comments on your post:

    Assuming you count Asian women as white men.

    That is the kind of line that keeps me LOLing, Steve. Thanks.

    A 2018 study showed that Black patients had improved outcomes when seen by Black doctors, and were more likely to agree to preventive care measures like diabetes screenings and cholesterol tests.

    Yeah, maybe they are more comfortable with whom they think is one of their homies during a little discussion, but let me tell you, if gall bladder surgery is coming up, they are not going to kick out the white-haired Oriental guy, and say “no, get me that black surgeon, Stat!

    The authors, Dr. Melanie Molina, Dr. Adaira Landry, Dr. Anita Chary and Dr. Sherri-Ann Burnett-Bowie, said they hoped …

    … that they could all have their name on a paper in a scientific journal without doing any of the icky hard science.

    Dr. Chowa said. “He did not think he did a single thing wrong that day. I was the only Black resident in my class. How could he not know who I am?”

    Was that wrong? Per the instructions of the great MILK god, he was simply being color-blind and judging you by the contents of your caricature … or something like that…

    Back to the subject of TV again, back in the day I used to watch my share of TV. I could swear the proportion of black doctor is 30-40%, especially in the ER, which is what they showed a lot in the shows. (There were not a whole lot of Proctology** dramas on anymore. TV has gone all to hell.) Was TV lying to me? I’m SHOCKED!

    .

    * Been there and been in the healthcare system – pretty good experience, and this was NOT in the big city, like Shanghai or Peking.

    ** BTW, spell-check refused to acknowledge the word “proctology”! Apparently, “colorectal” is the term of art now, so get your shit together, old fogies. Honestly, colorectal sounds much worse than proctology. At least with the latter, you may be able to remain ignorant about it.

  17. I’ve looked at statistics on income, education, life expectancy, and various other metrics of well-being. Based on what I’ve seen, there are 4 groups who are truly privileged in today’s America.

    1. Jews
    2. Subcons
    3. East Asians
    4. Some West Asian ethnic groups (Persians, Armenians, Mid Eastern Christians, Cubans, swarthy former Soviets, etc)

    What do all 4 groups have in common?

    1. All the above groups are highly acquisitive and competitive. They’re hungry.
    2. All are highly adept at utilizing clan stratagem to enrich themselves.
    3. Many of them are the “best and brightest” of their homelands (educated, skilled, fluent in English), so they’re prepared to do well. Selective migration.

    So very acquisitive and clannish, with a degree of selective migration.

    At least in the case of Jews and West Asians, they’re classified as “White.” So when you read statistics about how Whites are over represented by X% in a certain lucrative niche or leadership position, those statistics don’t distinguish between White Gentiles and the other groups. If the statistics were broken down by ethnicity, I bet White Gentiles would be under represented.

    One difference between Jews and the other groups (Subcons, West Asians, East Asians) is that the Jews aren’t that hungry anymore. So they often succeed through ethnic networking with friends and family in elite positions (“good old boy networks”). The other groups have to bust their rear ends a lot more, whether it be Subcon H-1bs or Chinese IP spies.

  18. Interesting how the study found that black patients improved when seen by black doctors. Why wouldn’t the same hold true for white patients and white doctors? Doesn’t matter I guess.

  19. @JohnnyWalker123

    The field of medicine has long skewed white and male.

     

    https://imgur.com/a/jzvClup

    https://imgur.com/a/or4N1wY

    https://www.aamc.org/news-insights/press-releases/majority-us-medical-students-are-women-new-data-show

    The Majority of U.S. Medical Students Are Women, New Data Show
    DECEMBER 9, 2019

    Women comprise the majority of enrolled U.S. medical students for the first time, according to 2019 data released today by the AAMC (Association of American Medical Colleges). This progress builds on the milestone reached in 2017, when, for the first time, women comprised the majority of first-year medical students.

    The proportion of women students has been rising over recent years, from 46.9% in 2015 to 49.5% in 2018. In 2019, women comprise 50.5% of all medical school students.
     

    In the medical profession overall, male doctors still outnumber female doctors, 64 percent to 36 percent, according to 2019 data from the Kaiser Family Foundation.

     

    If you've been into a hospital at any point in the last 3 decades, you'd be surprised at the diversity of the physician workforce.

    Lots of Subcons, Asians, Persians, African migrants, Muslims, Hispanics (usually not Mexican), etc.

    Within the younger ranks, a lot fewer Jews than you might think. Even when you do see young Jews, a lot seem to be the children of Eastern Euro or Middle Eastern migrants. Not American Jews.
    I suppose American Jews have lost the taste for academics and hard work.

    Medicine is becoming heavily foreignized these days.

    By the way, foreign-origin physicians seem heavily over represented in medical billing fraud.

    Here's an article about Armenians involved with medical fraud.

    https://www.csmonitor.com/Business/Latest-News-Wires/2010/1014/Medicare-fraud-Dozens-charged-in-record-scam

    Replies: @Dan Hayes, @Paul Mendez, @obwandiyag, @Pop Warner, @Anonymous

    Among the younger ranks, a lot fewer Jews than you might think.

    The field of medicine is a lot less lucrative and a lot less prestigious than it once was. Hospital administrators, government bureaucrats and insurance companies limit your earnings and micromanage what you can and cannot do.

    Hi-IQ people can make more money and enjoy more autonomy in other fields, like finance, entertainment, journalism, politics, real estate etc.

    (My retirement-age lawyer friends say the same thing: practicing law is a lot less fun/profitable than it was in the 90’s)

    • Agree: Jim Don Bob
    • Replies: @Anonymous
    @Paul Mendez

    Doctors are basically mechanics. There's no reason they should get more respect than the guy who fixes your car.

    Replies: @Paul Mendez, @Drew

  20. “Dr. Otugo said the encounters made her wonder whether she was competent as a medical practitioner, since others did not see her that way.”

    Play affirmative action games, win affirmative action prizes.

  21. Dr. Onyeka Otugo

    I’m trying to contain my addiction, but Steve– and the news in general– is such an enabler!

    Dr. Onyeka Otugo = Undertook yoga. You’r’ to go naked! Got yoke around you, ardent gook!

    Dr. Phindile Chowa

    I don’t want anybody, doctor or otherwise, phindling my chowa, or chowing my phindle. Those would be macroaggressions.

    Dr. Phindile Chowa = Lorded chain, whip. Inhaled whipcord. Prod while chain’d.

    • Replies: @Sam Malone
    @Reg Cæsar

    Do you do those in your head, or write the letters on in a Word document or something so you can move them around?

    Replies: @Reg Cæsar

  22. @anonymous
    A black doctor working in the emergency room of a major hospital told me some inaccurate nonsense some years ago when I went there for a sports injury. Even I, a non-doctor, knew he was dead wrong and connected with a white orthopedic surgeon who took care of it as a matter of routine. I wondered how a supposed doctor would know so little. Stay away from affirmative action doctors, they'll end up killing you.

    Replies: @vhrm, @jsm, @anon

    A black doctor working in the emergency room of a major hospital told me some inaccurate nonsense some years ago
    … I wondered how a supposed doctor would know so little. Stay away from affirmative action doctors, they’ll end up killing you.

    I’ve had this experience with white and asian doctors as well as have friends and family. You’ve got to take all of them with a grain of salt, verify everything, get second opinions and hit google to understand the options no matter what their ethnicity.

    • Agree: Cortes
  23. A decade or so ago, had to go to the emergency room and stay overnight for observation. When the time came for discharge, a pajeet physician came in to give me the word. He spoke for several minutes and I doubt I understood one word out of a dozen. Really bizarre and I’m sure it’s worse now.

  24. Illness has a way of obliterating social customs. Sick people often reveal what they’re really thinking.

    As a white male cis-gendered and straight physician, I’ve seen this countless times. I’ll never forget the first time I witnessed this. I was a medical student rounding on a patient in the cancer clinic. To my right was the Black attending physician. The woman addressed every question to me, the white male medical student. In short order I told her I was a student physician, and that the most senior person was the Black man to my left. Still, she persisted, as if she somehow could not wrap her head around the concept that the Black guy knew more than I did.

    After this encounter I talked with the attending physician, who possessed a good-humored if resigned attitude to the situation. He then told me he’d often been asked by a patient for a bedpan, or to take out the trash and to send in the doctor. The guy was a graduate of Yale medical school, the product of the best residency and fellowship programs in the world. And yet to this woman, he was just a Black man.

    I think encouraging Black applicants to apply for medical school and having some form of affirmative action programs to further encourage matriculation is a good thing. These doctors obviously bring an important perspective and there really are not enough of them.

    In order to make things “truly fair”, lets fix the public school system so that majority Black schools aren’t chronically underfunded and let’s subsidize MCAT prep courses to set Black students up for success.

    If Black medical school matriculants with lower statistics can succeed in medical school and become great doctors, perhaps its a sign that these admission metrics are not actually predictive of a person’s ability to succeed in medicine.

    Instead of using these statistics to de-legitimatize the qualifications of black medical school graduates, perhaps we should be considering how the use of these metrics serves to reinforce the status quo

    I always thought that since women and people with more skin pigmentation have more difficulty getting to where they are, that by average they must be better at their job.

    So, when you are a patient and you are assigned a Black woman doctor, you most probably get a better doctor then the other patients.

    • Disagree: The Wild Geese Howard
    • Replies: @usNthem
    @Tony the Doctor

    Right. Have at it doc.

    , @PiltdownMan
    @Tony the Doctor


    These doctors obviously bring an important perspective and there really are not enough of them.
     
    I'm no doctor. I'm trying to understand why the perspective they bring is important, from the point of view of medical science and its practice.

    Also, aside from the MCATs, how would you screen people for fitness to admission into medical school?

    Many doctors here are foreign medical graduates from the British Commonwealth, where medical schools typically take in students either right after high-school, or after completing a one year pre-med, to beef up their understanding of biology, mostly. Many have school specific competitive exams, just as we have the MCATs. The rest depend on ranking in end-of-high-school written exams, a screening process that typically requires the student to take a dozen or more hours long exams.

    What do we have, aside from the MCAT, that would ensure that quality of screening and fitness for purpose?
    , @Calvin Hobbes
    @Tony the Doctor


    So, when you are a patient and you are assigned a Black woman doctor, you most probably get a better doctor then the other patients.
     
    Here’s an interesting story about a Black woman doctor:

    The Teleka Patrick case: One year later

    https://www.mlive.com/news/kalamazoo/2015/04/the_teleka_patrick_case_a_look.html

    Before her death, Dr. Patrick worked as a psychiatrist in a hospital in Kalamazoo, Michigan.

    Dr. Patrick was batshit crazy. She moved to Kalamazoo because she was obsessed with gospel singer Marvin Sapp. He wanted nothing to do with her, but she stalked him, referred to him as her fiancée, and sent him tens of thousands of tweets. (There’s one of those creepy tweets embedded in the article linked to above.)

    Patrick’s paranoid craziness apparently took a turn for the worse, and she drove out of town one night in her car with no-tread tires. One of her tires blew while she was barreling along. She probably thought the demons had caught her, and she fled on foot in a mad panic. She ran into a pond beside the highway and drowned. The pond froze before they found her, and it wasn’t until the ice thawed four months later that the Mystery of Taleka Patrick was solved.

    Would someone that crazy but not Black have been allowed to practice medicine? I doubt it.

    , @Hypnotoad666
    @Tony the Doctor


    If Black medical school matriculants with lower statistics can succeed in medical school and become great doctors, perhaps its a sign that these admission metrics are not actually predictive of a person’s ability to succeed in medicine.
     
    I would love to know the tradeoff between GPA/IQ, and actual performance as a practicing doctor (including malpractice and harm to patients). I wonder if anyone has actually studied it.

    Medical school standards may well be arbitrarily set too high, thereby artificially restricting medical services to the public.

    On the other hand, there may be an intellectual level below which a doctor will do more harm than good.

    But wherever you set the bar, there is no reason to give blacks a special pass to limbo under the standard.

    Replies: @johnomd, @johnomd, @Anonymous

    , @Mr McKenna
    @Tony the Doctor

    If this guy can say "then" instead of "than", I can say "Tiny" instead of "Tony".

    , @Lurker
    @Tony the Doctor


    people with more skin pigmentation
     
    Thanks for the medical input. So racial differences are just skin deep?
    , @ThreeCranes
    @Tony the Doctor

    "she somehow could not wrap her head around the concept that the Black guy knew more than I did."

    Why would you assume that the black guy knew more than you did? She's showing smarts, playing the odds.

    , @Moses
    @Tony the Doctor

    When you or your family need to see a doctor, you seek out African American doctors right?

    Right?

    No more questions yer honor.

  25. @Paul Mendez
    @JohnnyWalker123


    Among the younger ranks, a lot fewer Jews than you might think.
     
    The field of medicine is a lot less lucrative and a lot less prestigious than it once was. Hospital administrators, government bureaucrats and insurance companies limit your earnings and micromanage what you can and cannot do.

    Hi-IQ people can make more money and enjoy more autonomy in other fields, like finance, entertainment, journalism, politics, real estate etc.

    (My retirement-age lawyer friends say the same thing: practicing law is a lot less fun/profitable than it was in the 90’s)

    Replies: @Anonymous

    Doctors are basically mechanics. There’s no reason they should get more respect than the guy who fixes your car.

    • Replies: @Paul Mendez
    @Anonymous

    Perhaps less, since cars rarely heal on their own.

    , @Drew
    @Anonymous

    It's my general belief that improvements in life expectancy at birth in first world countries are more correctly attributed to civil engineers and sanitation engineers than to medical professionals and pharmaceutical researchers

  26. We need to differentiate between jobs that require raw brain/physical power, and those where the social dynamic makes a difference.

    You probably wouldn’t want a heart surgeon admitted on affirmative action, doing your bypass. However, if having medical professionals in the community who look like the community helps with things like actually getting people through the door and paying attention, then why not? Long term, it saves both money and lives. For instance, having race specific midwives, trained in culturally specific mores, might stop the trend of pregnant women withdrawing from hospitals during pregnancy and childbirth. Also, even with all the confounds, students do better with teachers of the same race.

    It’s like being a cop versus being a firefighter. A firefighter has to be physically strong enough to carry people, and smart enough to understand fire science. If you can’t then, with no disrespect, find another profession. Cops need a certain physical strength and bearing, but most of the job is talking, being credible with the wider community, and the implicit backing of the entire profession. Affirmative action is a lot more logical in jobs that require social capital. Opponents of it need to be more nuanced.

    • LOL: 3g4me
    • Replies: @Jesse
    @Jesse

    Speaking of AA, what's your take on the Joseph Mensah débâcle? Some thoughts:

    (1) Why is BLM going after a very, very Black officer? Is it that at least 2 of the 3 people he shot (!) were visibly gay? Is it a fightback from African Americans against the Good Jobs not going to the actual descendants of American slaves? ("Mensah" sounds Ghanaian.)

    (2) Damn the optics are bad. 3 shot dead in 5 years? Eeeeesh.

    (3) Is community policing pushing Black officers into the most dangerous situations - y'know, in those disembodied "bad neighborhoods". It makes for better arrest rates for the officers but also puts them more against the most dangerous offenders.

    Replies: @Jesse

    , @Gordo
    @Jesse


    However, if having medical professionals in the community who look like the community helps with things like actually getting people through the door and paying attention, then why not?
     
    If that means that White people get White doctors then it's great.

    But it doesn't work that way.
  27. @Jesse
    We need to differentiate between jobs that require raw brain/physical power, and those where the social dynamic makes a difference.

    You probably wouldn't want a heart surgeon admitted on affirmative action, doing your bypass. However, if having medical professionals in the community who look like the community helps with things like actually getting people through the door and paying attention, then why not? Long term, it saves both money and lives. For instance, having race specific midwives, trained in culturally specific mores, might stop the trend of pregnant women withdrawing from hospitals during pregnancy and childbirth. Also, even with all the confounds, students do better with teachers of the same race.

    It's like being a cop versus being a firefighter. A firefighter has to be physically strong enough to carry people, and smart enough to understand fire science. If you can't then, with no disrespect, find another profession. Cops need a certain physical strength and bearing, but most of the job is talking, being credible with the wider community, and the implicit backing of the entire profession. Affirmative action is a lot more logical in jobs that require social capital. Opponents of it need to be more nuanced.

    Replies: @Jesse, @Gordo

    Speaking of AA, what’s your take on the Joseph Mensah débâcle? Some thoughts:

    (1) Why is BLM going after a very, very Black officer? Is it that at least 2 of the 3 people he shot (!) were visibly gay? Is it a fightback from African Americans against the Good Jobs not going to the actual descendants of American slaves? (“Mensah” sounds Ghanaian.)

    (2) Damn the optics are bad. 3 shot dead in 5 years? Eeeeesh.

    (3) Is community policing pushing Black officers into the most dangerous situations – y’know, in those disembodied “bad neighborhoods”. It makes for better arrest rates for the officers but also puts them more against the most dangerous offenders.

    • Replies: @Jesse
    @Jesse

    (4) While I have some amount of sympathy with people who were horrified at Mensah's actions, the protesters done messed up. Big time.

    Going to his/his girlfriend's home? Crosses a line. Going there, then claiming he "provoked" them by coming outside and TALKED to them, and therefore everything they do was justified? It's everything normal people hate about the Woke. Combined with him being Black, he's a very useful cudgel to push back.

    Replies: @Mike Pierson, Davenport Rector, Midfielder

  28. Once upon a time, for reasons beyond my control, I was assigned a black woman PCP.

    Don’t let it happen to you.

    • Replies: @Mike Pierson, Davenport Rector, Midfielder
    @The Wild Geese Howard

    Yep. I was nearly killed by a south asian lady.

    Outside the medical arena that would have been notable.

  29. @Mr. Blank

    The field of medicine has long skewed white and male.
     
    I wonder how accurate this stereotype is today. My wife has numerous health problems, so I've had the opportunity to interact heavily with the health-care industry in recent years. Here in Florida, I don't think I'm exaggerating when I say at least half of the many, many doctors we've dealt with are either South Asian or Middle Eastern. I've dealt with only two white male doctors in the past decade, and both looked like they were nearing retirement age.

    Replies: @Haole2, @B36, @stillCARealist

    Same in Texas. Indian, Pakistani, Middle Eastern. Remarkably very few Jewish doctors. Where did they go?

    • Replies: @Mike Pierson, Davenport Rector, Midfielder
    @B36

    Most have moved on to greener, less regulated pursuits. For those remaining in medicine, well there are a lot of plastic surgeons in NYC, LA, Miami Beach.

    You should see the waivers they have patients sign in advance of treatment.

    Psychiatry is also popular. Similarly low-risk if less lucrative.

    , @Old Prude
    @B36

    Where did all the Jew doctors go? Specialists serving the wealthy.

  30. @Jesse
    @Jesse

    Speaking of AA, what's your take on the Joseph Mensah débâcle? Some thoughts:

    (1) Why is BLM going after a very, very Black officer? Is it that at least 2 of the 3 people he shot (!) were visibly gay? Is it a fightback from African Americans against the Good Jobs not going to the actual descendants of American slaves? ("Mensah" sounds Ghanaian.)

    (2) Damn the optics are bad. 3 shot dead in 5 years? Eeeeesh.

    (3) Is community policing pushing Black officers into the most dangerous situations - y'know, in those disembodied "bad neighborhoods". It makes for better arrest rates for the officers but also puts them more against the most dangerous offenders.

    Replies: @Jesse

    (4) While I have some amount of sympathy with people who were horrified at Mensah’s actions, the protesters done messed up. Big time.

    Going to his/his girlfriend’s home? Crosses a line. Going there, then claiming he “provoked” them by coming outside and TALKED to them, and therefore everything they do was justified? It’s everything normal people hate about the Woke. Combined with him being Black, he’s a very useful cudgel to push back.

    • Replies: @Mike Pierson, Davenport Rector, Midfielder
    @Jesse

    Is anyone else permitted to join this conversation? Sounds to me like it's been enlightening for you, even if contrary to your natural impulses.

  31. @anonymous
    A black doctor working in the emergency room of a major hospital told me some inaccurate nonsense some years ago when I went there for a sports injury. Even I, a non-doctor, knew he was dead wrong and connected with a white orthopedic surgeon who took care of it as a matter of routine. I wondered how a supposed doctor would know so little. Stay away from affirmative action doctors, they'll end up killing you.

    Replies: @vhrm, @jsm, @anon

    My daughter was told by a black primary care physician at Kaiser (who “trained” in Nigeria and did her internship sewing up gunshot wounds of black gangbangers in Detroit) that celiac disease — an autoimmune disease that left untreated can result in 2x the rate of early death (due to increased risk of lymphoma, or malnutrition) and has an illness burden approximately equal to Type I diabetes — was not “serious.”

    • Replies: @obwandiyag
    @jsm

    My father's white anglo-saxon protestant golf-playing "doctor" killed him.

    You idiot.

    Replies: @bruce county, @Reg Cæsar, @JMcG, @ThreeCranes

  32. By Emma Goldberg

    When Dr. Onyeka Otugo

    Oh look everyone! It’s the New York Times!

    was doing her training in emergency medicine, in Cleveland and Chicago, she was often mistaken for a janitor or food services worker even after introducing herself as a doctor.

    After saying she was a doctor? Nope. Never happened.

    She realized early on that her white male counterparts were not experiencing similar mix-ups.

    How exactly did she ‘realize’ this? Was she following them around 24/7?

    • Replies: @Known Fact
    @Mr McKenna

    To produce a story like this you need a reporter who herself continually seethes over every tiny or entirely imagined slight. Maybe the editor too. More proof the NYT is a dysfunctional environment -- I worked in a happy newsroom once, and we didn't do these stories.

    Replies: @Nicholas Stix

    , @Hypnotoad666
    @Mr McKenna

    Does it also not occur to anybody what a classist put down this is to janitors and food service workers? Why is it so humiliating to be mistaken for an honest laborer doing an honest day's work? Are they really such untouchable refuse?

    Replies: @Redneck farmer, @The Last Real Calvinist, @ManhattanBorn

  33. A 2018 study showed that Black patients had improved outcomes when seen by Black doctors, and were more likely to agree to preventive care measures like diabetes screenings and cholesterol tests.

    Seems to me the real problem here is racism by black patients, who are less likely to listen to white and Asian doctors than to black doctors. Perhaps we should do a big sob story on all the white doctors mocroaggressed by black patients who won’t respect them because they are white.

    • Agree: James Speaks
    • Replies: @Hypnotoad666
    @Wilkey

    If black doctors do better with black patients, and vice versa, doesn't that mean we need to have segregated medical care. It's just science.

  34. anon[346] • Disclaimer says:
    @anonymous
    A black doctor working in the emergency room of a major hospital told me some inaccurate nonsense some years ago when I went there for a sports injury. Even I, a non-doctor, knew he was dead wrong and connected with a white orthopedic surgeon who took care of it as a matter of routine. I wondered how a supposed doctor would know so little. Stay away from affirmative action doctors, they'll end up killing you.

    Replies: @vhrm, @jsm, @anon

    I had a similar experience with a young, white doctor. Something else in the way of incorrect prescribing from a middle aged institutional doctor (“company doc”). NO excuse for not checking stuff on your phone while waiting in the ER or wherever, including medication interactions. But to be honest…stuff like this is why any family in the hospital has someone to sit with them as much as possible. All day, maybe all night if needed.

    D’ya know what they call the lowest ranked / last of the class in med school? Do ya?

    “Doctor”.

    • Replies: @Anonymousse
    @anon


    D’ya know what they call the lowest ranked / last of the class in med school? Do ya?
     
    Tough question, sometimes it’s “black” other times “colored” or “person of color” whereas “african american” had quite a heyday for a while. Plus there’s the whole thing about capitalizing it or not now... really a minefield if you want to be careful not to say anything racially insensitive.
  35. My mother is elderly and disabled. She moves slowly, talks quietly, and looks ancient. She told me this weekend that sometimes when people see her approaching, they act discomfited and get away from her quickly. She is quite surprised by this and wondered if she looked like a monster.

    My guess is that some folks are frightened of advanced age and its infirmities because they know that will be them some day. Mustn’t face frailty and weakness! I asked her if she felt micro-aggressed and if it made her want to vote for Democrats.

    These black doctors seem to have no idea of what human life really entails. Are they sure they want to be caring for others when they have so many needs of their own?

  36. @jcd1974

    She recalled one patient who asked repeatedly who she was over the course of a hospital visit, while quickly learning the name of her white male attending physician.
     
    In the 21st century white people (and only whites) are required to know the gender and how to pronounce every single name in the world, no matter how rare and exotic the name. Otherwise should you mispronounce a name, even if you've never encountered it before, you're racist!

    Replies: @stillCARealist

    Jeepers, this is so true it’s sad.

    I have friends from other countries who’ve been in the US 20 years, and they still cannot pronounce my simple English name without mangling the vowel sound. But God forbid I should pronounce a Spanish name with an English R sound and not the Spanish one. Get over yourselves, people!

  37. @Mr. Blank

    The field of medicine has long skewed white and male.
     
    I wonder how accurate this stereotype is today. My wife has numerous health problems, so I've had the opportunity to interact heavily with the health-care industry in recent years. Here in Florida, I don't think I'm exaggerating when I say at least half of the many, many doctors we've dealt with are either South Asian or Middle Eastern. I've dealt with only two white male doctors in the past decade, and both looked like they were nearing retirement age.

    Replies: @Haole2, @B36, @stillCARealist

    I haven’t had a white, male primary since the early 90’s. Right now we have a Filipino lady. She’s totally right wing…. hates Kamala Harris with a passion.

  38. Can media leave off with the horror at racial micro aggressions and perceived tiny slights and talk about some MACRO aggressions for a while? Like how a black guy just shot a five year old white child in the head at point blank range right in front of his house and right in front of his father and siblings.

    Is there any space for that along with worrying about Ms. Onyeka Otugo allegedly being mistaken for someone doing honest work she’s legitimately qualified for?

  39. @anon
    @anonymous

    I had a similar experience with a young, white doctor. Something else in the way of incorrect prescribing from a middle aged institutional doctor ("company doc"). NO excuse for not checking stuff on your phone while waiting in the ER or wherever, including medication interactions. But to be honest...stuff like this is why any family in the hospital has someone to sit with them as much as possible. All day, maybe all night if needed.

    D'ya know what they call the lowest ranked / last of the class in med school? Do ya?

    "Doctor".

    Replies: @Anonymousse

    D’ya know what they call the lowest ranked / last of the class in med school? Do ya?

    Tough question, sometimes it’s “black” other times “colored” or “person of color” whereas “african american” had quite a heyday for a while. Plus there’s the whole thing about capitalizing it or not now… really a minefield if you want to be careful not to say anything racially insensitive.

  40. I thought doctors were all Indian. With a few Koreans stuck in there for diversity.

  41. @jsm
    @anonymous

    My daughter was told by a black primary care physician at Kaiser (who "trained" in Nigeria and did her internship sewing up gunshot wounds of black gangbangers in Detroit) that celiac disease -- an autoimmune disease that left untreated can result in 2x the rate of early death (due to increased risk of lymphoma, or malnutrition) and has an illness burden approximately equal to Type I diabetes -- was not "serious."

    Replies: @obwandiyag

    My father’s white anglo-saxon protestant golf-playing “doctor” killed him.

    You idiot.

    • Replies: @bruce county
    @obwandiyag

    Was it a "peaceful" death ? I bet it was a peaceful death.

    Replies: @Mr McKenna

    , @Reg Cæsar
    @obwandiyag


    My father’s white anglo-saxon protestant golf-playing “doctor” killed him.

    You idiot.
     
    He should have got you instead. I bet your father was more civil.
    , @JMcG
    @obwandiyag

    Good.

    , @ThreeCranes
    @obwandiyag

    With a nine iron?

  42. @JohnnyWalker123

    The field of medicine has long skewed white and male.

     

    https://imgur.com/a/jzvClup

    https://imgur.com/a/or4N1wY

    https://www.aamc.org/news-insights/press-releases/majority-us-medical-students-are-women-new-data-show

    The Majority of U.S. Medical Students Are Women, New Data Show
    DECEMBER 9, 2019

    Women comprise the majority of enrolled U.S. medical students for the first time, according to 2019 data released today by the AAMC (Association of American Medical Colleges). This progress builds on the milestone reached in 2017, when, for the first time, women comprised the majority of first-year medical students.

    The proportion of women students has been rising over recent years, from 46.9% in 2015 to 49.5% in 2018. In 2019, women comprise 50.5% of all medical school students.
     

    In the medical profession overall, male doctors still outnumber female doctors, 64 percent to 36 percent, according to 2019 data from the Kaiser Family Foundation.

     

    If you've been into a hospital at any point in the last 3 decades, you'd be surprised at the diversity of the physician workforce.

    Lots of Subcons, Asians, Persians, African migrants, Muslims, Hispanics (usually not Mexican), etc.

    Within the younger ranks, a lot fewer Jews than you might think. Even when you do see young Jews, a lot seem to be the children of Eastern Euro or Middle Eastern migrants. Not American Jews.
    I suppose American Jews have lost the taste for academics and hard work.

    Medicine is becoming heavily foreignized these days.

    By the way, foreign-origin physicians seem heavily over represented in medical billing fraud.

    Here's an article about Armenians involved with medical fraud.

    https://www.csmonitor.com/Business/Latest-News-Wires/2010/1014/Medicare-fraud-Dozens-charged-in-record-scam

    Replies: @Dan Hayes, @Paul Mendez, @obwandiyag, @Pop Warner, @Anonymous

    Foreigners are cheaper. As usual. And US healthcare institutions don’t have to subsidize their education either. And having a nice diverse variety prevents unified labor action.

    • Agree: Old Prude, lavoisier
  43. @Tony the Doctor
    Illness has a way of obliterating social customs. Sick people often reveal what they're really thinking.

    As a white male cis-gendered and straight physician, I've seen this countless times. I'll never forget the first time I witnessed this. I was a medical student rounding on a patient in the cancer clinic. To my right was the Black attending physician. The woman addressed every question to me, the white male medical student. In short order I told her I was a student physician, and that the most senior person was the Black man to my left. Still, she persisted, as if she somehow could not wrap her head around the concept that the Black guy knew more than I did.

    After this encounter I talked with the attending physician, who possessed a good-humored if resigned attitude to the situation. He then told me he'd often been asked by a patient for a bedpan, or to take out the trash and to send in the doctor. The guy was a graduate of Yale medical school, the product of the best residency and fellowship programs in the world. And yet to this woman, he was just a Black man.

    I think encouraging Black applicants to apply for medical school and having some form of affirmative action programs to further encourage matriculation is a good thing. These doctors obviously bring an important perspective and there really are not enough of them.

    In order to make things "truly fair", lets fix the public school system so that majority Black schools aren't chronically underfunded and let's subsidize MCAT prep courses to set Black students up for success.

    If Black medical school matriculants with lower statistics can succeed in medical school and become great doctors, perhaps its a sign that these admission metrics are not actually predictive of a person's ability to succeed in medicine.

    Instead of using these statistics to de-legitimatize the qualifications of black medical school graduates, perhaps we should be considering how the use of these metrics serves to reinforce the status quo

    I always thought that since women and people with more skin pigmentation have more difficulty getting to where they are, that by average they must be better at their job.

    So, when you are a patient and you are assigned a Black woman doctor, you most probably get a better doctor then the other patients.

    Replies: @usNthem, @PiltdownMan, @Calvin Hobbes, @Hypnotoad666, @Mr McKenna, @Lurker, @ThreeCranes, @Moses

    Right. Have at it doc.

  44. @Tony the Doctor
    Illness has a way of obliterating social customs. Sick people often reveal what they're really thinking.

    As a white male cis-gendered and straight physician, I've seen this countless times. I'll never forget the first time I witnessed this. I was a medical student rounding on a patient in the cancer clinic. To my right was the Black attending physician. The woman addressed every question to me, the white male medical student. In short order I told her I was a student physician, and that the most senior person was the Black man to my left. Still, she persisted, as if she somehow could not wrap her head around the concept that the Black guy knew more than I did.

    After this encounter I talked with the attending physician, who possessed a good-humored if resigned attitude to the situation. He then told me he'd often been asked by a patient for a bedpan, or to take out the trash and to send in the doctor. The guy was a graduate of Yale medical school, the product of the best residency and fellowship programs in the world. And yet to this woman, he was just a Black man.

    I think encouraging Black applicants to apply for medical school and having some form of affirmative action programs to further encourage matriculation is a good thing. These doctors obviously bring an important perspective and there really are not enough of them.

    In order to make things "truly fair", lets fix the public school system so that majority Black schools aren't chronically underfunded and let's subsidize MCAT prep courses to set Black students up for success.

    If Black medical school matriculants with lower statistics can succeed in medical school and become great doctors, perhaps its a sign that these admission metrics are not actually predictive of a person's ability to succeed in medicine.

    Instead of using these statistics to de-legitimatize the qualifications of black medical school graduates, perhaps we should be considering how the use of these metrics serves to reinforce the status quo

    I always thought that since women and people with more skin pigmentation have more difficulty getting to where they are, that by average they must be better at their job.

    So, when you are a patient and you are assigned a Black woman doctor, you most probably get a better doctor then the other patients.

    Replies: @usNthem, @PiltdownMan, @Calvin Hobbes, @Hypnotoad666, @Mr McKenna, @Lurker, @ThreeCranes, @Moses

    These doctors obviously bring an important perspective and there really are not enough of them.

    I’m no doctor. I’m trying to understand why the perspective they bring is important, from the point of view of medical science and its practice.

    Also, aside from the MCATs, how would you screen people for fitness to admission into medical school?

    Many doctors here are foreign medical graduates from the British Commonwealth, where medical schools typically take in students either right after high-school, or after completing a one year pre-med, to beef up their understanding of biology, mostly. Many have school specific competitive exams, just as we have the MCATs. The rest depend on ranking in end-of-high-school written exams, a screening process that typically requires the student to take a dozen or more hours long exams.

    What do we have, aside from the MCAT, that would ensure that quality of screening and fitness for purpose?

  45. Doctor killed in Chicago was committed to ‘serving the underserved’

    https://www.wral.com/doctor-killed-in-chicago-was-committed-to-serving-the-underserved-/18011145/

    On Monday afternoon, when O’Neal [an emergency room physician at Mercy Hospital, south of Chicago’s downtown] left the hospital, she encountered a man who colleagues say was her former fiancé, and the two got into an argument. When someone in the hospital parking lot intervened, the man lifted his shirt and showed a handgun, police said. Then he opened fire, they said, killing O’Neal.

    O’Neal had worked at Mercy for about a year and a half, colleagues said. Before that, she received residency training at the University of Illinois College of Medicine at Chicago. During her undergraduate education at Purdue University, she studied psychology, volunteering as a mentor for at-risk teenagers.

    In an interview with the Chicago Sun-Times, her father, Tom O’Neal, remembered his daughter telling him that a professor at Purdue said she would not be able to become a doctor.

    “That drove her,” Tom O’Neal said. “She proved him wrong.”

    END QUOTE

    So she probably got into med school (after an undergrad psych major) with an application file that would have been instantaneously rejected (and maybe passed around for laughs) if it had come from a white or Asian applicant.

    From La Griffe du Lion:

    http://www.lagriffedulion.f2s.com/testing.htm

    For all its good intentions, affirmative action has created two levels of competence in American medicine, separated by a bit more than one standard deviation. When you are wheeled into the ER at 2:00 a.m., if you pray, pray that the black doctor who greets you entered medical school through the front door.

    • Replies: @Rob McX
    @Calvin Hobbes


    When you are wheeled into the ER at 2:00 a.m., if you pray, pray that the black doctor who greets you entered medical school through the front door.
     
    Also, if you visit a website offering medical services, it's always useful to check the "Our Team" page to see who's doing what. You want to be sure that guy who looks like George Floyd won't be the one cutting you open on the operating table.
  46. Anon[183] • Disclaimer says:

    The US needs to stop poaching doctors from countries that already have a major shortage of doctors like India, Nigeria, Pakistan, Cuba, South Africa, China. These doctors are needed much more in their home countries, and most are educated by their taxpayers. It is unconscionable for us to lure them over with H1b visas and green cards.

    In fact, I think we should repatriate all non-white doctors to their countries of origin, regardless of what passports they hold. It’s the best thing the US can do for the developing world to help alleviate world inequality, much better than the $35B in aid we give to these countries each year:

    A 2018 study showed that Black patients had improved outcomes when seen by Black doctors, and were more likely to agree to preventive care measures like diabetes screenings and cholesterol tests.

    Repatriate all black doctors to Africa. They are much needed there. I’m sure Bill Gates can pay them enough to make it worth their while. Plus they’ll never have to encounter any racism or microaggression there.

    • Replies: @Jonathan Mason
    @Anon

    While there is some logic in this argument, it has always been the case that immigrants have come to the United States because they had skills that were in demand and better paid than in the old country.

    In the 18th century this applied to clock makers, for example.

    Today many white-collar criminals come to the United States due to the fact that crime pays better in the US.

  47. @AnotherDad

    A 2018 study showed that Black patients had improved outcomes when seen by Black doctors, and were more likely to agree to preventive care measures like diabetes screenings and cholesterol tests.
     
    The obvious takehome from this study--if ture--and all the hurt feelings in the article ...

    black physicians should be doing primary care with black patients.


    (By extension black cliental might even be a good idea for black school teachers, black cops, blacklawyers, black politicians ... and if we extend this to white liberals ... our problems are solved! Separate nations.)

    Replies: @Hernan Pizzaro del Blanco

    Did they also study the outcomes of white patients ? Do white patients have better outcomes when they are seen by a white doctor ?

    Why are blacks more likely to agree to have medical tests when prescribed by a black doctor ? Are black patients racist against non-Black doctors ?

    • Thanks: Mr McKenna
  48. I had one loyal client — a black lady in fact — call me Doug for more than 10 years. And my name is not anything close to Doug. At least she never told me where to put the sandwich cart

  49. Anonymous[213] • Disclaimer says:

    On the fraught subject of affirmative action in professional schools, many readers here may remember Amy Wax’s controversial and nearly career ending comment a few years ago that blacks at U Penn law school (where she has taught for many years) almost never finished in the top quarter of the class and rarely in the top half. The Penn dean screeched that Amy was wrong but never offered up any numbers (readily available to him) to disprove her statement. This led me to look at the data for my own Harvard Law School class from the 1980’s. While Harvard does not, so far as I am aware, publish the stats in any easily accessible format, I had facebooks/yearbooks with pictures of substantially the entire entering class, plus the graduation ceremony program that lists all graduates and the Latin honors (summa, magna, cum laude or none) ultimately awarded to each — so it was possible to tabulate the results by hand. For my class and those of similar vintage, summas were virtually nonexistent (one or two per decade), magnas were about 10% of the class, cum laudes were about 35% and no honors were about 55%. The results that Amy Wax described for recent U Penn classes could just as well have described my class some 30 years before. Despite comprising over 10% of my entering class, not a single black graduated with any Latin honors. That is, all blacks graduating in my class were in the bottom ~55%. And as best I could tell, about 10% of the blacks who entered in my class did not graduate on time or at all. Also interesting: more than half of the blacks in my class came from Ivy League undergraduate colleges (the usual 8 plus Stanford), which was a slightly higher percentage of Ivy Leaguers than in the rest of the class. From what I have seen, there has been virtually no progress toward Sandra Day O’Connor’s goal of not needing affirmative action by 2028 (25 years after Grutter). AA yesterday, AA tomorrow, AA forever.

    • Replies: @not a hacker
    @Anonymous

    As a 1L in 1980, I was wandering the stacks one day and came across a monograph detailing the historical relationship between LSAT score and class rank at the school. My eventual grades were perfectly predicted by the study.

  50. @Mr McKenna

    By Emma Goldberg

    When Dr. Onyeka Otugo
     

    Oh look everyone! It's the New York Times!

    was doing her training in emergency medicine, in Cleveland and Chicago, she was often mistaken for a janitor or food services worker even after introducing herself as a doctor.
     

    After saying she was a doctor? Nope. Never happened.

    She realized early on that her white male counterparts were not experiencing similar mix-ups.
     
    How exactly did she 'realize' this? Was she following them around 24/7?

    Replies: @Known Fact, @Hypnotoad666

    To produce a story like this you need a reporter who herself continually seethes over every tiny or entirely imagined slight. Maybe the editor too. More proof the NYT is a dysfunctional environment — I worked in a happy newsroom once, and we didn’t do these stories.

    • Agree: Mr McKenna
    • Replies: @Nicholas Stix
    @Known Fact

    Thanks for the Eric Adams link, back in June. I just found it.

  51. I’m not a doctor, but I used to work in emergency rooms in various other capacities, sometimes doing two or three different jobs simultaneously, and I can tell you that a basic problem in ERs is a lack of understanding of bedside manner, or how to properly “hypnotize” a patient into compliance, a person who is distressed, panicked, and in pain. ER doctors are under a lot of stress and time constraints, so they frequently don’t have the time to assess the patient’s emotional state as a factor in treatment. Dentists, naturally, tend to be very good at this, since the reputation of dentistry is such that they assume prima facie that all their patients are fearful and in distress.

    Over time, I got to be very good at being a sort of “horse whisperer” for distressed patients. There’s no need for restraints or massive sedatives if you know how to talk to the person, slyly misdirect them, and get them on your side. They should hire more sleight-of-hand card magicians to work in ERs. I bet Penn Jillette would make a brilliant medical historian.

    • Replies: @Jonathan Mason
    @The Germ Theory of Disease

    I don't see how anybody can do two or three jobs at the same time. That is double dipping.

    Replies: @The Germ Theory of Disease, @The Germ Theory of Disease

  52. Larry David was concerned that Richard Lewis’s black dermatologist might have gotten by on affirmative action.

  53. A 2018 study showed that Black patients had improved “outcomes when seen by Black doctors, and were more likely to agree to preventive care measures like diabetes screenings and cholesterol tests.”

    LOL!!

    Is there any interest in doing a study on whether (w)hite patients or – heaven forfend!- (a)ll patients have improved outcomes when seen by !***Black***! Doctors? Inquiring minds want to know!

  54. @Calvin Hobbes
    Doctor killed in Chicago was committed to 'serving the underserved'

    https://www.wral.com/doctor-killed-in-chicago-was-committed-to-serving-the-underserved-/18011145/

    On Monday afternoon, when O’Neal [an emergency room physician at Mercy Hospital, south of Chicago’s downtown] left the hospital, she encountered a man who colleagues say was her former fiancé, and the two got into an argument. When someone in the hospital parking lot intervened, the man lifted his shirt and showed a handgun, police said. Then he opened fire, they said, killing O’Neal.
    ...

    O’Neal had worked at Mercy for about a year and a half, colleagues said. Before that, she received residency training at the University of Illinois College of Medicine at Chicago. During her undergraduate education at Purdue University, she studied psychology, volunteering as a mentor for at-risk teenagers.
    ...
    In an interview with the Chicago Sun-Times, her father, Tom O’Neal, remembered his daughter telling him that a professor at Purdue said she would not be able to become a doctor.

    “That drove her,” Tom O’Neal said. “She proved him wrong.”

    END QUOTE

    So she probably got into med school (after an undergrad psych major) with an application file that would have been instantaneously rejected (and maybe passed around for laughs) if it had come from a white or Asian applicant.

    From La Griffe du Lion:

    http://www.lagriffedulion.f2s.com/testing.htm

    For all its good intentions, affirmative action has created two levels of competence in American medicine, separated by a bit more than one standard deviation. When you are wheeled into the ER at 2:00 a.m., if you pray, pray that the black doctor who greets you entered medical school through the front door.

    Replies: @Rob McX

    When you are wheeled into the ER at 2:00 a.m., if you pray, pray that the black doctor who greets you entered medical school through the front door.

    Also, if you visit a website offering medical services, it’s always useful to check the “Our Team” page to see who’s doing what. You want to be sure that guy who looks like George Floyd won’t be the one cutting you open on the operating table.

  55. “micro” refers to their routine frequency, not the scale of their impact

    In Googling “microaggression”, everyone uses “micro” in the sense of a small aggression. It never refers to routine frequency. This is a bizarre comment.

  56. @Tony the Doctor
    Illness has a way of obliterating social customs. Sick people often reveal what they're really thinking.

    As a white male cis-gendered and straight physician, I've seen this countless times. I'll never forget the first time I witnessed this. I was a medical student rounding on a patient in the cancer clinic. To my right was the Black attending physician. The woman addressed every question to me, the white male medical student. In short order I told her I was a student physician, and that the most senior person was the Black man to my left. Still, she persisted, as if she somehow could not wrap her head around the concept that the Black guy knew more than I did.

    After this encounter I talked with the attending physician, who possessed a good-humored if resigned attitude to the situation. He then told me he'd often been asked by a patient for a bedpan, or to take out the trash and to send in the doctor. The guy was a graduate of Yale medical school, the product of the best residency and fellowship programs in the world. And yet to this woman, he was just a Black man.

    I think encouraging Black applicants to apply for medical school and having some form of affirmative action programs to further encourage matriculation is a good thing. These doctors obviously bring an important perspective and there really are not enough of them.

    In order to make things "truly fair", lets fix the public school system so that majority Black schools aren't chronically underfunded and let's subsidize MCAT prep courses to set Black students up for success.

    If Black medical school matriculants with lower statistics can succeed in medical school and become great doctors, perhaps its a sign that these admission metrics are not actually predictive of a person's ability to succeed in medicine.

    Instead of using these statistics to de-legitimatize the qualifications of black medical school graduates, perhaps we should be considering how the use of these metrics serves to reinforce the status quo

    I always thought that since women and people with more skin pigmentation have more difficulty getting to where they are, that by average they must be better at their job.

    So, when you are a patient and you are assigned a Black woman doctor, you most probably get a better doctor then the other patients.

    Replies: @usNthem, @PiltdownMan, @Calvin Hobbes, @Hypnotoad666, @Mr McKenna, @Lurker, @ThreeCranes, @Moses

    So, when you are a patient and you are assigned a Black woman doctor, you most probably get a better doctor then the other patients.

    Here’s an interesting story about a Black woman doctor:

    The Teleka Patrick case: One year later

    https://www.mlive.com/news/kalamazoo/2015/04/the_teleka_patrick_case_a_look.html

    Before her death, Dr. Patrick worked as a psychiatrist in a hospital in Kalamazoo, Michigan.

    Dr. Patrick was batshit crazy. She moved to Kalamazoo because she was obsessed with gospel singer Marvin Sapp. He wanted nothing to do with her, but she stalked him, referred to him as her fiancée, and sent him tens of thousands of tweets. (There’s one of those creepy tweets embedded in the article linked to above.)

    Patrick’s paranoid craziness apparently took a turn for the worse, and she drove out of town one night in her car with no-tread tires. One of her tires blew while she was barreling along. She probably thought the demons had caught her, and she fled on foot in a mad panic. She ran into a pond beside the highway and drowned. The pond froze before they found her, and it wasn’t until the ice thawed four months later that the Mystery of Taleka Patrick was solved.

    Would someone that crazy but not Black have been allowed to practice medicine? I doubt it.

  57. @obwandiyag
    @jsm

    My father's white anglo-saxon protestant golf-playing "doctor" killed him.

    You idiot.

    Replies: @bruce county, @Reg Cæsar, @JMcG, @ThreeCranes

    Was it a “peaceful” death ? I bet it was a peaceful death.

    • Replies: @Mr McKenna
    @bruce county

    I'll bet it came too late to be of any great use to society.

  58. When my mother was in the hospital with heart failure, she was assigned a black female cardiologist. She informed both my mom and my oldest brother that my mom’s condition was hopeless and that she should make whatever preparations for death she felt necessary.

    My brother questioned this prognosis, and the tension grew, ultimately resulting in a conversion in which the doctor said that she felt he was “disrespecting” her– apparently the foremost concern in this situation. Anyway, after having been released from the hospital, my mom lived another 3.5 years, which may not sound like much, but when you’ve been told you’re about to die, is quite a difference.

    • Replies: @Mr McKenna
    @black sea

    Every white death gets counted in the 'win' column, the faster the better, no matter how it comes about. Such is the endless Current Year.

  59. @Known Fact
    @Mr McKenna

    To produce a story like this you need a reporter who herself continually seethes over every tiny or entirely imagined slight. Maybe the editor too. More proof the NYT is a dysfunctional environment -- I worked in a happy newsroom once, and we didn't do these stories.

    Replies: @Nicholas Stix

    Thanks for the Eric Adams link, back in June. I just found it.

  60. The term [microaggression], coined in the 1970s by Dr. Chester Pierce, a psychiatrist . . . . “micro” refers to their routine frequency, not the scale of their impact.

    Nice try, but even a psychiatrist knows that “micro” refers to scale, not frequency.

    Then again, expecting words to have actual meanings is probably a manifestation of patriarchal crypto-fascist white privilege. Or something.

  61. My wife is a young emergency medicine doc. EM is only very slightly skewed toward males, but much more so among the older generation. She gets confused for nurses or techs a lot by patients, and occasionally by other physicians and health professionals (some of it is youth, but some of it definitely seems to be being a woman). It’s mildly annoying and sometimes makes her feel insecure about her role.

    On the other hand, she doesn’t subscribe to an ideology that actively encourages her to feel oppressed by this, which probably helps.

  62. @Anonymous
    @Paul Mendez

    Doctors are basically mechanics. There's no reason they should get more respect than the guy who fixes your car.

    Replies: @Paul Mendez, @Drew

    Perhaps less, since cars rarely heal on their own.

  63. @Tony the Doctor
    Illness has a way of obliterating social customs. Sick people often reveal what they're really thinking.

    As a white male cis-gendered and straight physician, I've seen this countless times. I'll never forget the first time I witnessed this. I was a medical student rounding on a patient in the cancer clinic. To my right was the Black attending physician. The woman addressed every question to me, the white male medical student. In short order I told her I was a student physician, and that the most senior person was the Black man to my left. Still, she persisted, as if she somehow could not wrap her head around the concept that the Black guy knew more than I did.

    After this encounter I talked with the attending physician, who possessed a good-humored if resigned attitude to the situation. He then told me he'd often been asked by a patient for a bedpan, or to take out the trash and to send in the doctor. The guy was a graduate of Yale medical school, the product of the best residency and fellowship programs in the world. And yet to this woman, he was just a Black man.

    I think encouraging Black applicants to apply for medical school and having some form of affirmative action programs to further encourage matriculation is a good thing. These doctors obviously bring an important perspective and there really are not enough of them.

    In order to make things "truly fair", lets fix the public school system so that majority Black schools aren't chronically underfunded and let's subsidize MCAT prep courses to set Black students up for success.

    If Black medical school matriculants with lower statistics can succeed in medical school and become great doctors, perhaps its a sign that these admission metrics are not actually predictive of a person's ability to succeed in medicine.

    Instead of using these statistics to de-legitimatize the qualifications of black medical school graduates, perhaps we should be considering how the use of these metrics serves to reinforce the status quo

    I always thought that since women and people with more skin pigmentation have more difficulty getting to where they are, that by average they must be better at their job.

    So, when you are a patient and you are assigned a Black woman doctor, you most probably get a better doctor then the other patients.

    Replies: @usNthem, @PiltdownMan, @Calvin Hobbes, @Hypnotoad666, @Mr McKenna, @Lurker, @ThreeCranes, @Moses

    If Black medical school matriculants with lower statistics can succeed in medical school and become great doctors, perhaps its a sign that these admission metrics are not actually predictive of a person’s ability to succeed in medicine.

    I would love to know the tradeoff between GPA/IQ, and actual performance as a practicing doctor (including malpractice and harm to patients). I wonder if anyone has actually studied it.

    Medical school standards may well be arbitrarily set too high, thereby artificially restricting medical services to the public.

    On the other hand, there may be an intellectual level below which a doctor will do more harm than good.

    But wherever you set the bar, there is no reason to give blacks a special pass to limbo under the standard.

    • Replies: @johnomd
    @Hypnotoad666

    I served as Chief of Staff for a hospital and was Chair of Credentials for a while, so I saw lots of incoming applications for our medical staff, as well as the renewals and the sealed "permanent records". Malpractice cases, failure to pass specialty Board within the allotted 5 yr period, disciplinary issues, and internal quality of care issues referred to our M/M committee all skewed along race lines pretty much as would be expected by MCATs and Board scores. Also, when I was in Medical School at a top 20 program, we had about 400 white students in my class. 4 (1%) of them failed Step 1 (we knew because they couldn't start their 3rd year, so no way to anonymize). We also had 8 black students in our class. Despite AGGRESSIVE test prep by the school, 4 of them also failed (50 fold odds ratio). This is was on the hard science section of the Boards: things like Physiology, Biochem, Neuro-Anatomy, etc. So hard to call it "culturally biassed". The knowledge gap was massive. The recent solution, as with many things in society, has been the remove the numerical scores and percentiles from the USMLE exams. Ignorance is bliss....

    Replies: @Hypnotoad666

    , @johnomd
    @Hypnotoad666

    The Bell Curve referred to work force studies where there was no job, even busboy, where performance did not improve with IQ. ER is a good case study. For at least the last 20 years, ER residencies have been extremely competitive. When I got in, to a mediocre mid-tier program at the time, they had 1400 applicants and only had to go down to their #10 pick to fill 6 spots. It's safe to say no white male under the age of 50 was likely not in the top 20% on GPA, MCAT, and their general medical boards. At the same time, there were still a fair number of Family Practice and General Practice doctors working in ER's that had grandfathered in. Despite frequently having more experience, there was almost no overlap in performance between the two groups. I'd say in 20 years I only worked with one non-boarded guy that would have been mistaken for a boarded caliber clinician. The actuaries that wrote our group malpractice policy took the number of non ER boarded practitioners into account because they told us it was a statistically significant predictor of bad outcomes. Most of the hospitals that aren't in Ghetto or deep rural won't credential non ER-boarded folks any more, based on their own experiences. Granted, ER may be a special case, as it is fast paced and you are often making complex decisions with incomplete knowledge/history on arriving patients while dealing with lots of noise and ample distractions, but at least from what I saw the barriers to entry were not needlessly inflated to restrict entry. Even among medical school grads, the ones at the top did noticably better than those in the middle and bottom over the long term.

    , @Anonymous
    @Hypnotoad666


    I wonder if anyone has actually studied [the tradeoff between GPA/IQ, and actual performance as a practicing doctor (including malpractice and harm to patients).
     
    Insurance companies must have detailed studies, buried deep in ultra-vaults in the remote reaches of Montana, and made available on a strict need-to-know, for-your-eyes-only basis to senior executives and to selected lead attorneys defending the largest malpractice actions.
  64. @Wilkey

    A 2018 study showed that Black patients had improved outcomes when seen by Black doctors, and were more likely to agree to preventive care measures like diabetes screenings and cholesterol tests.
     
    Seems to me the real problem here is racism by black patients, who are less likely to listen to white and Asian doctors than to black doctors. Perhaps we should do a big sob story on all the white doctors mocroaggressed by black patients who won’t respect them because they are white.

    Replies: @Hypnotoad666

    If black doctors do better with black patients, and vice versa, doesn’t that mean we need to have segregated medical care. It’s just science.

    • Agree: Mr McKenna
  65. @Mr McKenna

    By Emma Goldberg

    When Dr. Onyeka Otugo
     

    Oh look everyone! It's the New York Times!

    was doing her training in emergency medicine, in Cleveland and Chicago, she was often mistaken for a janitor or food services worker even after introducing herself as a doctor.
     

    After saying she was a doctor? Nope. Never happened.

    She realized early on that her white male counterparts were not experiencing similar mix-ups.
     
    How exactly did she 'realize' this? Was she following them around 24/7?

    Replies: @Known Fact, @Hypnotoad666

    Does it also not occur to anybody what a classist put down this is to janitors and food service workers? Why is it so humiliating to be mistaken for an honest laborer doing an honest day’s work? Are they really such untouchable refuse?

    • Agree: Jonathan Mason
    • Replies: @Redneck farmer
    @Hypnotoad666

    Yes, they are untouchables, according to the "well-educated".

    , @The Last Real Calvinist
    @Hypnotoad666

    Yes, for the typical champion of the working class, there is no worse insult than be taken for a member of that class.

    , @ManhattanBorn
    @Hypnotoad666

    I agree. I became a lawyer decades ago when few women did so; there were only three women in my class of 280, and one of the others was a nun. I was usually mistaken for a secretary, and people would apologize when they realized I was an attorney. I'd say, don't be sorry, being a legal secretary is an honest living!

  66. Anon[222] • Disclaimer says:

    The only concrete reason for having quotas or “quota-adjacent mechanisms” in medicine that I’ve seen is a “study” from “Stanford” that found that black patients tended to listen to and act upon advice from black doctors more.

    1. I bet you could take apart that study pretty easily. Researchers for such studies tend to know in advance what results they want, so they are blind to a lot of problems in their research protocols.

    2. Rather than populate medicine with a bunch of black mediocrities, might there be another way, such as better training for all doctors in dealing with blacks, or special black nurses who would be involved in cases to double check on comprehension and compliance?

    3. These black doctors are going to be doing a lot of tasks besides advising black patients to take blood presssion medications. They are going to be making critical decisions and diagnoses, performing surgery, keeping up with their reading of journals (something that black doctors especially love!), and so on. It’s a “glass 99 percent empty” problem. The vast bulk of what they do is not in furtherance of the reason that they were allowed to be doctors in the first place.

    4. If a black patient can ask for a doctor “who looks like me” so he can be more comfortable (although I think a lot of black patients are going to be thinking, “I want the Jew doctor, not the brother!”), can white patients ask for doctors that look like them and got higher MCAT scores? (It’s happened, and the answer is no, your hospital “fires” you and you end up shamed in your local newspaper.)

    • Replies: @Dissident
    @Anon

    You raise a number of worthy and compelling points.

    I have long noted that a great irony of affirmative action is that those who are ultimately most harmed by it are precisely those whom it purports to help. Sure, members of AA-eligible groups benefit from jobs and other opportunities that would not otherwise be open to them. But what about the larger picture; the longer-term? That AA inevitably results in those who are qualified on merit being suspected and even simply assumed to not be such has been widely noted. What I do not recall seeing acknolwedged, however, is that in at least many fields-- including and perhaps especially such critical ones as doctors, other medical personnel, and defense lawyers-- those who are most likely to find themselves (and often their very lives) dependent upon an under-qualified AA hire are those within the very same AA-qualifying demographics.

    This paradox is by no means limited to the area of affirmative action. Is not a great irony of the rioting, looting, vandalism and other violence that we are presently witnessing that the victims are disproportionately blacks and other non-whites? This includes the spikes in violent crime that inevitably result when police are handicapped. Additional ironies that undermine The Narrative would appear to be how many of those committing as well as championing the BLM-ANTIFA terror are white; how many of the police are non-white; and all the instances-- caught on camera but overwhelmingly suppressed by the holders of the megaphone-- of the latter (non-white police) being viciously attacked by the former (white "protestors").

    How many policies, positions or views that are expressly and specifically championed as benefiting a designated victim-status group actually do more to harm them? How expendable to third-world countries such as Nigeria, for example, are the massive numbers of their most intelligent, talented, capable and productive citizens that leave every year for the First World? Does anyone incite more resentment and animosity toward Jews than racketeers such as the ADL and the $PLC? (I almost wonder whether that might be their intent...) Who is most at-risk of being mutilated and otherwise irreversibly "treated" under the prevailing Transgender protocol? Who is most harmed by pro-buggery propaganda that glamorizes and sanitizes the hideous realities of what is inherently dangerous, brutal, unwholesome sexual behavior and a culture built-around it? Most at risk of being corrupted and desecrated discovering who he really is by a degenerate sodomite helpful older man? (The answer to both rhetorical questions is not the normal, well-adjusted, securely heterosexual individual.)

    (*Gender, let it always be remembered, is but a linguistic construct.)

    , @Dissident
    @Anon


    (although I think a lot of black patients are going to be thinking, “I want the Jew doctor, not the brother!”)
     
    How many remember when Bill Cosby endorsed the looney libel that Jewish doctors deliberately inject the HIV virus into black babies?
    ~ ~ ~
    A young Jewish woman fell in love with a local traditional tribal medicine man she met on a trip to Africa. Returning to the US with her new lover, the girl brought him to meet her mother. "Oy!", exclaimed the woman, looking and sounding highly disappointed (and speaking with a heavy Yiddish accent). "I said I wanted you to bring home a rich doctor!" SPOILER: (Not a witch doctor)
  67. Our betters – our economic betters – won’t be happy until we’re as neurotic and crazy as the people who accuse us of being neurotic and crazy. The very concept of microaggressions is to provide fuel to drive us to Crazy Town.

  68. @Hypnotoad666
    @Mr McKenna

    Does it also not occur to anybody what a classist put down this is to janitors and food service workers? Why is it so humiliating to be mistaken for an honest laborer doing an honest day's work? Are they really such untouchable refuse?

    Replies: @Redneck farmer, @The Last Real Calvinist, @ManhattanBorn

    Yes, they are untouchables, according to the “well-educated”.

  69. @Reg Cæsar

    Dr. Onyeka Otugo
     
    I'm trying to contain my addiction, but Steve-- and the news in general-- is such an enabler!


    Dr. Onyeka Otugo = Undertook yoga. You'r' to go naked! Got yoke around you, ardent gook!


    Dr. Phindile Chowa
     
    I don't want anybody, doctor or otherwise, phindling my chowa, or chowing my phindle. Those would be macroaggressions.

    Dr. Phindile Chowa = Lorded chain, whip. Inhaled whipcord. Prod while chain'd.

    Replies: @Sam Malone

    Do you do those in your head, or write the letters on in a Word document or something so you can move them around?

    • Replies: @Reg Cæsar
    @Sam Malone


    Do you do those in your head, or write the letters on in a Word document or something so you can move them around?
     
    The shorter ones can be done in the head. Mostly they come by the thousand from Wordsmith.org. Then it's a matter of sifting. Solving Jumbles and cryptic crosswords is good practice.

    What's fun is to detect certain words at first sight. E.g. death, or poison, or racial, or riot. The "must include" function on the advanced page narrows it down for you.

    Also important, only post the highly germane or particularly clever ones. Otherwise you just piss people off.

    Replies: @The Germ Theory of Disease

  70. @Haole2
    @Mr. Blank

    If you call Jews white then there are still white doctors. Others wise, almost no white doctors
    Move to Mexico for Spanish Doctors.

    Replies: @Dissident, @Hans

    Move to Mexico for Spanish Doctors.

    If the images of Mexican political and business elites I’ve seen are any indication, I would assume the doctors there also tend to be quite white. Oh, right, you said Spanish, not Hispanic or Latino

  71. I’ve never seen an Asian Female doctor, but they surely must exist. I did have a Puerto Rican doc while in the military, but he seemed OK. The worst doctor I ever had was South Asian, and no, I was not racially imagining it. My old white male doc just retired, leaving me literally in the hands of a pretty younger white female doctor, which can be surprisingly embarassing at check-ups. Good to know some things work at my advanced age.

    • Replies: @Dissident
    @The Alarmist


    My old white male doc just retired, leaving me literally in the hands of a pretty younger white female doctor,
     
    Reminds me of the time, as a lad of 9 or 10, that I was examined by a female pediatrician who was covering for my regular doc (who presumably was either out sick or on an emergency call). I remember feeling rather awkward and then relieved when she told me that I did not have to remove my underpants. But at the same time, to this day whenever I recall that experience, I am somewhat bothered by the thought that an important part of the exam may have been skipped. That noted, I cannot rule-out the possibility that I had not come in that day for a full physical but only for some specific concern. If that was the case, it would also make the possibility of my regular pediatrician simply being away on a normal, scheduled vacation seem entirely plausible.

    Both docs were white. My regular pediatrician was, I'm fairly certain, Jewish. The woman covering for him may or may not have been. By then, non-white physicians may not have been rare but I don't know that they were quite common yet. Certainly nowhere near the situation today. Whites/Jews still dominated the field, as best as I can recall. (This was also still before managed care/HMOs had really caught-on.)

  72. @Sam Malone
    @Reg Cæsar

    Do you do those in your head, or write the letters on in a Word document or something so you can move them around?

    Replies: @Reg Cæsar

    Do you do those in your head, or write the letters on in a Word document or something so you can move them around?

    The shorter ones can be done in the head. Mostly they come by the thousand from Wordsmith.org. Then it’s a matter of sifting. Solving Jumbles and cryptic crosswords is good practice.

    What’s fun is to detect certain words at first sight. E.g. death, or poison, or racial, or riot. The “must include” function on the advanced page narrows it down for you.

    Also important, only post the highly germane or particularly clever ones. Otherwise you just piss people off.

    • Replies: @The Germ Theory of Disease
    @Reg Cæsar

    I know a guy who can say anything backwards, at will. You quote a long passage of Shakespeare to him, and he can say the whole thing backwards at once (not word-for-word backwards, that's easy, but letter-by-letter, or syllable-by-syllable.). He says he can see the whole thing in his head, and he's just sort of reading out loud what he sees.

    Replies: @Sam Malone

  73. @obwandiyag
    @jsm

    My father's white anglo-saxon protestant golf-playing "doctor" killed him.

    You idiot.

    Replies: @bruce county, @Reg Cæsar, @JMcG, @ThreeCranes

    My father’s white anglo-saxon protestant golf-playing “doctor” killed him.

    You idiot.

    He should have got you instead. I bet your father was more civil.

    • Agree: throtler
  74. Until affirmative action and everything similar are abolished, it will be perfectly natural and justified to suspect that black people haven’t really earned whatever position they occupy.

  75. Perhaps doctors should wear a distinguishing article of clothing like a sombrero. Though that might be, as they say, problematic.

  76. @bruce county
    @obwandiyag

    Was it a "peaceful" death ? I bet it was a peaceful death.

    Replies: @Mr McKenna

    I’ll bet it came too late to be of any great use to society.

  77. @black sea
    When my mother was in the hospital with heart failure, she was assigned a black female cardiologist. She informed both my mom and my oldest brother that my mom's condition was hopeless and that she should make whatever preparations for death she felt necessary.

    My brother questioned this prognosis, and the tension grew, ultimately resulting in a conversion in which the doctor said that she felt he was "disrespecting" her-- apparently the foremost concern in this situation. Anyway, after having been released from the hospital, my mom lived another 3.5 years, which may not sound like much, but when you've been told you're about to die, is quite a difference.

    Replies: @Mr McKenna

    Every white death gets counted in the ‘win’ column, the faster the better, no matter how it comes about. Such is the endless Current Year.

  78. @Achmed E. Newman

    I’m not an expert on emergency care, but my impression from watching MASH is that it helps to have a rather callous personality that is not easily bruised.
     
    Well, I'm no doctor, and I don't play one on TV, and I don't figure I can assume for sure that TV is like reality. However, maybe you mean the M*A*S*H* movie, which to me seemed more realistic than the TV show by far.

    I agree with you that the docs are somewhat callous. It's that or be depressed all the time from all the ways our bodies can let us down. My doc friends have some great doctor jokes, but there's nothing better than the original doctor joke:

    [Guy bends his left elbow all the way] "Doc, it hurts when I do this."

    "Don't do that."

     

    OK, and I can tell you that this one surgeon was taking out a tube leading out from my torso one time. It could have been done by a nurse, but the guy was there and trying to be helpful. There were stitches and he just whaled on the whole knot and then tore it apart. "Owww!" I was really close to saying "hey man, I know you're used to working on people who are out cold, but take it easy, man!", but I thought of that, who knows, maybe 2 days later, maybe 5 minutes. Time goes very slowly in the hospital.

    Replies: @Giancarlo M. Kumquat

    ER docs are dealing with patients who are often scared to death. The callous doctor thing is way overrated. Above all,be very competent and caring. If you got that,then the rest will work itself out.

    I would never trust a black doctor. A friend with some serious problems casually mentioned that a doctor he saw once was an African.
    “An African??,” says I, “you’re lucky to be alive!”
    He is a liberal,teaches at Northwestern,but he seemed to have trouble grasping the idea that an African doctor could be “problematic.”

  79. @Tony the Doctor
    Illness has a way of obliterating social customs. Sick people often reveal what they're really thinking.

    As a white male cis-gendered and straight physician, I've seen this countless times. I'll never forget the first time I witnessed this. I was a medical student rounding on a patient in the cancer clinic. To my right was the Black attending physician. The woman addressed every question to me, the white male medical student. In short order I told her I was a student physician, and that the most senior person was the Black man to my left. Still, she persisted, as if she somehow could not wrap her head around the concept that the Black guy knew more than I did.

    After this encounter I talked with the attending physician, who possessed a good-humored if resigned attitude to the situation. He then told me he'd often been asked by a patient for a bedpan, or to take out the trash and to send in the doctor. The guy was a graduate of Yale medical school, the product of the best residency and fellowship programs in the world. And yet to this woman, he was just a Black man.

    I think encouraging Black applicants to apply for medical school and having some form of affirmative action programs to further encourage matriculation is a good thing. These doctors obviously bring an important perspective and there really are not enough of them.

    In order to make things "truly fair", lets fix the public school system so that majority Black schools aren't chronically underfunded and let's subsidize MCAT prep courses to set Black students up for success.

    If Black medical school matriculants with lower statistics can succeed in medical school and become great doctors, perhaps its a sign that these admission metrics are not actually predictive of a person's ability to succeed in medicine.

    Instead of using these statistics to de-legitimatize the qualifications of black medical school graduates, perhaps we should be considering how the use of these metrics serves to reinforce the status quo

    I always thought that since women and people with more skin pigmentation have more difficulty getting to where they are, that by average they must be better at their job.

    So, when you are a patient and you are assigned a Black woman doctor, you most probably get a better doctor then the other patients.

    Replies: @usNthem, @PiltdownMan, @Calvin Hobbes, @Hypnotoad666, @Mr McKenna, @Lurker, @ThreeCranes, @Moses

    If this guy can say “then” instead of “than”, I can say “Tiny” instead of “Tony”.

  80. One of the reasons for wearing a uniform in a healthcare setting is that it makes it easier for other people to identify who you are.

    For example, if a doctor is wearing a white coat, has a stethoscope around the neck, and has their name and the letters MD embroidered on the front pocket of the white coat, that usually prevents them from being identified as a food service worker.

    Not always, but it helps. People who are in an emergency room are often stressed out and not always thinking correctly. If a doctor is mistaken for a food service worker, at least he or she has the consolation that they are being paid a great deal more than a food service worker.

  81. @Jesse
    @Jesse

    (4) While I have some amount of sympathy with people who were horrified at Mensah's actions, the protesters done messed up. Big time.

    Going to his/his girlfriend's home? Crosses a line. Going there, then claiming he "provoked" them by coming outside and TALKED to them, and therefore everything they do was justified? It's everything normal people hate about the Woke. Combined with him being Black, he's a very useful cudgel to push back.

    Replies: @Mike Pierson, Davenport Rector, Midfielder

    Is anyone else permitted to join this conversation? Sounds to me like it’s been enlightening for you, even if contrary to your natural impulses.

  82. @The Wild Geese Howard
    Once upon a time, for reasons beyond my control, I was assigned a black woman PCP.

    Don't let it happen to you.

    Replies: @Mike Pierson, Davenport Rector, Midfielder

    Yep. I was nearly killed by a south asian lady.

    Outside the medical arena that would have been notable.

  83. @Reg Cæsar
    @Sam Malone


    Do you do those in your head, or write the letters on in a Word document or something so you can move them around?
     
    The shorter ones can be done in the head. Mostly they come by the thousand from Wordsmith.org. Then it's a matter of sifting. Solving Jumbles and cryptic crosswords is good practice.

    What's fun is to detect certain words at first sight. E.g. death, or poison, or racial, or riot. The "must include" function on the advanced page narrows it down for you.

    Also important, only post the highly germane or particularly clever ones. Otherwise you just piss people off.

    Replies: @The Germ Theory of Disease

    I know a guy who can say anything backwards, at will. You quote a long passage of Shakespeare to him, and he can say the whole thing backwards at once (not word-for-word backwards, that’s easy, but letter-by-letter, or syllable-by-syllable.). He says he can see the whole thing in his head, and he’s just sort of reading out loud what he sees.

    • Replies: @Sam Malone
    @The Germ Theory of Disease

    That's amazing, and impressive I guess. But is he overall extremely smart, or particularly wise, or is he exceptional really only in that mechanical trick that his brain is wired to make easy for him?

    Replies: @The Germ Theory of Disease

  84. @The Germ Theory of Disease
    I'm not a doctor, but I used to work in emergency rooms in various other capacities, sometimes doing two or three different jobs simultaneously, and I can tell you that a basic problem in ERs is a lack of understanding of bedside manner, or how to properly "hypnotize" a patient into compliance, a person who is distressed, panicked, and in pain. ER doctors are under a lot of stress and time constraints, so they frequently don't have the time to assess the patient's emotional state as a factor in treatment. Dentists, naturally, tend to be very good at this, since the reputation of dentistry is such that they assume prima facie that all their patients are fearful and in distress.

    Over time, I got to be very good at being a sort of "horse whisperer" for distressed patients. There's no need for restraints or massive sedatives if you know how to talk to the person, slyly misdirect them, and get them on your side. They should hire more sleight-of-hand card magicians to work in ERs. I bet Penn Jillette would make a brilliant medical historian.

    Replies: @Jonathan Mason

    I don’t see how anybody can do two or three jobs at the same time. That is double dipping.

    • Replies: @The Germ Theory of Disease
    @Jonathan Mason

    Don't be a prat your whole life. You know perfectly well (or at least you ought to) that police, and firefighters, and EMT, and schoolteachers and fishermen all do two or three "jobs" at the same time, and it's "understood" what is meant.

    Don't make me go all Wittgenstein on your glib ass.

    , @The Germ Theory of Disease
    @Jonathan Mason

    Example of doing two jobs simultaneously...

    ME: Okay, patient is a mildly obese gravida 3, claims non-smoker, claims non-diabetic, expresses lacerations consistent with domestic abuse, maintains that....

    DOCTOR: Hey Germ, we've got an inebriated junkie with a gunshot wound who's yelling and screaming about Jesus in Four, get in here and talk her down.

    ME: Okay, I'm on it, just let me finish this paragraph.

  85. @B36
    @Mr. Blank

    Same in Texas. Indian, Pakistani, Middle Eastern. Remarkably very few Jewish doctors. Where did they go?

    Replies: @Mike Pierson, Davenport Rector, Midfielder, @Old Prude

    Most have moved on to greener, less regulated pursuits. For those remaining in medicine, well there are a lot of plastic surgeons in NYC, LA, Miami Beach.

    You should see the waivers they have patients sign in advance of treatment.

    Psychiatry is also popular. Similarly low-risk if less lucrative.

  86. @Anon
    The US needs to stop poaching doctors from countries that already have a major shortage of doctors like India, Nigeria, Pakistan, Cuba, South Africa, China. These doctors are needed much more in their home countries, and most are educated by their taxpayers. It is unconscionable for us to lure them over with H1b visas and green cards.

    In fact, I think we should repatriate all non-white doctors to their countries of origin, regardless of what passports they hold. It's the best thing the US can do for the developing world to help alleviate world inequality, much better than the $35B in aid we give to these countries each year:


    A 2018 study showed that Black patients had improved outcomes when seen by Black doctors, and were more likely to agree to preventive care measures like diabetes screenings and cholesterol tests.
     
    Repatriate all black doctors to Africa. They are much needed there. I'm sure Bill Gates can pay them enough to make it worth their while. Plus they'll never have to encounter any racism or microaggression there.

    Replies: @Jonathan Mason

    While there is some logic in this argument, it has always been the case that immigrants have come to the United States because they had skills that were in demand and better paid than in the old country.

    In the 18th century this applied to clock makers, for example.

    Today many white-collar criminals come to the United States due to the fact that crime pays better in the US.

  87. This can’t be true. On Grey’s Anatomy all the best Doctors are black. If it’s on TV it just be true.

    • LOL: usNthem
    • Replies: @Rob McX
    @SkylertheWeird

    One way of solving the problem of incompetent AA medics would be to give them all jobs playing docs/engineers, etc. on TV, where they can do no damage.

  88. @Jonathan Mason
    @The Germ Theory of Disease

    I don't see how anybody can do two or three jobs at the same time. That is double dipping.

    Replies: @The Germ Theory of Disease, @The Germ Theory of Disease

    Don’t be a prat your whole life. You know perfectly well (or at least you ought to) that police, and firefighters, and EMT, and schoolteachers and fishermen all do two or three “jobs” at the same time, and it’s “understood” what is meant.

    Don’t make me go all Wittgenstein on your glib ass.

  89. @Jesse
    We need to differentiate between jobs that require raw brain/physical power, and those where the social dynamic makes a difference.

    You probably wouldn't want a heart surgeon admitted on affirmative action, doing your bypass. However, if having medical professionals in the community who look like the community helps with things like actually getting people through the door and paying attention, then why not? Long term, it saves both money and lives. For instance, having race specific midwives, trained in culturally specific mores, might stop the trend of pregnant women withdrawing from hospitals during pregnancy and childbirth. Also, even with all the confounds, students do better with teachers of the same race.

    It's like being a cop versus being a firefighter. A firefighter has to be physically strong enough to carry people, and smart enough to understand fire science. If you can't then, with no disrespect, find another profession. Cops need a certain physical strength and bearing, but most of the job is talking, being credible with the wider community, and the implicit backing of the entire profession. Affirmative action is a lot more logical in jobs that require social capital. Opponents of it need to be more nuanced.

    Replies: @Jesse, @Gordo

    However, if having medical professionals in the community who look like the community helps with things like actually getting people through the door and paying attention, then why not?

    If that means that White people get White doctors then it’s great.

    But it doesn’t work that way.

  90. @Haole2
    @Mr. Blank

    If you call Jews white then there are still white doctors. Others wise, almost no white doctors
    Move to Mexico for Spanish Doctors.

    Replies: @Dissident, @Hans

    I know 5 white doctors off the top of my head, classmates and acquaintances. I’m sure they can name multiples more. But excellent effort, Shlomo.

  91. @Jus' Sayin'...
    If affirmative action admissions to higher education, medical schools, internships, residencies, and fellowships did not exist then significant numbers of these problems would likely disappear.

    Replies: @Jim Don Bob

    Let me get this straight. These AAs were let into medical school ahead of more qualified whites, then “coached” along until they got their MD, which is a certain ticket to a comfortable life, and they are still unhappy?

    Paging Michelle Obama.

  92. I was rushed to the emergency room in September and kept for two days (Long weekend/labor day) and released, told to go see a cardiologist. Picked the head of non-invasive cardiology at the hospital, who happened to be a tall, light-skinned black woman. Met with her for five minutes (my heart rate was slow, although I am no athlete, and I had frequent skipped beats (bi-gemini), plus the ‘spells’ that had sent me to the ER in the first place). I thought I was overcome by toxic fumes (I’d been using rustoleom paint when it first happened) and had many questions, and when she said,”we’ll do a cardiac stress test” I thought that was happening now, and followed her out of the exam room. She pointed at the reception desk, said, “make an appointment” and disappeared behind swinging doors before I’d asked her any of my questions. Made the appointment for the next week. She cancelled (“the doctor is starting her vacation early”) and I was rescheduled for another two weeks. The ‘spells’ became less frequent and less severe, and I thought I had recovered and came thisclose to cancelling. When I finally had the cardio stress test this bitch’s hair caught fire and I was rushed into an operating theater where a very good, young Greek doctor inserted a stent in my heart. He told me I had a piece of plaque flipping like a trap door in my artery, shutting down the blood going into my heart when it flopped, causing my spells. It would have ultimately broke off and that would have been “lights out” for Woodsie. My follow up with this almost killed me cardiologist proved further incompetence. She started the meeting talking about how my continuing problems were a side-effect of a drug I was not on. She did not have the results of my latest test and had to send her assistant to rummage around in her office to find it. Regarding my slow heart rate, she told me that Lance Armstrong has a resting heart rate of 40 bpm. Well, I’m no Lance Armstrong, so that was a bull s… remark, too. I now go into NYC and see the Jewish cardiologist that has kept my mom alive for the last thirty years (she’s 92). I am convinced the first doc is an affirmative action hire who got through med school because her race and gender added a couple of points to every test she ever took, passed along because ‘we need diversity’. Bitch almost killed me.

    • Replies: @HammerJack
    @Woodsie

    Sadly, there are millions of stories like yours nowadays. Seems to be the price we must pay to appease the angry God of Diversity. Well, part of the price.

  93. @The Alarmist
    I've never seen an Asian Female doctor, but they surely must exist. I did have a Puerto Rican doc while in the military, but he seemed OK. The worst doctor I ever had was South Asian, and no, I was not racially imagining it. My old white male doc just retired, leaving me literally in the hands of a pretty younger white female doctor, which can be surprisingly embarassing at check-ups. Good to know some things work at my advanced age.

    Replies: @Dissident

    My old white male doc just retired, leaving me literally in the hands of a pretty younger white female doctor,

    Reminds me of the time, as a lad of 9 or 10, that I was examined by a female pediatrician who was covering for my regular doc (who presumably was either out sick or on an emergency call). I remember feeling rather awkward and then relieved when she told me that I did not have to remove my underpants. But at the same time, to this day whenever I recall that experience, I am somewhat bothered by the thought that an important part of the exam may have been skipped. That noted, I cannot rule-out the possibility that I had not come in that day for a full physical but only for some specific concern. If that was the case, it would also make the possibility of my regular pediatrician simply being away on a normal, scheduled vacation seem entirely plausible.

    Both docs were white. My regular pediatrician was, I’m fairly certain, Jewish. The woman covering for him may or may not have been. By then, non-white physicians may not have been rare but I don’t know that they were quite common yet. Certainly nowhere near the situation today. Whites/Jews still dominated the field, as best as I can recall. (This was also still before managed care/HMOs had really caught-on.)

  94. @Anon
    The only concrete reason for having quotas or "quota-adjacent mechanisms” in medicine that I’ve seen is a “study” from “Stanford” that found that black patients tended to listen to and act upon advice from black doctors more.

    1. I bet you could take apart that study pretty easily. Researchers for such studies tend to know in advance what results they want, so they are blind to a lot of problems in their research protocols.

    2. Rather than populate medicine with a bunch of black mediocrities, might there be another way, such as better training for all doctors in dealing with blacks, or special black nurses who would be involved in cases to double check on comprehension and compliance?

    3. These black doctors are going to be doing a lot of tasks besides advising black patients to take blood presssion medications. They are going to be making critical decisions and diagnoses, performing surgery, keeping up with their reading of journals (something that black doctors especially love!), and so on. It’s a "glass 99 percent empty" problem. The vast bulk of what they do is not in furtherance of the reason that they were allowed to be doctors in the first place.

    4. If a black patient can ask for a doctor “who looks like me” so he can be more comfortable (although I think a lot of black patients are going to be thinking, “I want the Jew doctor, not the brother!”), can white patients ask for doctors that look like them and got higher MCAT scores? (It’s happened, and the answer is no, your hospital “fires” you and you end up shamed in your local newspaper.)

    Replies: @Dissident, @Dissident

    You raise a number of worthy and compelling points.

    I have long noted that a great irony of affirmative action is that those who are ultimately most harmed by it are precisely those whom it purports to help. Sure, members of AA-eligible groups benefit from jobs and other opportunities that would not otherwise be open to them. But what about the larger picture; the longer-term? That AA inevitably results in those who are qualified on merit being suspected and even simply assumed to not be such has been widely noted. What I do not recall seeing acknolwedged, however, is that in at least many fields– including and perhaps especially such critical ones as doctors, other medical personnel, and defense lawyers– those who are most likely to find themselves (and often their very lives) dependent upon an under-qualified AA hire are those within the very same AA-qualifying demographics.

    This paradox is by no means limited to the area of affirmative action.

    [MORE]
    Is not a great irony of the rioting, looting, vandalism and other violence that we are presently witnessing that the victims are disproportionately blacks and other non-whites? This includes the spikes in violent crime that inevitably result when police are handicapped. Additional ironies that undermine The Narrative would appear to be how many of those committing as well as championing the BLM-ANTIFA terror are white; how many of the police are non-white; and all the instances– caught on camera but overwhelmingly suppressed by the holders of the megaphone– of the latter (non-white police) being viciously attacked by the former (white “protestors”).

    How many policies, positions or views that are expressly and specifically championed as benefiting a designated victim-status group actually do more to harm them? How expendable to third-world countries such as Nigeria, for example, are the massive numbers of their most intelligent, talented, capable and productive citizens that leave every year for the First World? Does anyone incite more resentment and animosity toward Jews than racketeers such as the ADL and the $PLC? (I almost wonder whether that might be their intent…) Who is most at-risk of being mutilated and otherwise irreversibly “treated” under the prevailing Transgender protocol? Who is most harmed by pro-buggery propaganda that glamorizes and sanitizes the hideous realities of what is inherently dangerous, brutal, unwholesome sexual behavior and a culture built-around it? Most at risk of being corrupted and desecrated discovering who he really is by a degenerate sodomite helpful older man? (The answer to both rhetorical questions is not the normal, well-adjusted, securely heterosexual individual.)

    (*Gender, let it always be remembered, is but a linguistic construct.)

  95. @obwandiyag
    @jsm

    My father's white anglo-saxon protestant golf-playing "doctor" killed him.

    You idiot.

    Replies: @bruce county, @Reg Cæsar, @JMcG, @ThreeCranes

    Good.

  96. Why is reading about Black! activities so effing tiresome?

    > Complainin’
    > Muh slavery
    > Lootin’
    > Bein’ tired
    > Killin’ & Shootin’ & Rapin’ (while meeting understandin’ by various writers)
    > Bein’ unhappy
    > Pinin’ for Africa but not really
    > Gettin’ arrested
    > Complainin’
    > Fatherlessly procreatin’
    > Muh reparations
    > More lootin’
    > Killing kids and a becky or two
    > Explainin to whitey why imma bein’ so tired
    > Worryin’ about getting lasting damage from microaggressin’
    > More complainin’
    > Being a right pain in the ass

    It’s as if there were a Big Racist Mother in some secret lair, instructing MSM by fax to be on the same page. Every single day. What’s up with that.

  97. @Anonymous
    @Paul Mendez

    Doctors are basically mechanics. There's no reason they should get more respect than the guy who fixes your car.

    Replies: @Paul Mendez, @Drew

    It’s my general belief that improvements in life expectancy at birth in first world countries are more correctly attributed to civil engineers and sanitation engineers than to medical professionals and pharmaceutical researchers

  98. @Anon
    The only concrete reason for having quotas or "quota-adjacent mechanisms” in medicine that I’ve seen is a “study” from “Stanford” that found that black patients tended to listen to and act upon advice from black doctors more.

    1. I bet you could take apart that study pretty easily. Researchers for such studies tend to know in advance what results they want, so they are blind to a lot of problems in their research protocols.

    2. Rather than populate medicine with a bunch of black mediocrities, might there be another way, such as better training for all doctors in dealing with blacks, or special black nurses who would be involved in cases to double check on comprehension and compliance?

    3. These black doctors are going to be doing a lot of tasks besides advising black patients to take blood presssion medications. They are going to be making critical decisions and diagnoses, performing surgery, keeping up with their reading of journals (something that black doctors especially love!), and so on. It’s a "glass 99 percent empty" problem. The vast bulk of what they do is not in furtherance of the reason that they were allowed to be doctors in the first place.

    4. If a black patient can ask for a doctor “who looks like me” so he can be more comfortable (although I think a lot of black patients are going to be thinking, “I want the Jew doctor, not the brother!”), can white patients ask for doctors that look like them and got higher MCAT scores? (It’s happened, and the answer is no, your hospital “fires” you and you end up shamed in your local newspaper.)

    Replies: @Dissident, @Dissident

    (although I think a lot of black patients are going to be thinking, “I want the Jew doctor, not the brother!”)

    How many remember when Bill Cosby endorsed the looney libel that Jewish doctors deliberately inject the HIV virus into black babies?
    ~ ~ ~
    A young Jewish woman fell in love with a local traditional tribal medicine man she met on a trip to Africa. Returning to the US with her new lover, the girl brought him to meet her mother. “Oy!”, exclaimed the woman, looking and sounding highly disappointed (and speaking with a heavy Yiddish accent). “I said I wanted you to bring home a rich doctor!” SPOILER:

    [MORE]
    (Not a witch doctor)

  99. @JohnnyWalker123

    The field of medicine has long skewed white and male.

     

    https://imgur.com/a/jzvClup

    https://imgur.com/a/or4N1wY

    https://www.aamc.org/news-insights/press-releases/majority-us-medical-students-are-women-new-data-show

    The Majority of U.S. Medical Students Are Women, New Data Show
    DECEMBER 9, 2019

    Women comprise the majority of enrolled U.S. medical students for the first time, according to 2019 data released today by the AAMC (Association of American Medical Colleges). This progress builds on the milestone reached in 2017, when, for the first time, women comprised the majority of first-year medical students.

    The proportion of women students has been rising over recent years, from 46.9% in 2015 to 49.5% in 2018. In 2019, women comprise 50.5% of all medical school students.
     

    In the medical profession overall, male doctors still outnumber female doctors, 64 percent to 36 percent, according to 2019 data from the Kaiser Family Foundation.

     

    If you've been into a hospital at any point in the last 3 decades, you'd be surprised at the diversity of the physician workforce.

    Lots of Subcons, Asians, Persians, African migrants, Muslims, Hispanics (usually not Mexican), etc.

    Within the younger ranks, a lot fewer Jews than you might think. Even when you do see young Jews, a lot seem to be the children of Eastern Euro or Middle Eastern migrants. Not American Jews.
    I suppose American Jews have lost the taste for academics and hard work.

    Medicine is becoming heavily foreignized these days.

    By the way, foreign-origin physicians seem heavily over represented in medical billing fraud.

    Here's an article about Armenians involved with medical fraud.

    https://www.csmonitor.com/Business/Latest-News-Wires/2010/1014/Medicare-fraud-Dozens-charged-in-record-scam

    Replies: @Dan Hayes, @Paul Mendez, @obwandiyag, @Pop Warner, @Anonymous

    The children of Jewish doctors go into politics or non-lucrative fields like the arts. Or, as others have stated, they go into fields that pay more than doctors. For the amount of training and work it takes just to make a “doctor’s salary,” It’s not as attractive option for those who have endless options

  100. @B36
    @Mr. Blank

    Same in Texas. Indian, Pakistani, Middle Eastern. Remarkably very few Jewish doctors. Where did they go?

    Replies: @Mike Pierson, Davenport Rector, Midfielder, @Old Prude

    Where did all the Jew doctors go? Specialists serving the wealthy.

    • Agree: HammerJack
  101. @Anonymous
    On the fraught subject of affirmative action in professional schools, many readers here may remember Amy Wax's controversial and nearly career ending comment a few years ago that blacks at U Penn law school (where she has taught for many years) almost never finished in the top quarter of the class and rarely in the top half. The Penn dean screeched that Amy was wrong but never offered up any numbers (readily available to him) to disprove her statement. This led me to look at the data for my own Harvard Law School class from the 1980's. While Harvard does not, so far as I am aware, publish the stats in any easily accessible format, I had facebooks/yearbooks with pictures of substantially the entire entering class, plus the graduation ceremony program that lists all graduates and the Latin honors (summa, magna, cum laude or none) ultimately awarded to each -- so it was possible to tabulate the results by hand. For my class and those of similar vintage, summas were virtually nonexistent (one or two per decade), magnas were about 10% of the class, cum laudes were about 35% and no honors were about 55%. The results that Amy Wax described for recent U Penn classes could just as well have described my class some 30 years before. Despite comprising over 10% of my entering class, not a single black graduated with any Latin honors. That is, all blacks graduating in my class were in the bottom ~55%. And as best I could tell, about 10% of the blacks who entered in my class did not graduate on time or at all. Also interesting: more than half of the blacks in my class came from Ivy League undergraduate colleges (the usual 8 plus Stanford), which was a slightly higher percentage of Ivy Leaguers than in the rest of the class. From what I have seen, there has been virtually no progress toward Sandra Day O'Connor's goal of not needing affirmative action by 2028 (25 years after Grutter). AA yesterday, AA tomorrow, AA forever.

    Replies: @not a hacker

    As a 1L in 1980, I was wandering the stacks one day and came across a monograph detailing the historical relationship between LSAT score and class rank at the school. My eventual grades were perfectly predicted by the study.

  102. Dr. Otugo said the encounters sometimes made her wonder whether she was a qualified and competent medical practitioner, because others did not see her that way.

    Maybe the others were on to something.
    I for sure would hesitate before seeing a black doctor.

  103. @Tony the Doctor
    Illness has a way of obliterating social customs. Sick people often reveal what they're really thinking.

    As a white male cis-gendered and straight physician, I've seen this countless times. I'll never forget the first time I witnessed this. I was a medical student rounding on a patient in the cancer clinic. To my right was the Black attending physician. The woman addressed every question to me, the white male medical student. In short order I told her I was a student physician, and that the most senior person was the Black man to my left. Still, she persisted, as if she somehow could not wrap her head around the concept that the Black guy knew more than I did.

    After this encounter I talked with the attending physician, who possessed a good-humored if resigned attitude to the situation. He then told me he'd often been asked by a patient for a bedpan, or to take out the trash and to send in the doctor. The guy was a graduate of Yale medical school, the product of the best residency and fellowship programs in the world. And yet to this woman, he was just a Black man.

    I think encouraging Black applicants to apply for medical school and having some form of affirmative action programs to further encourage matriculation is a good thing. These doctors obviously bring an important perspective and there really are not enough of them.

    In order to make things "truly fair", lets fix the public school system so that majority Black schools aren't chronically underfunded and let's subsidize MCAT prep courses to set Black students up for success.

    If Black medical school matriculants with lower statistics can succeed in medical school and become great doctors, perhaps its a sign that these admission metrics are not actually predictive of a person's ability to succeed in medicine.

    Instead of using these statistics to de-legitimatize the qualifications of black medical school graduates, perhaps we should be considering how the use of these metrics serves to reinforce the status quo

    I always thought that since women and people with more skin pigmentation have more difficulty getting to where they are, that by average they must be better at their job.

    So, when you are a patient and you are assigned a Black woman doctor, you most probably get a better doctor then the other patients.

    Replies: @usNthem, @PiltdownMan, @Calvin Hobbes, @Hypnotoad666, @Mr McKenna, @Lurker, @ThreeCranes, @Moses

    people with more skin pigmentation

    Thanks for the medical input. So racial differences are just skin deep?

  104. @Hypnotoad666
    @Tony the Doctor


    If Black medical school matriculants with lower statistics can succeed in medical school and become great doctors, perhaps its a sign that these admission metrics are not actually predictive of a person’s ability to succeed in medicine.
     
    I would love to know the tradeoff between GPA/IQ, and actual performance as a practicing doctor (including malpractice and harm to patients). I wonder if anyone has actually studied it.

    Medical school standards may well be arbitrarily set too high, thereby artificially restricting medical services to the public.

    On the other hand, there may be an intellectual level below which a doctor will do more harm than good.

    But wherever you set the bar, there is no reason to give blacks a special pass to limbo under the standard.

    Replies: @johnomd, @johnomd, @Anonymous

    I served as Chief of Staff for a hospital and was Chair of Credentials for a while, so I saw lots of incoming applications for our medical staff, as well as the renewals and the sealed “permanent records”. Malpractice cases, failure to pass specialty Board within the allotted 5 yr period, disciplinary issues, and internal quality of care issues referred to our M/M committee all skewed along race lines pretty much as would be expected by MCATs and Board scores. Also, when I was in Medical School at a top 20 program, we had about 400 white students in my class. 4 (1%) of them failed Step 1 (we knew because they couldn’t start their 3rd year, so no way to anonymize). We also had 8 black students in our class. Despite AGGRESSIVE test prep by the school, 4 of them also failed (50 fold odds ratio). This is was on the hard science section of the Boards: things like Physiology, Biochem, Neuro-Anatomy, etc. So hard to call it “culturally biassed”. The knowledge gap was massive. The recent solution, as with many things in society, has been the remove the numerical scores and percentiles from the USMLE exams. Ignorance is bliss….

    • Thanks: Rob McX, Hypnotoad666
    • Replies: @Hypnotoad666
    @johnomd

    It sounds like it's pretty clear that affirmative action in medicine is costing lives. But no on is going to try to quantify that cost. As you say, "ignorance is bliss."

  105. @Hypnotoad666
    @Tony the Doctor


    If Black medical school matriculants with lower statistics can succeed in medical school and become great doctors, perhaps its a sign that these admission metrics are not actually predictive of a person’s ability to succeed in medicine.
     
    I would love to know the tradeoff between GPA/IQ, and actual performance as a practicing doctor (including malpractice and harm to patients). I wonder if anyone has actually studied it.

    Medical school standards may well be arbitrarily set too high, thereby artificially restricting medical services to the public.

    On the other hand, there may be an intellectual level below which a doctor will do more harm than good.

    But wherever you set the bar, there is no reason to give blacks a special pass to limbo under the standard.

    Replies: @johnomd, @johnomd, @Anonymous

    The Bell Curve referred to work force studies where there was no job, even busboy, where performance did not improve with IQ. ER is a good case study. For at least the last 20 years, ER residencies have been extremely competitive. When I got in, to a mediocre mid-tier program at the time, they had 1400 applicants and only had to go down to their #10 pick to fill 6 spots. It’s safe to say no white male under the age of 50 was likely not in the top 20% on GPA, MCAT, and their general medical boards. At the same time, there were still a fair number of Family Practice and General Practice doctors working in ER’s that had grandfathered in. Despite frequently having more experience, there was almost no overlap in performance between the two groups. I’d say in 20 years I only worked with one non-boarded guy that would have been mistaken for a boarded caliber clinician. The actuaries that wrote our group malpractice policy took the number of non ER boarded practitioners into account because they told us it was a statistically significant predictor of bad outcomes. Most of the hospitals that aren’t in Ghetto or deep rural won’t credential non ER-boarded folks any more, based on their own experiences. Granted, ER may be a special case, as it is fast paced and you are often making complex decisions with incomplete knowledge/history on arriving patients while dealing with lots of noise and ample distractions, but at least from what I saw the barriers to entry were not needlessly inflated to restrict entry. Even among medical school grads, the ones at the top did noticably better than those in the middle and bottom over the long term.

  106. So long as affirmative action exists, it will be natural to be suspicious of the credentials of a black person. This is particularly the case in high status jobs where competency can be a matter of life and death, such as medicine.

    You cannot have it any other way.

    Go back to a meritocracy and there will no longer be any reason to question the credentials of a black person.

  107. At first glance of this topic ; I thought it was ” Pygmy ” doctors were the antagonists against White normal sized doctors. What a relief !

  108. @SkylertheWeird
    This can't be true. On Grey's Anatomy all the best Doctors are black. If it's on TV it just be true.

    Replies: @Rob McX

    One way of solving the problem of incompetent AA medics would be to give them all jobs playing docs/engineers, etc. on TV, where they can do no damage.

  109. I often ask myself where did these “new negroes”, or POCs, come from and when did they emerge? My wife graduated from Stanford med school in the 1980s and did her residency at one of the most prominent university hospitals in the mid-Atlantic, where she eventually became its first black and female (and first “2fer”, you could say) chief medical resident ever. Naturally, through her, there were many young black doctors in our circle of friends – some her work colleagues, some already well established practitioners, and others med school classmates. All were intelligent, competent, and hardworking. But none ever complained, even in private, about “discrimination”, or “microaggressions”, or slights from white colleagues, or about “systemic racism” and unfair treatment under such a regime. And they demanded nothing of anybody but themselves. And this at a time when the country was supposedly still emerging from at least de facto “Jim Crowism.” They just worked their asses off, like everybody else in that field, with laser focus on their professional development. I suppose they just had no time for looking for things like “microaggressions.” For them, the regimen for making a competent physician was as much a test of character (as Sailer notes in this article) as it was of medical skill and ability – regardless of race, creed, nationality, etc.

    That certainly does not seem to be the case today. Now well into the 21st century, these “new” black medical practitioners (if you believe the plaintiffs in this article are representative typical of young black doctors today) seem to spend more time hunting down and reporting on “microaggressions” in the workplace than they do on sharpening, or even just acquiring the basic diagnostic skills to become competent practitioners. And that being the case, it would be no wonder that their performance ratings suffered accordingly, which in turn causes them to complain even more about “systemic racism” and “microaggressions” and deflect the blame for their unfavorable ratings onto the “racist” system and away from the real source of their failures – i.e., their own character flaws and weaknesses. If there is any truth to the allegations leveled by the black doctors represented in this article that their non-black medical colleagues tend to look upon them askance, there’s little doubt that it is not without justification.

    Perhaps in the late 20th century great value was still placed on the content of character, whereas in the present time it’s become a non-sequitur. Also, practically anyone can find a med school somewhere in the western hemisphere from which to obtain an MD, and in these “woke” times even the “traditional” medical schools and hospital teaching programs are far less particular about the character and abilities of their affirmative action selectees than in my wife’s generation. So the pool of competent young black doctors nowadays is heavily diluted to begin with. This reflects poorly on all young black doctors, and most tragically on those who still have the same belief in character content as in my wife’s time. All are now stereotyped in accordance with this lowest common denominator view of black medical professionals.

    It seems to be only in very recent times that this blindly flawed “POC-negro” has emerged to prominence, along with the amplification of white liberal and radical black values via ubiquitous left-leaning social media platforms. This has subtly done more harm and damage to blacks in particular, but to America in general, than even the strictest “Jim Crowism” could ever do. Instead of having to earn respect, the POC of today would rather use their energies to harangue the govt to make it the law of the land that everyone autonomically respect POCs without any other conditions attached, as well as love every POC regardless of individual character or worthiness. It’s a positive feedback loop with terrible consequences for everyone. The more the POCs (particularly blacks) demand special favor, the more they set themselves apart. The more they set themselves apart, the less attractive they become as colleagues, and the less they learn about their chosen field of endeavor. The less attractive they become, the more fuel for their cries of victimization, and demands for governmental redress. And as the bars and barriers are lowered to address the continuous cries of victimization, the more diluted the pool of black talent and character becomes…

    We can make an educated stab at when and how this all came to be. But the bigger question is when and how will it all end? Whatever the socialscape may look like in the end, there is little doubt that in the final analysis blacks in particular will be at the very bottom of the rung, perhaps permanently and irretrievably…victims of their own self-victimization. This certainly seems to be the direction things are going when I think about my late wife’s generation of young black doctors compared to the representatives of today’s young black medical professionals cited in Sailer’s article. The only hope, on the other hand, is that the plaintiffs in this article are not representative of that sub-population of professionals, but are really disgruntled outliers. As we all know, the media is inclined towards amplified hyper-generalization that more digging or anecdotal evidence falsifies. I pray this is the case here, and that there are still young black Americans who are more interested in developing character than victim stripes. Unfortunately, it’s other blacks and POCs like those in this article who are in fact making it more and more difficult for other young blacks to aspire and succeed. Therein lies the tragedy of it all.

  110. Everyone here reading this, raise your hand if you’ve recently read some MSM article which claims that blacks’ distrust of white doctors advice is the result of the “Tuskegee effect.”

    Recall, that this is the 1920s era study of syphilis where a group of Tuskegee AL black men who had this disease were divided into two groups. One group was treated for it using current standard medicines and the other not treated.

    Obviously the untreated group had worse outcomes but many lived quite a long time despite lack of treatment. It is a widely known example of unethical medical research, though no one was intentionally harmed. Just neglected.

    Supposedly this very singular event is what drives the medical thinking of all American blacks. Kinda like Emmett Till.

    Though I have yet to see any reliable surveys of blacks which document any of that. My own opinion is that 1%< of black respondents would even acknowledge knowing anything about this.

    But such magical thinking doesn't slow down the editorial team at WaPo or the NYT.

    • Replies: @HammerJack
    @Muggles

    Yes, I've seen it cited several times recently as the reason black people won't follow health & medical advice and hence why their covid mortality rates are so high.

  111. @obwandiyag
    @jsm

    My father's white anglo-saxon protestant golf-playing "doctor" killed him.

    You idiot.

    Replies: @bruce county, @Reg Cæsar, @JMcG, @ThreeCranes

    With a nine iron?

  112. @Tony the Doctor
    Illness has a way of obliterating social customs. Sick people often reveal what they're really thinking.

    As a white male cis-gendered and straight physician, I've seen this countless times. I'll never forget the first time I witnessed this. I was a medical student rounding on a patient in the cancer clinic. To my right was the Black attending physician. The woman addressed every question to me, the white male medical student. In short order I told her I was a student physician, and that the most senior person was the Black man to my left. Still, she persisted, as if she somehow could not wrap her head around the concept that the Black guy knew more than I did.

    After this encounter I talked with the attending physician, who possessed a good-humored if resigned attitude to the situation. He then told me he'd often been asked by a patient for a bedpan, or to take out the trash and to send in the doctor. The guy was a graduate of Yale medical school, the product of the best residency and fellowship programs in the world. And yet to this woman, he was just a Black man.

    I think encouraging Black applicants to apply for medical school and having some form of affirmative action programs to further encourage matriculation is a good thing. These doctors obviously bring an important perspective and there really are not enough of them.

    In order to make things "truly fair", lets fix the public school system so that majority Black schools aren't chronically underfunded and let's subsidize MCAT prep courses to set Black students up for success.

    If Black medical school matriculants with lower statistics can succeed in medical school and become great doctors, perhaps its a sign that these admission metrics are not actually predictive of a person's ability to succeed in medicine.

    Instead of using these statistics to de-legitimatize the qualifications of black medical school graduates, perhaps we should be considering how the use of these metrics serves to reinforce the status quo

    I always thought that since women and people with more skin pigmentation have more difficulty getting to where they are, that by average they must be better at their job.

    So, when you are a patient and you are assigned a Black woman doctor, you most probably get a better doctor then the other patients.

    Replies: @usNthem, @PiltdownMan, @Calvin Hobbes, @Hypnotoad666, @Mr McKenna, @Lurker, @ThreeCranes, @Moses

    “she somehow could not wrap her head around the concept that the Black guy knew more than I did.”

    Why would you assume that the black guy knew more than you did? She’s showing smarts, playing the odds.

  113. @The Germ Theory of Disease
    @Reg Cæsar

    I know a guy who can say anything backwards, at will. You quote a long passage of Shakespeare to him, and he can say the whole thing backwards at once (not word-for-word backwards, that's easy, but letter-by-letter, or syllable-by-syllable.). He says he can see the whole thing in his head, and he's just sort of reading out loud what he sees.

    Replies: @Sam Malone

    That’s amazing, and impressive I guess. But is he overall extremely smart, or particularly wise, or is he exceptional really only in that mechanical trick that his brain is wired to make easy for him?

    • Replies: @The Germ Theory of Disease
    @Sam Malone

    I don't want to say anything to identify him, but, just to answer your question in a vague way: he is highly distinguished in two wildly different professional fields, he's an expert pianist, and he was kind enough to act as a mentor to me when I was a young man. So, yeah: genius type. Like Steely Dan would say, a major dude.

  114. @johnomd
    @Hypnotoad666

    I served as Chief of Staff for a hospital and was Chair of Credentials for a while, so I saw lots of incoming applications for our medical staff, as well as the renewals and the sealed "permanent records". Malpractice cases, failure to pass specialty Board within the allotted 5 yr period, disciplinary issues, and internal quality of care issues referred to our M/M committee all skewed along race lines pretty much as would be expected by MCATs and Board scores. Also, when I was in Medical School at a top 20 program, we had about 400 white students in my class. 4 (1%) of them failed Step 1 (we knew because they couldn't start their 3rd year, so no way to anonymize). We also had 8 black students in our class. Despite AGGRESSIVE test prep by the school, 4 of them also failed (50 fold odds ratio). This is was on the hard science section of the Boards: things like Physiology, Biochem, Neuro-Anatomy, etc. So hard to call it "culturally biassed". The knowledge gap was massive. The recent solution, as with many things in society, has been the remove the numerical scores and percentiles from the USMLE exams. Ignorance is bliss....

    Replies: @Hypnotoad666

    It sounds like it’s pretty clear that affirmative action in medicine is costing lives. But no on is going to try to quantify that cost. As you say, “ignorance is bliss.”

  115. @JohnnyWalker123

    The field of medicine has long skewed white and male.

     

    https://imgur.com/a/jzvClup

    https://imgur.com/a/or4N1wY

    https://www.aamc.org/news-insights/press-releases/majority-us-medical-students-are-women-new-data-show

    The Majority of U.S. Medical Students Are Women, New Data Show
    DECEMBER 9, 2019

    Women comprise the majority of enrolled U.S. medical students for the first time, according to 2019 data released today by the AAMC (Association of American Medical Colleges). This progress builds on the milestone reached in 2017, when, for the first time, women comprised the majority of first-year medical students.

    The proportion of women students has been rising over recent years, from 46.9% in 2015 to 49.5% in 2018. In 2019, women comprise 50.5% of all medical school students.
     

    In the medical profession overall, male doctors still outnumber female doctors, 64 percent to 36 percent, according to 2019 data from the Kaiser Family Foundation.

     

    If you've been into a hospital at any point in the last 3 decades, you'd be surprised at the diversity of the physician workforce.

    Lots of Subcons, Asians, Persians, African migrants, Muslims, Hispanics (usually not Mexican), etc.

    Within the younger ranks, a lot fewer Jews than you might think. Even when you do see young Jews, a lot seem to be the children of Eastern Euro or Middle Eastern migrants. Not American Jews.
    I suppose American Jews have lost the taste for academics and hard work.

    Medicine is becoming heavily foreignized these days.

    By the way, foreign-origin physicians seem heavily over represented in medical billing fraud.

    Here's an article about Armenians involved with medical fraud.

    https://www.csmonitor.com/Business/Latest-News-Wires/2010/1014/Medicare-fraud-Dozens-charged-in-record-scam

    Replies: @Dan Hayes, @Paul Mendez, @obwandiyag, @Pop Warner, @Anonymous

    By the way, foreign-origin physicians seem heavily over represented in medical billing fraud.

    Foreign-born physicians are HUGELY over-represented in the area of sexual abuse of patients.

  116. @Hypnotoad666
    @Mr McKenna

    Does it also not occur to anybody what a classist put down this is to janitors and food service workers? Why is it so humiliating to be mistaken for an honest laborer doing an honest day's work? Are they really such untouchable refuse?

    Replies: @Redneck farmer, @The Last Real Calvinist, @ManhattanBorn

    Yes, for the typical champion of the working class, there is no worse insult than be taken for a member of that class.

  117. Anonymous[151] • Disclaimer says:
    @Hypnotoad666
    @Tony the Doctor


    If Black medical school matriculants with lower statistics can succeed in medical school and become great doctors, perhaps its a sign that these admission metrics are not actually predictive of a person’s ability to succeed in medicine.
     
    I would love to know the tradeoff between GPA/IQ, and actual performance as a practicing doctor (including malpractice and harm to patients). I wonder if anyone has actually studied it.

    Medical school standards may well be arbitrarily set too high, thereby artificially restricting medical services to the public.

    On the other hand, there may be an intellectual level below which a doctor will do more harm than good.

    But wherever you set the bar, there is no reason to give blacks a special pass to limbo under the standard.

    Replies: @johnomd, @johnomd, @Anonymous

    I wonder if anyone has actually studied [the tradeoff between GPA/IQ, and actual performance as a practicing doctor (including malpractice and harm to patients).

    Insurance companies must have detailed studies, buried deep in ultra-vaults in the remote reaches of Montana, and made available on a strict need-to-know, for-your-eyes-only basis to senior executives and to selected lead attorneys defending the largest malpractice actions.

  118. @Sam Malone
    @The Germ Theory of Disease

    That's amazing, and impressive I guess. But is he overall extremely smart, or particularly wise, or is he exceptional really only in that mechanical trick that his brain is wired to make easy for him?

    Replies: @The Germ Theory of Disease

    I don’t want to say anything to identify him, but, just to answer your question in a vague way: he is highly distinguished in two wildly different professional fields, he’s an expert pianist, and he was kind enough to act as a mentor to me when I was a young man. So, yeah: genius type. Like Steely Dan would say, a major dude.

  119. Here’s something I over heard while eating lunch in the Med school courtyard when I worked at UCLA.

    The med school administrators offices had 2 doors, 1 in the hallway, and 1 opening to the courtyard. The White man Dean and one of the professors came out into the court yard. Prof was a White woman. Here’s the conversation I overheard.

    Dean but you have to pass her with a B
    Prof She’s failed every test failed badly And her clinical work is just awful.
    Dean You have to pass her with a B
    Prof She can’t learn, I can’t pass her
    Dean She’s black You have to give her a B

    Another elite White man imposing affirmative action

  120. @Anonymous
    As a patient, I would prefer not to have a black doctor, because placement in medical school has as much to do with race as it does achievement. I’d prefer not to have an asian doctor, because I’ve worked side by side with asians myself, and I’ve found they have a strong predilection to tunnel vision. The majority of whom either cannot or will not seriously consider variables outside of what’s obvious. In the practice of medicine, they can tunnel-vision, and do the right thing, while propelling you into an early grave.

    I even have a female asian ophthalmologist who fills in when my regular ophthalmologist is on vacation, and the decisions she tries to make are always "by the book" types of conclusions that would ensure my prescriptions would be less than optimal, though "correct." When I’d try to tell her why her decisions wouldnt work well for me, she responds as not fully convinced, even though the outcome has already been established. It’s like if a range of choices are outside of her tunnel-vision, it can’t be valid.

    I had an asian veterinarian who did the exact same thing. When I introduce variables related to a problem that would lend to a certain solution, it’s like he becomes autistic. He would be somewhat against it, but could never explain why. Because he didn’t know.

    Anyway, black professionals where my life is on the line is out of the question if I have a say in it. Asians I will resist if possible, but will acquiesce if I must. Certainly there are competent professionals who are black and asian, and if convinced, I’d certainly and easily make exceptions. It’s just not the norm.

    Replies: @Reg Cæsar

    I had an Asian veterinarian…

    Never a good idea.

  121. @Anonymous
    We've reached the point in U.S. Globocap English where the word "microaggressions" is problematically disrespectful to the, for sooth, non-microness of the violation denoted. Mind your manners, everybody.

    Replies: @TammyR

    In our city, nonwhite doctors predominate, and my mother, while having a heart attack, was manhandled by some of them in an Emergency Room. Those “aggressions,” however, don’t matter; I filed complaints, all of which were dismissed.

    Do not go to a hospital alone, if you can avoid it. Do not stay in a hospital without an advocate. Beware of nonwhite doctors; many are Affirmative Action mediocrities.

    The level of the racial hostility my mother encountered caused me to discontinue my relationships with nonwhites. I no longer believe in any of the diversity or integrationist crap peddled throughout my lifetime. I no longer believe those things are anything except frauds that will ultimately erase the society and culture our ancestors bequeathed to us.

    • Agree: HammerJack, Charon
  122. @Jonathan Mason
    @The Germ Theory of Disease

    I don't see how anybody can do two or three jobs at the same time. That is double dipping.

    Replies: @The Germ Theory of Disease, @The Germ Theory of Disease

    Example of doing two jobs simultaneously…

    ME: Okay, patient is a mildly obese gravida 3, claims non-smoker, claims non-diabetic, expresses lacerations consistent with domestic abuse, maintains that….

    DOCTOR: Hey Germ, we’ve got an inebriated junkie with a gunshot wound who’s yelling and screaming about Jesus in Four, get in here and talk her down.

    ME: Okay, I’m on it, just let me finish this paragraph.

  123. “Dr. Otugo said the encounters made her wonder whether she was competent as a medical practitioner

    She’s not the only person wondering that.

  124. @Tony the Doctor
    Illness has a way of obliterating social customs. Sick people often reveal what they're really thinking.

    As a white male cis-gendered and straight physician, I've seen this countless times. I'll never forget the first time I witnessed this. I was a medical student rounding on a patient in the cancer clinic. To my right was the Black attending physician. The woman addressed every question to me, the white male medical student. In short order I told her I was a student physician, and that the most senior person was the Black man to my left. Still, she persisted, as if she somehow could not wrap her head around the concept that the Black guy knew more than I did.

    After this encounter I talked with the attending physician, who possessed a good-humored if resigned attitude to the situation. He then told me he'd often been asked by a patient for a bedpan, or to take out the trash and to send in the doctor. The guy was a graduate of Yale medical school, the product of the best residency and fellowship programs in the world. And yet to this woman, he was just a Black man.

    I think encouraging Black applicants to apply for medical school and having some form of affirmative action programs to further encourage matriculation is a good thing. These doctors obviously bring an important perspective and there really are not enough of them.

    In order to make things "truly fair", lets fix the public school system so that majority Black schools aren't chronically underfunded and let's subsidize MCAT prep courses to set Black students up for success.

    If Black medical school matriculants with lower statistics can succeed in medical school and become great doctors, perhaps its a sign that these admission metrics are not actually predictive of a person's ability to succeed in medicine.

    Instead of using these statistics to de-legitimatize the qualifications of black medical school graduates, perhaps we should be considering how the use of these metrics serves to reinforce the status quo

    I always thought that since women and people with more skin pigmentation have more difficulty getting to where they are, that by average they must be better at their job.

    So, when you are a patient and you are assigned a Black woman doctor, you most probably get a better doctor then the other patients.

    Replies: @usNthem, @PiltdownMan, @Calvin Hobbes, @Hypnotoad666, @Mr McKenna, @Lurker, @ThreeCranes, @Moses

    When you or your family need to see a doctor, you seek out African American doctors right?

    Right?

    No more questions yer honor.

  125. @Woodsie
    I was rushed to the emergency room in September and kept for two days (Long weekend/labor day) and released, told to go see a cardiologist. Picked the head of non-invasive cardiology at the hospital, who happened to be a tall, light-skinned black woman. Met with her for five minutes (my heart rate was slow, although I am no athlete, and I had frequent skipped beats (bi-gemini), plus the 'spells' that had sent me to the ER in the first place). I thought I was overcome by toxic fumes (I'd been using rustoleom paint when it first happened) and had many questions, and when she said,"we'll do a cardiac stress test" I thought that was happening now, and followed her out of the exam room. She pointed at the reception desk, said, "make an appointment" and disappeared behind swinging doors before I'd asked her any of my questions. Made the appointment for the next week. She cancelled ("the doctor is starting her vacation early") and I was rescheduled for another two weeks. The 'spells' became less frequent and less severe, and I thought I had recovered and came thisclose to cancelling. When I finally had the cardio stress test this bitch's hair caught fire and I was rushed into an operating theater where a very good, young Greek doctor inserted a stent in my heart. He told me I had a piece of plaque flipping like a trap door in my artery, shutting down the blood going into my heart when it flopped, causing my spells. It would have ultimately broke off and that would have been "lights out" for Woodsie. My follow up with this almost killed me cardiologist proved further incompetence. She started the meeting talking about how my continuing problems were a side-effect of a drug I was not on. She did not have the results of my latest test and had to send her assistant to rummage around in her office to find it. Regarding my slow heart rate, she told me that Lance Armstrong has a resting heart rate of 40 bpm. Well, I'm no Lance Armstrong, so that was a bull s... remark, too. I now go into NYC and see the Jewish cardiologist that has kept my mom alive for the last thirty years (she's 92). I am convinced the first doc is an affirmative action hire who got through med school because her race and gender added a couple of points to every test she ever took, passed along because 'we need diversity'. Bitch almost killed me.

    Replies: @HammerJack

    Sadly, there are millions of stories like yours nowadays. Seems to be the price we must pay to appease the angry God of Diversity. Well, part of the price.

  126. @Muggles
    Everyone here reading this, raise your hand if you've recently read some MSM article which claims that blacks' distrust of white doctors advice is the result of the "Tuskegee effect."

    Recall, that this is the 1920s era study of syphilis where a group of Tuskegee AL black men who had this disease were divided into two groups. One group was treated for it using current standard medicines and the other not treated.

    Obviously the untreated group had worse outcomes but many lived quite a long time despite lack of treatment. It is a widely known example of unethical medical research, though no one was intentionally harmed. Just neglected.

    Supposedly this very singular event is what drives the medical thinking of all American blacks. Kinda like Emmett Till.

    Though I have yet to see any reliable surveys of blacks which document any of that. My own opinion is that 1%< of black respondents would even acknowledge knowing anything about this.

    But such magical thinking doesn't slow down the editorial team at WaPo or the NYT.

    Replies: @HammerJack

    Yes, I’ve seen it cited several times recently as the reason black people won’t follow health & medical advice and hence why their covid mortality rates are so high.

  127. @Hypnotoad666
    @Mr McKenna

    Does it also not occur to anybody what a classist put down this is to janitors and food service workers? Why is it so humiliating to be mistaken for an honest laborer doing an honest day's work? Are they really such untouchable refuse?

    Replies: @Redneck farmer, @The Last Real Calvinist, @ManhattanBorn

    I agree. I became a lawyer decades ago when few women did so; there were only three women in my class of 280, and one of the others was a nun. I was usually mistaken for a secretary, and people would apologize when they realized I was an attorney. I’d say, don’t be sorry, being a legal secretary is an honest living!

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