Patients need doctors who look like them. Can medicine diversify without affirmative action?

I couldn’t care less what my Dr looks like as long as they’re experienced and have proper credentials. I disagree with the entire premise of this article. Should there be no male gynaecologists?

I will say that when I had doctors who looked like me, they almost always treated me like shit (for example, an emergency room physician practically assaulted me while performing an arterial blood draw because he didn't like that I was pushing back against his dismissing my medical complaints).

Conversely, most of the doctors that did not look like me treated me very well and listened when I needed to discuss whatever health issue concerned me.

All of this to say that while it would be nice to see more people from underrepresented backgrounds enter professions such as medicine at the physician level, patients who look like their providers are not automatically going to be treated better. It will always be about who is a good human and practices good medicine, regardless of their background.

Patients are racist and genderist, can medicine accommodate them?

I’ve got a doctor who is almost exactly like me in every way and I feel like my comments/concerns are brushed aside and ignored, that’s just doctors in general.

“Doctors who look like me” is the biggest bullshit I have heard. I want doctors who are best qualified, competent, and perhaps most importantly - compassionate. I don’t give a shit if my doctor looks like SpongeBob or Bojack Horseman.

Diversity for diversity's sake is an empty phrase. Diversity for the sake of finding the best and brightest, that is the faith I am searching for.

This is the best summary I could come up with:

She plans to spend her career caring for the body’s largest organ, where differences in melanin give humans the skin colors underpinning the construct of race.

But more than two months after the Supreme Court struck down affirmative action in college admissions, concerns have arisen that a path into medicine may become much harder for students of color.

The disparities stretch from birth to death, often beginning before Black babies take their first breath, a recent Associated Press series showed.

Over and over, patients said their concerns were brushed aside or ignored, in part because of unchecked bias and racism within the medical system and a lack of representative care.

With affirmative action off the table at predominantly white institutions, historically Black colleges and universities may see an increase in applications, said Dr. Valerie Montgomery Rice, president and CEO of Morehouse School of Medicine in Atlanta.

The college, which typically has 115 openings for new medical students, receives between 7,000 and 9,000 applications per year, a number Rice said she believes will increase in light of the Supreme Court ruling.

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