Is There A (White) Doctor In The House?
That question might be one a lot of people are quietly asking as standards for entrance into medical schools continue to be watered down for non-White/Asian applicants. I was forwarded this story by Doctor Samizdat:
Penn medical school expands minority candidate program that does not require MCAT
There have always been at least three pillars of medical school admissions criteria.
One, your GPA and especially your science GPA. That kept students from loading up on bullshit courses to pad their GPA.
Two, your scores on the Medical College Admission Test, the MCAT. Like the SAT/ACT tests for undergrads, the MCAT provides a uniform standard to level out the disparity in grading at colleges and universities.
Three, your extra-curricular and work experiences. Are you a "well rounded" individual or someone who sat in your room and studied non-stop?
By removing the MCAT scores, but only for blacks, Penn is gaming the system. There is a difference between actively recruiting qualified black candidates for medical school versus lowering the standards for admission until you get enough black faces in your incoming class on social media.
The plan according to this article is to select undergrads early on for admission to the Penn Perelman School of Medicine. The program is being expanded to include five Historically black Colleges and Universities (HBCUs): Howard University, Morehouse College, Oakwood University, Spelman College, and Xavier University of Louisiana. These tend to be HBCUs with somewhat higher standards. For example, Howard University is perhaps the best known HBCU and boasts that their undergrads have a mean High School GPA of 3.66 and a fairly respectable Average SAT composite of 1184 (that is around the 65th percentile, so not awful). I hadn't heard of two of the others, Oakwood which is a Seventh Day Adventist school, and Xavier U of Louisiana, a black Catholic school that has this picture under the undergraduate admissions page:
Throwing up the "black power" salute. Very nice. Setting the stage for perpetual victimhood. Xavier seems to send a lot of students to med school and has their own pharmacy school, but again I have never heard of it before today.
In general, a younger black doctor is someone to avoid. This will only get worse in the future as admissions standards continue to be segregated into a two-tier system, one that is highly competitive for Whites and Asians and another than is far less selective for blacks and mestizos. Once they get into medical school, it is becoming nigh impossible to dislodge them. From Dr. Stanley Goldfarb in his book Take Two Aspirin and Call Me By My Pronouns: Why Turning Doctors into Social Justice Warriors is Destroying American Medicine.
The inarguable reality is that Blacks are preferentially admitted to medical school. Once admitted, they are virtually guaranteed to graduate. And once graduated, they are likely to find training programs more than eager to accept them in the name of diversity.
Goldfarb MD, Stanley. Take Two Aspirin and Call Me By My Pronouns: Why Turning Doctors into Social Justice Warriors is Destroying American Medicine (p. 44). Bombardier Books. Kindle Edition.
As Dr. Goldfarb notes, 60 years ago the attrition rate for medical school was on average 9% and much higher at some schools. That makes sense. My dad describes medical school as being a punishing slog and some people just aren't cut out for it. Today? As of 2019 the attrition rate for medical school has dropped to less than 3%, while Dr. Goldfarb notes this is much lower than other competitive disciplines like law school (11%) and nursing school (20%!). Again from his book:
Assuming that students today are no more intelligent or diligent than they were in the 1960s, the decrease in attrition from 9 percent in the early 1960s to 3 percent in 2019 suggests a lowering of standards.
Goldfarb MD, Stanley. Take Two Aspirin and Call Me By My Pronouns: Why Turning Doctors into Social Justice Warriors is Destroying American Medicine (p. 44). Bombardier Books. Kindle Edition.
That is putting it too gently. It doesn't suggest a lowering of standards, it screams it. Why are standards lower? Again you don't need to be a math whiz to put two and two together and come up with four. Medical schools are desperately trying to increase the number of black doctors they churn out and even lowering admission standards isn't producing enough black doctors as they tend to wash out at higher percentages (maybe because they shouldn't have been there in the first place?), so the "solution" is to lower the standards while in medical school to keep blacks enrolled long enough to give them their M.D.
It is happening all along the way, from the undergrad pipeline to the ranks of residents. I mentioned in a prior post, Moar Med School Malpractice, that the "Step One" Licensing Exam taken at he end of the second year of med school, is as of this spring Pass/Fail. The reason for this change had nothing to do with improving patient outcomes in the future and everything to do with the fact that on objective tests designed to measure all medical school students on an even playing field, blacks did very poorly and their poor scores (on average) meant that they were rightly not extended residency offers in the most competitive fields.
According to a study from the National Institutes of Health:
URiM stands for "Underrepresented in Medicine" and is the medical school buzzword that means "blacks and mestizos". The mean non-URiM (Whites and Asians) was 223.7 vs the URiM mean score of 216.1. A significant drop-off. The problem is of course not that too many underqualified URiM students are being admitted to medical school, no the real problem is that it "could jeopardize the benefits of a diverse residency program". In other words, competitive residency programs are less likely to select black and mestizo medical school graduates because they scored significantly lower when tested on core competencies for medicine.
The AAMC (Association Of American Medical Colleges) reported that black applicants are 3 to 6 times less likely to be offered an interview for internal medicine residencies
The fact that blacks just don't do as well on these tests is "problematic". Again, the real underlying issue is that black medical school students are, on average, significantly less prepared, qualified and intelligent compared to their White and Asian counterparts and predictably do much worse on the tests that measure core competencies.
What most people don't really think about or even know is that while getting into medical school is highly competitive, at least for Whites and Asians, that isn't the end of it. How you do in medical school significantly impacts which residency you are invited to join and that is a pretty big deal for med students as there is a prestige hierarchy within the medical field and the big driver is how much you make:
For most of us, making $232,000 a year is a huge sum of money but on the other end of the spectrum we see that orthopedic surgeons make more than double that amount or put another way, the average orthopedic surgeon makes more than $5,000 more every week than the average pediatrician. As you might guess, the highest paid and most prestigious fields are dominated by....White men.
You might recall a post from June, We Wuz Otolaryngologists And Sheeit!, where we noted that "...fewer than 1% of otolaryngologists are black". You will then notice that otolaryngologists are number three on the list above with an average annual salary of $455,000. This must also be racism! Then there is the tragic story of Dr. Brian Nwannunu, a black man who didn't feel wanted in his residency.
87 percent of orthopedic surgeons are White. This Baylor doctor is working to diversify his field.
No one would make eye contact with him? Maybe because making eye contact with blacks is generally a good way to enrage them? Or more likely it isn't true but it makes for a good story. The story is full of breathless outrage.
“Multiple people come up to me and say I’m the first black doctor they’ve ever seen,” said Nwannunu, a first-generation Nigerian American. “They said they don’t trust the older, white guy, but they trust me to do their surgery. That’s the type of difference that can be made when the career of orthopedics is diverse.”
Well good for them. I encourage blacks to seek out black doctors and leave the "older, White" doctors who actually earned their spot to take care of Whites. Imagine if a White resident said that White patients don't trust black doctors, the outrage would be thermonuclear.
According to a 2018 Association of American Medical Colleges report, 56.2 percent of all physicians, regardless of specialty, in the U.S. were white. Asian Americans make up the second-largest group at only 17 percent, Hispanic people make up 5.8 percent, and Black people account for 5.3 percent of doctors.
Whites are about 56% of the population so it seems to me that we are "represented" at the right level, if that is important (it's not). The blacks should be pissed at Asians who are dramatically overrepresented, not White guys.
Harrington and three researchers found that while current medical school classes are split evenly — with women leading men in 2017 and 2020 — the percentage of women in orthopedic surgery residencies has remained at 14 percent since 2009.
This is where biology comes into play, something that isn't given sufficient attention in medical school apparently. There is a big difference in gender in the various specialties:
Women dominate in family medicine, pediatrics and OB/GYN. Those specialties also have some of the shorter times in residency, typically three or four years. Orthopedic surgery, Otolaryngology and plastic surgery which are also the top three highest paying specialties have much longer (5-6 year) residencies. Neurosurgeons are looking at a 7 year residency and that is on top of four years as an undergrad and four years of medical school. Not surprisingly the "imbalance" is even higher for some types of surgical specialties.
In general, at best, you complete your residency for any specialty when you are 29 or 30. For the more specialized fields, like Orthopedic surgery or Neurosurgery, you can be 32-33 before you really get out of school and practicing medicine, which also accounts for why they are paid a lot more: the time commitment is more significant.
What do we know about men and women? One thing we know is this: women have a very limited window for having children. A large chunk of a woman's most fertile time is when she is under 18 and once a woman hits 30 her fertility generally drops off dramatically. On the other hand, while I haven't impregnated anyone in a while I am presumably pretty close to as fertile today at 50 as I was when I was 22. So if a woman in medicine also wants to have children, it makes sense that she weighs her own biological clock as well as her future earnings when deciding on a specialty. Lots of people do this. My father was talented enough to go into a surgical residency but he married my mom while in medical school and then had my two sisters while he was studying so he mostly wanted to get out of school and start working, a big reason he ended up in family practice.
That isn't "unjust", it is simple biology. Not everyone wants to wait until they are in their early 30s to start working in their profession and also start a family.
This post has dragged on a lot longer than I intended when I started but my point is the same as it has been in multiple posts on this topic: look with suspicion at black doctors, especially younger black doctors and really especially at younger black doctors in specialized fields. Your life and health are too important to entrust in the care of someone who might have his or her credentials because they happened to be the "right" race to appease the Woke gods.