The Future of Medicine Is Not Looking Good
The medical profession seems more interested in racial quotas than patient care.
This is a great example of people not understanding cause and effect.
Allow me to set the table.
It is without question that all academic organizations are desperately looking for that elusive successful black student. They go out of their way to admit blacks, often passing over more qualified and prepared White and Asian students, for no reason other than to stack their student demographics with more black and brown students at the cost of fewer Whites and Asians. This as we have been told for decades is inherently an unqualified good. Whether these students are qualified or suited to their field is irrelevant, all that matters is "representation", a fancy term that simply means "more spots for people who aren't White".
This is even true in academic fields that once were largely immune to this crap, primarily because people die if you screwed up in these fields: engineering, chemistry, aeronautics, especially medicine. If your Uber Eats driver is incompetent you get the wrong sammich. If your neurosurgeon is incompetent? You can end up a vegetable or dead.
Despite this (because of this?), the network of medical schools across America that were once tasked with the initial training of the people who would be the healers of our society have instead fallen into the same mindset of the rest of academia, emphasizing "racial justice" and other nonsensical notions.
It is not debatable that less qualified black and brown applicants are admitted to medical school compared to White and Asian students. The medical school application process is quite different from applying to an undergrad degree program. Prospective medical school applicants use an online portal provided by the AAMC (Association of American Medical Colleges) called the American Medical College Application Service (AMCAS). It is a one stop shop, so your verified MCAT scores are loaded into the system, letters of recommendation, transcripts, etc. You pick the schools you want to apply to and simply submit your application through this portal. It is pretty slick and saves a lot of time, but it also provides a glimpse into the world of medical school applicants and admissions. Here is what we see when it comes to matriculants into American medical schools.
I have shared this before but it is noteworthy and needs to be spread far and wide. What this tells us is that in 2021-2022 the 2,124 black matriculants (those admitted to) medical schools had significantly lower...
- Medical College Admissions Test (MCAT) scores
- Overall GPA
- Science GPA (important to keep pre-med students from loading their schedule with easier non-science classes)
...than any other racial group except American Indians and Eskimos, but their sample size is only 40 matriculants total. Here is a similar graph, I didn't put this together so I haven't verified the information but it looks correct (the MCAT scoring is different now):
Something else I found interesting. According to the 2020 U.S. census, around 18% of Americans self-identify as "Hispanic or Latino" while only around 12% identify primarily as black. The percentage likely goes up for younger people as the black percentage in America has stayed fairly static for a long time.
Around 9.3% of med school matriculants are black while less than 7% are "Hispanic or Latino" even though mestizo applicants have higher overall GPAs, science GPAs and MCAT scores than blacks. Mestizos also apply at much lower rates, from the above data there were 4,039 mestizo applicants versus 6,169 black applicants. Why are blacks being pushed into medical school while mestizos are not?
Something else interesting to note. According to what is reported by the AMCAS, the schools considered the most elite have higher than average percentages of black matriculants. In 2021, Johns Hopkins first year class had 14 black students out of a total of 120, or 11.6%. Harvard in 2021 reported 16 of 164 matriculants or around 10%. Stanford was 15 of 90 or a whopping 16.6%, up from only 7 matriculants just as recently as 2018 and more than half the percentage of Whites with 27 matriculants. The University of Michigan boasted 23 blacks in 2021 out of 170, or 13.5%. Meanwhile our Indiana system shows 33 blacks out of 366, or just 9% (Indiana's medical schools are all combined under Indiana University). What were once the best schools have a higher percentage of black matriculants even though blacks on average have lower scores, and I would be willing to be all the money I have that the black students being admitted to Johns Hopkins and Harvard have significantly lower scores and GPAs than White and Asian students who were passed over.
What this demonstrates is that in medicine, perhaps the most critical academic profession, less qualified candidates are being selected for no reason other than their race while other, more qualified candidates, are passed over also for no reason other than their race. We have personal experience with this.
I wasn't able to readily find statistics for med school graduation rates by race. I suspect that despite overt attempts to push black and brown med school students through the program, that the attrition rate for black and brown medical school students mirrors that of undergrad retention rates by race. I have written about this before, see: Participation Ribbon Egalitarianism Has No Place In Education and also More On Educational Egalitarianism but in a nutshell, even as we have pushed more and more blacks into college, the results continue to be awful with nearly 60% of black undergraduate matriculants having failed to complete their degree after six years.
I am sure the medical school washout rate is much lower but I also am confident that the completion rate for blacks in medical school trails Whites and Asians by a not-insignificant margin.
Back to the article. It is written by Usha Lee McFarling (see giant teeth to the left) and focuses on the high rates of dropping out or dismissal of black residents. As this is 2022, of course the only possible explanation is RAYCISMZ!
A STAT investigation found that Black residents either leave or are terminated from training programs at far higher rates than white residents. The result of this culling — long hidden, dismissed, and ignored by the larger medical establishment — is that many Black physicians have been unable to enter lucrative and extremely white specialties such as neurosurgery, dermatology, or plastic surgery. It’s a key reason these fields have been unable to significantly diversify their ranks even as the total number of residency spots has increased nationally.
Medical school is highly competitive and very stressful, and that is intentional. So is residency. That is by design as being a doctor means making decisions, often very quickly, that have life and death consequences. This is especially true as you get into the more challenging, and therefore more lucrative, specialties. The system is designed to weed out people who can't hack it. It used to be that we appreciated this as a people, no one wants a brain surgeon who freezes up under pressure. My dad told me about his experience in medical school many years ago and it was a lot of messing with their minds to cull the weak. There is less of that now and the medical profession has suffered for it.
The article starts out with the story of Rosandra Daywalker:
Rosandra Daywalker had always excelled. The daughter of Haitian and Jamaican parents in Miami — one an auto parts clerk, the other a nurse — she’d received a nearly perfect score on the SAT, earned a full academic scholarship to the University of Miami, graduated summa cum laude from Morehouse Medical School, and was inducted into the prestigious Alpha Omega Alpha medical honor society.
Then came the icing on the cake: She matched into the elite and highly competitive specialty of otolaryngology, a field she’d fallen for after watching an elegant head-and-neck cadaver dissection in medical school. Standing on the stage during Morehouse’s Match Day festivities in 2015, Daywalker beamed. Her family could not have been more proud. The fact that fewer than 1% of otolaryngologists are Black seemed a distant concern.
A couple of things jumped out at me immediately. She got a "nearly perfect score on the SAT" but what does that mean? It could mean a lot of things but we just simply don't know. Then were are told she received a "full academic scholarship" to the University of Miami, hardly an elite school by any measure, before going on to medical school at Morehouse Medical School. Morehouse is a historically black college and while I don't have access to the full profiles of med schools including average GPA and MCAT scores, I did at one point and you will have to take my word for it that the historically black college medical schools weren't getting the best and brightest.
She finally matched into otolaryngology, basically head and neck, which is a very competitive field. That is when things started to go wrong and we get a clue right away
But when her supportive female program director left, everything changed. Suddenly, Daywalker could do no right. She was told she wasn’t closing clinic notes fast enough, even though she thought she closed them as quickly as other residents. She was told to be on campus all day even though other residents often worked from home. Her previously excellent performance reviews dropped in every area. According to a lawsuit Daywalker brought against UTMB, she was intimidated in the operating room, denied rotations she requested, falsely accused of posing safety issues, subject to faculty members’ hostile comments about Black and Hispanic patients, and retaliated against for raising concerns about how a Black patient was treated.
Her supportive female program director left and now on her own she couldn't hack it. Notice lines like this:
She was told she wasn’t closing clinic notes fast enough, even though she thought she closed them as quickly as other residents.
She *thought* she was closing them fast enough, meaning that she wasn't. Pretty quickly she started to unravel, having panic attacks and then going on medical leave. In other words, the rigors of the program caught up to her after her "supportive female program director" wasn't around to run cover for her. Eventually she left the residency and of course is now suing the University of Texas Medical Branch at Galveston because her failure must be their fault. Also of interest was this blurb from the response to her suit:
Rosandra Daywalker sounds like a perfectly rational and balanced person that I definitely would want performing surgery on unimportant body parts like the head and neck.
The rest of the article are sob stories from blacks who couldn't hack it in their residency programs. There are lots of them, highlights in red mine:
Data on residency dismissal by race have not been routinely collected by national medical organizations and are frustratingly difficult to locate. But the few numbers STAT could find are startling and lopsided: While Black residents account for about 5% of all residents, they accounted for nearly 20% of those who were dismissed in 2015, according to an unpublished analysis by the Accreditation Council for Graduate Medical Education.
That analysis showed that in every field examined, including specialties that have historically been more welcoming to Black physicians such as family medicine and pediatrics, Black residents were dismissed at rates higher than white residents. The same analysis showed that within the field of surgery, 12% of Black residents were dismissed in 2015, while just 2% of white residents were. (ACGME officials cautioned that the analysis should be viewed with caution because the numbers of Black trainees is so small.)
In the more elite medical specialties, the numbers may be even bleaker. A 2020 paper found that people from groups underrepresented in medicine make up 6% of residents in orthopedic surgery, but 17% of those dismissed. In neurosurgery, the numbers terminated some years are higher than 20%, said Owoicho Adogwa, an assistant professor of clinical neurosurgery at the University of Cincinnati who last year co-founded the American Society of Black Neurosurgeons to help stem high attrition rates. Only a handful of those who leave neurosurgery training programs are able to find spots in new ones, he said. Most switch to other specialties, often non-surgical, while some leave medicine altogether, still carrying the massive debt of their medical school loans.
Clearly there is a pattern to be noticed. All across the spectrum, blacks are washing out of residency at much higher rates than Whites. The question is why this is happening. Ms. Usha Lee McFarling thinks she knows, and I am sure she decided this long before she started writing: RACISM!
That is of course not the only possible explanation or even the most plausible.
We have already seen that blacks with lower qualifications are being admitted to medical school in contrast with their White and Asian peers.
Shockingly, when these black and brown matriculants get through the academic portion of schools and away from the protective cocoon of sympathetic faculty and staff in a university setting, they seem to founder. Steve Sailer put it nicely....
Perhaps you could add in that people who have impulse control issues as a group might not be as well suited to occupations where high, constant stress levels are commonplace. Not everyone is suited to every job. I always thought I would follow in my father's footsteps and become a doctor but apparently if you can't stand the sight of blood and are terrible at math, it cuts your medical school dreams short in a hurry. I am not suited to being a doctor or any number of other professions from engineering to the NBA. That isn't unfair, it is simply how it is so I chose to do things that do suit my particular skill set. That is part of being an adult.When you flood the pipeline of medical students with matriculants who are not up to par with their peers, it is inevitable that you will see much higher attrition rates along the way, both in medical school and later in their career path. It is unfair to those washing out, not because it is "racist", but instead because mostly White liberals have set them up to fail and if you wash out of medicine after med school, your chances of paying off those big medical school loans gets much lower.Not to worry though, the same author of the original report published a follow-up report the next day: What will it take to level the playing field for Black residents?You can probably already guess. Her recommendations are....Collect the data, which means requiring onerous reporting for residency terminations by race:(Edjah) Nduom’s group is calling for dissemination of national data on residency termination by race and an accounting of residents who are dismissed or withdraw from individual programs so medical students can avoid programs with a poor history of graduating Black residents — and so these programs can be held accountable.This is rather blatant blackmail. No woke university administration want to see their residency program stand out as one that washes out too many blacks so you can be sure there will be extra pressure to coddle black residents, just as there is throughout the process of becoming a doctor.Next, improving "protections" for black residents....(Vanessa) Grubbs’ group plans to stage a demonstration in August to raise awareness about the unjust dismissals of Black doctors and trainees. What’s needed, she said, are firm due process guidelines, and sanctions from ACGME or even the Centers for Medicaid & Medicare Services, which funds residency programs and used the cudgel of withholding funding to desegregate hospitals in the 1960s.
At the very least, she said, residents should be allowed to have a faculty member or faculty member in the room with them during disciplinary proceedings. “It’s so unfair for a resident to be fighting this by themselves,” she said.Notice the reference to withholding funding. That is the ultimate stick to bring programs that are not sufficiently woke into line, because those funds are what keeps the administrators pulling down those fat salaries. I GOLd (guffawed out loud) at the idea of residents needing "a faculty member or faculty member in the room", nice editing job btw, in the room to hold their hands. A resident has completed four years of undergrad and four years of medical school so generally they are at least 26 years old but can't deal with a disciplinary proceeding without a security blanket. When I was 26 I had been married for six years, been in the workforce for four years and had three children. These residents are incapable of responding to a disciplinary proceeding without a babysitter? I wonder if White and Asian students will get bodyguards or just blacks?Then we need more "support" instead of "weeding out" of residents. The goal again is not to make sure that the best people are proceeding through the program but instead to make sure more blacks complete the programs, whether they should or not. Patients are going to be the ones who will suffer. Finaly they are urged to "not wait" to ask for "help".Shenelle Wilson, an Atlanta pelvic reconstructive surgeon who has set up a program to mentor aspiring urologists, said residents should document everything that happens to them, from achievements and praise they receive, to racist behavior they encounter. “I was raised by a lawyer who made me write down everything,” she said, adding that she used the material to contest claims being made against her, such as not covering shifts for other residents. “I had the receipts. They can be vague in their feedback and criticism, but you have to have 1,000 examples to counter what they say.”
Wilson also advised residents to send regular emails to supervisors asking for feedback and asking specifically if there is anything the resident should address. “If they don’t say anything back, that’s tacit agreement they see nothing wrong,” she said. “Then you’re building your case. You have to craft your story.”
And be sure all of that documentation is going to an outside email, Bradford warned, because one of the first things terminated residents lose is access to their institutional email.The focus seems to be on "building a case" in case you get in trouble instead of focusing on doing your job, writing down every time you actually do your job and badgering supervisors to get documentation that you are in fact doing your job. Maybe if black residents focused more on their position instead of "building a case" to defend themselves from being disciplined, they wouldn't be disciplined so often? Just a thought. Ms. McFarling closes her article with this gem:In recent years, about 8 students have matched into the nation’s roughly 234 neurosurgery residency spots each season. This year, Nduom, who tracked the numbers on Match Day via the many joyous announcements made on Twitter, said a record high 25 Black candidates had matched. In orthopedic surgery, 53 Black students matched this year. These young doctors are about to start their journey toward becoming specialty physicians.
The question is: Will they be allowed to finish?Allowed to finish? Talk about your loaded language, as if evil White doctors are simply pointing at black residents and declaring that they may not pass. What is worse is that many or most blacks believe that is the case.This is in line with the first article where Rosandra Daywalker claimed that her career in otolaryngology was "stolen" from her, rather than her simply not being up to the rigors of the program.Most medical schools and teaching hospitals seem loaded with wokeness so I am confident that they really, really want to have as many black residents as they can but there are certain minimum standards that simply must be met for people in the medical field. I think any rational person would want it that way, you want your doctor to be the most qualified person to care for you.An already outsized and rapidly growing area of investment in the medical field is not going toward medical breakthroughs or improving patient care and outcomes. It is instead inwardly focused on the medical community that is perceived as "too White", a rather odd accusation as virtually all of modern medicine is the result of White physicians and researchers. One unavoidable result of this effort to darken the American medical community is that patients will assume that a black physician is less qualified than a White or Asian physician, knowing that they have been given advantageous treatment from start to finish. That demeans and diminishes the accomplishments of the many black doctors who did made it on their own but even those blacks doctors seem more interested in racial quotas than they are in recognition for their real accomplishments. The other, more ominous result, is that the quality of medical care in America will continue to slide downward. How can it not when less qualified applicants are constantly admitted to medical schools and residents who are not suited to a role are pushed through anyway out of fear by administrators that they will look bad in front of their peers at cocktail parties? Competent medical care is going to become a scarce commodity, so I recommend putting "find a competent middle age White or Asian doctor" on your prepping list.