February 22, 2013

Burying the Lede

From MedPage Today:
Black Males Not Applying to Med School 
By David Pittman, Washington Correspondent, MedPage Today 
Published: February 10, 2013 
Fewer black men are applying to, accepted to, and attending U.S. medical schools despite an increase in the number of overall applicants and uptick in matriculation among other minorities, a report found. 
Black applicants were the second most populous demographic behind whites in the late 1970s. There were more black applicants than Asians and Hispanics combined. 
But in 2011, first-time African-American applicants were surpassed by Asians and Hispanics, the Association of American Medical Colleges (AAMC) said. 
Compared with 1977, the number of Hispanic applicants more than tripled in 2011 (3,459 versus 955) while first-time Asian applicants went from 966 to 8,941 when comparing 1977 to 2011. 
The number of first-time applications from blacks grew a mere 36% (2,361 in 1977 to 3,215 in 2011). 
In fact, black women outnumbered black men applicants in 2011 nearly two to one, the AAMC said. 
"Black or African-American males are applying to, being accepted to, and matriculating into medical school in diminishing numbers, which speaks to the increasing need for medical schools to institute plans and initiatives aimed at strengthening the pipeline," stated the report, called "Diversity in Medical Education." 
"In response, initiatives have been launched throughout the country in hopes of reversing this trend and producing more graduates. Medical schools are already investing in pipeline programs, but it is clear that additional targeted efforts are necessary," according to the report. 
While first-year enrollment was up 18.4% overall from 2002 to 2012 as the AAMC said last fall, that hasn't translated into a great number of more black men. 
Non-whites accounted for nearly half of U.S. medical school applications in 2011, the AAMC said. The number of applications from whites has dropped roughly 26% since the late 1970s.

So, from this data, we can see that ... hey, wait a minute, what was the second sentence in the 10th paragraph? "The number of applications from whites has dropped roughly 26% since the late 1970s." Isn't that a big deal?

I guess not.

59 comments:

Anonymous said...

Whites? Never heard of them.

rightsaidfred said...

The title here should be:

"Whites disenfranchised from medical school, Black increase hardest hit."

Yet more evidence of who our culture hates.

Future song title: "The Lament of the European Heritage Man."

libertoid said...

Well, MOOCs will fix all that. Right?

Jefferson said...

[QUOTE] "Black or African-American males are applying to, being accepted to, and matriculating into medical school in diminishing numbers, which speaks to the increasing need for medical schools to institute plans and initiatives aimed at strengthening the pipeline," stated the report, called "Diversity in Medical Education."

"In response, initiatives have been launched throughout the country in hopes of reversing this trend and producing more graduates. Medical schools are already investing in pipeline programs, but it is clear that additional targeted efforts are necessary," according to the report.[/QUOTE]

Who cares if Black men are not getting into medical school at a high rate. The number of Mestizos and Asians getting into medical school have significantly increased.

Aren't Mestizos and Asians considered diverse enough ? Or are Black men still considered the benchmark for diversity ?

Are Mestizos and Asians considered honorary Whites now ? Why isn't the increase in Mestizos and Asians into medical school considered good enough for the left wing diversity police ?

Do they prefer that the majority of the diversity in America's medical schools look like Christopher Dorner and not Sung Kang ? And if yes, why is that ?

Why does the left wing diversity police like Blacks more than they like Asians ? Why do Blacks trump Asians in the diversity pecking order ?

Are Blacks considered more vibrantly exotic than Asians in the eyes of the diversity police ?

Hugh said...

the whole article is poorly written, a simple table with then and now numbers and percentages would have done the trick.

Anonymous said...

Hugh, you don't get it. This is the standard way to create propaganda out of simple data -- write in text about isolated features of the data, juxtaposed in such a way as to insinuate false conclusions, relying on the reader to assume the reporter would in fact have asked all the obvious questions. Giving a table of the data is taboo. The bad writing is intentional, good writing would make it too hard to give the wrong impression.

Anonymous said...

Whites don't matter.

Anonymous said...

The number of applications from whites has dropped roughly 26% since the late 1970s.

We know whites were around 88% of the population pre-1965. What do you think they were in 1979? Let's assume they were 80%. Given that whites are around 65% today, that means the white percentage of the population has dropped around 19 percent since then. Yet white applications to medical schools have dropped by 26%!

That's BS.

Anonyia said...

Why do they care so much about black men in particular? I guess the applications of the black women aren't important enough to them.

eah said...

The number of applications from whites has dropped roughly 26% since the late 1970s.

Probably more so for white men than for white women. I also imagine the data for veterinary medical school is less dramatic.

When my employer-provided HMO assigns me an Asian primary care doctor -- it is Asians who are displacing/replacing Whites in medical school -- I either ask to choose my own, in which case I peruse the names and pick one whom I believe is likely to be white, or I let them keep assigning me one until they assign a white doctor (male or female, it doesn't much matter). I do this because I think a doctor ought to be able to communicate in English as least as well as I can. Otherwise I am not comfortable being treated by them. Been there, experienced that. Several times.

Anonymous said...

Is it the proportion of whites has dropped roughly 26% since the late 1970s, or the number? The article says its the number, but that seems wrong.

Anonymous said...

The BBC eight or so years back were complaining that Asians were being rejected for med school - something like 30% of applicants but only 20% of acceptances.

Given that they were only about 5% of their age cohort, the real story was about how they were applying at 6 or 7 times the rates of the Native Brits, but the BBC focused on the 'racism'.

Anonymous said...

As ever, Steve ferrets out the hidden little snippets - the snippets that really matter - and deflates the duplicitous and pompous.
What the author really wanted to do was truimphantly crow out the white decline in med. school applications as the headline and lead paragraph, but, as it happens, that is just a tad bit too strong, even in today's dystopia.
So, in thorough good ol' fashioned US-media style the story is spun, and spun in the way that gives the author Atticus Brooks cooties, ie as a boo-hoo-hoo about nasty whitey bullying poor little ol' blackie.
Even Pravda wa more truthful and original with its lies than the boiler-plate toddler game of white =evil and black=good that is *the* defining standard of the entire US media industry.
Thank God for the internet, I say.

Jefferson said...

[QUOTE]white =evil and black=good that is *the* defining standard of the entire US media industry.[/QUOTE]

Yet the irony is that most people in the left wing media who think white = evil and black = good, live in neighborhoods where people who racially look like Glenn Beck vastly outnumber people who racially look like Al Sharpton.

Anonymous said...

Perhaps that is because black males have realized that med school leads to disaster.

Anonymous said...

Why does the left wing diversity police like Blacks more than they like Asians ? Why do Blacks trump Asians in the diversity pecking order ?

It's because Blacks are such tenacious failures. They do badly in all fields other than sports and entertainment. So redeeming Blacks has tremendous moral significance for liberals! In a way it's kind of a religious thing, only stripped of any supernatural aspect. With sufficient faith, even Blacks can be made whole.

Asians OTOH tend to do rather well, so they are in much less need of redemption. In fact they are kind of an embarrassment in that regard, since their success tends to undercut the standard liberal explanation for Black failure, i.e., White racism. Still, they're not White, so they do get some diversity credit for that.

DYork said...

Black Males Not Applying to Med School

Well there's always television where the black male doctor is iconic in TV shows, commercials or news stories.

Start taking drama classes instead.

Anonymous said...

The late 1970's would be the baby boomers. And white people started having fewer children in the 80's or earlier. That would need to be factored in.

anony-mouse said...

Actually the biggest change (not buried, not even mentioned) is the huge fall in the number of males overall in Med School.

Anonymous said...

My theory is that the decline in applications from black men is due to the reduced prestige of doctors, while the decline in applications from white men is due in large part to the increased difficulty of getting into medical school for them.

Black men are virtually guaranteed of getting into medical school if they are above an IQ threshold that is very high for their demographic (maybe the top 2% of black students could get in if they took the right courses and then applied). These same black superstars, however, have an even stronger guarantee of being paid even more in banking or law. And there aren't many black male superstars left over to apply to medical school. Maybe black women don't as often go in for banking or law because know they would get endless thrills from bossing around ER charge nurses and the like.

Applications from white people have dropped partly for the same reason as they have from black men (lower prestige for the medical profession). The story for whites is a little more complicated, however, because there is not a certain number of seats reserved for whites, as there is for blacks. So while the medical profession is less desirable to upper middle class white folks, it still looks pretty good to sons and daughters of Indian and Asian immigrants, and these children of immigrants often out-compete white students in pre-med classes and in the MCAT. (Rates of application should be and probably are highly correlated with rates of admission because it is very costly in terms of time, effort, and stress to put together an application to medical school, so most people who apply have at least a chance of admission: about 1/2 of first-time applicants each year get in somewhere. People who don't have a good chance of admission often take the advice not to waste their time and money.)

--A white medical student in the US

Anonymous said...

Meanwhile, an African-American gentleman in Michigan has his pornography collection stolen and the local news channel help him share his feelings of loss and violation.

http://www.wzzm13.com/news/article/244365/14/Vintage-porn-collection-worth-7500-stolen

Seeing the three newscasters at the end discuss the matter with deadly seriousness is classic. Maybe they can get the poor guy a scholarship to med school to help him get over his loss?

Anonymous said...

Medicine is one of the few areas where affirmative action can't be crammed down the throats of polite whites. When it is your health on the line, you aren't going to tolerate being treated by a doctor with low test scores who was admitted to med school to make med school administrators vibrantly tingly.

So, a black doctor walks in to examine you. You politely listen to him, then you never go back to him. You probably don't even go back to any other doctors in the same practice. What if there is an emergency and he is the only doctor on call? How do you politely call for an appointment and tell the receptionist you don't want the vibrant doctor? The other doctors in the practice know this and so won't even hire a vibrant doctor.

Blacks won't even go to black doctors. They're no dopes. So the vibrant doctors, even the qualified ones can't build a practice.

In a big corporation, it is different. You hide the incompetence of the affirmative action hire by hiring someone else to do his work. I know I have fulfilled that role. The waste is just a small cost of doing business, and everyone politely doesn't mention it.

irishman said...

Now that it's mentioned, when I went to university, there were a lot of American medical students there, not a huge number, but a noticeable over-representation. Americans were rare everywhere else in college, which was perhaps a third foreign because it was English speaking and they got no fees for Irish students.

I only knew only one American medical student personally. He was from Chicago, said he had no Irish ancestry and said he went to college in Dublin because is cost him a fraction of what it would cost him in America. He was white and gay(which is how I "knew" him). I did not notice anything other than American whites among Dublin college students. My cursory understanding of American university education is that astronomical fees of $40,000 for a good private college get significantly written down based on ability to pay. I'm sure minorities get a big hand too. If The supreme court strikes down racial preferences this could become a new way to implement them via the back door.

What I want to know is when will American whites cop on and realise it's not their country anymore.

I am astonished by even the lack of a BNP minor far-right to fly the flag of resistence in America. You people have it to comfortable for your own good.

Whiskey said...

With two VERY ill family members, I am intimately acquainted with the general hostility and indifference of Asian Doctors, who don't really care much about patients who are not their immediate family going from personal experience: caveat anecdotes != data.

My guess is the largely Asian medical personnel (most nurses at many area hospitals are Filipino now) will make the general coldness and hostility of the modern hospital bitterly resented by most average Whites.

Which I suspect is the entire point of the elites, if you call them the new Mandarins (Megan McCardle) or Gentry (Joel Kotkin) or Superzips (Murray).

jody said...

26%? once PPACA kicks in, you'll see the number of euro american doctors really start to fall.

another unintended consequence of liberal politics. medicine will be seen as a very undesirable career. the pay will go down and down, the hours up and up. and those student loan bills from 10 years of college, yikes. simply crushing. with no good money coming in at the end of it all, to help pay them back either.

too many other opportunities in other fields to even bother considering medicine as a career. once obamacare is fully implemented the number and quality of euro american doctors in the US will decline much more steeply in a couple years than this article's figure of 26% over 40 years.

candid_observer said...

This article raises an issue I've been pondering for a time.

Is there any evidence that, based on genetics, genders among different races perform differently, in terms adjusted for the overall performance for their race?

That is to say, for example, are East Asian women in their performance on math tests more equal to the performance of East Asian men than are white women to white men, again based in part on genetics? This article seems to raise the possibility that African-American women outperform AA men on abilities related to medicine -- which might, in principle, be due to genetic differences.

I can't think of any evolutionary reason to assume that there aren't such differences between genders across races. To throw out a just so story, perhaps the sort of rice paddy agriculture of China, which might be best suited by equal roles for both male and female, would engender fewer differences than the sort of agriculture of Europe. In Europe it may have been that, say, males were more needed for their strength to do work in the fields, which in turn created, across the board, a more dominant role outside, relegating women to a more strictly household role.

Whether that just so story is even remotely correct is far less important here than the sort of possibility it suggests in diverging evolutionary pressures.

I'd be curious to know of any evidence of genetic difference along these lines.

Anonymous said...

Meanwhile, an African-American gentleman in Michigan has his pornography collection stolen and the local news channel help him share his feelings of loss and violation.

I thought porn is a white thing; and that blacks don't need it. Black men are famous for their physical endowments not to mention their sexual and social skills. They are supposed to be able to get what they want with any woman. So why porn?

Pat Boyle said...

I've mentioned this before but it bears repeating.

My doctor works at Kaiser in Oakland. He's Korean. His medical station has offices for about a dozen doctors. All of them are oriental. The names on the door are all Japanese, Chinese, or Korean.

That pattern is true for most of the other medical stations too. I could find no clearly Jewish names. That surprised me.

Most of the patients at Oakland Kaiser are black. Most of the medical functionaries like blood drawers and cast technicians are black too. So in the lobbies there are a lot of black faces on the walls. There will be a picture of a black head of some support department but never a picture of a black doctor - probably because there aren't any.

Twenty years ago I interviewed with Kaiser for over a year to be an Industrial Engineer (didn't get it) so I know a little about their management style. I think they decided to seek orientals for their medical positions for their combination of brains and temperament. Then they set a team to work obscuring their decision from the black patient population. That's fine with me.

I want my doctor to be smart. I want him or her to have an IQ of around 130. At that level there will be more than a 100 orientals available for every black. An IQ of 130 is about two SDs above the oriental mean but three for blacks. In an open and free job market there won't many blacks that qualify for the jobs that require brains.

I think blacks may be able to get into Med School through some affirmative action preference but are unlikely to be hired by a hospital or clinic. This failure of black MDs to get hired eventually feeds back to prospective students.

There are lots of famous black politicians. A few famous black lawyers. But almost no black doctors, famous or not.

Albertosaurus

Anonymous said...

I hate to have to say this, but it is what I feel. If I had a black doctor perform life threatening surgery on me I would refuse his service. I´m sure a few PC SWPLs would do the same. Nobody can be so PC as to put their life in danger.

Pat Boyle said...

It occures to me that you are inadvertantly running a "Turing Test".

The capscha block asks us to prove that we are not robots. So obviously you are exerting a Darwinian pressure on robots to evolve. How long can it be before software robots have good enough visual perceptions that they can figure out these little puzzles? Five years? Less?

I don't worry about that as much as I worry about how long it will be before software robots begin writing good comments?

Albertosaurus

Mr. Anon said...

"Jefferson said...

Why does the left wing diversity police like Blacks more than they like Asians? Why do Blacks trump Asians in the diversity pecking order?"

While they would never admit it, the fact is that institutions seeking "diversity" often fill those slots with east asians, south asians, and hispanics just so they can say that they have hired "diversely" while all the while avoiding dealing with blacks. They know that blacks are often just more trouble than they are worth, so they go for the easier way of scoring diversity brownie points.

Anonymous said...

As a straight white male of Germanic descent, the government and media of this country hate me and are deliberately trying to harm me.

not a hacker said...

when will American whites cop on and realise it's not their country anymore.

I guess you haven't seen Auster's site.

www.amnation.com


Anonymous said...

In the old USSR, the medical profession lost much of its traditional luster as women flooded into the profession, replacing men. This may be happening here in the US as well. We've certainly seen it before: as women enter a particular sphere, its cachet is lowered and it becomes more focused on fashion and social hygiene. Rush Limbaugh calls it "chickification." I've seen it firsthand in journalism. Among new hires, women outnumber men 2- or 3-to-1. And the only blacks are downstairs in the mailroom.

E. Rekshun said...

Anon: "Nobody can be so PC as to put their life in danger."

Not true. Many White females travel to black foreign destinations and get killed. Many others fraternize with and date black males and end up dead. SWPLs often let blacks in their homes or generally let them get too close because they don't want to appear "racist."

There is plenty of news about many of these incidents on truth=telling web sites, and occasionally in the MSM.

E. Rekshun said...

I just finished reading this piece on the dearth of black male med students and clicked on the wide screen to watch House Hunters. Of course, the first couple is a black male med resident and his attractive, shapely Eurasian wife. They're looking for a $400K single-family home in Atlanta. While he is fairly well-spoken, I suggest that the prospective doctor keep his lab coat on while in the OR to conceal his bicep tattoo.

If a space alien landed on earth and watched only House Hunters, he would think that American couples are comprised only of inter-racial and gay pairings.

Tony said...

"There are lots of famous black politicians. A few famous black lawyers. But almost no black doctors, famous or not."
What about Conrad Murray?

Anonymous said...

Nobody can be so PC as to put their life in danger.

A woman was raped in Bakersfield, CA a few years ago because she continued to walk to her car despite the presence of a menacing looking figure standing next to it.

The woman had just left the Babies R Us store on when she noticed a man in a tattered military coat lurking in the parking lot, she told police. The woman told detectives she was worried because the man looked like a thug, but she didn’t want to seem racist.

Anonymous said...

pat/albertosaurus --

Working for Kaiser as a general internist is not among the more prestigious or highly paid physician jobs, and Oakland (though it has its nice parts) is not a place most American Jewish docs would aspire to live. If you look at specialists in more desirable locations and in private practice, you may find more Jewish names. Regardless, you are right that the practice of medicine has declined in status with younger Jews. They are looking for a high payoff for less work, whereas medicine offers a moderate payoff for enormous work. And that is only is going to get worse with health care reform.

Anonymous said...

There are lots of famous black politicians. A few famous black lawyers. But almost no black doctors, famous or not.

And even fewer black engineers, I would imagine.

Anonymous said...

When my wife was pregnant with our fourth child, the doctor that was recommended to us to perform an invasive, possibly dangerous prenatal procedure was a black guy at Cedars Sinai. He came highly recommended, did a great job, and our son was born healthy and happy. Some of you people project way too many of your fears and resentments onto others.

David said...

America tanks - women and minorities hardest hit.

NOTA said...

anon 7:39:

I've had good experiences with black doctors, and one of the pediatricians at my kids' practice is a black woman with whom we're wuite comfortable. (I trust the guy running the practice to evaluate the people he hires.) But affirmative action creates an incentive to discriminate against blacks, on the part of rational patients with no particular dislike for blacks. The average black medical student is not as smart as the average white or Asian medical student, and that's by design, in order to fulfill a social goal of having "enough" black doctors out there.

I would much prefer a world in which everyone's accomplishments are likely to reflect their abilities and work and learning. But as long as we don't live in that world, rational patients are going to have an extra factor to weigh in choosing a doctor. I don't know how much weoght it deserves--probably not all that much, given the licensing and testing doctors go through--but it deserves some weight.

Anonyia said...


"I can't think of any evolutionary reason to assume that there aren't such differences between genders across races. To throw out a just so story, perhaps the sort of rice paddy agriculture of China, which might be best suited by equal roles for both male and female, would engender fewer differences than the sort of agriculture of Europe. In Europe it may have been that, say, males were more needed for their strength to do work in the fields, which in turn created, across the board, a more dominant role outside, relegating women to a more strictly household role. "

European agriculture was fairly varied according to place. In the British Isles a lot of people subsisted off of root crops. There are plenty of medieval illuminations showing women participating in wheat harvests. Also historically women's freedom of movement was higher in Northwestern Europe than in virtually all other civilized places. Viking women ran farms for half the year while men raided. You're forgetting about the selection pressure of war on men, which may have had a larger role in sex differences than agriculture/equality of roles.

David said...

The miniscule number of black doctors - and dentists - I've interacted with were excellent enough to be remarkable, and seemed to have booming practices. Dunno if this is the standard experience. But I live in a very white area...AA docs probably go elsewhere.

>And even fewer black engineers, I would imagine.<

NSBE

I wager it isn't academically helpful, just something else to get members' money. Anecdote time - I knew a member. He was in his 20s and owned the house next door to us...raised hell every weekend. Think of a blaxploitation version of John Belushi in "Animal House" and you've got a precise image. Maybe he was sowing his oats and went on to better things. (Dunno, because we moved, for this and similar reasons.)

E. Rekshun said...

@anon: "Some of you people..." Te he.

Andrew Ryan said...

I attended graduate school at a medical school in Philadelphia. One of our professors was on the admissions board for medical students, and would discuss their biographies (anonymously) with us over lunch and ask us what we thought about them. After mentioning one applicant's MCAT score, someone asked what was a "good" score to get into medical school. The professor replied "Is the student white or black?". We were a little taken aback by his frankness. The answer is 30 for white students and 23 for black students. FYI 23 was the average score and what I rec'd on a practice test once with no preparation.

I hope that either (a) the MCAT doesn't correlate with actual performance or (b) I never have a black doctor.

candid_observer said...

"European agriculture was fairly varied according to place. In the British Isles a lot of people subsisted off of root crops. There are plenty of medieval illuminations showing women participating in wheat harvests. Also historically women's freedom of movement was higher in Northwestern Europe than in virtually all other civilized places. Viking women ran farms for half the year while men raided. You're forgetting about the selection pressure of war on men, which may have had a larger role in sex differences than agriculture/equality of roles."

As I said, it's only a just-so story that I'm throwing out.

But I think it may be a mistake to focus too heavily in any case on the last millenium or two -- while I'm sure a thousand or two years can have some real effect across peoples, it's less likely I think to have had a major effect on the differences between genders, which I'd expect to respond considerably more slowly, given the relative indirectness of differential selection. I suspect that differences between genders based on race mostly go deeper into history.

Anonymous said...

Anon: "Nobody can be so PC as to put their life in danger."

Not true. Many White females travel to black foreign destinations and get killed. Many others fraternize with and date black males and end up dead.


White females love traveling to Africa alone to live and do social work for a few months or years.

Anonymous said...

Steve or another reader:

Can you please explain this article to me? It says that the "number of first-time applications from blacks grew a mere 36% (2,361 in 1977 to 3,215 in 2011)."

The headline and other paragraphs, however, indicate black applications have fallen. Is this a typo? Are black applications up or down?

Svigor said...

The capscha block asks us to prove that we are not robots. So obviously you are exerting a Darwinian pressure on robots to evolve. How long can it be before software robots have good enough visual perceptions that they can figure out these little puzzles? Five years? Less?

Less. They've gone from easy to solve to "toss-up" for humans in the last five years. I think they're pretty close to parity now.

When my wife was pregnant with our fourth child, the doctor that was recommended to us to perform an invasive, possibly dangerous prenatal procedure was a black guy at Cedars Sinai. He came highly recommended, did a great job, and our son was born healthy and happy. Some of you people project way too many of your fears and resentments onto others.

Hey, some people are more comfortable taking risks with their children's and pregnant wives' lives. As to your implied advice, I threw it into the trash bin, where you should have put the PC, untrustworthy advice you received via recommendation.

Anonymous said...

"Why do they care so much about black men in particular? I guess the applications of the black women aren't important enough to them." - To raise the status of black males. And since status is a zero sum game...

Truth said...

"Do they prefer that the majority of the diversity in America's medical schools look like Christopher Dorner and not Sung Kang ? And if yes, why is that ?"

I wouldn't want the majority of diversity in medical schools to look like either a 34 year old policemen, or a 40 year old actor, but maybe that's just me.

Truth said...

" An IQ of 130 is about two SDs above the oriental mean but three for blacks."

Not, technically it's one and a half above "orientals", three above blacks...and two above whites.

"There are lots of famous black politicians. A few famous black lawyers. But almost no black doctors, famous or not."

Oh, I don't know, Sport, the next guy you will be voting for for president qualifies...

http://news.yahoo.com/dr-ben-carson-president-ill-leave-god-130554763--abc-news-politics.html

Truth said...

"I would much prefer a world in which everyone's accomplishments are likely to reflect their abilities and work and learning."

We have that world, it's called "The Medical Bar Exam."

Truth said...

"Not true. Many White females travel to black foreign destinations and get killed."

Yep, and don't even need to get on a plane!

Truth said...

"If a space alien landed on earth and watched only House Hunters, he would think that American couples are comprised only of inter-racial and gay pairings."

LOL, he'd think the same thing if he read this site for a week.

Anonymous said...

Funny, I live in one of the world's major centers of medical excellence, and there are no problems here; you'd be hard-pressed to find a native-born black male doctor here. Harvard may be the font from whence bad PC baloney springs, but Harvard Medical School isn't a big part of it. Mass General, Beth Israel, etc. are probably 95% white and Asian doctors, and because the teaching hospitals get federal dollars, the support staffs are almost exclusively black and Hispanic.

But the hospitals in Boston attract the best and brightest in the world, so it would be difficult to marble in unqualified AA hires. I had minor surgery at Mass General a couple years ago, and the team was a British-Indian surgeon assisted by a Korean woman, anesthesia by an drop-dead gorgeous woman from Iceland, and three nurses, colorful Irish broads from Southie.

It's an absolute truth that a majority of black patients DON'T want black doctors, or nurses for that matter. My girlfriend is a nurse case manager at the "urban" hospital (best trauma unit in New England; Mass General transfers gunshot victims to them) and her biggest issue is straightening out problems between black patients and the under-trained yet arrogant Haitian nurses. Almost all her minority doctors are foreign. Her main job is setting up discharge plans, and her black patients from Boston are always asking for rehabs and skilled nursing facilities outside the city. That is, if Medicaid will pay for it!

Anonymous said...

"The BBC eight or so years back were complaining that Asians were being rejected for med school - something like 30% of applicants but only 20% of acceptances."

A lot of Asian students under parental pressure to go to medical school will be quite happy with the high rejection rate for Asian students - it's saves them from having to tell their parents they don't want to go.