Moved Medical school admissions and race - was: VP pick

[starwater]

First - may I remind you that they are not “girls”. They are women. They are adult, post-pubescent humans. It’s time to stop infantilizing women by calling them children.

"Girl" is commonly used in the English language for young adult women.

It is wrong to do so, disrespectful, lacking respect and dignity.

 

[Shadowy Man]

First - may I remind you that they are not “girls”. They are women. They are adult, post-pubescent humans. It’s time to stop infantilizing women by calling them children.

"Girl" is commonly used in the English language for young adult women.

It is wrong to do so, disrespectful, lacking respect and dignity.

And so it tells you something interesting about society that it is so “commonly used”. Especially when “boy” does not seem as commonly used for young adult men.

 

[Gospel]

First - may I remind you that they are not “girls”. They are women. They are adult, post-pubescent humans. It’s time to stop infantilizing women by calling them children.

"Girl" is commonly used in the English language for young adult women.

It is wrong to do so, disrespectful, lacking respect and dignity.

And so it tells you something interesting about society that it is so “commonly used”. Especially when “boy” does not seem as commonly used for young adult men.

Especially not young Black adults.

 

[stanley]

OMG look at all of those unqualified white boys getting in ahead of Asians!

How do you figure? If you look at the numbers vs. population sizes, whites are significantly underrepresented despite having grades and scores much better than blacks and Hispanics.
Both Asians and whites are being discriminated against by med schools to the benefit of blacks and Hispanics with mediocre grades and scores.

Whites are only under-represented because of the over-representation of Asians, while Blacks and Hispanics are even more under-represented. Whites are actually over-represented relative to Blacks and Hispanics. There are 4.6 times as many whites compared to blacks in the US, but there are 5.2 times as many whites in med school. Similarly, there are 3.07 times as many whites as Hispanics in the US, but 6.4 times as many whites in med school.

And Toni's reference to the unqualified whites is because their average MCAT CPBS score is lower than Asians, and that difference is in fact highly statistically significant at p < .0001.

 

[stanley]

Blacks are highly under represented among med students and doctors. This is a problem, because there is evidence that black patients have superior health outcomes when treated by black doctors. There are multiple factors for that, one being that a black doctor is more likely to be familiar with the typical lives of black people, and understanding of a patient is important. Even infant mortality rates are impacted.

Another factor is that black people often have a distrust of the medical community for very rational reasons, they have been abused by highly unethical practices in medicine and medical research. The most famous but far from only example being the Tuskegee study (which was still happening into the 1970's). where poor black men were promised free medical care for being in a study, but were not told they had syphilis and were given fake treatments so their disease went untreated while they assumed they didn't need to see any other doctors because they were getting care already. It is no mystery why black men were selected to be deceived in order to examine long term effects of untreated syphilis. The extreme lack of ethics in that research is what led to the creation of the national internal ethics review board system that now must approve all research on human subjects.

And yes, black people know about it, surveys show 80% of blacks know about Tuskegee, and it has contributed to a culture of distrust. Evidence suggests that such distrust is somewhat lessened when blacks are treated by a black doctor, which lead patients to disclose more personal information to their doctor and follow doctor advice.

https://www.aamc.org/news/do-black-... we say that if,of physician and patient race.

That all matters for this med school issue, because it is highly plausible that the health benefits of having more black doctors outweigh any impact of lower entrance exam scores on the quality of the doctors post med school. And improving actual health outcomes of people is the most important basis for med school admissions decisions.

 

[thebeave]

First - may I remind you that they are not “girls”. They are women. They are adult, post-pubescent humans. It’s time to stop infantilizing women by calling them children.

"Girl" is commonly used in the English language for young adult women.

It is wrong to do so, disrespectful, lacking respect and dignity.

The Golden Girls and That Girl would like to have a word with you.

 

[Jimmy Higgins]

 

[TomC]

Yeah, I was definitely dating myself when I liked the post.

Oh well, get off my lawn! I'm busy yelling at clouds.
Tom

 

[Derec]

The Golden Girls and That Girl would like to have a word with you.

How about New Girl?

It's more recent (2010s).

 

[Derec]

"Girl" is commonly used in the English language for young adult women.

It is wrong to do so, disrespectful, lacking respect and dignity.

The Left just loves to police language in most weird of ways ...

 

[stanley]

Has anyone mentioned that the reason we need more Black doctors is because there is lots of data that shows that it's common for Black people to be treated unfairly by a good percentage of white doctors? I'm going to post one link that explains this but I've read many during my days as a nurse. I did know one white doctor who was outstanding when it came to how he treated his Black patients. He even chose to practice in a low income Black neighborhood and walked with me once to visit a home health patient but people like him are rare. I've known a couple of incompetent Black doctors but I've known lots of nasty incompetent white doctors too, so bad doctors come in all ethnicities. But, even if the grades and MCAT scores are in some cases a little bit lower, there is a need for more Black doctors, especially in a state like Ga., where over 30% of the population is Black. Grades and MCAT scores don't determine if someone will be a great physician, regardless of ethnic background. Compassion and keeping up to date with one's area of practice are far more important and sadly, there are too many providers who lack compassion and don't seem to keep up to date with the newest things in medicine. It's complicated.

Note that the idea that black patients being treated unfairly has been shown to be mostly a socioeconomic confounder. Blacks and whites do not show statistical differences when you compare their treatment at the same facility. But underfunded inner city facilities treat everyone worse that decently funded suburban facilities.

That is not true.

It’s been explained to you more than once in this thread that it is not discrimination to use more criteria than GPA and MCAT scores to admit students

Nobody is arguing against that. But race and ethnicity, nor gender, should be among those criteria.

and that the differences in scores are small and not predictive of who will make a good physician.

The differences are not small and they are predictive of med school performance.
The Validity of MCAT Scores in Predicting Students' Performance and Progress in Medical School: Results From a Multisite Study
Take this paper. I do not have access to the full text, only the abstract.

Sorry, there's a major confounder apparent in the abstract: Researchers examined data from 17 U.S. and Canadian MD-granting medical schools for 2016 and 2017 entrants who volunteered for the research and applied with scores from the current MCAT exam.

Seems pretty low value as the sample of those who volunteered is probably non-random.

IE you don’t like the results…,

Huh? The study supports my side. I'm just saying it's got a bad enough confounder that I don't think it's decent evidence.

Actually it doesn’t.

If it's predictive of med school performance you can't say the difference doesn't matter.

It's just experience has taught me that when faced with any sort of research showing a social effect look for confounders. There are usually some obvious ones. (Not just a matter of race. Look at all the things that are supposedly related to living longer. There are the real ones, but the vast majority are because the action excludes many of the sickest. Moderate alcohol consumption appears to have been found to be in that category recently--because it lumps the non-drinkers with the can't-drinkers.)

These two studies do control for pretty much all other possible confounders, and still show that black people have better health outcomes when treated by black doctors.

The first one focuses on infant mortality. For many reasons black infants have higher mortality rates than whites. But when black mothers and their infants are treated by black doctors, the infant mortality rate difference is cut in half. They control for insurance provider, which hospital, time of year, and the 65 most prevalent predictors of infant mortality.

The second study is a longitudinal study over 10 years examining 1600 different US counties for the life expectancy and mortality rate differences between whites and blacks in those counties (every county in the USA with at least a single black PCP).
"Between-county influence results indicated that greater Black workforce representation was associated with higher life expectancy and was inversely associated with all-cause Black mortality and mortality rate disparities between Black and White individuals."

"Black workforce representation" was measured by dividing the % of PCP in a country who are black by the % of residents of that county who are black (so equal representation among PCPs and the population would be 1.0.

In addition to controlling for difference in total number of doctors, they controlled for all the following: rural or urban designation, percentage living under the poverty threshold, percentage of uninsured individuals, median age, percentage who identified as Hispanic, ratio of men per women, percentage with less than a high school degree, median home value, unemployment percentage, percentage of Medicare-enrolled individuals, age-adjusted percentage of adult tobacco smokers, percentage of adults with obesity, average daily density of fine particulate matter (air pollution), and number of hospital beds.

Also, since they are also comparing within-county differences between whites and blacks, that eliminates between county confounds for those analyses.

They not only observe that counties with higher black representation among PCPs have better health outcomes for blacks and reduce the outcome gap between blacks and whites within the same county, but that in years when a county saw an increase in black representation, mortality for blacks went down, then back up when that representation declined again.

In addition to this strong evidence of better health outcomes for blacks with access to black doctors, see my post above on this page about the evidence that black patients who have access to black doctors are more willing to seek medical care, honestly disclose to their doctor, and follow doctor advice. This is a result of both general culturally widespread white supremacy that leads to their distrust, and also the long and recent history of abhorrently unethical (nazi-like) experimentation on blacks causing the pain and death (with Tuskegee being just one example).

 

[laughing dog]

"Girl" is commonly used in the English language for young adult women.

It is wrong to do so, disrespectful, lacking respect and dignity.

The Left just loves to police language in most weird of ways ...

My mother (who no one would have thought was part of "the Left") took being called a "girl" as an insult back in the 1980s. But hey, you keep doing you.

 

[starwater]

"Girl" is commonly used in the English language for young adult women.

It is wrong to do so, disrespectful, lacking respect and dignity.

The Left just loves to police language in most weird of ways ...

Not weird in the least. It's called respect.

 

[Shadowy Man]

"Girl" is commonly used in the English language for young adult women.

It is wrong to do so, disrespectful, lacking respect and dignity.

The Left just loves to police language in most weird of ways ...

So, you think the Right doesn’t police language? Or only in “not weird” ways?

 

[Toni]

You don’t have to be a person of color to have doctors under treat your pain or other symptoms. Just female. And it’s worse if you are a woman of color. Black and Native American women have the highest rates of maternal mortality.

While I do agree that women's symptoms tend to get dismissed there's the very real issue of what facility. An awful lot of it comes down to the quality of care they have access to, not whether doctors are treating them differently.

Speaking from personal experience, your suppositions are absolutely incorrect. Data does not support your 'guess' either.

 

[Toni]

First - may I remind you that they are not “girls”. They are women. They are adult, post-pubescent humans. It’s time to stop infantilizing women by calling them children.

"Girl" is commonly used in the English language for young adult women.

Girl is commonly used between friends who are women. In other people's mouths, it is demeaning and insulting and intended as such.

 

[Don2 (Don1 Revised)]

The Left just loves to police language in most weird of ways ...

...says the guy who flipped out when Trayvon Martin's mother called him her child.

 

[Rhea]

"Girl" is commonly used in the English language for young adult women.

It is wrong to do so, disrespectful, lacking respect and dignity.

The Left just loves to police language in most weird of ways ...

A person has some choices when people gently tell them that certain language is demeaning and disrespectful.

• They can realize for the first time that their words make people feel demeaned and disrespected, and respond with a desire to stop being someone who disrespects and demeans, and decide to change their language, since that is free and easy when one wants to,
• They can realize the first time and try to change, yet keep making mistakes, but each time be genuinely contrite and say so, and slowly get better over time,
• They can realize for the first time, but think that being someone who is disrespectful and demeaning is less bad than putting in effort and therefore continue it, continuing to carelessly demean and disrespect,
• They can be utterly stumped by the idea and truly not have any understanding of what’s going on and thereafter be confused and hurt by why everyone seems to “get on their case” about it
• They can realize for the first time and quickly decide that respecting people who are women has no value and thence continue to use the words whenever they feel like it because they don’t care about the consequences,
  • This group will usually come up with a bunch of edge cases that they think give them permission to continue using the words without censure, because they think of women as a monolith anyway, so if one woman wants it, all women want it, thereby showing themselves to be someone who despises and blames women for all that is wrong in their world, instead of just accepting that they hate women and becoming gay.
• They can realize that it is disrepectful and demeaning and revel in this power, throwing it around as often as possible to feast on the discomfort of their listeners

It’s really very interesting watching which response different people choose, about whether or not to be a mean person. For some, being a mean person is a feeling they like. So they be they.

 

[stanley]

Figure 11. Percentage of U.S. medical school matriculants planning to practice in an underserved area by race/ethnicity, academic year 2018-2019

Figure 11 displays the percentage of 2018-2019 matriculants planning to practice in an underserved area by race/ethnicity.

www.aamc.org

And I also do not think that justifies discriminating against white and Asian students. Regardless of one's declarations when applying to med school, where one works depends on how many jobs are open in certain areas. You can't hire a physician at Bumfuck Medical Center unless that position exists and is funded. And if it exists and is funded, somebody will be hired for it. Sure, most people will apply in desirable urban areas, more than positions are available, and those that don't get hired will apply elsewhere. Whether or not they indicated desire to work in Bumfuck.

The goal of medical schools is not to make you feel warm and fuzzy about a delusional belief that the USA is or ever has been anything resembling a meritocracy. They exist to ensure that the public is being optimally served by medical professionals, and that means the whole public. Bumfuck USA and poor areas of almost all cities have a dangerous shortage of doctors that is costing health and lives. And it is yet another of the countless ways that blacks are fucked by the still continuing long term impact of centuries of violent oppression, not just informally, but written into law up through most of the 20th century, into the lifetimes everyone over 60 and the parents or grandparents of almost every American alive today.

If allowing more blacks into med school with slightly lower admission scores increases doctors in those underserved areas, then it is not only okay, by an ethical requirement of med schools to do so.

In addition, there is the fact supported by strong evidence (see my recent posts) that black doctors in particular are able to provide superior medical care to black patients from infancy through end of life. And black doctors are massively under-represented (far more than white doctors). So, that also justifies admitting black students with slightly lower scores.

Finally, note that the prior stats I presented about your original data shows that white people are being admitted at the expense of Asian students. That is, if your going to to use the same data to claim blacks are admitted at the expense of whites and Asians.

 

[thebeave]

The Golden Girls and That Girl would like to have a word with you.

How about New Girl?

It's more recent (2010s).

There's also The Gilmore Girls (which I never watched), but I think at least some of the "girls" in the show were adults.