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.
So what is your solution? Lower the standards even more for black students? And what if that means that they are more likely to flunk out of med school or not pass their board exams? Institute "race-conscious" policy for STEP too?
Because lower grades and MCAT scores also beget lower STEP scores.
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From:
The impact of United States Medical Licensing Exam (USMLE) step 1 cutoff scores on recruitment of underrepresented minorities in medicine: A retrospective cross-sectional study
Note that the authors are in full favor of the "more diversity" doctrine, but even they had to admit the facts.
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What your article shows is that about 87% of blacks pass the USMLE board exams on the first attempt, despite being admitted to med school with lower scores. And other data show 70% of people who fail and retake it pass. So, we're talking about maybe 4% who won't get licensed, which is not a big deal.
The article also showed that the numerical score difference between whites and blacks is small, only 0.35 standard deviations. The article stressed that if residencies use their own score cut offs that are higher than pass/fail , they will exclude many under-represented doctors, pointing to the same evidence I did that this will cause lack of doctors and poorer health in poor and minority communities. Well, guess what happened two years ago? The USMLE only now reports pass/fail scores.
As for flunking out of med school, only about 5% of blacks currently do so, despite being admitted with lower scores. So, a slight reduction in scores admitted is unlikely to increase failure rates more than 1% or so. Plus, the evidence that black doctors, despite having lower scores, increase the health and reduce mortality of their black patients shows that those scores have no meaningful impact on whether they become good doctors.
The right way to get more blacks into medicine is to close the achievement gap, not to apply different standards to black students. That's the soft bigotry of low expectation that has become so endemic on the left.
Only racists who ignore the still existing impacts of racism and pervasive white supremacy on black achievement would think there is anything wrong with looking beyond small differences in achievement scores when gatekeeping who can attempt to acquire the knowledge and skills to be a doctor and solve the crisis of doctor shortages that is killing people.
Of course, we should also strive to close the achievement gap caused by centuries of oppression and racism. but the right denies the reality of the causes of that gap and of refuses the efforts needed to help close it, which includes funneling additional (and yes, disproportionate) resources into those communities victimized for centuries and well into the late 20th century very disproportionate lack of resources.
But the gap is the result of centuries and will take a long time even with direct strong efforts at the grade school level. We shouldn't let black communities suffer for a couple centuries, though most on the right could care less about that.
And I find this idea that black patients should be treated by black doctors basically segregationist.
Yeah, I'm sure that is what bothers you. You're not fooling anyone. No one is suggesting black patients are only allowed to see black doctors, which would be segregationist. They are suggesting their should before black doctors available, first so that there are any doctors available for black people since white doctors are less willing to serve those communities, and second so there is a choice of doctors for patients to choose from, so they have better health outcomes. The actual lives of black people currently getting poor healthcare is more important than your pretense of being upset about what you wrongly construe as segregation.
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.
That's called prejudice. I do not think aspiring medical students should be discriminated against on the basis of race becasue of bigotry of some black patients.
No, it is called rational evidence based distrust based on objective fact. They are not prejudging, they are post judging after the white controlled medical industry has proven itself to have no regard for black lives. It will take a lot of counter evidence until they have rational basis to believe that is no longer true.
The most famous but far from only example being the Tuskegee study (which was still happening into the 1970's).
This study ended in 1972, more than half a century ago. Why should some 24 year old be punished over it?
No 24 year olds are being punished for it, stop you insane narrative. What is happening is blacks continue to suffer because of they have been given no reason to trust that anything has changed, and the rabid white supremacy that is the heart of the MAGA movement gives them plenty of evidence that white supremacy is no less today than when that and other medical studies were killing black people. Plus, that was just one of dozens of examples.
AAMC is an organization that is fully committed to racial preferences and will jump on anything to justify that.
AAMC is committed to committed to something you and MAGAs care less about, black people having access to effective live saving health care.
And the AAMC is just citing several peer reviewed published studies that clearly support the point, but I'm sure you didn't bother to read it because why bother with evidence when you have dogma.
