Posted on 09/04/2004 6:23:20 PM PDT by UnklGene
Why you should worry that there are fewer white male doctors - (in the UK)
By Dr Theodore Dalrymple (Filed: 05/09/2004)
The medical profession used to be the preserve, give or take an interloper or two, of the white middle class male. Surgeons were supposedly like Sir Lancelot Spratt, as played by James Robertson Justice, and general practitioners like Dr Cameron, as played by Andrew Cruikshank. Indeed, the exclusiveness of the medical preserve was one of the criticisms levelled at the profession as a whole by reformists. Whether white males served the population well or badly was quite beside the point: they were seen to be operating an old boys' network in order to retain their privileges.
Not for very much longer. White males, despite being 43 per cent of the population, comprise only 26 per cent of medical students. Whether you think this is a good, bad or indifferent thing depends on how seriously you take the idea that the ethnic composition of every rank in society ought exactly to coincide with the ethnic composition of society as a whole. Should you or shouldn't you worry about the fact that there are no professional footballers of Indian subcontinental origin, or that there are so few Chinese prisoners in our jails?
Irrespective of whether it matters, what accounts for the forthcoming decline in the numerical, and no doubt intellectual, predominance of white males in the British medical profession?
There are two possible explanations, which are not mutually incompatible. The first is the decline in academic performance, relative to other groups, of young white males. If places in medical schools are allocated strictly according to examination results, then any such decline would be reflected in their numbers in the student body. And it is certainly possible that the young white male subculture in this country is not conducive to concerted academic effort. Studiousness is not, after all, among the principal characteristics of the new laddishness. The children of several (though not by any means all) ethnic minorities, as well as girls, strive harder at school, and therefore succeed better, than the young white males.
There is also the possibility that medicine as a profession is a less attractive career than it once was. Certainly, the number of applications for each place at medical school is falling, which would suggest that such is the case. Clever, diligent white males, who once might have become doctors, prefer to do something else. The relative loss of white males is actually a sign of the decreasing prestige of medicine as a career.
Certainly, this decrease is a trend that successive governments have tried to encourage: and, unlike most government efforts, it seems to have achieved its aim. Governments are afraid of doctors, because they are held in high esteem by the public, and they might at some time seriously oppose the government. If the government cannot improve the health service, it can at least destroy the medical profession, which is the next best thing from its slightly peculiar standpoint.
Patients have therefore been encouraged officially to regard themselves as customers or consumers, rather than as people seeking advice and help from trusted professionals. And more and more, doctors are expected not to think for themselves and do what they think is right, as members of true learned professions should, but to act as part of the conveyor belt delivering central government policy to the population. They are technical clerks.
Not only are the financial rewards of medicine declining compared with other jobs, but the risks for doctors are growing ever greater. The public is litigious; the regulatory bodies are ever more bureaucratically intrusive and demanding; even the Crown Prosecution Service is adding its mite by insisting on prosecuting doctors more frequently than ever before for criminal negligence. Above all, doctors are increasingly beholden to bureaucrats, who are often their intellectual and moral inferiors.
Who wants to go through a lengthy and arduous training (though, further to reduce the prestige of the profession, the Government is trying to reduce the length and thoroughness of British medical education), only to find that he or she is simultaneously disrespected by the patients, the administrators and the Government, and subject to permanently mistrustful regulatory bodies of doubtful integrity? No wonder an ever larger proportion of the doctors in this country wish they had never gone into medicine in the first place, or fail to practise it once they have qualified, treating their medical degrees as people once treated their degrees in philosophy, history or literature as a sign of general intellectual competence rather than as the beginning of a career in the subject. While our doctors drop out, of course, doctors from poor foreign countries drop in. This is our ethical foreign policy.
No doubt those who see the whole of history as a tale of oppression by dead white males, from Plato to Ronald Reagan, will rejoice at or applaud the demise of the socially prominent white male doctor. But even they, when they are ill, will want their doctors to be as good as possible. There is nothing quite like serious illness, after all, for unmasking the frivolity of ideology. And if the social prestige of medicine is destroyed, it is quite likely that its quality will follow shortly afterwards. It is not that white males necessarily make the best doctors, of course; but if we don't want to be doctors, then you are in trouble.
A preview of what is to come here.
And don't think that electing Bush is a way to avoid it. If public sentiment turns overwhelmingly in favor of bureaucratic health care, either he'll be powerless to stop it or the GOP will lose in 2008.
That was too great an applause line in his speech. Bush won't go socialized.
I don't think he will. But if the public demands it, there might be enough support in the legislature to overturn whatever he might veto.
You know as well as I do that there are people like John McCain in the Senate.
In many places in rural America, the future is now. Example: East Liverpool , Ohio. Lots of Indian and Pakistani MDs. Very few Americans want to build a career in a burnt out steel town.
"That was too great an applause line in his speech. Bush won't go socialized."
Well, a speech is just words. I don't know how you can look at his actions - A new prescription drug entitlement from the government - and conclude he won't go socialized..... he surely isn't doing anything to stop the expansion of socialized medicine (medicare/medicaid), or slow it down, so I think that your conclusion has no material basis in fact.
"In many places in rural America, the future is now. Example: East Liverpool , Ohio. Lots of Indian and Pakistani MDs. Very few Americans want to build a career in a burnt out steel town."
But on the plus side, they have more experience treating medical disorders more common in the third world......we're gonna need that sort of experience.
That isn't a preview of what is to come. It is what already is in the US.
True, and I'll be comforted if I land in a rural ER with malaria or yellow fever. But will he be ablr to treat my MI when I have one?
Sorry--wasn't thinking so much decline of socialized medicine as RISE in tort-reform, esp. of medical & drug liability claims.
I went to a doctor back in April 2004 who couldn't help me because he couldn't understand my midwest accent and I couldnt understand his Pakistani accent.
Between our awful immigration policies and our lack of tort reform, this is what we've gotten.
There is another problem with non-American doctors. We had an Indian (from India) doctor in Fremont, Nebraska a couple of years ago. He did things like he did in India -- like reusing needles, stretching (watering down) medicine, getting two or more shots from a single shot bottle, etc. Unfortunately there was an outbreak of hepetitis at his clinic. About 200 people were affected. Several of them died. He ran back to India and stayed there. There was very little insurance and he had virtually no assets here. The people infected by him are SOL.
>>We had an Indian (from India) doctor in Fremont, Nebraska a couple of years ago.
See, this is a situation where the law of supply and demand should be applied.
The unfortunate events should be chalked up as a learning experience.
Remove the demand.
bttt
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