Posted on 09/05/2004 4:22:12 PM PDT by freedom44
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.
The former.
I think you can work twelves forever with twelve hours off.
That's what I think it is --- many of the foreign doctors come from countries that have socialized medicine and are pretty comfortable with the idea of it.
American doctors don't want the restrictions being placed on them --- restrictions that basically turn them into technicians looking up a set of managed care plans they must use.
But it's like what you said earlier --- that kind of schedule the residents used to face weeded out the less committed kinds.
Some good things that could come out of all this is that people should begin to realize their own health care isn't something they should turn over to a government beaurocrat or the clerks at their HMO or even to a physician. There isn't a magic pill that will take care of the effects of lifelong lack of exercise and wrong kind of eating. Most health problems and diseases can be avoided but it's something people have to do for themselves.
A group of feminist editors and reviewers excoriated the work and demanded that he rewrite the work to include famous women scientists.
At first, he simply informed them that there were no famous women scientists but they would have none of that and harangued him incessantly.
Finally, he gave in, went back to his research and came out with a second book chock-full of famous women scientists that no one had ever heard of.
Isaac, sorry; it was my father's name also, my fingers are bad.
Well, yes, but I didn't want to mention the garlic smell. ;>)
Thanks :)
Some links to back up my comments:
*Please note I am including liberal sources here, too. I invite you to make your own conclusions...same as I have.
http://lists.ucla.edu/pipermail/religionlaw/1997-August/009615.html
http://aad.english.ucsb.edu/docs/dmartin.html
http://www.adversity.net/FRAMES/Editorials/48_PatrickChavis.htm
http://www.uiowa.edu/~030116/116/articles/heriot.htm
Couldn't agree more. Not only are males not going to medical school any more, but they're not going to college in general like they used to.
That's not necessarily a bad thing. I've been out of college for 10 years, and from my experience the guys that never set foot on a college campus make just as much if not more $$$ than any college grads I know.
The craftsmen, tradesmen, small business owners, mechanics, salesmen, HVAC guys, etc etc, make just as much money and have a TON more job security than any college grad stuck in the corporate America grind.
Case in point....
I know of a guy that makes approx. $75,000 per year. We both live in semi-rural Southwest Virginia, so $75K a year is pretty good money. Well, he's the guy that sat next to me when we took the SAT tests in high school. We weren't great friends or anything, but we knew each other. I noticed at the time that his hands were dried up and peeling, he said that's because of the chemicals in the plant where he works. I snickered to myself "haha, you're a redneck loser, you'll work in a factory your whole life, and I'm going to college....hahaha."
Well, he's still working at that same place, 14 years and going strong. Now's he's the plant manager or something like that. I went to college, then the Army, got out and job hopped after layoffs, downsizing, etc.
Who's the smart one now? Why the heck did I bother with a $30,000 college education?
I don't think it's worth it any more. People can be just as successful, usualy a LOT more successful, by skipping college and getting out there and working, starting a business, learning a trade, etc.
Just my opinion, of course. :)
Or (according P.D.Q Bach's "The Seasonings"):
To curry favor,
Favor curry.
Thanks for the links
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