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.
Pretty gnarly nads there bud. lol That'll spark the female's interest.
Thank you--for making my point. A guy who wrote what I wrote has "nads". What a dickless culture we have now.
I understand. I do not have a previous screen name. I thus am a "newbie" for lack of a better word.
And, if I remember correctly the extreme right of the bellcurve is much more heavily populated by men. Of course the extreme left is too, but I'm not sure that negates my point.
Very few women, per population representation, are flocking to engineering schools. I think you can be of average intelligence and do really well in law school, memory is key there, but engineering requires higher brain function, IMO.
There are relatively few female architects as well, with no female architect coming even close to Wright's status or others of his caliber. Maybe that will happen in time, but I don't see it ever becoming a situation of glut.
Women excel in other areas such as 'instinct', but I don't think they are as smart as men. And when women are young, they are prone to not even use what they have. Hence the old expression, 'you could talk that girl out of her virginity twice with the same line.'
Didn't you say you went to a selective Law School? Don't they have records? Go find it yourself, Torie. Unless you're afraid of what you will find. I suspect that thet is the case because you would had to have been on another planet to have missed the story.
It is possible that you got in on the merits--as I pointed out woman always have-- but it is probable that you indeed took a more qualified guys place, in terms of pure stats. For you to play dumb or to ACTUALLY have missed all of this especially given that you seem to be about my age is frightening.
As another poster pointed out, Indian and other Asians are not the beneficiaries of racial preferences here in the US. If anything they are the victims. The article is about the UK, so I'm not sure what relevance it has to the situation here in the US, if any.
Women are the beneficiaries of gender perferences, which also go under the Orwellian term "affirmative action."
I don't care what color a doctor is, so long as he is GOOD.
FWIW... The doc doing Clinton's surgery tomorrow is a white male:
http://www.columbiasurgery.org/divisions/cardiac/staff_smith.html
You got that one right. The new doc we started seeing is Asian. Great doc, intelligent, and corrected prescriptions the old doc prescribed incorrectly. I am greatful to him for that.
Wow that's very narrow minded of you. How do you know how they got into medical school? Just by looking at them and a person's skin color? I've never filled out any racial categories so if you came to me as a patient exactly how would deduce my race/ethnicity to know whether I'm qualified or not?
How do you know he's white? Did you ask him?
I don't know why but the race of a doctor has never occured to me ever in my life. Then again, I don't go to hospitals often as I do try to take good care of myself.
Nice try, but I'm a WASP male, and since I was from out of state, and had no relatives previously admitted, I was kind of on my own. Cheers.
I think you have something about the extremes of the bell curve, but lawyers and docs don't inhabit the extremes mostly. They tend to be in the 120 to 135 IQ range - smart, but usually just short or quite short of the near genius category.
Bzzzt--wrong. And it's been this way for a while. MEN RULE!
Fair Test's 2001 COLLEGE BOUND SENIORS (approx 1.7 million) TEST SCORES
SAT scores by Gender
Female
502 Verbal
498 Math
1000 Total
Male
509 Verbal
533 Math
1042 Total
I responded later on to that. Stay tuned.
Never did for me either. We were stuck. My 18 year old son needed gall bladder surgery. Our doc retired due to sickness. We needed another doc pronto. This wonderful man helped us out. Sent us to a terrific surgeon. All within one week. Everything was professionally handled. Again the new doc was I think chinese, I'm not sure. It doesn't matter. He is a good doctor. I don't go to hospitals either. Unfortunately, this was necessary.
Maybe genetically considered caucasian but Indians aren't white. I don't know about how the administration treats Indians but that doesn't stop Indian doctors from calling some of my mother's friends niggers (esp. when they're darker than the doctors!).
I don't think it's as much that, as it is that it's much harder to mess around with test scores in engineering. An essay can have major failures in logical reasoning and even elementary spelling and grammar, and be marked "brilliant" if it was written by the "right" person, but marking an incorrect mathematical result as "correct" proclaims the professor doing the marking as an idiot.
An equation is either right or wrong. A software application either works or not. A bridge either stands or falls. That makes engineering a difficult target for affirmative action
"I went to a very prestigious and selective law school, admitted in 1974. At that time, woman made up about 20% of the class.."
What 'nice try'? I simply thought that there was a refrence to yourself in the above line.
By all means, if you are curious, check the data at your own school. The fact that they will do everything they can to withold it from you will pretty much answer any question in the matter.
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