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.
Can you send me the link to the guidelines you are referring to?
I have been doing clinical trials for a while now and have never had to undertake comparability trials with studies conducted in India (unlike China).
You are partially correct. I know some Indian schools that are as good or better than US schools. Then there are other Indian schools that are worse than Mexican schools.
What you say is true. But we do eat a lot of curry.......
I don't know where you live, but it may be a regional phenomena. I live in New York, and usually my mother's friends only encounter it amongst new transplants.
http://www.fda.gov/fdac/features/2003/303_race.html
Here's one of them that I found. It seems that the FDA thinks about this more than I do?
Curry is good. I've been eating it since I was a baby, and I still don't get why people think it smells *lol*
The best surgeon I ever worked with was Pakistani.
The best OBGYN I ever saw was West Indian.
The best cardiologist I ever worked with was Dravidian.
The problem is that the system of competitive exams with high failure rates has broken down, and nothing has taken its place.
The poster who wrote about Indian med schools is completely wrong-they are among the best in the world, just behind UK, Canada, US and Ireland.
However, they graduate everyone. The valedictorian from Lady Hardinge Medical College in New Delhi can run rings around the average HMS grad-but the last one in that class shouldn't be allowed to practice even in India.
At least half of every US medical school class should not be allowed to graduate-perhaps 2/3.
As long as getting in and paying the tuition guarantees graduation, and as long as passing the USMLE gets a foreign grad a license, our quality problems can't be solved.
The old system of extreme stress training, extreme competition, and honor was invented by white males, but anyone from anywhere could play, and often did.
What do you think of decreasing the work hours of residents?
Simple answer. SOCIALIZED MEDICINE. You want better doctors let them compete and let them charge based on the quality of their services. Why do the British complicate everything?
I think the very idea that residents have "work hours" is an absurdity.
Are the long hours leading to exhaustion in interns and residents largely a myth? If that's true, then there should be concern for nurses who work twelve hour shifts. I've worked twelve hour shifts in life before, but not in a hospital setting and lived through it.
The old system served two important functions:
1) Break quickly those who don't have the right stuff.
2) Identify quickly people who loved medicine so much that they had to be dragged out of the hospital.
We have fleets of people now who can get to practice (which is extremely stressful) without ever, ever being stress tested while they could still be stopped.
This, IMO, is very bad.
I think a lot of people are not interested in hospitals but concerning themselves with private practice. At least that's what I see from the amount of doctor offices cropping up in my area.
Not at all.
I worked 36 hour shifts for two years.
They don't do it any more, of course.
This is the only part that concerns me, neither of the doctors my family uses is white except they are older but it's the change in the type of person interested in becoming a doctor independent of ethnicity. It's all about government regulations, managed care plans, govermnent control.
This is a story that will not hit the MSM.
It is a phase we are going through. It will explode back to the way it was. Men in general are aggressive, and will not continue. I imagine a lot of men holding their tongue are suffering from stress, and it is time they let go.
But at the same time, I'd hate to be one of those patients at the "fag end" of one of those medicine-maniacs' shifts. Even if he or she loved it to death. Hey, wasn't I supposed to get the Celebrex, not the Celexa?
Excellent - I am so pleased to be able to address source documents rather than theories.
1. Asian generally means orientals. There are lots of differences between Caucasians and Orientals. Not many between Indians and Caucasians. In fact, the higher you go in the caste system (oh, no, now I've done it), the closer the similarity. Brahmins are more than 99% genetically identical to Europeans. This is not surprising if you know Indian history.
2. As the FDA says, they want racial data on ALL studies on ALL populations as the demand for identifying genetic basis for efficacy and safety increases. The web page gives examples, and so I won't repeat it here. The web page does not address specifically from which areas/countries it will accept data without bioequivalence studies.
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