Black Med Students At Former Slave Quarters: This Is About Resiliency

December 20, 2019 4:12 PM

"I wanted this photo to just show: We're here," Ledet says of the plantation photo. "This place is meant to destroy us. This place is meant to devalue us. But we here."

Margaret Lawrence, 105, Dies; Pioneering Black Female Psychoanalyst
She overcame many hurdles, including rejection by Cornell’s medical school, which told her a black man before her “didn’t work out.” (He had died.)

The Shortage of Black Male Doctors Is Medicine’s Real Emergency
Here’s what Temple and other Philadelphia colleges and universities are doing to put more black men in white coats.

The Struggle and Triumph of America's First Black Doctors
African American physicians have dealt with distrust and misperceptions for more than a century.

posted by jj's.mama (14 comments total)

I've been seeing this make the rounds on social media and it's so powerful - thank you for providing the backstory! The Philly Mag link is also very good. Here's a series of tweets that I've also seen going around lately - an anecdote from a black male doctor that explains very simply and vividly why it is important to have black men in medicine.
posted by sunset in snow country at 4:31 PM on December 20, 2019 [9 favorites]

This is so good and so powerful. Thank you for posting.
posted by storytam at 6:06 PM on December 20, 2019

Thank you for sharing this.
posted by PMdixon at 6:07 PM on December 20, 2019

Interesting that of the group, only two are men, per the link above.
posted by Windopaene at 6:10 PM on December 20, 2019 [1 favorite]

Margaret Lawrence sounds like a wonderful person, great stories and thanks for sharing.
posted by Meatbomb at 7:01 PM on December 20, 2019

Yeah, I’ve been seeing this posted everywhere by my medical colleagues. It’s nice that they quoted Russell Ledet who organized this and is enrolled in a joint M.D./M.B.A. program. Because it’s not enough to get African Americans into medicine as physicians. They are needed as physicians and leaders of health care organizations. Interestingly, my very old school very white very ivory tower alma mater had a program to recruit a develop minorities from inner city DC to become physicians and most ended up in leadership positions. But increasingly, having an M.D. in the U.S. means you are just a revenue generating cog in a big corporate machine and unless you are uniquely gifted with strong leadership skills and a vision, you need that management degree to actually move and shape health care in the direction that your background and your training is informing you to move it.

Healthcare in the US remains a terribly impractical financially imprudent career decision. Fortunately, one side effect is that you still see some incredibly gifted people going into it for all the right reasons.
posted by Slarty Bartfast at 2:55 AM on December 21, 2019 [5 favorites]

Because it’s not enough to get African Americans into medicine as physicians. They are needed as physicians and leaders of health care organizations.

That's true, but it's also kind of a derail. There need to be more black physicians doing everything, but in order for that to happen, there have to be more black physicians, period. It is absolutely vital that there be more black physicians actually seeing patients, not just running healthcare systems. People die because there are not enough black doctors out there providing care. Black doctors are *better doctors*: because they are more likely to work in underserved areas, because they are more likely to provide respectful, competent, culturally-sensitive care to black patients, because they are more likely to gain the trust of black patients. It would be a tragedy if all the black doctors moved into administration, rather than direct patient care, especially since the problems are systemic and not really changeable by individual administrators. But really, what needs to happen is that the physician workforce needs to represent the country as a whole, so that black doctors (and Latinx doctors, and doctors from low-income backgrounds, and doctors from other underrepresented categories) can be adequately represented throughout the system. And that's not happening. We're not even really making any progress towards that happening.

There is something that individuals can do about this, which is to support HBCUs. A huge percentage of black medical students come from historically black colleges and universities. I am extremely skeptical of diversity initiatives at primarily white institutions, and I say that as someone who is involved in pre-med diversity initiatives at a predominantly white institution. So if you're a doctor, don't donate money to your undergrad institution or your med school, assuming those are predominantly white institutions. Instead, take the money you would donate to them and send it to the UNCF or directly to Xavier or Howard. Then write to your alma maters and explain that you have diverted your usual financial support to HBCUs because you truly care about this issue. Because this problem isn't going to change until changing it becomes a priority, and it is a priority for HBCUs in a way that it doesn't seem to be for predominantly white institutions or for the medical profession as a whole.
posted by ArbitraryAndCapricious at 5:20 AM on December 21, 2019 [10 favorites]

Interesting that of the group, only two are men, per the link above.

When I was in grad school at a large state school, the university president trumpeted a new initiative to support black male undergraduates. In the press release they mentioned the total number of black male undergrads who weren't on a sports team. (The athletic department being perceived as providing adequate support? I don't know. Athletes weren't going to be representative of the student body as a whole, of course, because of recruiting.) How many kids could they find? Seven. Black students as whole were actually reasonably represented relative to the state's population, but it wasn't that they were absurdly athletic, rather virtually all black students were women. And I will bet you anything that that had to do with white supremacy and the school-to-prison pipeline.
posted by hoyland at 6:02 AM on December 21, 2019 [3 favorites]

Instead, take the money you would donate to them and send it to the UNCF or directly to Xavier or Howard.

*Morehouse School of Medicine feels snubbed*

Don't forget about the Vivien Thomas posts on MetaFilter either. More inclusion and diversity means more innovation and (hopefully) fewer J Marion Sims-type... events. (Ugh, I'm not even linking to that guy.) I started out in college as a black, male biology major with vague aspirations toward medical school, but I don't recall getting any special encouragement toward that end.
posted by tyro urge at 8:42 AM on December 21, 2019 [3 favorites]

Black doctors are *better doctors*: because they are more likely to work in underserved areas, because they are more likely to provide respectful, competent, culturally-sensitive care to black patients, because they are more likely to gain the trust of black patients.

I'm not denying that there is a need for more black doctors, but your reasoning seems a bit like a sweeping generalization. That is, it's similar to saying that we need more female gynecologists because only they can relate to women and understand their specific problems. But I've had female OB/Gyns who were far less supportive/understanding than the male doctors who've examined me...("Oh, it's just a Pap smear, it doesn't hurt that much, I've had many myself...")

In addition, just because a doctor is black doesn't necessarily mean he'll practice in underserved communities. They've got student loans to repay just like every other med student, not to mention their own personal daily bills to pay...oh, and malpractice insurance. Medicaid only pays so much versus private practice in more affluent areas, where patients tend to have better health care coverage. In either case, the physician needs to pay some office staff to wade through the mountain of paperwork required in medicine these days to keep charts and bill the insurance companies, etc, and if there is a choice between the payment delays in working with the government to get Medicaid to pay for treatments, during which time you still have to pay your office staff, versus practicing in an area where most patients have private insurance (still a mountain of paperwork, but it's not "the government"), how many freshly minted black doctors are altruistic enough to hang their shingle up in an impoverished area just by virtue of being black?
posted by Oriole Adams at 11:38 AM on December 21, 2019 [1 favorite]

I'm not denying that there is a need for more black doctors, but your reasoning seems a bit like a sweeping generalization.

It's a generalization that is backed up by a lot of research.
posted by ArbitraryAndCapricious at 11:50 AM on December 21, 2019

thanks for sharing this. Powerful.
posted by cabin fever at 12:08 PM on December 22, 2019

Splitting hairs about which communities (underserved/affluent) they'd serve doesn't matter much as long as they are serving a majority of black patients. We need more black doctors, period.
I reiterate, does skin color/ethnicity actually automatically make a physician more culturally competent? Does an Asian/Indian/Bangladeshi physician have less compassion/understanding/implicit bias when it comes to white female patients? Or is it just a matter of black patients feeling more confident and safe when treated by a black doctor? Which just goes back to the circular argument of patients feeling more comfortable with physicians of similar ethnicity...
posted by Oriole Adams at 1:41 PM on December 22, 2019

does skin color/ethnicity actually automatically make a physician more culturally competent?

Yes. A Black person has more understanding of what it's like to be Black. Is that the question you're asking?

Also, Black people in the US have very very good reasons not to trust the medical profession in the US due to a history of medical experimentation, medical exploitation, and the medical profession generally not treating them as people.

Whether people of color benefit from medical professionals that are also people of color is an answered question from what I've read (example).
posted by avalonian at 1:57 PM on December 22, 2019 [2 favorites]