No, I looked at his picture:
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.
Even the FDA does not consider Indians as a separate ethnic minortiy - we are genetically considered as caucasians.
*** How is that?? When I just read the guidelines saying something entirely different?
This is Britain, not America, so they have a socialized system, and I think malpractice is handled differently.
No, I looked at his picture:
And I said that I observed female students who were my peers in the law school, up close and personal sometimes, and did not find them to be intellectually inferior vis a vis men, and among the best and the brightest, women represented well, their overall percentage in the law school, on Law Review that was largely based on grades, and otherwise.
It's very weird. Judging from what I've read on this thread it seems that some people really do care more about this than I do *LOL* I just assume that everyone who is a doctor is qualified. The last doctor that I had was from the Phillipines and another from Africa.
You can deduce someone's ethnic background and upbringing from their features. If I am to believe what I read in some posts on this thread, then if he was hispanic or had some black blood, then he's automatically be less qualified than if he were plain old white. I'm not hassling you personally, I'm just thinking of a friend from Zimbabwe who is white and a doctor who has been turned down from institutions because they 'assume' things.
Comming to a hospital near you,
It won't make any difference how great your insurance is,
it won't make any difference if you'r co-pay on prescriptions is 2% on 100$ if there aren't enough doctors.
Bakke is no longer in custody of dept of corrections.
He was shot to death.
Torie: Excuse me, I didn't realize you were the thread sheriff here on FR. But the title was referring to why should worry that there are fewer white male doctors...and access is a major concern for the future....
I'm sure you have some point, you are just waiting to make, that I have not made.
'And I said that I observed female students who were my peers in the law school, "
Help me here...what's your point? They dumb down an entire education establishment in full view of the entire world to achieve an outcome in line with their own cherished beliefs. The repercussions are predicted in full view of the entire world. The negativwe result is arrived at in full view of the entire world, and you saw some woman who were your peer in intelligence back in school. What do you want me to say? That some woman might have the right stuff? I'm pretty sure I DID say that.
Perhaps the reason for this is a larger globalization of American academics. We have far and away the best places to learn here, and demand is growing in the more recently developed countries, and the more recently developed "global power" countries of India and China.
In my PhD program in engineering, I was the only American to take the qualifying exam when I took it. I felt like I was in the Olympics and representing America. I included Torie and Talblack in this post to say that while there was not a single female in my program (it is top 5), one graduated just before I got there and is now a United States astronaut. It is obvious we are built differently, mentally and physically, and I don't think comparing test scores is either meaningful or productive. What is counterproductive, however, is harboring latent prejudices against minority and female professionals. (Hell, I'm anti-anti-females around my office)
It isn't that women are stupider.
Having spent 20 years in hospitals. Women make very good doctors, however they do not work the same hours.
Women tend to work part time because they have kids.
They tend not to work as many years, retiring at a younger age.
They also tend to go into the less intense areas of medicine.
There are lots of female pediatricians, female obstetricians, internal medicine , family practice and lots of female psychiatrists.
Female surgeons are rare, female cardiologists are rare, female neurosurgeons and orthopedic mds are almost unheard of.
They also tend to avoid specializing in trauma.
Men generally want to go for the gusto. They are more aggressive and really like trauma and surgery. Surgery on anything. Blood flying in an er is a challenge.
Being naturally gadget happy they like the special proceedures with threading a catheter up a femoral artery into the heart or the head and watching it on a monitor.
They like sawing and hacking out fractured femurs and nailing new joints into place.
It's just the differences inherent in the sexes. It's not that women lack the smarts or the ability. If you don't like to take apart, hammer and fix things at home, why would you want to make yourself miserable by doing it at work.
I could, but I would not become a surgeon. I made a pledge to be a stay at home mother should I ever have children. Being a surgeon takes a lot of time and arrogance that I do not have.
The race issue doesn't light my fire as much as the gender issue does.
I would only consider a female gyn now that they are available.
There are always individual differences but there is no changing nature.
Men for all times have liked to break things, fix things, build things and tinker and be aggressive.
Women like to nurture, build relationships, do community activities, mess with kids, Why wouldn't it affect the types of specialties in medicine they choose..
What is counterproductive, however, is harboring latent prejudices against minority and female professionals. (Hell, I'm anti-anti-females around my office)
I have no such prejudice.
I don't like being asked to support a lie, to salute it or to respect it. AA is a lie. If you do not oppose it or speak against it you support it. AA is a fact in America today, it has been for thirty years.
What I focus on more than the stupidity of AA and political correctness in general is the damage to our culture. The point of the surgeon I alluded to eariler is that one very big difference between males and females seems to dictate that males will cease to compete and look to other ways of fulfilling the impulse that directs them to strive in a meritocracy.
Our culture up untill the '70's had directions for males in fulfilling themselves as men. Directions in stories, films songs and the culture itself that defined manhood and it's acceptable expression and achievement. All cultures have this, without it the center will not hold. Without it there is no there there.
How a culture does this has a lot to do with the standard of living in the culture. The Indians Columbus encountered were as smart, as manly and as brave as any european, but thy lived in a stoneage society. Why? Male aggression served the individual male NOT the society. Male agression uplifted the individual, it served him and was defined by him. Westerners had Judaisim and then Christianity to apply pressure to the natural force that is male aggression. (By the way male aggression is not a refrence to pysical violence of any kind)
Male aggression is only one of the forces in a culture, exactly half BUT half is a lot! It will work only in a meritocracy. Outside of a meritocracy achievement has not meaning--it is not measurable.
I defy anyone to tell me waht the definition of manhood is in the present day GOING BY SONG AND STORY PRODUCED BY THE PRESENT DAY CULTURE, NOT BY DEFINITIONS HELD OVER FROM THE 1950'S
In the 50's the definition was EASILY observable in songs, film, books, TV, plays and on and on. But to define a thing you must, neccessarily, exclude all other things. How then can we define manhood and at the same time exclude females from the definition. The answer is you can't, today. So we don't. But as I implied eariler, that natural force is still there, programed in the hearts and minds of boys, and it WILL out one way or another, it WILL find expression,whether or not anyone approves it or endorses it.
In order for a boy to become a man (or a girl to become a woman for that matter)the individual MUST have a definition of what one of those is, it's that simple. They WILL find one, that's an imperitive of life. Once we understood this and provided them with one in order to secure our future as a culture. If you need, say, an SR-71 spy plane you must first specify it or it can't be built, it can't come into existence. If you try, without specification, chaos will be the result.
The gender of a person could play a role, but that may be more cultural and what a woman is doing these days. There are women who are not wives and mothers who would make VERY good surgeons.
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