Dear Everyone,

I'm going into radiology, but I'm applying for prelim medicine, as I believe that medicine is the most fundamental specialty. I wanna learn a lot and I'm willing to work hard and long, but I'd like to go to a place where I can talk to my pts without constantly having to ask for an interpreter.

Does anybody know which of the following places have mostly English-speaking pts?

West Coast:
- UCSD
- Stanford
- U of Southern California
- Univ of Washington

East Coast:
- Yale
- NYU
- MGH
- Brigham
- BIDMC
- Hopkins
- Penn

Thanks for your help!

PS. I have nothing against learning a foreign language, but I don't think internship is the time to do it. My Spanish is only at the "duele aqui" level, which might work for radiology, but definitely not for medicine. :)

Not 100% sure on this, but you will likely be hard-pressed to find a place in California where there isn't a large Spanish-speaking population. New York and Boston are the same story. I am not sure about the others, but I imagine that large, academic centers in big cities will tend to have diverse patient populations.
If this is really important to you, you might want to apply to different types of places.

Anyway, if you want specifics, you can check out the US census for each city -- a little old, from 2000, but it gives an idea of the percentage of people who speak languages other than English at home... for example, in Boston, 13.5% of the population speaks Spanish at home, and about half of these people report that they don't speak English "very well"... per the census data, anyway.

http://censtats.census.gov/pub/Profiles.shtml

Why not? I am always up for a challenge...it would be fine if you go to a place with foreign-speaking people...others have managed before you and so will you...

Be confident and don't let demographic reports limit you...if you have the opportunity to go to a great place for residency, then by all means GO...

I can understand that a language barrier might be scary, but the reality is that it is not that bad...you'll be fine...

As a non spanish speaking resident at UCSF which has a diverse patient population in many ways, I have found little to no downside to working with patients with whom I needed a translator. In fact I think that the breadth of exposure has added a lot to my training so far. And the truth is, that even here a translator is not part of my daily routine. While UCSF wouldn't be an option for you, I would encourage you to really pick the program that you feel like you click with the best and try and match there regardless of how many non english speaking patients you will have. It really isn't that bad. That being said I would CAREFULLY evaluate how much pain you really want to endure as an intern going into radiology. While the idea of working hard and learning a lot is great, internship can be challenging and I would focus on a program that has well established didactic teaching because after this year the floor management of routine diseases won't be of much use to you unless you go into interventional radiology. that being said, have you checked out the hopkins combined neuro/IM/neurorads program? pretty cool if it is up your alley.

Thanks for your responses.

The neuro/IM/rads option would be awesome (though probably super-long), but I think it's been discontinued at Hopkins - as per http://www.neuro.jhmi.edu/NroRad/index.html.

-TS

I know this isn't on your list, but UPMC in Pittsburgh, PA has a solid prelim IM program with very minimal need for foreign languages. It's not the cushiest of prelims, you will learn a lot of medicine, but at the same time in a relatively balanced schedule. throughout my 5 years there as a med student and intern (prelim as well), I only needed to break out my spanish 2 or 3 times, one of which the patient actually spoke decent english but was too sick to talk initially.

as someone mentioned I think if you go to the boston, cali, or NYC programs being able to communicate in spanish will make your life much much easier. Dont know about Yale or Penn.