- Joined
- Mar 12, 2015
- Messages
- 280
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- 630
I 100% agree that those things happened are wrong, and I firmly believe that an African American or Hispanic or whatever else ethnicity constitutes URM status with high stats and better ECs than me should get accepted over me. But someone with an MCAT of 500 and a 3.3 GPA should not be sitting on 5+ IIs right now because of their skin color. Everybody wants to eliminate discrimination and racism, but in order to do that youve got to eliminate it from both sides.
Let me ask you - what is the purpose of a doctor in society? Presumably to protect the health and well-being of the citizens - all the citizens - of that society, right? So then when medical schools ask themselves - what does it mean to produce good doctors and how do we select them from our gigantic applicant pools? - you have to understand that creating a population of good doctors is not always going to be an easy task in which you can just take the applicants with the highest scores and those who have checked the boxes the best. You have to consider differential access to resources that might provide context for those applications, as well as how they're going to fit into the future healthcare system.
Historically, and presently, medicine in the US has been dominated by white and Asian people. This is a problem, as we have seen, time and time again, because it ultimately manifests itself in the form of injustice. If you don't know what I'm talking about, you can refer to Tuskegee, or the myriad of scientific literature that justified slavery by arguing that Black people had higher pain tolerance, or the story of Henrietta Lacks. If we truly want to create doctors who will be good doctors - those who will care for and protect the health of all citizens - that necessarily requires a population of diverse doctors, with diverse interests and diverse backgrounds.