1/11 I, like so many others, was and am deeply troubled by the now-retracted JAHA "diversity" article and what it purports to represent, and what it does represent, which are entirely different. Kudos to @DrQuinnCapers4 for his leadership, and that of many others. 👏👏👏
2/11 Personally, the article—and more importantly, the mindset it reflects—is repugnant to me. As an Asian American physician, it is all the more painful and embarrassing for me to read. It’s like your racist relative ruining the big holiday happiness. 🦃🍷🥧🧧🧧
3/11 But clearly, there are people who think this way, that applaud the “data”, that feel that they are somehow exposing the elephant in the room that they think is inclusion efforts or affirmative action or any other means to ensure diversity in medicine . . . 👩⚕️👨⚕️👩🏿⚕️👨🏿⚕️👩🏻⚕️👨🏼⚕️😷
4/11 . . . that define “merit” as narrowly or narrow-mindedly as a standardized test score, or perhaps who you know, what your parents do, where you grew up, whether or not you look like them, or whatever they picture when they think about “merit”, or what a doctor looks like!
5/11 We need to keep talking, and more importantly, keep listening. Good people can be mistaken, and disagree. (I’m not commenting on the JAHA author, whom I don’t know, and with whom I vehemently disagree in premise, design, methods, and conclusion).
6/11 Civil conversations can and should occur between people who come from different places viewpoints. That, of course, is one of the major arguments for diversity in medicine. When we all are the same, how are we going to hear anything except the echoes of our own voices?
7/11 Being a doctor is so, much, more than a test score. I have forgotten everything I ever learned for the MCAT & almost everything I ever knew briefly before USLMEs, and @AmBoardSurg will tell you I NEVER learned anything at all before most of my #ABSITE in-training exams.
8/11 BUT I am a much better doctor, now that I am much, much worse at standardized tests than I ever was. What makes me a better doctor is the more diverse experiences I have had along the journey, and all the #DifficultConversations. Paper debacles count as such.
9/11 Being a doctor is being human, is caring for your patients, is being there for a community, is doing the best you can and sometimes failing and getting back up again. We in medicine no matter what we look like or where we come from, ALL desperately need URM doctors.
10/11 We need to work on pipelines & recruitment & retention & promotion of URM students, residents, fellows, and doctors. We need more women in procedural fields and we ALL need to broaden our definitions of what “professionalism” means and looks and sounds like.
11/11 We can and must discuss our #diversitystrategies, check our own #implicitbias and blind spots, and get better. I have confidence that together, we can. I’m listening. Let’s keep talking, and let's keep laying plans. We have a lot of work to do!
*USMLE” & * @AmBdSurg (I would excuse my continual typos and insert my standard “English was my Second Language” ([true, but irrelevant] joke here, but I fear I might seem unprofessional)
