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posted by Fnord666 on Monday May 06 2019, @08:41PM   Printer-friendly
from the not-skewered dept.

Submitted via IRC for Runaway1956

Men are "scientific," women are "lovely" and underrepresented minorites are "pleasant" and "nice." If those sound like stereotypes, they are. But they're also words commonly used to evaluate medical students, a study finds.

Analysis of nearly 88,000 evaluations of third-year medical students written from 2006 to 2015 revealed evidence of implicit bias. White women and underrepresented minority groups were more often described by words about their personalities, while men were evaluated with more words describing their competancy.

The results, published online April 16 in the Journal of General Internal Medicine, give "a good idea of what kind of words are being used," says Carol Isaac, an education researcher at Mercer University in Atlanta not involved in the study.

Source: https://www.sciencenews.org/article/medical-student-evaluations-skewed-race-gender-biases


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  • (Score: 1, Insightful) by Anonymous Coward on Monday May 06 2019, @08:49PM (18 children)

    by Anonymous Coward on Monday May 06 2019, @08:49PM (#839823)

    And this is a problem because?

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  • (Score: 5, Insightful) by ikanreed on Monday May 06 2019, @09:19PM (16 children)

    by ikanreed (3164) Subscriber Badge on Monday May 06 2019, @09:19PM (#839837) Journal

    Because medical student reviews are used for selection into medical institutions. Medical institutions provide care to sick and injured people. Shuffling the best and brightest off to comparatively unimportant work because of incorrect information, is, in fact, wasteful of "human resources".

    Now, because this is america, the rich are the ones who lose out on better doctors, rather than any kind of system that allocates resources sensibly, but in other countries, this would be a terrible waste.

    • (Score: -1, Troll) by Anonymous Coward on Monday May 06 2019, @09:39PM (7 children)

      by Anonymous Coward on Monday May 06 2019, @09:39PM (#839849)

      What incorrect information are you referring to?

      Also, I was basically in medical school (phd taking med school classes). It was just memorizing a bunch of questionable stuff that I believed at the time but began severely doubting once I saw how that "information" was generated.

      I now avoid the healthcare system as much as I possibly can, the "all natural" pseudoscience stuff is probably better just because there is less opportunity to do damage.

      My point is: maybe (instead of whining about being mistreated) the "oppressed" people should start their own competing medical training system that isn't so crappy. Then I can go to the doctor again. The mistreatment of students is only going to be the tip of the iceberg of problems, I assure you.

      • (Score: 1, Insightful) by Anonymous Coward on Monday May 06 2019, @10:08PM (4 children)

        by Anonymous Coward on Monday May 06 2019, @10:08PM (#839870)

        I now avoid the healthcare system as much as I possibly can, the "all natural" pseudoscience stuff is probably better just because there is less opportunity to do damage.

        Tell that to Steve Jobs.

        • (Score: 0) by Anonymous Coward on Monday May 06 2019, @10:15PM (3 children)

          by Anonymous Coward on Monday May 06 2019, @10:15PM (#839873)

          I have no problem with his decisions, he probably survived longer with higher quality of life than he would have otherwise if he accepted injections of poison.

          • (Score: 0) by Anonymous Coward on Monday May 06 2019, @10:32PM (2 children)

            by Anonymous Coward on Monday May 06 2019, @10:32PM (#839881)

            Also, wtf:

            Aug. 25, 2011 -- Steve Jobs gave no specific explanation for his sudden resignation as Apple CEO. But one possible health reason is that his pancreatic cancer may have returned.

            If Jobs had suffered the most common form of pancreatic cancer, adenocarcinoma, the chances are he would have died soon after his 2003 diagnosis. But as Jobs later revealed, he had an unusual form of pancreatic cancer known as a neuroendocrine tumor or islet cell carcinoma.

            In 2004, nine months after his diagnosis, Jobs underwent surgery to remove the tumor. In 2009 he underwent a liver transplant, a procedure appropriate for only a small number of patients with this uncommon form of pancreatic cancer.

            https://www.webmd.com/cancer/pancreatic-cancer/news/20110825/faq-steve-jobs-pancreatic-cancer#1 [webmd.com]

            So he was getting all sorts of dangerous medical procedures... Also, if this started in 2003 and he survived til 2011 that is 96 months. Only about 50% of people under the age of 75 diagnosed with such tumors survive that long. see figure 1: https://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pmc/articles/PMC6426577/ [nih.gov]

            So everything I've heard about this story before looking into it is fake news. I should not be surprised.

            • (Score: 2) by Reziac on Tuesday May 07 2019, @02:55AM (1 child)

              by Reziac (2489) on Tuesday May 07 2019, @02:55AM (#839973) Homepage
              --
              And there is no Alkibiades to come back and save us from ourselves.
              • (Score: 0) by Anonymous Coward on Tuesday May 07 2019, @04:36AM

                by Anonymous Coward on Tuesday May 07 2019, @04:36AM (#840008)

                Interesting, so he was having all sorts of interactions with the medical industry. The headline story that he died because he was into all natural treatments is total fake news.

      • (Score: 0) by Anonymous Coward on Tuesday May 07 2019, @01:11AM (1 child)

        by Anonymous Coward on Tuesday May 07 2019, @01:11AM (#839939)

        Also, I was basically in medical school (phd taking med school classes).

        And I was basically in law school (our cellblock had a library).

        • (Score: 0) by Anonymous Coward on Tuesday May 07 2019, @01:20AM

          by Anonymous Coward on Tuesday May 07 2019, @01:20AM (#839943)

          Nah.

    • (Score: 5, Interesting) by JoeMerchant on Monday May 06 2019, @09:48PM

      by JoeMerchant (3937) on Monday May 06 2019, @09:48PM (#839855)

      The whole f-ed up AMA intake process is wasteful of human resources on so many levels - starting with making freshly graduated and residented M.D.s into "Minor Deities", both in their own minds and implicitly in the structure of healthcare delivery in the U.S.

      There are far too many competent, capable applicants who could relieve the artificial M.D. shortage in the U.S. who are denied at the MCAT, throttled at the residency programs, denied access to the available Med School programs due to a lack of ability to pay, and otherwise choked out leaving the remaining M.D.s sitting pretty on the ability to demand outrageous rates for their services, and making the whole concept of a 2nd opinion seem like something quaint you might have heard from Ward or June Cleaver, back in the day.

      Arguing about racial and gender bias amongst the camels attempting to pass the eye of the needle is really missing the point.

      --
      🌻🌻 [google.com]
    • (Score: 1, Flamebait) by legont on Monday May 06 2019, @11:43PM (4 children)

      by legont (4179) on Monday May 06 2019, @11:43PM (#839904)

      Well, I prefer lovely and pleasant doctors. I don't like scientific dicks. It would be a shame if I can't satisfy my selection by choosing an Asian female doctor.

      --
      "Wealth is the relentless enemy of understanding" - John Kenneth Galbraith.
      • (Score: 1, Informative) by Anonymous Coward on Tuesday May 07 2019, @01:13AM (3 children)

        by Anonymous Coward on Tuesday May 07 2019, @01:13AM (#839940)

        I don't like scientific dicks.

        I don't like dicks, period. No matter what adjective you use.

        • (Score: 0) by Anonymous Coward on Tuesday May 07 2019, @01:31AM (2 children)

          by Anonymous Coward on Tuesday May 07 2019, @01:31AM (#839947)

          Well, I'm pretty fond of my own.

          • (Score: 0) by Anonymous Coward on Tuesday May 07 2019, @02:51AM (1 child)

            by Anonymous Coward on Tuesday May 07 2019, @02:51AM (#839971)

            Then why do you beat on it all the time? Leave that poor thing alone.

            • (Score: 0) by Anonymous Coward on Tuesday May 07 2019, @03:43AM

              by Anonymous Coward on Tuesday May 07 2019, @03:43AM (#839994)

              Hey. He asked for it.

    • (Score: 5, Insightful) by darkfeline on Tuesday May 07 2019, @03:42AM (1 child)

      by darkfeline (1030) on Tuesday May 07 2019, @03:42AM (#839993) Homepage

      Maybe there shouldn't be a quota then, so evaluators don't need to find something positive to say.

      I don't know if the medical community has such quotas, but I have seen this anecdotally in education and the tech industry, where there are diversity quotas (not officially, of course, that is usually illegal). You need to pump up your numbers, but you can't outright lie and say someone has achieved A, B, and C when they have not. So you use soft attributes in evaluations, because people generally are "pleasant" or "nice" so you can use them even if there's nothing concrete to praise someone with.

      If you've gotten this far, note that I'm not asserting that this is happening in the medical community, but that's what it smells like from personal experience.

      --
      Join the SDF Public Access UNIX System today!
      • (Score: -1, Troll) by Anonymous Coward on Tuesday May 07 2019, @04:39PM

        by Anonymous Coward on Tuesday May 07 2019, @04:39PM (#840259)

        exactly. these propagandists are trying to act like these affirmative action class passers are being mistreated. yeah, fucking right. they are probably overwhelminglyt half ass motherfuckers b/c they've been getting shuiffled through school without merit their whole "victimized" lives. these are the types of people who graduate with degrees who can't even speak english, and i'm not talking about ESL people either.

  • (Score: 1) by nitehawk214 on Monday May 06 2019, @11:06PM

    by nitehawk214 (1304) on Monday May 06 2019, @11:06PM (#839889)

    Because Yelp-style reviews turn everything to shit and encourage lazy management to not accurately evaluate their employees.

    --
    "Don't you ever miss the days when you used to be nostalgic?" -Loiosh