Racism, Hazing And Other Abuse Taints Medical Training, Students Say

As doctors and nurses across the United States continue to gather outside hospitals and clinics to protest police brutality and racism as part of the White Coats for Black Lives movement, LaShyra Nolen, a first-year student at Harvard Medical School, says it's time to take medical schools to task over racism, too.

Research published earlier this year in JAMA Internal Medicine, for example, suggests that minority students are more likely to face discriminatory comments, public humiliation and inappropriate sexual advances during their medical education.

The JAMA Internal Medicine study of more than 27,500 medical students in 2016 and 2017 found that 38% of students nationwide from racial and ethnic groups that are under-represented in medicine — including students who are black, Latino or Native American — reported mistreatment.

"If these small disadvantages accrue throughout medical school, it could be contributing to keeping certain populations out of medicine," says Katherine Hill, the study's lead author and a medical student at Yale.

While he says he heard from many other students who experienced racism during training — physicians mocking non-white patients, peers telling their classmates of color they were accepted to medical school because of their race — some other people who read the essay dismissed his experience as a one-time incident.