Jared Evans

PASS Survey

Final Paper

With medicine and science technology becoming increasingly important in to day’s society, it is necessary to re-evaluate the social diversity aspect of medicine and what effects it can have on the medical field, patients and doctors themselves. With my major being Neuroscience, I feel that it would be more appropriate to relate diversity to the entire field of medicine. While today’s institutions of higher learning promote the idea of attracting a rich and diverse medical community, they still have trouble in actually manifesting this goal. Why is this? This is an important question in the medical field. Hispanics and blacks are among the most underrepresented groups in US medical schools. This is a problem because it begins the chain of a lack of relation between certain races within the hospital and or medical community and environment. A study in 2008 declared that doctors who went to a more racially diverse medical school had a better time dealing with racially diverse patients in the real world. This is an important topic of discussion because there are also statistics that prove the patient population in hospitals and medical centers is more diverse today than ever before, this is why the doctors being put into the hospitals need to follow suit. Whites make up a large 62% of the medical field with Asians making up another relatively large amount of 22%. The essence of my argument is that nearly 2/3 of doctors are white while much less than 2/3 of their patients are white. This topic could cause a heated debate between certain people, but it is important to realize that the patient is just as important as the doctor, and in order for them to have a healthy, successful time within the medical environment, they need to be taken care of by someone they can easily relate to and identify with. The broader, bigger picture of my idea is the fact that the more diverse the medical field becomes, the more ideas can be generated and the more success the global medical community can have