Lex
Diversity is important in every career field and the medical field is no exception. A black doctor went viral on Twitter after giving an example of why there need to be more black men working in medicine.
The doctor, who goes by @Oga_DoctorBlue on Twitter, tweeted about a black patient who was diagnosed with multiple sclerosis after being told he might have possibly had a stroke. For the purposes of this article, let’s just refer to the doctor as Dr. Blue.
The patient was probably overwhelmed with all the information he received but didn’t have any questions for the doctors who gave him his diagnosis.
Dr. Blue’s attending doctor misread the man’s confusion as apathy, but Dr. Blue knew that probably wasn’t it.
So he made a point of going back to the patient and asking again if he had any questions.
He was able to answer all the questions and give the patient an accurate picture of his diagnosis.
The whole mix-up was cultural in nature and could be avoided if there were just more black doctors working in the field.
Dr. Blue stressed that his attending physician was neither a bigot nor uncaring. No one was mocking the patient. They just didn’t understand what he was really feeling.
Once the man understood the basics of his diagnosis, he became a lot more involved in the conversations with the doctors.
Dr. Blue’s hypothesis about there needing to be more black men in the medical field is backed by a recent study that found that black men tend to be more comfortable with black doctors (that’s a vast oversimplification, but you get the point).
He also clarified that there don’t just need to be more black doctors, but that statistics show that fewer black men are matriculating into medical school now than in 1978, and it’s the only minority group whose numbers have decreased. Hopefully, this downward trend will be reversed sooner rather than later.