Wednesday, May 21, 2025

Diversity Is A Strength: Doctors, Health Care Workers More Antisemitic

 In "Ask Your Doctor if Jihad Is Right for You," published at Tablet Magazine, it notes that "[a]ccording to the Anti-Defamation League (ADL) and other legacy Jewish organizations, antisemitism is born of ignorance which must be fought through education." But that seems contradicted by actual evidence. For instance, the author points out, the students and professors agitating on behalf of Palistinians and against Jews can hardly be characterized as uneducated and ignorant. In fact, I would add, in addition to higher than average education, they probably have more exposure to Jews on a day-to-day basis than the typical American. 

    But antisemitism seems to be especially high among health professionals, according the article. Using information gathered by the Stop Antisemitism group of people who have made antisemitic posts:

We observe that the representation of health care workers is highly disproportionate. While only 10.8% of American laborers are employed in health care, 190 of 702 (27%) individuals profiled by Stop Antisemitism work in health care. Second, among health care workers, physicians are disproportionately represented, accounting for 91 of 190 (48%) health care workers and 13% of all profiled antisemites. Given that there are only 834,500 physicians and surgeons, doctors make up only 0.5% of the entire American workforce, so they are more than 26 times overrepresented among the antisemites identified by Stop Antisemitism. 

And what makes a post antisemitic?

The criteria Stop Antisemitism uses to identify antisemites can be found in the International Holocaust Remembrance Alliance (IHRA) definition. Among other things, the IHRA definition labels as antisemitic tropes about Jewish power and control, allegations of dual loyalty to Israel, applying double standards to Israel, and comparing Israeli policy to that of Nazi Germany.

So why are doctors so antisemitic? According to the article, it's because there are so many foreign trained doctors (i.e., Muslim doctors):

    ... For all the physicians in the dataset we created, we were able to find internet records indicating where they received their medical training. Forty-seven of 91 (52%) physicians in the dataset obtained their medical degree in a country other than the United States compared to about 25% of the American physician workforce. Of those 47 who obtained their medical degrees abroad, 68% were trained in the Middle East (40%) or Pakistan (28%). 

    The challenge posed by foreign-trained doctors is that they arrive in the U.S. after having largely completed their moral formation, sometimes in political systems that explicitly promote antisemitism in their schools. The antisemitism they openly display in the U.S. may have been considered appropriate or even enlightened in their home countries. In fact, in the Middle East, higher levels of education are associated with an increased propensity for professing antisemitism. While education may not be protective against antisemitism, coming from cultures that openly embrace antisemitism enables it to publicly flourish even within polite society. Combine those attitudes with an American health care system that normalizes racial and ethnic tribalism with ideas like whiteness as a form of psychopathology, and the results are predictably disastrous.

    This problem will only get worse as the rate of importing doctors from abroad is rising. In 1981, only 9% of doctors newly placed in residencies came from foreign medical schools. By 2024, 25% of residencies were filled with people trained abroad. Blame for the dramatic shift toward foreign-trained doctors is partly due to latent effects of supply constraints imposed by the gatekeepers of MD and DO granting schools. Until 2005, the American Medical Association and the Association of American Medical Colleges encouraged restrictions on medical school expansion due to their (erroneous) prediction of a looming glut of physicians in the United States. Those restrictions ultimately necessitated reliance on foreign-trained doctors.

    Even after recognizing that there was a shortage rather than a glut of doctors, U.S. medical schools have failed to keep up with demand so that there are now 1.39 residency openings for every graduate of U.S. medical schools. A shortage in the domestic training of doctors now arises from a dearth in the availability of clinical training sites. The gap that this creates between the demand for new physicians and training of new physicians currently must be filled with foreign-trained doctors.

The dependency on foreign born doctors is certainly not due to a dearth of capable Americans:

Removing the accreditor stranglehold on medical education would prevent cartel behavior that artificially limits the domestic training of new physicians. Moreover, effort and resources might need to be expended by health authorities to ensure a sufficient supply of clinical training sites. These efforts can be undertaken without sacrificing quality. After all, the acceptance rate for U.S. medical schools has fallen over time while the average MCAT scores and GPAs of those accepted have risen. There is more than enough high-quality domestic demand to become a doctor for medical schools to expand without diluting quality. 

But that would mean admitting more white men into medical school which cannot be tolerated by the elites.

1 comment:

  1. We have plenty of people who could become doctors. The problem is that last line of yours.

    ReplyDelete

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