Being Kicked off the Pedestal

I have a space in my heart for anthropologists. I love their passion, their approach to  academics and perhaps the most, their provocative styles. Prof. Wende Marshall, a Princeton Alumna, is UVA's notorious Medical Anthropology instructor. Today, she was invited to our Social Issues in Medicine class to talk about Health Disparities. As soon as I saw her name, I laughed. Not because I was laughing at her but because I knew she would  stir up some emotions in my medical school class. 

Wende started her talk to first year medical students by saying that she has little faith in biomedicine. This first line probably offended many---we are here to learn medicine for the next 4 years of our lives. She said a few other things (she only had 20 minutes to actually speak as the 50 minute lecture was split with another speaker) that should not have been surprising to a student of an undergraduate liberal arts curriculum but clearly, that wasn't the case with my class. People got very defensive very quickly and the room was very tense. Students defended that they didn't have time to worry about injustice because they had too much biochemistry to learn. Others argued that science was inherently non-biased. And possibly, the most ignorant comment was that of a student telling our invited speaker that she interrupted a student's comment.

After the talk, one of my classmates went to Wende to apologize for our class' behavior.  I wondered about my class and really was embarassed by how we had presented ourselves. Instead of showing that we came into medicine to change our societies by serving the sick and vulnerable, we PROVED Wende's criticisms that physicians are isolated from their societies, that they don't know how people are really living and are not willing to get off their comfortable pedestal. As the Vice President of this class, I really wish people would get over themselves. Being a medical student does not entitle you to disrespect others, to put value judgements on unfamiliar opinions and thoughts, to be immature and to be low-class. Start acting like professionals or at least mature adults. And if communicating to people, being polite, being congenial, and being aware of your world is too much for you, you probably should not have gone into medical school. And finally, please read something other than Netter's. A physician is a scholar. We should all be able to converse about theories, philosophies and current events. Today was so shocking to people perhaps because they skipped (or slept through) some important lectures about humanity, religion and family systems. In your practice, your patient is going to be more aware of you not being aware of them as a person, as a human being, than you needing to look up more information about their mystery diagnosis. 

Let's get real here.