Spyke

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What's happening in France?

A couple of things immediately come to mind:

  • Long standing protests against the retirement age being raised to 72 (someone correct me on this one, please)

  • Police fired into a car that would not comply with a traffic stop and killed the occupant (who, I believe was a minority person). Rioting has ensued as a result.

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Patients need doctors who look like them. Can medicine diversify without affirmative action?

I will say that when I had doctors who looked like me, they almost always treated me like shit (for example, an emergency room physician practically assaulted me while performing an arterial blood draw because he didn't like that I was pushing back against his dismissing my medical complaints).

Conversely, most of the doctors that did not look like me treated me very well and listened when I needed to discuss whatever health issue concerned me.

All of this to say that while it would be nice to see more people from underrepresented backgrounds enter professions such as medicine at the physician level, patients who look like their providers are not automatically going to be treated better. It will always be about who is a good human and practices good medicine, regardless of their background.