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Re:ChatGPT Health by gmadsen on Thursday January 08, 2026 @04:25AM (#46539038)
You still need 2 deviations above the average college student to get to med school. As a rough proxy for intelligence. The bottom threshold for doctors is certainly higher than lawyers
Re:ChatGPT Health by HPsquared on Thursday January 08, 2026 @04:51AM (#46539211)
It doesn't matter how intelligent they are, if they only have 5 minutes to spend on your case.
Re:ChatGPT Health by unsupp0rted on Thursday January 08, 2026 @07:31AM (#46540291)
Not for quota hires.

If I had a black doctor in 1995 I guarantee that’d be the top-5% of doctors.

In 2026 that’s somebody who got into med school with 2 deviations below the other candidates, which puts me at risk as their patient.

DEI was the worst thing to happen to non-white-male doctors in the history of medicine. They can be the best clinician in the world but patients won’t trust them. I’m not even sure administrators or colleagues will either.

It put the whole system at risk.

Re:ChatGPT Health by kulahan on Thursday January 08, 2026 @07:37AM (#46540337)
Huh? So your complaint is that you keep getting black doctors? That’s dumb, but whatever - why not just… get a white doctor? Or Asian or whatever you think is the smart one?
Re:ChatGPT Health by unsupp0rted on Thursday January 08, 2026 @07:43AM (#46540383)
That’s an uncharitable interpretation.

My complaint is that med school graduates today are no longer to be relied upon, because past standards are gone.

It’s likely a white male med school graduate today is very good, because the med school held them to a near-impossible standard to beat out the black-female candidates that it preferred to accept.

30 years ago this wasn’t the case. People who didn’t like say, black doctors, were racist and ignorant of statistics.

Today those statistics have changed and it’s not racist to understand this.

Re:ChatGPT Health by nomel on Thursday January 08, 2026 @09:10PM (#46549312)
This is where their perspective comes from: https://www.thecollegefix.com/med-schools-still-accept-black...

This has been going on for 20 years: https://pmc.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/articles/PMC1120616/

Black students (among other minorities) with unacceptable MCAT (as in, if another race had them they would be rejected) are accepted, at a rate 6-10x more likely to be admitted with similar scores. The motivation is that doctors should match the demographic they treat, and minority doctors are underrepresented, so should be accepted at higher rates: https://www.uclahealth.org/news/article/clinical-outcomes-pa...

The obvious outcome is that minorities students, being less prepared as measured by MCAT and somewhat setup for failure, have a much higher failure rate, with black students being 85% more likely to leave medical school than white: https://news.yale.edu/2023/07/31/black-md-phd-students-exper...

USMLE scores have been changed to pass/fail, to hide the actual score, to help prevent rejection of minority students who previously would have been rejected: https://n-age.org/wp-content/uploads/A-Test-of-Diversity-—-W... https://www.sciencedirect.com/science/article/abs/pii/S00904...

The system was, as is the stated goal by all, setup to pass minority students that would have previously been rejected, at every step of them becoming a doctor, to provide a net positive for minority populations, since it's accepted that you'll get the best outcome if your doctor is the same race as you.

Re:ChatGPT Health by kulahan on Thursday January 08, 2026 @11:32PM (#46550058)
I feel like only the last paragraph was relevant here - I don’t particularly care why he wants a doctor of race X instead of Y. My question remains the same: why not just… get a doctor with the skin color you prefer? You’re not exactly assigned one for life at birth.
Re:ChatGPT Health by nomel on Friday January 09, 2026 @01:20AM (#46550667)
I think you're bringing up a different (very related) point than him, with both points having truth:

1. You're free to pick the race of your doctor. Matching your race is a data driven positive.

2. 30 years ago, the system made sure a minority doctor was (at least, but probably more so do to discrimination) as competent as a white doctor. These days, the system is intentionally and deliberately set up so to help pass less competent minority students, due to the positives of #1.

It's a mushy relative thing.

Re:ChatGPT Health by unsupp0rted on Friday January 09, 2026 @03:41AM (#46551437)
Thank you, this is it exactly. And my biggest concern isn't the % of unprepared students who leave medical school. It's the % who stay and get passed through.

"You know what they call the most unqualified insert-identity-here person in the med school class of 2025 who squeezed by because it would look bad if they didn't?"

"Dr."

Which is why 99% AI-driven diagnosis can't come fast enough.

Re:ChatGPT Health by threethirtytwo on Thursday January 08, 2026 @08:37AM (#46540795)
It’s 120 to 130 which is similar to engineers.

They aren’t that much smarter. The selection criteria is more about the ability to handle pressure than it is about raw intelligence.

Tons of bottom feeders go to medical schools in say Kansas, so there’s a lot of leeway here in terms of intelligence.

Re:ChatGPT Health by nradov on Thursday January 08, 2026 @11:25AM (#46542905)
What a weird comment. There are several good medical schools in Kansas. In particular the University of Kansas School of Medicine is top notch.
Re:ChatGPT Health by threethirtytwo on Thursday January 08, 2026 @11:34AM (#46543029)
Only wierd for you because you got triggered by the Kansas part. In general the comment is true.

There’s a school in Kansas that sits right on top of Caribbean schools in terms of reputation. I know several people who had to go there.

Re:ChatGPT Health by nradov on Thursday January 08, 2026 @01:01PM (#46544230)
In general your comment was false. You're just lying and making things up. There are lower-tier medical schools in California, Massachusetts, and most every other state. The state, whether it's Kansas or somewhere else, is almost totally irrelevant to the quality of physicians produced.
Re:ChatGPT Health by threethirtytwo on Thursday January 08, 2026 @01:09PM (#46544336)
No I'm not. I'm referring to a specific bad school(s) in kansas. I never made a comment about Kansas itself.

I never said the state is correlated with the quality of the doctor, or even if the quality of the school is associated with the quality of the doctor. You made that up. Which makes you the liar.

Re:ChatGPT Health by nradov on Thursday January 08, 2026 @01:34PM (#46544662)
If you're referring to a specific school then name the school instead of making lame low-effort comments about a state.
Re:ChatGPT Health by threethirtytwo on Thursday January 08, 2026 @01:44PM (#46544800)
>If you're referring to a specific school then name the school instead of making lame low-effort comments about a state.

You're fucking right. I should've named the specific school. (And I didn't make a comment about the state I made a comment about school(s) in the state which is not about all schools in the state.)

That's would I should do. What you should do is: Don't accuse me of lying and then lie yourself. Read the comment more carefully. Don't assume shit.

No point in continue this. We both get it and this thread is going nowhere.