Black and Hispanic pre-med students face additional hurdles in med school: Gunshots

Sabina Spigner says she always knew she wanted to be a doctor. But, as a pre-med student at the University of Pennsylvania, she struggled to balance a heavy course load while working up to 20 hours a week.

“I was working all the time, because I had no money and I was on a work-study program,” says Spigner.

His grades suffered. During her first year, she turned to her pre-medical counselor for help. “She was like, well, you know, you’re just not going to med school with that GPA. so I think you should consider something else. And she didn’t really introduce me to a lot of resources or options other than just giving up,” Spigner says.

This conversation took place almost eight years ago. Spigner – who is black and Southeast Asian American – said when she recalled the experience on Twitter last month, “unfortunately a lot of people shared similar stories.”

“You know, this is something that’s happening across the country and it’s very, very common, especially for students of color, to be discouraged,” she says.

For decades, major medical organizations have attempted to diversify the ranks of physicians, where black and Hispanic physicians remain vastly underrepresented relative to their proportion of the U.S. population. This is important because research has shown that people from underrepresented racial and ethnic groups may have better health outcomes when their doctors look like them.

But a recent study in the journal JAMA Health Forum highlights the factors, including financial pressures and discrimination, that can prevent determined students of color from attending medical school.

The study looked at the responses of over 81,000 students who took the Medical College Admissions Test. The standardized exam is grueling: People study for months or even years, says the study’s first author, Dr. Jessica Faiz of the University of California, Los Angeles.

“You paid for the test. You took all this time to study. You’re definitely determined to apply” to medical school, says Faiz, an emergency physician and member of UCLA’s National Clinician Scholars Program.

Even so, Faiz and his colleagues found that black and Hispanic applicants were significantly less likely to apply and enroll in medical school than white applicants. Not only that, but Black, Hispanic, and Native American students were more likely to say they faced financial barriers, such as difficulty getting test prep materials and already had large student loans. .

“Even more, they are more likely to be discouraged by counselors when applying to medical school compared to their white counterparts,” says study co-author Dr. Utibe Essien, assistant professor of medicine and health equity researcher at UCLA.

Another key finding: Black, Hispanic, and Native American students were more likely to have parents without a college degree and more likely to go to a low-resource college, which the researchers defined as a college with a lower admissions process. selective and a majority of students living off campus.

These factors “really trickle down to your social media which is really integral to being a successful medical student,” Faiz says. For example, the study found that students of color were less likely to have followed a doctor — an experience that can spruce up a medical school application. Faiz says this likely reflects a lack of the kinds of connections that make it easy to set up this kind of experience.

Essien notes that decades of research has shown that patients of color can benefit from having a doctor of their own racial or ethnic background. For example, studies have found that they are more likely to have received preventive care in the past year and more likely to be satisfied with the health care they receive.

For minorities, says Essien, “having a doctor who looks like you makes you more likely to take the flu shot, get a colonoscopy, consider more invasive heart surgery.”

There’s even startling new evidence that black people live longer if they reside in counties with more black doctors. But this new study came with a sobering finding: Just over half of U.S. counties were excluded from the national analysis because they didn’t have a single black primary care physician. Faiz says this finding, which was published the same day as the study she conducted, underscores why it’s so important to better understand the factors that keep students of color from attending medical school.

Essien adds, “We’re not just advocating diversity out of the goodness of our hearts. It really, literally, saves lives.”

Dr. Jaya Aysola is executive director of the Center for Health Equity Advancement at Penn Medicine. She wrote a commentary that accompanied the study in JAMA Health Forum. Aysola says the study sheds light on the financial barriers and unconscious biases that can block the path to medical school for students of color.

“From who advises you to submit an application, to who then helps select your application, to those who interview you, there is a bias throughout this process.s,” Aysola said.

As for Sabina Spigner? She didn’t let her medical advisor’s discouragement stop her from pursuing her medical school dreams. She decided to pursue graduate studies first. She finished with two master’s degrees — in science and public health — before heading to medical school at the University of Pittsburgh. When she graduates next month, she will finally officially be Dr. Spigner.

She says she lives by the philosophy that “only you can tell yourself whether you can succeed or not. It’s not someone else’s job to say that.”

“I am proof that there is a way.”

She will begin her residency in OB/GYN at Northwestern University in June.