September 27, 2004
Harvard doctor claims ethnic biasNews
I know a lot of students go abroad to medical school because they haven’t gained admittance to a U.S. school. The most popular location for Indians seems to be India or the Caribbean. I have heard however that because these schools have the reputation of being less rigorous, life can be very difficult for those that go abroad to study or for foreign born doctors who want to later practice in the U.S. The Boston Globe Reports:
A Harvard Medical School assistant professor who was training to be a psychiatrist filed a federal lawsuit this week alleging that while serving in a residency program run by Harvard at a Brockton veterans’ hospital, he was discriminated against because he is from India.
Rajendra Badgaiyan, an assistant radiology professor for Harvard at Massachusetts General Hospital, alleges in his suit that he may not get his license to practice psychiatry because the director of the residency program was biased against Indian doctors and therefore made false claims about his performance.
What was it that let Badgaiyan to claim discrimination?
The suit alleges that after Badgaiyan joined the residency program in Brockton in 2001, Mushrush made “disparaging remarks concerning physicians of Indian extraction and about the quality of medical institutions and medical education in India.”
Ironically the Economic times reports (scroll down within the link) that a power group of Indian American doctors is urging congress to waive visas for Indian doctors:
The American Association of Physicians of Indian Origin (AAPI) has joined rural and inner-city healthcare advocates in demanding the renewal of the Conrad-30 programme that expired June 1, 2004.
The Conrad-30 programme allows foreign-born doctors, also known as international medical graduates (IMGs), to stay in the US after the expiry of their temporary J-1 work visas as long as they promised to work in America’s most underserved communities like the rural areas. Without this J-1 visa waiver, the affected IMGs are required to go back to their country of origin before being permitted to apply to return to the US.
abhi on September 27, 2004 09:44 AM in News · T·r·a·c·k·b·a·c·k address · Direct link · Email post
abhi,
I've trained and worked with physicians trained in the US (I trained here) and abroad. My personal experience is that there is a lot of heterogeneity in physicians who get their MD in India. For one thing, we do four more years of school here (or most do). Some Indian trained physicians are among the very best and dwarf my American collegues. Some are just awful by training and by attitude and deserve to be kicked out of their respective training programs. What I have also found, is that some are very sensitive and if you point out that they don't know something, or that here in America you have to do some extra things which come across as, uh, 'kissing up' to people not trained here (like volunteering to work in someone's lab or taking extra duties or doing extra talks which get you in good with powers that be), they get really really offended. Oh, what am I trying to say? Basically, unless I know more about the specifics in a he said/he said issue, I can't judge this. I believe there is a very real predjudice against foreign trained physicians which is just awful, but unfortunately there is also a cohort that is giving their collegues a really bad name.
(also, MD are the initials of my name, not some pretentious reference to what I do : ) )
Isn't it the same in other professions too? People who have trained in foreign institutions are always perceived to be inferior to their US-trained counterparts. Some of it is justified and understandable. So are the anti-discrimination lawsuits I guess!!
CONTACT ME AS I HAVE A LAWSUIT AGAINST A RESIDENCY PROGRAM
One cannot complain of recruiting awful ones for every Indian doctor has to go through the same process as anu US doctor to qualify for a residency program - the same USMLE, the same CSA and , presumably, the same interview if not that is outright biased from the start.
This brown Sahib attitude has done us harm from time immemorial