My Niece Deserves Better

By W. F. Twyman, Jr.

Every time a crusading medical school dean admits an uncompetitive, unqualified black student, said medical school dean hurts my niece. When you make crazy assumptions about the health needs of black women, you are harming my black niece. And by giving the incompetent false hope, you have made my niece’s journey in life that much harder.

Let me explain since the narrative only seems to go one way these days.

My niece is a smart pre-med student at a top university. She has several doctors in her family. Is she a privileged black person? Yes, she is. She is a graduate of a prominent private prep school. She has traveled the world. Her parents are no strangers to acclaim on the world stage. She is an Ivy League legacy daughter, the descendant of a Central American family, and wants to become a doctor.

Sadly, these are lousy times for my niece to apply to medical school.

First, there are crusading medical school deans who are not holding black applicants to the same standards as white and Asian students. Expectations for blacks have totally collapsed at some medical schools to my horror. At one local medical school and to boost diversity, standards are no more. “Standardized tests that up to 50 percent of some UCLA cohorts now fail…Nationally, only 5 percent of students fail those exams.” At this medical school, eight medical school professors, including four members of the medical school admissions committee, revealed that black applicants have a lower bar to overcome.

The first-year curriculum contains a mandatory course on “structural racism.” Structural racism. “Other units discuss the ‘sickness of policing’ and link ‘Queer liberation to liberation from the carceral state.’" Meanwhile, what are the failing medical students learning? “And the students that remain have become increasingly entitled about their ignorance with one professor reporting that he was berated by a student in the operating room who accused him of putting her on the spot when she could not identify a major artery.”

If I can help it, this incompetent student will never see me in a medical capacity.

Second, my niece deserves to be admitted in flat out competition with other applicants for admission. To do otherwise plants doubt in her mind as to her qualification and doubt in the minds of her white and asian classmates and doubt in the minds of her faculty members. Why set my niece up for the imposter syndrome, that she doesn’t belong and can’t handle the work?

Third, my niece is not marginalized. She is not oppressed. She is not suffering from structural racism. The required first-year curriculum would expose my niece to zany dogma and slogan words. She needs to learn about major arteries. Her instruction should be color indifferent.

Fourth, the longer lasting evil is the poor perception of black doctors as a group in the larger world. Who in their right mind would feel comfortable going to a doctor who has failed their first and second-year exams? I wouldn’t. It is not about race. It is about competency. My niece deserves an admissions process that allows my niece to hold her head high in medical school. One does the opposite when one erases grades and MCAT scores in favor of boosting diversity.

Let’s talk about the foreseeable consequences of throwing standards to the wind for black applicants to medical school. One doesn’t magically become a medical genius in medical school. That is magical thinking. As with all things in life, garbage in becomes garbage out.

Did you know that Michael Jackson died because his black doctor, Conrad Murray, negligently administered the drug propofol? Dr. Murray lacked specialty training. The drug was not supposed to be administered as a sleep aid. Jackson’s death was ruled a homicide by the Los Angeles’ Coroners Office. Dr. Murray graduated from Meharry Medical School where the average MCAT score is 503. For purposes of comparison, the median MCAT score at Yale Medical School is 522. The median MCAT score for black applicants is 494. There is a world of difference between 494 and 522.

Michael Jackson was a part of my growing up. I loved Michael Jackson. I cut Dr. Murray no slack.

We have been down this road before with no competitive standards for admissions to medical school. Remember the Bakke case in 1978? I do. The white male applicant Alan Bakke's MCAT score overall was 72; the average applicant to UC Davis scored a 69 and the average applicant under the special program for black applicants was a 33. The UC Davis Medical School denied Bakke admissions. Bakke had to go the U.S. Supreme Court to gain admissions to medical school. He graduated in 1982 and led a fine career as an anesthesiologist at the world-renowned Mayo Clinic.

And as for the applicant who replaced Bakke? What became of the black medical student Dr. Patrick Chavis admitted with almost non-existent MCAT scores?

Dr. Chavis left a wake of carnage in his medical career. Dr. Chavis “performed liposuction on 43-year-old Tammaria Cotton and killed her. Two other women came close to being killed at Chavis’s incompetent hands.” Note well about the character of Dr. Chavis: “Yolanda Mukhalian lost 70 percent of her blood after Chavis hid her in his home for 40 hours following a bungled liposuction; she miraculously survived.”

An incompetent doctor tends to remain a danger to the public. “In 1997, the Medical Board of California suspended Chavis’s license, citing his ‘inability to perform some of the most basic duties required of a physician.’ The board further noted Chavez’s insensitivity to patients’ pain. The board had access to a tape recording of patients screaming in agony while Chavez humiliated them.”

How did Dr. Chavis meet his end? “According to a Los Angeles County Sheriff's detective I spoke with last week, Chavis was murdered on the night of July 23 in Hawthorne, an economically depressed neighborhood on the southern edge of Los Angeles. Three unknown assailants shot him during an alleged robbery at a Foster's Freeze.”

I fault the admissions committee at UC Davis that admitted an uncompetitive and unqualified applicant to medical school for reasons of boosting diversity, not merit. Black patients like Michael Jackson and Yolanda Mukhalian deserved competent black doctors.

It is difficult to identity all instances where nominal standards for medical school admissions have caused patient harm on the back end. The internet doesn’t easily lend up stories of failed black doctors who should not have been admitted to medical school in the first place. If one can’t identify a key artery in medical school, stay away from me and my family. I don’t care about your race. I care about your competency.

I know a doctor who failed his residency boards over twenty times. He spent perhaps half of his adult life taking the boards twice a year. He never passed but he could always take the boards again, and again, and again. The medical school admissions system failed this person. He should have been encouraged to discover his real talents in life in his early 20s. Indeed, the hunger for increasing the number of black doctors sucked in this young man and the rest was a long slog through study all the time year after year after year. He grew to hate his profession and life. Would you want to be his guy’s patient? He eventually passed as a middle-aged man. It was poignant, a dream deferred.

These are the foreseeable consequences of choosing race over qualifications. Wasted lives and endangered patients.

Conclusion: My niece deserves a world where she can pursue her medical school dreams free of ideology, dogma and slogan words. She doesn’t want to become a Dr. Conrad Murray, a Dr. Patrick Chavis or a resentful young doctor who can’t pass her boards. She wants a fair and square opportunity to be admitted on good faith terms. Medical school deans do my niece no favor if they play around with identity politics and the dreams of my niece.

She wants to do no harm. And admissions committees for medical schools should do the same.

Dr. Conrad Murray & Michael Jackson