"What it means to be the ideal physician remains at the forefront of the pursuit of humane and equitable healthcare. The body of knowledge that aspiring medical doctors require to fulfill these duties properly is even more vexing. From Hippocrates to the 1910 Flexner Report to the 2015 expansion of the MCAT covering social determinants of health, ethics, and philosophy, the medical profession continues to be an archetypal model of an elite and hierarchical profession, in which efforts to reduce patterns of inequality in ...
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"What it means to be the ideal physician remains at the forefront of the pursuit of humane and equitable healthcare. The body of knowledge that aspiring medical doctors require to fulfill these duties properly is even more vexing. From Hippocrates to the 1910 Flexner Report to the 2015 expansion of the MCAT covering social determinants of health, ethics, and philosophy, the medical profession continues to be an archetypal model of an elite and hierarchical profession, in which efforts to reduce patterns of inequality in professional practice unintentionally reinforces them. In Curricular Injustice, Lauren D. Olsen explains how the U.S. medical profession cultivates its vision of the ideal doctor. With the recent expansion of the MCAT to include humanities and social science subjects, she focuses on how the undergraduate pre-med curriculum fails to achieve its aims. The book contains two parts, the first explains how an ideal education is viewed as the means to produce the right kind of doctors and the second identifies four practices, which Olsen calls marginalizing, therapeutic, leisure, and critical that seek to achieve the ideal. Unfortunately, all but the critical form, Olsen argues, serves to reinforce the status quo in the field. She concludes that the medical profession, due to the way future doctors are educated, individualizes systemic problems. A greater emphasis on critical approaches that raise awareness of the role of social structure in social inequality is the only way to educate doctors to treat unequal patients equally"--
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