Goal of Increasing Diversity in Medical School Becoming Reality - Higher Education

Goal of Increasing Diversity in Medical School Becoming Reality - Higher Education: ...Given the disproportionately lower rates of wellness among people of color than among Whites—driven by everything from lack of finance to insufficient self-care to lingering distrust of mainly White-run medical institutions—Taylor has co-launched a campaign aimed at urging more students of color to pursue medicine and to create means of putting medical school within their reach.

Since its somewhat accidental launch—it all started with a Facebook collage of 131 Black women doctors thanking Disney for making Doc McStuffins a Black girl—the We Are Doc McStuffins Project & Artemis Medical Society has achieved a global membership of more than 2,400 female medical, osteopathic or naturopathic physicians. Ninety percent of them Black, while the rest are in other areas of medicine.

“I was just intuitively inclined toward becoming a doctor,” said Artemis Society co-founder Dr. Erikka Magra, who practices emergency medicine at the U.S. Naval Base in Naples, Italy. Coming up, she was one of a handful of Blacks in her San Diego schools. Her doctor was White and a wonderful caregiver. His race didn’t factor into her decision as much as her view of science as very cool stuff.