DOCTOR ORIGINS CHANGING

Theodore Dalrymple notes with alarm the way white males are being driven away from the medical profession in Britain and replaced by "overseas trained" doctors. He is tactful enough not to quote what "overseas trained" doctors can be like (see here for a very sanitized account of it) but it is another good reason not to get sick in Britain. A few excerpts:

"The medical profession used to be the preserve, give or take an interloper or two, of the white middle class male.... Not for very much longer. White males, despite being 43 per cent of the population, comprise only 26 per cent of medical students.

Irrespective of whether it matters, what accounts for the forthcoming decline in the numerical, and no doubt intellectual, predominance of white males in the British medical profession?

There are two possible explanations, which are not mutually incompatible. The first is the decline in academic performance, relative to other groups, of young white males. If places in medical schools are allocated strictly according to examination results, then any such decline would be reflected in their numbers in the student body....

There is also the possibility that medicine as a profession is a less attractive career than it once was. Certainly, the number of applications for each place at medical school is falling, which would suggest that such is the case. Clever, diligent white males, who once might have become doctors, prefer to do something else. The relative loss of white males is actually a sign of the decreasing prestige of medicine as a career.....

Not only are the financial rewards of medicine declining compared with other jobs, but the risks for doctors are growing ever greater. The public is litigious; the regulatory bodies are ever more bureaucratically intrusive and demanding; even the Crown Prosecution Service is adding its mite by insisting on prosecuting doctors more frequently than ever before for criminal negligence. Above all, doctors are increasingly beholden to bureaucrats, who are often their intellectual and moral inferiors.

While our doctors drop out, of course, doctors from poor foreign countries drop in. This is our ethical foreign policy.