How Should Physicians Respond to Racist Patients?

Very difficult for medical professionals I imagine. Racist patients get to take comfort in majority numbers at the moment but it would be interesting to see them needing a minority specialist (Doctor) at a certain hospital while they need critical care (e.g Ben Carson). I could never take that oath because there would be a lot of dead racists patients if I was the Doctor.

In 2000, the American Medical Association codified its opinion on the issue, issuing in its code of ethics a mandate that doctors could not refuse to care for patients based on any “invidious” discriminatory criteria like race or ethnicity.

But what does the doctor do when the patient discriminates?

Dr. Jain, an attending physician at the Boston V.A. Medical Center, describes an encounter with a hospitalized patient who is upset over a pharmacy regulation. Frustrated that he cannot obtain his usual type of insulin, the patient turns on Dr. Jain. “You people are so incompetent,” he says. “Why don’t you go back to India?”

“What are our obligations,” Dr. Jain writes, “when we are the subject of their inhumanity, cruelty or intolerance?”

“It’s medicine’s ‘open secret,’” said Kimani Paul-Emile, an associate professor of law at Fordham University who has written extensively on the topic. “The medical profession knows this happens but doesn’t want to talk about it.”

"There’s something wrong,” Dr. Jain said, “when a person can go to work, be subject to intolerance or abuse and have it be ignored and accepted by colleagues as part of the job.”

another example:

The story is that the parents of a child patient refused to have care delivered by black or other minority ethnic doctors though the request was phrased a touch more colourfully.

"After a difficult process, including requests for a reversal of the decision (including from me), which unexpectedly led to a board level inquiry, the medical director told the family that care would be provided by staff regardless of their ethnicity and the family relented."
He added: "Is institutional racism happening in our hospitals?



"The decision to enable racist parents to determine who was to deliver their child's care based on ethnicity was to effectuate the racist views of a racist.



"But there are limits to patient choice and when racists are confronted they may ultimately relent.

like I said there would be a lot sick or dead racists if it was my hospital :lol_2 in fact a sign at the hospital door would read: "We don't care for racist patients." lol no PUN intended


Sources:

http://www.medscape.com/viewarticle/859379#vp_2

http://www.telegraph.co.uk/news/heal...te-doctor.html

http://well.blogs.nytimes.com/2013/0...s-racist/?_r=0