Kimani Paul-Emile was featured in Medscape about her recent article in the New England Journal of Medicine that explores how minority doctors deal with racist patients.
It is a rare minority physician who has not at least once encountered a patient who refuses the physician’s care out of bigotry. In fact, it is one of “medicine’s open secrets,” Kimani Paul-Emile, JD, PhD, an associate professor of law and faculty codirector of the Stein Center for Law & Ethics, Fordham Law School, New York City, told Medscape Medical News.
“So many physicians of color can recall at least one time in their career when this came up,” she said, “and there aren’t meaningful guidelines for how to balance the interests at stake when these issues arrive.”
Dr Paul-Emile wrote an article for the UCLA Law Review about this issue from the legal perspective several years ago. Several physicians since then have asked her to address it in a medical journal, so she and three others now present a framework for how to consider these situations in a perspective piece published in the February 25 issue of the New England Journal of Medicine.
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“We hope this isn’t the end of talking about how issues of race and bigotry enter the practice of medicine and how we need to be aware of them and have appropriate means of dealing with them when they arrive,” Dr Paul-Emile told Medscape Medical News. “As society becomes more pluralistic and the core of physicians become more diverse, we need to be prepared to deal with the challenges and the promise that such necessary diversity brings.”