Kimani Paul-Emile was featured in HowStuffWorks Now about her recent article in the New England Journal of Medicine that explores how minority doctors deal with racist patients.
Walk into a restaurant and demand a white server, and you might get kicked out. Walk into a hospital and demand a white doctor, and you might get a white doctor.
It’s one of health care’s open secrets, according to Kimani Paul-Emile. She’s an associate professor of law at Fordham Law School and co-directs the school’s Stein Center for Law & Ethics. In a 2012 paper in the UCLA Law Review, Paul-Emile writes, “Such requests by patients are not only quite common but also are often accommodated quietly.”
In the Feb. 25, 2016, issue of the New England Journal of Medicine, Paul-Emile revisits the subject with colleagues from the UCSF Medical Center. In “Dealing With Racist Patients,” the authors suggest a systematic response to patient refusals of doctors based on bigotry, which they say can raise “thorny ethical, legal, and clinical issues — and can be painful, confusing, and scarring for the physicians involved.”