How Medical Schools Are Attempting Reform

Medical education shapes how doctors think, not just what they know. Doctors aren’t only taught facts. They’re taught how to interpret symptoms, decide who needs urgent care, and determine how serious a patient’s condition is. That judgment matters, because two patients can walk in with the same symptoms and receive very different treatment depending on how a doctor interprets what they’re seeing and hearing.

For a long time, some of what was taught in medical training wasn’t accurate. Certain ideas about race were treated as fact, even though they weren’t supported by real science. Medical students were taught, or at least exposed to, claims that Black patients had thicker skin, felt less pain, or exaggerated symptoms. Those ideas sound extreme now, but they were repeated often enough to influence how doctors were trained.

Medical students learning inaccurate racial data.

Those beliefs were tied to earlier medical practices that treated Black people as less sensitive to pain. One of the clearest examples is J. Marion Sims, a doctor in the 1800s who performed repeated surgeries on enslaved Black women. Women like Anarcha, Betsey, and Lucy were operated on without anesthesia, even after anesthesia existed. Sims justified this by claiming they didn’t feel pain the same way. They did. They were simply not treated as patients whose pain mattered.

There were also broader patterns during slavery where doctors experimented on enslaved people without consent and without pain relief. These experiments weren’t rare exceptions. They were part of how medical knowledge was developed at the time, and they were often justified using the same false beliefs about pain tolerance.

Even though those practices are in the past, the ideas didn’t fully disappear. A 2016 study found that some medical students and residents still believed at least one false claim about biological differences between Black and white patients, including differences in pain perception. That shows how long these ideas can stick around, especially when they’re passed down through education.

Medical schools have started to address this. Many now teach students about health disparities so they understand how factors like income, environment, and access to care affect health. They’re also teaching students to think about bias and how it can influence decisions, especially when a patient’s pain or symptoms aren’t easy to measure.

There’s also more focus on what’s called social determinants of health. That just means looking at the full picture of someone’s life, where they live, what resources they have, and how that affects their health. It helps doctors understand why outcomes can be different even when conditions look similar.

These changes are important, but they take time. Medical education moves slowly because curriculum changes have to be reviewed and approved at multiple levels. Still, what doctors learn during training shapes how they practice for years.

When newer doctors are trained with better information and more awareness, that changes how care is delivered. Looking closely at what was taught in the past isn’t about blaming individuals. It’s about understanding how certain ideas became normal and making sure they don’t continue to affect how patients are treated today.

Follow Smart Brown Girl for deeper analysis on the systems shaping policy, history, and everyday life.

Subscribe on YouTube for long-form discussions.

Follow on Instagram for visual explainers.

Read deeper research on Substack.

Support independent analysis on Patreon.

Smart Brown Girl