Black doctor explains why medicine needs ‘more black men’

A black doctor’s twitter post has gone viral for his simple anecdote about the need for more black men in medicine in the US.

Going by the Twitter handle Oga_DoctorBlue, the doctor shared the story of a black patient who was diagnosed with a stroke, before being re-diagnosed as having multiple sclerosis following an MRI scan.

The doctors informed the man about what was happening, but he appeared to show ‘apathy’ when they broke the news to him.

‘[I don’t know] if apathy is the word, seems like he doesn’t care’ was the resounding response from his colleagues, but the doctor went back to the patient and began explaining the diagnosis to him.

So after running the list, I don't even stick around with the team. I go straight back to dude's room and the code switch was automatic. "Look man, I know all that was a lot. Did you really get what the doc was sayin?" Mans looked at me with a face of relief.

And now my dude understands what he has, why we need the tests we need, and what the rest of his life might look like. All because I could recognise what everyone else seemed to miss, from a cultural perspective. He's not apathetic. Folk just weren't connecting with him.

He outlined the entire affair on a Twitter thread, and it quickly went viral:

He adds that there is a need for black men in medicine:

#isaidwhatisaid because the stats show there are less black men matriculating into med school now than there were in 1978...the only minority group to decrease since then. So that's what I chose to correlate with having a more diverse healthcare team.

His thread was liked hundreds of thousands of times.

People are pushing for my diversity in medicine:

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