An Interview with AAIP President Dr. Jim Thompson

TC: Are there any obstacles that Indian students in particular face in attending medical school?

JT: I think the biggest issue still is the lack of appreciation by students that this is an option. They often have not been encouraged either in school or at home to pursue something like a career in the health professions, so one of the most important messages we give them is "you can do this."

TC: Do you think in general that pre-med programs and medical schools adequately address issues relating to Indian health?

JT: Pre-med is widely variable. Indian kids can get scholarships to go to good colleges and into pre-medical tracks, but not everybody is able to do that. Sometimes they end up in rural schools or inner city schools that are just not primed that way, so they don’t get the kind of pre-medical education they really should get and it puts them at a disadvantage when they try to get into medical school. And of course, it’s a rare school that will emphasize the Indian culture. There are the exceptions; at some of the Indian schools in Oklahoma and elsewhere, including the old boarding schools that have been taken over by Indian people, students certainly get a healthy dose of Indian culture, but it’s so widely variable. With regard to overall preparation, we see young people coming into some of the AAIP programs who obviously have been prepared quite well; others have not. But often its not the quality of the education per se, it may be the quality of the mentoring they’ve gotten or the quality of the advice they’ve gotten about what to take and how to prepare themselves. For example, extracurricular activities are very useful for anybody who wants to enter medical school. It’s important to get involved in health care. We tell them to go volunteer in the emergency room or at the hospital. Take courses that are at least close to medicine like biochemistry and things like that. Again on the subject of culture, once they get to medical school, medical schools are really awful in terms of cultural competence and training physicians how to deal with people of varying cultures, and certainly the Indian culture is no exception to that. It's very rare that you’ll find a medical school that even provides so much as a single lecture to the students on culture.

I think once Indians get to medical school too, they become even more of a minority than they were before because seldom are there other Indian students in the school. And in fact, one thing we do is encourage students to do is pick a school where there are some other Indian students. There are a few – Oklahoma, Arizona, Dartmouth, New Mexico, the University of Washington in Seattle, and Minnesota, come to mind. Medical school is very stressful, so you have to have a support system of some kind. It doesn’t all have to be Indians, of course, but if you can find a place that has people that understand where you’re coming from culturally, and you can hang out with those people, you’re just a lot better off. Professors who understand are important, but most of the support group and it really has to be peers.