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On Being Gay In Medicine

Writing for Common Health, Dr. Mark Schuster reflects on a career as a gay physician that began during an era in which gays and lesbians were viewed with widespread revulsion by the medical establishment:

On another rotation, I was on a consult service that helped diagnose a man with AIDS. His case hit home. He had just moved across the country with his boyfriend, who was a first-year Harvard medical student. The pulmonary fellow on our team, a generally kind man, grumbled to me that he hated having to go into this patient’s room. And so we didn’t go in much. The patient’s intern also avoided him, even managing to find herself too busy to perform a timed blood draw one night for a key lab test. I was still there writing my consult note, so after several attempts to gently remind her to take a break from having a light evening and chatting with staff, I just did it myself. This patient was not unlike any number of patients at hospitals around the country, wondering why the clinicians who were supposed to provide care and comfort appeared to be avoiding and even judging them.

He eventually died. His surviving boyfriend, the medical student, joined some other medical students and me at the 1987 National March on Washington for Lesbian and Gay Rights. While there, our visit to the AIDS quilt, a collection of panels that each represented someone who had been lost, was particularly poignant as we remembered my former patient and so many other patients and friends.

Read the full article here.

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We’ve made so much progress, but we still have a ways to go. It’s inspiring to see and read stories like this with such strength and vigor. At the medical school I attend, I rarely see such blatant discrimination, but I feel that the vast silence in our school is telling. I’m not saying students should be outed, but at the very least there needs to be much more education on it beyond the half lecture hour or so on it. One of my elective classes which focused on culture in medicine spent a session talking about gender; I’m glad our professor was extremely open to her own prejudices to try to educate herself to become better. She encouraged the same in us. Still, with all her effort, there were lots of things about the lgbtq family she didn’t know that were extremely important. We have an LGBTPM group on campus which has done very little in the past year (if anything, I can’t remember). I’ve tried to promote it within my own organization by creating a Gender & Sexuality Chair to work with them and create more programming on the topic. I can’t do everything, but I want to. There’s an aching need in our school for subjects like this to be brought to the forefront. 

We have amazing people at our school that work and study hard, that have passions and needs and goals. They’re activists in their own rights and do what they can on their own issues. I hear all the time about what needs to be done at our school - what’s lacking and how much improvement can be made to make it more amazing.  Instead of talking about it (and I realize the irony of me typing all this out), do something about it. Maybe the real issue at our school isn’t discrimination or lack of education on social issues. It’s apathy.