Re female doctors: http://gomerblog.com/2018/08/advice-for-new-female-doctors/
Re the importance of minority doctors: https://news.virginia.edu/content/study-links-disparities-pain-management-racial-bias
Hoffman and her team asked white medical students and residents, 222 participants in total, to rate on a scale of zero to 10 the pain levels they would associate with two mock medical cases, a kidney stone and a leg fracture, for both a white and a black patient, and to recommend pain treatments based on the level of pain they thought the patients might be experiencing. They were also asked the extent to which various beliefs about biological differences between blacks and whites are true or untrue; for example: that blacks age more slowly than whites; their nerve endings are less sensitive than whites’; their blood coagulates more quickly than whites’; their skin is thicker than whites’ (all false); and several other items, some of them true, such as: Whites are less susceptible to heart disease; whites are less likely to have a stroke than blacks.
The researchers found that half of the sample endorsed at least one of the false beliefs, and those who endorsed these beliefs were more likely to report lower pain ratings for the black vs. white patient, and were less accurate in their treatment recommendations for the black vs. white patient.
Also for black people and medicine, we aren’t even 50 years out from the end of the Tuskegee syphilis experiment - arguably the worst ethics violation in American medicine and completely racially motivated. I think that skepticism and fear of doctors, especially white doctors, will persist at least until we have no overlap between the people alive when that study was happening and the people living in America.