Pre-Med Advice from Meron Teklu!
Everyone deserves to have a doctor who will respect them and understand their lived experience. Preferably, every person involved in the U.S. medical system would get to see a the doctor of their choice (healthcare would also be publicly and universally available and, oh yeah, FREE, but that’s a different post).
There is too often a disconnect between doctors and their patients, particularly when it comes to doctors listening to female patients and their patients of color.
Women with serious medical emergencies are often ignored, written off, or belittled as dealing with “women’s issues” like menstruation (just to be clear, we know what period pain feels like more than you, SIR).
The maternal mortality rate among Black women is abominable, with Black mothers being 2.6 times more likely to die during pregnancy than white mothers. To top it off, there are STILL fully trained doctors practicing today who genuinely believe that Black folks have a naturally higher pain tolerance to white folks.
Part of these gaps in knowledge and empathy is due to the socioeconomic barriers that often prevent BIPOC communities from accessing opportunities that would lead them to studying medicine. In our environment of systemic racism, privileged white children are often funneled into powerful positions like doctors, lawyers, and politicians, while Black and Brown students with just as much aptitude or more are kept from the resources that would get them to those positions.
That’s why we need people like medical student and influencer Meron Teklu out there not only breaking down barriers and joining the medical field herself, but sharing her institutional knowledge for other women of color to follow her. Meron has gained over 51,000 followers on TikTok for sharing her journey as a pre-med student at Johns Hopkins University in Baltimore, MD. Meron is now in her second year of medical school at the Icahn School of Medicine at Mount Sinai in New York.
Thank you again, Meron, for sharing this invaluable information with other potential pre-med students! Follow her on Instagram and TikTok for more pre-med advice and to follow Meron’s journey through medical school:
Instagram / TikTok / Linktree
Do YOU have institutional wisdom or knowledge that you want to pass along to your peers? Reach out to us to tell your story: emma@mo-foundation.org!
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(1) Tips for New Pre-Med Students
(2) Early Assurance Programs
(3) Clinical Experience
(4) Shadowing Doctors
Sources:
- Hoyert DL. “Maternal mortality rates in the United States, 2021.” NCHS Health E-Stats. 2023.
DOI: https://dx.doi.org/10.15620/cdc:124678. Accessed Sept. 5, 2024. - “Racial bias in medicine” by Kate Raphael. https://globalhealth.harvard.edu/racial-bias-in-medicine/. Accessed Sept. 5, 2024.
- “Proportion of Black physicians in U.S. has changed little in 120 years, UCLA research finds” by
https://newsroom.ucla.edu/releases/proportion-black-physicians-little-change. Accessed Sept. 5, 2024