“We're IMGs, and we're often seen as human garbage outside of primary care”: A qualitative investigation of dynamic status hierarchy construction online by medical trainees

Grace Franklyn

Social Science & Medicine, 2023, vol. 317, issue C

Abstract: In the United States health care system, “USMDs,” or allopathic US-trained medical graduates, are generally considered higher status than “non-USMDs,” or osteopathic and international medical graduates (also abbreviated as IMGs). Two key aspects of this professional hierarchy have yet to be understood: one, how it is socially and culturally reproduced during specific medical training timepoints, such as the US residency placement cycle; and two, how changes within this hierarchy may be occurring among the new generation of medical trainees and professionals. To answer these questions, I qualitatively analyzed comments from a selection of medical student Reddit posts, called “Name and Shame,” where users discussed their experiences with discrimination and mistreatment during residency interviews spanning 2018 to 2020. From this analysis, I found that after exposure to and discussion of stories of applicant mistreatment, while some students on the forum reproduced this professional hierarchy, others rejected this inequality, with non-USMD users advocating for themselves and USMD students supporting their lower status peers. These findings highlight that the construction and understanding of this USMD/non-USMD hierarchy may be more dynamic than previously thought, especially among contemporary trainees now entering the medical profession.

Keywords: Professional status; Status hierarchy; International medical graduate (IMG); Doctors of osteopathic medicine (DOs); Medical education; Medical students; Social media (search for similar items in EconPapers)
Date: 2023
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DOI: 10.1016/j.socscimed.2022.115611

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