Does Your Physician Look Like You?

I had my first visit with a new doctor a week ago. When he walked into the exam room, I didn’t flinch. He looked exactly like me. Except he was taller, thinner, younger, better looking and had thicker hair with no gray. But he was a white male, and that’s probably why I didn’t flinch. He’s like me, so he knows me.

Then I thought about how many people do flinch when they see a new doctor for the first time, and the doctor doesn’t look like them. He or she is not like me, so how can he or she possibly know me? It’s not prejudice as much as comfort in familiarity. Or discomfort from the lack of familiarity.

Some stats came out last month from the Kaiser Family Foundation (KFF) that suggest that there may be a lot of flinching going on as people meet new doctors. In a report called, “Physician Workforce Diversity by Race and Ethnicity,” KFF compared the race and ethnicity composition of the physician workforce with the race and ethnicity composition of the general public.

It’s a simple idea whose results send a powerful message during this unprecedented time of the Trump regime’s anti-DEI and anti-immigration agenda and policies. (The agenda and policies are simple, too. If you can’t be a straight white man, you can be a straight white woman who’s subordinate to a straight white man. Yes, in 2025.)

Anyway, here are the connects and disconnects from the KFF report. The data is from 2023.

• 58% of the population is white, and 63% of the doctors are white.
• 5% of the population is “other,” and 3% of the doctors are “other.”
• 20% of the population is Hispanic, but only 7% of the doctors are Hispanic.
• 12% of the population is Black, but only 6% of the doctors are Black.
• Only 6% of the population is Asian, but 21% of the doctors are Asian.

In short, the chances of a Hispanic or Black person seeing a new physician who looks like them is pretty slim. Anti-DEI and anti-immigration actions and policies that directly or indirectly restrain or reduce the number of Hispanic and Black physicians are stupid if you really want to Make America Healthy Again.

“Recent policy changes may exacerbate challenges to obtaining racially concordant care for those who value it most,” the KFF report said politely.

I took the report’s findings a step further and compared the gender composition of the U.S. population with the gender composition of the physician workforce.

According to the latest data available from the U.S. Census Bureau, as of July 1, 2024, 49.5% of our total population of about 340.1 million people identified as male; 50.5% identified as female. By comparison, 61% of the more than 1.1 million professionally active doctors in April 2025 identified as male, according to a separate data set from the KFF; only 39% identified as female.

Again, in short, the chances of a female person seeing a new physician who’s also a female is pretty slim. Anti-DEI and anti-immigration actions and policies that directly or indirectly restrain or reduce the ranks of female physicians are stupid if you really want to Make America Healthy Again.

Private-sector healthcare organizations must step up, not tuck away in a drawer, their DEI, health equity, health disparity and pro-immigration initiatives. The health of your patient population depends on it.

Thanks for reading.