When I was in my second year of medical school, a third-year student (who later also went into emergency medicine, as I did) came to speak to our class about being on the wards. He gave an animated talk about how important it was to recognize that when residents, attendings, or nurses hollered at us on our clinical rotations, 99% of the time, it wasn’t something we were truly being targeted for: He likened the situation to Boston traffic – how drivers lean on their horns for little cause because they are simply frustrated about their days.

It’s not personal, he said.

When I got to my clerkships, I was dismayed to find that I had underestimated how often I would experience the mistreatment the well-meaning third-year had warned us about. As a medical student, I was berated on numerous occasions for absolutely no logical reason. Residency was worse. The sexism and cruelty was hard to manage, and yet, I had little recourse. 

In a recent piece, AAMC staff writer Stacy Weiner highlighted that, in 2023, at least 38% of US medical students reported having suffered mistreatment and that residents described similar rates. According to the piece, 75% of students and residents don’t report their mistreatment, at least in part because of concerns about retribution. 

The good news is that there are some institutions that are implementing systems to decrease mistreatment, including the University of Colorado School of Medicine and Penn State College of Medicine in Hershey. To its credit, Icahn School of Medicine at Mount Sinai created an online form to report mistreatment with access from every hospital computer.

Here is the AAMC article with more details about this ubiquitous, critical issue.