I’m not the kind of patient who cares where my doctor went to school, but anecdotally, I’ve met doctors who went to Howard Medical School which were exceptional in their so-called bedside manner.
My first experience with a Howard doctor was in the emergency room at Valley Medical, the county hospital for Santa Clara county. I had a broken arm, and probably because they were helping out the resident doctors, the ones assigned to me told me they were in from other hospitals. One was from Stanford, confident and efficient in resetting my bones. The other told me he was from Howard, which even to my pain-rattled brain was surprising. All the way from Washington, DC to here? I wondered aloud. But, yes, I guess once in a while doctors from Howard will fly across country to give aid to hurt Californians.
What impressed me with this East Coast doctor was that he was actually paying attention to me as a patient. Most doctors are just fine, but eager to quickly identify and fix (or deworsen) what is wrong. Some doctors — and I put this on those from prestigious programs — barely make eye contact and I have the impression that with each cyst they see and every symptom that reveals itself, their medical student self is taking note of at least 10 possible diseases that could be relative to said symptom in said patient in readiness for the pop quiz his teacher is about to pepper him with.
I live in the South now, so I encountered another Howard-educated doctor here as well. And just like the one who’d come to San Jose, this one took care to look at my face and listen carefully before getting to work. If you don’t typically have doctors like this, it is impressive. And I suspect there is something in the Howard Medical School education that teaches them this skill, and that other schools may wish to emulate.