Researchers at the Feinberg School of Medicine recently found that medical schools in the U.S. overlook disability in their curricula. The study found this oversight affects how physicians care for patients with disabilities and also makes it harder for people with disabilities to become doctors.

According to the CDC, 28.7% of adults in the U.S. have a disability. Despite this figure, Feinberg Prof. Carol Haywood found that medical schools frame disability instead as a weakness and isolate it from other fields.

“Curriculum committees didn’t necessarily see an inherent need or value for teaching about disability,” Haywood said. “They would often say, ‘Oh, we already teach about disability, so we don’t need another class about that.’ But in fact what they meant is that they teach about how to treat disability as a problem, and not how to acknowledge disability as a part of human life.”

Ableism within the medical field is well-known, Haywood said, so the study focused on how medical school shapes this sentiment through its curriculum.

Haywood interviewed medical school students and faculty from across the country as part of the study. Some of the participants were already interested in expanding ableism-aware education, she said.

Students in the study said they did not feel safe sharing their disabilities with professors. They said that professors sometimes frame disabilities as problems which makes it harder to diversify the field.

“They worry that their faculty or the educators will see them as unable to fulfill the requirements of medical school based on their disability,” Haywood said. “Then they’re afraid to request the accommodations that they have full rights to.”

In addition to hearing that students felt unprepared to care for patients with disabilities, she said  study participants noted that physicians and faculty with disabilities were often treated differently.

One of the faculty members she talked to said that ableism in the medical field impacted their relationships with some of their patients.

“The patient said (to the physician), ‘You can’t even take care of yourself, so how could you take care of me?’” Haywood said. “There’s this perception that because the physician uses a wheelchair, they’re unable to take care of themselves. And so this, these negative ideas about disability just kind of are pervasive across the medical system.”

Haywood said Feinberg was different from other schools she studied because it has been trying to address this lack of ableism-aware education in its own curriculum for years.

Physical Medicine and Rehabilitation Prof. Leslie Rydberg helps lead the initiative.

“We really find it valuable to think about not just the foundational content necessary to provide disability competent care, but really give the students the opportunity to actually see patients and see this at work,” Rydberg said.

At Feinberg, all students are required to spend two weeks with the PM&R department, getting hands-on experience at the Shirley Ryan AbilityLab with patients with disabilities.

One student told Rydberg that his time with PM&R prepared him to care for a patient who had mobility issues after a stroke.

“He just was applying the things that he had learned in his clinical rotation to other specialties in other fields to provide excellent patient care,” Rydberg said. “That just made me so happy.”

Haywood said she hopes the study helps increase ableism-aware education in medical programs nationwide.

Second-year Feinberg student Alyssa Levitt is the outgoing president of Northwestern’s chapter of the Disability Advocacy Coalition in Medicine, advocating for ableism-aware education in medical schools across the country.

She said she volunteered at one of the events hosted by DAC-Med to play soccer with adults and children with developmental disabilities in her first year of medical school. 

“I kind of realized, ‘Hey, we hadn’t explicitly talked about serving folks with disabilities within our medical school curriculum,’” Levitt said. “We got there eventually … advocating for these folks and making sure that both my colleagues and I feel well prepared to serve these individuals in the future.”

Levitt learned about caring for people with disabilities later that year and said Feinberg’s ableism-aware curriculum is “ahead of its time.”

She and Haywood both said it was important to incorporate ableism-aware education into all medical fields.

“Not just as a one-time course or as a one-time kind of lecture or discussion, but to really acknowledge that disability is something that exists across all conditions, across all populations, and will be relevant to all areas of medical practice,” Haywood said.

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