Eradicating Essentialism from Cultural Competency Education

An increasingly diverse society requires physicians to be able to competently treat those with whom they do not share ancestry and/or culture. Therefore, medical school educators need to train physicians who are capable of interacting appropriately and effectively with individuals from a broad array of populations and cultures. Such education cannot be simply a list of traits about other groups, as this may merely reinforce stereotypes. Instead, this education must expose and eradicate the existing essentialist biases in medicine. Essentialism, by focusing on differences, artificially simplifies individual and group identities and interactions. The essentialist viewpoint needs to be replaced with an ethnogenetic one, which recognizes that groups, cultures, and the individuals within them are fluid and complex in their identities and relationships. The ethnogenetic perspective must be fully integrated into medical education if medical schools are to produce physicians who will be truly qualified to give competent patient care in our increasingly complex societies.