Why having more doctors with disabilities is important to patient care

Key Takeaways

In recent years, the percentage of physicians who identify as disabled has increased. Despite the increase, bias and prejudice against physicians, especially those with mental disabilities, persists, researchers say. Residency applicants experience varying match rates across specialties, with general surgery and surgical specialties experiencing particularly poor match rates.

When Dr. Lisa Meeks began researching the prevalence of physicians with disabilities, she started with no foundation.

“I started in 2015 by proving that people with disabilities existed. That was the first hurdle I felt I had to get through to establish this,” said Meeks, an associate professor of family medicine and learning and health sciences at the University of Michigan.

One of her previous studies, published in JAMA in 2016, found that 2.7 percent of medical students had disabilities.

That number appears to be growing: A recent survey by Meeks and other researchers at the Docs with Disabilities Initiative found that 5.9% of physicians applying for residency positions in 2022 and 2023 report having a disability.

However, the rate at which medical school graduate applicants with disabilities match with their desired residency varies widely by specialty. Matching to a residency is an important step in advancing in medical education after medical school. While some specialties, such as pediatrics and internal medicine, have higher match rates for applicants with disabilities than those without disabilities, other specialties lag behind.

“It is disturbing, but not surprising, to see our suspicions confirmed: the disparities for applicants with disabilities are most pronounced among surgical specialties, including orthopedics, and general surgery, where match rates are so low at under 60 percent,” said Mi Thien Nguyen, MS, co-author of the study and an MD-PhD candidate at the Yale School of Medicine.

Persistent prejudice against doctors with disabilities

Overall, applicants with disabilities made up less than 6% of applicants, but many had match rates similar to those of their peers. But people with disabilities often don’t disclose them in the workplace or on employment documents. The U.S. Bureau of Labor Statistics estimates that about 13% of Americans have a disability. Of this group, only 37.1% of people ages 16 to 64 are employed.

While reliable data on disability disclosure rates in the workplace is hard to come by, research from the nonprofit organization Disability:In suggests that workplace stigma leads to low disability disclosure rates worldwide.

To Meeks and his colleagues, the same bias persists in the medical field.

Meeks said this stigma is often directed at people with mental illnesses, and there is a widespread perception that doctors with mental illnesses can’t or shouldn’t perform their duties.

“If we really leaned towards that, 40% of our workforce would have to leave,” Meeks said, “and a lot of times it’s because of the medical field… I think we have a lot of people who come in with no disability and end up disabled with a mental health condition as a result of their training experience.”

In many ways, bias against physicians with disabilities mirrors the challenges that patients with disabilities face. A 2021 study published in the journal Health Affairs found that 56.5% of physicians surveyed felt a strong desire to welcome patients with disabilities into their practice. More than 80% of those same respondents said they believe people with disabilities have a lower quality of life.

However, only 3.5% of the doctors surveyed, or 25 out of 714, received disability accommodations at work.

Addressing stigma in medical training

Meeks said she believes obstetrics and gynecology is a specialty where the presence of doctors with disabilities can change the stigma that disabled patients face. She described the training environment and matching process in the field as “unforgiving.” Both Meeks and Nguyen expected the gap to be much larger than it is.

Meeks said about 25 percent of current research on disability health disparities focuses on women, a focus that highlights the persistent bias women with disabilities face.

A recent systematic review identified a variety of reasons why women with disabilities struggle to access appropriate health care, including cost, lack of knowledge from health care providers, and inadequate facilities.

“If we could recruit more doctors with disabilities into the obstetrician-gynecologist profession, it would open up avenues of practice that could directly alleviate some of these perceptions of what it means to be disabled,” she said.

Another area that needs further investigation, Nguyen said, is whether doctors with disabilities are implicitly or explicitly pushed into certain specialties.

“I think there’s a big disconnect between what students originally wanted to go into once they get in,” Nguyen says, “because counseling, subliminal, hidden curriculum advice during medical school often discourages students from going into certain specialties because of the chances of matching.”

While research on disability representation in the health care workforce tends to be dominated by negativity, Meeks says the slight increase in the number of disabled physicians is a ray of hope: She and her colleagues believe the data can help dispel a misconception among residency program administrators that matching for disabled physicians is far lower than it actually is.

“[This] “Data can be used to challenge assumptions that some people in these professions have about who is participating in their training programs,” Meeks said.

What this means for you

While the number of physicians with disabilities is gradually increasing, significant challenges and biases remain. These biases not only impact the career trajectory of physicians with disabilities, but also reflect broader attitudes toward patients with disabilities in the medical community. The researchers hope that their data will continue to bolster efforts to improve representation and inclusion of people with disabilities in medicine.

Verywell Health uses only high-quality sources, including peer-reviewed studies, to support the facts in our articles. Learn more about our editorial process to learn more about how we fact-check and ensure our content is accurate and trustworthy.

Meeks LM, Herzer KR. Prevalence of self-disclosure disorders among allopathic medical students in the United States. JAMA. 2016;316(21):2271–2272. doi:10.1001/jama.2016.10544

Nguyen M, Meeks LM, Sheets ZC, et al. “Consequences of Primary Residence Matching for Applicants with Disabilities.” JAMA. Published online April 17, 2024. doi:10.1001/jama.2024.5000

Iezzoni LI, Rao SR, Ressalam J, et al. “Physicians’ perceptions of people with disabilities and their medical care: Reporting the results of a survey on physicians’ perceptions of people with disabilities.” Health Affairs. 2021;40(2):297-306. doi:10.1377/hlthaff.2020.01452

Matin BK, Williamson HJ, Karyani AK, Rezaei S, Soofi M, Soltani S. Barriers to accessing health care for women with disabilities: a systematic review of qualitative studies. BMC Womens Health. 2021;21(1):44. doi:10.1186/s12905-021-01189-5

By John Roepke

John Roepke is a freelance journalist based in Regina, Saskatchewan, Canada, who writes about disability and health for a variety of media outlets.

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