The Short Coat Podcast

Dr. Marley Doyle is a reproductive psychiatrist at the University of Nebraska Medical Center. She's also "legally blind", with 20/400 vision. She struggled through medical school just like all med students, but with that additional complication. She made it, however, and her discussion with Aditi Patel and Irisa Mahaparn gives some clues as to why. First, her disability was invisible which made it easy for people to assume that she wasn't disabled. And second, she was naive to the fact that she could ask for help. In other words, she stumbled through it all and came out the other side without having been a "burden" for her school. Years later, she acknowledges that she could have asked for more help. We also discuss the technical standards that most schools have in place to define what a student physician should be able to do physically, intellectually, and emotionally to succeed in school. These standards, however, often seem to be written with a stereotypical disabled person in mind, one who cannot p