Contraindicated: Disabled Doctors and the Construction of the Physician/Patient Binary

• In Event: Medical Sociology Section Roundtables
  In Refereed Roundtable (90 minute): Table 4. The Institution of Medicine

Abstract

Medicine is organized around a foundational binary: the physician who knows, and the patient who is known. This distinction is not merely functional—it is a credibility hierarchy that determines whose account of the body will be believed and whose will be doubted. Under compulsory able-bodiedness, this binary maps directly onto disability: disabled people belong on the patient side, as objects of medical care rather than its providers. Yet only 3% of US physicians report a disability compared to 26% of American adults; these numbers that likely reflect significant concealment, as hostile training environments construct passing as able-bodied as a survival strategy from the earliest stages of the pipeline.

This paper draws on a content analysis of 51 medical school guidebooks published between 1997 and 2024, and an ongoing series of semi-structured interviews with disabled medical professionals across four career stages, to examine how the physician/patient binary is institutionally constructed and socially enforced. Training materials position the binary as foundational and mutually exclusive, explicitly instructing disabled trainees to conceal their disabilities and framing disability experience as a liability rather than a legitimate professional identity. In clinical encounters, disabled physicians find their credentials do not travel across the binary: physician status offered no protection against dismissal and disbelief in the patient role, and in several cases actively inverted. This paper argues that credibility in medicine is not just earned through knowledge or capital alone—it is assigned by role, and withheld by the same structural mechanism. Disabled physicians are not simply an underrepresented population within medicine, but a structurally revealing one, whose position on both sides of a boundary medicine insists is natural exposes how that boundary is made.

Author

• Grace Franklyn, University of North Carolina-Chapel Hill