How Indian doctors paved the way for the country’s most powerful export – trust

Ask a British person to picture their family doctor, and there’s a good chance they’ll describe someone who looks like Dr Patel – South Asian, probably in their 40s or 50s, calm under pressure, the steady hand who diagnosed your father’s heart condition and delivered your nephew at three in the morning. This isn’t accident or assumption. It’s arithmetic.

For most of the past 70 years, if you visited a National Health Service surgery in an underserved neighborhood, or checked into a hospital in a struggling northern town, or needed a specialist willing to work nights in geriatrics or psychiatry, you were statistically more likely to be treated by a doctor from India than by one from Edinburgh or Essex.

The stereotype had become so deeply embedded in the national psyche that by 2010, the BBC built a successful series around the premise, calling it, with characteristic British directness, The Indian Doctor. It became a cultural touchstone, like Yorkshire tea or the NHS itself.

The same pattern took hold in America, though without the television series. Walk into a rural hospital in Iowa or North Dakota, and the physician who treats you is more likely than not to be foreign-born. In primary care and specialties like oncology, immigrant doctors account...

Read more