LGBT Attitudes and Knowledge Among Mysore Medical Students

One of the projects I am working on concerns Mysore medical student's perceptions and knowledge about the LGBT community. The reason I wanted to undertake this project is because I myself have experienced a lot of medical discrimination in the United States as a queer, non-binary trans masculine, intersex, polyamorous, caedograysexual individual and I wanted to learn more about how doctors all around the world can better treat their LGBT patients.

Introduction to the Issue

Everyone deserves to have equal access to good healthcare regardless of their sexual or gender identity. However, Lesbian, Gay, Bisexual, and Transgender (LGBT) patients in India commonly face discrimination by doctors which affects their quality of care. According to Arora et al., doctors often do not know the varied needs of the LGBT community and treated them as a homogenous group (2022). This can impact their quality of care because every person in the LGBT community has different needs that vary according to their gender, sexual, and romantic orientation. For example, transgender patients need assistance with their transition and doctors who can aid in providing access to gender affirming care (Chandran & Kuttapan, 2019; Pandya & Redcay, 2020; Singh et al., 2014), whereas the lesbian community needs more mental health focused and substance abuse interventions (Bowling et al., 2016). Care must be patient centered and specific to the patient.

A doctor’s knowledge about their medical practice starts when they begin medical school. This time is important as it molds and shapes a doctor’s beliefs and how they will treat their patients. During this time, it is crucial to educate medical students about LGBT people as they will carry this knowledge and attitude towards them into their practice. As such, analyzing their current perceptions, knowledge, and views about the LGBT community is needed to understand how to improve their education about the LGBT community. That is why I undertook this project: to learn more about how medical students in India view the LGBT community which could inform future interventions to improve medical treatment of LGBT patients.

Currently, many studies show Indian medical students do not have much knowledge about LGBT patients, which will impact their treatment of LGBT patients when they practice medicine (Banwari et al., 2015). A study conducted by Debnath, et al. found that over half of medical students “did not really understand homosexuality” (2022). This is because they did not receive much information about the LGBT community throughout their schooling, which can lead to LGBT stigma (Saraff et al., 2022). Medical students have also not been exposed to many LGBT patients as 71% of medical students in Southern India reported ever having been exposed to a trans patient (Jain et al., 2022).

Additionally, medical students generally either have a neutral or negative leaning stance towards homosexuality, although they vary depending on the school. Chandran et al. found that 55% of medical students in Kerala believed homosexuality was a disorder and required therapy (2016). Debnath et al. also found that 60.7% of medical students in West Bengal did not believe homosexuality was a sexual orientation (2022). However, another study conducted the same year found that 80% of medical students in West Bengal did believe homosexuality was a sexual orientation (Kar et al., 2022). Sholeye et al. found that first year medical students in Gujarat held conservative views towards homosexuality (2018). YR et al. revealed that medical students in Mangalore had a neutral and less positive stance towards people with same gender attraction in their 2022 study. As demonstrated, medical students’ attitudes tend to lean towards neutral and less positive stances, but there are some in certain schools who hold more positive views.

The current literature also reveals that medical student hold biases that affect their perception of LGBT people, as well as misconceptions and misinformation about this community. Medical students in West Bengal, for example, believed homosexuals were more promiscuous which is a common stereotype about homosexuals (Chandran et al., 2016). Additionally, West Bengal medical students also believed homosexuality was “easily recognizable”, are a danger to society, and should not be employed in schools (Debnath et al., 2022). There were even some medical students who believed homosexuality was an illness (Kar, et al., 2022). Although prejudice and stereotypes seem to be common in medical schools towards LGBT people, Ahuja et al. demonstrated in their study that medical students can improve their perceptions of LGBT patients with an intervention increasing empathy among them, so interventions should be developed in this population to improve LGBT treatment in healthcare.

As addressed, there is some literature about medical student’s perceptions and knowledge about the LGBT community in India. However, none have looked into medical students in Mysore. Because results can vary from city to city, it is important to explore this question in Mysore to gain a better understanding of how medical students in different cities of India perceive LGBT students, as well as the knowledge they may have about this community. This project focuses on Mysore medical student’s perceptions and awareness of the Indian LGBT community and will be used to determine what gaps there are in LGBT knowledge among the medical community to develop interventions for Mysore medical students and doctors as a way to better their understanding and treatment of this community and ultimately improve healthcare for the Indian LGBT population in Mysore.

My Work in This Project

I shadowed Hector Peguero, the lead of this project, in his work. Hector showed me the questionnaire he was going to administer to the students as well as his plan for the project. Before sending it off to the students, I helped edit the questionnaire for errors and to make it more inclusive. Hector then turned it into a Qualtrics survey and we went to the medical school with Dr. V to talk to the head of the school to give us permission to distribute the survey. He told us about a conference the medical school help surrounding LGBT healthcare a few years ago and looked forward to collaborating on this project with us. We were very happy that he was receptive to the idea and allowed us to distribute the survey to the students through a link. Our goal was to reach around 200 completed surveys. In just 48 hours after we distributed it, we had approximately 180 completed. We were very happy with these results. Now the next step is to sort and filter out incomplete data then analyze the responses. Once we have everything analyzed, we will be publishing the paper with the results.