Comment on Foreign Medical Graduates

To the Editor.—  The issue of foreign medical graduates (FMGs) has been intensively analyzed. Interestingly enough, it is difficult to find any literature by authors who are FMGs themselves.In the paper recently published by Bergen and Lenoble, the so-called second-class physician is once more brought to attention. According to the authors, of all the physicians in private practice, only 13% are FMGs; the rest of private medical care delivered to the American public is done by US physicians. At the present time, however, there is no surveillance of medical quality standards for this group. So we have no evidence that the US physician belongs to a homogeneous group once he is established in practice. It is, instead, more feasible to believe that there might be differences as a group in the sophisticated academic University Medical Center as compared with the private office of a small community. The fact is