Twenty-one percent of U.S. medical students who took a national 2010 survey said they’d been required to go shopping or babysit for a supervisor — and 5 percent said they’d experienced unwanted sexual advances in school. Most didn’t report it for fear of retaliation.

At U. Minnesota, the Medical School showed 14.5 percent of students reported mistreatment during their time in medical school. The rate was 8 percent in 2009 and 13.9 percent the year prior.

Kathleen Watson, associate dean for students and student learning, said more reporting of mistreatment, mostly verbal harassment, in the medical school shows that students’ awareness has fine-tuned.

Watson, the chairwoman of a committee that meets with mistreated students, said the most common form of abuse she sees is “belittling,” or being made to feel ashamed because of a comment.

The national average for the medical school students who report mistreatment was 16.9 percent in the 2010 survey, administered by the

Association of American Medical Colleges. That figure was nearly the same reaching back to 2007, when it was 14.5 percent.

Fifty percent of the 13,000 students surveyed said they had “occasionally” been publicly humiliated or belittled. Only 13 percent said they had never been publicly belittled, while 31 percent said it had happened “once” and 5 percent said “frequently.”

Watson said the medical school takes these events very seriously. “We try to be very proactive,” she said, “and simply will not tolerate the behavior that we have any ability to control.”

Chris Thompson, a fourth-year medical student at the University of Minnesota, said he doesn’t think the University is managing the issue of harassment effectively.

Thompson compared the public humiliation that he and some of his friends have experienced to domestic abuse because medical students are dependent on their supervisors’ approval.

“It’s a culture that values performance and punishes poor performance with personal humiliation,” he said.

The University dealt with other  complaints of mistreatment this spring, brought on by an accreditation survey from 2010.

The most abnormal results from that survey were from Duluth, where five students — or 12 percent of the medical school’s first-year class — reported feeling mistreated.

Phillip Radke, president of the University’s Medical Student Council, helped write the campus survey, which was part of the accreditation process for the Medical School. When he saw that the response from Duluth was higher than normal, he recommended that the medical school administration investigate further.

“I wasn’t alarmed per se, but I thought it was interesting,” Radke said.

Radke’s concern echoed down the medical school’s chain of command, starting a series of interventions. Initially, Gary Davis, the regional Medical School dean for Duluth, met with the student vice president of the first-year class. When that didn’t yield more information, the student representative met with the class to seek details, but those who had reported mistreatment remained silent.

In the end, Davis met with the first-year class himself and invited students to stop by his office, send an email or call an anonymous tip line.

“Disappointingly, [only] one person came to my office who had reported it,” Davis said.

That student told Davis that during her clinical rotation, her supervisor at a community clinic outside of the University made inappropriate comments about her race in fall 2010. The student’s University clinical instructor immediately switched her to another supervisor.

A second student, who had not reported mistreatment on the survey, emailed Davis about a University faculty member whose attitude was “uncaring” or “tough,” Davis said.

“Some kinds of mistreatment you get a lot more alarmed about than others,” Davis said.

Thompson said he has heard about friends being ostracized during their clinical rotation after expressing their philosophical and political views. He said one supervisor had made jokingly sexual comments about classmates during a rotation and another blatantly told a medical student who was pregnant that she should stay home.

“Right now the info on data harassment is collected by the University and not shared with Medical Students at all. I would like access to that information,” he said.

“People want to be stimulated and challenged but they don’t want to be mistreated,” Thompson said.