Social Justice Culture is Now Infiltrating the Study of Medicine
“politicized medical education should worry all Americans”
When your life is on the line, will you really care how ‘woke’ your doctor is?
Dr. Stanley Goldfarb, formerly of the University of Pennsylvania’s Perelman School of Medicine, writes at the Wall Street Journal:
Take Two Aspirin and Call Me by My Pronouns
The American College of Physicians says its mission is to promote the “quality and effectiveness of health care,” but it’s stepped out of its lane recently with sweeping statements on gun control. And that isn’t the only recent foray into politics by medical professionals. During my term as associate dean of curriculum at the University of Pennsylvania’s medical school, I was chastised by a faculty member for not including a program on climate change in the course of study. As the Journal reported last month, such programs are spreading across medical schools nationwide.
Why have medical schools become a target for inculcating social policy when the stated purpose of medical education since Hippocrates has been to develop individuals who know how to cure patients?
A new wave of educational specialists is increasingly influencing medical education. They emphasize “social justice” that relates to health care only tangentially. This approach is the result of a progressive mind-set that abhors hierarchy of any kind and the social elitism associated with the medical profession in particular.
These educators focus on eliminating health disparities and ensuring that the next generation of physicians is well-equipped to deal with cultural diversity, which are worthwhile goals. But teaching these issues is coming at the expense of rigorous training in medical science. The prospect of this “new,” politicized medical education should worry all Americans.
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Please don’t post links to the pay-walled WSJ! That is very annoying. If you want us to be able to read the full text of an essay that you approve of which appeared in that publication, you need to copy-and-paste the entire text thereof into your post.
Seriously, people are just noticing it? Trust me, it was already in place when HIV-AIDS were connected and has only gotten worse. NIAID is now funded at about the same level as NCI (National Cancer Institute). Hmmm, one of the most easily preventable diseases (if you don’t do two things, your chances of getting it are about zero) vs cancer, which will likely affect 1/4 of the population over the course of their lives.
Ooops, forgot the all important “data.” Notice that NIAID is funded at 2-1/2X the amount of Neurological Disorders and Stroke, and 3X Drug Abuse and Alcoholism combined. Organize the whiners and look how priorities change.
https://www.nih.gov/about-nih/what-we-do/nih-almanac/appropriations-section-1
They emphasize “social justice” that relates to health care only tangentially.
Sorry, but “climate change” doesn’t even bear tangentially. Nor does “gun control”. And the whole “woke pronoun” thing is a detriment to healthcare, not a benefit – a doctor needs to know what you actually are (e.g., what bits you actually have), not how you “identify”.
A trend that is becoming more common is not only the increase is these social justice issues in college, but how various schools are instituting new policies on the admission and retaining of women and minority students in STEM fields. Increasingly requirements for admission and to pass various classes are being eased for women and minority students in an effort to get more enrolled in STEM programs and retain more of them through to graduation. What is being lost here is the fact that a poorly designed bridge is not going to be prevented from failing because the person who miscalculated everything is a woman or minority just like surgical mistakes are not going cease because the surgeon is a woman or minority.
I’ve followed the development of the MCAT (Medicl College Admissions
Test) over the past 40 years, and this trend is clear in medical admissions. The “new” MCAT emphasizes “social” material over basic science, which has been watered down to allow for more “diversity” in the applicants. Many medical schools have dialed back their premed requirements for the sciences and added more requirements is “social studies” areas.
This is the result of allowing Leftists to take over our educational system. As if it were not bad enough that basic teaching/education is now more of a process of Leftist brainwashing and indoctrination than any sort of teaching, but to allow this insanity to become part of the medical/science curriculum is societal/civilizational suicide. Just imagine having brain surgery performed by an Affirmative Action doctor…
you can try to protect yourself by selecting an MD that is 40 or over. the older your doctor is, the less likely they were trained using these methods.
The over 40 physicians are retiring earlier than in years past or changing specialties or changing careers altogether. My last PCP retired and the one before that entered another field and takes zero patients.