Physicians Raise Concerns About ‘Decolonizing Medicine’ Class at U. Maryland
“Framing medicine primarily through an identity‑based lens can lead future doctors to see patients through ideological categories rather than as individuals with specific clinical needs”
Social justice should have no place in the study or practice of medicine.
The College Fix reports:
‘Decolonizing Medicine’ class at UMD prompts concerns about politicizing health care
Physicians are raising concerns over new course offerings at the University of Maryland that incorporate identity politics into various public health and medical programs at the public institution.
“Decolonizing Medicine: Steps to Actionable Change” is a one-credit undergraduate public health course, first taught in the spring of 2025 and offered again this semester.
Designed for students studying medicine, public health, or health policy, it covers how “colonial legacies” impact “global health systems” and the “concept of ‘the White body’” as the standard in medical training, according to the university registrar’s catalog. The “student-facilitated discussion-based” course also is open for registration for the current spring semester as a two-credit elective.
However, outside medical educators and field experts raised concerns about the impact of these identity politics-based courses. The College Fix spoke recently with Dr. Jane Orient, executive director at the Association of American Physicians and Surgeons.
“The title of the course as well as the description reflects the ideological view of oppressors (white colonialists) versus the oppressed (people of color), a fundamental anti-white racist view,” Orient said. “The statement that modern medicine has been shaped by ‘colonialism’ makes no sense to me … Modern medicine was shaped by scientific advances.”
Orient also expressed her concerns over the politicization of medical education and deviating from high standards of empirical data and hard science. “The purpose of medicine, according to the late Donald Seldin, is to relieve pain, reduce disability, and postpone death. It is not about social reform,” Orient said to The Fix.
“Framing medicine through Marxist concepts of oppression is destructive of the art and science of medicine,” Orient added. “Doctors are not called to judge their patients’ worth or to engage in cultural revolution.”
Dr. Kurt Miceli, medical director at Do No Harm, a nonprofit that works against the politicization of medicine, raised similar concerns.
“Framing medicine primarily through an identity‑based lens can lead future doctors to see patients through ideological categories rather than as individuals with specific clinical needs,” Miceli told The Fix in a recent interview.
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Comments
Is the “doctor” you are consulting a medical professional or an idealogue? How can you tell going in? There’s a reason why trust in institutions has eroded…
that’s only one of a huge number of reasons why the average man/woman has lost trust in the “medical profession”
Marx knew everything about everything! Just ask His disciples!!
Y’all can thank those “white bodies” for the “modern medicine” you’re enjoying.
I hadn’t realized that Herr Doktor Professor Karl Marx was an eminent physician whose ideas needed to be covered in a special class in medical school. I was under the (apparently mistaken) impression that the distinguished Doktor Professor Marx was an economist and a communist ideologue.
So, we’re going to submit patients to segregation now?
That was always the objective of the “civil rights” movement!
A surgeon and medical assisted in dying advocate I met once was way too enthusiastic about indigenous medical practice. Specifically the one where indigenous granny sacrifices herself by going out on an ice floe to “conserve scarce resources for the strength of the tribe” — instead of the selfish western practice of knee replacement surgery.
“Indigenous medical practice” has a ring to it that Californians will go gaga over.
this is why america will *gladly* pass more and more euthanasia laws
as the blmplo students cant really do the jog and when they botch yet another surgery etc
they’ll just give you the option to take your bye bye pill
correction: do the job
Is this a required course or an elective? I didn’t see that in the article.
It’s a one credit course, so probably not required. But what is represents is the possible beginning of a trend, which would be dangerous.
So people who want to see a “white” doctor — assuming there are any — will automatically be labeled “racist.”