Disturbing left-wing propaganda infects our medical schools
If there is one area of life you would hope might be off limits to the left-wing insanity ripping through the nation like wildfire, surely it would be the field of medicine. When it comes to your health, politics should not have anything to do with how you’re treated by your doctor.
Yet, a guest speaker, whose lecture was required by all first-year medical students at UCLA as part of their mandatory course on “structural racism,” said a prayer to “the ancestors” and “mama earth.” She went on to criticize private property and accuse “colonizers” of “pimp[ing] and play[ing] mama earth.” She concluded her talk by having the students get on their knees and touch “mama earth” with their fists while she prayed. Then later, according to a report in the Washington Free Beacon, she led the students in chanting, “Free, Free Palestine.”
Science is no longer at the helm of American medical schools. It has been replaced with the DEI obsession.
Good times were had by all — unless you happened to be a Jewish student in that class.
In February, Dante King, a guest faculty member of the University of California at San Francisco School of Medicine, delivered a lecture titled, “Diagnosing Whiteness and Anti-Blackness: White Psychopathology, Collective Psychosis and Trauma in America.” King says white people are racist because they’re genetically predisposed to psychopathy. What any of this has to do with learning medicine is any commonsense person’s guess. But unfortunately for America’s medical future, this kind of left-wing propaganda is fast becoming the rule rather than the exception.
Top-ranked Harvard Medical School has activist courses such as “Social Change and the Practice of Medicine,” to teach aspiring doctors how to be “important advocates for social change.” At George Washington University’s School of Medicine, students take courses in: “How to Talk About Race, Power, and Privilege in Classroom and Clinical Settings,” “Moving Beyond Bystanding … to Disrupting Racism,” and the ever-popular “Beyond the Binary: Navigating Pregnancy and Affirming Care for People with Diverse Gender Identities.”
There’s also “Confronting U.S. History: We Must End Racism to End Health Disparities.” That course includes a webinar session with Nikole Hannah-Jones, creator of the New York Times’ “1619 Project.” I guess if all our doctors hate America, it makes patients healthier.
At the Indiana University School of Medicine, first-year students in basic anatomy class are taught that gender is a “social construct,” that sex and gender “fall along a continuum, rather than being binary,” and that man and woman gender types are “oversimplifications.” These are all real classes, many of them required, at America’s leading medical schools.
According to Do No Harm, an organization established to expose and combat this insanity, 23 of America’s top 25 medical schools now have antiracism instruction as a core part of their curriculum. One UCLA med student told Fox News last month that left-wing ideology is “laced through all four years of medical school.”
“I would say there’s not any room for pushback,” the student said. “It’s more framed as if this is the reality of medicine, or this is the reality of our society. And then the discussion is, what can we do about this? But it’s not a discussion of whether the premise is anything other than [the] objective facts.”
UCLA medical students are asked to participate in climate activism including going to a “big oil resistance” event, pressuring state legislators to support a climate bill, and helping researchers at UCLA study “the environmental injustices of the prison industrial complex.”
This movement goes beyond medical schools rebooting their curriculum or even just having a few activist classes. The State University of New York’s Upstate Medical University in Syracuse, which has been around since 1834, put together a diversity task force that produced a 164-page report demanding action like this: “Health care professionals must explicitly acknowledge that race and racism are at the root of these health disparities.”
The report also requires all students and staff to be trained in “bystander intervention” for bias, and all new faculty members are required to sign a pledge affirming their commitment to diversity, equity, and inclusion.
Christopher Rufo reported on the oath that medical students at the University of Minnesota must now take that includes a pledge to “honor all Indigenous ways of healing that have been historically marginalized by Western medicine” and to recognize the harm caused by “white supremacy, colonialism, the gender binary.”
Does this indoctrination create a greater passion for activism or for becoming better, more dedicated doctors?
In 2022, a Wake Forest medical student was about to draw blood from a patient who made an apparently mocking comment about the “pronouns” pin that this female student was wearing. The medical student then retaliated by missing the patient’s vein on purpose so that she had to stick the patient twice. Then the student bragged about what she’d done in a tweet. After some backlash, Wake Forest eventually placed her on “extended leave.”
In 2022, the president of the American Association of Medical Colleges said: “We believe this [diversity, equity, and inclusion] deserves just as much attention from learners and educators at every stage of their careers as the latest scientific breakthroughs.”
Really? DEI is just as important for medical doctors to follow as science? By the way, the organization he heads, in partnership with the American Medical Association, forms the accrediting body for medical schools in the United States.
In 2022, the AAMC released its “DEI Competencies” report, which spells out the DEI propaganda that medical schools are expected to incorporate in their training of doctors. This unquestioning devotion to DEI now governs admission standards at medical schools. The AAMC now discourages schools from using the MCAT admission test to select medical students. Dozens of schools have made the MCAT optional.
The University of Pennsylvania, an Ivy League school, now has guaranteed admission with no MCAT required for black students who meet GPA and internship requirements. They also get a 50% discount on tuition. The MCAT itself has been altered to try to create more equity in admissions. One-quarter of the questions are now about social issues and psychology.
As part of broadening the admission process beyond a student’s aptitude for actually becoming a doctor, most med school applications now have DEI questions. One doctor, writing recently in the Wall Street Journal, says:
I assume most people don’t know how politicized the selection and training of their future physicians has become. Even I, a physician, was unaware until my son went through the med-school application process.
Nearly all the schools requested multiple essays providing a detailed explanation of the applicant’s dedication to DEI and participating in DEI-related activism. Some schools had essays querying the applicant’s activism for, or opinion of, progressive border policies. Most also requested that students discuss how they have been adversely affected by systemic racism (and if they haven’t been affected, then they should discuss what they plan to do to fight systemic racism, anyway).
Science is no longer at the helm of American medical schools. It has been replaced with the DEI obsession. Does that make you feel safer when you think about booking your next checkup? And heaven forbid if you have go to the emergency room, let’s hope your doctor signed his DEI pledge and didn’t flunk out of “How to Talk About Race, Power, and Privilege in Classroom and Clinical Settings.” After all, I expect my doctor to explain my privilege before taking my vitals.
The woke takeover of our medical schools must stop. Our safety depends on it.
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