More doctors are publicly condemning the Marxist racial and gender ideological agenda into which medical school students are being trained, asserting patents’ health, and even their lives, are being sacrificed for a totalitarian political worldview.
A report published last week, for example, by Do No Harm, an organization of physicians, healthcare professionals, medical students, patients, and policymakers, revealed the pervasive infiltration of woke diversity, equity, and inclusion (DEI) ideologies in Tennessee medical school curricula and programs.
But, as John Sailer, a fellow at the National Association of Scholars, wrote last week as well, the critical race and gender theory ideologies have now infiltrated most American medical schools.
“Forget about the oath to do no harm, future doctors are being forced to swear allegiance to racial dogmas,” Sailer observed at Tablet:
Increasingly, medical schools and schools of public health are enthusiastically embracing the values of DEI and instituting far-reaching policies to demonstrate their commitments to the cause. To many in the universities and perhaps in the country at large, these values sound benign—merely an invitation to treat everyone fairly. In practice, however, DEI policies often promote a narrow set of ideological views that elevate race and gender to matters of supreme importance.
Jane Orient, M.D., executive director of the Association of American Physicians and Surgeons (AAPS) told The Star News Network DEI programs “should be called what they are: anti-white, anti-excellence, anti-science, and anti-Christian.”
“They sacrifice the needs of patients, even their lives, to a totalitarian political ideology,” Orient added. “It is pervasive in organized medicine as well. The advocacy agenda of the American Medical Association (AMA) and others is completely ‘Woke’ and punishes dissent. The ultimate ‘equity’ is equal immiseration and death.”
Just as the radical left in America have actually sought to convince millions that killing an unborn child is “women’s health care,” they have named their woke DEI agenda “anti-racism.” Despite the euphemistic moniker, however, the agenda, as Sailer wrote, includes forcibly shifting the perceived balance of power from “oppressor” whites to “victim” blacks.
“Of course, when applied to the allocation of lifesaving medical care, these ideals can carry weighty consequences,” he explained. “During the height of the COVID pandemic, New York, Minnesota, and Utah issued guidance for allocating monoclonal antibodies that heavily prioritized racial and ethnic minorities.”
“While this hyper-racialized approach has long been the norm in humanities departments, it now appears to have fully crossed over into the hard sciences as well, with medical schools leading the charge,” Sailer added.
In Tennessee’s medical schools, for example, Do No Harm revealed students at Vanderbilt University School of Medicine (VUSM) are urged to participate in social justice webinars and activities during which they are segregated “based on race,” the report notes, adding one such “anti-racism resource” offered by the school is “11 Things You Can Do to Help Black Lives Matter End Police Violence.”
Woke gender ideology is also knit into the fabric of VUMS, as the school touts its “Gender Affirmation Toolkit for Vanderbilt Employees.”
VUMS also suggests a “Second Look Weekend” for medical school admissions, during which students are encouraged to cluster together according to identity group, and offers a “Health Equity Certificate” for medical students who participate in a 2-month “immersion experience in health equity.”
Marilyn Singleton, M.D., a black board-certified anesthesiologist and visiting fellow at Do No Harm, wrote in an op-ed at the Washington Post last week she is “appalled” by “mandated implicit bias training” at American medical schools.
“When I graduated with a medical degree in 1973, a Black woman in a class of mostly White men, there was a real sense that the days of obsessing over skin color and making race-based assumptions about our fellow human beings was finally fading — and, hopefully, soon gone for good,” she noted, but added:
Apparently not. That racial obsession has come rushing back — in academia, politics, business and even in my beloved medical profession. But now it’s coming from the opposite direction. The malignant false assumption that Black people are inherently inferior intellectually has been traded in for the malignant false assumption that White people are inherently racist.
Singleton observed that, in her state of California, such “implicit bias training” is now required by law and includes other targets such as “gender identity, age, and disability.”
“But in practice, such training — a mainstay of the diversity and inclusion industry, worth an estimated $3.4 billion in 2020 — is overwhelmingly about race,” she asserted, explaining the radical agenda is not only embedded in medical school curricula, but also in “continuing medical education,” at least 50 hours of which California physicians must participate in every two years in order to renew their medical license.
“The training’s focus is on exactly what the name suggests: deeply ingrained prejudice toward people of different races,” Singleton noted. “There is no room for debate, for the law states baldly: ‘Implicit bias, meaning the attitudes or internalized stereotypes that affect our perceptions, actions, and decisions in an unconscious manner, exists.’”
On February 16, Joe Biden issued an executive order that mandated all agencies of the executive branch to embrace the radical DEI agenda.
Biden’s latest Executive Order installs “equity” czars in every federal government agency and converts the entire Executive Branch into a DEI cult.
We at AFL are vowing relentless opposition to this racist effort to divide our citizens. https://t.co/eIcKD1TdHl
— America First Legal (@America1stLegal) February 18, 2023
The order establishes “equity-focused leadership across the federal government,” including the State, Treasury, Defense, Justice, Interior, Agriculture, Commerce, Labor, Health and Human Services, Housing and Urban Development, Transportation, Energy, Education, Veterans Affairs, Homeland Security, Small Business Administration, Social Security, General Services, Environmental Protection Agency, National Science Foundation, and Office of Personnel Management Departments – within 30 days.
Richard Amerling, M.D., a member of the AAPS board of directors and chief academic officer of The Wellness Company, affirmed in comments to The Star News Network that the “Marxist woke agenda has been destroying education for years and now has its hooks in Medicine and medical school.”
"AAPS is warning about 'unknown and unknowable long-term risks' it says are inherent to 'gender-affirming care' in minors, adding that the consequences of gender transition surgery are irreversible." https://t.co/o5UIa0vxLH
— Association of American Physicians & Surgeons (@AAPSonline) February 24, 2023
“Critical Race Theory, gender fluidity and transitioning, and other aspects of wokeism have made their way into medical school curricula, enforced by the Association of American Medical Colleges, which is an accrediting agency,” Amerling explained, noting his own personal experience:
As a former Professor at St. George’s University, I personally witnessed the dumbing down of medical school admissions and training. If anything, it’s worse in the US. According to Heather MacDonald, the average MCAT score for an accepted minority applicant is about 50% less than an accepted Caucasian or Asian applicant. As she said in a recent interview, you can have diversity or meritocracy, but not both.
Amerling noted that “gender-affirming care” – the provision to minors of puberty blockers, cross-sex hormones, and transgender surgeries, such as elective double mastectomies – has now “become a flash point in the battle to destroy what’s left of the medical profession.”
“This horrific assault on vulnerable children is both unscientific and unethical, yet much of ‘official medicine’ endorses it!” he observed, noting that both AAPS and Do No Harm, founded by Amerling’s former colleague Stanley Goldfarb, M.D., are both “effectively pushing back against this destructive practice and the entire woke agenda that is poisoning medicine and medical education.”
As Singleton observed, “implicit bias” training mandates send the message to black physicians, such as herself, that “I should be wary of my White colleagues because, after all, they’re biased against people like me.”
The radical woke indoctrination agenda could likely create worse health outcomes for black patients, she suggested as well.
“It fosters a climate of distrust and resentment that threatens to undermine the medical and moral progress I’ve seen over the decades,” Singleton offered. “Why are we going back to the days when race defined so many lives and dimmed so many futures?”
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Susan Berry, PhD is national education editor at The Star News Network. Email tips to [email protected]
Photo “Doctor and Patient” by National Cancer Institute.
