Freedom

By Washington Examiner

Doctors are supposed to examine their patients as individuals, analyzing their symptoms and behavior without regard to race or economic status. For hundreds of years, that’s what medical schools taught doctors to do.

Not anymore.

In the wake of the 2020 riots, the Association of American Medical Colleges is trying to change fundamentally how medicine is practiced. This will be hazardous to your health .

The association started initiatives to “promote social justice in a comprehensive manner,” including by pushing medical schools to undergo an inventory to assess their so-called Diversity, Equity, and Inclusion policies. Do No Harm, a conservative medical watchdog group, has obtained documents from medical schools across the country from this inventory, and the results are alarming.

This week, the Washington Examiner will be publishing stories about documents obtained from four medical schools that show an alarming embrace of the social justice ideology behind these DEI initiatives. In the name of “health equity,” AAMC is pushing medical students to rethink how they practice medicine.

“Inequities cannot be understood or adequately addressed if we focus only on individuals, their behavior, or their biology,” reads an AAMC DEI document. Instead, “health equity work requires” the identification and disruption of “dominant narratives” that “limit our understanding of the root causes of health inequities.”

The tendentious ideological mumbo-jumbo continues: “Narratives grounded in white supremacy and sustaining structural racism, for example, perpetuate cumulative disadvantage for some populations and cumulative advantage for white people, especially white men,” the guide explains in a passage filled with enough buzzwords and jargon to choke a camel. “Narratives that uncritically center meritocracy and individualism render invisible the genuine constraints generated and reinforced by poverty, discrimination, and ultimately exclusion.”

In other words, instead of thinking, “How can my patients protect themselves against health problems?” the AAMC asks medical students to think, “What kind of public collective action is necessary to confront health inequity across identifiable populations?”

When doctors are at work, they should focus exclusively on the well-being of each patient, whom they should treat as an individual deserving of an individual’s human dignity. They should not be treated as a marker of some social ill identified less by genuine observation than by the doctor’s ideological prejudices. These are ills, in any case, for politicians to resolve, not for doctors to freelance. It’s one thing if medical students want to become social activists in their free time outside the classroom, but this sort of ideological claptrap has no place taking valuable time and effort in the detailed medical training that doctors undergo.

Seeing patients as members of a racial group instead of as individuals with scientifically explainable health problems is precisely the opposite of good medicine. The state governments that control many of these medical schools should take a hard look at how DEI programs are undermining their public health missions and should reject them.