The following article has been authored by a non-clinician.
The U.S. Department of Health and Human Services (HHS) has increased Medicare payments to doctors who demonstrate their "commitment to anti-racism."
To receive the bonus reimbursement, providers will need to identify "explicit and implicit biases" in their patient care and develop a plan to rectify alleged "historic health inequities experienced by people of color."
The same radical left movement institutionalizing critical race theory (CRT) in American classrooms and corporate boardrooms is remaking American healthcare to impose race-based decision-making preferencing people of color.
The American public, largely unaware of medicine’s turn away from objective science towards discrimination, deserves to know that their health and well-being are at risk due to this race-focused ideology.
The traditionally conservative medical establishment has bought into the spurious claim that our health care system is "systemically racist" — that institutionalized racism is responsible for racial disparities in the demographics of the medical profession and in healthcare outcomes for people of color.
The American Medical Association published the "2021 Organizational Strategic Plan to Embed Racial Justice and Advance Health Equity," demanding that the medical profession dismantle white supremacy, racism, and other forms of oppression, ignore existing knowledge and skill gaps between white and Asian medical students, on the one hand, and Blacks and Hispanics on the other, and embrace race-based preferences throughout the medical profession.
The goal being, to achieve "just representation of Black, Indigenous and Latinx people in medical school . . . as well as . . . leadership ranks."
The Association of American Medical Colleges (AAMC), representing 171 U.S. and Canadian medical schools, 400 teaching hospitals and health systems, released the Orwellian "Guide to Narrative, Language and Concepts" that reads like Chairman Mao Tse-tung's "Little Red Book," dictating the use of CRT narratives, language and concepts.
The 54-page document is filled with ideologically-charged recommendations to police language, rejecting words and concepts like "meritocracy" and "individualism" which are "rooted in systems of power."
Banned words and phrases include "morbidly obese," "the homeless," "inmates," "individuals," "Caucasian," "equality," "disadvantaged," and "target communities."
Incredibly, the AAMC practices genetic denialism, insisting that race has "no genetic or scientific" role in contracting disease, treatment modalities, and health outcomes.
Ignoring the fact that genes are important in the pathogenesis and treatment of disease will impact screening racial minorities for serious inherited medical conditions, affecting their healthcare outcomes.
When medical elites feel compelled to banish words, demean merit, deny the role of genetics in healthcare and insist that medical care be disseminated based on the color of your skin rather than in the traditional color-blind manner as required by law, each and every one of us should be frightened.
Medical schools have traditionally used the Medical College Admission Test (MCAT), administered by the AAMC, to evaluate academic skills necessary for success in medical school.
Many medical schools today no longer require the MCAT so that they may ignore or hide the knowledge gap between accepted minority students and whites and Asians.
According to an analysis by Professor Mark Perry for the American Enterprise Institute, based on 2013 to 2016 GPA and MCAT data, black and Hispanic students were significantly more likely to be admitted to medical school at every level of achievement than their white and Asians peers.
It's clear from the data that medical schools utilize "affirmative discrimination" and "racial profiling" admission policies that favor black and Hispanic applicants over better qualified Asian and white students.
Today, skin color takes precedence over academic ability.
Halfway through medical school, students are tested in their knowledge of basic sciences by taking the U.S. Medical Licensing Step One exam.
Scores are used by hospitals to select Residents.
Black students, because their average Step One test scores are lower, have not been admitted into competitive residencies at the same rate as whites and Asians.
In an effort to provide "equity," the Step One exam now is no longer graded, but merely scored pass-fail. This makes testing less demanding and disguises any knowledge-gap disparities.
In addition, residency programs are manipulating other selection requirements to admit increasing numbers of people of color.
At medical schools, professors are being "re-educated" regarding their medical student grading and faculty hiring practices with workshops devoted to combating their own racism.
Similar to undergraduate universities, increasing amounts of medical school faculty time are spent on so-called "anti-racism" activities.
Medical schools are altering their curriculum, replacing pure science courses with credit-bearing CRT advocacy training.
According to Legal Insurrection’s medical school database, 39 out of 50 medical schools surveyed require courses in "systemic racism."
Those numbers will increase with the new AAMC guidelines requiring medical school graduates to display "knowledge of the intersectionality of a patient’s multiple identities and how each identity may present varied and multiple forms of oppression or privilege related to clinical decisions and practice." Failure to comply with these requirements could put a medical school’s accreditation status at risk.
When announcing its guidelines, the AAMC’s president declared that woke identity politics "deserves just as much attention from learners and educators at every stage of their careers as the latest scientific breakthroughs."
Being indoctrinated in "intersectionality" does nothing to improve a student’s clinical knowledge. Every moment spent regurgitating "social justice" jargon is time not spent in rigorous training to learn how to diagnose and treat illness, prescribe drugs and save lives.
The prospect of this new politicized medical education should worry all Americans.
Funding of scientific research is now being redirected to diversity cultivation.
The National Institutes of Health (NIH) and the National Science Foundation are diverting significant taxpayer dollars from curing diseases to fighting white privilege and cisheteronormativity.
Private research dollars are following the same trajectory.
NIH supports a multidisciplinary neuroscience initiative to expand understanding of the brain, focusing on treatments for Alzheimer’s, Parkinson’s, autism, and depression.
Since mid-2021, applicants seeking research funding are now required to submit a plan demonstrating how they will "enhance diverse perspectives" by empowering individuals from groups "traditionally underrepresented" in biomedical research, such as Blacks.
To the NIH, the small number of blacks in neuroscience research is irrefutable evidence of discrimination, even though grant reviewers don’t see an applicant’s race.
The agency completely ignores racial disparities in academic skills, achievement and doctoral degrees, while supporting more than 60 "diversity and inclusion" initiatives.
The current obsession with no-causes-but-racism is degrading scholarly research.
Science’s purpose is to advance knowledge, not to be a "social justice" vehicle.
No consideration is given to the obvious knowledge gap present in the Black and Hispanic medical school applicant pool.
No consideration is given to the important role played by poverty, crime, drug abuse, poor education, single-parent families, welfare dependency, unhealthy lifestyles, dysfunctional government services, and lack of adequate insurance when analyzing the lower health outcomes among Blacks and Hispanics.
Instead of addressing these issues, the blame is placed on "racism."
The medical profession has abandoned rational thought in favor of intolerant racist dogma in a misbegotten effort to right past wrongs, insisting that giving preference to people of color is a form of reparations for white racism and must be institutionalized across the medical field.
Common sense says that patients of all ethnicities will suffer.
The public’s trust in medical institutions, which has already fallen during the coronavirus pandemic, will decline as will the quality of medical care.
Ziva Dahl is a senior fellow with the news and public policy group Haym Salomon Center. Ziva writes and lectures about U.S.-Israel relations, U.S. foreign policy, Israel, Zionism, Antisemitism and BDS on college campuses. Her articles have appeared in such publications as The Hill, New York Daily News, New York Observer, The Washington Times, American Spectator, American Thinker and Jerusalem Post. Read Ziva Dahl's Reports — More Here.
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