Steve Templeton, a professor at Indiana University School of Medicine–Terre Haute, recently warned against seeing younger doctors because of the lack of rigor at med schools today, saying students are often graded on a pass/fail basis and get dragged over the graduation finish line.
“I’d be more skeptical of physicians that are younger…I know a little bit more about how they were trained. I suspect there would be more than a few that would not have made it [in the past],” Templeton told The College Fix.
Making matters worse, med schools have now embedded critical race theory and diversity, equity and inclusion dogmas into their policies and curricula — so not only is the training easier, it’s replete with progressive ideologies.
A roundup of such examples was published recently in National Review:
The Harvard Medical School course “Caring for Patients with Diverse Sexual Orientations, Gender Identities, and Sex Development” promises that “clinical exposure and education will focus on serving gender and sexual minority people across the lifespan, from infants to older adults.” An Indiana University Medical School “Sex and Gender Primer” for first-year students stresses that sex and gender “fall along a continuum, rather than being binary constructs,” and provides instruction on the use of “inclusive terminology.” A June 2020 letter from medical-school faculty at the University of California, San Diego, referred to the deaths of George Floyd, Breonna Taylor, and Ahmaud Arbery and committed to creating “a curriculum which addresses the part we play in righting these systemic injustices” and using “these tragic events to strengthen our resolve.” One survey found that 39 of America’s 50 most prestigious medical schools contained some element of mandatory critical-race-theory training in their curricula.
These curricula are downstream from a myriad of medical-school initiatives, many of them recent, to make politically au courant views an essential part of their instruction. The medical school at the University of California, San Francisco, has produced a document titled “Anti-Racism and Race Literacy: A Primer and Toolkit for Medical Educators,” which asserts the need for its faculty “to deepen our understanding of the complex mechanisms and manifestations of racism, and to intentionally dismantle racism in the learning environment and in clinical medicine.” George Washington University’s School of Medicine and Health Sciences launched a combined “Covid + HIV Screening and Testing Model” and offered as training for its use a webinar discussion moderated by 1619 Project creator Nikole Hannah-Jones and titled “Confronting U.S. History: We must end RACISM to end health disparities.” Leaders at the University of Michigan’s medical school, “in response to a nationwide call to stand in solidarity against racism,” created an “Anti-Racism Oversight Committee (AROC)” and “sought feedback from faculty, staff, nurses and learners about how we can eliminate racism and inequities that may exist today at Michigan Medicine.” …
The students at such institutions are not always passive receptacles of political instruction. Some cheer it on. White Coats for Black Lives, a medical-student activist group with chapters at more than 70 med schools across the country, identifies as its twofold mission “dismantling dominant, exploitative systems in the United States, which are largely reliant on anti-Black racism, colonialism, cisheteropatriarchy, white supremacy, and capitalism” and “rebuilding a future that supports the health and well-being of marginalized communities.” An essential part of that future is to abandon capitalism, which the group believes “is antithetical to the health and well-being of marginalized populations, particularly Black people in the United States,” because it “aims to maximize profit.” (“Socialism provides one alternative that establishes collectively-owned resources and prioritizes basic human rights,” the mission statement helpfully suggests.)
The Aug. 14 article goes on to note the end result is patients will suffer because they will be treated as a bloc and not individuals.
The piece, written by Jack Butler, cites doctors who “did not object to measures to increase medical access or to improve patient trust. What they objected to was the notion that adopting the trendiest left-wing theories, or transforming medicine into political advocacy, will achieve those ends.”
“…The doctors who resist politicized medicine want to treat patients as individuals, not as abstractions or generic members of an aggregate.”
MORE: Harvard med class focuses on LGBTQIA+ ‘infants’ and older
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