Woke Medicine Abandons Meritocracy and Sense
It’s no secret that medicine has become increasingly woke.
As I noted in the Daily Sceptic last year, the American Medical Association advocates “the removal of sex as a legal designation on the public portion of the birth certificate” on the grounds that it “fails to recognize the medical spectrum of gender identity”. So that organisation has fully embraced transgender identity politics.
In a must-read article, Heather Mac Donald documents how the medical establishment has also embraced racial identity politics.
“Medical schools and medical societies”, she notes, “are discarding traditional standards of merit in order to alter the demographic characteristics of their profession”. According to economist Mark Perry, black students are seven times more likely to be admitted to medical school than similarly qualified white students, and more than nine times more likely than Asian students.
Laxer entry requirements for black students mean that those who get admitted perform less well as doctors. A recent study based on data from 6 medical schools found that black residents were consistently rated lower than white or Asian residents. However, the authors ignored the obvious explanation for these disparities, and concluded they must be due to “bias in faculty assessment, effects of a non-inclusive learning environment, or structural inequities in assessment.”
Professor Stanley Goldfarb wasn’t convinced. “Could it be they were just less good at being residents?”, he opined on Twitter. In response to this perfectly reasonable (and almost certainly correct) suggestion, Goldfarb was deluged with accusations of “racism”. One user said he “might be the most garbage human I’ve seen with my own eyes”. He was then admonished in an official email by the chair of his own department.
As Mac Donald notes, it isn’t just medical schools that are engaging in woke activism. The Howard Hughes Medical Institute, founded by the reclusive billionaire and aerospace enthusiast, is one of the world’s largest funders of basic biomedical research. Yet in May of this year, it announced $1.5 billion worth of funding for “diverse” labs where “minoritized scientists will thrive and persist”.
Woke activism is even stopping research from being carried out at all. In May of this year, Mac Donald reports, a scientist lost the funding for her drug trial because it didn’t include enough black people. This was despite the fact that the drug is for a type of cancer black people rarely get – meaning there were almost no black patients available to take part.
Unlike traditional hubs of woke activism like ‘gender studies’ and ‘critical race theory’, medicine actually matters. People expect their doctors to be selected on merit, rather than via racial bean-counting. And they assume that research gets funded because it matters, not because the person doing it happens to a run a “diverse” lab.
Mac Donald’s article contains much other germane evidence, and is worth reading in full.
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Sooner or later, aeroplanes will start falling out of the sky and structures will start collapsing. Then let’s see how long these dangerous, evil loonies can deny reality. Can we just re-divide the world between people who want to be treated and live like overgrown children denying reality and being led by manipulaive nutters, and people who want to live as free adults responsible for their own actions. The former civilisation would turn to shit within a few decades.
I understand a similar thing happened with the hippy communes of the 1960s. Still, the kidults are a frightful nuisance for now.
Indeed except it seems like this time the kidult hippies are running the show and it’s us who will be forced onto communes
Maybe we will get reservations as well (or perhaps some “first nations2 are more equal than others?)?
I’ve read the article and thought it made an interesting read (a bit long, though). But I beg to differ somewhat: The notion that unversities are meritocratic is laughable. What enables people to make a successful university career is not being very talented/ brilliant in the field of their studies but more mundane qualities like being able to cope well with ubiquitous bullying, knowing when and how to cheat and effective social networking. Apart from that, general mediocrity is entirely sufficient. Actually, even helpful to a degree, as this implies being less of a potential threat to all kinds of established entities or entities in the process of establishing themselves and thus, making fewer enemies.
I completely agree that medical education and unversity education in general should exclusively focus on talent, knowledge and competence. However, knowing that this is (as with all human institutions) decidedly not the case, I understood the text as mostly being a covert complaint about some alien force having broken into the bullshitting network and now exploiting it for its own benefit, causing some of the people otherwise suppose to benefit from it to lose out instead.
Good points
What’s changed is that denial of reality seems to be getting overtly normalised rather than in a systematic political fashion rather than just random career self advancement bullshitting.
There’s a rather huge difference between having, on the one hand, a minimum standard and selecting your mates or relatives who meet that standard rather than the riff-raff and hoi polloi and, on the other, lowering standards so much that dark-skinned people can claim places.
I see absolutely no difference between different privileged groups all keen on selecting their mates and relatives instead of those whom they consider riff-raff and hoi polloi. The only reason why group quotas are at all tolerable is that the standard is already so abysmally low that it really doesn’t make a difference anymore. The roof has fallen in a while ago. Repainting the debris can thus stop.
The world is literally turning into the Ayn Rand novel Atlas Shrugged. It’s almost a prophecy
Because of the Covid vaccine scam, many people have lost trust in conventional medicine and doctors. Along with increasing difficulties in obtaining NHS medical treatment in any case, people are turning in greater number to alternative therapies that do not follow the Big Pharma narrative, which anecdotally seem at least as successful as conventional treatments. So the qualified doctor, in future, may end up being nothing more than the stormtrooper of the Governmental health systems – built to do one thing (follow procedures) only.
“Because of the Covid vaccine scam, many people have lost trust in conventional medicine and doctors.”
Quite possibly some will be disbelieving when I confess that I used to show a degree of deferential respect when in the clutches of NHS medics. This had been waning in the years prior to the Scamdemic but now I can safely say that as far as I am concerned they have to prove their worth to me before respect is shown. To all intents and purposes the majority are simply civil servants in uniforms.
Apologies to the remaining decent ones. I know some are still doing their best.