The Corruption Of Medicine

The post-George Floyd racial reckoning has hit the field of medicine like an earthquake

• Virtually every major medical organization-from the American Medical Association (AMA) to the American Association of Medical Colleges (AAMC) - has embraced the idea that medicine is an inequity-producing enterprise
• Vast sums of public and private research funding are being redirected from basic science to political projects aimed at dismantling white supremacy
• The country needs to pivot from euphemisms to explicit conversations about power, racism, gender and class oppression, forms of discrimination and exclusion
• A key solution to this alleged oppression is identity-based preferences throughout the medical profession
• To be white is to be per se racist; apologies and reparations for that offending trait are now de rigueur

Every other measure of academic mastery has a disparate impact on blacks and thus is in the crosshairs

• In the third year of medical school, professors grade students on their clinical knowledge in what is known as a Medical Student Performance Evaluation (MSPE).
• White students at the University of Washington School of Medicine received higher MSPE ratings than underrepresented minority students from 2010-2015
• The disparity in MSPEs tracked the disparity in Step One scores
• A 2022 study of clinical performance scores anticipated that foregone conclusion
• Researchers hypothesized three possible explanations
• bias in faculty assessment
• effects of a non-inclusive learning environment
• structural inequities in assessment

Despite the allegations of faculty racism, disparities in academic performance are the predictable outcome of admissions preferences.

• In 2021, the average score for white applicants on the Medical College Admission Test was in the 71st percentile, meaning that it was equal to or better than 71 percent of all average scores. The average score of black applicants was 35th percentile, a full standard deviation below the average white score
• Medical schools use wildly different standards for admitting black and white applicants
• According to race advocates, differences in MCAT scores must result from test bias
• Some activists seek to eliminate the MCATs entirely
• Admitting less-qualified students to Ph.D. programs in the life sciences will lower the caliber of future researchers and slow scientific advances
• The stakes are higher in medical training, where insufficient knowledge can endanger a life in the here and now

Funding that once went to scientific research is now being redirected to diversity cultivation

• The Howard Hughes Medical Institute is one of the world's largest philanthropic funders of basic science and arguably the most prestigious.
• In May 2022, it announced a $1.5 billion effort to cultivate scientists committed to running a "happy and diverse lab where minoritized scientists will thrive and persist."

Racial disparities in health, they say, are the biggest medical challenge of our time

• Changing the demographics of the medical profession is essential to eliminating the sometimes-lethal racism that black patients encounter in health care. Changing the orientation of medical research-away from basic science and toward race theory-simply moves medicine to where it can be most effective.
• And changing the profession's awareness of its own biases is also key to achieving medical equity.

https://www.city-journal.org/the-corruption-of-medicine