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The awakened dominance of American higher education can seem tragically comical when confined to the English department. But when it infiltrates the hard sciences, much more is at stake. Read and be shocked how the politics of awakening is about to infect medical education.
The Association of American Medical Colleges (AAMC) is a Washington, DC-based nonprofit organization that represents and advises medical schools. He also has influence with the Liaison Committee on Medical Education, the national accreditor that sets standards for medical schools. So when the AAMC tells schools to review how they teach, America’s future doctors will be forced to listen.
The AAMC recently released a report outlining the new “diversity, equity, and inclusion competencies” that medical students and residents are expected to master. Practicing doctors working in teaching hospitals may also soon be required to undergo this form of political re-education.
As a starting point, aspiring physicians will need to become fluent in concepts such as “intersectionality,” which the AAMC defines as “overlapping systems of oppression and discrimination that communities face based on race, gender, ethnicity, capacity, etc.” Medical students who managed to avoid learning critical career theory in college will now get an immersion course.
They are also expected to demonstrate “knowledge of the intersectionality of a patient’s multiple identities,” not to be confused with personality disorders, and “how each identity can result in varied and multiple forms of decision-related oppression or privilege.” and clinical practices. This sounds as if every medical diagnosis had to be made with an accompanying political and sociological analysis.
Aspiring doctors will need to learn that race is a “social construct that is the cause of inequalities in health and medical care, not a risk factor for disease.” However, racial or ethnic groups are sometimes more prone to certain health problems. For example, black women are at increased risk of a type of breast cancer known as triple negative, and women of Ashkenazi Jewish descent are at increased risk of the BRCA gene mutation.
Relationships between race and disease are not always well understood, but knowing they exist can improve outcomes for minority patients. It does not help patients in immediate need of a doctor to assume that their condition is really about “systems of power, privilege and oppression” in society.
Medical students are also expected to articulate how their own “identities, power, and privilege (eg, professional hierarchy, culture, class, gender) influence interactions with patients,” as well as “the impact of various systems of oppression in health and health”. care (eg, colonization, white supremacy, acculturation, assimilation).”
Most young people pursuing a career in medicine want to help patients. They will now be taught that “an intricate web of social, behavioral, economic, and environmental factors, including access to quality education and housing, have a greater influence on the health of patients than doctors,” write the leaders of the AAMC in a StatNews op-ed. touting his new awakened curriculum. The implicit message is that the best way to help patients is to expand the size and reach of government.
Social and economic circumstances clearly can affect individual health behavior. But the hyperclass and racial consciousness that the AAMC wants to instill in doctors may result in poorer care for minorities. “Systems of oppression” as a standard of analysis could easily turn into medical fatalism.
AAMC leaders further write in StatNews that “we believe this topic deserves as much attention from students and educators at every stage of their careers as the latest scientific advances.” That sounds dangerous. Will learning about mRNA technology or the latest treatment for melanoma take a backseat to new theories of cultural appropriation?
The United States faces a dire and looming physician shortage as baby boomers retire. It will not help to attract would-be doctors by telling top students that they must attend to their guilt as racial and political oppressors before they can diagnose their cancer.
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It appeared in the print edition of July 27, 2022.