Heather Mac Donald is a favorite of mine. In her most recent column at City Journal, she comments on “The Corruption of Medicine”:
The post–George Floyd racial
reckoning has hit the field of medicine like an earthquake. Medical education,
medical research, and standards of competence have been upended by two related
hypotheses: that systemic racism is responsible both for racial disparities in
the demographics of the medical profession and for racial disparities in health
outcomes. Questioning those hypotheses is professionally suicidal. Vast sums of
public and private research funding are being redirected from basic science to
political projects aimed at dismantling white supremacy. The result will be
declining quality of medical care and a curtailment of scientific progress.
Virtually every major medical
organization—from the American Medical Association (AMA) and the American
Association of Medical Colleges (AAMC) to the American Association of
Pediatrics—has embraced the idea that medicine is an inequity-producing
enterprise. The AMA’s 2021 Organizational Strategic Plan to Embed Racial
Justice and Advance Health Equity is virtually indistinguishable from a black
studies department’s mission statement. The plan’s anonymous authors seem aware
of how radically its rhetoric differs from medicine’s traditional concerns. The
preamble notes that “just as the general parlance of a business document varies
from that of a physics document, so too is the case for an equity document.”
(Such shaky command of usage and grammar characterizes the entire 86-page tome,
making the preamble’s boast that “the field of equity has developed a parlance
which conveys both [sic] authenticity, precision, and meaning” particularly
ironic.)
. . .
And so medical schools and medical
societies are discarding traditional standards of merit in order to alter the
demographic characteristics of their profession. . . .
Read Ms. Mac Donald’s full article here. Her sad conclusion: “The guardians of science have turned on
science itself.”
Exit question: What criteria would you use to decide on
which doctor to choose for your open-heart surgery?
# # #
