For better or worse, I have had a front-row seat to the meltdown of twenty-first-century medicine. Many colleagues and I are alarmed at how the DEI agenda—which promotes people and policies based on race, ethnicity, gender, religion, and sexual orientation rather than merit—is undermining healthcare for all patients regardless of their status.
Five years ago I was associate dean of curriculum at the University of Pennsylvania’s Perelman School of Medicine, and prior to that, codirector of its highly regarded kidney division. Around that time, Penn’s vice dean for education started to advocate that we train medical students to be activists for “social justice.” The university also implemented a new “pipeline program,” allowing ten students a year from HBCUs (historically black colleges or universities) to attend its med school after maintaining a 3.6 GPA but no other academic requirement, including not taking the MCAT (Medical College Admission Test). And the university has also created a project called Penn Medicine and the Afterlives of Slavery Project (PMAS) in order to “reshape medical education. . . by creating social justice-informed medical curricula that use race critically and in an evidence-based way to train the next generation of race-conscious physicians.” Finally, twenty clinical departments at the medical school now have vice chairs for diversity and inclusion.
Although some discussion of social ills does belong in the medical curriculum, I’ve always understood the physician’s main role to be a healer of the individual patient.
At the onset of the Covid-19 pandemic, I noticed that trainees were unprepared to care for critically ill patients. It was becoming clear to me that discriminatory practices—such as reserving monoclonal antibodies against Covid-19 for minority patients, and preferential hospital admission protocols based on race—were infiltrating medicine as a whole.
In March 2022, I started a nonprofit called Do No Harm with some acquaintances to combat discriminatory practices in medicine. We began a program to inform the public and fight illegal discrimination. We demand that any proposed changes in medical school admissions or testing standards require legislative approval and a public hearing—and we are getting results.
Our argument is that medical schools are engaging in racial discrimination in service to diversity, equity, and inclusion. We have filed more than seventy complaints with the U.S. Department of Education’s Office for Civil Rights (OCR), which exists in large part to investigate schools that discriminate based on race, color, ethnicity, sex, age, and disability. Surely the radical activists never expected anyone to turn the administrative state against them, but that’s what we did.
And it worked—even under the Biden administration.
I will now reiterate my comment from during COVID that, when I am old, I will not accept medical care from anyone who doesn’t have a thick foreign accent.
If I think you went to medical school in the US you can’t prescribe me aspirin. The ‘pediatrics’ people think kids can wear ball gags to school and it won’t affect their speech and the ‘public health’ people think the spirit of George Floyd stops the spread of viruses. Oh and they also don’t really know what penises and vaginas are anymore.
Good job, Democrats.
DEI is destroying everything it touches - that must be the intention; there is No chance that’s just a side effect. Divisive, corrosive and by its nature, forces every environment to accept lower quality everything.
Doctors, pilots, lawyers, judges, medical researchers, brain surgeons, teachers, truck drivers, police…. Our lives are literally in the hands of other people all the time.
When they’re there because somebody needed a person to fill their left-handed, green haired, blind, gender dysphoric “person living with obesity”token then we are screwed.