Once the envy of the world, American medical care continues to be infected with Leftist woke ideology with abysmal and terrifying outcomes.

Under the term “health equity” the only parameter that matters appears to be a person’s melanin level, not his need for timely medical treatment.

Consequently:

More than 10 million nonblack Americans with chronic kidney disease may have seen their treatments or transplants delayed because of policy changes enacted after 2020.  Some of those patients now face greater risk of death because national transplant organizations have embraced racial activism.

Patients of all races deserve a formula that accurately estimates their individual kidney function, not one that favors one racial group at the expense of others. 

Then there is the Advil Pain Equity Project to end “systemic pain racism.”  It should be noted that Advil is owned by Pfizer. In fact, as explained in FortuneWell,

According to a study, three out of four Black people believe there is bias in how their pain is diagnosed. Now Advil, a popular pain relief brand, is aiming to address inequity in pain diagnosis and treatment with the Advil Pain Equity Project.

As part of the multiyear project, Advil is awarding grants to the Morehouse School of Medicine and BLKHLTH, an Atlanta-based nonprofit, to support the development of patient resources and a course for medical school students to address pain equity both in and outside of medical facilities.

Dare one ponder the possibility that this is merely “a plan to sell $50 million more in pills to Black people – disguised as a fight to end ‘pain racism?’”

On the other hand, keynote speaker at the 2023 Social Justice Awards sponsored by Institutional Diversity & Equity (ID&E), “author, physician, and thought leader Dr. Uche Blackstock, founder of Advancing Health Equity, is committed to dismantling racism in health care and closing the gap in racial health inequities.” 

Consequently, in 2024, is the American patient caught between the greed of pharmaceutical companies and the vise of leftwing social justice activists?  And this does not even begin to analyze the spiraling health care costs that have long confounded Americans.

Moreover, faith in American medicine has certainly been tarnished by the treatment afforded those health care workers who dared to question the federal government’s edicts concerning the mRNA Covid-19 “vaccines.” 

Florida Surgeon General Dr. Joseph Ladapo declared that “COVID-19 vaccines are not appropriate for use in human beings” and called for a complete halt of the mRNA COVID-19 vaccines.  Ladapo issued this warning “based on overwhelming evidence that the COVID-19 shots that Pfizer and Moderna assured us were ‘safe’ are contaminated with plasmid DNA.” 

Consider the fact that the government continues to purposefully censor truthful information. In fact, Dr. Aaron Kheriaty, the psychiatrist who challenged the University of California Irvine Vaccine Mandates was fired for this.  It has led to what is being called the most important free speech case in a generation known as Missouri v. Biden (Murthy v. Missouri).

In 2023 Kheriaty asserted that “[a]lthough this case is still relatively young, and at this stage the Court is only examining it in terms of Plaintiffs’ likelihood of success on the merits, the evidence produced thus far depicts an almost dystopian scenario. During the COVID-19 pandemic, a period perhaps best characterized by widespread doubt and uncertainty, the United States Government seems to have assumed a role similar to an Orwellian ‘Ministry of Truth.’”

In the book If I Betray These Words by Wendy Dean, M.D. it is patently clear that doctors, nurses, and other healthcare providers are increasingly forced to consider the demands of other stakeholders . . . before the needs of their patients.  This moral injury [emphasis mine] began long before the Covid –19 pandemic but surely it has accelerated.

Moreover, as would be expected in Leftist/Marxist ideology, anti-Semitism has crept into U.S. medicine as well. Is the terrorist organization Hamas gaining a foothold in U.S. medicine?

As if the antisemitism that has swept through Harvard needed an accelerant, a growing group of professors and other employees inaugurated the spring semester by rolling out the university’s chapter of Faculty and Staff for Justice in Palestine (FSJP). It’s part of a new U.S. network to ‘support’ the National Students for Justice in Palestine, an organization that called the Oct. 7 massacre in Israel ‘a historic win for the Palestinian resistance.’

Significantly, more than 40 percent of the 112 signatories to FSJP’s founding statement were from Harvard’s medical and public health. Among the FSJP founding statement’s signers are practitioners in internal medicine, psychiatry, pediatrics, and cancer care. Count this among many worrisome signals that the antisemitism roiling U.S. undergraduate programs has bled into the healthcare field as well, particularly among younger doctors and medical students. It has implications for medicine.

Physicians are brazenly posting comments on their personal social media that vilify Israel while calling for its ‘dissolution’ and rail against ‘Zionist doctors,’ with comments such as, ‘[t]he presence of Zionism in US medicine should be examined as a structural impediment to health equity.’

To add to this cauldron, consider the effect of illegal immigrants who seek medical treatment in U.S. hospitals.  This is resulting in billions of dollars in unpaid healthcare costs.  Denver and Arizona hospitals have “experienced a rise in uncompensated care costs due to the influx of illegal immigrants.”  New York City and California now offer free healthcare for illegals. 

In a report titled “The Historic Dollar Costs of DHS Secretary Alejandro Mayorkas’ Open Borders Policies Phase 4 Interim Report” issued by the House Committee on Homeland Security, it was revealed that the United States is paying $451 billion in annual costs with much of it to reimburse providers for care for illegal immigrants who do not pay.

And, finally, Stanley Goldfarb, former associate dean of curriculum at the University of Pennsylvania's Perelman School of Medicine explained in the Wall Street Journal (Sept. 12, 2019) that “during [his] term as associate dean of curriculum at the University of Pennsylvania's medical school, [he] was chastised by a faculty member for not including a program on climate change in the course of study.

Why have medical schools become a target for inculcating social policy when the stated purpose of medical education since Hippocrates has been to develop individuals who know how to cure patients?

A new wave of educational specialists is increasingly influencing medical education. They emphasize ‘social justice’ that relates to health care only tangentially. This approach is the result of a progressive mind-set that abhors hierarchy of any kind and the social elitism associated with the medical profession in particular.

These educators focus on eliminating health disparities and ensuring that the next generation of physicians is well-equipped to deal with cultural diversity, which are worthwhile goals. But teaching these issues is coming at the expense of rigorous training in medical science.

The prospect of this ‘new,’ politicized medical education should worry all Americans.

As concerns about social justice have taken over undergraduate education, graduate schools have raced to develop curricula that will steep future educators in the same ideology.

Where will all this lead? Medical school bureaucracies have become bloated, as they have in every other sphere of education. Curricula will increasingly focus on climate change, social inequities, gun violence, bias and other progressive causes only tangentially related to treating illness. And so will many of your doctors in coming years.

Meanwhile, oncologists, cardiologists, surgeons and other medical specialists are in short supply. The specialists who are produced must master more crucial material even though less and less of their medical-school education is devoted to basic scientific knowledge.

Ultimately, woke medicine will destroy the Hippocratic Oath.  The idea of race-based healthcare is morally unethical, repugnant, and intrinsically destructive.

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Eileen can be reached at middlemarch18@gmail.com.