The New Doctor’s Orders

- July 28, 2023

“Medical-school curricula have become suffused with leftism.” Well, that’s a serious charge — and it should be arresting to anyone who has ever needed to visit a doc — but as Jack Butler writes in the cover story for the new issue of National Review magazine, this is not simply the case of an overzealous Diversity, Equity, and Inclusion bureaucrat or two.

Radical politics has infected American medicine.

The examples are numerous. At Harvard’s Medical School, there’s a course titled “Caring for Patients with Diverse Sexual Orientations, Gender Identities, and Sex Development” that promises "clinical exposure and education will focus on serving gender and sexual minority people across the lifespan, from infants to older adults." And Harvard is not alone:

An Indiana University Medical School "Sex and Gender Primer" for first-year students stresses that sex and gender "fall along a continuum, rather than being binary constructs," and provides instruction on the use of "inclusive terminology." A June 2020 letter from medical-school faculty at the University of California, San Diego, referred to the deaths of George Floyd, Breonna Taylor, and Ahmaud Arbery and committed to creating "a curriculum which addresses the part we play in righting these systemic injustices" and using "these tragic events to strengthen our resolve." One survey found that 39 of America's 50 most prestigious medical schools contained some element of mandatory critical-race-theory training in their curricula.

If you had hoped that America’s doctors- and nurses-in-training were laser-focused on, you know, medicine, well . . . you’d better buckle up.

As Jack writes in his essay — “Is Your Doctor Racist?” — there are ominous signs outside the cloistered world of the medical schools as well because “things are not much better in the various societies that inhabit the firmament of professional medicine.”

In 2021, the American Medical Association produced an “Organizational Strategic Plan to Embed Racial Justice and Advance Health Equity” that, as Jack reports, begins by asserting “that we are all living off the taken ancestral lands of Indigenous peoples for thousands of years.”

[The AMA] has also released, as part of its continuing-medical-education programs, a video titled "Racism in Medicine: Historical Foundations and Strategies for Advancing Health Equity," which urges viewers to identify "opportunities to center community and historically marginalized voices as you design interventions" and to "consider how your own decisions, whether at work or in the community, and at home, may be supporting false racial ideologies or beliefs."

Read the whole thing in the new August 14, 2023, issue of National Review magazine.

In it, you’ll also find articles such as:

Jim Geraghty spelunking through the caverns of Joe Biden and Donald Trump’s lies in “Liar, Liar“
Maddy Kearns’s conversation with Lila Rose, the mother and tireless advocate for the preborn
Daniel DePetris, a scholar with the think-tank Defense Priorities, on the arguments for and against offering Ukraine NATO membership
John O’Sullivan on the British Tories stumbling towards the next election in “Party on the Verge of a Nervous Breakdown“
And Ross Douthat’s review of Christopher Nolan’s Oppenheimer

You'll find all this and more — the world-famous "The Week" section, book reviews and literary criticism, Rob Long’s gonzo satire — in each issue of National Review magazine. If you're already a subscriber, thank you. If you're still thinking about joining up, today you can get a print-magazine-only subscription for just $24. That's less than $1 per issue and 60 percent off the cover price.

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Thank you and remember: Read NR today to keep the woke doctors away.