Continuing a dangerous trend that we’ve been observing for some time now, the American Medical Association (AMA) and the Association of American Medical Colleges (AAMC) have been working to change both admission standards and the curricula in medical schools with an eye toward bringing science more in line with social justice concepts. Both groups cosponsor the Liaison Committee on Medical Education, which accredits medical schools throughout the country. They want to do away with “meritocracy” in admissions, claiming that having the schools accept only the best-performing students is “malignant” and “creates harm.” Perhaps even more alarmingly, they want to stress that associating race with genetics in the practice of medicine is equally evil. The result this could have on the quality and medical knowledge of the next generation of doctors and the impact on patients who receive flawed diagnoses is truly alarming. (Free Beacon)
The two accrediting bodies for American medical schools now say that meritocracy is “malignant” and that race has “no genetic or scientific basis,” positions that many doctors worry will lower standards of care and endanger lives by discouraging vital genetic testing.
The Liaison Committee on Medical Education, which accredits all medical schools in North America, is cosponsored by the American Medical Association (AMA) and the Association of American Medical Colleges (AAMC)—the same groups that on Oct. 30 released a controversial guide to “advancing health equity” through “language, narrative, and concepts.”
Those concepts include the ideas that “individualism and meritocracy” are “malignant narratives” that “create harm,” that using race as a proxy for genetics “leads directly to racial health inequities,” and that medical vulnerability is the “result of socially created processes” rather than biology.
Integrating these ideas into medicine, five professors and practicing doctors told the Washington Free Beacon, would be a catastrophe, resulting in underqualified doctors, missed diagnoses, and unscientific medical school curricula.
Erasing the concept of race when diagnosing certain diseases and insisting that the root causes of certain maladies impacting some races disproportionately is purely a function of racism and inequality will have disastrous results for some minority groups. As a group of experienced doctors point out, there are many serious diseases that have been traced to specific genetic lines, and that knowledge is critical to correctly diagnosing and treating those conditions.
Such conditions include Tay-Sachs, primarily found in Ashkenazi Jews or sickle cell disease, disproportionately seen in Black patients. There is also triple-negative breast cancer, which accounts for significantly higher rates of occurrence in Black women. Failing to take those primarily genetic factors into account could result in incorrect diagnoses or a failure to conduct early screening. And that could cost lives.
The fact that the AMA has been slowly overtaken by political correctness and social justice causes is not a new phenomenon, sadly. It’s been happening for some time now. One of the bigger earlier examples that is still plaguing us is the group’s nearly blanket acceptance of the current political beliefs about transgenderism and gender dysphoria. After long realizing the nature of that sort of mental ailment, the group began rewriting the commonly accepted medical literature to satisfy the woke mobs. Before you knew it, there were doctors approving and performing “gender correction” surgery and prescribing puberty suppression drugs to children. (Drugs that have never been approved by the FDA for the treatment of anything other than precocious puberty.)
This is a crisis that gets almost no attention from the majority of the mainstream media and it is directly impacting people’s lives. We are already seeing medical “treatments” being prescribed that should result in medical malpractice lawsuits but are being blithely accepted by the people we are allegedly relying on for their expertise. The more “woke” the AMA becomes, the further they will drift away from established medical science. And if they lower the standards too far for medical school admission you probably aren’t going to want to make an appointment with whoever graduates last in that class.
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