This is one issue that I’ve been wrestling with here for several years now. For the longest time, Americans grew used to placing their trust in the medical profession. When you ran into a health problem, you went to see a doctor or perhaps get checked in at a hospital. While not all care is equal, actual doctors were assumed to know a lot more than the layman and were bound by a professional code of ethics to “do the right thing” and to “first do no harm.” They were far more trusted than politicians and for good reason. But lately, things have changed. We’re seeing doctors increasingly engage in actions and policies that are clearly unscientific and in some cases patently dangerous. This is most obvious in the field of “gender-affirming care,” but it also cropped up during the response to the COVID pandemic. So how did things reach this point? At National Review, Mark Antonio Wright may have struck on at least part of the answer. The curriculum at many medical schools has been quietly changing and adopting new policies that are drawn straight from the political leftist playbook rather than the results of verifiable medical studies. Harvard Medical School is cited as one prominent example, but there are many others.

“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.

You should be highly alarmed to learn that Harvard Medical School is promising a curriculum that will “serve gender minority people from infants to older adults.” They are apparently graduating doctors who have been led to believe that there are “gender-diverse infants” out there.

More damning examples are offered. At Indiana University Medical School, first-year students are told that sex and gender “fall along a continuum, rather than being binary constructs.” They are being told this in defiance of thousands of years of medical scientific research and the obvious evidence that surrounds us all. The University of California, San Diego medical school introduced coursework referencing George Floyd and other suspects who were killed during encounters with police, committing to creating “a curriculum which addresses the part we play in righting these systemic injustices.”

What does George Floyd have to do with medical work unless you happen to be studying the treatment of blunt-force trauma to the throat? In 2021, the AMA released “An Organizational Strategic Plan to Embed Racial Justice and Advance Health Equity.” And we have already seen both the AMA and the American Academy of Pediatrics (AAP) endorse treatments in “gender care” that have no historical basis in science, including the use of drugs that have never been approved or even clinically tested for those purposes.

That’s how we apparently got to this point. It starts in medical school and becomes amplified by the largest medical associations. And the trans surgery industry that is already worth billions of dollars per year and is growing quickly is happily going along for the ride. Meanwhile, one European country after another is banning these procedures, at least for children, and launching clinical studies to find out what’s going on.

Perhaps the greatest challenge before us is not simply identifying the problem, which seems very obvious when you look at the context I’m describing here. The actual issue involves what can be done about it if anything. These large medical organizations like the AMA and the AAP exist outside the direct oversight of the government. And medical schools are also barely regulated at all in terms of defining their curricula. For a long time, that situation made sense, particularly given the public’s historical relationship with the medical industry as I described at the top. After all, who do you want to set the controls of medical science and establish best practices? Actual doctors or a bunch of Washington bureaucrats?

But now we’re dealing with something new and it’s beyond alarming. The scientists we previously trusted are increasingly abandoning science and replacing it with leftist ideological dictates. But we never installed any guardrails on this system because it didn’t seem as if we would need them. The only way to reign them in would be some entirely new type of government oversight agency, but that would be placed in the hands of the aforementioned elected bureaucrats. Given the current crop in the swamp at the moment, they could conceivably make matters even worse rather than better. Forcing all of the doctors and the member of the AMA and AAP to sit down and watch What is a Woman might be a good first step, but they would probably just ignore it. I would like to suggest a more fiscally conservative solution and advise everyone to “vote with their feet” and stop using the services of doctors who support these practices. But it’s hard enough for many people to find any competent medical care as it is. I’m sorry to say it, but I don’t see a quick, viable solution. And yet one is very badly needed.