America’s medical system has become totally woke

Anyone looking for proof that the medical establishment has gone mad need look no further than the University of California at San Francisco.

Last week, an Adjunct Assistant Professor of Medical Education at Mayo Clinic College of Medicine and Science and guest UCSF faculty member told a 300-person audience that white people are racist because they are genetically predisposed to psychopathy. 

Need more? How about Dr. Sherita Golden, a professor of medicine and vice president at Johns Hopkins University School of Medicine, who sent out a mass email last month with a list of identities to repent for, including: “white”, “able-bodied”, “heterosexual”, “cisgender”, “male”, “Christian”, “middle or owning-class”, “middle-aged”, and “English-speaking”. Public outrage led Dr. Golden to apologize and delete her X account. 

Oh, and this past November, the American Psychiatric Association published Gender-Affirming Psychiatric Care.

This ostensibly definitive textbook offered politicized polemics such as “scientific neutrality is a fallacy”, denounced the “mythical man-woman binary”, and used the words “oppress” 60 times, “power” 62 times, “victim” 63 times, “intersectional” 62 times, and “queer” 83 times.

Nearly 7,000 healthcare professionals signed an open letter calling the work unethical and unsafe.

What is going on?

Once a conservative-to-moderate profession, medicine in America has swung left–very left. And this politicization is alienating mainline America and undermining healthcare. 

The transition has come fast. Data from Stanford political scientists Adam Bonica and colleagues shows that over the past 20 years, medicine has gone from 60% Republican to 80% Democrat.

This shift is still underway.

Research published in 2019 by Bonica showed that physician contributions to political campaigns have skewed increasingly Democrat since the 1990s.

We are witnessing a fulminant ideological takeover.

Ideological pruning is partly responsible for medicine’s shift to the left.

Applications for the majority of medical schools require diversity statements.

Only students who profess left-wing beliefs progress to the interview stage. However, once admitted, students receive further political indoctrination.

A lifelong Democrat, I was shocked to see this at my own medical school at Texas Tech University Health Sciences Center.

One of our lecturers called America “white supremacist”, promoted the scientifically discredited theory of implicit bias, and peddled Critical Race Theory (CRT), a tradition grounded in neo-Marxism.

The professor glowingly cited Ibram X. Kendi’s book How To Be An Anti-Racist, where Kendi wrote: “The only remedy to past discrimination is present discrimination [against whites].”

This is in West Texas, where the population — and patient base – is predominantly conservative and nearly 90% white.

Today, all medical schools nationwide are encouraged by the Association of American Medical Colleges, which influences accreditation, to teach these extremist beliefs.

The left-wing takeover of medicine does not improve healthcare outcomes in our vulnerable populations. It does the opposite. It kills.

Take Covid and the public mistrust that surrounded the pandemic.

University of Chicago health policy researcher Harold Pollack has pointed out that medicine’s political left-turn deeply alienated Republicans.

During the pandemic, this resulted in widespread vaccine hesitancy on the political right, which cost hundreds of thousands of lives. Politics — not “misinformation” — was the problem here.

Medicine’s love affair with radical politics compromises individual patient outcomes, as well.

Doctors today struggle to provide culturally competent healthcare to those with divergent values and beliefs.

Just when uneducated white men are showing the largest declines in life expectancy of any group in America, research shows America’s left-wing doctors are abandoning the conservative rural communities where they live.

Meanwhile, as a child mental health crisis is exploding in rural communities, psychiatrists and pediatricians, medicine’s most left-leaning doctors, are scarce and growing scarcer.

Ironically, in the name of social justice, medicine is amplifying healthcare inequalities.

Nor do far-left-wing ideologies serve vulnerable minorities.

Race has long been used to inform the interpretation of kidney function, likely diagnosis, drug dosing, etc.

Yet in the wake of George Floyd, medical elites suddenly falsely declared that using this information is racist.

Ideology has replaced healthcare.

When doctors prefer ideology over hard data, fatal blunders result.

In the 1990s, professional societies promoted pain as the “fifth vital sign”, based on little evidence.

The opioid prescribing craze ensued, culminating in half a million overdose deaths.

Similarly, proponents of woke philosophies declare that it improves medicine. 

The evidence says otherwise. 

Kevin Bass is a scientist and author. X: @kevinnbass