The Patriot Post® · Woke Mind Virus Infecting Medical Schools

The Association of American Medical Colleges (AAMC) was in a tizzy after the death of George Floyd and the ensuing riots. How was the institution going to ensure that it would not suffer the same fate as the police? The solution: Make diversity, equity, and inclusion (DEI) the top priority for medical schools under their auspices.

The AAMC first needed to determine how much work it had to do. It assigned the 101 institutions under its accreditation wing an 89-question survey to assess just how poorly different medical schools were doing at diverse, equitable, and inclusive. Schools with a failing grade were immediately in danger of losing their accreditation. That’s quite a cudgel to wield against schools to force them into wokeness. The AAMC effectively manipulated these schools into DEI medicine, which is actually hazardous for the health of people in these future doctors’ care.

What exactly does DEI entail for the brainwashed or go-along-to-get-along students whose aspiration is to become a doctor and serve the community? Here are some examples the the Washington Examiner uncovered. An AAMC document says:

Inequities cannot be understood or adequately addressed if we focus only on individuals, their behavior, or their biology. Narratives grounded in white supremacy and sustaining structural racism, for example, perpetuate cumulative disadvantage for some populations and cumulative advantage for white people, especially white men.

In other words, patients should not be treated on an individual basis based on their symptoms; they should be treated based on what would be most equitable for the culture at large. Ergo, medicine based on “equity” would put patients who happen to be white and male at the back of the line regardless of the severity of medical need. So much for “do no harm.” The document goes on:

Narratives that uncritically center meritocracy and individualism render invisible the genuine constraints generated and reinforced by poverty, discrimination, and ultimately exclusion.

Doctors, particularly med students, have long operated under the vigor of meritocracy and individual success. That pressure mostly produces competent, seasoned medical professionals. Unfortunately, like most things the woke mind virus infects, med school is getting rid of time-tested standards and commonsense practices in lieu of equity.

Perhaps the ultimate end game of DEI in medicine is to enforce socialistic medicine. Readers need look no further than Canada to see how disastrous and evil that system is to its citizens. People wait for years to get treatment for life-threatening diseases (often times too late to do any good) because of the backlog of patients and governmental red tape. Canada’s DEI system also succeeds in dehumanizing the population to the extent of convincing its poor, mentally struggling, aged, or physically disabled citizens to kill themselves through the MAID Act. It also produces a generation of doctors who have no aspirations to excel in their craft — they are not rewarded for going above and beyond. Equity in medicine is deadly, dehumanizing, and is the author of mediocrity.

The American people are starting to fight back. In Texas, the America First Legal (AFL) foundation has filed class-action lawsuits against six Texas medical schools. These schools are accused of discrimination in their admissions process and illegally favoring racial minorities and women applicants above those who were more qualified and happened to be white or Asian.

One of the maligned students whom the AFL is representing obtained the records of all the other applicants of the schools he applied to and was rejected from. According to Fox News: “What he found was the median and mean grade point averages and MCAT scores of admitted Black and Hispanic students were ‘significantly’ lower than the GPAs and MCAT scores of admitted White and Asian students, the AFL said. The applicant also found that the female students who were admitted had lower MCAT scores than admitted male students.”

Texas med schools are not the only ones. Back in September, our Douglas Andrews covered the story of the University of Pennsylvania doing the exact same thing. UPenn actually said that minority students didn’t even have to take the MCAT in order to successfully apply to the UPenn School of Medicine.

This is where the “diversity” part of DEI comes into play. Because of the AAMC, undergrad grades, not MCAT scores, are what matters to these schools. They are meeting a racial and sex quota so that they don’t get accused of racism or sexism.

Med school should have standards of excellence that it holds students to. Graduates literally have the American people’s lives in their hands. The demand for the best and the brightest is in the interest of all Americans, and the AAMC’s unscrupulous move to bow to the woke mind virus and stray away from actual academic standards is a dangerous game that no one wins.