The Politicization of Medicine
How ideology has infiltrated medical institutions, distorted their priorities, and politicized the physician's role
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In a provocative essay for The Chronicle of Higher Education, Sally Satel and Thomas Huddle critique what they see as the growing politicization of medicine in the United States. They argue that, since the death of George Floyd in 2020, medical schools and professional associations have increasingly infused their curricula and institutional missions with progressive ideology, mandating dubious interventions like unconscious bias training, promoting ideological concepts as medical imperatives, and pressuring physicians to adopt activist roles that fall outside their clinical expertise. Below is an excerpt; you can read the whole piece here or here.
Over the past decade, we’ve grown ever more concerned about dubious strains of social-justice advocacy infiltrating medicine. Following the murder of George Floyd in 2020, doctors’ pursuit of social reform coalesced, almost overnight, into a mission.
Within a week of Floyd’s death, for example, the Association of American Medical Colleges, which is a co-sponsor of a major accrediting body, announced that the nation’s 155 medical schools “must employ antiracist and unconscious bias training and engage in interracial dialogues.” A year later (and again in 2024), the American Medical Association released a Strategic Plan to Embed Racial Justice and Advance Health Equity that encouraged physicians to dismantle “white patriarchy and other systems of oppression”…
Medical students are now immersed in the notion that undertaking political advocacy is as important as learning gross anatomy, physiology, and pharmacology…
Certain debates have become off-limits. Consider, for instance, a 2020 incident involving Norman C. Wang, a cardiologist with the University of Pittsburgh School of Medicine. After Wang published a peer-reviewed critique of affirmative action in a respected medical journal, his colleagues denounced him on social media for his “racist thinking” and condemned his paper as scientifically invalid and “racist”…
Researchers are promoting unscientific modes of thinking about group-based disparities in health access and status. The University of Minnesota’s Center for Antiracism Research for Health Equity decrees “structural racism as a fundamental cause of health inequities,” despite the fact that this is at best an arguable thesis, not a fact…
In what borders on compelled speech, the State University of New York’s Upstate Medical University issued a 164-page report from a diversity task force insisting that “Health care professionals must explicitly acknowledge that race and racism are at the root of [Black-white] health disparities.” Other variables influencing the course of chronic disease, prominently the patient’s health literacy and self-care, receive scant attention…
At one point, the CDC vaccine advisory committee proposed prioritizing the anticipated Covid vaccine by race rather than age, solely because older cohorts disproportionately comprised whites. This plan would have delayed vaccination of the elderly—the highest risk group—and, according to the CDC’s own projections, resulted in more overall deaths…
[W]e propose three guidelines…
First, the reform they promote must have a high likelihood of directly improving patient health. “Dismantling white patriarchy and other systems of oppression” is not an actionable goal. Our primary job is to diagnose and treat, and to do no harm in the process. We have no expertise in redistributing power and wealth. Even seasoned policy analysts cannot readily tease out strong causal links between health and economic and social factors that lie upstream…
Second, physicians’ actions or their advice to policymakers should be rooted in expertise that is unique to their profession. Opining and advocating on behalf of general social issues exploits their moral authority, turns medicine into a vehicle for politics, and risks the trust of the public. Medical professionals will, of course, have their own views of the public good. They are free to take to the barricades as citizens—but not while wearing their white coats.
Third, doctors must not lose sight of the impact of advocacy on patients and students. While advocating for one’s own patients is a basic obligation of being a doctor, advocating on behalf of societal change can work against those patients, drawing time and attention away from their care.
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