Woke guidelines also for doctors. Critical Race Theory also intoxicates medicine
Remember the famous Chinese curse that consists in wishing those who want us badly to "live in an interesting time"? Well, if here, in old Europe and in Italy in particular, we cannot complain about interesting events, phenomena and times, what should they say in America, where, in addition to everything else, they are grappling with the spread of a new school of thought that goes by the name of Critical Race Theory (CRT, critical race theory, I talked about it here a few months ago)?
Personally, every time I have to deal with it for self-updating or to write about it, I can't help but think of the words used by Antonio Gramsci, who is considered the godfather of the CRT, to describe his time icastically: "The old world it is dying and the new world is struggling to be born. Now is the time for the monsters ”. This famous quote, in fact, is a rather free translation of Gramsci, popularized by the Slovenian philosopher Slavoj Žižek, who renders “In this interregnum a great variety of morbid phenomena appear” with “Now is the time of monsters”. Gramsci himself most likely had no idea that a century later those words would prove incredibly prophetic of the here and now in the United States of America. Putting ourselves in the shoes of Americans, we should recognize that today the monsters – or morbid phenomena – are among us, it is the neighbors, colleagues and friends who accept and embrace the Critical Theory of Race and its ramifications in the many fields of human life and of scientific research.
One of these fields, perhaps the least suspicious, is that of medical science and practice. Let's briefly give an account of three key events to give the Italian reader an idea of how things went.
Let's say right away that there is a particularly significant date, June 25 last year, when the White Coats for Black Lives (WC4BL), an association of medical students, released its “vision and values”statement . The organization, which has 75 branches in medical schools across the United States and has been called to action by the Black Lives Matter movement, "aims to dismantle racism in medicine and fight for the health of blacks and other people of color. […]. Our work is twofold: 1) to dismantle the dominant and exploitative systems in the United States, which largely depend on anti-black racism, colonialism, cisheteropatriarchy (a male, straight, sex-compliant system of power), from white supremacy and capitalism; and 2) rebuilding a future that supports the health and well-being of marginalized communities ”. WC4BL also focuses on the "dismantling of fatphobia " (pathological fear of fatness), embracing "unlearning toxic medical knowledge and relearning medical treatments that target black needs".
As if that weren't enough, these phenomena demand an end to both prisons and the police and propose to "destigmatize and decriminalize the use of drugs", "decriminalize sex work", offer "universal" access to abortion and "defend the 'bodily autonomy of trans and non-binary people', removing practically all obstacles to total liberalization in the field of gender self-determination – we are talking about free access to gender-affirming surgery .
The second event is the recent publication of an Association of American Medical Colleges (AAMC) guide to anti-racist planning. Among the guidelines is the suggestion that universities develop a scorecard "similar to the White Coats for Black Lives Report Card on Racial Justice". This is obviously a very important recognition! What appears to be written by crazy madmen has become an inspiration for the prestigious association founded in 1876 at Jefferson Medical College in Philadelphia with the aim of setting the standards for medical schools in the United States.
The third key event is the publication of Guide to Language, Narrative, and Concepts ("Guide to Language, Narrative, and Concepts") on October 30, 2021, a collaboration between the American Medical Association (AMA), which is the most large association of US doctors and medical students, and the Center for Health Justice of the aforementioned AAMC. The document offers "a guide to the language best suited to promote health equity, contrasting traditional as well as obsolete terms with alternatives focused on equity", explores "the importance of narratives (the power behind words)" and provides "a glossary of key terms and definition of key concepts ". Terms like "Caucasian", for example, should be avoided. Conventional phrases such as "low-income people have the highest level of coronary heart disease in the United States" and "Native Americans have the highest death rates in the United States" should be changed to respectively:
"People underpaid and forced into poverty due to banking policies, real estate developers bourgeois neighborhoods, and corporations undermining the power of the trade union movement, among others, have the highest level of coronary heart disease in the United States"
And
"Expropriated by the government of their land and culture, Native Americans have the highest death rates in the United States"
The Guide also includes the idea that "individualism and meritocracy" are "evil narratives" that "create harm" and that "race-based medicine leads directly to racial inequalities in health."
Predictably enough, many mostly conservative researchers and lawmakers with links to the medical profession have dismissed the “woke” guidelines as potentially dangerous. Bonner Cohen, a researcher at the conservative National Center for Public Policy Research , warned that the guidelines further inflame racial divisions in the United States. "One of the first thoughts that came to my mind is that this is a violation of the Hippocratic Oath, which says all doctors must not do any harm," Cohen told the Washington Times .
Sally Satel, a practicing psychiatrist and lecturer at Yale University School of Medicine and a collaborator with the American Enterprise Institute , writing in the Australian online journal Quillette , said the "indoctrinologists" were distracting medical professionals from their legitimate purpose. "Doctors cannot – and should not – dismantle racism and related systems of oppression as part of their clinical mission," he wrote .
“To imply that such activity falls within our sphere of competence is to abuse our authority. Physicians can reasonably lobby for policies that directly promote health, such as better coverage for patient care or more services, but we will lose our focus and dilute our patient care efforts if we try to address what we perceive. be the root causes of health inequalities ".
"Integrating these ideas into medicine," five professors and practicing doctors told the Washington Free Beacon , "would be a catastrophe, resulting in a shortage of qualified doctors, missed diagnoses, and unscientific medical curricula." The guide will not only affect how doctors speak, these professionals said, but also what they know and how they treat patients. "It may even make them reluctant to check racial minorities for serious conditions – including many cancers – they are more likely to inherit, on the misconception that genes play no role in health disparities due to racial discrimination." . "They are trying to superimpose the social sciences on the medical sciences," said Jeff Singer, an Arizona surgeon.
Let's face it: this is a huge cultural achievement not only for Antonio Gramsci but also for Max Horkheimer, Theodor Adorno and the entire Frankfurt School, who created cultural Marxism! It is no coincidence that the AMA-AAMC guide promotes the Critical Race Theory as a means to achieve “equity” in the medical field and practice. He also cites the Race Forward organization and a document published by the advocacy group of the new directives on how to defend the CRT, entitled Guide to Counter-Narrating the Attacks on Critical Race Theory attacks on the CRT ".
Columnist Matt Bai rightly called the guide "Orwellian" in a piece in the Washington Post . He wrote:
Let's leave aside the obvious question of why it's the AMA's job to teach someone what counts as acceptable language for now. As far as I know, the folks at Fowler's Modern English Usage (a prestigious dictionary) have never published a guide to performing thyroid surgery. Be that as it may, the most powerful medical associations in the country have decided that the "dominant narratives" of inequality in health care must be "identified, interrupted and corrected", according to an introduction that appears to have been taken from Mao's Little Red Book …
If it seems little to you …
The post Woke guidelines for doctors too. Critical Race Theory also intoxicates medicine appeared first on Atlantico Quotidiano .
This is a machine translation from Italian language of a post published on Atlantico Quotidiano at the URL https://www.atlanticoquotidiano.it/rubriche/linee-guida-woke-anche-per-i-medici-la-teoria-critica-della-razza-intossica-anche-la-medicina/ on Sat, 22 Jan 2022 03:57:00 +0000.