Gone are the days when Dr. Kildare or Ben Casey would attend to your health and leave it at that. Now quacks have decided to enter into politics and, strange for a group who make scads of cash, enter into it from the Marxist side by promoting critical race theory.
Granted, it’s the health bureaucrats at the American Medical Association, not rank and file physicians, who have embarked upon this path. So don’t expect your local neurosurgeon to join in a Bolshevik march anytime soon. But this 55 page missive from the AMA is so ridiculous, so out of their lane, and so chock full of stupidity in would make Trapper John McIntyre throw up in revulsion.
The AMA has no use for ideas like “meritocracy,” “individualism” and the “‘free’ market.” Oh, no. How passe. Perhaps, since they don’t cotton to merit or capitalism, they’d be willing to go to medical school in Cambodia and strive to graduate at the bottom of their class? That should make certain a popular practice. And then they can give back, all nasty capitalist concepts, their boat, McMansion, Mercedes, kids’ private school, European vacations, etc. You know, all in solidarity against the free market.
The AMA goes on. “Given the deep divides that exist between groups in the United States, understanding and empathy can be extremely challenging for many because of an inability to really ‘walk a mile in another’s shoes’ in a racialized sense. Collectively, we have an opportunity and obligation to overcome these fissures and create spaces for understanding and healing.” Political cant, not medicine.
Not to mention this tripe. “The dominant narratives in American medicine and society reflect the values and interests of the historically more privileged socioeconomic groups—white, heterosexual, able-bodied, cisgendered, male, wealthy, English-speaking, Christian, U.S.-born. These narratives have been deeply rooted in value systems and ingrained in cultural practices that have given preference to the interests of society’s most powerful social groups. But they can also be wielded as a weapon to oppress others.” That is a tremendously racist, sexist, and religiously bigoted thing to write. Also, profoundly anti-American.
It adds this sound diagnostic counsel. “That is the case, for example, with the use of adjectives that dehumanize individuals by reducing them to their diagnosis—simply referring to a patient living with diabetes as a ‘diabetic’—or that unfairly labels groups of people as ‘vulnerable’ to chronic disease while ignoring the entrenched power structures, such as racism, that have put them at higher risk.” Ah yes, so your politics matters more than your actual health. Oh, such wisdom.
Conservatives responded. “This document, published by the largest medical association in the country, is a brazen attempt to politicize the medical field and subject health care workers to far-Left speech police,” Anderson added. “While the Left continues to falsely claim that CRT isn’t real, Americans are noticing what’s happening, and they’re fighting back. From the waiting room to the classroom, families are standing up to reject this racist ideology,” said Jessica Anderson, executive director for the conservative group Heritage Action. As we’ve seen with vaccine mandates, the Left now wants to control medicine. They must be stopped.