Forget Your Physician and See the Witch Doctor

At least voodoo hasn't lowered its standards

Race huckstering, as I call it; or racial equity, as others call it, is all the rage nowadays. By whatever name it gets called, the idea is clear enough: Your identity is at least as important, if not more important, than your behavior and achievement. In the precincts occupied by People Who Are More Caring Than You Are, this has become the governing rule. Even more than enrapture with transgenderism, identity obsession has become the mainstay of Wokeness.

Academia and the MSM have tacitly been selling the idea that this will be all benefit and no cost. But, as Paul showed, there are costs aplenty. In the example he discussed, the lowering of standards to make the Memphis police “look more like the community” very likely contributed to the gruesome beating death of Tyre Nichols.

In that instance, putting identity over performance cost a young man his future. It won’t be the last — far from it — because the infection Wokeness will visit upon policing, critically important though it is, is nowhere near as important, and will be nowhere near as costly, as the infection Wokeness will visit and has been visiting on medicine.

Here’s the story from Real Clear Politics, titled, “Code Red: Downplaying Academic Excellence in Med School Admissions” (emphasis added):

America’s top medical schools, worried they have too few minority students, are doing something about it. They are lowering academic standards for admission and trying to hide the evidence. Columbia, Harvard, the University of Chicago, Stanford, Mount Sinai, and the University of Pennsylvania have already done so. The list already tops forty, and more are sure to follow.

Of course, the universities won’t admit what they are doing – and certainly not why. All they will say is that their new standards add “equity” and “lived experience.” Unfortunately, adding those factors inevitably lessens the weight given to others.

The harsh reality is medical schools are downplaying academic achievement and MCAT scores, which give the best evidence of how well students are prepared for medical school. The MCAT is specifically tailored for that purpose. In addition to a section on critical reasoning (similar to the SATs), it examines students on biology and biochemistry, organic chemistry, the physics of living systems, and the biological and psychological foundations of behavior.

Well sure, but that stuff is so bourgeois. Yes, I know it sounds like it might be related to, or perhaps even critical for, developing expertise as a doctor, but we need to get with The Modern Understanding that it’s just there to prop up the white ruling class. Therefore….

[M]ed schools want to downplay them and add inherently subjective criteria like “lived experience.”

Maybe it’s just me, but when I go to the doctor, I don’t have all that much interest in his lived experience, but a good deal of interest in whether he knows something about biology.

If you think the deficient understanding of science that the Woke regimen is sure to produce in new doctors — a deficiency certain to be fatal in God knows how many cases — is a breathtaking cost, you’re right. But it won’t be the only cost. Honesty and openness in the medical profession are also, and necessarily, going to get deep-sixed.

Med schools are especially eager to get rid of the MCATs. After years of evaluating admissions folders, they know they cannot meet their goals for minority enrollment if they retain their near-total emphasis on academic qualifications. They know, too, that standardized tests and grades leave a statistical trail. They want to kick dust over that trail before the Supreme Court’s expected ruling against affirmative action. They fear the statistics will show marked differences in admission rates for individuals from different groups who have similar scores and GPAs. That’s not a wild guess. Admission teams know the evidence from years of experience.

Can it really come as a surprise that tanking standards in favor of racial nose-counting breeds dishonesty? People want doctors who know medicine. When what gets served up to them instead are doctors who might know medicine or might not, but are experts in their “lived experience,” the customer base (i.e., everyone) is not going to be thrilled. So somehow, the ball has to get hidden.

This is all perverted, and given the stakes tragic, but in its way funny at the same time. It reminds me of the Marx brothers movie “Duck Soup,” to which Paul introduced me in law school. In it, Groucho’s brother Harpo gets his head stuck in a vase and Groucho, his most arduous efforts notwithstanding, can’t pull the vase off. So he does the next best thing. He paints Harpo’s face on it.

This fakery is what has taken hold in medical school admissions and, therefore, starting sooner than you want to think, in your visits to the doctor. It’s bad enough in training police and lawyers. In training doctors, it’s the pathway, not to social justice, but to the morgue.