What is Happening to My Profession?

The latest manifestation of Indoctrinology is a 54-page document from the American Medical Association called Advancing Health Equity: A Guide to Language, Narrative, and Concepts. The guide condemns several dominant narratives in medicine. One is the narrative of individualism, and its misbegotten corollary, the notion that health is a personal responsibility. A more equitable narrative, the guide instructs, would expose the political roots underlying apparently natural economic arrangements, such as property rights, market conditions, gentrification, oligopolies and low wage rates. The dominant narratives, says the AMA, create harm, undermining public health and the advancement of health equity; they must be named, disrupted, and corrected.

One form of correction that the AMA recommends is equity explicit language. Instead of individuals, doctors should say survivors ; instead of marginalized communities, they should say, groups that are struggling against economic marginalization. We must also be clear that people are not vulnerable, they are made vulnerable. Accordingly, we should replace the statement, Low-income people have the highest level of coronary artery disease, with People underpaid and forced into poverty as a result of banking policies, real estate developers gentrifying neighborhoods, and corporations weakening the power of labor movements, among others, have the highest level of coronary artery disease.

via quillette.com

My own doctor is great and LWJ has retired from medicine now. She seems to be turning into a profession pregnant dog rescuer. Who knew?

I hope the AMA etc. will eventually extract themselves from this mess of wokeness, but how much harm will they do in the meantime?