Medical Institutions And Doctors Should Help Patients, Not Foment Woke Social Activism

A new consensus has emerged among experts in the medical field. Leaders at the AMA and the AAMC and publishers of prestigious medical journals like the New England Journal of Medicine all agree that the future of health care is woke political activism. Now, taking their cues from the top, medical schools and hospitals across the nation have adopted these ideas.

In this new politicized medical landscape, focusing on individual patients, their biology, their choices, and their treatment leads to unequal outcomes and causes harm. The claim is that doctors must root out structural racism, the true cause of health disparities and negative health outcomes. According to the AMA, it is health care workers’ job to dismantle conscious and unconscious bias and reshape laws, policies, and the systems in place in communities and institutions like schools, housing, and health care. It is, of course, reasonable to acknowledge that the environment in which patients are born, live, and work has effects on patients’ health. But turning doctors into antiracist activists who wage war on every institution in America’s society is a grave and unnecessary mistake.