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November 2021

Medical Journals Pour Forth Hundreds of Articles on Race and Racism By John Murawski,

https://www.realclearinvestigations.com/articles/2021/11/11/medical_journals_pour_forth_hundreds_of_articles_on_race_and_racism_803026.html

Part 2 of 2 Articles (Part 1 Here)

The prestigious Journal of the American Medical Association and its JAMA network of other periodicals have published about 950 articles on race, racism, and racial and ethnic disparities and inequities in the past five years – about a third appearing in just the past year.

A search for “health disparities” on the National Library of Medicine’s PubMed.gov search page shows an exponential “hockey stick” trend in recent years, with articles through October already surpassing last year’s total of 10,719. By comparison, “ovarian cancer” yields 7,134 search results last year, while “aortic aneurysm” yields fewer than 4,000.

These numbers attest to the fact that the academic study of racial justice, power and privilege is no longer the sole domain of non-scientific university departments, such as sociology, literature and education. The trendy topic has migrated to peer-reviewed medical journals, where editors now view systemic racism as a leading cause of disproportionate illness and premature mortality among black people.

A PubMed.gov search for articles on “health disparities” shows a “hockey stick” trend lately.
PubMed.gov

“The rules of the game have definitely changed, and these changes can be easily seen at the highest level,” said Shervin Assari, a professor of family medicine and urban public health at Charles R. Drew University of Medicine and Science, a historically black medical school in Los Angeles.

In the wake of the COVID-19 pandemic and the George Floyd killing by a Minneapolis cop, medical researchers have seized on systemic racism as a unifying theory that explains the shorter life expectancies and more prevalent chronic conditions among black Americans. The mass conversion to systemic racism as the canonical explanation for health disparities has swept through the medical profession with stunning velocity, emboldening scholarship with the certitude of a single explanatory narrative.

The immorality of confusing victims with villains By Ruthie Blum

https://www.jpost.com/opinion/the-immorality-of-confusing-victims-with-villains-opinion-684741
The sentencing this week of Arad resident Aryeh Schiff returned a longstanding Israeli debate about the “purity of arms” to the fore. Though the crime for which he was convicted in July wasn’t military in nature, the arguments surrounding it are reminiscent of those raised in relation to the IDF.

A year ago in December, the then-70-year-old was arrested for shooting and killing 36-year-old Bedouin Mohammad al-Atrash – an ex-con with a hefty rap sheet – who had broken into his car and was driving it away. Schiff recounted that he and his wife were awoken by a noise that they realized was the auto theft in progress.

He then ran outside with his pistol drawn and fired twice at the car. The first thing he did when he discerned that the thief had been hit was to phone the police and an ambulance.
Paramedics evacuated Atrash to the Soroka Medical Center in Beersheba, where he was pronounced dead from a bullet wound to the head. Meanwhile, Schiff fully cooperated with interrogators, admitting that he had not first fired a warning shot in the air. He claimed, however, that he had aimed at the car’s tires, not the robber in the driver’s seat.

“All my life, I will have to live with the fact that I killed a person unintentionally,” Schiff told the Beersheba Magistrate’s Court. “My grief is deep for taking a person’s life… I am very sorry for the tragic event.”

POLICE AND prosecutors told a different story, however, based on video footage of the incident, which showed Schiff pointing his weapon at Atrash. They appealed the court’s decision to release Schiff on house arrest for the duration of the investigation, requesting that he be charged with reckless manslaughter, and claiming that he posed a flight risk. After extending his remand three times at the behest of the prosecution, the court finally sent Schiff home.

The following July, three months ago, the Beersheba District Court rejected Schiff’s claim of self-defense and convicted him of manslaughter. He was sentenced to nine months of community service through a plea bargain, thwarting the prosecution’s initial demand that he be imprisoned for four to six years.

Not surprisingly, responses to both the case itself and the verdict were divided along political lines, with the Right backing Schiff and the Left assuming its customary, bleeding-heart stance.

Meretz MK Mossi Raz, for example, called the sentence an “embarrassment,” warning against the “normalization” of citizens taking the law into their own hands. Of course, he had to add, “I can’t help thinking that if Schiff had been an Arab, his punishment would have been far more severe.”

Never mind that the second part of his statement is especially ridiculous, given the major problem of violence and lawlessness in the Arab sector, which police and prosecutors have been at a loss to tackle and that the government keeps vowing to rectify. Raz’s point was clear: to suggest that nationalism and racism are responsible for all of Israel’s societal flaws.

What Is an America that Holds Prisoners Indefinitely without Charging Them? E. Jeffrey Ludwig

https://www.americanthinker.com/articles/2021/11/what_is_an_america_that_holds_prisoners_indefinitely_without_charging_them.html

The U.S. is facing a serious constitutional crisis over the handling of the cases of defendants in the Jan. 6 so-called “insurrection” in Washington, D.C. to protest the presidential election modus operandi and the results.  Those being held for many months without a trial are being denied their habeas corpus rights under the U.S. Constitution and even dating back to English law hundreds of years before our Constitution was implemented.  Not only are they being incarcerated without having had a trial, but there is some evidence that they are being mistreated or are being held 23 hours a day in solitary confinement, which is a punishment accorded only the most dangerous criminals, such as serial killers and terrorists.

What are habeas corpus rights?  According to the American Civil Liberties Union (ACLU), “[h]abeas corpus is a fundamental right in the Constitution that protects against unlawful and indefinite imprisonment.  Translated from Latin it means ‘show me the body.’  Habeas corpus has historically been an important instrument to safeguard individual freedom against arbitrary executive power.”  A citizen must be charged and cannot be held indefinitely.  A charge requires a trial, and, if found guilty in a trial, there is a sentence for a specific amount of time.

Even PolitiFact — hardly an unbiased fact-checker — relates, “The vast majority of defendants have been released from custody while awaiting trial, but some [my italics] held in jail have been kept in solitary confinement.”  The fact that exact numbers for how many are held in solitary confinement or for how long suggests to this writer evasion by the Washington, D.C. jail authorities.

Despite the attempt by outlets like PolitiFact to minimize the problem of solitary confinement, a number of GOP senators have voiced their concern about this problem, and even the ACLU — certainly not an outreach arm of the Republican Party — has become involved.  However, the Republican senators who are concerned do not have a specific number.  The lack of definitiveness in this area is alarming.

Wokeness M.D. by Tevi Troy

http://www.tevitroy.org/25821/wokeness-medicine

Twenty years ago, the physician Sally Satel argued in her book PC M.D. that political correctness had taken over medicine. PC M.D. described a lowering of standards to increase doctor diversity, the blithe use of dubious “recovered memories” in sexual-abuse allegations, and the endorsement for political reasons of questionable techniques such as “therapeutic touch.” Some of these concerns no longer have much purchase in our common cultural conversation. But Satel’s larger point continues to resonate: Politics, and especially leftist political theories emanating from the universities, can interfere with the practice of medicine in a deleterious way.

These days, the problem is not “politically correct” medicine, but “woke” medicine. PC’s impact on medicine was real, and worrisome, but the current fear is that PC’s implications could pale before woke’s troubling impositions, which are more intensive in both scale and scope across multiple sectors in health care.

To what extent is ideology influencing the medical field?

The first question is whether wokeness is directing doctors to treat patients unequally. Wokeness at its heart looks at intersectionality and judges people’s merits and worth on their place along the spectrum of oppression. This pernicious concept means that those with more claims to historic oppression should be granted preferable treatment over those with fewer claims—with white “cisnormative” males having none of said claims. The enshrinement of this concept contravenes the foundational principles enshrined in the Hippocratic Oath, the ethic that has guided medical practice for millennia.

The Hippocratic Oath does not actually say, “First, do no harm.” What it does say is this: “Into whatever homes I go, I will enter them for the benefit of the sick.” It specifically directs doctors to avoid the mistreatment of patients, “whether they are free men or slaves.” The practical effects of this doctrine are extraordinary. At the national level, for example, Israeli doctors famously treat victims of terror attacks and the perpetrators of such attacks the same way, with no distinction. This approach has long been widely accepted as a signal of a doctor’s morality and good character and has been broadly absorbed in our popular culture.

The Sissy Generation By Andrew Gorlin

https://www.americanthinker.com/articles/2021/11/the_sissy_generation.html

Just 70-80 years ago we had what was dubbed “The Greatest Generation” – the people who had fought and won World War II.  Now, just a couple of generations down the road, we have unconditionally surrendered to a disease with minuscule mortality (for the vast majority of the population), and which is to a large degree treatable. How did that happen?

Roll back to the first months of 2020, when we just learned about the sinister new virus which was killing people and for which we had neither vaccine nor cure. We were scared – in the 21st century, we don’t expect to encounter something to which our medicine has no answer. A lot of things about COVID-19 were unknown at the time, but one of the first confirmed pieces of information was that this virus spares children.

What great news! Whatever calamity befalls us, children are always our main concern. Now, when we know that they are safe, shouldn’t we, adults, breathe a big sigh of relief, return to normal life and let the doctors do what they always do: treat the sick, research for a cure, work on the vaccine? I can imagine that this would have happened a few decades ago, despite the (incorrect) perception that the mortality rate was maybe small, but still meaningful, a few percentage points. Yet the only developed country that behaved more or less like that was Sweden. The rest of mankind locked themselves up and essentially stopped living normal lives.

The word that we heard the most during this time was ‘safety.’ Coming to work is declared unsafe — sure, we can stop working, no big deal. Going to school is unsafe — cheer up, kids, you are staying home today — and next week, and then month after month after month. Wear your mask everywhere and stay at least 6 feet away (better 20) from everybody. Safety is king!

How did we end up here? As very often happens the course happened first gradually, then suddenly. The worship of safety began long ago and now it’s everywhere. Everything we buy and use, from lawnmowers to toasters to toothbrushes, undergoes elaborate safety checks and is accompanied by instructions for safe operation. And not only is it a legal requirement but, for many people, safety became the most important feature of any device. There is a commercial on TV promoting gutter guards.  A woman asks her husband: ‘Do you climb a ladder to clean the gutter?” “Yes.” “But it’s unsafe!” — enough said, everybody needs to get the damn thing.

Of course, nothing is wrong with being safe, and many things that we do toward that end are good and reasonable — like seat belts, and later airbags in cars. But more and more the idea of ‘being safe’ has morphed into ‘feeling safe’, so the natural desire for safety is now abused beyond recognition. In other times, the idea of banning a group of people from entering some location would be called ‘segregation’; today the leftist students who don’t want to be around anybody with different views demand ‘safe spaces.’ When a controversial speaker is invited to speak at a university, protesters wouldn’t say ‘we hate this guy’ (which would be the truth, but ‘hate’ is a loaded word nowadays, better not to use it); instead, they declare that such an event would make them ‘feel unsafe’.