RUTHFULLY YOURS

In 39 years as a practicing nurse, I urged hundreds if not thousands of patients to consider seeking additional care at the Mayo Clinic. The famous medical center, based in Minnesota and with major campuses in Florida and Arizona, is widely regarded as one of the best in the country. Yet I can no longer in good conscience recommend this once-prestigious institution. The Mayo Clinic is now fully and unashamedly woke, and worse, it’s aggressively pushing its divisive agenda on the rest of health care.

The Mayo Clinic’s descent is deeply troubling because it occupies a unique place in medicine. Its website is wildly popular with patients who want information about conditions; many travel to Mayo locations for care. Hospitals and health-care groups look to it for guidance on everything from treatment protocols to human resources to a thousand other things. As a nurse, I relied on Mayo’s professional-development tools, and physicians across the country depend on Mayo’s continuing-education courses, which cover an astounding 42 topics and specialties. It also offers conferences that draw physicians from around the world. When Mayo says, “We share our knowledge globally, impact policy, and partner with others to create lasting — and much-needed — change,” it’s understating its influence on medicine.

So it matters when the Mayo Clinic pledges a staggering $100 million to the woke agenda, as it did last fall. It’s devoting this money to “eliminate racism and advance equity and inclusion . . . and to improve health equity.” Practically, this money is going to conferences, courses, and communications that are designed to shape the entire medical field around divisive and discriminatory ideology.

I participated in one such event in early August: Mayo’s two-day “RISE for Equity” event, which offered in-person and virtual attendance for continuing-education credit. It was designed for professionals including hospital administrators, hiring managers, and health-care educators, with the goal of “advancing and directing policy, programs and institutional initiatives” across the medical landscape — i.e., every part of medicine. I encountered nothing but indoctrination.

I was told in no uncertain terms that “racial and social injustice is a known public-health threat.” I learned tips for “recognizing and addressing microaggressions.” I was told about “systemic biases in physical space,” and that ideas such as “meritocracy” and “color blindness” are myths. Throughout, the connection to medicine was tenuous at best, and in the case of opposing merit and equal treatment of patients, the Mayo Clinic is actively undermining both medical education and care. Ditto when it bragged that “the Mayo Clinic has a comprehensive strategy” to “improve health equity.” Translation: It can help your medical provider make decisions based on race. This is the path to discrimination.

This event was far from an outlier. The Mayo Clinic has another continuing-education course on “developing anti-racism leadership competencies,” meaning benchmarks by which medical administrators and executives are judged. Once again, the result will be racial discrimination, which “anti-racism” demands as penance for past injustice. Mayo explicitly wants to drive anti-racist “organizational change.”

Another course struck close to home. Focused on “responding to patient and visitor bias,” it was grounded in the divisive belief that people are racist because of their skin color, with a special focus on white people’s supposed ingrained racism toward black people. I was fired from a Texas hospital last year for refusing to take a test about this so-called “implicit bias.” Here I found the Mayo Clinic pushing the same insulting and false narrative on medical professionals nationwide, while simultaneously teaching them how to deal with ostensibly “biased” patients.

Worst of all, the Mayo Clinic is embedding the woke agenda in courses that, on their face, are fully focused on other topics. Take the 2023 Mayo Clinic Quality Conference. By the end, attendees are expected to “identify that diversity, equity, and inclusion applies to all aspects of health care.” In other words, according to the Mayo Clinic, the quality of your medical care depends on the wokeness of your physician, doctor’s office, or hospital.

The sad truth is that wokeness has infected the Mayo Clinic. I’m no longer comfortable recommending it to patients. The Mayo Clinic has started a downward spiral — and the consequences for the medical profession and patient health are only going to get worse.