Displaying posts categorized under

MEDICINE AND HEALTH

What DEI Does to a Medical School Share By George Leef

https://www.nationalreview.com/corner/what-dei-does-to-a-medical-school/?utm_source=recirc-desktop&utm_medium=homepage&utm_campaign=right-rail&utm_content=corner&utm_term=third

The DEI advocates always say that their admission policies favoring students just because they have the right ancestry has only the upside of promoting “social justice” and never the downside of wasting space on weak students. They accept only capable students, so goes the claim.

That line will be harder to sell once people have read this Washington Free Beacon piece.

For the past several years, UCLA’s medical school has had a crazed admissions director who won’t tolerate any dissent over her favored students. The result is that some faculty members are now talking covertly to the press about the distressing results.

Here’s a slice: “One professor said that a student in the operating room could not identify a major artery when asked, then berated the professor for putting her on the spot. Another said that students at the end of their clinical rotations don’t know basic lab tests and, in some cases, are unable to present patients.”

Will the school’s governing body do anything?

But look on the bright side. Some of these UCLA Med grads will become lousy doctors, but at least the profession overall will have more “equity,” and that’s what really matters.

Report: Medical Schools Secretly Defying Supreme Court’s Ruling on Affirmative Action By Eric Lendrum

https://amgreatness.com/2024/05/17/report-medical-schools-secretly-defying-supreme-courts-ruling-on-affirmative-action/

A coalition of medical professionals revealed the methods by which medical schools across the country are circumventing the Supreme Court’s ruling outlawing the practice of affirmative action, and employing such race-based policies anyway.

According to Fox News, the group Do No Harm released new research this week revealing that “many in the healthcare establishment nevertheless remain ideologically committed to the principle of racial favoritism and reject the virtue of race blindness.” This comes despite the Supreme Court’s landmark decision last year in the case Students for Fair Admissions v. Harvard, which determined that affirmative action, the practice of admitting students or hiring staff based solely on their race, was unconstitutional.

The study, titled “Skirting SCOTUS: How medical schools will continue to practice racially conscious admissions,” states that “efforts to game admissions with an eye toward bolstering racial diversity commonly occur under the moniker of ‘holistic admissions.’”

“In theory, holistic admissions should mean de-emphasizing the metrics that primarily determine admission to medical school (e.g., GPA and MCAT scores) and placing greater focus on other academic qualifications, personality traits, or professional accolades,” the report continues. But “in practice, ‘holistic’ admissions often represent a rebranding or workaround of affirmative action.”

Do No Harm also pointed to the official statements of numerous medical organizations and groups which condemned the Court’s ruling, including the Association of American Medical Colleges (AAMC). Following the ruling, AAMC issued a statement saying that “the AAMC believes that a diverse and inclusive biomedical research workforce with individuals from historically excluded and underrepresented groups in biomedical research is critical to gathering the range of perspectives needed to identify and solve the complex scientific problems of today and tomorrow.”

The AAMC even explicitly vowed to defy the court, admitting that “we will work together to adapt following today’s court decision without compromising these goals.”

“They feel that diversity is such an important value in health care that they need to ignore the Supreme Court and go their own way,” said Dr. Stanley Goldfarb, chairman of the board of Do No Harm. “There’s really no justification of this. Their responsibility is to the patients, to create the most qualified workforce that they can possibly create.”

The Supreme Court’s 6-2 ruling in Harvard, alongside the parallel case Students for Fair Admissions v. University of North Carolina, ended 45 years of affirmative action being legal nationwide, as originally determined in the 1978 case Regents of the University of California v. Bakke.

Lessons from COVID Totalitarianism By J.B. Shurk

https://www.americanthinker.com/articles/2024/05/lessons_from_covid_totalitarianism.html

The COVID police state revealed Western governments’ zeal for totalitarianism.  Forced masking, forced experimental injections, forced school and business closures, forced isolation, and forced compliance provided Western citizens an opportunity to see the tyrannical inclinations hiding just beneath the surface of their supposedly beneficent “democracies.”

None of it was pretty.  Mass propaganda disguised as medical expertise (remember when Joe Biden and his CDC army of Goebbels clones demanded that we wear three or more masks outside?) and mass censorship of social media conversations (because, we were frequently told, disinformation kills!) proved that — when push comes to shove — Western governments will quickly dispense with protections for free speech.  Wannabe dictators (intent on protecting “democracy” by being authoritarian) embraced their true “Do as we say!” dispositions and branded the public’s rights and liberties as “enemies of the State.”

Officials summarily punished anyone who resisted COVID’s descending Iron Curtain.  Canadian Prime Minister Trudeau seized the bank accounts and property titles of Freedom Convoy protesters.  Videos from Australia and New Zealand showing police forces blocking roads, securing quarantine camps, and pushing citizens back into their homes looked like scenes from a Mad Max movie.  California Democrats buried skateparks in sand, cordoned off jungle-gyms with yellow crime tape, and arrested lone surfers paddling in the ocean.  Abandoning moderation and constitutional constraints, Western totalitarians embraced intimidation, coercion, and surveillance on a wide scale.  

Throughout the West, governments prohibited places of worship from conducting religious services, recorded license plate numbers of congregants, and issued excessive fines to clergy.  Those same governments prevented families from comforting hospitalized loved-ones and forced spouses, parents, and grandparents to die heartbroken and alone.  In other words, Western officials tore families apart, inflicted tremendous emotional pain upon the most vulnerable, and denied the anguished any access to spiritual refuge.  It is no surprise that such intentional government malice produced skyrocketing rates of alcohol and drug addiction, lifelong psychological traumas, and a burgeoning epidemic of suicide.

How to solve America’s doctor shortage: Sally Pipes

https://www.pineisland-eagle.com/2024/05/16/guest-commentary-how-to-solve-americas-doctor-shortage/

Doctors appointments will be hard to come by over the next decade, according to new data from the Association of American Medical Colleges. By 2036, the organization estimates that the United States will be short as many as 86,000 physicians.

This is a shortage of not just doctors but medical care. In most sectors of the economy, shortages tell suppliers it’s time to boost production. But government regulation has artificially restricted the supply of medical care for years.

We must relax those regulations in order to boost the supply of medical care — and meet the needs of patients.

There are plenty of medical professionals who can help address this shortage of medical care — if only they’re allowed to. Nurse practitioners and physician assistants go through years of training and clinical practice to get qualified. They can diagnose and treat patients, including by prescribing medication. Right now, there are about 280,000 nurse practitioners and 126,000 physician assistants in the United States.

In many areas, “scope of practice” laws prevent these professionals from practicing to the full extent of their training. Nearly half the states have laws limiting nurse practitioners’ ability to practice.

Proponents of these rules argue that allowing nurse practitioners and physician assistants to practice without restrictions would put patients at risk. Yet research shows otherwise.

A study by researchers at New York University and Boston College concluded that “(s)tate regulations restricting (nurse practitioner scope of practice) do not improve the quality of care.” A study from the University of Central Florida found that broadening nurses’ scope of practice may actually improve quality of care.

And according to a 2023 study from the University of Alabama School of Law, over a 14-year period, expanding scope of practice for nurse practitioners and physician assistants reduced healthcare-related deaths — by 12 per 100,000 people and 10 per 100,000 people, respectively. Rural areas, which tend to have the biggest primary-care shortages, saw even greater improvements.

It’s clearly time for states to get rid of scope-of-practice rules.

The Woke Gobbledygook That Passes for Erudition in Medical Journals Wesley Smith

https://www.nationalreview.com/corner/the-woke-gobbledygook-that-passes-for-erudition-in-medical-journals/?utm_source=recirc-desktop&utm_

Our most august medical journals are in danger of becoming more woke ideological-advocacy publications than disseminators of learned scientific studies. This is particularly true of the New England Journal of Medicine, which regularly publishes progressive gibberish pushing “equity” that is often nearly impossible to understand.

Here’s the latest example. From “Keep Your Eyes on the Prize — Focusing on Health Care Equity”:

We believe that health care–centric goals — equity in patient experience and clinical outcomes — should be the primary equity-related targets for clinicians, health care administrators, health plans, and payers. The health care sector is best positioned to improve the effectiveness and equity of the care it delivers and has the most control over these factors. To be clear, providing equitable health care includes addressing HRSNs [individual health related social needs] as part of treating illnesses shaped by structural SDOHs [structural social drivers of health]. But provision of acute and chronic care is often inequitable, with suboptimal quality, even for patients without unmet HRSNs.

The key word is “equity,” but can anyone explain what the heck that means? Speak plainly, for goodness’ sake! Oh, here it is:

Screening patients for HRSNs and referring those with such needs to indicated services can be helpful but doesn’t address underlying structural SDOHs, such as income inequality, structural racism, and a lack of robust social services; structural drivers create much of the downstream need captured in HRSN screening.

My brain is itching!

‘Pedagogical Malpractice’: Inside UCLA Medical School’s Mandatory ‘Health Equity’ Class

https://freebeacon.com/campus/pedagogical-malpractice-inside-ucla-medical-schools-mandatory-health-equity-class/

Top physicians, including former Harvard dean, say required course is riddled with dangerous falsehoods.

Students in their first year of medical school typically learn what a healthy body looks like and how to keep it that way. At the University of California, Los Angeles, they learn that “fatphobia is medicine’s status quo” and that weight loss is a “hopeless endeavor.”

Those are two of the more moderate claims made by Marquisele Mercedes, a self-described “fat liberationist,” in an essay assigned to all first-year students in UCLA medical school’s mandatory “Structural Racism and Health Equity” class. Launched in the wake of George Floyd’s death, the course is required for all first-year medical students.

The Washington Free Beacon has obtained the entire syllabus for the course, along with slide decks and lecture prep from some of its most explosive sessions. The materials offer the fullest picture to date of what students at the elite medical school are learning and have dismayed prominent physicians—including those sympathetic to the goals of the class—who say UCLA has traded medicine for Marxism.

Jeffrey Flier, the former dean of Harvard Medical School and one of the world’s foremost experts on obesity, said the curriculum “promotes extensive and dangerous misinformation.”

UCLA “has centered this required course on a socialist/Marxist ideology that is totally inappropriate,” said Flier, who reviewed the full syllabus and several of the assigned readings. “As a longstanding medical educator, I found this course truly shocking.”

One required reading lists “anti-capitalist politics” as a principle of “disability justice” and attacks the evils of “ableist heteropatriarchal capitalism.” Others decry “racial capitalism,” attack “growth-centered economic theories,” and call for “moving beyond capitalism for our health.”

CDC Demonstrates Failure of Public Health Management of the COVID-19 Pandemic Dr. Harvey Risch

https://johnhabelesmd.substack.com/subscribe?utm_source=email&utm_campaign=email-subscribe&r=8t06w&next=https%3A%2F%2Fjohnhabelesmd.substack.com%2Fp%2Fcdc-shows-failure-of-public-measures&utm_medium=email

In so many words—and data—CDC has quietly admitted that all of the indignities of the Covid-19 pandemic management have failed: the masks, the distancing, the lockdowns, the closures, especially the vaccines, all of it failed to control the pandemic.  It’s not like we didn’t know that all this was going to fail, because we said so as events unfolded early on in 2020, that the public health management of this respiratory virus was almost completely opposite to principles that had been well established through the influenza period, in 2006.  The spread of a new virus with replication factor R0 of about 3, with more than one million cases across the country by April 2020, with no potentially virus-sterilizing vaccine in sight for at least several months, almost certainly made this infection eventually endemic and universal.

Covid-19 starts as an annoying, intense, uncomfortable flu-like illness, and for most people, ends uneventfully two-three weeks later.  Thus, management of the Covid-19 pandemic should not have relied upon counts of cases or infections, but on numbers of deaths, numbers of people hospitalized or with serious long-term outcomes of the infection, and of serious health, economic and psychological damages caused by the actions and policies made in response to the pandemic, in that order of decreasing priorities.  Even though numbers of Covid cases correlate with these severe manifestations, that is not a justification for case numbers to be used as the actionable measure, because Covid-19 infection mortality is estimated to range below 0.1% in the mean across all ages, and post-infection immunity provides a public good in protecting people from severe reinfection outcomes for the great majority who do not get serious “long-Covid” on first infection.

‘Sweden has been vindicated on Covid’ Martin Kulldorff on why lockdowns were a disaster for public health.

https://www.spiked-online.com/2024/04/17/sweden-has-been-vindicated-on-covid/

Almost as quickly as the Covid-19 pandemic swept the world in 2020, governments began locking down. These measures, we were told, might have been insanely authoritarian and historically unprecedented, but politicians were just ‘following the science’. We simply had to give up our freedoms in order to save lives. And yet, in Sweden, ‘the science’ looked very different. The nation refused to go into full lockdown, insisting this would be better for health in the long-run. It made itself a global pariah in the process.

So, four years on from the first lockdowns across the West, has Sweden’s more liberal approach been proven wrong or vindicated? Swedish epidemiologist and biostatistician Martin Kulldorff, one of the co-authors of the anti-lockdown Great Barrington Declaration, joined Brendan O’Neill on the latest episode of his podcast, The Brendan O’Neill Show, to discuss how Sweden fared. They also discussed censorship and the lockdown on dissent during the pandemic. What follows is an edited extract from their conversation. Listen to the full episode here.

Brendan O’Neill: Were you taken aback by how difficult it became to criticise lockdowns during the pandemic and have a reasoned, scientific discussion?

Martin Kulldorff: I was shocked. I never imagined that someone like me, a scientist stating what used to be basic principles of public health, would suddenly be at the centre of a political whirlwind. The interesting thing for me, though, was that I had two different experiences simultaneously during the pandemic. On the one hand, I was mostly writing and advising in the US, where I live. But at the same time, I was deeply involved in the Swedish debate. I was published in Swedish newspapers, defending Sweden’s approach to the pandemic. In the US and UK, I was a fringe voice opposing the establishment. But in Sweden, I was actually defending the establishment position of not closing everything down.

Of course, not everyone in Sweden was happy with the government’s strategy. There was a group of 22 scientists who publicly opposed the no-lockdown approach in 2020. In effect, they wanted Sweden to copy China, the US and the rest of the world and shut society down. So they published critical articles in Sweden’s major newspapers, making arguments that I completely disagreed with and responded to. And even though I thought they were wrong, I’m glad they wrote those pieces. There were obviously plenty of people in Sweden who agreed with them and were asking why we were doing things differently. People wanted to know why we weren’t locking down like everywhere else.

Heather Mac Donald Kidneys Don’t See Color Meritocratic medicine scores another triumph with a genetically modified pig kidney—but the STEM diversity crusade threatens to replace discovery with identity-driven mediocrity. Heather MacDonald

https://www.city-journal.org/article/kidneys-dont-see-color

On March 16, 2024, surgeons at Massachusetts General Hospital transplanted a genetically modified pig kidney into a 62-year-old man suffering from end-stage kidney disease. The groundbreaking operation was, among much else, a refutation of the STEM diversity crusade, which threatens the medical progress that lay behind the landmark procedure.

Transplant recipient Richard Slayman had endured the usual debilitating effects of kidney failure for years. Healthy kidneys filter toxins and excess fluids from blood and excrete those waste products as urine. When kidneys fail, if no donated human kidney is available to replace them, patients spend hours a week hooked up to a dialysis machine that filters their blood mechanically. Slayman had already spent seven years on dialysis before receiving a human kidney in 2018. That transplanted kidney itself faltered, however, and by 2023, Slayman was back on dialysis. This time, though, he required biweekly visits to the hospital to keep his blood vessels open. He developed congestive heart failure. And he rejoined the more than 100,000 Americans waiting, often futilely and fatally, for a human kidney.

If Slayman’s new pig kidney continues to function, the capacity to transplant animal organs successfully into humans (a process known as xenotransplantation) will be as significant as curing cancer, says nephrologist Stanley Goldfarb. Getting to this point required 125 years of scientific creativity and an ever more complex understanding of molecular biology. None of that development had anything to do with racial identity.

Slayman’s genetically modified pig kidney represents a return of sorts to the origins of transplant science. When surgeons started contemplating organ transplants in the early twentieth century, they initially focused on organs from other mammals, since harvesting human organs was considered problematic at best. The French surgeon Alexis Carrel began a series of transplant experiments on dogs after discovering how to connect arteries to arteries and how to widen narrowed vessels—prerequisites to organ transplantation. For the next several decades, surgeons in France, Germany, Russia, and the U.S. transplanted goat, sheep, and monkey kidneys into dying human patients, but the organs (and patients) quickly failed. It would take the evolution of another branch of medical science—immunology—to understand why.

Birx Busted How the white coat supremacist teamed with Fauci to take down Trump. by Lloyd Billingsley

https://www.frontpagemag.com/birx-busted/

It Wasn’t Fauci: How the Deep State Really Played Trump, a short documentary now making the rounds, aims to prove that, in 2020, President Trump was not in command of the nation. The “fourth branch” of government, the administrative or “deep state,” took control and basically shut down the country, leaving disaster on every hand. One of the major players, Dr. Deborah Birx, has managed to escape notice.

Birx graduated from Houghton College and earned her medical degree at the Penn State. From 1980 to 1994 she served the U.S. Army, attaining the rank of colonel, and served a stint at the Walter Reed Army Medical Center. Birx’s bio showed no advanced degrees in molecular biology or biochemistry but she worked with Dr. Anthony Fauci, director of the National Institute of Allergy and Infectious Diseases (NIAID).

Fauci contended that AIDS was caused by HIV, a claim disputed by Nobel laureate Kary Mullis, Peter Duesberg of UC Berkeley,  Charles A. Thomas, and other leading medical scientists in “The Group for the Scientific Reappraisal of the HIV/AIDS Hypothesis.” Instead of debating these scientists, all more qualified than himself, Fauci branded them “AIDS denialists,” sought to block their media appearances, and in some cases deprived them of funding. See professor Duesberg’s Inventing the AIDS Virus, a virtual post-grad course in virology and exposure of Fauci. Deborah Birx was his faithful disciple.

From 2005-2014, Dr. Birx served as director of the CDC’s Division of Global HIV/AIDS (DGHA) In that role, Birx led the implementation of CDC’s PEPFAR (President’s Emergency Plan for AIDS Relief) programs around the world. As the documentary points out, that was Birx’s ticket to the Covid task force, where her mantra was “silent asymptomatic spread,” endless repeated, with several variations.