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MEDICINE AND HEALTH

Patients, Not Medical Students, Are a Vulnerable Population By Sheldon Rubenfeld

https://www.nationalreview.com/2024/01/patients-not-medical-students-are-a-vulnerable-population/

Baylor College of Medicine’s cancellation of a lecture on antisemitism in medicine is just one sign of the troubling consequences of DEI.

Two months after Hamas’s October 7 invasion of Israel, Baylor College of Medicine canceled a lecture scheduled many months before on “Antisemitism in Medicine,” to be given by me and another physician who has received many antisemitic threats, some of which led to police protection. Last year, my long-running course at Baylor on medicine and the Holocaust was canceled. It has become increasingly evident that medical schools, medical-licensing bodies, and medical organizations are reluctant to acknowledge, let alone confront, the fact that their diversity, equity, and inclusion (DEI) policies breed antisemitism in medicine.

For the past 20 years of my nearly 50-year affiliation with Baylor, I offered an elective course, Healing by Killing: Medicine during the Third Reich, to first-year medical students. The course describes Hitler’s adoption of the German medical profession’s eugenic racist ideology and the central and indispensable role of physicians in designing and implementing the Holocaust. It also includes many disquieting photos and film clips from Auschwitz, Dachau, and other concentration camps. Judging by essays submitted in earlier years, the students took to heart the lessons about the potential for physician abuse of patients.

In April last year, I gave the fifth of the course’s nine lectures, “Why the Jews?” The first half of the lecture outlines the history of antisemitism; the second half is about countertransference, a common psychological phenomenon that occurs when a physician allows his or her feelings to influence a patient’s treatment. I asked the students to identify personal biases that could interfere with good patient care, such as biases against patients with a particular diagnosis, disability, ethnicity, gender, sexual orientation, political party affiliation, religion, educational level, personal features such as tattoos, and so on, and gave as an example my experience as a young doctor with a suicidal Palestinian graduate student, an example I had used many times before.

Florida Surgeon General Joseph Ladapo Calls For a Halt in the Use of COVID-19 mRNA Shots By Debra Heine

https://amgreatness.com/2024/01/03/florida-surgeon-general-joseph-ladapo-calls-for-a-halt-in-the-use-of-covid-19-mrna-shots/

On Wednesday, Florida Surgeon General Joseph A. Ladapo called for a complete halt in the use of COVID-19 mRNA “vaccines” due to DNA contaminants in the products that can affect unintended parts of the body and lead to “turbo cancers” among recipients.

Without a proper assessment of the risks of DNA integration, “these vaccines are not appropriate for use in human beings,” the surgeon general said in a press release.

Dr. Ladapo’s move comes after sent a letter to Food and Drug Administration (FDA) Commissioner Dr. Robert M. Califf and Center for Disease Control and Prevention (CDC) Director Dr. Mandy Cohen last month demanding answers to his questions regarding the discovery of billions of DNA fragments per dose of the Pfizer and Moderna COVID-19 mRNA injections.

Ladapo, a Harvard-trained MD and PhD, was not satisfied with the FDA’s response

In his December 6 letter, the Surgeon General had outlined his “concerns regarding nucleic acid contaminants in the approved Pfizer and Moderna COVID-19 mRNA vaccines, particularly in the presence of lipid nanoparticle complexes, and Simian Virus 40 (SV40) promoter/enhancer DNA.”

Code red: DEI is in the ICU Opposition to programs based on racial discrimination is mounting Charles Lipson

https://thespectator.com/topic/code-red-dei-is-in-the-icu/

One of the most important political developments of 2023 was the growing pushback against “diversity, equity and inclusion.” Those DEI programs and the ideology that underpin them are under siege politically and legally, and they are losing. They had grown rapidly, thanks to a mixture of support, indifference and timidity. But that began to ebb last year and will continue to recede in 2024.

The wounded patient was wheeled into the intensive care unit when the Supreme Court undermined a crucial foundation for DEI and related affirmative action programs. The decision came in Students for Fair Admissions v. Harvard and a similar case against the University of North Carolina. SCOTUS ruled the universities were illegally discriminating when their admissions favored some minorities and effectively penalized others. Neither public nor private universities had the right to do that.

Those lawsuits were brought against universities on behalf of Asian-Americans, but their victory has reverberated through the world of corporations, non-profits and government agencies. That’s not surprising since those institutions have a host of programs and practices similar to those at Harvard and UNC. They, too, discriminate in hiring and promotion, in hopes their “affirmative” policies will create more inclusive, racially-diverse workplaces. One question sure to reach the High Court is whether these programs are illegal.

The programs also raise practical questions. One is whether they actually achieve their aim of creating more inclusive workplaces. Or do they create more hostile, racially-divided ones and wider public resentment beyond them? Another question is whether institutions committed to these programs can find ways to work around the court decisions and hide their efforts.

The policies used to pursue these goals are sometimes called “reverse discrimination” because they benefit groups, primarily African-Americans, who had long been subjects of pernicious discrimination, segregation, and, indeed, racial hatred.

The terminology of “reverse discrimination” is outdated and misleading. We live more than half a century after the tectonic changes of the mid-1960s, when President Lyndon Johnson and a supportive Congress passed the Voting Rights Act, the Civil Rights Act and a series of massive government programs, many of them meant to assist historically-disadvantaged groups. After that long span, the beneficiaries today are the children and grandchildren of those who were harmed by segregation and Jim Crow laws.

Leprosy, Polio, Malaria, TB, Measles … and Massive Unscreened Illegal Immigration James Varney

https://www.realclearinvestigations.com/articles/2023/12/27/leprosy_polio_malaria_tb_measles__and_massive_unscreened_illegal_immigration_1000817.html

Successful public health campaigns and medical advances have enabled the United States to conquer a range of disfiguring and damaging diseases. Polio, which paralyzed thousands of Americans annually, was wiped out by widespread vaccinations. In 1999 the nation’s last hospital for lepers closed its doors in Louisiana. A global campaign eradicated smallpox, while lethal tuberculosis, the “consumption” that stalked characters in decades of literature, seemed beaten by antibiotics. Measles outbreaks still occur from time to time, but they are small, local, and easily contained.

Vaccination in Pakistan, one of two countries where polio is still endemic. The other is Afghanistan, source of an estimated 90,000 taken into the U.S. since America’s chaotic 2021 withdrawal. 

Recently, however, some of these forgotten but still formidable infectious diseases have begun to reappear in the U.S. For two years running, polio has been detected in some New York water samples, and this fall, leprosy re-emerged in Florida, where cases of malaria have also been recorded.

Health officials say they are not sure why these and other infectious diseases are resurfacing. One distinct possibility, which officials are loath to discuss, is that the millions of migrants who have crossed into the country in recent years could be bringing the scourges with them, since many are from countries where such rare diseases persist and vaccination programs are not robust.

“The recent polio and leprosy cases are almost certainly imports to the U.S.,” said Dr. Jay Bhattacharya, a physician and scientist at Stanford University, one of the most outspoken critics of official COVID-19 narratives in the last pandemic that later proved flawed.

And the Biden administration, an aggressive promoter of often mandatory vaccination last time, now is offering little public comment on the connection between disease and the porous borders with which its immigration policy has become widely identified.

A Health Care Checkup On Justin Trudeau’s Canada

https://issuesinsights.com/2023/12/29/a-health-care-checkup-on-justin-trudeaus-canada/

For decades, Americans have been told that the only humane, decent health care system is one run by the government. The oft-uttered complaint is that it’s a shame that the richest country in the world doesn’t have universal medical care. The reality is that the universal systems in other wealthy nations are cruel, cold bureaucracies.

If there are any doubts that this is true, look northward, to Canada, where waiting lists for treatment are leaving “patients frozen in line,” Pacific Research Institute President and Chief Executive Officer Sally Pipes recently wrote in Forbes.

“When everyone within a country is trapped in a public health insurance system,” says Pipes, patients suffer through a median waiting time “for medically necessary treatment from a specialist after being referred by a general practitioner” for an average of 27.7 weeks.

“That’s over six months – the longest ever recorded,” she adds.

It’s DEI or Bust for the American College of Surgeons By Richard T. Bosshardt

https://www.nationalreview.com/2023/12/its-dei-or-bust-for-the-american-college-of-surgeons/

The organization has launched a diversity, equity, and inclusion tool kit to ‘help’ doctors, advocating principles that have no place in medicine.

America’s surgeons are not woke enough, according to the American College of Surgeons (ACS). Such is the message of the leadership to fellows of the ACS. In a previous column on this site, I described how the ACS doubled down on anti-racism and DEI at its annual Clinical Congress in Boston this October with courses in its educational program for surgeons. To underscore its ongoing commitment to anti-racism and DEI, the ACS just launched its DEI Toolkit and continues to promote this ideology as though its life depended on it.

To say this is puzzling is an understatement, especially given recent trends. Diversity, equity, and inclusion departments throughout the country are being shut down, DEI administrators are being handed their walking papers, and the ideologies of anti-racism and DEI are being increasingly recognized for their illiberal, divisive, and fraudulent nature. Take anti-racism. Even Ibram X. Kendi, who coined the term, is incapable of defining this in a coherent manner. When asked to define anti-racism, he offered: “Antiracism is a collection of antiracist policies leading to racial equity that are substantiated by antiracist ideas.” This is a classic circular argument that no critically thinking person would accept.

And, yet, the American College of Surgeons has grabbed onto the ideology of structural racism and just won’t let go. After embracing anti-racism and DEI in 2020 and promoting the ideologies at the 2023 annual Clinical Congress in October, the leadership of the ACS is seeking to further embed anti-racism and DEI in the college and into surgical practices. The tool kit is an exhaustive, some might say exhausting, compilation of everything related to pushing the narrative of systemic and structural racism as the source of disparities including minority representation within the ACS and clinical outcomes in minority surgical patients. If it promotes anti-racism and DEI, it is in the tool kit. Time and space do not permit a thorough dissection of the entire tool kit, but a few examples will suffice to demonstrate the profound ideological tone.

Most ‘Transgender’ Kids Turn Out to Be Gay Subjecting them to medical interventions is the modern-day version of ‘conversion therapy.’ By Roy Eappen

https://www.wsj.com/articles/most-transgender-kids-turn-out-to-be-gay-gender-affirming-care-conversion-therapy-58111b2e?mod=opinion_lead_pos7

As a medical professional who happens to be gay, I’ll be celebrating Dec. 15, the 50th anniversary of the American Psychiatric Association’s decision to remove homosexuality from its list of mental illnesses. The longstanding designation was based on prejudice, not medical research, and the revision marked the beginning of the end for so-called conversion therapy, which sought to “cure” gays and lesbians of a nonexistent malady.

Half a century later, the medical establishment is pushing a new kind of conversion therapy under the guise of transgender identity. No one is suffering more than gay kids. In Canada, where I practice, and in the U.S., physicians provide what’s euphemistically known as “gender-affirming care” to patients as young as 8, and the leading transgender health association has opened the door to interventions at even earlier ages. Under this framework, those who feel uncomfortable with their bodies may receive a medical regimen including puberty blockers, cross-sex hormones and sex-change surgeries. These interventions typically stunt, remove or irreversibly modify a patient’s sexual development, genitals and secondary sex characteristics. Any endocrinologist or other physician who rejects this approach is alleged to be endangering the health and even the life of his patients.

But are these patients really “transgender”? Research shows that some 80% of children with “gender dysphoria” eventually come to terms with their sex without surgical or pharmaceutical intervention. Multiple studies have found that most kids who are confused or distressed about their sex end up realizing they’re gay—nearly two-thirds in a 2021 study of boys. This makes sense: Gay kids often don’t conform to traditional sex roles. But gender ideology holds that feminine boys and masculine girls may be “born in the wrong body.”

In this light, “gender-affirming care” looks a lot like conversion therapy. In the past, it took the form of electroshock therapy, chemical castration and even lobotomy. Now it takes the form of rendering teenagers sterile and sexually dysfunctional for life. Clinicians from the main U.K. transgender service referred to prescribing puberty blockers as “transing the gay away”—a play on the description of old-fashioned conversion-therapy as “praying the gay away.” A clinician who resigned from the U.K. service accused it of “institutional homophobia.” Clinicians at the service had a “dark joke” that “there would be no gay people left at the rate Gids”—the Gender Identity Service—“was going.”

Climate and COVID – Making It Up As They Go Along By Brian C. Joondeph, M.D.

https://www.americanthinker.com/articles/2023/12/climate_and_covid__making_it_up_as_they_go_along.html

During COVID, we were all told to “follow the science.” The COVID poster boy, Dr. Anthony Fauci, went so far as to self-proclaim, “I am the science.”

What science was the “COVID experts” following? Masks were previously deemed ineffective during viral respiratory infection outbreaks until COVID when Dr. Fauci and Surgeon General Jerome Adams suddenly did an about face and proclaimed masks effective and necessary.

Were they making up mask science? It seems so. What changed? Not viral particle sizes. The British Medical Journal recently published a systematic review concluding,

Real-world effectiveness of child mask mandates against SARS-CoV-2 transmission or infection has not been demonstrated with high-quality evidence. The current body of scientific data does not support masking children for protection against COVID-19.

A Norwegian paper reported a 33-40% higher incidence of self-reported COVID in those wearing masks often or always, respectively.

COVID “science” said mask up when the actual science said no benefit or even harm from masking.

Then there was “safe and effective” vaccine science.

A BMJ study found, “A gradual increase in the risk of COVID-19 infection from 90 days after receiving a second dose of the Pfizer-BioNTech vaccine.” Wait! The science said less COVID after getting vaccinated, not more.

A confirming Cleveland Clinic study discovered a higher incidence of COVID infection among their employees correlating with more vaccine doses.

Were COVID public health recommendations on masks, vaccines, and distancing about the medical science or the political science?

Now pivot to climate change, formerly known as global warming.

No scientist will argue that the climate is not changing. The planet has gone through numerous ice ages, large and small, obvious evidence of a changing climate. The disagreement is over what is causing that change.

Subverting Medical Science For A Race-Based Political Agenda By Paul Williams

https://www.americanthinker.com/articles/2023/12/subverting_medical_science_for_a_racebased_political_agenda.html

The story of the change in testing standards for chronic kidney disease is a warning about the politicized degradation of American medical care.

For almost two years, everyone has ignored an important “health equity” story affecting 87% of Americans. It concerns the medical definition of chronic kidney disease (CKD), which is an impairment of the kidney’s ability to filter waste, toxins, and excess fluids from the blood. Affecting approximately 37 million US adults, the disease can lead to dialysis, kidney replacement, and death.

Physicians and health care providers rely on laboratory measurements of glomerular filtration rate (GFR) to diagnose CKD and to qualify patients for treatment, Medicare-paid education, referrals to a nephrologist (kidney specialist), and kidney transplants. GFR is usually estimated from a chemical in the blood called “creatinine.” High creatinine levels signify that the kidneys are not functioning well. Nearly 250 million creatinine measurements are made each year in the US.

On average, blacks have higher creatinine levels than non-blacks with the same kidney function. Their higher creatinine levels may arise because blacks in America have greater average muscle mass than non-blacks.

For over two decades, the formulas used to estimate GFR have included a correction for the higher creatinine concentrations in blacks in order to obtain the very best estimate of their directly measured GFR (the gold standard of kidney function.) This correction factor increased black GFR between 16% and 21%.

One might assume that CKD and GFR would be defined with scientific impartiality. However, one consequence of the race adjustment is that, at the same blood creatinine level, a black patient might not receive the same kidney treatment as a non-black patient. Thus, whites with lower creatinine numbers will receive medical intervention, while blacks will not.

This has led medical students and physicians-turned-activists to cry discrimination. Activists collected petitions at major hospitals calling to remove the race correction. Medical journals published no fewer than fifty commentaries, editorials, and articles calling for its abolition. Print and internet news articles dutifully reported that the formulas were racist.

There was little published opposition once the race correction was framed as a civil rights issue. Scientists’ reticence to speak out was not unexpected, given that research funding requires nearly unanimous endorsement from the National Institutes of Health (NIH), and no scientist can risk alienating even one grant reviewer.

John Tierney The Covid Catastrophe A new book calls elected leaders and public-health officials to account for their handling of the pandemic.

https://www.city-journal.org/article/the-covid-catastrophe

The Big Fail: What the Pandemic Revealed About Who America Protects and Who It Leaves Behind, by Joe Nocera and Bethany McLean (Portfolio/Penguin, 448 pp., $32)

The American response to the Covid pandemic was an unprecedented disaster— surely the costliest public-policy mistake ever made in peacetime—but most of the politicians, public-health officials, scientists, and journalists responsible still refuse to acknowledge the damage they caused. Many still pretend that the lockdowns and mandates were effective. Others argue that they did the best they could under the circumstances and dismiss critics as partisans trying to score political points. It’s time, they plead, for all of us to move on.

Joe Nocera and Bethany McLean have not moved on, and their new book, The Big Fail, is especially valuable for two reasons. First, it provides an insider’s view of how mistakes were made during the pandemic and how public-health officials and scientists blatantly violated basic principles of their professions. Second, these veteran journalists can’t be dismissed as conservative partisans. Nocera, who now writes for the Free Press, was a long-time op-ed columnist at the New York Times; McLean is a contributing editor to Vanity Fair. Their book attacks Republicans, especially Donald Trump, along with other targets that left-leaning readers love to hate, such as the business executives who run hospital chains and have made America dependent on factories in foreign countries for masks and other medical supplies.

But The Big Fail also shows Democrats how much needless harm their leaders caused, and its subtitle is a dagger aimed at a liberal’s bleeding heart: What the Pandemic Revealed About Who America Protects and Who It Leaves Behind. Democrats in blue states reveled in moral superiority during the pandemic, denigrating the selfishness and stupidity of red staters who refused to lock down, close schools, and wear masks. They mocked #FloridaMorons on Twitter and proclaimed their devotion to “the common good.” The Right lambasted those Democrats for their virtue signaling (as in the Babylon Bee headline, “Inspiring: Celebrities Spell Out ‘We’re All In This Together’ With Their Yachts”). The Big Fail chronicles why they deserved it.