https://www.nationalreview.com/2024/10/how-to-fight-the-lefts-politicization-of-medicine/
A new study challenges one of the more popular reasons cited for introducing left-wing ideology into medicine, and it outlines an agenda for making health care apolitical.
‘A sick society must think much about politics, as a sick man must think much about his digestion,” C. S. Lewis wrote. “To ignore the subject may be fatal cowardice for the one as for the other.” In the national delirium of a presidential election, the maladies of politics impose themselves on our minds to an even greater degree.
Unfortunately, the current state of the medical field is not much of an analgesic. In recent years, left-wing ideology has thoroughly penetrated medicine. But new research undercuts one of the more popular academic buttresses of this blatant politicization. It’s more than enough to make one wonder if a movement that bills itself as pro-health might actually be iatrogenic.
Health care has not been immune from the whole-of-society effort by the Left to take control of institutions and subordinate them to its aims. Medical schools, journals, professional societies, continuing-education courses, and other institutions of the medical field now tilt left, as I documented last year.
Examples abound. The official publication of the American College of Emergency Physicians recently published a case for DEI in medicine. Harvard’s School of Public Health is offering a “Settler Colonialism” course. The Cleveland Clinic is currently being investigated for possible discrimination against white patients. The important roles academia and the government play in the medical field make this reality sadly unsurprising.
It still may have been a surprise to some when a related research paper became fodder for the Supreme Court. In her dissent from the Supreme Court’s majority opinion that overturned affirmative action last year, Justice Ketanji Brown Jackson wrote that the practice “saves lives” (indirectly), citing a 2020 study to claim that high-risk black newborns are twice as likely to live if they have a black physician. What the study actually found was that half as many black newborns died while being treated by a black physician as when treated by a white physician, while the survival rate was above 99 percent in either case.