{"id":1472534,"date":"2022-05-12T08:01:16","date_gmt":"2022-05-12T12:01:16","guid":{"rendered":"https:\/\/www.conservativenewsdaily.net\/breaking-news\/?p=1472534"},"modified":"2022-05-12T08:01:22","modified_gmt":"2022-05-12T12:01:22","slug":"the-malignant-equity-agenda-is-already-corrupting-medicine","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/www.conservativenewsdaily.net\/breaking-news\/the-malignant-equity-agenda-is-already-corrupting-medicine\/","title":{"rendered":"The Malignant \u2018Equity\u2019 Agenda Is Already Corrupting Medicine"},"content":{"rendered":"<aside class=\"mashsb-container mashsb-main mashsb-stretched\"><div class=\"mashsb-box\"><div class=\"mashsb-count mash-medium\" style=\"&quot;\"><div class=\"counts mashsbcount\">16<\/div><span class=\"mashsb-sharetext\">SHARES<\/span><\/div><div class=\"mashsb-buttons\"><a class=\"mashicon-facebook mash-medium mash-nomargin mashsb-noshadow\" href=\"https:\/\/www.facebook.com\/sharer.php?u=https%3A%2F%2Fwww.conservativenewsdaily.net%2Fbreaking-news%2Fthe-malignant-equity-agenda-is-already-corrupting-medicine%2F\" target=\"_top\" rel=\"nofollow\"><span class=\"icon\"><\/span><span class=\"text\">Facebook<\/span><\/a><a class=\"mashicon-twitter mash-medium mash-nomargin mashsb-noshadow\" href=\"https:\/\/twitter.com\/intent\/tweet?text=&amp;url=https:\/\/www.conservativenewsdaily.net\/breaking-news\/?p=1472534&amp;via=ConservNewsDly\" target=\"_top\" rel=\"nofollow\"><span class=\"icon\"><\/span><span class=\"text\">Twitter<\/span><\/a><a class=\"mashicon-subscribe mash-medium mash-nomargin mashsb-noshadow\" href=\"#\" target=\"_top\" rel=\"nofollow\"><span class=\"icon\"><\/span><span class=\"text\">Subscribe<\/span><\/a><div class=\"onoffswitch2 mash-medium mashsb-noshadow\" style=\"display:none\"><\/div><\/div>\n            <\/div>\n                <div style=\"clear:both\"><\/div><\/aside>\n            <!-- Share buttons by mashshare.net - Version: 4.0.47--><div><img decoding=\"async\" src=\"https:\/\/www.conservativenewsdaily.net\/breaking-news\/wp-content\/uploads\/2022\/05\/4406308114_3f5bc3231f_k.jpg\" class=\"ff-og-image-inserted\" alt=\"image\" \/><\/div>\n<p>A few years ago, concepts such as \u201cwhite supremacy,\u201d \u201csystemic racism,\u201d and \u201cstructural intersectionality\u201d were not the standard fare of prestigious medical journals. But a\u00a0<a href=\"https:\/\/www.healthaffairs.org\/toc\/hlthaff\/41\/2\">February special issue<\/a>\u00a0of \u201cHealth Affairs,\u201d the Washington, D.C.-based, peer-reviewed journal, analyzes racial health disparities not through biology, behavior, or culture, but through the lens of \u00a0\u201cwhiteness,\u201d along with concepts such as power, systems of oppression, state-sanctioned violence, and critical race praxis \u2013 a sampling of terms that appear in the issue.<\/p>\n<p>The Health Affairs special issue reflects the effort of \u201canti-racist\u201d scholars to transform concepts still considered speculative and controversial \u2013 and some say unprovable \u2013 into scientific fact. It is being advanced by other high-profile publications as well, including\u00a0<a href=\"https:\/\/www.nejm.org\/race-and-medicine\">The New England Journal of Medicine<\/a>, The\u00a0<a href=\"https:\/\/jamanetwork.com\/journals\/jama\/issue\/326\/7\">Journal<\/a>\u00a0of the\u00a0<a href=\"https:\/\/jamanetwork.com\/journals\/jamanetworkopen\/fullarticle\/2781103\">American Medical Association<\/a>, and Scientific American, which last year ran articles entitled \u201c<a href=\"https:\/\/www.scientificamerican.com\/article\/modern-mathematics-confronts-its-white-patriarchal-past\/\">Modern Mathematics Confronts Its White, Patriarchal Past<\/a>\u201d and \u201c<a href=\"https:\/\/www.scientificamerican.com\/article\/denial-of-evolution-is-a-form-of-white-supremacy\/\">Denial of Evolution Is a Form of White Supremacy<\/a>.\u201d<\/p>\n<p>But this scientific aspiration faces major challenges. Science demands verification, testability, and replicability, whereas race is a social construct that can be difficult to separate from factors like class or culture, and explaining the data often remains dependent on academic theories about systemic racism. The articles in Health Affairs indicate that elevating the concept of systemic racism from moral certitude to scientific fact will require developing new tools and methods.<\/p>\n<p>In a Health Affairs paper titled\u00a0<a href=\"https:\/\/www.healthaffairs.org\/doi\/10.1377\/hlthaff.2021.01439\">\u201cThe Intellectual Roots of Current Knowledge on Racism and Health,\u201d<\/a>\u00a0researchers from Harvard University and the University of Maryland identify \u201cthe critical need for paradigmatic shifts that incorporate racism as a driver of inequities,\u201d noting that \u201cscientific language has the power to encourage normative standards.\u201d Those pushing the effort expect that it will take years to build up a knowledge base and critical mass of scholarly research. If successful, it would empower the anti-racist movement with what advocates expect to be recognized as unimpeachable scientific authority.<\/p>\n<p>According to researchers with this perspective, racial inequalities in lifespans, health, income, and other metrics largely result from one cause: cultural norms and unconscious beliefs that privilege whites and males at the expense of groups that lack power and are oppressed. Cultural elites advocating this view \u2013 whether one calls it wokeness, systemic racism, critical race theory, or just the truth \u2013 are now leaders of many top institutions in media, publishing, universities, scholarly journals, school systems, and government.<\/p>\n<p>The American Medical Association\u2019s\u00a0<a href=\"https:\/\/www.ama-assn.org\/system\/files\/2021-05\/ama-equity-strategic-plan.pdf\">86-page strategic plan<\/a>\u00a0for racial justice and health equity challenges prevailing standards of quality and merit as a strategy of protecting the privileged domain of white males: The AMA condemns \u201cequal treatment\u201d and meritocracy as \u201cmalignant\u201d white supremacist ideologies that obscure \u201ctrue power and site of responsibility.\u201d The Association of American Medical Colleges, which co-sponsors the accrediting body for U.S. medical schools, is working to establish an advocacy culture in medical schools that haven\u2019t yet gotten with the program voluntarily.<\/p>\n<p>Dissenters say that the medical establishment has become captive to a leftist ideological agenda. They argue that \u201canti-racism\u201d can be hard to distinguish from anti-science when it fixates on a single variable (race), selectively seeks out data to prove a hypothesis (confirmation bias), ignores plausible alternative explanations \u2013 and worst of all \u2013 silences criticism.\u00a0<\/p>\n<p>\u201cConfounding science with political ideology is never good,\u201d said Michael Shermer, the founding publisher of Skeptic magazine, whose\u00a0<a href=\"https:\/\/michaelshermer.substack.com\/p\/scientific-american-goes-woke?s=r\">monthly column was terminated<\/a>\u00a0at Scientific American after 18 years in a disagreement over what Shermer saw as woke ideology infecting the venerable publication. \u201cThey\u2019re saying we already know the answer \u2013 the answer is racism,\u201d Shermer said in a phone interview with RealClearInvestigations. \u201cWe\u2019re going to ignore all the other variables. They\u2019re just reducing complex problems to one variable.\u201d<\/p>\n<p>The Health Affairs articles in the February\u00a0<a href=\"https:\/\/www.prweb.com\/releases\/february_issue_of_health_affairs_examines_racism_in_health_care\/prweb18480647.htm\" target=\"_blank\" rel=\"noreferrer noopener\">special issue<\/a>\u00a0rely on sociological theories,\u00a0<a href=\"https:\/\/www.healthaffairs.org\/doi\/full\/10.1377\/hlthaff.2021.01422\" target=\"_blank\" rel=\"noreferrer noopener\">personal testimonials<\/a>, and even\u00a0<a href=\"https:\/\/www.healthaffairs.org\/doi\/full\/10.1377\/hlthaff.2021.01061\" target=\"_blank\" rel=\"noreferrer noopener\">poetry<\/a>\u00a0to augment traditional scientific protocols. Scholars \u201cencourage the use of a theory-driven approach\u201d to interpret data that would otherwise have to be treated as random or inconclusive.<\/p>\n<p>\u201cThis approach just drives me crazy,\u201d says Dr. Stanley Goldfarb, a kidney specialist who retired last year from the University of Pennsylvania\u2019s Perelman School of Medicine. \u201cIt\u2019s basically finding associations and claiming it proves\u00a0causality. They are going to find evidence for their theory because they are trying to do everything they can to prove their theory. That\u2019s why they keep saying: We have to find the evidence.\u201d\u00a0<\/p>\n<p>One way of summarizing this dispute is that traditionalists like Goldfarb are suspicious of scholarly activism as a corrupting influence on science, whereas researchers like those writing for Health Affairs are suspicious of neutrality and colorblindness as a cloak for systemic racism.<\/p>\n<p>\u201cThis feels like an example of institutional capture, where you\u2019re only good if you buy into the theory,\u201d says Chris Ferguson, a psychology professor at Stetson University in DeLand, Florida, who describes the race-focused scholarship as an example of stubborn data being shoehorned into an uncooperative theory. \u201cWhat happens is, other scholars begin to pick at it, and it falls apart,\u201d Ferguson added. \u201cTwenty years out this is going to look like a huge embarrassment.\u201d<\/p>\n<p><em>This article was adapted from a <\/em><a href=\"https:\/\/www.realclearinvestigations.com\/articles\/2022\/04\/05\/woke_medicines_got_a_tricky_operation_coming_up_grafting_systemic_racism_onto_hard_science_824726.html\"><em>RealClearInvestigations article published April 5<\/em><\/a><em>.<\/em><\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"<p>A few years ago, concepts such as \u201cwhite supremacy,\u201d \u201csystemic racism,\u201d and \u201cstructural intersectionality\u201d were not the standard fare of prestigious medical journals. But a\u00a0February special issue\u00a0of \u201cHealth Affairs,\u201d the<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":773,"featured_media":2315279,"comment_status":"open","ping_status":"","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"_mo_disable_npp":"","fifu_image_url":"","fifu_image_alt":"","footnotes":""},"categories":[],"tags":[],"class_list":["post-1472534","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","has-post-thumbnail","hentry"],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.conservativenewsdaily.net\/breaking-news\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/1472534","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.conservativenewsdaily.net\/breaking-news\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.conservativenewsdaily.net\/breaking-news\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.conservativenewsdaily.net\/breaking-news\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/773"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.conservativenewsdaily.net\/breaking-news\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=1472534"}],"version-history":[{"count":0,"href":"https:\/\/www.conservativenewsdaily.net\/breaking-news\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/1472534\/revisions"}],"wp:featuredmedia":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.conservativenewsdaily.net\/breaking-news\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media\/2315279"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.conservativenewsdaily.net\/breaking-news\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=1472534"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.conservativenewsdaily.net\/breaking-news\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=1472534"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.conservativenewsdaily.net\/breaking-news\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=1472534"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}