Posted on 12/21/2021 4:05:24 AM PST by gattaca
Rejection used to be common for medical sociologist Thomas LaVeist when he tried to get his research published on the effects of racism on the health of black people. “Now,” said the 60-year-old dean of Tulane University’s School of Public Health and Tropical Medicine, “I have those same journals asking me to write articles for them.”
LaVeist’s experience illustrates the transformation in medical research. While few would dispute that black Americans are more prone to chronic health problems and have shorter life expectancies than whites, the medical community generally sought answers in biology, genetics, and lifestyle. Research, like LaVeist’s, that focused on racism was frowned upon as an amateurish detour from serious intellectual inquiry.
In recent years, and especially since Black Lives Matter protests erupted last year, systemic racism has been transformed from a fringe theory to a canonical truth. Medical researchers offer a sweeping socio-political explanation for racial health disparities by citing the hundreds of peer-reviewed articles authored by LaVeist and a host of others, thus conferring upon the study of systemic racism the imprimatur of scholarly authority.
This year, the National Institutes of Health issued an apology to all who have suffered from structural racism in biomedical research. The NIH is dedicating $90 million to the study of health disparities and structural racism, engaging in more than 60 diversity and inclusion initiatives, and committing “every tool at our disposal to remediate the chronic problem of structural racism.”
Deemed incontestable, systemic racism provides the political rationale for “dismantling”—in the words of no less an authority than the NIH—the institutions and cultural standards that, according to the framework’s advocates, are maintained to uphold white supremacy.
The consequences of ignoring this new prime directive for racially focused research were made clear this year when the top two editors of the Journal of the American Medical Association were pressured to resign after the organization ran a podcast that questioned whether systemic racism explains racial health disparities.
“This is the first time the NIH has issued a call for research on structural racism. This is the first time JAMA fires an editor who said something wrong about racism,” says Shervin Assari, an associate professor of family medicine and urban public health at Charles R. Drew University of Medicine and Science in Los Angeles, one of four historically black medical schools in the U.S. Assari has authored more than 350 papers on race, social determinants, and health equity
To institutionalize its new policy, JAMA is revising its peer review standards and diversifying its ranks to advance health care equity, a term that refers to narrowing or even eliminating racial health disparities in chronic conditions and life expectancies. Similar steps are being adopted throughout the medical profession. A lead editorial in JAMA’s August special issue dedicated to racial health disparities called systemic racism a scientific fact beyond dispute and said all medical journals are morally obligated to document it in their research.
Racial health disparities underlie the four-year gap in black-white life expectancy in the United States. Factors that contribute to this disparity include chronic conditions, unintentional injuries, and suicide and homicide, which is the leading cause of death for black males aged 44 and younger. Scholars committed to the systemic racism explanation blame the disproportionately high crime rates in poor black neighborhoods on discrimination, substandard schools, and other manifestations of systemic racism.
The rapid turn of events has blindsided traditional doctors.
“The spectacle of the gatekeepers of medical publications announcing a political blueprint that medical authors must follow – or else – is pretty breathtaking,” Thomas Huddle, who retired this year as professor at the University of Alabama–Birmingham’s medical school, said by email. “The medical gatekeepers are in the grip of a moral panic.”
Some find the systemic explanation to be leftist polemic, while others doubt that it explains everything it claims to explain. These skeptics worry about the career implications of publicly dissenting from the new orthodoxy – but it’s also possible that blaming an entire national culture for racial disparities could prompt independent scholars and conservative think tanks to produce opposing research that explores black-on-black murder, racial disparities in IQ testing, and other taboo subjects.
The transformation sweeping through the health-care profession is not happening in a vacuum. It mirrors social justice movements committed to exposing structural racism that allegedly pervades education, criminal justice, the arts, hard sciences, and other domains of U.S. society. Activists in those fields, as well as medicine, talk of dismantling white supremacy and other “structures“ that cause racial and gender power imbalances and harm non-white groups.
Skeptical physicians say that medical journal editors are essentially replacing the scientific method with a political ideology, namely critical race theory, and leaving little room for alternative explanations—such as personal agency or cultural differences.
“There’s a tremendous amount of groupthink,” said Stanley Goldfarb, a former dean for curriculum who taught about kidney disease at the University of Pennsylvania medical school before retiring this summer. “If you don’t agree with all that, you’re a bad person.”
This article was adapted from a RealClearInvestigations article published Nov. 11.
Cancer...........................and not the actual disease
Not a single facet of this mess passes scientific muster.
My thought, exactly. Medical Journals Suffer Cancer.
I wonder if this will ever end.
I suppose the “equity” in medical research would mean that in the case of cycle cell anemia that instead of looking for a cure for a disease that primarily effects ‘people of color’ they will find a way for more white people to have it. Perhaps they can use a vaccine.
I am getting notices that reimbursement will be tied to taking anti-racist training. People, from my perspective, have diseases and problems that really don’t discriminate. Medicine should always been kept away from politics. In the 90’s I received threatening letters from the POTUS that I was under treating pain, the forth vital sign. Now, it’s a huge process to give people the pain medicine they need. I hold the Clinton administration responsible for the ongoing, and very lethal, narcotic epidemic. Today it will be accepting CRT, forced upon us by the Biden administration. The war on Physicians continues, such now most have to work for a corporation that will force them into the next government mandate. I find it sickening, and the outcome, to dangerous, for the average American.
Continue to assault and destroy physicians at your own, and childrens peril. Once it’s broken, you can’t fix it.
The scientific method is a tried and true process that stood the test of time until 2019.
The process was corrupted by data omission and manipulation and short cutting critical steps. Time is a critical variable that cannot be substituted, discounted or redefined.
>Skeptical physicians say that medical journal editors are essentially replacing the scientific method with a political ideology
We have a term for this from 20th Century history.
Lysenko “Science”.
Better to be politically correct, than correct, if your livelihood, and even your life, is on the line.
Look, Critical Race Theory is a way to force removal of white people from the military and federal jobs to be replaced with Black or other minorities because the federal welfare system is going broke. So people receiving welfare are being shifted into the military for make-work jobs and to do this they have to kick out white soldiers and employees. All this is being done as anti-racist when it is grossly racist, but neither the courts or the legislatures will lift a finger to stop it.
The private practitioner is quickly becoming extinct..more’s the pity :-/
Physicians are pressured to tow the corporate line and espouse questionable facts and treatments to the public.
Why read the now woke journals anymore? That nonsense from The Lancet was it for me...phooey
And don’t get me started on pain meds... Those who need them are now forced to jump through hoops... and then they get prescribed pills that have significant levels of acetaminophen as an unnecessary additive.... a pain clinic physician once told me that was to scare people off from abusing the medications as the acetaminophen was, of course, poisonous in large amounts. i.e. Hydrocodone 2.5mg with 325mg acetaminophen...take too many too often and there goes your liver. This smells a bit like the feds spiking industrial ethyl alcohol with methyl alcohol during prohibition... the intention was to sicken or kill anyone who was stupid enough to drink it... :-(
Alcohol was, and remains, the drug of choice to self-prescribe for pain, both emotional and physical... and many are forced to use it because they cannot manage to get a prescription for more suitable pain medication.
Dear God, beam me up...
yep.
Science is lost too...
The Marxists’ plan to bring down the U.S. was carried out over more than four decades, first in the humanities, the political and social science, librarianship, education. It included the imposition of politically constructed, divisive major like Women’s Studies, Black Studies, and Middle East Studies. A new academic position was created: Dean for Minority Students or Dean for Black Students. I shuddered at the anticipation that the coordinated phalanx of spoilers was infecting the hard sciences; one prayed that real scientists, historically rational, relying of real scientific method wouldn’t fall for the nonsense and wouldn’t let is happen. When I went to an ivy league college reunion, I heard a cross section of young faculty scientists reciting “climate change” doctrine. I was heartsick to witness what was being taught, but still hoped that this wouldn’t fly in the field of medicine, whose practitioners study and care about the reality of the anatomy and physiology, diseases, treatments, and cures of the human body.
Medical doctors today are sick of heart over the deluge of idiocy and marching orders that the business-oriented and other heel-clicking administrators are imposing because of government dictates and threats. They are afraid. The good doctors have retired or are pulling back to working just a couple of days a week or are going into alternative modes of private medical practice. The newer doctors are largely educated and trained in third world countries or have been domestically brainwashed with the nonsensical catechism.
The online medical records systems require medical staff to waste time asking patients questions about “preferred pronoun” and other political agendas. Patient satisfaction questionnaires abound. They rarely ask about the ability of the doctor, but rather, whether the doctor is nice, how long the patient had to wait, whether parking is convenient, etc. Doctor profiles emphasize the doctors’ hobbies, how he wants to build a relationship, but not whether the doctor has helped them or demonstrated that he knows his field.
Exactly.
More like “Aryan science.”
“Opposing research on black on black crime, racial disparities on IQ and other taboo subjects”?
Go for it, let the taboo research be done and settle this once and for all
Disclaimer: Opinions posted on Free Republic are those of the individual posters and do not necessarily represent the opinion of Free Republic or its management. All materials posted herein are protected by copyright law and the exemption for fair use of copyrighted works.