Posted on 04/03/2002 1:17:02 PM PST by Tumbleweed_Connection
Would you rather your doctor know which side your liver is on or be sensitive to your concepts of "social justice"? If "reformers" of Western medical education have their way, the latter skill might be given equal weight with the former.
Patricia Hausman, editor of Science Insights, an electronic publication of National Association of Scholars, recently solicited the views of John Robinson, a professor of medicine and microbiology at Loyola University's Stritch School of Medicine in Maywood, Ill.
Robinson said that about 10 years ago, the complaint arose among politicians, patient groups and even medical organizations that although faculties were well qualified to teach such subjects as anatomy and physiology, they were ill-equipped to teach "communications skills" and such matters as "social, racial, gender and class justice."
Consequently, schools hired those "who hammered home the notion that the rest of us really didn't know how to teach medical students and had to accept their pedagogic reforms to produce better doctors."
Attacks on Gun Rights
Initial "reforms" focused on highly politicized role-playing in first-year classes, Robinson said. "This set the stage for all sorts of superficial, one-sided concepts related to domestic violence, gun control, wellness, alternative medicine, spirituality, over-the-top sexual histories, alleged effects of racism on health, and more."
Robinson believes that in implementing these changes, school administrators abrogated their commitment to the scientific method. They did not insist on verification that a problem existed or that the altered curriculum would change, much less improve, anything.
"Many of us worry that crowding out concepts of human biology and disease may produce lots of warm and fuzzy but ill-informed doctors," he told Hausman. "Most faculty still hold dear the concept that patients want to be cured first and cuddled later, if at all."
Thought Police Punish Dissent
Skeptical students don't dare express their dissatisfactions openly. Their grades suffer, Robinson said, if they fail "to respond in accordance with P.C. dogma." But they share their concerns with faculty they trust.
Robinson said a patient stopped him in a corridor, pointed to a seminar flyer titled "Introduction to Flower Essence Therapy" and demanded to know, "You doctors don't actually believe this stuff, do you?" The unspoken message, he said, might have been, "If so, get me out of here!"
Most faculty are too busy with research and clinical care to realize how serious the potential problem is, the professor said. He is more tuned in to it as course director for the basic science years of Loyola's medical school.
Standards Suffer Again
Robinson is alarmed at the next step on the agenda. Not satisfied with transforming the curriculum, reformers want to change the type of student going into medicine. "The idea is to de-emphasize scientific reasoning skills and seek out students who are warm and feeling," he told Hausman.
In fact, at the 2001 annual meeting of American Association of Medical Colleges, association President Jordan Cohen proposed using grades and scores on the MCAT (Medical College Admission Test) merely to establish floors for entering students.
"Rather than giving more weight to higher scores, why doesn't each school decide for itself ... what level of GPA and MCAT performance is sufficient for predicting success," Cohen said in a statement. "Even more daring, how about beginning the screening with an assessment of personal characteristics and leave the GPAs and MCAT scores till later?
"Rather than looking first for reasons to reject an applicant - like evidence of a lackluster start in college, or a bad semester, or a C in organic chemistry, or a 7 on an MCAT subtest - why not look first for reasons to accept an applicant?" Cohen's examples of such reasons were "evidence of deep-seated social awareness, of having triumphed over adversity, of personal sacrifice for the benefit of others."
And over empahsis on "purely scientific" practise led to as many mistreatments as any quackery.
Don't forget that is only 150 years since Joseph Lister developed antiseptic techiniques -- and even he in applying them came close to being a nut.
The not so nutty surgeons then didn't bother washing their hands and instruments from patient to patient.
When recent airplane hijackers are exclusively young males of Middle Eastern origin, PC dictates that airport security scrutinize 80 year old Congressional Medal of Honor winners. Now my doctor will question me about whether I have a gun in my home rather than ask about my medical condition.
Consider the changes in cardiology in the last 5 years.
A bigger problem is too many women in medical schools -- not enough men. The women bail out of their medical careers early, and why not? -- for motherhood is a higher calling. But that leaves us sparse of US practitioners.
Women now a distinct majority in colleges, meaning the pipeline is trickling out...
. . . for that is the dirty little secret of liberalism--that in the world of no bottom line, liberalism is the quick and easy way to be holier--actually, only more demagogic, but who's counting--than thou.
The word "snob" comes from the latin/French "sans nobility"--abbreviated "s. nob" in lieu of title, in British "public" schools where titles of nobility were the norm. It escaped no one's attention that children who lacked titles tended to compensate with affected importance.
A similar effect is seen when a person who is good at creating an attractive screen image, for example, and who--tho typically is no more moral or intelligent than the typical man on the street--is asked for her opinions as if her beauty necessarily were more than skin deep. Cheap demagic plattitudes are only to be expected . . . and all take refuge in them, since those who proved themselves capable of more would make themselves unpopular by "breaking the curve".
a.cricket
I recently read a an interview with an actor who served in WWII. He escorted the Saudi king to meet at the Yalta conference. He was instructed not to look directly at the king.
This all reminds me off the racist patient who doesn't want to hear that a jewish doctor performed the life saving surgery or that he got a transfusion from a black man.
This PC medicine could backfire.
Medicine should not mingle with Socialism.
Whites will feel socially safer with white doctors, Blacks with Black doctors..etc.
People will be seeking out doctors who have the same political views. Their personal information goes into a perminant medical file, written in the doctors OPINION.
Guess I'll have to find a white conservative doctor so my records will be socially positive.
They just look down on us because of "cultural differences", not because they are racist.
?
*blush*
a. cricket
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