12 hours ago
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Have you been to a doctor recently? Or seen a nurse? Lucky you if your doctor or nurse graduated long ago!
Americans’ trust in the medical profession has tanked — from 73% confidence in medical leaders in 1966 to a feeble one-third in 2022, with only one in five people feeling confident about the health-care system.
Anthony Fauci certainly contributed, equating himself to science while contorting it, covering up and mismanaging during the COVID pandemic, but set him aside.
Two recent stories show why Americans increasingly distrust the profession.
The smaller repugnant story: A Virginia nurse (now fired) urged medical providers to sicken ICE agents with laxatives, paralytics or poison ivy.
Whatever happened to “First, do no harm,” medicine’s most basic commandment?
Must patients worry about health-care providers considering themselves activists first, dehumanizing people to identity labels?
The larger, far more consequential story also involves identity and activism.
The Department of Justice moved to intervene in a lawsuit launched by Do No Harm (the organization combating identity politics in medicine), Students for Fair Admissions (of the landmark racial-discrimination case against Harvard) and a rejected white applicant to UCLA’s David Geffen School of Medicine.
The plaintiffs accuse UCLA of ongoing race-based admissions, in brazen defiance of the Supreme Court’s 2023 SFFA v. Harvard ruling that such discrimination is unconstitutional.
President Trump’s Justice Department opposing race-based admissions is a much-needed change from Biden’s, which axed the prior Trump administration lawsuit fighting Yale University’s discrimination against Asian applicants.
Americans know labeling and judging people by their color is immoral, dehumanizing and plain illegal.
Each alone should be sufficient reason for UCLA to stop the harm.
Another reason is compelling by itself: Racial preferences corrupt merit and undermine trust.
The DoJ filing calls out the lowered standards that produce “less well academically qualified doctors,” which cause the predictable and logical stigma black and Hispanic physicians face for a lifetime — are they “really qualified to practice medicine,” or did they need “a preference to be admitted to medical school”?
But what many miss is even more alarming:
When medical schools lower standards like this, it’s not just those who got preferential treatment you can’t trust.
Everyone else also comes out of medical schools worse.
Lowering standards for one group drags down standards for all. Medical schools can’t allow those who should never have been admitted on merit to fail.
Their machinations would be exposed.
Solution? Dilute the curricula to bury the evidence.
Water down challenging content and displace real medical training with mindless allegiance activities on the diversity, equity and inclusion (DEI) that escaped from admissions.
When patients head to the emergency room, they’ll be happy to know that Georgetown University Emergency Medicine Residency Program students took courses like “Microaggressions in Clinical EM Simulation.”
To the clinic for a toothache, that Oregon Health & Science University dentistry students completed courses like “Social Determinants of Health, Social Justice and Equity.”
Or to the internist, that a UCLA grad likely studied “fatphobia” in its “Structural Racism and Health Equity” course, and a Medical College of Wisconsin grad was required to learn “Allegories on Racism.”
The full array of such courses in medical schools throughout the country taking precious time from medicine is stunning.
Did this factor in curriculum changes in UCLA, where more than half of some cohorts recently failed standardized (non-UCLA) “shelf exams” in basic areas such as family medicine, emergency medicine, internal medicine and pediatrics?
Or when significant grade inflation is shown in increases in the percentage of top clerkship grades given from 2014 to 2022?
The effects flow further downstream through residency and licensing requirements.
The US Medical Licensing Examination Step 1 test has become Pass/Fail, and the Step 2 Clinical Skills exam is discontinued, left for individual schools to address.
And DEI in medical schools degrades not just medical care but research.
America dominated the world university rankings for many years, but multiple rankings now indicate its decline, from the peak of 125 universities in the top 500 globally in 2018 to 102 universities in the 2026 World University Rankings, while China and Asia are surging into the top tier, with three Asian universities in the top 20 for life sciences.
Harm from DEI admissions in medical schools extends far beyond the white and Asian applicants bypassed or the stigmatized black and Hispanic doctors.
That’s a myopic, minimizing view of the harm.
All recipients of medical care — the public — stand injured when medical schools practice DEI, as do future generations who would have benefited from today’s research.
The medical profession needs to kick out DEI and return to “First, do no harm,” beginning with revived merit-based standards.
Dear Patient: Merit and identity-based preference cannot coexist. Which do you choose?
Wai Wah Chin is the Chinese American Citizens Alliance Greater New York founding president and a Manhattan Institute adjunct fellow.
English (US)