UCLA’s medical school reportedly boasts a mandatory “health equity” class that teaches first-year students pure, unadulterated nonsense.
The syllabus for the course, “Structural Racism and Health Equity,” notes that students are required to read an article by “fat liberationist” Marquisele Mercedes about how “fatphobia is medicine’s status quo.”
“Weaving together the medical and scientific literature with her personal experiences and positionality as a Black fat scholar-activist, she describes how weight came to be pathologized and medicalized in racialized terms and offers direct recommendations to healthcare providers and researchers for resisting entrenched fat oppression,” the syllabus reads.
But it gets worse.
According to Aaron Sibarium of the Washington Free Beacon, Mercedes has previously claimed that “ob*sity,” as she writes it, is a slur “used to exact violence on fat people” …
Mercedes claims that “ob*sity” is a slur “used to exact violence on fat people”—particularly “Black, disabled, trans, poor fat people”—and offers a “fat ode to care” that students are instructed to analyze, taking note of which sections “most resonate with you.”
— Aaron Sibarium (@aaronsibarium) April 24, 2024
Another required reading, an essay called “Disability Justice,” assails the alleged evils of “ableist heteropatriarchal capitalism,” calls for “moving beyond capitalism for our health,” attacks “growth-centered economic theories,” and states that “anti-capitalist politics” are a cornerstone of so-called “disability justice.”
Yet all this is just the tip of the iceberg.
“[The course] is littered with the lingo of progressive activism—’intersectionality’ is a core value of the class, according to slides from the first session—and states outright that it is training doctors to become activists,” according to Sibarium.
The course is littered with the lingo of progressive activism—”intersectionality” is a core value of the class, according to slides from the first session—and states outright that it is training doctors to become activists. https://t.co/5OdFjinQ1y pic.twitter.com/ILN7EXYsxS
— Aaron Sibarium (@aaronsibarium) April 24, 2024
Students will “build critical consciousness” and move toward a “liberatory practice of medicine” by “focusing on praxis,” according to the slides. pic.twitter.com/IEFLnpSpOm
— Aaron Sibarium (@aaronsibarium) April 24, 2024
A section called “Our Hxstories” adds that “[h]ealth and medical practice are deeply impacted by racism and other intersectional structures of power, hierarchy, and oppression—all of which require humility, space and patience to understand, deconstruct, and eventually rectify.” pic.twitter.com/Rmp5TBmgoe
— Aaron Sibarium (@aaronsibarium) April 24, 2024
The good news is that many critics in positions of power have been crying foul over the ridiculous syllabus, including Jeffrey Flier, the former dean of Harvard Medical School. Speaking with Sibarium, he said outright that the course “promotes extensive and dangerous misinformation.”
“UCLA has centered this required course on a socialist/Marxist ideology that is totally inappropriate,” he added. “As a longstanding medical educator, I found this course truly shocking.”
Flier was especially peeved by Mercedes’ outrageous definition of obesity.
“This is a profoundly misguided view of obesity, a complex medical disorder with major adverse health consequences for all racial and ethnic groups,” he said. “Promotion of these ignorant ideas to medical students without counterbalancing input from medical experts in the area is nothing less than pedagogical malpractice.”
Nicholas Christakis, a sociologist and physician at Yale University, agreed, calling the course “nonsensical.”
The relationship between health and social factors “should indeed be taught at medical school, but to have a mandatory course like this—so tendentious, sloganeering, incurious, and nonsensical—strikes me as embarrassing to UCLA,” he said.
Flier likewise agreed with Christakis’ latter point.
“There are areas where medicine and public health intersect with politics, and these require discussion and debate of conflicting viewpoints,” he admitted. “That is distinct from education designed to ideologically indoctrinate physician-activists.”
True.
Yet sadly, this madness is now par for the course thanks to a nationwide effort to inject the tenets of “diversity, equity, and inclusion” (DEI) into everything.
Overwhelming number of nation’s top medical schools require mandatory CRT training – watchdog https://t.co/PPJL5SDB9K pic.twitter.com/zIlrRWKZzw
— BPR (@BIZPACReview) February 21, 2022
“Stanford Medical School sprinkles lessons on ‘microaggressions,’ ‘structural racism,’ and ‘privilege’ throughout its curriculum,” Sibarium notes. “Residents at Yale Medical School must complete an ‘Advocacy and Equity’ sequence focused on ‘becoming physician advocates for health justice,’ while those in the infectious disease program must complete additional lessons on ‘Diversity, Equity, and Antiracism.’”
Meanwhile, Columbia Medical School reportedly promotes an “Anti-bias and Inclusive” curriculum by demanding students use terms like “people with uteruses” instead of “women.”
This DEI madness is reportedly being driven by the far-left Association of American Medical Colleges, which two years ago released a set of “DEI” competencies to reportedly guide the creation of curricula.
“Schools should teach students how to identify ‘systems of power, privilege, and oppression,’ the competencies state, and how to incorporate ‘knowledge of intersectionality’ into clinical decision-making,” according to Sibarium.
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Author: Vivek Saxena
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