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The recent letters by leaders of Brigham and Women’s Hospital (May 3) and the Association of American Medical Colleges (April 29) leave out key details. Responding to my op-ed on how antiracist ideology is corrupting healthcare (“Keep Politics Out of the Doctor’s Office,” April 19), their denials show how deep the rot goes.
Brigham and Women’s Sunil Eappen and Mallika Mendu write, “We are not moving toward preferential care for any group.” Yet last year their hospital announced a pilot initiative cast in exactly those terms: a “preferential admission option for Black and Latinx heart failure patients.” It’s a sign of things to come. Race-based care is a fundamental demand of the activist set.
As for the AAMC,
David Skorton
and Henri Ford should have discussed their organization’s forthcoming competencies on diversity, equity and inclusion. The latest version calls for physicians to be trained in identifying “a patient’s multiple identities and how each identity may present varied and multiple forms of oppression or privilege.” It wants medical educators to be “role models” who teach “how systems of power, privilege, and oppression” inform healthcare. Another section focuses on “colonization” and “white supremacy.” This is not educating medical students about “environmental, social and economic factors that affect a patient’s health.” It is indoctrination.
These letters prove that a radical, divisive and discriminatory ideology has captured the commanding heights of the medical profession. But Americans don’t want this in healthcare anymore than they do in public safety or education, and physicians will suffer if they are force-fed such extremism. Let’s call this what it is: dangerous and un-American.
Stanley Goldfarb,
M.D.
Chairman, Do No Harm
Bryn Mawr, Pa.
I assume the medical colleges’ goal of recruiting in “a holistic fashion” means it wants every medical-school class to have a certain proportion of black and Latino students, even if that means denying admission to more qualified applicants. But the public expects something different. The AAMC should protect the public by assuring that the very best applicants enter the medical profession. I don’t care how culturally responsive my physician is and I have no interest in his politics, but I care that he knows how to diagnose and treat my illness.
Dwight Oxley,
M.D.
Wichita, Kan.
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