Top Medical Schools Embrace Critical Race Theory

Medical school has a simple, essential mission: Train the next generation of physicians to treat individual patients and improve lives. But that mission is in danger. Future physicians are being taught to see patients through the lens of race, which can only lead to discrimination and worse care.

Look no further than the 25 most prestigious medical schools – everything from Harvard to Yale to Stanford to the Mayo Clinic. At least 23 require that students take classes or go through training grounded in “Critical Race Theory.” At least 16 of these medical schools have said they will redesign their entire curriculum around Critical Race Theory, which holds that physicians are biased and health care is systemically racist. The goal is to make medical students “anti-racist.”

Yet anti-racism is discrimination in disguise. At its core is the idea that health care should prioritize minority populations – and deprioritize others. That leads to preferential treatment to patients of some races and rationed care based on skin color. This is already happening at some hospitals, and as current medical students graduate, it will spread nationwide.

Medical students need to learn that different populations have different health needs, which is crucial to providing the best treatment to individual patients. They should never learn that it’s acceptable to lump patients into different groups and provide different levels of care on that basis. Yet that’s exactly what’s happening at America’s top medical schools, and they are far from the only ones. Patient health and well-being depend on future physicians learning medicine – not activism.