The Corruption of Continuing Medical Education

Doctors who want to keep their medical licenses must take ongoing coursework known as “Continuing Medical Education.” Yet woke activists are increasingly seeking to embed their divisive ideas in this key element of the medical community. Case in point is a new effort by the Gold Foundation and NYU Grossman School of Medicine.

The organizations have developed a series of webinars on “advancing health equity.” Doctors can obtain a Continuing Medical Education (CME) credit for each episode they watch. The whole series is steeped in activist jargon, boasting that it “uses critical humanities scholarship to educate physicians about racism, sexism, and other forms of prejudice.”

Take the most recent episode, from late April, entitled “Abolition Medicine: Re-Imagining the Role of Social Justice in Healthcare.” It’s described as having “the express objective of building an anti-racist future,” while also touching on “the pandemic and police brutality.” Upcoming episodes include “Race and Racism in U.S. Medical Education” and “Drowning: Film and the Challenges of Migrant Health Ethics.” 

What’s more, the project is explicitly meant to turn doctors into activists. Its creators brag about how the webinars will “promote the key function of ‘social advocacy’ in medical education.” They also say the courses will enable doctors “to similarly educate the learners whom they teach.”

This isn’t continuing medical education. It’s divisive political indoctrination. As doctors take courses to keep their licenses current, they should be learning things that help them provide better care to individual patients. The Gold-NYU collaboration does nothing of the kind.