Commentary
A Med Student Just Sent Us This Amazing Note
Share:

We recently received this note from a medical student. We are keeping their identity anonymous per their request.
I am a medical student at what is widely regarded as an elite academic institution. I came to medical school in search of a broader understanding of scientific truth and a deeper understanding of how the world works. But the field of Medicine, through its inextricable connection to academia, is instead propagating and rationalizing sociopolitical ideologies through a pseudoscientific lens. It is now willing to supersede the Hippocratic Oath.
This fact has become increasingly apparent to me since I entered medical school. I was immediately bombarded with critical race theory talking points. Students are encouraged to go on an intellectual scavenger hunt for racism, with the aim of identifying racism as the core factor underpinning every medical and scientific discovery and practice. Professors facilitated critical theory exercises where students must consider their intersectional immutable characteristics, thus implicitly identifying themselves as inherently oppressed, or inherently an oppressor among different dimensions. I have also had to attend many propagandistic and self-flagellating lectures on unconscious bias, systemic racism, etc.
Aside from critical race theory, the medical school has taken clear positions on many controversial political issues, supporting what many view to be directly injurious to others. This includes radical abortion policy, chemical castration of children, authoritarian COVID policy, and other ideas which make a mockery of the framework of evidence-based medicine and the system of medical ethics that lay the foundation for Western medicine. Many of these positions are made explicit through public statements and direct influence of public policy, while some positions are established through internal memos as well as curricular components.
Medical school leaders have openly supported participating in local violent BLM riots (being careful to pretend that there was no violence, of course), and routinely send out false and inflammatory statements about explosive political issues. As you might expect, dissent, or even questioning, of any of these viewpoints immediately evokes rage from other students and consternation from professors.
Equally concerning, the time spent discussing these topics detracts from the time needed to cover medical concepts. In my estimation, I have had to attend more lectures on pronouns and left-wing politics than on kidney diseases. At the current rate, I will have a better understanding of how men get pregnant than how women get pregnant.
Not only is this ideological rip-current creating the current cataclysm of public distrust in medical and scientific institutions, but it also brews partisan malcontent and destroys good faith debate among students and faculty. Of central curiosity to me, why are medical students allowing this takeover? Surely, not all must agree with these propositions. In my experience, a large percentage of medical students disagree with at least one of these objectives. Many students find these ideas to be illogical, recognizing that a substantial amount of time is being wasted with political nonsense, and they also realize that speaking up amounts to academic suicide.
More strikingly, however, is that most students fail to recognize the gravity that these issues have on a societal level. They are willfully ignorant of the potent social harms and collateral damage that will ensue en route to the fatally flawed utopian vision of wokeism, including a new age of racial discrimination and authoritarianism.
Many others are willing to play along with these issues on a simplistic level, careful to avoid identifying the nuances that may get them in trouble. It is easier for students to simply not think too hard. After all, developing a deeper understanding of the history and tenants of gender theory in order to contest these positions will waste even more time. Most students, understandably, do not see that as a valuable use of time when there are real, complex diseases to study.
Medical schools, and universities more broadly, rely on the assumption that students will tacitly accept these radical ideologies, or at the very least that students will not be motivated or capable of identifying the profound logical fallacies and factual errors present. It is unavoidable that students who disagree with woke ideologies will have to spend the time to better understand and defend positions in order to confront these institutions en masse, in a manner that is articulate, professional, and thorough.
Do No Harm is doing precisely that. Dr. Goldfarb is setting an excellent model. It is my hope that medical students will engage with the ideas that Do No Harm advocates, so that we may present a formidable intellectual force against the dangerous aspirations of radical left-wing medical schools and healthcare institutions.