This Is The Woke Endgame in Healthcare

We’re often asked: What do woke activists ultimately want from healthcare? A big part of the answer can be found in a new scholarly paper published in the prestigious journal, Academic Medicine. It’s as radical as it is sweeping, grounded fully in Critical Race Theory. Ultimately, the woke vision has nothing to do with healthcare – and everything to do with divisive ideology.

The paper is titled, “The REPAIR Project: A Prospectus for Change Toward Racial Justice in Medical Education and Health Sciences Research.” The acronym REPAIR stands for “Reparations and Anti-Institutional Racism.” Sure enough, reparations is one of the organizing themes: “The theme of medical reparations builds on the longstanding call for slavery reparations.”

Another theme is “abolition,” which “examines the intersections of incarceration, policing, and surveillance in health care and the role of clinicians in furthering or stopping oppressive practices.” The final major theme is “decolonizing the health sciences,” which “targets ‘othering’ practices entrenched in scientific methodologies that have arisen from colonial-era beliefs and practices around imperialism.”

Practically speaking, this vision “calls for an end to police violence and the torture of Black people,” while “compelling physicians to intervene to prevent such violence.” It also means “questioning the use of armed police for security in hospitals,” which “turns healing places into sites of risk not just for undocumented, paroled, or profiled individuals.”

What’s more, the paper “calls on physicians working in the criminal legal system to simultaneously advocate for ending racial incarceration.” And it says “clinicians working in prisons can become complicit in advancing racialized incarceration practices by providing and/or withholding health care for the incarcerated.”

The paper’s authors explicitly state their goal: “transforming medical education, clinical training, and health sciences research,” which will ultimately transform all of healthcare. They also state they’ve “learned that a tightly organized and passionate group of students and faculty can make impactful changes at a medical institution with amenable leadership, particularly during moments of popular protest.” 

Perhaps the only good thing the authors write is that “bringing critical theory concepts” (which means Critical Race Theory) “into medical education and practice remains a considerable challenge.” If physicians and patients continue to push back on this radical agenda, that challenge will grow – and for the health and well-being of the American people, it must grow, fast.