Ohio State Hosts Lecture Urging Doctors to Become Pro-DEI Activists

One might think the purpose of medical schools is to teach students how to practice medicine, and that medical professionals should focus on the practice of medicine.

But according to Dr. Quinn Capers, doctors should also become activists.

“I would say to you that doctors, physicians, we must now be activists,” Capers said, speaking in a recent lecture at Ohio State University. In fact, Capers mentioned the importance of being “activists” and promoting “activism” roughly 20 times during his lecture.

What does this activism look like? Well, according to Capers, it’s taking “a knee against police brutality” and marching “to have racism declared a public health issue.”

But Capers also has a more political activity in mind: voter registration. He applauded students at the University of Texas Southwestern Medical Center for registering people to vote, and even appeared to call one’s voter registration status a “social determinant of health.”

Capers also insisted that physicians should educate the public on health disparities and inequities.

“Teach about disparities and inequities, and you got to talk about solutions, please,” Capers said. “But teach even when the topic is uncomfortable; be an activist … as a medical educator.”

The solution to these disparities is, predictably, more diversity in the medical profession.

And how can medical schools work to forward diversity in healthcare? Well, per Capers, one way is implicit bias training to eliminate so-called unconscious biases he says disadvantage minority students.

Capers argues admissions committees should take implicit bias tests and undergo implicit bias trainings to address this issue.

The problem is that implicit bias tests do not track with real-world bias and discrimination. The tests don’t meet accepted standards of reliability.

Interestingly, Capers failed to mention explicit bias in medical school admissions, in which medical schools explicitly discriminate against applicants based on their race. That explicit discrimination, however, disadvantages white and Asian students.

A look at 2013-2016 admissions data analyzed by the American Enterprise Institute shows that black and Hispanic students were accepted at far higher rates than their white and Asian counterparts with similar grades and Medical College Admission Test (MCAT) scores.

If Capers is concerned about racial discrimination, he may be looking in the wrong places.

Additionally, implicit within Capers’ arguments is the claim that diversifying the medical profession will reduce health disparities. Capers has previously advocated for the notion that racial concordance, in which patients are treated by physicians of the same race, improves health outcomes among minority groups.

There is simply no evidence for this. Do No Harm released a report last year showing that four out of five systematic reviews of racial concordance have shown no positive impact on health outcomes.

Thankfully, more and more states are taking steps to ensure ideas like Capers’ are rejected in medical curricula. But in the meantime, the students at these schools deserve better.