When medical journals waste their time chasing ideological rainbows, they undermine the authority of physicians and the scientific basis of medical practice. That is as true in Britain as it is here.
Case in point: The Lancet, founded in 1823 by the English surgeon Thomas Wakley. Recent (and not so recent) articles in that august publication have forsaken the journal’s pledge to provide “[t]he best science for better lives” and have delivered instead run-of-the-mill progressive orthodoxies.
Among the lowlights:
We could go on but won’t. Suffice it to say that the journal’s interest in wading into political waters has not diminished.
No other conclusion is possible when one examines “A guide to anti-racist medicine,” Dr. Sruthi Saravanan’s October 24, 2026, review of the edited collection Anti-Racist Medicine: An Essential Guide to Advancing Equity in Medical Education, Research, Technology, Policy, and Practice.
That volume, edited by Zeshan Qureshi (a physician) and Mehrunisha Suleman (a “medically trained bioethicist”), bills itself as a “first-of-its-kind textbook address[ing] increasingly important questions associated with race, ethnicity, and medicine.”
Needless to say, Saravanan’s review is overwhelmingly positive.
To begin with, Saravanan sets forth the highly ideological contention that “[f]ar-right movements in many countries are fuelling xenophobia and racism and gaining traction through policy and media.”
It is “in this context,” the author continues, that the “timely” book under consideration “challenges the racist narratives and misconceptions that have been instilled in medicine.”
What are those racist narratives and misconceptions, exactly? Though Saravanan’s review is curiously short on specifics, one particular complaint does emerge — that “physicians and researchers must be,” and presumably have not been, “careful in how we define and describe racism in our scholarly efforts and clinical practice, as [racism] continues to be a determinant of health equity within minority communities.”
Note the circular reasoning thus employed. Doctors must “define” racism carefully because racism affects the health of “minority communities.” Yet how do we know that racism does that grim work until we define it? Moreover, do we have any reason to believe that insufficiently expansive definitions of racism will be accepted?
This is but one moment in Saravanan’s piece in which ideological assumptions get ahead of the evidence. Elsewhere, the author joins the book itself in calling for medical practitioners and researchers to bring an “intersectional perspective [to their work] to ensure equity is achieved.”
He suggests that “[c]linicians’ own racial biases and presumptions about people can be harmful, affecting diagnostic judgement and outcomes for patients.”
He argues that “[a]ntiracism should underpin admission processes, medical school curricula, and postgraduate training, as racial biases and prejudice can lead to differential attainment.”
He insists that “institutional racism persists in health-care systems.”
No proof of these claims makes its way into the article. Indeed, the thoughtful reader is likely to experience the piece not as an argument but as a dashed-off list of progressive medical talking points.
Perhaps most damagingly, the article repeats the book’s call for the further politicization of medical scholarship, approvingly informing us that “[t]he authors also call for medical journal editors to uphold the diverse scholarship that is necessary to advance scientific knowledge and promote equitable health care.”
In fact, accurate, evidence-based, replicable scholarship will advance scientific knowledge and promote better health outcomes for patients of all races. Whether that scholarship is “diverse” matters not.
Saravanan concludes by remarking that “Anti-Racist Medicine provides the blueprint for creating a more equitable health-care system.”
Whether or not that’s true, keeping politicized book reviews out of medical journals is certainly part of the blueprint for rescuing medicine from ideological capture.
