In medical education, where future physicians are meant to learn the art and science of healing, one might expect a focus on evidence-based medicine, rigorous diagnostics, and unbiased patient care. 

Instead, at Drexel University College of Medicine, students are being educated in content chock-full of radical identity politics.The school’s “Antiracism in Healthcare” module, a free resource offered by the school’s Center for Professionalism and Communication in Health Care, serves as a vehicle for Critical Race Theory (CRT) dogma, discriminatory rhetoric, and unsubstantiated claims about “structural racism” as the root of all health ills.

By prioritizing ideological indoctrination over scientific inquiry, Drexel is training a generation of doctors more attuned to grievance politics than to genuine medical excellence. 

At its heart, the “Antiracism in Healthcare” module promises to equip students with tools to “explain how structural, cultural, and individual racism have shaped our common history and led to vast societal disparities in education, policing, wealth and healthcare.” In fact, the course is explicitly a primer on CRT, the theory which posits racism as a deeply embedded structural feature of American society where “whiteness” is an oppressive force and health outcomes are less about biology or behavior than about invisible “power structures.”

Drexel’s module, with its numerous appeals to “antiracism,” pushes physicians to engage in activism and thus erodes trust in medicine as patients sense doctors more focused on politics than pulses.

For instance, the module’s learning goals demand that students “commit to being antiracist in [their] attitudes and behaviors,” a phrase that echoes Ibram X. Kendi’s How to Be an Antiracist, where not being actively “anti-racist” (read: engaging in racial discrimination to achieve “equity”) makes you racist by default. 

This attitude is put into an ethical framework that presupposes “responsibility.” From the section “Medicine and the Myth of Race”:

“In this modern era of racial reckoning, we recognize that we are moral agents in healthcare. We not only have responsibilities to put our patients first and to treat all individuals as equals, but to work for social justice. We have a responsibility to become aware of and change our biases and behaviors to reflect the highest ideals of our professions. We have a responsibility to contribute to changing our institutions and laws to realize the potential and benefits of diversity, equity and inclusion.”

In short, the course is essentially claiming that being a physician requires political activism. 

This is downright irresponsible – it requires spending excessive time teaching students to be better activists, promoting harmful and discriminatory ideas in the political arena, rather than the advancement of medical knowledge.

Next, Drexel endorses embedding Critical Race Theory into medical education:

“[M]any conservative politicians have demonized the teaching of critical race theory. Yet this teaching is essential for healthcare students, who are learning their professions in an unequal and unjust healthcare settings, and who need to advocate for change. Tsai, Wesp and their colleagues describe how CRT education can transform medical and nursing education (Tsai et al., 2021; Wesp et al., 2018).”

The reasons for rejecting CRT are quite extensive and very robust.

CRT teaches physicians to view patients on the basis of their race and identity, and promotes the notion that every racial and gender group should have the exact same social and economic outcomes. To achieve this, racial discrimination is required.

The module takes this ideological activism a step further, arguing that “social justice” should be a “core principle in clinical ethics” in its “Ethics & Antiracism” section:

“As modern bioethics emerged during the 1960s and 1970s, the principle of social justice featured as another fundamental, guiding principle. The interpretation and application of this principle has continued to develop and has gained increasing prominence and significance. Applications of the social justice principle have always included the equitable distribution of limited healthcare resources (distributive justice). Social justice also always informed the negotiation between individual autonomy and health of the public: individual autonomy must be curtailed at times in the service of public health (e.g., quarantine, mandated vaccinations, mandatory reporting of certain diseases and conditions). Belatedly, mainstream clinical ethics has now intensified and broadened its understanding of social justice to also address structures of racism and other social oppression and practitioner bias as they relate to patient care and outcomes and the health of communities.”

Following the logic through here, this would have social justice as much of a fundamental part of medicine as the Hippocratic Oath. 

Moreover, Drexel’s endorsement of distributing healthcare resources on the basis of “social justice” seems a lot like discrimination. And when such discrimination occurs in the field of healthcare, it’s a matter of life and death.

Unfortunately, Drexel isn’t an outlier; it’s simply another example of a problem Do No Harm regularly documents. But it is almost as if Drexel is trying to one-up everyone else, given some of the material in this class. 

The result of all of this is that patients suffer most: when trust crumbles, they skip care, widening real disparities.Drexel’s “Antiracism in Healthcare” module isn’t education — it’s indoctrination and a Trojan horse for CRT’s assault on medicine. Drexel should replace this education with evidence-based training, not race-obsessed rants. A core ethical principle of medicine is primum non nocere — first, do no harm. Drexel is doing the opposite, harming students, patients, and the profession. Let medicine be medicine again.