The big names in this medical school need a comprehensive review.
The David Geffen School of Medicine at UCLA should have the mission of training the great doctors of tomorrow. But, according to numerous recent reports, they are more interested in training an army of social justice warriors armed with stethoscopes.
First-year medical students are required to take a course on “Structural Racism and Health Equity,” implemented as part of an anti-racist atonement program following the death of George Floyd in 2020. According to most testimonies, this unnecessarily feeds a cancer of awakening.
Earlier this month, students were forced to listen as Lisa “Tiny” Gray-Garcia, a pro-Hamas spokesperson who led the class in singing “Free and Free Palestine,” called modern medicine a “white science” and demanded that they pray to “Mom.” Earth.”
There are lessons on “decolonization” and “climate activism.” There was once a classroom exercise that divided students into racial groups, but it was canceled in January after a civil rights complaint.
However, the final revelation about the course syllabus takes the cake – and it’s a multi-layered concoction frosted with sweeping, unscientific proclamations about obesity and health.
According to the Washington Free Beacon, Geffen students should read “No Health, No Care: The Great Flaw in the Hippocratic Oath,” an essay by Marquisele Mercedes. Mercedes, a self-proclaimed “fat liberator,” believes obesity is a slur “used to exert violence on fat people” – particularly “black, disabled, trans, poor and fat people.”
“Fatphobia,” she writes, “is the status quo of medicine. »
The essay – which begins with an unsatisfactory medical experience Mercedes says she had at age 13 with a thin, white, blond doctor – is a self-indulgent, self-indulgent rant from a proudly overweight academic simply trying to justify her own size. .
It’s also an absurdist ode to victimhood that feeds the reader an assortment of intersectionality terms and traces the “origins of fatphobia” to white European Enlightenment philosophers.
And how quaint it is to imagine this: Jean-Jacques Rouseau shames a dinner guest, making loud pig noises as she takes a bite of her second helping of bread.
But there is more. Mercedes makes many questionable claims – calling the relationship between weight and health “troubled” and saying “there is evidence that weight loss is a futile and hopeless endeavor.”
We know that everyone’s bodies are different and weight loss can be affected by a multitude of issues, including genetics and underlying medical conditions. We’re constantly learning new lessons about reducing fat, but none of them say, “Don’t do it if you’re obese.”
But take it from Jeffrey Flier, the former dean of Harvard Medical School Flier, who said the course “promotes widespread and dangerous misinformation.”
“This is a deeply flawed view of obesity, a complex medical disorder with major adverse health consequences for all racial and ethnic groups,” Flier told the Washington Free Beacon. He added that teaching these “ignorant” ideas to medical students is nothing short of “malpractice”.
Flier said, “(UCLA) has centered this required course on a socialist/Marxist ideology that is completely inappropriate. As a long-time medical educator, I found this course truly shocking.
Personally, I want a doctor who’s going to call balls and strikes — and who isn’t petrified of having difficult conversations about how lifestyle choices can affect overall health.
Not someone who has been indoctrinated by the high priestess of fatness or someone who has made being fat a new religion.
This essay belongs at an open mic night – not at a medical school responsible for sending competent doctors into the world.
If they don’t trim the fat from this storied institution, a medical degree from UCLA will become repellent to patients. Run if you see it hanging on a doc’s wall.
New York Post
