GENERAL MEDICAL NEWS
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More on the politicization of medicine: boycotting practitioners for their alleged political beliefs?
Hard to believe, but out of all medical specialty fields, it had to be a therapist who publicly promoted the boycotting of colleagues for their personal political beliefs. Her name is Heba Ibarahim-Joudeh, a Professional Counselor with Illinois license number 2024-02634, who announced to the Facebook group “Chicago Anti-Racist Therapists” that she “put together a list of therapists and/or practices with Zionist affiliations that we should avoid referring clients to.” And as psychiatrist Sally Satel, MD, reported in The Free Press (1), Ibarahim-Joudeh then added to the message, “please feel free to contribute additional names, as I’m certain there are more out there.”
The list of 26 therapists had only one common denominator: they all were Jewish! And how do you think the response from Anti-Racist Therapists was upon receiving this message? They, of course, responded enthusiastically to the idea, though, of course, not very becoming for a group of professionals with that name. Indeed, they added further names and practices to the list; surprisingly, some were non-Jewish colleagues – though not for trying to project at least a degree of objectivity, but because they had Jewish-sounding names.
Sally Satel, MD,
is a practicing psychiatrist in Washington, D.C., a lecturer at Yale University School of Medicine in CT, and a resident scholar at the American Enterprise Institute.
Satel sees this behavior as typical for a troubling trend within the world of psychotherapy, where more and more clinicians consider psychotherapy to primarily be a political rather than clinical enterprise. Doesn’t that sound surprisingly similar to what prominent journalists have called replacing the century-old obligation of journalists to “neutral objectivity” with “moral clarity,” (2) which within just a few years has succeeded in largely ruining the credibility of most news media.
Is this the beginning of choosing your doctor based on her/his political beliefs? Never underestimate our ability to make stupid decisions!
References
1. Satel S. American Enterprise Institute. The Free Press, August 13, 2024. https://www.aei.org/op-eds/inside-the-campaign-to-blacklist-zionist-therapists/
2. Welch M. Reason. June 24, 2020. https://reason.com/2020/06/24/journalists-abandoning-objectivity-for-moral-clarity-really-just-want-to-call-people-immoral/
The politicization of the nation’s top medical schools.
In an opinion piece in the New York Post on September 15, 2024, Jay P. Greene, who is a senior fellow at Do No Harm, a national association of medical professionals that describes itself as “combating the attack on our healthcare system from woke activists,” reports on a study he conducted which strongly suggested that “the nation’s top medical schools prioritize left-wing activism over science.” Instead of classes on anatomy and physiology, they are forced to take classes on justice and diversity (1).
Why does that not surprise? The subject has been addressed in the VOICE repeatedly in recent months. It is not only our medical schools that have gone woke; so have most of our medical societies (just visit the website of ACOG as an example). Looking at the inclusion of “ideology” into curricula in the country’s 10 highest-ranked medical schools (per US News and World Report ranking) based on publicly available course catalogues, he searched through content analysis for specific keywords, eight politicized words and eight scientific or medical terms (examples: race/racism and equity vs. chemistry and physiology) Across all course catalogues, politicized words appeared over 2,400 times; scientific and medical terms only 1,900 times. Among the top 10 schools, only Duke and Washington University skewed more toward science than politics, though also not by much. Stanford led the pack of wokeness with ideological terms beating science more than two to one. Thank God A.I. is coming to help these future doctors make diagnoses!
So, what then are we to do with college and university campuses where wokeness rules? For at least some answers to this highly complex issue we refer our readers to a quite remarkable recent article by Jennifer Schuessler, who is a reporter for the Culture Section of The New York Times. Her article attempts to negotiate between the Republican (or better described non-woke) viewpoint that colleges should embrace “viewpoint diversity” (the president of Wesleyan University apparently prefers the term “intellectual diversity”) by hiring more conservative faculty members (most colleges nowadays, of course, have an overwhelming majority of liberal and very faculty members). The woke left on the other hand “sees such efforts as breaking the current status quo and, thereby, weaponizing academic values against itself” (2).
Democrat (blue) and Republican (red) faculty members in different academic fields.
This article is definitely worth a glance, and not only because it, amazingly, appeared in The Times. The paper even printed the following quote from a prominent psychologist: “When universities have lost the trust of centrists and moderates, you can’t blame it on the right.” Wow!
References
1. Greene JP. New York Post. September 15, 2024. https://nypost.com/2024/09/15/opinion/new-study-finds-medical-schools-value-activism-over-science/
2. Schuessker J. New York Times. September 14, 2024. https://www.nytimes.com/2024/09/14/arts/viewpoint-diversity-universities-conservatives.html
Antisemitism and DEI in colleges and universities continues
And since we are already talking about college education, interestingly once again in the opinion pages of The New York Times, two senior Stanford University academics (one a former dean of the university’s law school) concluded that programs at the university were too ideological, which only exacerbates problems on campus. In other words, “DEI is not working, and new approaches are needed,” paraphrasing the title of their article.
The original impetus for their article appears to have been the rise of antisemitic incidents after October 7, 2023, at the Stanford campus. Both authors were appointed to a subcommittee “on antisemitism and anti-Israeli bias, which (what a surprise!) concluded that, “many Jews and Israelis have experienced bias and felt insecure on campus.” In the following sentence the authors–not even appreciating its absurdity–note that a parallel committee formed to address anti-Muslim, Arab, and Palestinian bias reached similar conclusions.
In other words, when Stanford University – like many other leading universities and colleges much too late – noticed that it had a significant antisemitism problem, it apparently also felt that it had an at least similar anti-Muslim problem. Why would it, otherwise, have established two subcommittees in parallel to investigate antisemitism and anti-Muslim biases? Yet, in contrast to the innumerable, and very obvious antisemitic events that took place on the Stanford campus, has anybody heard about even a single anti-Muslim event prior to establishment of these subcommittees? Of course not, - because there were no such events; yet, interestingly, as the article noted, the anti-Muslim bias committee “reached similar conclusions to the antisemitism subcommittee.” Seriously?
The authors then noted that the antisemitism subcommittee felt pressured by many of the 300 people they “listened to” during 50 listening sessions “to recommend adding Jews and Israelis” (an interesting Freudian distinction!) “to the identities currently recognized by Stanford’s DEI programs, so that their harms would be treated with the same concerns as those of people of color and LGBTQ+ people, who are regarded as historically oppressed.” And it is at this point – when there was pressure to add Jews and Israeli’s to traditionally oppressed minorities, the two authors (and we assume other academic leaders) suddenly noticed that DEI does not really work!
Are you getting the point? Here is just one more example for how what widely for decades has been considered “kosher” (or – to demonstrate our objectivity – “halal”) for everybody, once it comes to the Jews (forgive us for throwing Israelis in with Jews; there, of course, also exist Muslim, Christian, and other believers among Israelis), things no longer apply. And isn’t this exactly what one would define as antisemitism?
So, what led two leading sages among Stanford’s academic leadership to come to the conclusion that DEI no longer works? Coming from such two prominent voices, the answers are disappointing, though not surprising, because they have been obvious for quite some time. It just took the no-longer deniable antisemitism on campuses to make things so obvious that even liberals, like the two authors of The New York Times’ op-ed, no longer can deny the obvious: “Rather than correcting stereotypes, diversity training too often reinforces them, breeds resentments, and impedes students’ social development,” the two authors apparently only very recently discovered. And they went on, “overall, these programs may undermine the very groups they seek to aid by instilling a victim mind-set and pitting students against one another.”
To the objective observer these words sound like platitudes because they are platitudes. They just state the obvious, what every clear-minded and not ideology-contaminated college professor should have deduced from what was happening on college and university campuses for years. And especially at a school like Stanford – which prides itself on being one of the essential intellectual hubs of this country, if not the world – it is not only astonishing that it took these two authors so long to reach these conclusions but, as they noted in their article, that only now “an increasing number of educators are coming to these conclusions.”
And what are the recommended solutions? Unfortunately, here, too, all the two authors have to offer are more platitudes: “Conflicting viewpoints must be brought into conversation with one another in a constructive way, to form a picture that is more complete and reliable than we would have were we to look at only the dominant perspective or only at subaltern perspectives,” to quote another academic “thinker” the article refers to (does this not sound exactly like a Kamala Harris answer?) A Harvard “thinker” on the subject is quoted as suggesting – what else – a new term, “confident pluralism,” defined as “honoring our own values while making decisions together.”
We could go on with examples of further platitudes in the article but do not want to challenge the patience of our readers. Only so much: to demonstrate the absurdity in the thinking process of too many current academic intellectuals, here is the article’s closing paragraph: “The current system is not good for Jews at Stanford and other universities. It’s not good for Muslims, either. And it’s certainly not good for society as a whole.”
We, of course, fully agree that DEI is not good for society as a whole; but to once more, feel obliged to compare antisemitism to anti-Muslim biases is absurd; and to use the recent surfacing of antisemitism on campuses to DEI, is beyond absurd. Antisemitism is as old as the Jewish religion and DEI is/was just one of the most recent fashionable ideological manifestations of radical socialism.
Unfortunately, the intellectual dishonesty of this New York Times article only confirms the continuing intellectual dishonesty of academic leaders at almost all leading colleges and universities who apparently to this day have not learned anything from their failures in dealing with the consequences of what happened on their campuses following October 7, 2023.
Reference
1. Brest P, Levine EJ. The New York times, August 30, 2024. https://www.nytimes.com/2024/08/30/opinion/college-dei-programs-diversity.html
A.I. vs human intelligence - who is better in extracting data from medical records?
So-far physicians are doing better than generative artificial intelligence in extracting data from medical records a recent study by investigators from New York’s Columbia University demonstrated.1 One, however, wonders how long this advantage will last, considering how many medical providers are in the process of bringing more order traditionally often by hand-written medical records.
Reference
1. Burford et al., JAMA Network Open 2024. 7(8):e2425981
What to do if you get plagiarized?
As if we would need further evidence of the deterioration in publication integrity (see also the earlier article on publication integrity by N. Gleicher, MD, in this issue of the VOICE), Dan Garisto published in Nature magazine the story of a scientist who was asked to review a paper for a journal because it was in his area of expertise. As he pursued the review, he noted a figure identical to what he had published on the subject (1). He advised the journal, and the paper was rejected. Low and behold, it nevertheless a few weeks later appeared in print in another journal. After being informed, the journal, Proteomics, retracted the paper.
As it turned out, the paper was the product of a Moscow-based paper mill (yes, not only China has those!), and the paper was retracted, eith four of the listed authors claiming to have had no knowledge of the paper and its submission. Unbelievable; and strikingly bad luck for the perpetrator of this scam because imagine somebody else was the original reviewer. This scam would, likely, never have been detected, leaving one wondering how many other such fake papers are out there and are being widely cited.
Reference
1. Garisto D. Nature 2024;633:260-262
Membership uproar at the British Medical Association (BMA)
Almost everybody appears these days to lament the politicization of medicine, as we previously reported, with a good example being the controversy surrounding the Cass Review on gender identity services and treatments of children and adolescents published to initially quite thunderous applause after four years of investigation in the U.K. We there also noted that – after initially being very well received – to everybody’s surprise the BMA (out of all organizations!) suddenly turned hostile and voted against the Review.
Now the BMA appears in the midst of a major crisis because a significant membership opposes its stance and have initiated a “not in our name campaign.” According to a Lancet report (1), comments accused the BMA of lack of transparency and disregard of evidence (we suggest you peruse our above noted editorial elsewhere in this issue of the VOICE). Words like “disappointed,” “shocked,” and “appalled” were recurrent comments.
Interestingly, since the BMA’s rejection of the conclusions of the Cass Review, the Academy of the Medical Royal College reiterated its support of the Review.
Though all of this happened in the U.K., why is this of importance for the U.S.? Because, unfortunately, in the U.S., in contrast to the U.K. and other European countries, academia and organized medicine have been very quiet regarding gender-affirming care of children and young adults for much too long. In many ways, remaining quiet in the face of poor medical and ethical practices, however, speaks for itself. Which brings us to the second reason why those occurrences in the U.K. can teach us something here on the other side of the Atlantic: as members of professional organizations, nobody forces us to accept all the crap that they often serve up on their membership without proper prior consultation.
Reference
1. Thornton J. Lancet 2024;404:1004-1005