The outstanding public intellectual, Heather Mac Donald has written a penetrating analysis of the current state of medical education, practice criteria, and organizational structure. Appropriately called the Corruption of Medicine, it details the horrible pit the profession has thrown itself into. Gone is first do no harm. In its place is the patient be damned while invented sins are exorcised. Systemic racism is an invented miasma of epic dimensions that has seized the entire apparatus.
Consider the profession under assault. Medicine occupies a special place in modern life. The relationship between patient and doctor is and should be unique. I know from lifelong experience how hard it is to practice the profession at a high level. Purposefully lowering standards to achieve dubious social goals is a path to disorder, decay, and degradation of essential practice standards. If you are not horrified by the condition of medicine that Ms Mac Donald describes in telling detail, you are in for some very bad medical encounters, which may be your fate regardless of how you react to her depiction of medicine leaping off the precipice of reason.
The abandonment of standards such that underrepresented minorities can gain admittance to the profession despite lacking the qualifications that would allow them to practice it with the requisite skill is not doing them a good turn. The more they are inappropriately favored the more likely their prospective patients are to avoid their services out of fear that they are not up to the standard required for first rate medical care. When I see a doctor as a patient, my only concern is his skill and effort to assemble the right diagnosis and treatment plan. The social conditions from which he emerged are irrelevant.
Mac Donald details the failure of virtually every important medical organization. Particularly noteworthy for their commitment to deranged thinking are the AMA, the American Association of Medical Colleges, The American Association of Pediatrics, The Journal of the AMA, The New England Journal of Medicine, and The U.S. Medical Licensing Exam. Individual medical schools and departments are singled out for behaviors that will harm those who seek their aid when most vulnerable.
A medical professor who objects to the current reorganization of his profession along the banks of insanity is likely to find himself thrown into the new Styx wearing leaded shoes. Mac Donald’s article though accurate to the standards of nuclear physics is so disturbing that it may take more than one go to finish it. That medicine has allowed itself to be untrue to its noble calling is both a sadness and dysfunction that will carry an awful cost and which will be repaired at an even greater price. Ms Mac Donald’s article is required reading for anyone who claims continued purchase on reality.
