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Dr. K's avatar

I know this article is half tongue in cheek, but the points are vital.

I work with the Admissions Committee and the basic tenor of that is essentially (and I wish I were exaggerating): we do not really care too much about your ability to care for patients or to learn the material -- we just care for "how far you have traveled in your life journey" and your demographic and social justice warrior scores. I wish I were exaggerating but I am not. The Admissions Committee is not even privy to MCAT scores or GPAs...might cause some people to be screened out. This is generally LCME (the accrediting body for medical schools) driven (talk about a far-left cesspool) but the entire educational matrix is suffering. We have now gone to pass/fail for everything (including national boards) because everyone is less competent (no surprise) and we do not want to illustrate it. The eventual outcome is the deprecation of medical care -- and no one ever speaks to this even though it is the elephant in the room.

It really does not matter what your political stance/affiliation is (I am a fierce independent, but far from a Bernie Sanders supporter.) -- In medicine only two things matter: 1) Do you have the intellectual capacity to learn the massive amounts of material and to apply it to each individual patient who appears before you? and 2) Do you have the passion/resolution that your calling in life is to take the best possible care of the person for whom you have assumed such responsibility? There is a reason that for so many years medicine has been considered a profession, not a job. Every distraction from these two elements (including virtually all of the "doctors need to think this way about race/sex/whatever) is bad for doctors, bad for the health system and worst of all, bad for patients.

The group of us that worry primarily about what is best for the next patient you see seems to be shrinking radically. Every admission request is about how "I want to get into medicine to help my victim group". I can think of nothing more wrong nor more toxic.

This entire discussion is getting like the conversation about CA2098 that says "you can only say/think about COVID what the diktats of the State tell you to say/think or we will cancel you (and your license)". This is just the same thing, writ larger.

If you are a patient, be very afraid, I fear.

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Adrian Gaty's avatar

When I was in med school, considering the controversial nature of the topic, they let us opt out of abortion related procedures during our OB rotations if it violated our conscience. I don’t know if that’s still an option.

But what about the trans controversy? From everything I hear about the med school experience today, they won’t let you “opt out” of participating in that issue, and good luck to anyone, student or lecturer, who dissents from that orthodoxy.

So it’s not a question of whether they’ll let a “conservative” (if that’s what we now call people who think castrating children is wrong) *into* med school, it’s a question of whether a conservative can make it through med school without getting a) mobbed or b) losing their soul/conscience/self-respect by constantly living a lie.

Eventually they’ll just build conservative friendly med schools, the med school version of Hillsdale, is my guess.

Sad state of affairs!

https://gaty.substack.com/

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