Academia Problematic Competence The Thrill of Medicine

The Very Best Of Hands

December 11, 2023 by David 81 Comments

Are you Canadian and feeling unwell? Fear not, I bring thrilling news. From Canada’s Royal College of Physicians and Surgeons:

Medical training should centre around “values such as anti-oppression, anti-racism, and social justice, rather than medical expertise,” according to the report, shared in late November by a member of the working group.

This report here.

The interim report recommends “de-centring medical expertise” and instead focusing medical school education on the values of “anti-racism,” “anti-oppression,” “social justice and equity,” “inclusive compassion,” and “decolonisation.” 

Apparently, it’s a “cultural shift which is necessary for the profession.” Because, we’re told, all medical workers – yes, all of them, across the entire country – “participate daily in the perpetuation of structural violence upon those most marginalised amongst us, particularly those who are racialised, and live at the intersections of marginalisation.”

How this “violence,” this all-pervasive downtroddenness, is perpetuated by the receptionist at the local medical centre is, alas, not explained. No examples are offered. Indeed, evidence and logical argument are entirely absent. Given the sweeping nature of the demands, the absence of any kind of realistic and meaningful argument, with actual points of fact that one might address, is a tad curious.

Instead, we get a list of seemingly arbitrary words, among which, “colonisation, slavery, and white supremacy.” Oh, and “settler colonialism, heteropatriarchy, capitalism, ableism, classism, sexism, homophobia, transphobia…” Needless to say, the list is quite extensive, though not particularly illuminating. Less an explanation as an incantation. Magical words. With which to conjure contrived, pretentious guilt. A kind of modish neuroticism.

We are, however, told that the priorities of physicians, nurses, and medical administrators should be less about “professionalised knowledge,” those drug dosages and such, and more about “lenses of social justice.” These allegedly corrective lenses will “allow physicians to more effectively engage in… social change.” Suitably re-educated, their mentalities rewired, medical workers will have “bidirectional relationships with… the land.”

Which is obviously what you want when that itchy rash won’t go away.

At which point, it’s perhaps worth noting that the Royal College oversees Canada’s medical school education programmes. The institution is tasked with “setting national standards for medical education.”

So, nothing to worry about, then.

Update, via the comments:

Regarding this,

The interim report recommends “de-centring medical expertise” and instead focusing medical school education on the values of “anti-racism,” “anti-oppression,” “social justice and equity,” “inclusive compassion,” and “decolonisation.” 

Svh adds,

None of those things have value.

Well, “anti-racism,” for instance, seems to consist largely of peddling black racial narcissism and anti-white sentiment, along with policies that actually sabotage the life-chances of minority students. Say, by actively championing a failure to learn rudimentary spelling and grammar:

The students are encouraged to be hyper-critical, indeed delusional, regarding the motives of all white people, even to the point of dismissing the correction of spelling and grammar as some egregious, racially motivated act of oppression. And yet the motives of their educators, the ones who tell them these things, and whose status and careers depend on cultivating tribalism and paranoid resentment, and a kind of pernicious flattery, are spared any similar questioning – or, so far as I can see, any questioning at all.

So much for “critical thinking.”

And so, students who leave university saddled with debt and a worthless Angry Studies pseudo-qualification, and who subsequently repel employers with their chippy attitude, inept spelling, and grammatical incompetence, will presumably rationalise any rejection, any hardship, as proof of the evils of “whiteness” and the “racist society” that their lecturers banged on about. Because the more obvious explanation – that they were dupes, taken for a ride by race-hustling parasites – would be much too bruising to their egos.

In light of which, any value seems overwhelmingly negative. Except, of course, for the race-grifting mediocrities who get paid to propagate such things.

The contradictions of “equity” and competence have been noted here before, at some length, with striking illustrations. And while proponents of “equity” are often oddly reluctant to define this rather loaded term, it seems to mean something like equality of outcome regardless of inputs. And as values go, that isn’t entirely endearing. Or a basis for a civilisation.

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