New study finds medical schools value activism over science

Forget anatomy or physiology: Many of the medical students heading back to class this month are taking courses that focus more on social justice and diversity. 

That’s my conclusion in a new study that analyzes the curricula at medical schools across the country. 

Future physicians are spending more time on divisive political topics and less time on the medical science on which individual and public health depend — a fact that should terrify policymakers and patients alike.

My study — the first to document the prevalence of ideology in medical school curricula — focuses on schools’ publicly available course catalogs. 

Using the US News and World Report rankings, I started with the top-ranked institutions in the country, then worked my way down the list. 

While many institutions don’t disclose their coursework, the top 20 that publicly list their courses show how political ideology is displacing traditional medical education.

I searched for how often specific keywords appear in each catalog’s courses, a widely used research technique known as “content analysis.”

Specifically, I looked for the usage of eight politicized words and eight scientific or medical terms that directly bear on medical education. 

Think “race/racism” and “equity” compared to “chemistry” and “physiology.”

All told, across the course catalogs I analyzed, politicized words appeared more than 2,400 times — while scientific and medical terms appeared about 1,900 times. 

In the top 10 medical schools with publicly accessible course catalogs, including top-ranked Harvard Medical School, only those at Duke University and Washington University skew more scientific than political, though not by much of a margin.

At Stanford’s School of Medicine, ideological terms appeared more than twice as often as scientific ones — and a look at specific Stanford courses makes it obvious how things have gone astray. 

Stanford offers a course called “Global Leaders and Innovators in Human and Planetary Health” that focuses on “environmental sustainability” and “social and environmental justice and equality.”

By contrast, the word “obesity” does not appear a single time in Stanford’s course catalogue, even though it poses one of the greatest challenges to American health.

The Baylor College of Medicine in Texas offers a course on “Human Rights and Medicine” that covers “immigration reform,” “the use of torture,” “gender issues” and “issues of distributive justice affected by militarization in society.” 

Judging from its catalog’s complete lack of words that are commonly used in medical research, like “randomized” and “placebo,” teaching medical students how to interpret — let alone conduct — research appears not to be Baylor’s priority.

Even courses with titles that seem to cover traditional medical topics have been infected by ideology, according to their descriptions. 

For example, Harvard Medical School offers “Integrated Human Pathophysiology” — which somehow incorporates topics such as “health equity” and “climate change.”

The Icahn School of Medicine’s catalog lists “Introduction to Anesthesiology,” which despite the title is described as “a core component of the Human Rights and Social Justice Scholars program” that’s “intended to provide students with a space for building critical thinking and community around social justice work.” 

It’s unclear whether students also learn how to administer anesthesia.

The degree to which ideological goals are eclipsing scientific ones extends well beyond top-ranked medical schools.

In 2022, the Association of American Medical Colleges issued competencies that effectively control what all these institutions teach. 

The list of topics that medical students must master includes everything from “intersectionality” to “colonization” to “systems of power, privileges, and oppression.”

While non-elite schools tend to have less politicized language today, that’s all but certain to change over time: The activists who dictate medical curriculum are demanding more radicalism.

Yet the de-emphasis on medical education will inevitably create a crisis of physician quality, which is already closer than Americans realize. 

UCLA’s Geffen School of Medicine, which doesn’t publicly detail its curricula, is already well known for introducing divisive politics into its courses. 

According to internal documents shared with the Washington Free Beacon, the percentage of UCLA students who fail the frequent standardized “shelf exams” has soared, with more than half in some recent years failing routine tests on emergency medicine, pediatrics and other critical fields.

Such is the predictable result of medical school curricula that talk about racism and diversity more than randomized controlled trials. 

Then again, the activists behind this disturbing trend are conducting a trial of their own — namely, on what will happen to Americans’ health when physicians who didn’t learn medicine try to treat them.

Jay P. Greene is a senior fellow at Do No Harm.