Medical schools were told that their curriculum should include content about “the diverse manner in which people perceive health and illness” and the “basic principles of culturally competent healthcare.”
This sounds nice, but it is really a call to treat people of different races differently, and not only for appropriate medical reasons such as the prevalence of sickle-cell disease. A doctor’s professional responsibility should be to apply medical knowledge to treat all patients equally regardless of race. Instead, medical students have been required to spend hours on “antiracist” protocols that amount to indoctrination in identity politics rather than building medical expertise.
The new standards instead encourage “practice-based learning and improvement,” emphasizing that medical school faculty should help students acquire “skills of self-directed learning, including the ability to self-identify critical gaps in knowledge or understanding and to find . . . relevant information to fill those gaps.” That’s a real improvement.