The honchos at this medical school need a check-up from the neck up.
The David Geffen School of Medicine at UCLA should be tasked with educating the great doctors of tomorrow. But, according to a slew of recent reports, they’re more interested in churning out an army of social justice warriors with stethoscopes.
First-year medical students are required to take a “Structural Racism and Health Equity” course, implemented as antiracist atonement programming in the wake of George Floyd’s 2020 death. By most accounts, it’s unnecessarily feeding a cancer of wokeness.
Earlier this month, students were forced to listen to Lisa “Tiny” Gray-Garcia, a pro Hamas speaker who led the class in chants of “Free, free Palestine,” called modern medicine “white science” and demanded they pray to “Mama Earth.”
There are lessons on “decolonization” and “climate activism.” There used to be a class exercise that divided students into racial groups, but that was canceled in January after a civil rights complaint.
The latest revelation about the course syllabus, however, takes the cake — and it’s a multi-tiered concoction frosted with radical and unscientific proclamations about obesity and health.
According to the Washington Free Beacon, Geffen students are required to read “No Health, No Care: The Big Fat Loophole in the Hippocratic Oath,” an essay by Marquisele Mercedes. A self-proclaimed “fat liberationist,” Mercedes believes obesity is a slur “used to exact violence on fat people” — specifically, “Black, disabled, trans, poor fat people”
“Fatphobia,” she writes, “is medicine’s status quo.”
The essay — which begins with an unsatisfactory medical experience Mercedes says she had as a 13-year-old visiting a slim, white, blonde doctor — is a self-centered, indulgent rant from a proudly overweight academic simply trying to justify her own size.
It’s also a nonsensical ode to victimhood that force feeds the reader a smorgasbord of intersectionality terms and traces the “origins of fatphobia” to white European Enlightenment philosophers.
And how quaint to picture it: Jean-Jacques Rouseau fat-shaming a female dinner guest, making loud pig noises as she takes a bite of her second helping of bread.
But there’s more. Mercedes makes many dubious claims — calling the relationship between weight and health “muddy” and claiming “it is proven that weight loss is a useless, hopeless endeavor.”
We know that everyone’s bodies are different and weight loss can be affected by a myriad of issues, including genetics and underlying medical problems. We’re constantly learning new lessons about trimming fat — but none of them say, “Don’t, if you’re obese.”
But take it from Jeffrey Flier, the former dean of Harvard Medical School Flier, who said the course “promotes extensive and dangerous misinformation.”
“This is a profoundly misguided view of obesity, a complex medical disorder with major adverse health consequences for all racial and ethnic groups,” Flier told the Washington Free Beacon. He added that teaching these “ignorant” ideas to medical students is nothing less than “malpractice.”
Flier said: “[UCLA] has centered this required course on a socialist/Marxist ideology that is totally inappropriate. As a longstanding medical educator, I found this course truly shocking.”
Personally, I want a doctor who is going to call balls and strikes — and who isn’t petrified of having difficult conversations about how lifestyle choices may be affecting overall health.
Not someone who was indoctrinated by the high priestess of fatness or a person who turned corpulence into a new religion.
This essay belongs at a spoken-word open-mic night — not in a medical school tasked with sending competent doctors into the world.
If they don’t trim the fat from this storied institution, a UCLA medical degree will become patient repellent. Run if you see it hanging on a doc’s wall.
