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Rima E Laibow MD's avatar

First of all, thank you for an intelligent, thoughtful and non-polemical discussion of race/minority based politics and its downstream effects especially in medicine.

I entered medical school in 1966 and graduated from Albert Einstein College of Medicine in 1970. I have been an passionate and active advocate for freedom and fairness all of my sentient life (I got kicked out of an organization for lack of right think/right speak for the first time at the tender age of 14), attending my first political rally for integration in DC when I was 17 years old. So I have a LOOOOOOONNNGGGGG history in these wars.

After the assassinations of MLK and RFK in 1968, my progressive medical school ("liberal" back then, when that had a very different meaning) set up the King-Kennedy Program, which recognized the disparity of preparation opportunities for otherwise suitable candidates for admission to medical school.

In the affirmative action zeitgeist of the time (institutionalized racism doused with a whole lot of self-congratulatory kumbaya, but never dealing with the root causes of the problem), they set up a very generous scholarship for disadvantaged black candidates who had completed university but could not make the grade because of discriminatory educational and social conditions. Well and good.

These fortunate young people would receive a generous financial stipend, room and board, books and supplies, live on campus and receive a year of remedial education to prepare them to stand for the MCATs a year later.

Sounds lovely, right? Except for the fact that the "disadvantaged" students chosen were 1. the daughter of a black neurosurgeon who had attended an elite Ivy League university but was an uninterested and very desultory student, 2. a black Oriental Languages major from Columbia University who had never take an pre med course but thought "it would be fun to be a doctor" and a couple of other students who qualified ONLY because they had a sufficiently discernable amount of melanin in their skin.

Not one of them achieved passing marks for admission when they took the MCAT a year later. But ALL of them were admitted to the medical school class because, and here I quote from what the Dean of Admissions told me when I raised the question of why unqualified students had been admitted, denying places to qualified ones, "not admitting them would be racist".

As they pursued their medical educations, what is your guess as to whether their performance was evaluated to the same standards as more "privileged" students and whether the resulting medical competence they could deliver to every one of their patients was what each of those patients had a right to expect and, indeed, what they were hinging their very survival upon?

If medical education quality, rigor and honesty, delivered to the highest quality, most qualified students makes no difference to outcome, then why spend the time and effort, to say nothing of the money involved, on it? If those components are both significant, then anything like affirmative action or DEI, or, call it what it is, straight up racism, endangers lives, lots and lots and lots of lives and degrades the fluttering tatters of what is left of the dignity and virtue of our allegedly once noble profession.

When do we develop the spine, the fortitude, the guts, the principles, the balls, to look those who want to destroy everything we hold dear as decent human beings, in the eye and the ballot box and the wallet and tell them the truth, with a resounding "Not only 'NO!', but HELL NO!"

By the way, those same destroyers are fomenting the disgusting "Comprehensive Sexuality Education" and 15 minute cities and digital vaccine IDs and CBDC.

And falling for it is made virtuous by the Ministry of Truth.

Please visit https://PreventGenocide2030.org for a peaceful mechanism to take action to say "NO! and HELL NO!"

And say it to groupism (race, gene therapy status, political affiliation, antisemitism, islamophobia, sexism, whatever) in medicine. Say it loud, and often and don't stop saying it until it no longer needs to be said because we have drowned out the race/minority politics crap.

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Kev's avatar

I have subscribed to over thirty substack writers since the beginning of substack. Over time, I have noticed that many of the writers who ostensibly drew rational conclusions from data and appeared to espouse a reasonable data-driven argument would instantaneously convert to a rabid tribalist when the subject matter switched. Some examples: writers who apparently could see through the Covid propaganda, but then swallowed the Ukraine propaganda; writers who could see through the Ukraine propaganda but then blindly accepted the climate change propaganda, etc. Very few can stay objective from subject to subject. Kudos to A Midwestern Doctor for nailing it again; a data driven, objective, reasoned argument!

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