What Happens When Doctors Can’t Tell the Truth?

From What is Happening to My Profession? by Sally Satel.  The profession is the medical profession and her concern is the creeping racism and anti-scientism of Critical Race Theory and Postmodernist ideologies.  Well worth a read.  We think of science as being immune from emotional ideologies but that is naive.

Belief is always independent of knowledge.  We have an immense capacity to ignore inconvenient facts that collide with belief.  Satel's concern is that the ideology of CRT and Postmodernism is also anti-human rights and authoritarian.  As CRT creeps in, respect for the individual and the capacity to communicate freely bleeds away.  And science is founded on the capacity to freely congregate with others and there to communicate in open fashion.  Once you begin to forbid either or both of those rights, science loses its impetus and devolves into rote ideological check-lists of procedures.

The implementation of the social justice agenda has constrained collegial discourse, challenged the maintenance of standards, and suppressed honest analysis of certain problems. In her article called “What Happens When Doctors Can’t Tell the Truth?,” Katie Herzog wrote of “doctors who’ve been reported to their departments for criticizing residents for being late. (It was seen by their trainees as an act of racism) … I’ve heard from doctors who’ve stopped giving trainees honest feedback for fear of retaliation. I’ve spoken to those who have seen clinicians and residents refuse to treat patients based on their race or their perceived conservative politics.”

Two cancellations have attracted notice. Last year, Norman Wang, a cardiologist at the University of Pittsburgh School of Medicine who expressed skepticism about mandatory affirmative action after conducting a careful review of the data was stripped by his department of his directorship of the electrophysiology fellowship and barred from having contact with medical students, residents, or fellows because his views were “inherently unsafe.” His peer-reviewed paper, ‘Diversity, Inclusion, and Equity: Evolution of Race and Ethnicity Considerations for the Cardiology Workforce in the United States of America from 1969 to 2019,’ which appeared in March 2020 in the Journal of the American Heart Association (JAHA) was retracted by the journal without Wang’s consent. The American Heart Association, which publishes JAHA, tweeted that his article “does NOT represent AHA values.” The cardiologist has sued both the university and the American Health Association.

In another case, the editor-in-chief of the Journal of the American Medical Association was effectively forced to resign last June for a somewhat tone deaf, but otherwise unremarkable, 15-minute podcast on racism in medicine and because of a tweet advertising it. “Although I did not write or even see the tweet, or create the podcast, as editor-in-chief, I am ultimately responsible for them,” he said in a statement. What other examples have escaped attention? “Most who are troubled by this are keeping their heads down and keeping their mouths shut,” said my colleague Thomas Huddle, an internist and professor who retired this year from the medical school at the University of Alabama at Birmingham, one of the few physicians willing to go on the record. “They’re deeply afraid of social media mobs and of academic administrative superiors who’ve taken this stuff on,” he said of his colleagues to Real Clear Investigations.