Regular readers know that because I have been working with doctors for twenty-some years, I often joke the best medical advice I can give is “Do not get sick.”
That started as a lighthearted jest. Here’s how it ended, with this headline: “Penn medical school expands minority candidate program that does not require MCAT.”
Pandering to blacks in higher education has been routine for some time before Penn’s move. Blacks, for instance, had on average worse scores on the MCAT than Asians, but blacks were accepted at much higher rates than Asians. Here’s one example of many, from AEI.
At the lowest MCAT scores, 56% of black applicants were accepted, but only 6% of Asians were, a difference of more than 9 times.
Another analysis found that blacks at the lowest MCAT scores and who had the lowest GPAs had a 50 times higher chance than of-no-colors of being accepted. This is a hilarious analysis because the author admits that if we held “black applicants to the ‘same standards’ as white applicants, we would…[be] effectively halving the number of blacks who get into medical school.” (Memorize those scare quotes around standards.)
But then he assumes those missing blacks would be made up solely of of-no-color applicants, which proves, therefore, to the author, that more of-no-colors with worse scores would get in, lowering the average MCAT scores of of-no-color applicants. Which, though irrelevant and silly, is true. It also ignores that Asians with higher scores would take the place of blacks.
Anyway, the author gives the game away with throat clearing right before showing how admitting blacks with lower scores ackshually doesn’t take seats away from of-no-colors with better scores:
In addition to righting the decades-long structural and historical factors that have limited opportunities for black students to enroll in medical school, there are many benefits to having diversity in the medical profession. A diverse physician population encourages [blah blah blah]
Point is, even with blacks being given tremendous advantages over Asians and other races, it wasn’t enough advantage. DIE quotas were not being met, and if there is anything the woke are serious about, it is DIEing.
Now I have told us innumerable times that the dreadful and false theory of Equality destroys standards. The pattern is always the same. A group first pledges to DIE. It promises standards will not be lowered. Standards are then lowered. Then it is declared the standards were never necessary.
Then it is discovered full DIE has not been reached. It is then announced we must DIE harder. At which point—the point at which our medical schools are now at—the entire litany is repeated with the remaining standards.
According to the original article, even though (“racist”?) MCAT scores will no longer be required, a certain minimum undergraduate GPA will be.
My bold prediction (screenshot this) is that this GPA will be discovered to be too high, too arduous. Racial “disparities” will persist. So the minimum GPA will be lowered; the requirement of any GPA could very well be eliminated.
Even this will not achieve DIE. What could is to allow the matriculation of any black who wants to be a doctor, in much the same manner as City College’s open admissions in the 1960s.
I hope you see the problem. No, it’s not that, as a kindly doctor said in the original article, that “The stakes are too high (life and death) to start lowering standards or taking shortcuts with basic fundamental scientific knowledge necessary for developing critical thinking skills to diagnose and properly treat diseases”.
No. It’s that are still some standards inside medical schools. Not as many as before, and the few remaining (such as being able to tell male from female) are being tossed on various woke bonfires, but still enough to guarantee “disparities” in graduation rates.
Full DIE will not, and cannot, be achieved until all standards are eliminated.
Which is happening, as described in this City Journal article. “Step” tests, which must be passed to advance in med school, are being quashed.
A fourth-year Yale medical student describes how the specter of Step One affected his priorities. In his first two years of medical school, the student had “immersed” himself, as he describes it, in a student-led committee focused on diversity, inclusion, and social justice. The student ran a podcast about health disparities. All that political work was made possible by Yale’s pass-fail grading system, which meant that he didn’t feel compelled to put studying ahead of diversity concerns. Then, as he tells it, Step One “reared its ugly head.” Getting an actual grade on an exam might prove to “whoever might have thought it before that I didn’t deserve a seat at Yale as a Black medical student,” the student worried.
A very short time from now, if you are rational, and do not suffer from Equality, and do not feel the need to DIE, you will look at the black doctor approaching you and say to yourself, “Uh oh.”
Which, for the same black doctor if there were no DIEing, no “affirmative” action, no cheating, and with standards galore, you’d say, “It hurts when I do this, doc.”
And he’d say…
Bonus It’s not only medicine, of course, but every field that swears to DIE. Though you are not allowed to say so. If you do, you are canceled. You know Yours Truly was canceled. Well Amy Wax is undergoing cancellation now in law. Excellent interview here.
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Since the purpose of woke medicine is killing people they could recruit doctors in prisons. Kill two birds with one pill.
In order to go full DIE, medical schools MUST admit more mentally retarded students. Stop retardophobia now!
“How Will You Know If Your Black Doctor Specializes In Diversity?”
If he/she/they/it is black.
It’s the 95% that make the 5% look bad.
Screw it!
Any person who chooses to identify as a doctor, IS a doctor!
Call them by their preferred title – Dr./Doc/Dem.
If you don’t let them treat you and pay them, then you are a bigot!
Now take off all you clothes and bend over on the table for an examination. They may have failed MCAT, but they know how to perform this one!
With the recent performance art of covid-19 people should realize the
entire medical establishment is completely kaput. They changed the
definition of what a vaxcine was to accommodate the panic with nary a
whimper from a predominantly white medical establishment. This reality
altering phenomena started years ago when the definition of herd immunity
was expropriated by the vaxcine lobby. With a 100k govt. bonus for every
covid-corpse the medicos got busy increasing their bottom line via the lavish
application of ‘Trump Triumph Ventilators’ and murderous nursing home
transfers. Now all the number pimping is forgotten though it was meticulously
planned.
This isn’t new. I went to Case Western and graduated in 1981. We all knew that 10 percent of the students were “diversity” admissions, although they must have called it something else then.
It made it harder for the rest of us to flunk a test.
Nobody wants to know how the sausage is made until they find out
they are the principal ingredient.
I’ve had two black GPs. The first always left me wondering, and behind his back I referred to him as “Dr. Affirmative Action Jones”. The second was older, and may have gone to school as far back as the 1970s. He was good. It’s a mixed bag. I’ve also had white and Asian doctors who were thoroughgoing quacks. All of that having been said, in light of the lowering of standards I’ve suspected and this article has confirmed, I’ll be avoiding black doctors whenever possible. If that makes me a racist, too bad.
Thoroughgoing quacks are everywhere in medicine, unfortunately. Smarts are not a necessary and sufficient quality to do good work, as we have seen with the bioweapon jab fiasco. What US blacks have is a general suspicion that serves them well and potentially serves their patients. Neither Briggs nor I were recommending avoiding black doctors. You must be wary of the whole profession, get carefully involved in the decision making, and get other opinions if you smell any type of rat. Be careful out there. Best text to understand my comment is my book Butchered by “Healthcare”.
“Pandering to blacks in higher education has been routine for some time before Penn’s move.”
Big question that is begged here: And what happens to these students who are admitted under relaxed standards, but then still have to complete a rigorous and demanding curriculum?
Great question, with data not usually being made available to the public.
However we do have a recent case study. Here’s what the defense is for the black nurse who killed 6 by driving her Mercedes at 90mph through a red light in LA last month:
“Linton’s family became aware of her mental health issues in May 2018 when she was a nursing student at the University of Texas in Houston, her lawyers wrote. Her sister Camille Linton said in a letter to the court that Nicole’s studies to be a nurse anesthetist caused her first mental health breakdown.”
https://www.yahoo.com/news/nurse-accused-killing-5-might-230519645.html
Probably public whining about Imposter Syndrome would have been a better outcome. But…here we are. Will be interesting to see how her trial plays out.
Kent,
That’s the money question. Something like this is happening:
https://twitter.com/SullyDucksworth/status/1564656155292491777
60% of enrolled black students flunk out of Illinois’s universities?
That’s amazing.
Back in the old days, Kent, such folk (regardless of skin tone), simply dropped out. I recall a saying early on, “Look to your left and look to your right, one of you won’t be here next year”; and that was often the case, even with the higher standards for admission. Obviously, “DIE” doesn’t want to live in reality.
Kent,
That’s why GPAs and Step scores have to go. Too judgmental.
“Blacking out?” More likely suicide due to the way she felt on her toxic psych drugs. See Butchered by “Healthcare”
In the early 2000s the decent male Indian physician I saw in the area I moved to for work left the area.
I was grandfathered into the care of a black female physician.
Never again.
The process:
-We are just trying to see if there are inequities in hiring, no one is saying that the standards are bigoted.
-We are just doing some extra recruiting to make sure everyone has an opportunity, no one is going to have an easier time getting through the standards.
-We are just double checking to make sure that the standards are fair since there are disparities in hiring, no one is making any changes.
-We are just giving minorities some accommodations like increased access to studying resources and multiple attempts on the exams, everyone will still have to meet the same standards in the end.
-We are just making some minor changes to the standards, since they are obviously bigoted due to disparities continuing even in the face of accommodations. But we will make sure that all the job relevant standards remain.
-Since many minorities have continued to fail the job relevant standards we are just re-evaluating whether or not they truly or “job relevant.” No one is going to be hired without being able to do the job.
-Diversity is our greatest strength and is itself a job relevant standard. Only a bigot would disagree!
-#SHUTDOWNSTANDARDS, we cannot move forward until we reach full diversity.
-There are still too many whites and Asians being hired, despite our best efforts. We will add new standards to rectify this error.
-Do my job? That sounds like a demand a racist would make.
When I got Coronadoom around New Year’s Day I treated myself with what the FLCCC recommended and I had my own supply of Ivermectin and so the only thing I wanted from by Doctor was a Zpack and I had to brow beat the woman before she finally relented “It is not recommended for Covid but I am tired of arguing with you. I’ll call in a script.”
It is not the race of the doctor that is troublesome as much as it the doctors complete reliance upon the CDC and the AMA which are completely politicised and compromised and yet GOP voters just can’t wait to again vote for The Orangeman who let his idiot son–in-law Jared and his tech buds write the program for how America would respond to Cornoadoom and then chose Fauci and Brix (who STILL haven’t treated even one Coronadoom patient)
to shutter the country.
America is doomed,
@Rudolph Harrier
“The Process” is the best description of the real world I have seen. Every little step, every little slice of the bologna, nothing so large that people rebel. Everything small enough to be met with a laugh and a WTF?! instead of a loud “HELL NO!”
Well done, Sir!
It is happening in Psychology, too, where we are having to stop the requiring GRE scores.
All,
Vexxines about to DIE harder. Pfizer bans whites, Asians.
High school math teacher. Exactly. “Under-served populations”
Pfizer Fellowships are racist? Nothing new there, they just said the quiet part out loud. Apparently the law doesn’t have very big teeth; Pfizer corporate attorneys know they can apologize and change nothing about the program except the language in the brochure, thus getting their marketing win with the woke crowd without much financial risk.
“We showed them!” claim the conservative groups in their fundraising emails.
Sometimes we conservatives are such idiots when it comes to dealing with the left.
So 94% of all blacks in the highest cohort are admitted. What’s that, like two or three blacks? If a thousand Asians applied and 56% are admitted, that’s still a whole lot more Asian med school students than black ones.
I was on a medical discussion board that focused on medical school admissions. In one thread, a non-trad black candidate was worried that their 510 MCAT was too low to be admitted into an MD program. The rest of their application was solid, though nothing to to write home about; the typical CV of a med school hopeful. An attending who was involved in admissions said that their MCAT score wasn’t going to be an issue when applying to Top 25 programs. He further explained that due to the candidate being black WITH a 510 MCAT score he’d be considered “a catch” – if he does well in interviews he’ll most likely proceed to the next round and be offered a spot in the next matriculated class.
The attending also implied that if you were white or Asian that 510 MCAT score would bar you from even stepping on campus for an interview.
Given that there are plenty of medical school programs within the States, from ranked to non-ranked, I see this the same way when it comes to undergraduate acceptance. A black candidate with a 510 MCAT score with an average application isn’t what you think of when you think of a Northwestern MD or a Mayo MD. This isn’t to say that this applicant won’t make a competent, caring physician – it’s just that maybe a Top 25 program may not be the right match for him. In the end medical school ranking doesn’t matter much unless you want to enter academics in medicine, then some name clout may help.
If the social left wants more minorities to become physicians then, in the end, it doesn’t matter if a chunk of the 510 MCAT scorers, if they are black, Hispanic, Native American, biracial applicants end up in non-ranked medical schools, or medical schools ranked anywhere between 40-100. I could respect this more if that was the case of their narrative, but it isn’t.
There’s also the DO route if getting into an MD isn’t a possibility or if they prefer to go into primary care. (I am aware that there are plenty of DO physicians who have gone to further specialize.)
Take it from Thomas Sowell – matching the student with the right program is far more important than that student getting into a program that’s a poor fit. An engineer who graduated from Bradley University is no more less of an engineer who graduated from Georgia Tech if the former makes due diligence.
A little about me. During my senior of high school I applied to a small, local private liberal arts college on a whim. It was strictly a decision based on expanding my options in case I was rejected at my preferred colleges. My application was painfully mediocre, but it was good enough be granted a seat in the following freshmen class. I was later sent a letter saying I was awarded a five figure renewable scholarship. Why? I was a racial/ethnic minority and the college needed more minorities. I was flattered. I would eventually decline the admission seat.
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