by James C. Sherlock

Do you assume that Virginia’s medical schools are strict meritocracies, taking only the most well prepared and accomplished applicants?

And that their efforts are then focused entirely on creating the most skilled physicians possible?

If so, you are mistaken.

The Medical College Admission Test (MCAT), written by the American Medical Association (AMA), a proudly progressive organization, measures everything they know to measure.

The AMA knows MCAT is by far the best predictor of success in medical school and brags about it. The MCAT itself was redesigned in 2015 to include sections that required test-takers to have an understanding of the social and behavioral sciences.

The current MCAT sections breakdown is as follows:

• Section 1 – Biological and Biochemical Foundations of Living Systems (BBLS);
• Section 2 – Chemical and Physical Foundations of Biological Systems (CPBS);
• Section 3 – Psychological, Social, and Biological Foundations of Behavior (PSBB);
• Section 4 – Critical Analysis and Reasoning Skills (CARS).

Remember that women and minorities who take the MCAT are not so “disadvantaged” that they do not feel ready to apply to medical school.

The AMA hoped the change would produce more women and “underrepresented” (as opposed to Asian-American) minorities with high MCAT scores.

Fair enough.

Yet the rest of the woke medical leadership refuses to accept the results of AMA’s MCAT because that test still does not yield the “correct” candidates.

Read the chair-elect of the Association of American Medical Colleges (AAMC) Board of Directors and dean for medical education at Georgetown University School of Medicine make the case for racial preferences in admissions.

But also read in the same article that he anticipates such discrimination on the basis of race will be ruled unconstitutional. So do most observers.

Perhaps he will then join conservatives in advocating to get minority students better prepared in Virginia K-12 schools. So they can take and excel in the required undergraduate courses in higher numbers. Or he won’t.

But currently candidates with the best MCAT scores are not always chosen. On purpose.

Especially if they are White or Asian males. Or political conservatives. God help them if they are both. Again on purpose.

It is federal law, of course, that discrimination on the basis of race, sex, or moral, religious or political views is illegal. That has not proven to be an obstacle to discrimination on the basis of race, sex or religious, moral or political views.

Some of the “undesirables” who are nonetheless admitted to medical school, if motivated only to be the best doctors they can be to help people, are quickly disillusioned.

The political, religious, and moral tests start with the applications process.

Emulating Russian and Chinese military academies.

Then a new set of medical education standards rolled out in July of 2022 by the Association of American Medical Colleges (AAMC) requires not only wokeness but hard evidence of it.

The AAMC administers the Medical College Admission Test. It

represents 171 US and Canadian medical schools along with more than 400 teaching hospitals and health systems. One of its key roles is developing standards for the topics and concepts medical students must learn. And what, you ask, are the latest requirements? You guessed it: diversity, equity and inclusion.

When announcing the standards, the AAMC’s president and chair of its council of deans declared that woke identity politics “deserves just as much attention from learners and educators at every stage of their careers as the latest scientific breakthroughs.” [Emphasis added.]

That leaves us all at risk from the dual radicalization and weakening of the classes of new physicians who will care for us and our progeny.

That in turn makes Glen Allen Va’s Do No Harm, launched in 2022, critically important to everyone.

It is led by Dr. Stanley Goldfarb, a former associate dean of curriculum at the University of Pennsylvania’s Perelman School of Medicine, the author of the article quoted above. Watch Dr. Goldfarb discuss the problem.

Do No Harm already has more than 4,750 members. In one year.

We will take a look at what Do No Harm has already exposed about Virginia’s medical schools and post-graduate medical education.

For the full inventory of Do No Harm’s work in the Commonwealth, go here and select Virginia.

University of Virginia Medical School. Do No Harm has spent a good deal of effort in its short existence petitioning the federal Department of Education (DOE) Office of Civil Rights (OCR) for enforcement of Title IX of the Education Amendments of 1972 — discrimination on the basis of sex.

Those government attorneys, paying attention to the law rather than personal politics, have proven helpful.

Each campus receiving federal funds has its own Title IX office. Some explicitly ignore university policies and activities that are violations of that law.

The Biden administration DOE OCR in March opened a formal investigation into UVa. University of Virginia Medical School, by partnering in the Perry Initiative, is charged with discrimination on the basis of sex.

It seems a prima facie case.

On another front, UVa’s Comprehensive Cancer Center has a new DEI Program Coordinator, and the School of Medicine is hiring a DEI Program Manager and Events Coordinator.

From Do No Harm:

Naturally, these jobs slot into a rapidly growing DEI bureaucracy, with the cancer center position (now filled) “reporting to the Associate Director of Diversity, Equity and Inclusion.”

Note that the DEI officials do not report to Dr. Craig Kent, Chief Executive Officer, UVA Health and the Executive Vice President for Health Affairs.

Of course they don’t. They are political commissars. For reference see the Soviet armed forces under Stalin.

VCU Medical School. Each year medical schools submit a Diversity, Inclusion, Culture, and Equity (DICE) inventory to the Association of American Medical Colleges (AAMC).

The AAMC celebrated the results in a November 2022 report. Read the executive summary. See their Antiracism Education Collection. Be afraid for the future of medicine.

You will see that any school that got a “score” of 80% or higher was designated as having made “substantial efforts,” the highest tribute.  It was achieved by 64% of medical schools.

VCU Medical School got a score of 94.4. Hard to imagine what they left out.

In the Executive Summary of the AAMC report is this line.

Medical schools reported plans to use their findings from the DICE Inventory to begin making policy changes, inform their strategic planning, and support LCME accreditation documentation and ongoing improvement efforts.

“Support LCME accreditation documentation” is not a throw-away line.

The Liaison Committee on Medical Education (LCME) is recognized by the U.S. Department of Education as an accrediting agency for medical education programs leading to the MD degree.

See how that works?

No DICE, no accreditation. VCU is a DICE platinum card holder

Carilion/Virginia Tech Medical School. Too new to review.

EVMS. No word. There is no public access that I can find to the DICE scores of America’s medical schools. Perhaps to prevent a race to apply to those schools with low scores.

The AAMC. In an article in the New York Post, Dr. Goldfarb reports

100% have “admissions policies and practices for encouraging a diverse class of students.” Fully 85% have leaders who’ve “used demographic data to promote change” within their institution.

In other words, medical schools are giving skin color and gender a consistently bigger emphasis in recruiting.

And once admitted, the AAMC is changing their curricula.

The AAMC, which has both a Chief Diversity and Inclusion Officer and a Senior Director, Equity and Social Accountability, in July of 2022 published Diversity, Equity, and Inclusion Competencies Across the Learning Continuum. Those “competencies” were developed by a Diversity, Equity and Inclusion Advisory Committee. Of course.

Try for a moment to consider the viewpoint diversity on that committee.

Or just read the “Competencies” required. Some of them are praiseworthy.

But then there are:

Demonstrates knowledge of the intersectionality of a patient’s multiple identities and how each identity may result in varied and multiple forms of oppression or privilege related to clinical decisions and practice.

Practicing Anti-racism and Critical Consciousness in Health Care.

“dentifies systems of power, privilege, and oppression and their impacts on health outcomes (e.g., White privilege, racism, sexism, heterosexism, ableism, religious oppression).

Describes how stratification (e.g., by race, ethnicity, primary language, socioeconomic status, LGBTQ identification) of quality measures can allow identification of health care disparities.

Describes the impact of various systems of oppression on health and health care (e.g., colonization, White supremacy, acculturation, assimilation).

Then check out the curricular models.

• Some are good, like University of Tennessee Caring for Patients With Intellectual or Developmental Disabilities (IDD).
• Some, well, like Harvard. Read how Harvard Medical School interweaves Sexual and Gender Minority Health Faculty Development Modules. Or don’t.
• Read the Icahn School of Medicine at Mount Sinai Center for Antiracism in Practice module “Faculty Development in Antiracist Pedagogy and Critical Consciousness.” It is exactly what its title suggests.

Then read the Glossary of Select Terms. Informative, no definitive, in its own right.

By defining the terms of reference, AAMC defines the required speech of medical school students.

The ACGME. Finally, there is the Accreditation Council for Graduate Medical Education (ACGME). It

is a private, 501(c)(3), not-for-profit organization that sets standards for US graduate medical education (residency and fellowship) programs and the institutions that sponsors them, and renders accreditation decisions based on compliance with these standards.

Read “ACGME Equity Matters.“

ACGME standards, mirroring those of the AAMC, complete the progressive capture of medical education, including continuing medical education (CME).

Even if they break federal education laws. Which they unabashedly do.

Bottom line. The left is not only comfortable with forced political speech, it insists on it.  In medical school.

They see nothing wrong with requiring on threat of expulsion that medical students hew to a progressive dogma that comes with its own glossary of mandatory terms.

See UVa Medical School’s expulsion of Kieran Bhattacharya for lack of deference to the catechism.

Even progressives must admit that it would take a progressive political view to apply to put up with all of that either as faculty or as students for all of the years of medical education.

Which is what the progressive leadership has in mind.

And plans to achieve.

Support merit in the medical profession. Support Do No Harm. Become a member. 

Your health and the health of your children and grandchildren depend upon it.

Next. Next we will examine Do No Harm’s work protecting minors from gender ideology.

Godspeed to them.