This is the Cadre Daily Podcast for Tuesday, May 7, 2024. I'm Caleb Brown.

Most of us don't want to go back to a world in which the quality of your medical treatment is consciously

influenced by your skin color or how you think about the world.

And yet some professional medical organizations appear to be fostering exactly that kind of future, where ideological

commitments overwhelm the oath to first do no harm.

Cato's Eric Smith and Jeff Singer comment. Jeff, I'm not going to ask you to recite the oath that you took when you became a physician but I know everybody knows how it starts first do no harm

that's true but over the last several years many medical schools have allowed faculty and

students to compose their own oaths and a lot of them have digressed so far from the purpose of a medical education that a person

hearing the oath recited might wonder what profession is an oath about because it doesn't even

discuss patients or patient autonomy or

respect for patients instead it talks about a whole bunch of social

injustices and the like.

This is something that was originally brought to my attention

fairly recently.

Frankly, I was reading, was it the canceling of the American mind, but the idea that schools of

medicine or people who are medical professionals including psychiatrists where a non-zero fraction of the people who practice those occupations

believe it is entirely appropriate to either not treat certain people or in the process of treating certain people not actually helping them with the problems that they have been brought to you.

Right. I've seen this work its way through other institutions, other disciplines.

Even I didn't think the long march through institutions would include

med school. I didn't see that coming. But it shows just how insidious this whole

thing is with the problematic version of the I which is one

that is inherently divisive very us versus them very essentialist in saying that certain people of certain colors act a certain way, right?

...