Very few people make it through life without, at one time or other, coming in contact with the medical system. Some people, due to serious illness or injury, develop a close relationship with their healthcare providers. It's almost inevitable you'll one day need medical attention, and the following will surely give you great confidence in the care you'll be receiving from the next generation of doctors.
At UCLA's Geffen School of Medicine, prospective physicians are required to take certain specialized classes. You'd like to think... to better diagnose and treat disease and trauma, courses such as Anatomy, Organic Chemistry, and Pathophysiology would be at the top of the curriculum. But... you'd be wrong.
Medical students at UCLA, as well as many other medical schools, are required to take, amongst other utterly irrelevant classes, the following: "The Sickness of Policing and Incarceration," "Anti-Settler Colonialism/Indigenous Health," "Environmental Racism and Justice," and "Structural Racism and Health Equity." Mandatory classes such as those may be critical to the transplantation of Woke ideology, but none will help to diagnose and treat that stroke you're having.
The course objectives are to "Understand the concepts of race/racism, power, colonialism, patriarchy, and capitalism and their manifestations in the history of medical thought, education, practice, and research, and to shape the healthcare system overall. while understanding the impact both structural and social determinants have on the health of marginalized communities." I am NOT making this up!
After spending over 2 decades in the back of an Advanced Life Support Medic Unit treating patients suffering with everything from hangnails to heart attacks. I'm finding it difficult to understand how "colonialism, patriarchy, and health equity" have anything to do with diagnosing and treating illnesses and injuries.
But what would I know? By UCLA's standards, I'm a member of the pro-incarceration settler-colonist patriarchy... and a racist capitalist, to boot. Apparently, the nearly 17.000 patients who passed through the back of my ambulance were all at grave risk because I didn't "understand the impact both structural and social determinants have on the health of marginalized communities." All those patients I treated for sucking chest wounds would have been so much happier had I focused on the "Sickness of Policing" rather than sealing the bubbling hole in their chest and preventing them from developing a tension pneumothorax... and dying.
The students enrolled in UCLA's medical school... and so many others nationwide, will be graduating soon; they'll be taking positions in private practice, HMOs, ERs, and operating rooms everywhere. Assuming you live long enough, there's no chance you won't one day meet some of them in a clinical setting and, considering what they learned in medical school...
Living longer may not be an option.