Doctors Warn New Medical School Guidance Would Lead to Unqualified Physicians and Unscientific Medicine

The two accrediting bodies for American medical schools now say that meritocracy is "malignant" and that race has "no genetic or scientific basis," positions that many doctors worry will lower standards of care and endanger lives by discouraging vital genetic testing.

The Liaison Committee on Medical Education, which accredits all medical schools in North America, is cosponsored by the American Medical Association (AMA) and the Association of American Medical Colleges (AAMC)—the same groups that on Oct. 30 released a controversial guide to "advancing health equity" through "language, narrative, and concepts."

Those concepts include the ideas that "individualism and meritocracy" are "malignant narratives" that "create harm," that using race as a proxy for genetics "leads directly to racial health inequities," and that medical vulnerability is the "result of socially created processes" rather than biology.

Integrating these ideas into medicine, five professors and practicing doctors told the Washington Free Beacon, would be a catastrophe, resulting in underqualified doctors, missed diagnoses, and unscientific medical school curricula.

The guidance won't just influence the way doctors talk, these practitioners said, but also what they know and how they treat patients. It could even make them unwilling to screen racial minorities for serious conditions—including many types of cancer—that they are more likely to inherit, on the mistaken belief that genes play no role in racial health disparities.