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Aaron Sibarium is a national treasure. So much so that back in February, I wrote one of my “Things I Like” columns dedicated to him and his work at The Washington Free Beacon. 

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Sibarium not only gets the scoops, but he gets the scoops on stories that matter in the long run. Covering political scandals gets you headlines and maybe a scalp, but revealing the dark underbelly of our institutions and the ideology that animates them is far more important work. 

Sibarium has another in his series about the self-destruction of our medical institutions, and this one fits in with my own focus on UCLA Medical School’s deeply corrupted education of the next generation of medical practitioners. 

UCLA is a top medical school, breaking the top 10 in many specialties, including Primary Care. 

It is also a hot mess. An ideological swamp, with noxious ideological gas wafting into the air. I would hesitate to see a doctor educated at the school. 

Seriously. I would. 

UCLA’s curriculum has many problems, but they can all be summed up as “healthcare is about liberation.” 

Call it Critical Health Theory, or CHeaT. Yes, I did make that up. 

Students in their first year of medical school typically learn what a healthy body looks like and how to keep it that way. At the University of California, Los Angeles, they learn that “fatphobia is medicine’s status quo” and that weight loss is a “hopeless endeavor.”

Those are two of the more moderate claims made by Marquisele Mercedes, a self-described “fat liberationist,” in an essay assigned to all first-year students in UCLA medical school’s mandatory “Structural Racism and Health Equity” class. Launched in the wake of George Floyd’s death, the course is required for all first-year medical students.

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I am old enough to remember when doctors were supposed to help people get healthier, and that rarely included telling people that attempts to eat right and exercise were oppressive. 

Want to eat yourself to death? That’s healthy! Do you enjoy smoking? 4 out of 5 doctors enjoy Lucky Strikes! About the only junk food UCLA disapproves of is Cheetos, and that is because they remind them of Donald Trump, the Cheeto Hitler. 

“Entrenched fat oppression” is only one of many things that must be eradicated from the medical curriculum. The gender binary, of course, must be eliminated, as well as CO2 and capitalism. 

UCLA “has centered this required course on a socialist/Marxist ideology that is totally inappropriate,” said Flier, who reviewed the full syllabus and several of the assigned readings. “As a longstanding medical educator, I found this course truly shocking.”

One required reading lists “anti-capitalist politics” as a principle of “disability justice” and attacks the evils of “ableist heteropatriarchal capitalism.” Others decry “racial capitalism,” attack “growth-centered economic theories,” and call for “moving beyond capitalism for our health.”

The essay by Mercedes “describes how weight came to be pathologized and medicalized in racialized terms” and offers guidance on “resisting entrenched fat oppression,” according to the course syllabus. Mercedes claims that “ob*sity” is a slur “used to exact violence on fat people”—particularly “Black, disabled, trans, poor fat people”—and offers a “fat ode to care” that students are instructed to analyze, taking note of which sections “most resonate with you.”

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As a person who has reduced his BMI from “Morbidly Obese” to merely “Obese,” I can sympathize a bit with the desire to remove the stigma. But only a bit. Obesity is manifestly unhealthy, as we can see from the rash of fat influencers who have been dropping like flies, often before 40. 

I have criticized the fat positivity movement a number of times, and invariably, somebody or another gets angry at me for making fat people feel bad. 

It’s not the fat people I am upset with, though. Quite the opposite! It is the people selling the notion that fat is healthy. Those people are destroying lives. It is no different from people trying to convince anorexics that not eating is healthy. 

It’s deadly, and it’s not medicine. 

“Abelist hetero-patriarchal capitalism.” Do you mean people being healthy, raising families, and creating prosperity? Those, my friend, are good things. Free love is unhealthy. Wallowing in addiction will kill you. Kids turn out to be the foundation of society. They will also pay your social security and take care of you when you are old. My wife and I couldn’t have kids, and it is a hole in our family. 

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Snapshots of the course have been leaking for months and left the school doing damage control as members of UCLA’s own faculty have spoken out against the curriculum. The most recent embarrassment came when a guest lecturer, Lisa Gray-Garcia, led students in chants of “Free, Free Palestine” after instructing them to kneel on the floor and pray to “Mama Earth.” Lessons on “decolonization” and climate activism, as well as a classroom exercise that separated students by race, have also stirred controversy.

“There are areas where medicine and public health intersect with politics, and these require discussion and debate of conflicting viewpoints,” Flier said. “That is distinct from education designed to ideologically indoctrinate physician-activists.”

The mandatory class is part of a nationwide push by medical schools to integrate DEI content into their curricula—for residents as well as students— both by adding required courses and by changing the way traditional subjects are taught.

Praxis, by the way, is Marxist code for revolutionary action. When you hear “praxis” you should run away. Seriously. 

Unfortunately, it isn’t UCLA alone that is moving in this direction. As is often the case, the worst of it comes straight from the top–the medical school association in this case. 

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The mandatory class is part of a nationwide push by medical schools to integrate DEI content into their curricula—for residents as well as students— both by adding required courses and by changing the way traditional subjects are taught.

Stanford Medical School sprinkles lessons on “microaggressions,” “structural racism,” and “privilege” throughout its curriculum. Residents at Yale Medical School must complete an “Advocacy and Equity” sequence focused on “becoming physician advocates for health justice,” while those in the infectious disease program must complete additional lessons on “Diversity, Equity, and Antiracism.”

Columbia Medical School promotes an “Anti-bias and Inclusive” curriculum by encouraging educators to use “precise, accurate language.” Instead of “women,” guidelines for the curriculum state, faculty should refer to “people with uteruses.”

The changes have been driven partly by the Association of American Medical Colleges—one of two groups that oversees the accrediting body for all U.S. medical schools—which in 2022 released a set of DEI “competencies” to guide curricula. Schools should teach students how to identify “systems of power, privilege, and oppression,” the competencies state, and how to incorporate “knowledge of intersectionality” into clinical decision-making. Students should also be able to describe “public policy that promotes social justice” and demonstrate “moral courage” when faced with “microaggression.”

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In a previous column, I wrote that I had developed a prejudice that Asian Indian doctors seem to be more scientific and less mushy-minded than younger American doctors. My sample size is, of course, low, so this is anecdotal data. Several commenters (including doctors) expressed the same thought, though, as did a relative who has several Indian doctors. 

It is not my advice to seek out doctors of any ethnicity, of course. Each doctor is an individual, but it is clear that American medical education is ideologically compromised. Whether it is alphabet ideology, anti-capitalism, or a celebration of feelings over facts, our medical schools are positively dangerous to our nation’s health. 

We have medical associations attacking basic biological facts, land acknowledgments, celebrations of “indigenous” science and all sorts of nonsense taking over. 

Doctors are even having political arguments with patients, or dropping them altogether over political disagreements. 

First do no harm? Not any longer.