Injecting Wokeness into Health Care

Suffering from a critical health emergency? Rest assured that the American Medical Association (AMA) is working to ensure the doctors assisting you in your darkest hour are respectful of your personal pronouns.

A new AMA-partnered report, “Advancing Health Equity: A Guide to Language, Narrative and Concepts,” promises to “give a fresh perspective about the language… to recognize the harmful effects of dominant narratives in medicine.” In fighting alleged systemic racism and other woke-identified plagues on American society, the guide “promotes a deeper understanding of equity-focused, first-person language and why it matters.”

In a Heartland Institute critique of the guide and other progressive redirections of American health care, National Center Senior Fellow Bonner Cohen, Ph.D. slammed the group for “decid[ing] this is the appropriate time for doctors to adopt speech codes that reflect the prevailing narrative of woke culture” as “the United States tries to cope with a growing shortage of physicians, nurses, first responders and other medical personnel.”

In the AMA guide, so-called “health equity” is impossible unless there is “explicit recognition and reconciliation of our country’s twin, fundamental injustices of genocide and forced labor.” Bonner noted how radicals are “injecting transformative language into everyday medical discourse” to, as the guide describes it, “develop a critical consciousness of the root causes and structural drivers.”

Bonner wrote:

Conventional phrasing should give way to equity-focused language. Here are two examples: “Native Americans have the highest mortality rates in the United States.”  This should be replaced by: “Dispossessed by the government of their land and culture, Native Americans have the highest mortality rates in the United States.”

Similarly, “Low-income people have the highest level of coronary heart disease in the United States” should be replaced by: “People underpaid and forced into poverty as a result of banking policies, real estate developers gentrifying neighborhoods, and companies weakening the power of labor movements, among others, have the highest level of coronary disease in the United States.”

“Nowhere in the document,” Bonner pointed out, “is it made clear how AMA’s advocacy of a highly politicized concept of health equity and the organization’s prescribed speech codes will improve the care of patients in need.”

Yet this radical interpretation of bedside manner goes beyond the printed page and into medical certifications. In Michigan, for example, physicians must complete two hours of training in sex and gender issues that suggests gender is “defined by the individual” and not by longtime scientific indicators including DNA and anatomy. In allowing the patient to set such terms, physicians were reportedly told to avoid asking women who claim they are men about possibly being pregnant.

To read all of Bonner’s Health Care News article – “AMA Pushed Physicians to Embrace Woke Speak” – click here.