There are new standards for teaching medicine in the US, which include achieving “competencies” in “white privilege,” “anti-colonialism,” and “race as a social construct.”.The Association of American Medical Colleges (AAMC) released their new “race-essentialist” standards for schools of medicine this month. It is called the “Diversity, Equity, and Inclusion (DEI) Competencies Across the Learning Continuum.” .“Since the founding of the United States, there have been systemic health and health care inequities grounded in racism, sexism, homophobia, classism, and other forms of discrimination that still permeate our current health system,” stated the DEI..“Recent broad societal calls for social justice and the disparate impacts of the COVID-19 pandemic have added urgency to the need for improved integration of diversity, equity, inclusion, and anti-racism in medical education and training.”.The DEI is a requirement for medical schools to change their curriculums to incorporate the social justice learning objectives..There are three stages of race and gender training in the DEI: “new to DEI journey,” “advancing along DEI journey,” and “continuing DEI journey.”.A medical student entering residency new to the “journey” must show “evidence of self-reflection and how one’s personal identities, biases, and lived experiences may influence one’s perspectives, clinical decision-making, and practice.”.“Value of diversity by incorporating dimensions of diversity into the patient’s health assessment and treatment plan,” states the DEI..“Knowledge of the intersectionality of a patient’s multiple identities and how each identity may result in varied and multiple forms of oppression or privilege related to clinical decisions and practice.”.Faculty are required to show medical students how to incorporate the DEI into their medical practice by being “role models.”.Medical students are expected to know the “systems of power, privilege, and oppression and their impacts on health outcomes (e.g. White privilege, racism, sexism, heterosexism, ableism, religious oppression).”.The DEI says that race is “not a risk factor for disease,” but the ability to “articulate race as a social construct” is required as “a cause of health and health care inequities.”.This new curriculum is part of AAMC’s stated agenda to push “anti-racism and critical consciousness in health care.”.The purpose is to show the “systems of oppression on health and healthcare… colonization, white supremacy, acculturation, [and] assimilation.”.“The origins of these inequities are often rooted in systemic racism and discrimination,” stated the DEI. .“At the nexus of education and clinical care, academic medicine has a responsibility to address and mitigate the factors that drive racism and bias in health care and to prepare physicians who are culturally responsive and trained to address these issues.”.The AAMC controls the accreditation of medical schools and can force schools into compliance or take away their accreditation. .The AAMC administers the medical college admissions test (MCAT) and can force future medical students to accept the DEI ideology or fail the MCAT..They announced no timeline for when the DEI has to be incorporated into medical school curriculums.
