(Robert F. Graboyes, Inside Sources) An infection is spreading through American health care—the virulent strain of political correctness known as “wokeness.”
In October, the American Medical Association and American Association of Medical Colleges issued its 54-page “Advancing Health Equity: A Guide to Language, Narrative and Concepts” (AHE). This Orwellian assault on the English language is a manual for indoctrinating American medical students into a far-left cult of the woke.
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AHE insists that doctors abandon hundreds of common English words and phrases, substituting convoluted constructions drawn (by AHE’s admission) from critical race theory and intersectionality.
Henceforth, sayeth AHE, an individual with, say, a genetic propensity toward diabetes, is not “vulnerable” to the disease. Rather, his susceptibility to the illness is because he is “oppressed,” “made vulnerable,” or “disenfranchised.” Some nefarious force made him susceptible to diabetes.
AHE overtly rejects the notion that one’s health results in part from individual choices. Whatever ails you, some oppressor meant for it to happen to you.
Doctors are to memorize long lists of ponderous, politically correct circumlocutions. There are no minorities—only “minoritized” people. The obese are now “people with obesity.” Free clinics must be called something else because “free” is demeaning. Doctors can no longer combat cancer or fight a war on cancer because, Heaven forfend, the words “war” and “combat” imply violence and might send emotionally frail Americans reeling toward the fainting couches housed in their safe spaces.
AHE aims to demonize, demonize, demonize. Doctors must never again say that “Low-income people have the highest level of coronary artery disease in the United States.” Instead, in the manner of parrots, they must say that “People underpaid and forced into poverty as a result of banking policies, real estate developers gentrifying neighborhoods, and corporations weakening the power of labor movements, among others, have the highest level of coronary artery disease in the United States.”
Doctors will henceforth tread a linguistic minefield and be judged immoral when they stumble. The ultimate message of AHE is that the doctor’s primary obligation is to politically re-engineer society rather than to comfort and heal individual patients.
