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Culture War Roundup for the week of March 31, 2025

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So, I can often be found posting on here complaining about bias in medicine (although I disagree about some of the kinds of bias with quite a few posters here).

We do have something of an update to a long running story that’s worth sharing.

Meddit link for more discussion and detail: https://old.reddit.com/r/medicine/comments/1jotpzz/follow_up_on_the_study_showing_discrepancies_in/

Basically, awhile back there was a headline about how black babies received worse outcomes when care for by white doctors. Apparently, this went so far as to get cited in the supreme court.

Sometime later someone on Meddit (which is still quite pro-woke) noticed that they forgot to control for birth weight, which would likely completely kill the effect size (explanation: white physicians have more training and take care of sicker babies who have worse outcomes). At the time there was a significant amount of speculation essentially going “how do you miss this? That would be the first you would control for.”

Well, it turns out that someone filed a FOIA request and well, to quote Reddit:

“A reporter filed a FOIA request for correspondence between authors and reviewers of the article and found that the study did see a survival benefit with racial concordance between physician and patient, however it was only with white infants and physicians. They removed lines in the paper *stating that it does not fit the narrative that they sought to publish with the study.” *

While I often criticize medicine for being political, I’m often found here telling people to trust the experts when it comes to (certain aspects) of COVID or whatever, and well this kinda stuff makes it very very hard.

The initial findings were passed around very uncritically and sent up all the way to the supreme court.

How can people trust with this level of malfeasance? How do we get the trust back? How do we stop people from doing this kind of thing? I just don’t know.

How do we get the trust back?

You don't? I'm pretty sure the correct answer is "make like the police and get defunded." Or get subject to a constant background level of social opprobrium for the rest of your life. Same difference.

Everybody knew what they were getting into when they kicked this off. They just thought it was worth the risk.

They just thought it was worth the risk.

No, most people were fooled just as much as anyone else was. Everyone in medicine is in the academia basically, and most of the academy are true believers.

No, most people were fooled just as much as anyone else was.

They were warned. Repeatedly. Not quietly. Not by conservatives.

I really don't think that is true. People in medicine are there because they are willing to suffer to help people. They are getting it wrong because of propaganda efforts by the university administrations and journalist classes.

They are just as fooled as everyone else, even the bad actors in this case think they are helping and doing the right thing because "these things are true, if the data doesn't match we must have done something wrong!" after years of being brainwashed.

I really don't think that is true.

You really don't think it's true that people were warned? That's really not a question of mental state.

I'm not sure what you mean.

"The mental state of people in medicine isn't related to whether they were warned about what they were normalizing."

I'm sorry you still aren't being clear.