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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.
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.
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.
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.
So I don't know if this is the point that Listening is getting at, my take on this is that anyone in academia - which medicine counts as close enough and people who do medical research certainly fit - who is brainwashed is entirely responsible for their being brainwashed. One of the core themes of academia is to be skeptical, especially of oneself. This requires checking things against objective reality and listening to people who disagree with oneself, especially when it comes to narratives that sound convincing. If they bought into the propaganda efforts by the university administrations and journalist classes, then they ignored these basic, fundamental "warnings" that are core to any form of higher education.
On a practical level I think that sort of thinking is gone from almost all modern education - we don't really focus on critical thinking any more and much of the university experience in America is essentially just a fancy trade school.
In medicine in particular you have to get phenomenally good at box checking and thinking too much is going to get you in serious trouble and unable to advance. This is magnified by downstream pressures - people who are republican or unable to hide being republican don't get admitted to medical school, people who aren't willing to engage in games about social signaling don't end up at good programs for residency, teachers who don't engage with wokeness either get fired or pushed into non-teaching roles and so on.
Outside of medicine most disciplines in school don't really select for or allow much in terms flexibility on this front.
Some people do still have those chops but you have to be very good at turning them off and not saying shit to succeed.
Basically blame the framework for brain washing people, not the people who got brainwashed.
If your job requires you to not notice - at every level, for years, with tremendous pressure to do so....it's hard to keep noticing.
And while the impacts of not noticing from medicine are higher, I'm not sure we should be held to a higher standard than anyone else - all the other disciplines are having this problem and medical professionals are already held to a higher standard in so many different ways that put much of the community on the knife's edge of burnout, suicide, substance abuse, and exit. Don't add more.
This seems more like an argument for the dissolution of the monasteries than a defense.
Of course not—the sea pouring in certainly won't be confined to just medicine.
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