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'With gratitude, we, the students of the University of Minnesota Twin Cities Medical School Class of 2026, stand here today among our friends, families, peers, mentors and communities who have supported us in reaching this milestone.

'Our institution is located on Dakota land. Today many indigenous people throughout the state of Minnesota, including the Dakota and the Ojibwe call the Twin Cities home.

'We also recognize this acknowledgment is not enough,' Englander continued, adding: 'We commit to uprooting the legacy and perpetuation of structural violence deeply embedded within the health care system.

'We recognize inequities built by past and present traumas rooted in white supremacy, colonialism, the gender binary, ableism and all forms of oppression.

'As we enter this profession with opportunity for growth, we commit to promoting a culture of antiracism, listening and amplifying voices for positive change.

'We pledge to honor all indigenous ways of healing that have been historically marginalized by western medicine.

'Knowing that health is intimately connected with our environment, we commit to healing our planet and communities.

'We vow to embrace our role as community members and strive to embody cultural humility.

'We promise to continue restoring trust in the medical system and fulfilling our responsibility as educators and advocates.

'We commit to collaborating with social, political and additional systems to advance health equity. We will learn from the scientific innovations made before us and pledge to advance and share this knowledge with peers and neighbors.

'We recognize the importance of being in community with, and advocating for, those we serve.

'We promise to see the humanity in each patient we serve, empathize with their lived experiences, and be respectful of their unique identities.

'We will embrace deep and meaningful connections with patients, and strive to approach every encounter with humility and compassion.

'We will be authentic and present in our interactions with patients and hold ourselves accountable for our mistakes and biases.

'We promise to communicate with our patients in an accessible manner to empower their autonomy.

'We affirm that patients are the experts of their own bodies, and will partner with them to facilitate holistic wellbeing.

'We will be lifelong learners, increasing our competence in the art and science of medicine.

'We recognize our limits and will seek help to bridge those gaps through inter-professional collaboration.

'We will prioritize care for the mind, body and soul of not only our patients, but of our colleagues and selves,' the new students continued.

'With this devotion, we will champion our personal wellness and bring the best versions of ourselves to our profession.

'We will support one another as we grow as physicians and people,' they said, before concluding: 'We are honored to accept these white coats.

'In light of their legacy as a symbol of power, prestige and dominance, we strive to reclaim their identity as a symbol of responsibility, humility and loving kindness.'

This is the product of government schools.

quote:

"We are honored to accept these white coats."

Gosh, their white coat ceremony seems a little racist after all that.

So, equity and social-justice are more important than having proper medical knowledge.

Just remember, that fully ONE-HALF of all Medical School graduates were in the BOTTOM HALF of their class.

I'm glad I don't work for the Babylon Bee. It would be really challenging to top that.

It’s a freaking priesthood and has been for decades if not longer … They speak their own language, high barriers to entry, special robes and cloaks along with ornaments and artifacts.

Now you know their prayers…

The MDs we have here in the forum are damn good people, every last one of them.

quote:

'We affirm that patients are the experts of their own bodies…..
'

Experts? Yup, we’re experts alright.

Having traveled some outside this country, it appears that America has the highest percentage of overfed people in the world.

Somebody, or worse - some committee, took a notable amount of time to come up with all this high and mighty blather. Not exactly an encouraging product of our system of higher education.

Ok, rant off…..

Hippocratic oath is bestowed after attaining the Medical degree--not upon entering medical school.

The Revised Hippocratic Oath
"I swear to fulfill, to the best of my ability and judgment, this covenant:
I will respect the hard-won scientific gains of those physicians in whose steps I walk, and gladly share such knowledge as is mine with those who are to follow.
I will apply, for the benefit of the sick, all measures [that] are required, avoiding those twin traps of overtreatment and therapeutic nihilism.
I will remember that there is art to medicine as well as science, and that warmth, sympathy, and understanding may outweigh the surgeon's knife or the chemist's drug.
I will not be ashamed to say "I know not," nor will I fail to call in my colleagues when the skills of another are needed for a patient's recovery.
I will respect the privacy of my patients, for their problems are not disclosed to me that the world may know.
Most especially must I tread with care in matters of life and death. If it is given me to save a life, all thanks. But it may also be within my power to take a life; this awesome responsibility must be faced with great humbleness and awareness of my own frailty.
Above all, I must not play at God.
I will remember that I do not treat a fever chart, a cancerous growth, but a sick human being, whose illness may affect the person's family and economic stability. My responsibility includes these related problems, if I am to care adequately for the sick.
I will prevent disease whenever I can, for prevention is preferable to cure.
I will remember that I remain a member of society, with special obligations to all my fellow human beings, those sound of mind and body as well as the infirm.
If I do not violate this oath, may I enjoy life and art, respected while I live and remembered with affection thereafter.
May I always act so as to preserve the finest traditions of my calling and may I long experience the joy of healing those who seek my help."

The woke cancer has metastasized through the majority of American med schools in recent years. But, there are good docs who sounded the alarm and are fighting back. Dr. Stanley Goldfarb is one of them. And he's not just some doc in a box somewhere. He's a board certified nephrologist, Professor Emeritus and former Associate Dean at the U Penn School of Medicine. He found Do No Harm as one way to fight back.

A recent article from the NY Post:

https://nypost.com/2022/09/29/...g-american-medicine/

UPenn doctor: ‘Anti-racist’ policies are wrecking American medicine

By Dana Kennedy
September 29, 2022 3:55pm

Dr. Stanley Goldfarb, a professor emeritus at the University of Pennsylvania’s medical school, is giving members of his profession heart palpitations.

Goldfarb, 78, says new “anti-racism” med school policies are lowering standards, reducing students to the color of their skin and corrupting medicine in general — much to the outrage of his fellow faculty members.

“I understand we need to give people more opportunities,” Goldfarb, a trained nephrologist, told The Post. “But there are some things you can’t sacrifice. This focus on diversity means we’re going to take someone with a certain skin color because we think they’re OK, that they can do the work. But we’re not going to look for the best and the brightest. We’re going to look for people who are just OK to make sure we have the right mixture of ethnic groups in our medical schools.”

After the May 2020 murder of George Floyd, the powerful American Medical Association (AMA) and Association of American Medical Colleges (AAMC) claimed that systemic racism was to blame for racial disparities between white and black patients.

Last year, the AMA announced a three-year strategic plan to “aggressively push forward” new policies that encourage people of color to enter the medical profession, in order to help eliminate the disparities between white and minority patients.

In January 2022, Step One of the US Medical Licensing Exam, which for years gauged the progress of medical school students and assessed their suitability for prestigious residency programs, was changed from numerical grades to a pass/fail, giving students more time to “authentically develop” their interests in such things as “community engagement.”

Several medical schools have already scrapped the Medical College Admission Test (MCAT) for certain students. The MCAT is the primary exam required to get into med school.

Goldfarb said this new push for diversity and equity has meant that some high-performing white — and often Asian — students can’t get into medical school because those slots are being given to black and Hispanic students who don’t have to show such high grades or test scores.

“It’s manyfold harder for a white medical student who has average grades to get accepted into medical school, maybe 30 or 40 times harder than a minority student with the same grades,” Goldfarb said, adding that the parents of a young white man with a 4.0 GPA in college recently reached out to him when their son’s applications to US medical schools were rejected.

He said the new policies could eventually hurt minority students who could be viewed as less competent than their white peers.

“This is the downside of affirmative action,” Goldfarb added. “The brilliant black doctors of the future like a Ben Carson, who was considered one of the premier pediatric neurosurgeons in the world, may be looked at by someone who says, ‘Hey, this person doesn’t belong at Johns Hopkins — he’s only here because they wanted more diversity in the neurosurgery department.’”

Goldfarb is fighting back through Do No Harm, an organization he founded this year that helps protect doctors, patients and health care itself from “discriminatory, divisive ideologies.” In March, he doubled down with the new book “Take Two Aspirin and Call Me by My Pronouns: Why Turning Doctors into Social Justice Warriors Is Destroying American Medicine.”

As a result of his remarks, he has been publicly censured by UPenn Medical School’s chairman, Dr. Michael Parmacek. A minority advocacy group run by Dr. Ashley Denmark, a black female doctor, also started a petition earlier this year demanding Goldfarb’s removal from the college.

In May, Denmark founded an organization called Project Diversify Medicine, which helps minorities get into med schools. Denmark, 38, who grew up near Ferguson, Mo., graduated from Spelman College in Atlanta and Edward Via College of Osteopathic Medicine in Spartanburg, SC.

“Goldfarb represents the privilege that a lot of white male doctors enjoy, which is the ability to express themselves freely without recourse,” Denmark told The Post, adding that she was abruptly fired from her last position as a doctor in Missouri because of her work with Project Diversify Medicine and for filing a complaint alleging discrimination.

“Doctors like me don’t get the support a white doctor like Goldfarb does. Racism ends in a funeral for a lot of black and brown patients. All we want is more doctors who look like our community. And he is wrong about how changing standards will impact medical education. We still have to pass the same boards and same rotations after we graduate.”

But Goldfarb said he doesn’t care about professional blowback.

In May, Do No Harm filed a civil rights lawsuit against federal health officials in eight states, challenging a new rule by the Department of Health and Human Services, Medicare and Medicaid that enables higher pay for doctors who adopt an “anti-racism” plan.

In June, the organization filed five discrimination complaints against the US Department for Civil Rights alleging that the Florida College of Medicine, University of Minnesota Medical School, University of Oklahoma-Tulsa School of Community Medicine, University of Utah School of Medicine and the Medical College of Wisconsin were biased against white students because they only offered scholarships to minorities.

Goldfarb, who began at UPenn in 1969, said the change at the medical school began in 2018 when Dr. Suzanne Rose arrived on campus and was named senior vice dean for medical education.

“We’d had a very stable leadership for quite a while and resisted going the way some other medical schools were going but she brought in this new ideology,” Goldfarb said. “She wanted to link up to what the American Medical Association was doing in education, which was promoting woke ideas, and there was a phrase that she told me that always stuck with me. She said we have too much science in the curriculum — which meant physicians should be more akin to social workers in their activities, particularly primary care physicians, rather than learning hard science that relates to patient care.”

Rose did not return a phone call from The Post.

The AAMC represents 171 US and Canadian medical schools along with more than 400 teaching hospitals and health systems. The AAMC and AMA are joint sponsors of the independent medical school accreditation body, the Liaison Committee on Medical Education — and thus indispensable for accreditation.

In response to accusations that medical education was going too woke, the AAMC referred The Post to a letter to the editor in the Wall Street Journal written by two doctors from the organization, which stated, “There’s a growing body of evidence about what race is and isn’t, and its effect on health. These new insights are improving medical practice. They can also improve medical education, where they are taught in addition to, not at the expense of, the most solid grounding in STEM disciplines.”

A spokesman for UPenn’s medical school emailed a statement to The Post saying that Goldfarb’s opinions do not reflect the “core values” of the school.

“Dr. Goldfarb has not held a role as an associate dean at the Perelman School of Medicine since 2019 and he became an emeritus faculty member in 2021. We are fortunate to attract talented and diverse students and we are committed to rigorous medical training that prepares future doctors to understand the full spectrum of physiologic and social factors that impact health. As an institution, we deeply value inclusion, diversity, and equity, and are proud of the many efforts of our community — in education, clinical care, scholarship, and community service.”

This message has been edited. Last edited by: 12131,

I think 'woke' should be renamed 'wreck'. That seems more descriptive to me.

How do you address the medical student who passed all the necessary examinations, but came bottom of the class?

Doctor.

China is filled with "indigenous" medicine called TCM or "Traditional Chinese Medicine".

None of it is founded in science and most of it amounts to quackery. China has destroyed many priceless dino fossils, because grinding up "dragon bones" and consuming them is "good for health". Trust me the old wives tales are through the roof, and even educated people can't see the illogic.

Moving from "indigenous" medicine to real science based medicine has improved public health by orders of magnitude. And even then a lot of science is still educated guesswork because the human body and all it's systems are incredibly complex, and it's hard to control variables in a human being.

This message has been edited. Last edited by: Lefty Sig,

Plenty woke doctors out there. I had my run in with one two years ago. Went to emergency with stomach pains. Got a older female doc who came into the room decked out with so much gear on I wasn't sure if she was taking a ride on the space shuttle or auditioning for a part in an Outbreak remake.

She was interested in two things. Testing me for Covid and lecturing me on how Trump allowed the virus to run rampant. I finally interrupted her and asked about my stomach pains. Take two aspirins and call me in the morning was basically her response.

Went to the clinic on Monday got signed on with a new doc because I didn't have a regular doc assigned to me because I stay away from clinics and hospitals as much as possible. Younger gal and quite attractive. Told her right off no Covid testing no lectures. Diagnose my stomach problem and that's it. No other fishing expeditions and no unnecessary treatments or tests. She looked at me and sat quiet for a few moments and said of course sir. Turns out I had a nasty bout of diverticulitis.

quote:

Originally posted by 2BobTanner:
Just remember, that fully ONE-HALF of all Medical School graduates were in the BOTTOM HALF of their class.

What do you call someone who graduated last in medical school?

Doctor

Hey, somebody needs tell the old joke about graduating last in medical school.

This thread would be incomplete without several dozen renderings.

Better yet, write into a haiku. That would be great.

You're all taking too long.

Here's one I plagiarized from somewhere on the 'net.

Check my rash, my throat.
Help me, last place doc.
Not sick anyway.

Oh, and, did you hear the one about the med student who graduated at the bottom of the class?

He's called "Doctor".

quote:

Originally posted by 2BobTanner:
Just remember, that fully ONE-HALF of all Medical School graduates were in the BOTTOM HALF of their class.

And let's not forget that there are a lot of people who are good at taking tests (like my brother) who can't do much of anything when dealing with the physical aspect of things.

I don't put much faith in someone's GPA, only in their expertise.

Medical school is like building a frame work of knowledge; the real learning/"filling in" of the frame work is during Internship/Residency and then in practice afterward. One needs a certain amount of intelligence and "stick to it" quality to get through med school and residency. In college, one might take one or two hard classes a semester and fill out the rest with easier classes. In Med school, every class (5, 6, 7 a semester) were hard and that went on for 2 solid years; one had better have developed good work/study habits in college if one was to get through the immense amount of information thrown at them and expected to be retained. The last two years, one starts to do clinical rotations; "boots on the floors" so to speak, and see and do what docs do for the rest of their lives. This is where one is begun to be trained to think and act like a real doctor; it's merely a "wet your feet" time, though, as that aspect of the training significantly intensifies during internship/residency, where independent thought, action and responsibility is taught/learned along with significant raw knowledge acummulation.
Where one placed in Med school has less to do with one's ability as a practicing physician than how one performed in internship/residency, in my opinion. This is from one who went through all I have said...
And thank you Parabellum for your kind words above!

I have met my shared of doctors who are not analytical thinkers. Engineers are analytical and we isolate and reduce variables. When I have been very ill doctors have tried to apply what I call "recipe" diagnoses, sort of a matching game of symptoms, but ignoring significant symptoms that didn't "fit".

The most frustrating thing is when you tell them what to look for, they don't even bother, insist it's something else, and you have to go to multiple doctors and get the same attitude until one actually listens, and that one tests for what you told every doctor to look for, and sure enough, that's what it was.

All the while I had some symptoms consistent with the original diagnosis, but others that were completely inconsistent and way out of the norm. They ignored the weird thing and went with the simple thing. But the weird symptoms WERE the answer.

Different specialities have different degrees of deductive reasoning/diagnostic ability. Then there are some docs who should have much by virtue of their field but just don't have the skill set or inclination or time (or some combination thereof) to do it. I was in a field and place where I had the time/desire/ability to solve medical puzzles, so to speak. It's not for every doctor; for example, surgeons tend to not be top diagnosticians in my opinion, but if you tell them what is wrong and the fix is in their field, they can do a wonderful job.

As for accepting a patient's own diagnosis of their problem, I would tell them I would listen to what they thought might be going on and take it into consideration, but I reserved the right to try to determine for myself what might be the problem (and this usually required me to ask a HUGE number of questions...)

As for "weird" symptoms/complaints, most docs, when they hear "hoof beats, think of horses", but in my field, I was expected, and indeed, did look for gemsbok, elands, zebras etc. Part of being in my speciality was learning what symptoms/findings were relevant, and which one was a "red herring" and not; this is a skill that takes years to learn and as above, some specialities have more skill at this than others.