Hispanic Heritage Month News: Hispanic Anesthesiologist in Texas Arrested for Putting Lethal Drugs in IV Bags

Dr. Raynaldo Rivera Ortiz Jr. accused of killing one person, inducing cardiac emergencies in a dozen others

From the Daily Mail:

At least Dr. Raynaldo is diverse! Which reminds me of a Heather Mac Donald article I’ve been meaning to substack for a while now. …

You have no idea how “Racial Justice” is destroying the medical profession — wasting billions of dollars on “white privilege” classes, jettisoning MCATs, test scores and grades to promote minorities, canceling promising cancer research for lack of “diversity” (don’t worry - it’s a cancer mostly white people get) — all because a Fentanyl addict died of a heart attack in police custody in the Year of Our Floyd.

Don’t expect that cure for cancer coming any time soon.

The highlights:

The Corruption of Medicine

by Heather Mac Donald

Summer 2022 City Journal

The post–George Floyd racial reckoning has hit the field of medicine like an earthquake. …

Virtually every major medical organization—from the American Medical Association (AMA) and the American Association of Medical Colleges (AAMC) to the American Association of Pediatrics—has embraced the idea that medicine is an inequity-producing enterprise. …

A key solution to this alleged oppression is identity-based preferences throughout the medical profession. The AMA strategic plan calls for the “just representation of Black, Indigenous and Latinx people in medical school admissions as well as . . . leadership ranks.” …

[M]edical schools and medical societies are discarding traditional standards of merit in order to alter the demographic characteristics of their profession. … [A]ny test or evaluation on which blacks and Hispanics score worse than whites and Asians is biased and should be eliminated.

**

The U.S. Medical Licensing Exam is a prime offender. At the end of their second year of medical school, students take Step One of the USMLE, which measures knowledge of the body’s anatomical parts, their functioning, and their malfunctioning; topics include biochemistry, physiology, cell biology, pharmacology, and the cardiovascular system. High scores on Step One predict success in a residency….

Black students are not admitted into competitive residencies at the same rate as whites because their average Step One test scores are a standard deviation below those of whites. … It is Step One that, in the language of antiracism, “disadvantages” underrepresented minorities, not any lesser degree of medical knowledge.

The Step One exam has a further mark against it. The pressure to score well inhibits minority students from what has become a core component of medical education: antiracism advocacy. … Getting an actual grade on an exam might prove to “whoever might have thought it before that I didn’t deserve a seat at Yale as a Black medical student,” the student worried.

The solution to such academic pressure was obvious: abolish Step One grades. Since January 2022, Step One has been graded on a pass-fail basis. …

**

In the third year of medical school, professors grade students on their clinical knowledge in what is known as a Medical Student Performance Evaluation (MSPE). The MSPE uses qualitative categories like Outstanding, Excellent, Very Good, and Good. White students at the University of Washington School of Medicine received higher MSPE ratings than underrepresented minority students from 2010 to 2015, according to a 2019 analysis. The disparity in MSPEs tracked the disparity in Step One scores.

The parallel between MSPE and Step One evaluations might suggest that what is being measured in both cases is real. But the a priori truth holds that no academic skills gap exists. Accordingly, the researchers proposed a national study of medical school grades to identify the actual causes of that racial disparity. The conclusion is foregone: faculty bias. As a Harvard medical student put it in Stat News: “biases are baked into the evaluations of students from marginalized backgrounds.”

"[In a 2022 study,] Professors from Emory University, Massachusetts General Hospital, and the University of California at San Francisco, among other institutions, analyzed faculty evaluations of internal medicine residents in such areas as medical knowledge and professionalism. On every assessment, black and Hispanic residents were rated lower than white and Asian residents. The researchers hypothesized three possible explanations: bias in faculty assessment, effects of a noninclusive learning environment, or structural inequities in assessment. University of Pennsylvania professor of medicine Stanley Goldfarb tweeted out a fourth possibility: “Could it be [that the minority students] were just less good at being residents?”

[P]unishment was immediate. Predictable tweets called him, inter alia, possibly “the most garbage human being I’ve seen with my own eyes,” and Michael S. Parmacek, chair of the University of Pennsylvania’s Department of Medicine, sent a schoolwide e-mail addressing Goldfarb’s “racist statements.”

***

Choose your doctor.

[I]n 2021, the average score for white applicants on the Medical College Admission Test was in the 71st percentile, meaning that it was equal to or better than 71 percent of all average scores. The average score for black applicants was in the 35th percentile—a full standard deviation below the average white score. …

[F]rom 2013 to 2016, only 8 percent of white college seniors with below-average undergraduate GPAs and below-average MCAT scores were offered a seat in medical school; less than 6 percent of Asian college seniors with those qualifications were offered a seat, according to an analysis by economist Mark Perry. Medical schools regarded those below-average scores as all but disqualifying—except when presented by blacks and Hispanics. Over 56 percent of black college seniors with below-average undergraduate GPAs and below-average MCATs and 31 percent of Hispanic students with those scores were admitted …

[S]ome medical schools offer early admissions to college sophomores and juniors with no MCAT requirement, hoping to enroll students with, as the Icahn School of Medicine at Mount Sinai puts it, a “strong appreciation of human rights and social justice.”

Increasing amounts of faculty time are spent on such antiracism activities. …

More than half of the top 50 medical schools recently surveyed by the Legal Insurrection Foundation required courses in systemic racism. …

[F]aculty are responsible for teaching how to engage with “systems of power, privilege, and oppression” in order to “disrupt oppressive practices.” Failure to comply with these requirements could put a medical school’s accreditation status at risk and lead to a school’s closure. …

*

Despite the persistent academic skills gap, a minority hiring surge is under way. … One would have to be particularly dense not to grasp the expected result. In recent years, the Memorial Sloan Kettering Cancer Center, the Cleveland Clinic Taussig Cancer Center, the Uniformed Services University of the Health Sciences, the University of Chicago Cancer Center, the University of Pittsburgh Division of Medical Oncology, the Massey Cancer Center at Virginia Commonwealth University, the University of Miami Miller School of Medicine, and the Department of Medicine at UCLA’s medical school have hired black leaders. …

It matters who heads research ventures and medical faculties. Top scientists can identify the most promising directions of study and organize the most productive research teams. But the diversity push is discouraging some scientists from competing at all. …

[A] UCLA doctor says that the smartest undergraduates in the school’s science labs are saying: “Now that I see what is happening in medicine, I will do something else.” …

[T]he NIH and the National Science Foundation are diverting billions in taxpayer dollars from trying to cure Alzheimer’s disease and lymphoma to fighting white privilege and cisheteronormativity…

[I]n May 2022, [The Howard Hughes Medical Institute] announced a $1.5 billion effort to cultivate scientists committed to running a “happy and diverse lab where minoritized scientists will thrive and persist,” …

**

The New England Journal of Medicine, another formerly august institution now in thrall to racial politics, presents a nonstop stream of articles on such topics as the “Pathology of Racism,” “Toward Antiracist Allyship in Medicine,” and “How Structural Racism Works—Racist Policies as a Root Cause of U.S. Racial Health Inequities.” …

[S]cientific American published a “special collector’s edition” on “The Science of Overcoming Racism” in summer 2021. The edition was dominated by … denunciations of the police, and scorn for any suggestion of patient self-efficacy. (Prescribing weight loss to black women, for example, is a “racist” way to fight obesity, wrote a sociology professor and a nutritionist.) …

[C]ancer grant applications must now specify who, among a lab’s staff, will enforce diversity mandates and how the lab plans to recruit underrepresented researchers and promote their careers. …“It is not easy summarizing how your work on cell signaling in nematodes applies to minorities currently living in your lab’s vicinity,” the researcher says. Mental energy spent solving that conundrum is mental energy not spent on science, he laments, since “thinking is always a zero-sum game.” …

[I]n May 2022, a physician-scientist lost her NIH funding for a drug trial because the trial population did not contain enough blacks. … Better, however, to foreclose development of a therapy that might help predominantly white cancer patients than to conduct a drug trial without black participants. …

[T]he proponents of the systemic racism hypotheses are making a large bet with potentially lethal consequences. In accordance with the idea that racism causes racial health disparities, they are changing the direction of medical research, the composition of medical faculty, the curriculum of medical schools, the criteria for hiring researchers and for publishing research, and the standards for assessing professional excellence. They are substituting training in political advocacy for training in basic science. They are taking doctors out of the classroom, clinic, and lab and parking them in front of antiracism lecturers. Their preferential policies discourage individuals from pariah groups from going into medicine, regardless of their scientific potential. They have shifted billions of dollars from the investigation of pathophysiology to the production of tracts on microaggressions.

But what if they are wrong?…

Science goes astray when politics becomes paramount, as in the denial of plant genetics and natural selection under Stalin. …

The scientific method is a natural corrective to such fatal errors. Now, tragically, when it comes to the contention that racism is the defining trait of the medical profession and the source of health disparities, opposing views have been ruled out of bounds and are grounds for being purged.

Read the whole thing here.

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