A Beverly Hills plastic surgeon slammed the “corrosive ideology of DEI” impacting her profession, saying it lowers standards and endangers patients.
“Every American who cares about their right to equal, skillful medical treatment should join me in condemning medicine’s DEI-fueled politicization,” Dr. Sheila Nazarian wrote in an opinion column for the Jerusalem Post this week.
“Sacrificing our evaluative standards for misguided hierarchies of oppression has real, vital risks for the millions of people who seek medical care each year,” the star of Netflix’s “Skin Decision: Before and After” warned.
A 2022 study from the Association of American Medical Colleges revealed the strong influence DEI has on the industry, with 43.6% of the nation’s top medical schools reporting they had “promotion and tenure policies that specifically reward faculty scholarship and service on DEI topics.”
CRITICAL RACE THEORY-RELATED IDEAS FOUND IN PROGRAMS AT 108 OF 155 TOP AMERICAN MEDICAL SCHOOLS
While DEI’s impact on higher education has been well-documented, “we should be especially horrified by its intrusion into medicine, the field tasked with treating life-or-death situations and caring for the most vulnerable, of any race, among us,” Nazarian wrote.
Medical schools scrapping MCAT admission requirements for certain students in the name of DEI is one example of how these far-left ideas have lowered standards and raised “serious concerns about competence within the next generation of American doctors,” she argued.
“Abandoning meritocracy in favor of politicized, qualitative standards will only endanger the patients who land in the care of the doctors shaped by this system. Every curriculum item, research grant, and faculty training meeting sacrificed at the altar of identity politics is a wasted opportunity for students to learn a real skill that might actually help them save a life,” Nazarian said.
DEI further endangers patients, she argued, because it teaches doctors to view patients through an antiracist lens that can only lead to biased patient care.
“In medicine, rather than creating a more equitable medical system, DEI reduces the world to a flawed hierarchy of victimhood, advancing a worldview so riddled with hypocrisy and antisemitism that it now leads its supposed champions of the marginalized to celebrate terrorism and justify the murder of Jews,” she wrote.
“The growing numbers of future medical professionals being trained within the antisemitic strictures of the DEI regime raise serious risks about their ability to regard all patients with equal care and respect,” she added.
But Nazarian said there were signs of hope that medical schools could turn this trend around. She pointed to the national accrediting body for U.S. medical schools testifying earlier this year that their accreditation standards do not “establish or define any quantitative outcomes” regarding DEI, as first reported by the Wall St. Journal.
The surgeon ended her column by calling on Americans to stand up against the DEI movement and by demanding schools scale back their DEI focus.
The University of North Carolina’s medical school is one such institution that has done this. The medical school abandoned its DEI task force in June, ahead of the Supreme Court’s ruling rejecting affirmative action policies in college admissions.
