American Medical Association Denounces Individualism

The AMA's “Advancing Health Equity: A Guide to Language, Narrative and Concepts" has all sorts of guidelines for replacing meaningful words and descriptors with political slogans.

But they left out the most helpful one, which is renaming the American Medical Association as the American Marxist Association.

No, this isn't over-the-top right-wing sloganeering. The AMA's Health Equity guide literally reads like warmed-over Marxism.

Instead of saying, "Low-income people have the highest level of coronary artery disease in the United States", doctors are being told to say, "People underpaid and forced into poverty as a result of banking policies, real estate developers gentrifying neighborhoods, and corporations weakening the power of labor movements, among others, have the highest level of coronary artery disease in the United States."

The best part of this is how the medical part of the sentence has now thoroughly been buried under a leftist political rant about real estate developers and labor unions with the "people" part now hopelessly segregated from the "coronary artery disease" part.

Good luck scanning the AMA's proposed replacement sentence and making any sense out of it.

But it just gets worse from there.

Instead of saying, "For too many, prospects for good health are limited by where people live, how much money they make, or discrimination they face", medical professionals are expected to say, "Decisions by landowners and large corporations, increasingly centralizing political and financial power wielded by a few, limit prospects for good health and well-being for many groups."

Landowners? This is how you know they were cribbing from Lenin and Mao. I'm sure that the new woke AMA, like Mao, has plans for "landowners", meaning anyone who owns land.

The AMA's new jargon displaces the medicine and replaces it with political speeches. It also replaces descriptors with calls to action.

And so you don't say, "Factors such as our race, ethnicity or socioeconomic status should not play a role in our health" and you do rant, "Social injustices including racism or class exploitation, e.g., social exclusion and marginalization, should be confronted directly, so that they do not influence health outcomes."

Confronted directly, indeed. With some bombs and bullets, perhaps guillotines. 

And then the AMA goes to war against individualism.

The narrative of individualism

Individualism is a philosophy and group of ideas, expressed in symbols, practices, and stories that supports a belief that self-sufficient individuals are rational beings that freely make consumer-like choices, independent of political influences, living conditions or historical context. Among these ideas is the concept of meritocracy, a social system in which advancement in society is based on an individual’s capabilities and merits rather than on the basis of family, wealth or social background. Individualism is problematic in obscuring the dynamics of group domination, especially socioeconomic privilege and racism. In health care, this narrative appears as an over-emphasis on changing individuals and individual behavior instead of the institutional and structural causes of disease.

Individualism is problematic is a belief held only by collectivists, that is to say Communists, Nazis, and other such lovely folk.

Meanwhile doctors are being warned not to tell a morbidly obese heart attack patient to eat less, address the root causes by participating in a march against racism and donate to DSA candidates through ActBlue.

Individuals don't really exist. Your patient is just a collection of identity politics statistics. Don't view him as an individual, but as a microcosm of a bunch of social problems which you should remedy, not by treating him, but by treating collective root causes. 

If you want a preview of the end of medicine, here it is.

Avoid both blaming individuals for their condition or assuming that inequity can be resolved through programmatic fixes that ignore the social responsibility of corporations and government agencies

There's no more medicine. Only social justice.

As an institution goes woke, it increasingly loses the ability to perform its core function. Like a parasite or a virus, wokeness hijacks everything and redirects it to serving its own agendas while destroying the host.

American Medical Association Denounces Individualism  | Frontpagemag