Thanks to audio recorded by a medical school student, journalist Katie Herzog reports in a July story that a professor stopped mid-lecture to apologize for two normal words – “pregnant woman” – that he had said earlier in front of the class.
“I don’t want you to think that I am in any way trying to imply anything,” the professor tells the class, “and if you can summon some generosity to forgive me, I would really appreciate it.”
The professor, who is teaching an endocrinology course at a University of California med school, goes on to apologize, again, and assures the students he did not intend to offend them.
“The worst thing that I can do as a human being,” he says, “is be offensive.”
Interviewed by Herzog about the “woke” culture at the med school, the anonymous student says a second professor told the class of future physicians that biological sex, sexual orientation, and gender are all “constructs” created by people. In a third example, the student said professors feel threatened by their own “woke” students who have circulated petitions to punish them for using words such as “he” and “she” during course discussions.
What that means, Herzog summarizes, is that medical students at a major university are demanding to be taught that human beings do not comprise two sexes, unlike other mammals, and back the demand with threats.
Asked about the "woke" culture at medical schools, Christian Medical Association spokesman Dr. Jeffrey Barrows says CMA has learned an alarming number of medical schools are dropping biological reality in the name of progressive wokeness.
“What we're seeing is that the more progressive states are the ones that are leading the way,” he tells One News Now. “Western states have been pushing this. They've been pushing the pronoun issue, even in clinic.”
Christian Medical Association has active chapters at more than 300 medical school campuses across the country, where the faith-based group is learning from students about what they are witnessing in the classroom.
And what is happening? According to doctors and professors interviewed by Herzog, there is a Mao-like purge under way in which criticizing a black med student for running late for class, for example, can be viewed as racism and thus ruin a distinguished career.
Herzog has been documenting the far-left purge over the summer, beginning with a June story describing a group of doctors who meet regularly in a Zoom call to secretly discuss the zealot-like push to impose leftist ideology in the field of medicine.
In the current culture of “Black Lives Matter” slogans and the ideology of Critical Race Theory, a psychologist said terms like “equity” and “justice” are becoming the goal rather than medicine.
“The intellectual foundation for this movement is the Marxist view of the world,” the psychologist said, “but stripped of economics and replaced with race determinism.”
“People are afraid to speak honestly,” a doctor who immigrated to the U.S. from the Soviet Union told Herzog for the story. “It’s like back to the USSR, where you could only speak to the ones you trust.”
“We’re afraid of what's happening to other people happening to us,” a West Coast physician told her. “We are seeing people being fired. We are seeing people's reputations being sullied.”
According to Dr. Barrows, there is much more at stake than political correctness. Men and women, are different and often need different treatments.
“Women that have heart attacks present very differently than men who have heart attacks,” he explains. “Instead of chest pain they have more upper stomach pain.”
There is also the issue of medical research, which leads to ground-breaking progress in medicine, he says, which is now in danger if “woke” culture takes over and ruins progress in the name of being progressive.
Another doctor in Herzog’s story delivered a similar warning since an important and well-researched journal article, for example, could be viewed as non-progressive and thus harmful to transgenders and minorities.
“In health care, innovation depends on open, objective inquiry into complex problems,” the doctor said. “But that’s now undermined by this simplistic and racialized worldview where racism is seen as the cause of all disparities, despite robust data showing it’s not that simple.”
