(Don't) Trust Me: I'm A Doctor

Has medicine gone mad?

For doctors, heartbeats are our world. Without a heartbeat, we haven’t a viable patient, at least not for long.

Which is okay for the pathologists, but not for the rest of us.

‘Twas apropos, then, as I was mulling over how to frame this short essay last week while driving my son to school, that my Spotify playlist should spit out a tune from Calgary folk singer Carolyn Harley’s album Heartbeat of the World:

When it feels like the world is going crazy

Everywhere you look it’s come undone…

When the world is completely cock-a-doodle…

Don’t let your defences sweat the big stuff

Just lift your head and howl at the moon

The world of medicine has indeed gone completely cock-a-doodle. The latest iteration of the madness that has taken over our venerable profession arrived last week courtesy of Toronto Metropolitan University (formerly Ryerson University, so named in honour of Egerton Ryerson before the great man’s name was stripped from the institution in the face of utterly false accusations of racism toward Indigenous peoples. (The actual truth matters not one whit once you’ve been caught in the cross-hairs of modern-day wokesters: Guilty! Off with your head! Down with your statues! Away with your name!)

TMU is launching a new medical school, which is wonderful news given the woeful shortage of physicians in this country. But the new school’s admission metrics for aspiring doctors are quite the opposite of wonderful.

Of 94 spots, 69 will be admitted via three streams: an Indigenous Admissions Pathway; a Black Admissions Pathway; and an “Equity-deserving” Admissions Pathway, which will welcome a long list of the presumably downtrodden and disadvantaged, including, of course, what I’ve come to think of as the alpha-numerics — it’s easier on my over-taxed brain than LGBTQIA2S+, which was the ever-lengthening acronym the last time I checked. Also included in the “Equity” category are disabled people; non-white folks; children of non-white immigrants; people who have “faced familial and/or socio-cultural barriers such as loss of both parents; long term involvement with the child welfare system, and/or precarious housing”; applicants older than 26; and individuals with “lived experiences of poverty”.

But if you’re a plain-vanilla white applicant who can’t finagle a way to tick one of those boxes (pro tip: just” identify as” one of those categories, and you’re golden), take heart — 25 spots remain open to you!

Reverse racism: it’s so 2024.

Oh, and if you’re not say, smart? Is ok, hic, ‘cos no problem: minimum GPA’s just 3.3. An’ even that’s fudgeable, if you’re “disadvantaged”. Hit me again, bar-keep. No MCAT score, you say? Don’t sweat it, dude: ‘tisn’t needed.

If those last few lines sound as if they were written by a drunk person, it’s because only someone deeply inebriated would believe that this will end well.  At the (considerable) risk of sounding flagrantly offensive, I’ll revive this old adage: garbage in, garbage out.

None of this is surprising to those of us on the “inside”. Last December, a subcommittee of Canada’s Royal College of Physicians and Surgeons recommended changes to its CanMEDS educational structure, the “framework that identifies and describes the abilities physicians require to effectively meet the health care needs of the people they serve.”

No longer will the focus be, as priority number one, on turning out competent physicians. Horrors, no: the new model will seek “to centre values such as anti-oppression, anti-racism, and social justice, rather than medical expertise”.

Never mind that your appendix ruptured because its inflammation was missed two days earlier by your oppressed low-IQ disabled racialized non-binary physician, leaving you deathly ill in the ICU with peritonitis and a drain in your abdomen. Diversity! Equity! Inclusion! Hallelujah!

Nor is any of this a surprise to observers watching the steady march of the healing profession away from the Hippocratic standards which governed medical practice with a steady hand for centuries. Most medical schools have long done away with having graduates recite the Hippocratic Oath. Abortion and euthanasia (call it MAiD if you want, but killing people is what it’s all about) are all the rage these days; and old Hippocrates wasn’t so down with those things:

I will not give a lethal drug to anyone if I am asked, nor will I advise such a plan: and similarly I will not give a woman a pessary to cause an abortion.

So stark raving mad has the healing profession gone in this country that many of its practitioners will tell you straight-facedly that it’s possible for boys to become girls, and girls, boys; and some “doctors” will even interfere with the normal physiology of our youth with puberty blockers and transgender hormones, and then by lopping off breasts and genitalia.

Hippocrates is spinning so fast in his grave that the world is wobbling.

Those of us appalled at what is happening to our profession — and there are more than a few — have no choice but to sweat the big stuff, even if it seems as though we’re just howling at the moon.

We may be in the minority; but we’d do well to imbibe encouragement from the inimitable Will Rogers:

It’s always wise to drink upstream from the herd.

Because downstream — where most of our colleagues seem to be gulping — is thick with toxic effluent.