Not since Trump took to the White House briefing room and encouraged his health officials to study the injection of bleach into the human body as a means of fighting Covid, have I seen a more cringeworthy spectacle than the transreligious rite Dr. Robert Englander, associate dean for undergraduate medical education at the University of Minnesota led at the Medical School’s White Coat Ceremony on August 19.
The White Coat Ceremony has been a rite of passage for medical students since its creation by the Arnold P. Gold Foundation in 1993. During this ritual a white coat is placed on each student’s shoulders, often while reciting the Hippocratic Oath. The White Coat Ceremony “emphasizes compassionate…scientifically excellent care from the very first day of training in the healthcare professions.” Instead, the students revelled in self-loathing and contempt for the profession of medicine, declaring their white coats to be a “symbol of power, prestige and dominance” and pledged to fight “white supremacy, colonialism, the gender binary…and restore trust in the medical system.”
The University of Minnesota Medical School used to be a highly respected institution. The same can be said of the leader of this embarrassing aggrandizement of wokery and quackery, Dr. Robert Englander. His resume includes Yale Medical School, John Hopkins, Harvard; he’s run the Ivy League medical school gamut. There was a time when all that might have meant that the University of Minnesota Medical School and men like Dr. Englander could be trusted. But those days are long gone.
Faculty and students know that the public has lost its trust in the medical system; using the word “restore” implies rebuilding, but if this wokesque spectacle is any indication, nothing less than a miracle will restore that trust. Dr. Englander announced students would “reclaim their identity”, as if they had lost it between classes and finding it would restore the profession to its former glory. But I don’t care about my doctors’ “identity”. In fact, I thank them to keep it to themselves. I don’t want to be burdened with anyone’s identity crises and delusions. I don’t want to know with whom they have sex, what their “pronouns” are, or have their obnoxious neologisms foisted on me.
“We strive to embody cultural humility… to advance health equity” and “honor all indiginious ways of healing.” The problem with that is that most indiginous ways of healing are based in paganism and animism. Primitive people may have had some useful medical insights about medicinal plants, but they were utterly ignorant of most scientific realities that make modern medicine possible. So, does “honoring all indiginious ways of healing” mean students will perform trephination (boring holes in a person’s skull to “let out” demons and illnesses)? How about bloodletting or ointments made out of animal feces and lizards?
What now passes for “cultural humility” includes destroying priceless artworks, tearing down monuments and statues and kvetching about the sins of our ancestors, whose accomplishments we deride and use to elevate ourselves. The people who lived before us were barbarians, because they lived before us; we’re better because we live now. At the same time, we’re told not to “marginalize indiginous healing methods.” So, on one hand there is no cultural humility, and on the other you degrade and debase yourself while elevating these primitive concepts above you.
You’d think there were limits to the amount of gibberish that the most highly educated people in our society can produce in an afternoon, but there was more to come: “declaring the ‘gender binary’ oppressive.” As Daily Wire show host and journalist Matt Walsh put it, it is “theoretically possible that somebody suffering from performative white guilt could be a competent medical professional, but it is impossible to be a competent medical professional or even a semi-competent one while harboring the delusion that biology is [an]...oppressive patriarchal construct and conspiracy.”
All medicine is based on the reality of biology. That’s why there is no “alternative medicine.” There is only “medicine.”
Modern medicine has been captured – not by an ideology or politics; both have always infected the profession – by a religion that is centered around the fundamental rejection of truth. Many religions have been untrue with false ideas about the world, but even those have strived for the truth. They claim to be true. But this modern western religion simply rejects truth as a category. This is not ignorance. Indiginous cultures were ignorant through no fault of their own. All ancient people were ignorant. They didn’t know very much about how the physical world functioned or why, because it hadn’t been explained to them or had yet to be discovered. But the Woke religion stands in the light of truth, on the shoulders of people who have revealed many great truths to its followers, but it chooses falsehood.*
Many would say all religions are false. This, however, is falsehood as religion. Its high priests occupy positions of power and prestige in our culture. They run our schools and our government. And now they rule the medical professions, which is a blood-curling thought to keep in mind the next time you see a doctor.
I suggest that at next year’s White Coat Ceremony, the University of Minnesota Medical School replace the white coats with hair shirts, so the junior doctors may physically experience the psychological pain inflicted on horrified parents and guests witnessing physicians of the future wallow in self-contempt and scorn for their profession, education and those who made it possible.
As for the obligatory “land acknowledgement”– I refer to Bill Maher’s advice: “If you’re not going to give it back, please shut up.”
Íris Erlingsdóttir is an Icelandic journalist. She lives in Minnesota.