Gibberish has penetrated the doctor’s office and operating room. In a field exclusively reliant on science – in other words, on accurate depictions of what is – medical administrators turned their backs on it and instead became practitioners of voodoo, sorcery. If you’re a doctor and find yourself now in the equivalent of a coven, you might get fired for publicly expressing your amazement. It happened to Dr. Kendall Conger of Duke University Health.
Here’s the upshot. Duke University Health president Dr. Barbara Griffith sits atop an organization that magically discovered a “public health crisis” of racism in 2021, a racism so prevalent that we must drop common sense, reason, logic, and verifiable evidence to jump onboard the frenzy. Dr. Conger in the hospital’s emergency room noticed it, said so, and was fired.
Duke’s “antiracism pledge” was purported to be “guided by science”. Dr. Conger asked, what science? In fact, they couldn’t produce any, just more gibberish. The zealots’ sensory response when caught off-guard is to wondrously make the racism “implicit racism”. Make it shadowy, vague, and thus unscientific, that’s how. When responding to Dr. Conger’s query, one Duke official admitted, “I concede that I cannot find a [clinical] trial that proves implicit bias is the cause of worse health outcomes for African Americans. Believe me. I have looked.”
It’s more than that. The “implicit bias” is unprovable by nature; it’s “implicit”. You must resort to racial bean counting of providers and patients and then leap to worse health outcomes, skipping over a vast ocean of other variables. Gibberish, absolute gibberish, and by people who might have to remove your infected spleen. What’s next, scapulimancy (divination from an examination of an animal’s shoulder blades)? Jump off the gurney and run for the exits if you view the slitting of a cow’s throat in an adjacent room. What’s the difference?
Dr. Conger was fired for publicly drawing into question a partisan pledge of dubious validity. A taxpayer subsidized organization takes a partisan position in a contentious public debate and suddenly all its employees must clamp their mouths shut? All this proves that bureaucracies are more sensitive to public embarrassment than in their commitment to science. Dr. Barbara Griffith and her coterie stepped on a rake, but you could get fired for warning them.
Oh, the times that we live.
RogerG
Sources:
1. Thanks to Mike Markham at the James G. Martin Center for Academic Renewal in “Duke Health Fires Conservative Doctor”, 7/1/2024, at https://www.jamesgmartin.center/2024/07/duke-health-fires-conservative-doctor/
2. Thanks to George Leef of National Review for drawing my attention to Markham’s piece in “Doctors Must Not Dissent”, 7/1/2024, at https://www.nationalreview.com/corner/doctors-must-not-dissent/?utm_source=recirc-desktop&utm_medium=homepage&utm_campaign=right-rail&utm_content=corner&utm_term=second