Drying leaves

While in Great Hills Park on the morning of July 15th I made portraits of several kinds of drying leaves. The top photograph shows those of a white prickly poppy, Argemone albiflora. I don’t know what kind of leaves got pulled together in the webbing you see below, nor what critter did the pulling.

 

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Incompetent Competencies

The other day I read with horror about how the Association of American Medical Colleges (AAMC) just released its official Diversity, Equity, and Inclusion (DEI) Competencies. For me, competency means that doctors are thoroughly educated in anatomy, disease, and medicine. For the AAMC, competency means that medical students and doctors will glibly prattle all the required woke dogma. As John D. Sailer notes in an article about this for the National Association of Scholars, “the president of the AAMC and the chair of the AAMC’s Council of Deans emphatically stated their support: ‘We believe this topic deserves just as much attention from learners and educators at every stage of their careers as the latest scientific breakthroughs’—a truly remarkable statement of priorities from the leaders of America’s foremost medical education association.”

And as I note here now, time spent on “woke” drivel means time stolen from a proper medical education. It means less-competent doctors, and therefore poorer medical care and ultimately more deaths. On other occasions I’ve noted that the rearranged Holy Trinity of Diversity, Inclusion, and Equity yields the acronym DIE. Now it’s clear that the acronym will be even more apt than I realized.

Here are a few of the cant- and jargon-filled incompetent competencies the AAMC is pushing:

Demonstrates knowledge of the intersectionality of a patient’s multiple identities and how each identity may result in varied and multiple forms of oppression or privilege related to clinical decisions and practice [students]

Identifies systems of power, privilege, and oppression and their impacts on health outcomes (e.g., White privilege, racism, sexism, heterosexism, ableism, religious oppression) [students]

Articulates race as a social construct that is a cause of health and health care inequities, not a risk factor for disease [students]

Practices moral courage, self-advocacy, allyship, and being an active bystander or upstander to address injustices [residents]

Role models anti-racism in medicine and teaching, including strategies grounded in critical understanding of unjust systems of oppression [faculty]

Role models how knowledge of intersectionality informs clinical decision-making and practice [faculty]

If you want to feel sick, go ahead and read the article.

 

© 2022 Steven Schwartzman