Woke Medicine

Description

James Nuzzo:

"I define Woke medicine as a philosophy of healthcare, rooted in critical theory, which holds that individual health is largely—if not entirely—determined by unjust power structures in society. According to this view, certain social and environmental factors disproportionately affect individuals based on their demographic identity, leading to unequal health outcomes among different groups. The goal of Woke medicine, then, is to raise awareness of these perceived injustices and to improve health outcomes among DEI-designated groups by addressing “structural factors” or the “social” and “political determinants” of health.

...

These (ideas) include a misguided focus on health “disparities,” taking non-evidence-based cheap shots at other physical therapists, coercing physical therapists into practicing affirmative care, promoting biological denialism (e.g., in the case of transgender athletes), and unnecessarily injecting political activism into the physical therapy profession."

(https://www.realityslaststand.com/p/the-queering-of-physical-therapy)

Status

The Rise of Woke Medecine in the U.S.

James Nuzzo:

"Critical theory and Woke ideas originated in university humanities departments. But acute observers have probably noticed the emergence of these ideas in the sciences, including medical science and health science. Deborah Cohan, a medical doctor in San Francisco, declared “I am a racist,” in an article she wrote for the New England Journal of Medicine in 2019. After telling the world how racist she was, Cohan proceeded to tell other white doctors how racists they were, too. Cohan’s two-page commentary was a treasure trove of Woke nomenclature, which she used in repeated displays of virtual signalling and self-flagellation. Cohan littered the pages of one of the medical profession’s most historically important journals, not with words such “organ,” “brain,” “tumor,” and “infection”, but with words like “privilege,” “white supremacy,” “implicit bias,” “implicit racism,” “racial inequities,” “dismantle,” “revolution,” and, of course, “social justice.”

Readers of the Rubbish Bin at The Nuzzo Letter will know that Cohan’s article is not a stand-alone in terms of Woke papers published in biomedical and public health journals. Readers may recall the qualitative study out of the University of Saskatchewan in 2022, in which the study’s thesis was all about “confronting the problem of whiteness” in nursing education. Readers may also recall the editorial in Lancet Public Health titled, “Addressing weight stigma,” in which the anonymous author lamented about the pervasive and “stereotypical perception that people with overweight and obesity are somehow responsible for their weight.” The author professed that the “obesogenic environment” is largely responsible for obesity and that individual responsibility and personal health choices are dogmas of the past.

Nevertheless, sceptics might wonder if Woke critics are overexaggerating the impact of Woke on biomedical research and overemphasizing the musings of only a small number of unhinged medical practitioners and health researchers.

My recent study, published in the Psychreg Journal of Psychology, sought to bring clarity to such questions. I quantified the extent to which Woke ideas are prevalent in biomedical and public health research. To do this, I searched for Woke (or Woke-related) words and phrases in the titles and abstracts of papers indexed in PubMed. PubMed is a digital database that archives millions of studies and commentaries in fields such as medicine, public health, nursing, psychology, exercise science, and more. Thus, if Woke is impacting health science, a search of PubMed will reveal this.

I searched for 156 Woke words and phrases. These words and phrases were selected based on my acquaintance with Woke concepts and James Lindsay’s online dictionary of Woke terminology.

Importantly, only the titles and abstract of articles were searched. The text making up the bodies of the articles were not examined. Consequently, the results inevitably underestimate the extent to which Woke concepts are referred to by health researchers. The results also do not reflect the impact of Woke on academia as a whole, because PubMed does not index all academic journals. For example, it does not index many education and sociology journals, which is where Woke ideas originated and are most prevalent.

The analysis revealed that use of Woke nomenclature has increased markedly in health and medical research over the past 15 years. Below is a graph that demonstrates the total use of all 156 Woke words and phrases from 1960 to 2022. The accelerated use of these words, which be seen in the sharp upward trend of the line on the graph, corresponds roughly with the time of Donald Trump’s presidential election win in 2016."

(https://jameslnuzzo.substack.com/p/new-research-confirms-the-rise-of?)