Thread by @aaronsibarium

NEW: UCLA medical school's mandatory health equity class teaches students that weight loss is a "hopeless endeavor" and that "ob*sity" is a slur "used to exact violence on fat people."

The full syllabus has shocked prominent doctors—the former dean of Harvard Medical School.🧵

All first year students are assigned an essay by Marquisele Mercedes, a self-described "fat liberationist," who "describes how weight came to be pathologized and medicalized in racialized terms" and offers guidance on "resisting entrenched fat oppression," per the syllabus.

Mercedes claims that "ob*sity" is a slur "used to exact violence on fat people"—particularly "Black, disabled, trans, poor fat people"—and offers a "fat ode to care" that students are instructed to analyze, taking note of which sections "most resonate with you."

The assignment shocked Jeffrey Flier, the former dean of Harvard Medical School and one of the world’s foremost experts on obesity, who said the curriculum "promotes extensive and dangerous misinformation."

UCLA "has centered this required course on a socialist/Marxist ideology that is totally inappropriate," said @jflier, who reviewed the full syllabus and several of the assigned readings. "As a longstanding medical educator, I found this course truly shocking."

One required reading lists "anti-capitalist politics" as a principle of "disability justice" and attacks the evils of "ableist heteropatriarchal capitalism." Others attack "growth-centered economic theories" and call for "moving beyond capitalism for our health."

Snapshots of the curriculum have been leaking for months and and left the school doing damage control. The full syllabus—which we are publishing today—is more extreme than anything that's been reported.
freebeacon.com/wp-content/upl…

The course is littered with the lingo of progressive activism—"intersectionality" is a core value of the class, according to slides from the first session—and states outright that it is training doctors to become activists. freebeacon.com/wp-content/upl…

Students will "build critical consciousness" and move toward a "liberatory practice of medicine" by "focusing on praxis," according to the slides.

A section called "Our Hxstories" adds that "[h]ealth and medical practice are deeply impacted by racism and other intersectional structures of power, hierarchy, and oppression—all of which require humility, space and patience to understand, deconstruct, and eventually rectify."

That jargon reflects a worldview with clinical implications. In a unit on "abolitionist" health,students are assigned a paper that argues police should be removed from emergency rooms, where 55 percent of doctors have been assaulted—mostly by patients—per a 2022 survey.

Flier said the syllabus was so bad it called for an investigation—and that anyone who signed off on it was unfit to make curricular decisions.

The school's dean, Steven Dubinett, should "review the course and the curriculum committee that approved it," Flier said.

"If that body judged the course as appropriate, he should change its leadership and membership."

Nicholas Christakis, a sociologist and physician at Yale University, who has spent decades providing medical care to underserved communities, including in the South Side of Chicago, called the curriculum "nonsensical."

The relationship between health and social forces "should indeed be taught at medical school," @NAChristakis wrote in an email, "but to have a mandatory course like this—so tendentious, sloganeering, incurious, and nonsensical—strikes me as embarrassing to UCLA."

One of the leaders of the course is Shamsher Samra, a professor of emergency medicine who in December signed an open letter endorsing "Palestinians’ right to return" and linking "health equity" to divestment from Israel. medium.com/@antiracistsat…

A unit on "Queerness/Gender," for example, assigns readings on "gender self-determination" and "DIY transition," but does not include any of the research from Europe—such as the Cass Report—that has led England and other countries to restrict hormone therapies for children.

A unit on "Queerness/Gender," for example, assigns readings on "gender self-determination" and "DIY transition," but does not include any of the research from Europe—such as the Cass Report—that has led England and other countries to restrict hormone therapies for children.

The omission of inconvenient facts extends to a unit on Los Angeles's King/Drew hospital—nicknamed "Killer King" for its high rates of medical error—which the course promotes as an example of "community health."

Founded in 1972 as a response to the Watts riots, the hospital was majority black, had a documented policy of racial preferences, and was hit with several civil rights complaints by non-black doctors alleging discrimination in hiring and promotion.

It closed in 2007 after a Pulitzer Prize-winning investigation by the Los Angeles Times found numerous cases in which patients had been killed or injured by clinical mistakes, such as overdosing a child with sedatives and giving cancer drugs to a meningitis patient.

Efforts to reform the hospital stalled, according to the Times, because its board of supervisors feared coming across as racially insensitive.

The assigned readings on King/Drew do not include any of this history.

Lecture slides instead praise the hospital for "suturing racial divides," but suggest that it may not have gone far enough. A focus on "producing highly talented and skilled physicians," one slide reads, "forced" King/Drew to hire doctors who were, "in some cases, not Black."

The slides suggest that "lived experiences," "historical memory," and "other knowledges" can constitute medical expertise. Biomedical knowledge, after all, is "just one way of knowing, understanding, and experiencing health in the world."

For more on the class, including links to the various readings, check out my full article in the @FreeBeacon. freebeacon.com/campus/pedagog…