Politically Medicated
Shattan, Joseph
Joseph Shattan Politically Medicated SALLY SATEL M.D. PC, M.D.: HOW POLITICAL CORRECTNESS IS CORRUPTING MEDICINE In 1348 a terrible plague, the "Black Death," ravaged Europe. Scientists now...
...Her five recommendations for curbing the AIDS epidemic, delivered during a lecture to the annual meeting of the American Public Health Association in 1998, were: Limit the power of corporations, cap salaries of CEOs, eliminate corporate subsidies, prohibit corporate contributions to politicians, and strengthen labor unions...
...And if a woman looks like hell, she feels like hell because she is devalued in our society...
...In PC, M.D., Dr...
...Researchers are now getting paid to examine the relationship between health and "powerlessness," health and "discrimination," health and "racism," and even health and "classism...
...How comforting to know that, when overweight Ruth drops dead of a heart attack, at least she will not have succumbed to the sexist notion of feminine pulchritude...
...Most disturbing," writes Satel, "their stubborn reluctance to acknowledge each person's responsibility in preserving his own health threatens to reverse many of the gains made by public health movements in the past century...
...Sally Satel (a prac§iiiti§iiii "One is for protection and one is for company, but I can't remember which is which...
...But what is most disturbing about PC, M.D...
...associations and hold impressive posts in schools of public health...
...I forced myself to look at my body and learn to love it...
...Improved sanitation in nineteenth-century America curtailed typhoid, tuberculosis, and yellow fever, and twentieth-century antibiotics and vaccines virtually eliminated polio and smallpox...
...Therapist: I know...
...Therapist: But that's the way we are trained to think...
...According to Satel, social-produc-tionists "now sit at the helm of professional Medical researchers are getting prestigious grants to examine the relationship between health and "powerlessness," health and "racism/' and even health and "classism...
...is the sense one gets that, although many of her colleagues recognize social-production-ists as dangerous ideologues intent on dragging public health back to the Middle Ages, Dr...
...Central to these and other medical breakthroughs is a scientific habit of mind that rejects fuzzy social theorizing, and subjects all explanations ticing psychoanalyst and a lecturer at Yale's School of Medicine), is not so easily vanquished...
...Satel's important book contains many more examples of this kind of breathtaking intellectual perversity— each more outrageous than its predecessor...
...Disenchanted with rigorous scientific standards and hard-headed analysis, a growing number of medical professionals have turned to a new academic fad: social productionism.The basic idea behind "social productionism" is that society—through its racist, sexist, and "classist" institutions—is the real source of most of the diseases that afflict us...
...Satel has accumulated a vast body of evidence in support of this thesis...
...Massive pogroms took place all across Europe...
...Well, as Sally Zierler of Brown University's Department of Public Health has explained, AIDS is "a biological expression of social inequality...
...Satel is one of the few mavericks courageous enough to take them on...
...Fifty years ago, this sort of analysis would have been dismissed as "vulgar Marxism...
...They are highly active in legislative and political debates, have changed admissions criteria for medical school, and "have infiltrated respected academic journals "Though "practitioners of PC medicine" are not yet the "majority in the health professions" membership and influence are increasing...
...Needless to say, this early attempt to root out disease only added to the overall horror...
...Over subsequent centuries, societies gradually evolved better approaches to public health issues...
...Harvey V Fineberg, former dean of the Harvard School of Public Health, describes his institution: "A school of public health is like a school of justice...
...Our bodies are the single most powerful asset we have in our society.You might try thinking about your weight by discovering ways in which being fat affords you power in your relationships and begin to love yourself just the way you are...
...of disease to rigorous and demanding standards of proof...
...How widespread is this new world-view...
...In their terror, they turned against the "politically correct" villain of the day—Europe's Jews—whom they accused of poisoning the wells in order to destroy Christendom...
...Ruth: That won't be easy...
...Or consider this recent excerpt from the Annals of Epidemiology, written by a researcher at the Centers for Disease Control: "We the scientific community are no different from the public or the media: We bring everything we have been taught by our cul104 THE AMERICAN SPECTATOR ¦ March 2001 ture—our xenophobia, our racism, our sexism, our 'classism,' our tendency to 'otherize.'" Finally, consider how Dr...
...It also demonstrates how these new ideas are changing the way medicine is being practiced—through an abomination called "multicultural counseling," for example, whereby patients are segregated for treatment along racial lines...
...It wasn't easy for me either...
...Here, for example, is an excerpt from a session between a politically enlightened therapist and her patient: Ruth: I know it sounds silly, but I just feel fat, old and ugly these days...
...Basic Books, 285 pages, $27.00 c Books, 285 pages, $27.00...
...Fighting disease thus requires medical professionals to set aside traditional health concerns and join the struggle for social justice...
...Scientists now believe it was the bubonic plague, carried from Asia to Europe by infected rats...
...But how can the pursuit of justice help us deal with such dread diseases as AIDS...
...But the monster of political correctness, according to Dr...
...But at the time, people had not the slightest understanding of what had befallen them...
...Consider, for example, recent grants awarded by the prestigious National Institutes of Health...
...Evidently, what Yeats said at the start of the twentieth century— "The best lack all conviction, while the worst are full of passionate intensity"— applies no less to the twenty first...
...But the people Satel is describing have advanced far beyond traditional Marxist categories of analysis...
Vol. 34 • March 2001 • No. 2
