« Sunday Morning Book Thread - 11-13-2022 ["Perfessor" Squirrel] | Main | First-World Problems... »

Those Physicians Who Embrace Patently False And Obviously Ridiculous Theories? Their Critical Thinking Is Clearly Flawed And They Are Not Competent To Practice Medicine On Real People

This sounded so insane that I had to check the actual study; maybe the author misread it! But it was written by Karol Markowicz, who is no slouch, so I suspected it was real...and crazy.

'Masks reduce racism' study is latest sign US medical establishment is insanely, perilously woke

Is there anything masking can’t do? Except for control COVID spread, of course.

A new study in the New England Journal of Medicine purports to show that mask policies in schools work to contain COVID. But that’s not all: The authors conclude, “We believe that universal masking may be especially useful for mitigating effects of structural racism in schools, including potential deepening of educational inequities.”

Sure, masks help fix structural racism. Why not? And the next study will show masking fights climate change.

No, what this study shows is that much of the medical establishment continues to be intensely woke — and deeply dishonest because of it. Just as the “experts” told us gathering in crowds wasn’t OK in spring of 2020, but just weeks later protesting for Black Lives Matter somehow was.

Oh...that's probably not the nuttiest part of the entire thing. The study also discusses all sorts of nonsensical historical artifacts that have nothing to do with....anything! But they dutifully link imagined issues with Covid. It is difficult to read because it is untethered from reality, but it is a glimpse into the chaotic mindset of the medical establishment that has bought into the most insane ideas about society and culture.

During the Covid-19 pandemic, schools have become an important setting for implementing policies that minimize inequitable health, educational, social, and economic effects on children and their families. However, even before the pandemic, schools were not uniformly health-promoting environments. Chronic underinvestment in combination with structural racism codified in state-sanctioned historical and contemporary policies and practices (e.g., redlining, exclusionary zoning, disinvestment, and gentrification) eroded tax bases in some school districts and shaped the quality of public school infrastructure and associated environmental hazards.These processes left school districts differentially equipped to respond to the Covid-19 pandemic and concentrated high-risk conditions, such as crowded classrooms and poor indoor air quality due to outdated or absent ventilation or filtration systems, in low-income and Black, Latinx, and Indigenous communities.

Huh? The data simply don't support these contentions. It's like looking at a Diabetes Wing at a hospital and saying that there is structural racism at work because there are more black patients than there should be...assuming perfect distributions of risk.

But that's not how the world works, and that's not how medicine works. Looking for cultural and societal causes for disease is an interesting academic exercise, but telling some diabetic fatty who smokes that it's structural racism that caused his disease is malpractice. And of course those societal causes are a priori blamed on the WHITE PATRIARCHY.

I'll be honest...I don't really understand what the hell the authors of this diarrheic blather are trying to say. They don't recognize the many changes that were occurring in student behavior concurrent with the relaxation of masking, in particular greater exposure to the world outside of their schools. In addition, they fail to recognize that the virus rapidly became ubiquitous, mutated, and decreased in severity (typical viral progression). And they ignore the huge amount of data that show that their conclusion is incorrect; there is ample evidence that demonstrates that masking in schools has essentially no effect on Covid rates.

What terrifies me is that nonsense such as this study is replacing real biomedical scholarship and research. The intersection of progressive, left-wing politics and medicine does not belong in a healthcare system that used to be the best in the world. Physicians who take seriously this sort of hyper-politicized garbage do a disservice to their patients, who deserve to be treated as individuals, not as populations of ethnic or socio-economic groups without any individuality.