"Social justice" medicine
Graph of the Week
This week’s graph illustrates the number of articles indexed in PubMed that contain the phrase “social justice” (or “social injustice”) in their titles or abstracts.
Key Points
• PubMed is a database that indexes millions of research articles in fields such as medicine, biology, and public health.
• Searching for specific words or phrases in PubMed can help to identify trends in biomedical research.
• “Social justice” is a phrase now in frequent use in academia, politics, the media, and the not-for-profit sector.
• “Social justice” is part of Critical Theory. It means to correct unfair group power dynamics that supposedly exist in society. These unfair power dynamics are to be dismantled (via revolutionary means if necessary), and all societal resources are to then be redistributed to achieve “equity.” (See James Lindsay’s description of “social justice” at his New Discourses website).
• The concept “social justice” started in university humanities departments, but it is now entering the fields of science and medicine.
• This week’s graph illustrates the frequency of use of the phrase “social justice” in biomedical research. It shows the number of articles indexed in PubMed that contain the phrase “social justice” (or “social injustice”) in their titles or abstracts.
• Use of the phrase “social justice” was mostly non-existent prior to 2000. Its use grew steadily over the first 10 years of the new millennium and then its use accelerated markedly in 2015.
• The observed trend in use of the phrase “social justice” also corresponds with trends observed with use of other Woke phrases in biomedical research articles, as documented in my published paper on the topic.
• “Social justice” and other similar concepts in the Woke medicine milieu often misidentify causes of health problems. Consequently, “social justice” medicine has the potential to endanger patient safety and lead to the misallocation of funding and resources in medicine and public health.
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"..lead to the misallocation of funding and resources in medicine and public health."
Unless_ the funding bodies themselves are influenced/incentivized to promote a particular agenda.
Great post, doc!
So scary; so scary.
Medicine may not have fallen yet ... but I will ask the pronouns when meeting a new doctor.
Depending on the reaction I will run or feel a little bit more at ease.