Students enrolled in medicine at the University of California of Los Angeles are being taught how to address “fatphobia” and other concepts in support of “health equity.”
A first-year course called “Structural Racism and Health Equity” is part of a more extensive roadmap to combat “structural racism” and more at UCLA. The syllabus for this course includes texts aimed at dismantling “medical fatphobia” at a time when obesity rates are skyrocketing and weight-loss drugs are being touted as the solution.
“Medical fatphobia isn’t the result of providers not knowing some special cheat codes for working with fat patients. Providers didn’t all miss the day in medical school where students were taught how not to be cruel to fat people. Fatphobia is medicine’s status quo,” reads one of the class documents titled “No Health, No Care: The Big Fat Loophole in the Hippocratic Oath,” written by Marquisele Mercedes.
The article also mentions the origin of “anti-fatness” and how anti-fatness and anti-blackness were rooted in European colonialism to discriminate against minorities, mentioning works in the same vein.
“In Da’Shaun Harrison’s Belly of the Beast: The Politics of Anti-Fatness as Anti-Blackness, the Black fat queer trans abolitionist theorist notes that ‘for race to be constructed, the Slave had to exist — and had to exist as the antithesis of health — so that European physicians, anthropologists, and other eugenicists could determine what set the Slave apart from the… Caucasian,'” Mercedes wrote.
The article also goes on to cite the CDC on how health equity is reached.
“According to the CDC, health equity ‘is achieved when every person has the opportunity to attain his or her full health potential’ and no one is disadvantaged from achieving this potential because of social position or other socially determined circumstances,'” the document reads.
Some medical experts have questioned the health equity curriculum being taught at UCLA.
Jeffrey Flier, the former dean of Harvard Medical School, called the new course “truly shocking” and said that “[UCLA] has centered this required course on a socialist/Marxist ideology that is totally inappropriate,” according to RedState.
As previously reported by The Dallas Express, the Tarrant County Hospital system JPS Health is under public scrutiny due to revelations of its 100-point evaluation scale used to purchase medical equipment prioritizing “diversity.” According to the scale, minority-owned certified firms automatically get 15 points for “diversity and inclusion.”