Academia and the new dark age: Part 6 – Head Girls vs physician thought criminals
11 September 2023
The Journals of the American Medical Association, or JAMA Network, are a stable of peer-reviewed medical journals published by the American Medical Association. The flagship publication, JAMA, is – according to that bastion of truthiness, Wikipedia – ranked as the third leading journal in the category ‘Medicine, General & Internal’.
I’ve been a subscriber to JAMA‘s email alert service for many years. I receive an email notifying me when new articles in, and new issues of, the journals that I’m particularly interested in are published. This service is completely free, and anyone can sign up for it.
Much of the content is behind a paywall, but by entering an article’s digital object identifier (DOI) into Sci-Hub, I can usually obtain the full text for free. This is very useful, because precious little that is published in any of the JAMA journals is worth paying for.
I noticed that the JAMA stable had begun tumbling down the wokehole several years ago. Articles that obsessively focus on racial and sexual inequity have become more and more prevalent. In the last couple of years, JAMA has become fixated on disparities related to ‘gender’ – whatever the hell that means, given that definitions of gender and gender identity are slipperier than a Pfizer pflunkey giving testimony before the Australian Senate.
Here’s a selection of such woke pseudoscience from the last couple of months:
Stress as a Risk Factor for Mental Disorders in a Gendered Environment. This paper is basically a giant pile of twaddle about how “the differential risk for exposure to stress incurred by the social construct of gender” impacts on rates of depression, anxiety, PTSD, alcoholism and other so-called mental disorders in men vs women. According to the authors, men are more likely to become alcoholics because “gendered norms provide greater social acceptance of substance use among men relative to women”… and definitely not because males experience more dopamine response from alcohol than females. Furthermore, women are more likely to be diagnosed with major depressive disorder, generalised anxiety disorder and PTSD because of, you know, work and family stress and something something something… and not because, on average, women have heightened sensitivity to negative emotion (unpleasantly titled ‘neuroticism’ in the personality psychology literature) which is remarkably consistent across different ethnicities.
Interpretation: While 56 percent of Black students and 31 per cent of Hispanic students in the lowest of these three bands of academic performance scores who applied to medical schools were accepted, just 6 per cent of Asian students and 8 per cent of White applicants with these lower scores were accepted. Of the students with the highest academic performance scores, 94 per cent of Black applicants and 83 per cent of Hispanic applicants were accepted into medical school, compared to only 58 per cent of Asian and 63 per cent of White top-performing applicants. This results in a skewing of medical school admissions toward relatively underqualified Black and Hispanic students. If, as one would logically assume, entry to higher-paid specialties is more competitive, students with the highest academic performance will have an advantage over lower-achieving students.
Association of Racial and Ethnic Identity With Attrition From MD-PhD Training Programs. This paper found that Black students enrolled in a combined MD-PhD training program were more likely to drop out of medical school, and more likely to drop the PhD program and to graduate solely as an MD, than White students. The authors claim to have carried out a statistical adjustment for MCAT scores, but provide no details of how this adjustment was performed. Although the study was conducted using deidentified data (meaning that students were not asked why they dropped out), the authors are convinced that there’s racism afoot. They claim that “Black medical students report disparate experiences of mistreatment and discrimination”, but the reference they cite for this assertion, Association of Socioeconomic Status With Alpha Omega Alpha Honor Society Membership Among Medical Students, does not even mention student experiences of mistreatment or discrimination. Instead, it finds that – not surprisingly – medical students with high MCAT scores were more likely to be members of an honour society whose membership criterion is high academic achievement. See previous point.
Cardiac Arrest Survival at Emergency Medical Service Agencies in Catchment Areas With Primarily Black and Hispanic Populations. The authors of this non-contribution to medical progress went looking for evidence that communities with majority Black and/or Hispanic populations had lower survival rates of out-of-hospital cardiac arrest (OHCA – abrupt cessation of heartbeat) than majority White/Asian communities. Disappointingly for them, they found that survival rates for OHCA were a mere 1.9 per cent lower at emergency medical service (EMS) agencies working in Black and Hispanic catchment areas than in White/Asian catchment areas, and that “this difference was not explained by EMS response times, rates of EMS termination of resuscitation, or first responder rates of initiating cardiopulmonary resuscitation or applying an automated external defibrillator.” In other words, the paltry difference in survival rates could not be attributed to brown or black OHCA sufferers receiving worse care. Nonetheless, the authors remain convinced that there must be an explanation related to “structural racism”, even though they failed to locate any… and those lower survival rates couldn’t possibly be related to a markedly higher prevalence of risk factors for sudden cardiac death in Black and Hispanic individuals.
There are plenty more examples that I could cite, but I think I’ve made my point. The emphasis that JAMA editors accord to such articles, and their panicked response to accusations that they’re not antiracist enough (which in 2021 led to the forced resignations of their editor-in-chief and deputy editor for the thoughtcrime of proposing the use of a less divisive term than ‘structural racism’), paint a clear picture: According to JAMA, any and all differences in patient outcomes are attributable to structural racism, sexism and whatever the hell we’re supposed to call discrimination based on ‘gender’ (which, I’ll remind you, is merely a social construct). It will happily publish papers with sloppy methodology and conclusions that are inconsistent with the study findings, as long as they support this postmodernist worldview.
Now that you have a sense of JAMA‘s ideological stance, I’m sure you won’t be shocked to learn that it’s all-in on the official COVID narrative. So all-in, in fact, that in mid-August, it published an article written by five Head Girls from the Department of Health Promotion and Policy, School of Public Health and Health Sciences, at the University of Massachusetts, which excoriated US physicians for sharing “COVID-19 misinformation” on social media, and called for federal and state governments to coordinate with professional regulatory bodies to “regulate content or discipline physicians who participate in misinformation propagation related to COVID-19 or other conditions”.
(You simply must read Bruce Charlton’s pointy piece on Head Girl Syndrome. It will help you make sense of the midwitocracy that currently rules over us. Here’s just a brief teaser:
“Modern society is run by Head Girls, of both sexes, hence there is no place for the creative genius. Modern Colleges aim at recruiting Head Girls, so do universities, so does science, so do the arts, so does the mass media, so does the legal profession, so does medicine, so does the military… And in doing so, they filter-out and exclude creative genius… The Head Girl can never be a creative genius because she does what other people want by the standards they most value. She will work harder and at a higher standard in doing whatever it is that social pressure tells her to do – and she will do this by whatever social standards prevail, only more thoroughly.”
And how, pray tell, do the authors of this illustrious piece of scholarship – which consisted of trawling through social media sites to find examples of COVID wrongthink expressed by physicians and then hyperventilating about how dangerous it was and how the perps must be punished and silenced – define “COVID-19 misinformation”? You’ll be shocked, I tell you, shocked to learn that
“We defined COVID-19 misinformation as assertions unsupported by or contradicting US Centers for Disease Control and Prevention (CDC) guidance on COVID-19 prevention and treatment during the period assessed or contradicting the existing state of scientific evidence for any topics not covered by the CDC (eTable in Supplement 1).”
Would you like to see that table of the incontestable scientific facts about COVID, which those thought criminal doctors contradicted? Of course you would. Here it is:
If you can manage to read this COVID catechism without either bursting into hysterical laughter or experiencing a powerful urge to yell obscenities at the academic NPCs who compiled the list, you have more self-control than I do. Feel free to share your secrets of stoicism in the comments section below. Meanwhile, here’s some George Orwell for you:
“If all others accepted the lie which the Party imposed — if all records told the same tale — then the lie passed into history and became truth. ‘Who controls the past,’ ran the Party slogan, ‘controls the future: who controls the present controls the past.’ And yet the past, though of its nature alterable, never had been altered. Whatever was true now was true from everlasting to everlasting. It was quite simple. All that was needed was an unending series of victories over your own memory. ‘Reality control’, they called it: in Newspeak, ‘doublethink’.”
“In the end the Party would announce that two and two made five, and you would have to believe it. It was inevitable that they should make that claim sooner or later: the logic of their position demanded it. Not merely the validity of experience, but the very existence of external reality, was tacitly denied by their philosophy. The heresy of heresies was common sense.”
The Head Girls who wrote this nasty little piece of propaganda are deeply disturbed that not enough thought criminals have been punished by their licensing boards, and that – god forbid – some of those fascists in the Republican party have defended physicians’ right to express differing opinions:
“National physicians’ organizations, such as the American Medical Association, have called for disciplinary action for physicians propagating COVID-19 misinformation,32 but stopping physicians from propagating COVID-19 misinformation outside of the patient encounter may be challenging.33 Although professional speech may be regulated by courts34 and the FDA has been called on to address medical misinformation,16 few physicians appear to have faced disciplinary action. Factors such as licensing boards’ lack of resources available to dedicate toward monitoring the internet35 and state government officials’ challenges to medical boards’ authority to discipline physicians propagating misinformation36 may limit action.”
With no apparent sense of irony, the Defenders of the COVID Faith call for… someone or other (how about the Ministry of Truth?) to crack down on medicos who spread “misinformation”:
“This study’s findings suggest a need for rigorous evaluation of harm that may be caused by physicians, who hold a uniquely trusted position in society, propagating misinformation; ethical and legal guidelines for propagation of misinformation are needed.”
Oooh, yes, just think of all the harm that was inflicted by doctors who alerted the public to the safety signals showing up in pharmacovigilance databases; provided information on early treatment of COVID with cheap, safe, off-patent medicines and nutraceuticals; and worked to free schoolchildren from bacteria-infested, communication-blocking, and utterly useless face nappies.
Speaking of those face-nappies, the Head Girls were particularly worked up about the January 2023 Cochrane review which found that cloth and surgical masks, and N95/P2 respirators, are as useful as a third armpit for preventing viral respiratory illnesses. No No NO, they insist, the review doesn’t prove that at all:
“A recent Cochrane Review has been misinterpreted to have definitively shown that wearing masks does not reduce transmission of respiratory viruses and has been used to support assertions that masks definitively ‘do not work.’37“
… except that Oxford University epidemiologist Tom Jefferson, who headed up the team which produced the exhaustive 305-page Cochrane analysis of 78 high-quality scientific studies, involving over 610 000 participants, has flatly stated that
“There is just no evidence masks make any difference. Full stop.”
But I’m sure the Head Girls are way better than the Cochrane team at interpreting The Science™.
“To know and not to know, to be conscious of complete truthfulness while telling carefully constructed lies, to hold simultaneously two opinions which cancelled out, knowing them to be contradictory and believing in both of them, to use logic against logic, to repudiate morality while laying claim to it, to believe that democracy was impossible and that the Party was the guardian of democracy, to forget whatever it was necessary to forget, then to draw it back into memory again at the moment when it was needed, and then promptly to forget it again: and above all, to apply the same process to the process itself. That was the ultimate subtlety: consciously to induce unconsciousness, and then, once again, to become unconscious of the act of hypnosis you had just performed. Even to understand the word ‘doublethink’ involved the use of doublethink.”
The comments on the article suggest that JAMA‘s readership isn’t entirely on board with the Party’s agenda. It’s worth noting that the vast majority of JAMA network articles that I have read, have no comments at all, even when the subject matter is vitally important to clinical practice. But this low-quality effort, which makes precisely zero contribution to better patient outcomes, had garnered seven comments at the time of writing this post. Three of these expressed full support for punishing and censoring doctors who challenged, or even raised questions about, the official narrative. Here’s a sample.
Michael Holloway, PhD (retired), praised bow-tied Big Pharmastooge Peter Hotez’s valiant efforts to ‘debunk’ reality and fulminated, “These authors are right: it is the job of medical and academic institutions to take strong and effective action against pseudoscience campaigns that are actively killing people.”
John Rubin, MD FACP, hyperventilated “We need to show the public that we are not afraid to punish the “bad apples” in our profession. It is time these physicians have their academic positions, along with their board certifications and licenses, be evaluated to see if these are the colleagues we want caring for our communities.”
George Bussey, MD, JD, MHA, is hankering for a good doxxing of the wrongthinkers: “I do wish there was an appropriate place to identify and publicize the identities of these individuals.”
“A hideous ecstasy of fear and vindictiveness, a desire to kill, to torture, to smash faces in with a sledgehammer, seemed to flow through the whole group of people like an electric current, turning one even against one’s will into a grimacing, screaming lunatic. And yet the rage that one felt was an abstract, undirected emotion which could be switched from one object to another like the flame of a blowlamp.”
The other four comments fan the faltering flames of hope that the field of medicine is not entirely infested with insipid Head Girls who wish to enforce their mediocrity on others.
Martin Krsak, MD, MSc and Vladimir Nosal, MD, PhD pointed out that “convalescent immunity [that is, the immunity gained from recovery from infection] was unfairly disregarded as the grounds for exemption from certain mandates” and that this scientifically unjustifiable position undermined the public’s trust in COVID-19 ‘vaccines’. They’re still fans of the transfection agents, mind you; they just think it was really dumb for people who already had immunity to SARS-CoV-2 to be mandated to take them.
Daniel Benz, MD queried the criteria used to define ‘misinformation’ and asserted that “The individual physicians should be able to review all information and decide for themselves which is accurate and which is not.”
Nigel Wilson, MB BCh Cantab MRCGP FFOM, of Cambridge University, pointed out the centrality of open discourse to advancement in medicine, and rhetorically wondered, “When did we forget the fundamental principles of the enlightenment, that all ideas can be discussed, and that nobody has a veto on any ideas? How did the principles of treating colleagues with respect and upholding the free speech of those with whom we disagree become so degraded?”
And finally, Anthony Perry, MD (Retired), fired a full broadside at the Head Girls: “It’s not hard to find instances in which the consensus of authorities in medical practice was not only erroneous, but even seriously harmful and where medical renegades turned out to be correct. In my 50 years of internal medicine practice, I observed many. I find the approach to identifying misinformation in this paper concerning. Misinformation should not be an appropriate term in scientific debate. Some of the examples of misinformation in the article are open to debate and not incontrovertible enough to demand universal acceptance.”
Geez, Dr Perry, I’m glad you’re retired; the Thought Police would be breaking down your door for that one! Don’t you know that War Is Peace, Freedom Is Slavery and Ignorance Is Strength?
To end on a (somewhat) hopeful note, the new dark age that has descended on academia is now becoming so plainly visible that an increasing number of professionals and, to a lesser extent, academics themselves are beginning to rattle the cage. As Bruce Charlton astutely observed, Head Girls are entirely lacking in creative genius, and any institution that they dominate will, therefore, eventually become so starved of the lifeblood of innovation by its own intellectual sclerosis, that it will wither and die. Our job is to nurture and hone the processes of intellectual inquiry by which high-quality ideas are produced and low-quality ones are rejected (see my previous articles How to sharpen your bullsh*t detection skills, and How to spot bullsh*t arguments – Part 1 and Part 2), until the moribund midwitocracy finally keels over. Long live the thought criminals!
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