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UCLA med school's mandatory 'Structural Racism and Health Equity' course teaches weight loss is 'useless'
UCLA has previously come under fire for pushing segregation exercises and prayers to a pagan god
By Lindsay Kornick Fox News
Published April 25, 2024 7:05am EDT
First-year medical students are required to learn that weight has little to do with health, according to a new report.
The Washington Free Beacon obtained a syllabus from the "Structural Racism and Health Equity" course at The David Geffen School of Medicine at UCLA. The document includes required reading lists to prepare for classes regarding topics like "The Sickness of Policing & Incarceration," "Anti-Settler Colonialism/Indigenous Health" and "Environmental Racism & Justice."
Among the materials for the "Disability Justice" session include an article by Marquisele Mercedes, titled "No Health, No Care: The Big Fat Loophole in the Hippocratic Oath," which says "fatphobia is medicine’s status quo."
"It is proven that weight loss is a useless, hopeless endeavor. You are unlikely to lose weight in any permanent way and highly likely to open yourself to the myriad risks associated with weight cycling. The relationship between weight and health is also muddy," the essay reads.
The essay also insisted that "the concept of ob*sity is used to exact violence on fat people, and fat activists regard it as a slur."
The course describes Mercedes' essay as "Weaving together the medical and scientific literature with her personal experiences and positionality as a Black fat scholar-activist, she describes how weight came to be pathologized and medicalized in racialized terms and offers direct recommendations to healthcare providers and researchers for resisting entrenched fat oppression. Take note as you read of what resonates with your own experiences learning about weight and fatness within medicine, and what pieces of her concluding ‘fat ode to care’ most resonate with you."
Other materials in the syllabus include works on why "the border crisis is a myth" and how medicine must be used to dismantle racism.
The course objectives are to "Understand the concepts of race/racism, power, colonialism, patriarchy, and capitalism and their manifestations in the history of medical thought, education, practice, and research and shaping the healthcare system overall" and "Understand the impact both structural and social determinants have on the health of marginalized communities."
An assignment that was allegedly due in the past week also focused on the topic "Combating Incarceration, Housing Injustice, and Environmental Racism with Community Organizing-Community Health Impact."
Fox News Digital reached out to The David Geffen School of Medicine at UCLA for a comment but has yet to receive a response.
UCLA’s medical school has come under fire in the last few months over its "Health Equity" class for its assignments and controversial events.
Earlier this month, the UCLA Jewish Faculty Resilience Group spoke to several witnesses who testified that an invited lecturer "instructed students to touch the floor, 'mama earth with a fist' while she made a 'non-secular' prayer to ‘mama earth’ and our ‘ancestors.'"
The speaker also allegedly "instructed students to get out of their seats and stand upright with her for a closing prayer, once again to ‘mama earth’ and the ‘ancestors.’ Of those gathered, a handful of students who were visibly uncomfortable declined to participate, remaining seated throughout."
In January, the school was forced to cancel a class exercise that divided students into racial groups following a civil rights complaint.
"Recognizing the imperfect and problematic nature of our socially constructed racial categories, we ask that you identify the group in which you feel you are most perceived as in clinical spaces," the exercise reportedly said.
The "Structural Racism and Health Equity" class was established in 2020 as part of the school’s "anti-racist" curriculum shift in the wake of George Floyd’s death.
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