Medical Schools’ Support for the Status Quo

It’s time for medical schools to give students the freedom needed to address the structural and social determinants of health.  (Read the entire article at Bill Moyers’ website.)

Throughout the medical education process, we rarely discuss the powerful systemic structures that lead to poverty, inequality, environmental degradation and suffering. The medical school system does not teach us to confront the systems of power and the powerful who make decisions that affect millions. On the contrary, medical school functions as a highly efficient system of indoctrination to ensure that physicians are less likely to question or confront the systems of power.

….We are unfortunately pursuing what the legendary educator Paulo Freire referred to as the “banking model of education” in which information is deposited for medical students to receive, memorize and repeat. We need to pursue a more liberating educational structure in which medical students are empowered to think critically about deep systemic structures of power and how they lead to illness.