White Patient Autonomy Jeopardized by Disabled Law Professor

Recently in the news a certain law professor suggested that blacks could legally argue that their race constitutes a form of disability in the United States, resulting in a torrent of laughter from the alt-right and finger-wagging from Based Black Conservatives everywhere. With a name like Kimani Paul-Emile, you are undoubtedly already forming your own racist, sexist, and anti-Semitic conclusions about why she would attempt to circumvent usual burdens of proof regarding discrimination by appealing instead to the Americans with Disabilities Act.

It’s hardly the first time this tactic has been employed as a work-around to advance some social justice nonsense, in fact, it’s regularly used as an argument for why trigger warnings ought to be mandatory on campus.

While this hilariously absurd piece of legalistic pilpul hasn’t gained traction in Clown World yet, some of Kimani’s other bullshit has taken root in prestigious places. No, I’m not talking about Kimani’s hilarious attempt to tackle the “problem” of scientists and healthcare researchers using race as a salient category. Instead I’m referring to a particularly contradictory and dangerous take on patient autonomy that appeared in the New England Journal of Medicine.

Essentially, in healthcare, all treatment is contingent on the patient providing “informed consent”, provided they are mentally competent to do so. If the patient doesn’t consent, the healthcare provider has to quit. Occasionally patients will request that care be rendered by someone of their same gender, or more troublesome, they might actually have the gall to request a provider of a particular race. This racism by patients is an “open secret” of healthcare, causing many black men in white coats to go cry in the supply room next to the bags of normal saline because an old white lady called them a nigger.

Quite naturally, the media spins this as being vile Neo-Nazis refusing to let brave women of color take care of their babies, or based six-year olds refusing to allow some spic to take their blood pressure, but the real “open secret” is that minorities and women are the usually the ones making these demands for a particular provider and having them accommodated.

Kimani Paul-Emile takes these facts in stride and applies some predictable, boilerplate critical theory to the situation. Her contention is that “institutions should not accommodate patients in stable condition who persist with reassignment requests based on bigotry”, while simultaneously running with the idea that blacks, Muslims and Hispanics discriminating against white male doctors is completely legitimate because they’re only trying to avoid implicit racial bias. Medicine itself is infatuated with the concept that blacks are better cared for by other blacks and providers in general should be of the same demographic as the patient they’re treating. I could hardly find myself disagreeing; I would certainly never complain if 911 calls for crackheads and morbidly obese negresses had to be picked up by black EMTs. Of course no one EVER dares to ask if it’s also true that white patients are better served getting care from white medical providers.

Kimani also spends a lot time fixating on how detrimental it is to the mental health of all those marginalized Doctors of Color when they experience racial discrimination from a patient. No word yet on whether or not she’s concerned about the mental health of white medical providers attacked by crackheads. Weirdly the subjective feelings of the healthcare provider are suddenly being weighed against basic Duty to Act and doing what’s best for your patient.

Her legal approach is to point out that if a facility tells a healthcare provider not to provide care for a patient based on that patient’s racial preference, this is in violation of the Civil Rights Act. Technically this is true and in fact negligent dindus in nursing homes have indeed sued when their facilities “accommodated” the requests of white patients that didn’t want bedsores and skin tears from illiterate Nigerians. On the bright side, Boomers have no way of avoiding a horrible death from preventable sepsis now. Obviously the angle here is that if a facility mandates a provider can’t render care to a particular patient because of their racial preferences, they’re open to legal liability. This probably doesn’t apply if there’s no official policy and the patient himself “fires” the provider. 

Overall she a priori defines racial discrimination by patients as being understandable if said patient is a minority, and “bigotry” if this discrimination is done by a white person. She even reminds healthcare providers that “bigotry” could be the result of altered mental status, wink-wink, nudge-nudge. (If that patient has AMS, then they’re certainly not capable of refusing to let that Somalian nurse give them a lethal dose of epinephrine.) She even developed a handy flowchart to help hospitals determine if their patient is an evil white bigot that should have their patient autonomy super-ceded by an interrogation process.

The troubling thing is this rent-seeking hack has appeared at prestigious hospitals like John Hopkins and is cited on their website. This blatantly twisted rhetoric that casts suspicion and prejudice on white patient autonomy while offering sympathetic understanding for minorities discriminating against white doctors is actually gaining acceptance in the medical community, the same group of people the fervently believes we should be hiring more Somalis and Guatemalans to provide healthcare services. Not only do they want to replace white doctors and nurses, they also apparently want to take away your right to refuse care from these brown-skinned diversity hires. 

I for one suggest all of you start looking into signing a DNR.

– By Alex McNabb and published on TRS and Identity Dixie.