Within a week of the George Floyd tragedy, the Association of American Medical Colleges, announced that the nation’s medical schools “must employ anti-racist and unconscious bias training and engage in interracial dialogues.” A year later, in May 2021, the AMA released its “Organizational Strategic Plan to Embed Racial Justice and Advance Health Equity,” while the Journal of the American Medical Association devoted itself to “a heightened and appropriate emphasis on equity and publication of information that addresses structural racism with the goal of overcoming its effects in medicine and health care.”

Sally Satel, M.D., a practicing psychiatrist and a lecturer at Yale University School of Medicine, asks whether these are appropriate goals for medicine and for physicians. Also a resident scholar at the American Enterprise Institute, Dr. Satel studies mental health policy and political trends in medicine. Medical training is undergoing a worrisome experiment, she says, as it adopts social justice as a primary goal and encourages doctors to take on advocacy roles. She will discuss the manifestations of this new imperative and its historical roots, as well as the potential harm to patients, future doctors, and the trust of the public in her profession. Finally, she will suggest more effective ways for doctors to improve the health of patients who suffer the most in our society.

This talk, sponsored by the Program on Freedom and Free Societies (F&FS), is free and open to the general public.

A video recording of the talk is available here.

Dr. Satel is author of Drug Treatment: The Case for Coercion (AEI Press, 1999) and PC, M.D.: How Political Correctness Is Corrupting Medicine (Basic Books, 2001). She coauthored One Nation under Therapy (St. Martin’s Press, 2005) with Christina Hoff Sommers,  The Health Disparies Myth (AEI Press, 2006) with Jonathen Klick, Brainwashed: The Seductive Appeal of Mindless Neuroscience (Basic, 2013) with Emory psychologist Scott Lilienfeld, and Mind the Children: How to Think About the Youth Mental Health Collapse (AEI Press, 2025) with Naomi Schaeffer Riley. Brainwashed was a finalist for the 2014 Los Angeles Times Book Prize in Science.

She is the editor of When Altruism Isn’t Enough: The Case for Compensating Kidney Donors (AEI Press, 2009) and a co-editor of  Evaluating the Brain Disease Model of Addiction (Routledge, 2022) and The Free Inquiry Papers (AEI Press, 2025).

“Medicine in the Age of Social Justice” is being presented thanks to the generous support of Michael J. Millette ’87 and the Millette family as well as that of the Triad Foundation and other donors.