Physicians are crying foul over the University of Maryland offering a controversial course that injects identity politics into medical training.
First offered in the spring of 2025, “Decolonizing Medicine: Steps to Actionable Change” is a one-credit undergraduate public health course “designed for students studying medicine, public health, or health policy,” according to The College Fix.
However, the course’s content appears to have very little to do with medicine and a lot to do with leftist, anti-white identity politics.
“This course provides a comprehensive foundation of how colonial legacies continue to shape global health systems and medical practices,” a course description reads.
“We will critically engage with the concept of ‘the White body’ as the standard in medical training, explore the consequences of the historical context underpinning colonial medicine, and interrogate neocolonial dynamics in contemporary global health efforts,” the description continues.
University of Maryland is offering a class this spring called ‘Decolonizing Medicine.’
It’s about how ‘colonial legacies’ impact ‘global health systems’ and the ‘White body.’https://t.co/OE4EX2Aa0B
— The College Fix (@CollegeFix) January 19, 2026
Speaking with The College Fix, Dr. Jane Orient of the Association of American Physicians and Surgeons bluntly argued that the course is “anti-white.”
“The title of the course as well as the description reflects the ideological view of oppressors (white colonialists) versus the oppressed (people of color), a fundamental anti-white racist view,” she noted.
“The statement that modern medicine has been shaped by ‘colonialism’ makes no sense to me … Modern medicine was shaped by scientific advances,” she added.
Orient also raised concerns about how the course twists the true purpose of medicine.
“The purpose of medicine, according to the late Donald Seldin, is to relieve pain, reduce disability, and postpone death. It is not about social reform,” she said.
“Framing medicine through Marxist concepts of oppression is destructive of the art and science of medicine. Doctors are not called to judge their patients’ worth or to engage in cultural revolution,” she added.
Dr. Kurt Miceli of the nonprofit Do No Harm further warned that “framing medicine primarily through an identity‑based lens can lead future doctors to see patients through ideological categories rather than as individuals with specific clinical needs.”
“These courses focused on identity politics, unfortunately, shift attention from evidence-based reasoning to ideological framing, which risks confusing political analysis with clinical judgment,” he added in a separate statement to Fox News.
Similar courses can also be spotted at Harvard University:
Here are some of the current Harvard courses on “decolonization,” promoting theories of “anticolonial struggle” and “how BIPOC communities forged [intersectional] solidarities to rebel against global white supremacy.”
In practice, decolonization means Gaza-style violence. pic.twitter.com/jygas8Pqox
— Christopher F. Rufo ⚔️ (@christopherrufo) October 9, 2023
Reagan Dugan, the director of higher education initiatives at Defending Education, slammed the University of Maryland for injecting Critical Race Theory — the most abominable form of identity politics — into the course.
“Coursework that frames medicine as problematic because of its ‘colonial legacy’ is both historically and scientifically unfounded,” he told Fox News. “The coursework seems to go even further and push critical theory into the classrooms of our future health leaders.”
“Instead of training future doctors to serve all patients well, this emphasis appears to encourage them to see patients as oppressor and oppressed. Our institutions should train medical students in medicine, not progressive orthodoxy,” he added.
Continuing her previous remarks to The College Fix, Dr. Orient stressed that the introduction of identity politics into health and medicine undermines the Hippocratic Oath.
“The Hippocratic ethic holds that doctors should do their best for each patient and not harm any of them,” Orient said. “Identity politics implies that some are to get less than your best to achieve some sort of social goal or to right hypothetical past harms.”
Dr. Miceli, meanwhile, warned that the ideological dogma being promoted by the course and others like it is bad for clinical rigor.
“It must never be allowed to overshadow or replace the scientific foundation clinicians rely on to deliver effective patient care in an objective, compassionate manner,” he said. “Medical education should center on rigorous, evidence‑based training that prepares future clinicians to practice medicine rooted in science, not ideology.”
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V. Saxena is a staff writer with a decade of experience as a professional writer, and a lifetime of experience as an avid news junkie. He holds a degree in computer technology from Purdue University. Saxena also contributes to BizPac Review.
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