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Minnesota students replace Hippocratic oath with woke pledge to 'honor all Indigenous ways of healing'

University of Minnesota medical students also pledged to fight against 'white supremacy, colonialism, gender binary and ableism'

MINNEAPOLIS, MINNESOTA: In a controversial pledge ceremony, incoming medical students at the University of Minnesota were forced to give a pledge vowing to "honor all Indigenous ways of healing." It included those members of the society who have been "historically marginalized by Western medicine." Furthermore, the students also pledged to fight against "white supremacy, colonialism, gender binary, ableism and all [other] forms of opression" at the school’s white coat ceremony on August 19. The pledge was administered by Dr Robert Englander, the associate dean for undergraduate education, as seen in the ceremony video.

The ceremony had come under the fire for being hypocritical, after an opponent of critical race theory Christopher Rufo, tweeted the video on Tuesday, October 11. He wrote the following day, "The most incredible thing about this clip is that the doctor almost certainly doesn't believe in what he's saying. But he submits anyway—because the institutional powers now require otherwise intelligent people to falsify their own beliefs and repeat the left-wing copypasta.”

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In the video, Englander reminds that the campus is established on Dakota land and several Native Americans continue to live in the area. He also said during the ceremony, “This acknowledgement is not enough,” before bringing focus on the necessity to “recognize inequities built by past and present traumas rooted in white supremacy, colonialism, the gender binary, ableism and all forms of oppression,” according to a Daily Mail report.

The students also pledged to honor "all indigenous ways of healing that have been historically been suppressed by western medicine," as well as "to promoting a culture of antiracism, listening and amplifying voices for positive change." They further vowed to "embody cultural humility" and asserted "that patients are the experts of their bodies." The cermony was concluded with the students saying, "We are honored to accept these white coats."

The pledge was ridiculed on the social platform by several people and many threatened to even boycott doctors who would have attended the University of Minnesota. One Twitter user wrote, “These people will be our doctors in our elder years. I don’t know about you but that scares the crap out of me.” Another wrote, “Regressive... When Medical Schools take an oath vilifying skin color and Ignore the Biology and Science of Chromosomes ..” The other tweeted, “When I push the term neo-Lysenkoism I'm not being flippant. The guys are actually WORSE!” One added, "It’s a cult. You can complain about this rudimentary labeling all you want but what you see here is part of a liturgy (and not of the “everything is liturgy” variety). They are reciting a creedal confession.” Another Twitter user said, “They've been crippled. This room full of future doctors is now incapable of doing their jobs competently. All because they've sworn an oath to serve the needs of a flawed ideology above the needs of their patients.” “And we wonder why our medical system is broken? No wonder nobody wants to go to the Dr anymore,” tweeted another.

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