Tuesday Michigan Governor Gretchen Whitmer announced that all medical professionals in the state would be required to undergo implicit bias training. This training would be required annually in order to maintain a professional license. Whitmer created this rule, but failed to share what she learned about herself after she underwent the training.
This training is meant to identify implicit biases and how they impact others. The only issue, is that there is no accurate way to test for implicit bias that is proven to work consistently. Implicit association testing (IAT) is most commonly used.
The test retest score of IAT is only .44 making it extremely unreliable. To be considered acceptable in reliability, the test retest score would need to be at least .7, IAT falls far outside of this criteria.
Orlene Hawkes, the Director of Michigan’s Department of Licensing and Regulatory Affairs said that disparities in health outcomes throughout the pandemic “require emergency action,” according to Breitbart. Even if disparities did exist, disparities do not equal discrimination or prejudicial treatment.
This conclusion without explanation, and concrete evidence to support it is invalid.
Garlin Gilchrist, Lieutenant Governor claimed that the implicit bias training has become necessary because the healthcare system was “designed by men with indifference to the experiences of people who do not look or live like them.”
Gilchrist, himself a democrat has concluded that because the healthcare system was possibly created by bigoted people that the people currently working in it must also be bigoted. His line of reasoning is that something’s creation or creators reflect its current state.
He fails to apply this line of reasoning to his own political party. The Democratic Party that fought for slavery, and instituted Jim Crow Laws.
Both Gilchrist and Whitmer underwent the training. When confronted Whitmer became audibly anxious and refused to share what implicit biases she discovered in herself.
“What can you tell us about what you learned about your own implicit biases?” A reporter asked the Governor.
“I think it’s, you know, it’s very helpful to, um, you know, you go through a number of exercises and you make choices and then you get an opportunity for feedback,” she nervously replied.
“Um, I was, you know, I, I learned something every single day. I think, you know, as evolving humans we should all strive to learn something every single day,” she said
She claimed that the training was comprehensive, and took an hour and a half to complete. But still resisted stating a clear answer.
“Going through real world exercises that might happen in an office setting or might happen on the road, um, was really helpful to take that pause, that I think everyone needs to take on occasion and really understand what’s happening here and why so we can do better,” she finished.
This is the current state of Michigan. Medical professionals forcibly subjected to “training” that has no reliability or factual backing in order to keep their medical licensees. The training itself has nothing to do with medicine.