Shrink control: The limits of a psychiatrist's skepticism.

• Author: Sullum, Jacob
• Position: Cultures & Reviews

Just when you thought that Bill Maher's insipid talk show had given political incorrectness a bad name, along comes Sally Satel to redeem the concept. She is only partly successful.

It doesn't help that Satel's publisher treats political correctness as if it were a new concept. The cover of her book refers to it twice, and even though the subtitle tells you what PC stands for, olitically and orrect have been inserted in small type next to the P and C in the title. Someone at Basic Books clearly was worried that browsers would mistake PC, M.D. for a science fiction novel about a computer that prescribes antibiotics.

The cover, of course, is not Satel's fault. But what's inside--a psychiatrist's warning about the corruption of medicine by ideology--sometimes leaves readers wondering how meaningful it is to call Satel's opponents politically correct. The phrase was originally used by leftist academics to describe people who shared their political outlook, a perspective that emphasized the grievances of oppressed groups and the collective guilt of white heterosexual men. By the late 1980s, politically correct had become a term of derision, referring to the stifling intellectual atmosphere that prevailed on campuses dominated by former '60s radicals and to "progressive" standards of speech and behavior emanating from the academy.

Much of what Satel attacks in PC, MD.--for example, the assumption that differences in health between whites and blacks must be due to racism--is reminiscent of ideas criticized in books ranging from Dinesh D'Souza's Illiberal Education to Alan Charles Kors and Harvey Silverglate's The Shadow University. But while the professors and administrators described in those books rein in dissenting students and faculty members through stigma, re-education, and Kafkaesque disciplinary proceedings, many of Satel's targets are gad-flies rather than Torquemadas, challenging orthodoxy rather than enforcing it. Dismissing their concerns, Satel ends up defending authoritarian policies that go beyond anything practiced even at the most intolerant universities.

Satel, a fellow of the American Enterprise Institute and a lecturer at the Yale University School of Medicine, is most persuasive as the voice of calm reason, dissecting the abuse of science for ideological purposes. Some feminist critics of conventional medicine, for example, promote "therapeutic touch," a form of quackery that has gained acceptance at many nursing schools. The technique involves waving your hands a few inches from the patient's body to adjust his "human energy field." Satel's debunking of therapeutic touch goes beyond a rhetorical eye roll. She discusses the technique's appeal (which includes the close, prolonged attention it entails), the relevance of the placebo effect, and the potential harm of steering patients away from other therapies. Satel does not reject out of hand the possibility that there might be something to learn from alternative medicine, but she insists that its remedies be held to rigorous scientific standards.

Satel is similarly careful and thorough when she considers racial differences in disease and mortality rates. She shows that many factors need to be considered before any part of these gaps can reasonably be attributed to discrimination, whether by doctors or by society in general. She is likewise skeptical of claims that women are at a systematic disadvantage, both as patients and as health professionals, because of their sex. In both cases, Satel acknowledges historical grounds for such suspicions, including the infamous Tuskegee Syphilis Study...