Never afraid to swim upstream—even at the risk of professional retaliation from entrenched interests with good reason to fear her—Marilyn M. Singleton, M.D., J.D., never forgot that the calling of a physician is to treat patients in need of care.
Singleton, aged 77, died unexpectedly on June 18, according to the Association of American Physicians and Surgeons (AAPS) where she once served as president and board member. Friends and colleagues say her remarkable life models a path future physicians should follow. After graduating from Stanford, she earned her medical degree from the University of California San Francisco. A board-certified anesthesiologist, she practiced medicine in Oakland, California since 1973.
Singleton used her legal training to challenge government policies that are detrimental to the practice of medicine and the well-being of patients everywhere. In 2012, she ran for Congress in California’s 13th Congressional District as an independent.
No Identity Politics
Over the years, Singleton provided Health Care News and many other media outlets with commentaries and quotations revealing her prodigious knowledge of the medical world and her understanding of the forces undermining the doctor-patient relationship and—by extension—public health.
“We were so grateful to have Dr. Singleton as a contributing editor,” said AnneMarie Schieber, the managing editor of Health Care News. “A gifted writer and speaker, she was generous with her time, insights, and wit. She really did blaze a trail as a daughter of a flight surgeon who applied to Stanford after being told ‘they don’t accept Negroes.’ Identity politics deeply offended her.”
Singleton Gems
Here’s a small sampling of her wisdom. On California joining Colorado, Oregon, Vermont, and Washington in allowing the composting of human corpses, as an alternative to cremation or burial, to protect the planet from climate change:
“The religion of Mother Earth now supersedes all human decency…Human composting is yet another way to devalue life—we are the same as kitchen scraps that don’t fit in the garbage disposal.”
And, on the World Health Organization (WHO) planning to confront “Disease X” as part of a pandemic treaty:
“In what universe is adding more top-down bureaucracy efficiency, transparency, and accountability work? WHO continues to tout itself as a public health leader but kowtowed to China by failing to challenge it on the origins of the new coronavirus, now known as SARS-CoV-2. Moreover, WHO relies on donations to fulfill its mission. This leaves the organization vulnerable to private entities—like its largest donor, the Bill and Melinda Gates Foundation—having an undue influence on policy.”
Criticized Pandemic Policies
Throughout her career, Singleton has called out the health care establishment on many fronts, but most pointedly on the policies surrounding the COVID-19 pandemic.
Singleton was particularly critical of mandated COVID-19 shots and how the government shielded the drug companies with immunity from the effects of their products.
“When it was clear the injections had serious side effects and did not stop transmission of COVID, the government should have suspended the injections program as in 1976 with the H1N1 vaccine,” Singleton told Health Care News. “Importantly, mandates to take a drug that was not effective as a vaccine should have been prohibited. … There was no informed consent. These cases deserve to be in a medical malpractice civil court.”
The Centers for Disease Control and Prevention (CDC) particularly raised Singleton’s ire because the agency became more beholden to special interests than protecting the public. The agency’s lackluster performance during the pandemic indicated it was ready for a complete overhaul.
“First, it needs an independent, external review to see how the public health agency should actually work,” said Singleton. “When you look at the CDC’s history, when it started in 1946 it was a center for communicable diseases, and that might be the first step. Walk it back to communicable diseases—period, end of story.”
Corporate Health Care
Singleton wrote that corporations were taking over health care with collusion of the government.
“Over the last couple of years, we’ve been living in a frenzied political atmosphere of inflation worries, unaddressed crime, Covid, monkeypox, and a variety of social issues,” Singleton wrote in an op-ed two years ago in Tulsa Today. “These are distractions from thinking about the big picture: the march toward government and corporate control over our lives, including absorbing medical practice into the statist-corporate complex.”
Singleton published many policy briefs and commentaries, which are posted on her page, “Marilyn Singleton, MD, JD – American. Black. Doctor: Uncensored,” at the journalism website Muck Rack.
One Last Battle
Before her death, Singleton and the Pacific Legal Foundation (PLF) were pursuing a lawsuit on behalf of patients challenging California’s mandate requiring implicit bias discussions in all continuing medical education (CME) courses.
“‘Implicit bias,’ is the idea that medical professionals unconsciously treat patients differently based on their race or other immutable characteristics,” the PLF states on its website. “In practice, this means that CME courses on advanced cardiac life support, minimally invasive surgery, or diabetes management, for example, must reserve time in each session to remind everyone that they should be conscious of a patient’s race, ethnicity, gender, or sexual orientation.”
Singleton, Azadeh Khatibi, M.D., and Do No Harm, a national medical advocacy organization, challenged the California mandate, represented pro bono by PLF. Singleton wrote in The Washington Post that the implicit bias requirement spreads “the malignant false assumption that White people are inherently racist.” PLF announced that the case Singleton helped bring, Azadeh Khatibi, et al. v. Hawkins, et al., will continue in her absence.
Proving Others Wrong
Singleton’s death is a “terrible loss,” said Jane Orient, M.D., executive director of AAPS.
“She was a third-generation physician—who proved everybody wrong who said a black doctor wouldn’t make it in the top-tier institutions where she trained—including Stanford, the University of California San Francisco, and Harvard,” said Orient.
Bonner Russell Cohen, Ph. D. (bcohen@nationalcenter.org) is a senior fellow at the National Center for Public Policy Research.