As a student of medicine in the library, overwhelmed by facts that hadn’t yet cohered into a point of view, I read medical journals. They brought me relief — a feeling that life as a doctor was full of muddled people, usually trying to do their best, who found purpose in their work. As a young doctor dispirited by the stench of the wards, I returned to them for the same encouragement.

This week the British Medical Journal carried an editorial on “scholasticide”, a term coined by Oxford political theorist Karma Nabulsi. The journal defines it as “deliberate attacks” on a society’s education system during armed conflict and says it “has repeatedly been used as a weapon of occupation and settler colonial violence in Palestine”. The destruction it describes is real: 90% of Gaza’s school buildings, as well as every one of its universities, have been damaged or destroyed. Without question, education is essential to health. The problem is that the editorial’s demands — sanctions, prosecutions, calls for boycott and divestment from Israel — are not prescriptions for a medical problem but a political manifesto.

Medical journals used to present science in a human way. As a student, I wrote for The Lancet about feeling uncomfortable in a clinic when I had a cup of tea and none to offer my patient. Now even the personal stories are often chosen with a nod to ideology. The science, the randomized trials and the observational studies remain, but now they are surrounded less by evocations of the chaotic reality in which doctors and patients find themselves and more by activism.

Last month, NEJM Voices, the New England Journal of Medicine’s essay site, published a piece suggesting an unidentified “they” are deliberately trying to kill black academics following the case of Jason Arday, whose death is treated as a crime but whose plagiarism is sidelined. “They are trying to kill us. They always have been,” it reads. The piece wasn’t an editorial, but it was selected and published by the editors. Having helped edit a leading medical journal, I know how deliberate these choices are. “I don’t care,” said the NEJM piece, “whether or not any of these allegations against Prof. Arday were true.”

Truth used to be what mattered. Science and medicine approached it with humility, aware of ambiguity and doubt. Activism has little patience for either, treating doubt both as morally suspicious and passive complicity. British publications have been eager pioneers. The Lancet has made Gaza an extraordinary editorial preoccupation, to a degree its relative public-health burden cannot explain. It selects letters accusing medicine of “selective silence” on Gaza and demanding The Lancet “speak up” more, and has taken up the term “healthocide”, first used in BMJ Global Health to accuse Israel of crimes in Lebanon and Gaza.

The previous editor of the BMJ, Fiona Godlee, was arrested a year ago under the Terrorism Act for supporting Palestine Action. The current editor, Kamran Abbasi, spoke of his pride in her actions, and said Keir Starmer “will be damned by history as the UK Prime Minister who made peaceful protest against genocide a criminal act”.

Campaigning is an essential part of public health. Reading the journals was once like entering a common room, where doctors spoke unguardedly about their experiences. But now it’s like stumbling into a political meeting where stridency proves virtue and slogans replace doubt.

Medical journals are not alone in embracing activism. Science publication Nature was founded in 1869 but first endorsed a US presidential candidate in 2008. A randomized experiment found its endorsement of Joe Biden in 2020 made Donald Trump supporters lose trust in both Nature and science generally.

Science has method; scientists do not. Science is where our beliefs get peer-reviewed by reality. Randomized, controlled trials retain their virtue but our top medical journals have lost much of theirs. If I were a medical student reading the journals today, wondering what sort of life to lead, I would look elsewhere.