Commentary
“Top Doctor” Company Castle Connolly Is Up To Their Same Old Racial Concordance Tricks
Share:

Last year, Do No Harm reported how Castle Connolly—a New York City-based company that publishes top doctor rankings—jumped on the woke bandwagon by launching their DEI initiative that pushed for racial concordance.
Racial concordance is the false belief that patients have better health outcomes after seeing doctors of their own race. It is a thinly-veiled effort to push racial segregation in medicine under the guise of advancing equity. Yet companies like Castle Connolly are back at it again, pushing racial concordance despite all the evidence to the contrary. Recently the company published their “2024 Top Black Doctors” to allegedly “honor top clinicians and enable patients to find Castle Connolly Top Doctors who have shared backgrounds and experiences.”

Unfortunately, Castle Connolly is not the only entity pushing for racial concordance. For example, the Association of American Medical Colleges (AAMC)—which represents all accredited medical schools in the United States—has wholeheartedly endorsed the concept. Other medical organizations, such as the American Medical Association and American Academy of Pediatrics, have echoed this view.
But there’s more to come: in their press release, Castle Connolly also teased their plans to launch several other so-called “distinctions”, including “Exceptional Women in Medicine”, “Top Asian American and Pacific Islander Doctors”, “Top LGBTQ+ Doctors”, and “Top Hispanic and Latino Doctors”. Apparently, advocating de-facto racial segregation among one race is not enough for Castle Connolly—they are intent on pushing racial concordance in all racial groups equally. It bears a jarring resemblance to the “separate but equal” doctrine that has long been abandoned by American society.
However, just because an idea is increasingly popular among the medical establishment does not mean it is true.
In late 2023, Do No Harm published an exclusive report—entitled “Racial Concordance in Medicine: The Return of Segregation”—which evaluates several systematic reviews of racial concordance studies. Unsurprisingly, in nearly all of these reviews, racial concordance was not associated with any improvement in medical outcomes. And in the few instances in which a small number of academic articles suggested otherwise, these analyses typically suffered from fatally-flawed study designs.
Indeed, as Do No Harm researchers Ian Kingsbury and Jay Greene noted in their report, “the fashionable idea that doctors see patients as members of a racial group rather than as individuals fails to withstand scrutiny—and it promises a return of racial segregation.”
Make no mistake: Castle Connolly and the woke medical elite would rather side with the cherry-picked, flawed data of fringe activists pushing segregation in medicine than follow the actual evidence.
In addition, the Castle Connolly list of the Top Black Doctors is also, ironically, lacking geographical diversity. Their Top Black Doctors only hail from 30 different states, meaning doctors representing 40 percent of the nation’s states are entirely missing from the list. And among those states, there is a remarkable geographic concentration in just a few cities. For example, 20 percent of the list’s 240 doctors are from Atlanta, Georgia and Columbus, Ohio alone.
In other words, patients in need of finding a top doctor outside of a few population centers in less than two-thirds of states are completely out of luck. However, this could be interpreted as an encouraging sign that there are still many doctors that are resistant to the idea of nominating their peers to be on a racial concordance-based list.
Even more ironic, however, is that Castle Connolly’s primary search page for doctors offers no opportunity for users to filter potential medical providers on the basis of race. Distance, specialty, insurance, language, and other key factors are all optional search filters—but not race. It is almost as if race is not a relevant consideration for patients when finding a doctor!

Ultimately, patients deserve the right to choose the best doctor for them. Unfortunately, Castle Connolly and other organizations are perpetuating the myth that racial concordance should be a determining factor in finding the right doctor. Ultimately, the best doctors should be determined on the basis of their merits—not the color of their skin. The sooner that the misguided beliefs of racial concordance—which are rooted in medical segregation—are repudiated, the better.