Commentary

The American Academy of Family Physicians Continues Its March Towards Woke-Ism

  • By Do No Harm Staff
  • March 15, 2024

Does your family physician subscribe to politicized ideologies? According to the American Academy of Family Physicians (AAFP), that may not be quite enough to meet the organization’s goals.

Do No Harm has previously covered the AAFP’s obsession with DEI concepts, which have manifested themselves in a blatantly discriminatory ideology. In 2022, Do No Harm flagged materials and presentations from the AAFP’s primary annual event, where the organization held at least 10 sessions on DEI-inspired concepts, pushed a discredited “implicit association test”, and emphasized physicians focusing on a patient’s race rather than their medical needs.

Less than a year later, Do No Harm reported that the AAFP’s Vice President of Medical Education decried the U.S. Supreme Court ruling on affirmative action and called for new ways to discriminate and indoctrinate the next generation of physicians.

Today, it seems like AAFP is at it again. The AAFP’s National Conference of Constituency Leaders—its primary annual leadership event—will be held in April. The AAFP is looking for all participants, but is really interested if you represent “recognized special constituencies”.

Figure 1. From an email sent to AAFP members (December 2023).

One of these constituencies is a member of a minority group, defined as “an active AAFP member who is African American, Asian, Native Hawaiian or Pacific Islander, American Indian, Alaska Native, ethnic Latino, or Other.” Members of these constituencies may be eligible for reimbursements—but only one member per constituency, on a first-come first-serve basis.

And for participants who make it to the conference beforehand, they can join in early on the indoctrination for the pre-conference programming entitled “Advancing Health Equity and Social Justice in Family Medicine: Bridge Care Gaps by Breaking Barriers”.

Aside from their annual conference, the AAFP is also promoting “diversity milestones for program assessment”, a type of scorecard to gauge compliance with DEI-related initiatives. The milestones emerged out of a “Diversity and Health Equity Task Force” spearheaded by the Association of Family Medicine Residency Directors (AFMRD).

Figure 2. From a joint presentation by the AAFP and the AFMRD (2022).

Each of the five “domains” identified by the task force for medical education programs—which are “institution, curriculum, evaluation, resident personnel, and faculty personnel”—have controversial and divisive criteria. These include such milestones as: “all evaluators participate in bias training annually”, “curricula in inclusion, antiracism, structural oppression is integrated longitudinally throughout the entire curriculum”, “partners with the community in anti-racist and equity work in the community/population served”, and many more.

Medical education programs are encouraged to self-reflect and score themselves, with the goal of being as committed to DEI concepts as possible. Perhaps ironically, scores of residency programs in the initial pilot assessment averaged at just between 2.0 and 2.65 out of 5, depending on the domain graded. Surely, from the AAFP’s vantage point, there is much more ground for them to cover. [However, even the AAFP fails to practice what they preach. For example, the organization’s Board of Directors has a notable minimum level of diversity.]

Put simply, the AAFP has fully embraced a DEI-rooted ideology that promotes selective discrimination, controversial bias trainings and curricula, and even unfair selective standards for their own conference participants. Family physicians across the country would do well to distance themselves from these concepts and the woke organization that is pushing them.