Months after a complaint by Do No Harm’s chief medical officer, a woke continuing medical education (CME) course previously certified for credit no longer holds that designation — at least for physicians. Yet the course is still widely available, albeit in altered form, and continues to substitute progressive ideology for useful healthcare instruction.
HealthStream’s “Implicit Bias for Clinicians” course “present[s] strategies and interventions … to reduce bias and improve culturally competent care across individual, organizational, and broad-scale settings.”
Its ideological buttress is the notion that “[i]mplicit bias impacts healthcare in many ways” and that “how healthcare professionals perceive, diagnose, and treat patients … causes significant healthcare disparities in access, quality, and outcomes.”
Until recently, the course was accredited by both the Accreditation Council for Continuing Medical Education (ACCME) and the American Nurses Credentialing Center (ANCC). Now, however, only the course’s ANCC accreditation remains.
Do No Harm might reasonably take some credit for that development.
On February 1, 2026, Do No Harm’s Dr. Kurt Miceli filed a complaint with the ACCME, pointing out the course’s violation of “several key standards” set forth by the organization.
Specifically, Dr. Miceli wrote, the course “is highly ideological and politically charged with few, if any, references to the science.”
Moreover, it “fails to provide a fair and balanced perspective … introduces bias, makes unsubstantiated claims, and promotes ideological advocacy that undermines the objectivity of medical education.”
A look at the “Implicit Bias for Clinicians” training then offered supports Dr. Miceli’s assertions.
Contending that “implicit bias is a public health problem,” the course instructed learners on “white privilege,” an “inherent set of advantages, benefits, and entitlements … bestowed on people due to the presentation of the color of their skin.”
It warned against “white supremacy” and stated baldly that “[w]hite people dominate society in the U.S. to the detriment of other racial and ethnic groups.”
It urged practitioners to “recognize and acknowledge that every person holds implicit biases, including yourself.”
Happily, this ideological and unscientific material has been largely eliminated from HealthStream’s course. To the extent that the February complaint spurred a revision, we will take the win.
However, the material that remains, while considerably less provocative, is nevertheless unsound.
For example, and as its name makes clear, the course continues to be built upon the cracked foundation of “implicit bias,” a debunked, pseudoscientific construct that posits “unconscious” racism where no visible prejudice exists.
It appeals to the flawed Implicit Association Test (IAT), a vehicle designed to demonstrate users’ unconscious racism by measuring how quickly they match, e.g., black or white faces to positive or negative words.
The nurses who avail themselves of this continuing-education opportunity will not find that their skills or knowledge have been improved.
Rather, they will have wasted their time on ideologically driven content designed to signal the “virtue” of its creators and to introduce progressive orthodoxies into healthcare practice.
The fact that HealthStream’s course has been stripped of its worst elements is a very good thing. Nevertheless, the fact that it still exists at all is an ongoing problem.
