Continuing Medical Education Shouldn’t Include Activist Rants

What do you get when political activists shape continuing medical education (CME)? Whatever the answer is, it has very little to do with science.

Take, for example, “When Identity and Genetics Intersect,” a 34-minute podcast and quiz offered by the American Medical Association (AMA) for 0.5 credits of CME.

While the activity’s learning objectives themselves raise our hackles — containing as they do the woke claim that “research in human genetics can cause harm to underrepresented populations” — perusal of the podcast transcript produces much greater alarm.

The troubling comments in question proceed from podcast guest Kellan Baker, at recording time the executive director of the Whitman-Walker Institute (WWI). According to Baker,

• “structural racism and anti-LGBTQ bias [affect] HIV risk among LGBTQ people of color”;
• “too often, diversity of gender identity [is] treated as a pathology … [i]nstead of being treated as a foundational element of who people are”;
• “everyone has a gender identity, regardless of how it is or is not encoded in the genome”;
• “[t]he question of how you know who you are is too often tracked back to genetics in this very deterministic fashion that says[,] in the case of sex and gender, for example, that if you have two X chromosomes, you’re a female, you’re a woman, you’re a girl”;
• similarly, an “XY chromosome [is taken to mean] you’re male, you’re a man, you’re a boy, no questions asked. And that is actually not the situation for transgender people”;
• “looking to the genome … has major ramifications for policy” — for example, “[t]he ability to play on sports teams for transgender people. And genomics and genetics are really being invoked to create a very simplistic, anti-scientific, binary world that totally excludes the realities of transgender people”;
• the U.S. is trying “to criminalize the provision of best practice medical care to transgender people”;
• “[s]tates are rushing to ban transgender people from public life and from accessing appropriate medical care.”

These are ideological talking points barely disguised as scientific discourse. Nevertheless, as the following screen capture indicates, the AMA provides not only CME but “[m]edical [k]nowledge” points for physicians enrolled in the American Board of Internal Medicine’s Maintenance of Certification program, to name just one institutional participant.

Perhaps we ought not to be surprised by Baker’s thinly veiled activism. After all, the now-former WWI executive director currently works for the progressive Movement Advancement Project as senior advisor for health policy, helping that organization to “advance equity” by, e.g., releasing a “Talking About Transgender Youth Participation in Sports” educational messaging guide.

The far-left opinion journal Mother Jones recently quoted Baker’s lament that the Department of Health & Human Services’ August report on the financial incentives behind “gender medicine” is “part of a broader pattern from this administration: [u]sing the power of government to attack science and target health care providers instead of helping families get the care they need.”

No, the real surprise lies in the fact that the AMA continues to endorse Baker’s CME even now, despite its obvious politicization and lack of scientific content. That decision should shock anyone who cares about the actual continuing-education needs of physicians and the grounding of medicine in actual facts.

But perhaps we should say we wish we were surprised. Given the now-decades-long intrusion of wokeness into the medical establishment, the sad truth is that we’re not.