Part of Do No Harm’s work of highlighting and counteracting divisive trends in medicine is talking to audiences whom we don’t always reach.
For an organization that means to help shape the conversation around “Diversity, Equity, and Inclusion” (DEI) and youth-focused gender ideology, breaking through to new readers couldn’t be more crucial.
We’re proud to share some of our recent excursions into new territory. Do No Harm’s ideas are landing, and we’ll be partnering with our members and allies to keep up the good work.
• The recent Washington Post article “How Trump administration threats could affect medical school admissions” spends much of its time quoting the talking points of “diversity” proponents — for example, Association of American Medical Colleges chief executive David J. Skorton, who announced in a 2023 webinar that “[l]ives depend on us successfully diversifying the health care workforce.”
Yet the article also quotes our own Ian Kingsbury, senior director of Do No Harm’s Center for Accountability in Medicine, in support of the Trump administration’s efforts to force medical schools to comply with the Supreme Court’s Students for Fair Admissions v. Harvard decision:
Every data point that we see speaks to continued and really pervasive discrimination within medical school admissions. […] As Pres. Reagan famously quipped, “When you can’t make them see the light, make them feel the heat.”
• Bloomberg, too, recently quoted one of our experts. In “Trump Asks DOJ to Probe Hospitals Over Trans Health Coding,” Do No Harm’s chief medical officer, Kurt Miceli, MD, explained that “gender ideologues are able to misuse medical diagnosis codes to avoid proper reporting and scrutiny and to enable potentially fraudulent billing practices.” Thus did Dr. Miceli share the central theme of our April report on that subject.
• Miceli also wrote letters to the editor at Neurology and JAMA Network Open earlier this year, making the case in both instances that unscientific narratives of structural injustice are shifting attention away from the proper practice of medicine and medical education. Miceli in Neurology: “Patients would be better served by a roadmap tackling neurologic disease, not political agendas.”
• Miceli’s contributions to STAT and KevinMD do similar work, urging physicians to focus on patients rather than advocacy. An excerpt from the latter is illustrative: “Diverting attention toward broad policy agendas risks diluting medicine’s core mission and for that we will all inevitably suffer.”
• Do No Harm’s Jay Greene, director of research, published his own JAMA Network Open letter earlier this year, explaining why a recent examination of racial disparities in black and white mortality rates suffers from methodological and interpretive problems. “[T]he evidence presented,” Greene writes, “does not sufficiently support the claim that systemic discrimination, via stress pathways, directly shortens lives in Black communities.”
These incursions into new territory matter. Too often, readers of mainstream publications have never heard an authoritative, evidence-based case against the progressive narratives and policy preferences that have come to dominate the American medical establishment.
To the extent that we’re storming those gates, we’re setting ourselves up for even more wins down the road.
That’s news we’re happy to make happen — and to share.
