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Do No Harm Files Complaint Against Two Oklahoma Schools for Discriminatory Nursing Scholarship Program

SALT LAKE CITY, UT; July X, 2026 – Today, Do No Harm filed a complaint with the U.S. Department of Education Office for Civil Rights (ED-OCR) alleging that Northeastern State University (NSU) and Northeastern Oklahoma A&M College (NEO) unlawfully discriminate on the basis of race in a nursing scholarship program offered solely to American Indian students.

Both schools receive federal funding and are subject to federal civil rights laws. Do No Harm’s complaint alleges that the schools’ program — the Northeast Oklahoma Recruitment and Advancement of American Indians into Nursing (NEORAAIN) program — violates Title VI of the Civil Rights Act of 1964 through the exclusion of all students who are not of American Indian descent. The program covers tuition, books, fees, and living expenses for recipients of the award in addition to providing mentorship and access to professional events.

“NSU and NEO are excluding qualified individuals from rich learning opportunities based solely on race, regardless of their academic ability, skills, experiences, and perspectives and even if they commit to serving in Indian health facilities,” said Dr. Kurt Miceli, Chief Medical Officer at Do No Harm. “Favoring one race over all others is not only unlawful and unjust but also discredits the value of hard work and meritocratic achievement that is critical to our healthcare-education system. Do No Harm urges both universities to reverse their discriminatory ways and recenter their nursing scholarship program around excellence and academic rigor.”

The NEORAAIN program advances discrimination by offering scholarship opportunities to some students rather than others on the basis of race. The program aims to:

  • “Increase the number of Native American nurses.”
  • “Support Native American students pursuing nursing degrees.”
  • “Prepare [Native American students] to serve in Indian health facilities following graduation.”

Do No Harm’s complaint argues that the NEORAAIN program’s preferences have no legally justified basis and requests that the ED-OCR investigate NSU and NEO and find that their race discrimination violates Title VI.

Do No Harm, established in April 2022, has rapidly gained recognition and made significant strides in its mission to safeguard healthcare from ideological threats. It has over 50,000 members, including doctors, nurses, physicians, and concerned citizens across all 50 states and 26 countries.

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The Chloe Cole Act Rolls On

The Chloe Cole Act of 2026 has cleared an important legislative hurdle and is one step closer to becoming law. Americans eager to protect children from transgender ideology should celebrate.

Introduced by Rep. Bob Onder (R-Wis.) and co-sponsored by 86 other House Republicans, H.R. 7651 establishes a private right of action enabling children, parents, or guardians to sue providers of transgender surgeries or other interventions that were performed on minors.

The bill cleared the House Judiciary Committee on a party-line vote last Wednesday and now heads to the House Rules Committee, the last step before consideration by the full House.

In a statement released by the Independent Women’s Forum, Rep. Onder expressed his dismay “that politics and ideology have been allowed to override sound medical judgment, leaving vulnerable children to undergo irreversible procedures without a comprehensive psychological evaluation, treatment of underlying mental health conditions, or truly informed parental consent.”

The Chloe Cole Act, he continued, “would allow families to hold clinics and hospitals accountable and ensure victims have adequate time to seek justice.”

Do No Harm agrees. In his own statement, Chief Medical Officer Kurt Miceli, MD, noted that “[p]assing The Chloe Cole Act will not only establish a strong deterrent against sex‑rejecting procedures in minors by exposing harmful actors to real legal accountability but also mark a meaningful step toward justice for those harmed by the child sex‑change industry.”

H.R. 7651 is an attempt to implement at the federal level what a number states have already done. Among the states that have passed into law a similar private right of action are Arkansas, Iowa, Indiana, Kentucky, Louisiana, Missouri, Mississippi, North Carolina, Nebraska, Oklahoma, and Tennessee. Montana’s law creating one has been blocked by its state Supreme Court.

Though these piecemeal efforts are welcome, they create a two-tiered system in which red-state children are protected from ideological manipulation concerning “gender,” while blue-state children are not.

The Chloe Cole Act is an attempt to remedy this situation, because all children deserve these protections regardless of where they live, and minors who have been harmed need justice.

What is the Act’s likely legislative future? Regrettably, the House Judiciary Committee advanced the bill on a party-line vote, with no Democrats voting in support of the measure. The bill has no Democratic cosponsors. No Democratic senators have spoken in favor of the Act, and one struggles to imagine that 60 votes will be found to achieve Senate cloture, even if the House passes the bill successfully.

Nevertheless, the effort is worthy and essential. Opponents of sex-rejecting procedures for minors need allies wherever we can find them. The American litigation system could be an effective one, and this Act would open it up to all children and their families.

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Gender Madness at the American Society of Pediatric Hematology/Oncology

The American Society of Pediatric Hematology/Oncology (ASPHO) describes its annual gathering as the “leading education conference” in its field. That makes the society’s commitment to leftist race and gender orthodoxies all the more troubling.

Scheduled for May 11–14, 2027, ASPHO’s next conference will feature “educational/scientific workshops” comprising “interactive, problem-solving discussions, debates, or cases.”

Conference organizers urge workshop proposers to “seek speakers from a diverse group of faculty,” considering not only the “institution size” and “career level” of prospective panelists but their “gender” and “race/ethnicity,” as well.

Although this policy represents a lamentable emphasis on identity categories rather than scientific merit, it is par for the course given the woke-era politicization of medicine. What is less predictable — and at least as troubling — is the “previously accepted, well-received workshop proposal” offered as a sample to attendees.

That proposal, titled “Hematology Consults in Transgender Medicine,” notes that many of the “10% of high school students [who] identify as gender non-congruent … are transgender,” a state of affairs that leads “to an increased use of medications with potentially serious hematologic adverse effects (thrombosis, erythrocytosis, etc.).”

According to the proposal, hematologists “are being asked to provide consultation to the transgender community regarding critical management questions” and should know “how to mitigate the risks of such treatments.”

This is precisely the opposite of how medical care should work. Yes, practitioners should be aware of the side-effects of the interventions they propose, but “risk mitigation” makes no sense given the very low certainty that pediatric transgender medicine offers meaningful psychological or quality-of-life benefits at all.

If, as a 2021 medical study showed, “data indicat[e] higher rates of venous thromboembolism (VTE) and ischemic stroke (IS) among [biologically male] participants receiving [hormone therapy],” then that is an argument against prescribing estrogen to high-school boys. It is not an argument for “mitigat[ing] the risks” of such “treatment.”

Similarly, if, as another 2021 medical study found, “[e]rythrocytosis occurs in trans men using testosterone,” then the role of physicians should be to prevent that outcome in children, not to manage it.

Sadly, ASPHO’s sample proposal is more concerned with “appropriate terminology” than with preventing harm to gender-dysphoric children and adolescents in the first place. Of the proposal’s three “learning outcomes,” two concern the language used by hematologists (e.g., “the new gender-neutral hemophilia nomenclature”).

These confused values are as unsurprising as they are disappointing.

According to the organization’s “Diversity, Equity, & Inclusion at ASPHO” page, DEI is “infused into the Society” through a diversity advisory group and regular diversity-themed webinars and “eNews” statements.

The same page offers a link to the debunked “Implicit Association Test” beloved by activist progressives.

Even an entirely legitimate and beneficial medical pursuit is framed using “antiracist” terminology: “We Must Support Black Lives to Improve Sickle Cell Disease Care.”

In short, ASPHO’s medical expertise appears increasingly to be giving way to leftist ideology. That is bad news for pediatric hematology/oncology patients, as well as for the broader medical and scientific establishments.

Like all Americans, physicians have every right to their individual political beliefs. When entire medical societies allow politics to corrupt their work, however, we are all in trouble.

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At the University of Chicago’s Pritzker School of Medicine, Mixed Signals on ‘Inclusion’

What happens when a DEI committee co-opts the language of the right while otherwise maintaining a standard-issue leftist perspective? The University of Chicago’s Pritzker School of Medicine seems to be running that experiment.

Pritzker’s Identity and Inclusion (i2i) Committee is not to be confused with its Health Equity, Diversity, and Inclusion office, a separate administrative unit straightforwardly dedicated to the principles of DEI.

Rather, i2i is a steering committee comprising faculty and staff members, student “affinity group” representatives, and members of the “student governance, wellness, and curriculum committee[s].” The body is “responsible for providing ongoing direction for programs and/or curricula at Pritzker that support an inclusive learning environment and promote respectful and effective communication with diverse patients and colleagues.”

One sees right away the tension baked into i2i’s mission. “Respectful and effective communication” is an obvious good in the realm of medical education. An “inclusive learning environment,” conversely, is too often a stalking horse for unscientific and discriminatory DEI initiatives.

Closer examination of i2i’s activities produces further confusion. The committee develops “civil discourse” resources, in which “diversity of thought … [is] valued.”

It arranges “civil discourse events,” a move that calls to mind much-lauded initiatives by education reformers to break the progressive stranglehold on campus speech.

Yet this encouraging language is surrounded on i2i’s website with ideas that wouldn’t be out of place in the farthest-left DEI bodies in America.

The committee “[e]nhanc[es] cultural competency training during Free Clinic Orientation.”

It provides “[t]raining in bias and identity issues that affect patients during the Clinical Skills course sequence.”

It “[i]dentif[ies] speakers to give foundational lectures on the nature of self and identity.”

It conducts an “annual student-led climate survey” and hosts an “all-school town hall to review the survey results.”

These are poor initiatives, proceeding directly from the same DEI mindset that produces racially discriminatory hiring and recruiting policies and identity politics in the classroom.

Trainings in “cultural competency,” for example, risk reducing patients to demographic labels, treating identity as a clinical shorthand instead of engaging with the complexity of patients’ individual histories, preferences, and beliefs.

Similarly, training in “bias” often presumes that clinician prejudice — implicit or otherwise — is the primary cause of any noted disparity, downplaying or even ignoring factors such as patient behavior, cultural practices, genetic variation, etc.

“Lectures on the nature of self and identity” belong in the philosophy classroom, not the medical school.

So-called climate surveys seem harmless enough until one recalls Texas A&M’s infamous (and disastrous) attempt to “fix” its own climate “problems.” To the extent that the disease existed in the first place, it was far less unpleasant than the cure.

Pritzker should go out of its way to avoid similar trouble. Indeed, its i2i committee’s pronouncements on civil discourse suggest that at least some reasonable notions have support on campus.

A word to the wise, however: DEI ideologies and civil discourse cannot coexist forever. An institutional commitment to the former soon makes the latter impossible.

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Do No Harm Supports the Chloe Cole Act

Statement by Dr. Kurt Miceli, Chief Medical Officer at Do No Harm, in support of the Chloe Cole Act:

I applaud the elected officials who are fighting for The Chloe Cole Act, which establishes a private right of action for individuals who were harmed as vulnerable children by the sex‑change industry. For too long the scandal of sex‑rejecting procedures on minors has proliferated to an alarming degree through misinformation and pseudoscience. These interventions carry significant risks, cause great harms, and often do irreversible damage. Passing The Chloe Cole Act will not only establish a strong deterrent against sex‑rejecting procedures in minors by exposing harmful actors to real legal accountability but also mark a meaningful step toward justice for those harmed by the child sex‑change industry.

Do No Harm, established in April 2022, has rapidly gained recognition and made significant strides in its mission to safeguard healthcare from ideological threats. It has over 50,000 members, including doctors, nurses, physicians, and concerned citizens across all 50 states and 26 countries.

Please view Dr. Miceli’s formal statement here and below.

Chloe Cole Act Statement (Final)
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Do No Harm Files OMB Comment on Federal Funding of Chemical and Surgical Mutilation of Children

Two days ago, Do No Harm answered the Office of Management and Budget’s (OMB) request for comment on a proposed rule to ensure that federal funding does not support the chemical and surgical mutilation of children under 19 years of age.

Specifically, OMB proposes requiring federal agencies or pass-through entities to verify that government funds are not supporting “the so-called ‘transition’” of minors.

Do No Harm fully supports this effort.

To begin with, scientific evidence does not validate the procedures in question, which can include the use of puberty blockers, cross-sex hormones, and invasive surgeries that attempt to physically reject a child’s biological sex.

Furthermore, and consequently, funding these procedures contradicts the government’s commitment to support science-based medicine. Sex-rejecting procedures for minors are ideological, not scientific.

Finally, by directing agencies and recipients — unless expressly required by law — not to use federal awards to support “disparate-impact” studies, litigation, or related activities, the proposed rule reasonably seeks to prevent federal funding from creating race-conscious incentives in medicine. Do No Harm strongly supports this prohibition.

Please read the full comment here or below.

DNH OMB Rule Comment PDF
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Do No Harm Report Exposes Rise in Woke and Weak Research by Medical Students

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Salt Lake City, UT: July 14, 2026 – Today, Do No Harm released a report that exposes how low-quality medical student–authored research has increased over the last two decades, corresponding with medical schools’ elimination of letter grades. The report concludes that the increased volume of studies authored or co-authored by students is driven by their desire to pad their résumés in the absence of other academic distinctions. Moreover, the student research in question is disproportionately focused on politicized topics.

The report, titled “Why Johnny Can’t Stop Writing: The Boom in Low-Impact, Politicized Medical-Student Research,” conducts an advanced search through the medical-journal database PubMed to identify publications authored by medical students and, separately, those that use politicized terms such as “equity,” “justice,” “racism,” and “diversity.”

“Without the use of the letter-grade system, students are searching for other ways to stand out for fellowships and residency programs, which has inevitably led to an arms race in publications authored by medical students,” said Jay Greene, PhD, Director of Research at Do No Harm. “To compound the problem, quantity is incentivized over quality — leading to shoddy research and focus on politicized topics. Our report reveals the many factors responsible for the degradation of the research enterprise and offers proposed solutions to correct course. By returning to objective letter grading, schools would incentivize students to focus on mastering their skill set in the clinical space rather than fluffing their résumés with baseless research endeavors.”

Click here to read the full report.

The report also conducts a thorough analysis of two competing studies. The first, by Hausner et al., concludes that medical research grew in both volume and quality between 2003 and 2023. The second, by Elliott et al., finds that the rise in student-authored articles led to a notable decline in quality. Do No Harm’s analysis concludes that the Hausner study excluded 72 percent of medical-student publications in its analysis, distorting its findings, In addition, the primary metric used in the Hausner study, Relative Citation Ratio (RCR), is an unreliable indicator of article quality.

The report cites several examples of low-quality and politicized research, calls for medical students to redirect their time and energy toward excelling in coursework and acquiring the knowledge needed to be excellent physicians, and furthers Do No Harm’s larger mission to depoliticize medical research and recenter medical education on rigor and skill.

Do No Harm, established in April 2022, has rapidly gained recognition and made significant strides in its mission to safeguard healthcare from ideological threats. It has over 50,000 members, including doctors, nurses, physicians, and concerned citizens across all 50 states and 26 countries.

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Do No Harm Files FDA Comment on ‘Sex’ Versus ‘Gender’

Last week, Do No Harm submitted to the U.S. Food and Drug Administration a comment in support of a proposed rule replacing “gender” with “sex” — or removing “gender” altogether — throughout Title 21 of the Code of Federal Regulations.

The proposed change follows the directive of Executive Order 14168, “Defending Women From Gender Ideology Extremism and Restoring Biological Truth to the Federal Government,” issued on January 20, 2025.

It also aligns with scientific evidence.

Per the executive order: “[E]very agency … shall use the term ‘sex’ and not ‘gender’ in all applicable Federal policies and documents.”

This is important because sex (not “gender”) is a primary variable that affects pharmacokinetics — i.e., the movement of drugs through the body. Clinical studies, prescription labeling, and adverse-event reporting can all be compromised when differences between the two sexes — men and women — are improperly indicated or not taken into account.

At stake here is women’s health. The safety and efficacy of medical treatments should not be sacrificed in furtherance of gender ideologies.

Please read the full comment here or below.

DNH - FDA Comment vf2
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SUNY Medical Schools Have Embraced DEI. Blame SUNY.

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Included among the State University of New York’s (SUNY) constituent institutions are four medical schools. All four express a commitment to wokeness in the form of DEI.

  • At Stony Brook University’s Renaissance School of Medicine, administrators make this allegiance clear in the form of a mission statement: “We are committed to recruiting and training diverse students, clinicians and physician-scientists in biomedical sciences.”
  • At SUNY Upstate Medical University, site visitors learn that among the institution’s “Values” is a pledge “to embrace diversity and inclusion.”
  • At the University of Buffalo’s Jacobs School of Medicine and Biomedical Sciences, professional planning is done in part by those “dedicated to community engagement, diversity, equity and inclusion.”
  • And at SUNY Downstate Health Sciences University, the mission statement includes a promise “[t]o foster an environment that embraces cultural diversity.”

At best, these gestures are vogue frivolities — concessions to an activist class that demands ideological tribute from public institutions.

At worst, they are actively harmful, leading to discrimination in favor of some people and against others in an attempt to address different outcomes among racial groups.

Yet attempts by reformers to address this behavior at SUNY’s medical schools will necessarily be an uphill battle. The reason? SUNY itself has been captured by ideological forces intent on the widespread introduction and defense of DEI.

The evidence is unignorable:

  • In 2020, the New York Association of Chief Academic Officers, a group comprising SUNY’s 64 campus academic leaders, released a formal statement in support of the Black Lives Matter movement and committed to “providing a structural and cultural campus experience of equity and inclusion.”
  • Among SUNY’s Academic Affairs offerings is the “Diversity, Equity, Inclusion, and Social Justice Fellows” (DEISJ) program, committed to “developing, sustaining, and growing a community of practice on diversity, equity, inclusion, and social justice curricular issues across the SUNY system.”
  • A DEISJ webinar series has included presentations on “Constructions of Class Identity and Power,” “Critical Disability Studies and Intersectional Ableism,” and “Developing DEISJ Content Across the Curriculum.”
  • The Empire State Diversity Honors Scholarship Program awards tuition funds to undergraduates who have “overcome a disadvantage” or who will “contribute to the diversity of the student body by demonstrating a commitment to facilitating and enhancing diversity, equity and inclusion efforts.”
  • SUNY’s “General Education Framework” mandates “Diversity: Equity, Inclusion, and Social Justice” instruction and asks students to “analyze the role that complex networks of social structures and systems play in the creation and perpetuation of the dynamics of power, privilege, oppression, and opportunity.”

Nor are things better at many of SUNY’s individual campuses:

  • At SUNY Broome, the President’s Task Force on Diversity & Inclusion “promote[s] equity and diversity” and “make[s] recommendations [about] … hiring processes, campus policies and protocols, training and professional development, campus events, and overall campus climate.”
  • Also at SUNY Broome: “All-gender restrooms provide equal access to public facilities for those regardless of gender identity or expression.” And: Unseemly racialist instruction abounds, including the claim that “It’s So Hard for White People to Talk About Racism.”

  • At the time of this writing, SUNY Erie Community College is hiring an employee-relations manager and chief diversity officer who will “elevate inclusiveness and implement best practices related to diversity, equity, and inclusion, particularly as it pertains to the recruitment and retention of students, faculty, administrators, and staff.”
  • Earlier this year, Binghampton University hosted an inaugural DEI Symposium, featuring “national and campus higher education professionals [and] highlighting the importance of diversity, equity and inclusion efforts.”

This is one of the ways in which activists perpetuate DEI ideology. By gaining a foothold both at the senior administrative level of SUNY and in the individual SUNY campuses, bad actors make it next to impossible for dissenting administrators and campuses to resist (assuming any such individuals or institutions exist).

In other words, a SUNY medical school that wished to dispense with unscientific DEI frippery would be swimming upstream. All the momentum is going in the other direction.

To be clear, this doesn’t mean that reformers’ task is hopeless. But it does mean that we have a long road ahead of us.

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North Carolina’s New Medical School Is Already Woke

Methodist University’s new Cape Fear Valley Health School of Medicine has recruited its inaugural class of students and will begin instruction later this month. Unfortunately, the budding institution appears to have laid a foundation of DEI.

Located in Fayetteville in south-central North Carolina, Methodist’s new School of Medicine was created in part to address a physician shortage east of the state-bisecting Interstate 95. As such, one might expect (and indeed one finds) an emphasis on the healthcare needs of a particular set of people in the institution’s materials.

Methodist SOM’s job page, for example, cites its “clear mission to prepare graduates who are … community-engaged.”

The institution’s “Mission, Vision & Values” page specifically notes that, “[i]n non-metropolitan counties in North Carolina, growth in physicians-per-capita has been slow” and that “[t]he University’s … medical school will be perfectly positioned to address this deficiency.”

The new school intends to prepare graduates “who will contribute to … improving health outcomes … wherever they may practice.” Nevertheless, “southeastern North Carolina” receives a particular nod.

None of this is undesirable. Regional physician shortages are real, and a medical school created to address that gap has every right to hold to a community-focused mission.

The problem occurs when an appropriate regional focus gives way to inappropriate DEI ideology.

That is already happening at Methodist SOM. The previously cited job page, for instance, mentions not only “community-engaged” graduates but graduates who are “focused on equity.”

The page boasts of Methodist SOM’s “Diversity & Inclusion Initiatives,” noting its “targeted recruitment and retention efforts aimed at ensuring a diverse faculty and student body.”

Over on the “Mission, Vision & Values” page, site visitors learn that graduates should be “equity-focused physician leaders who will contribute to mitigating health disparities.”

Because the institution intends to “educate a diverse population,” it lists among its “Values” a desire for “Inclusive Belonging.”

One might reasonably ask what any of this has to do with medical science. Indeed, like most of the doctrines of the “Diversity, Equity, and Inclusion” movement, this thinking has at its core the assumption that “systemic” forces have created racist outcomes that only social engineering can address.

If that proposition is true, then DEI advocates should produce the evidence. That they are unable to do so reveals much about the ideological (rather than scientific) nature of their claims.

Nevertheless, Methodist’s new medical school appears to be constructing a DEI apparatus that may already be affecting hiring and admissions. Regarding the latter, consider the words of Hershey Bell, MD, the institution’s dean: “What stood out” as Methodist SOM measured applicants “was not just academic excellence, but alignment with our mission.”

It may well be the case that south-central and southeastern North Carolina need a medical school. But they don’t need a woke one.

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A Victory for Science and Fairness in Women’s Sports

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On June 30, the Supreme Court ruled in West Virginia v. B.P.J. and Little v. Hecox that neither Title IX nor the Equal Protection Clause prevent states from providing separate men’s and women’s sports teams on the basis of biological sex. Notably, since approximately 2020, 27 states have enacted legislation to maintain female sports for biological females. The judgment is a victory for common sense.

The consolidated cases were brought by male athletes who wished to compete on female sports teams on the basis of their transgender identification. At issue was whether state laws in West Virginia and Idaho that prevent such an outcome discriminate on the basis of sex in violation of federal civil-rights laws and the Constitution.

In a unanimous 9–0 ruling, the Court declared that the states’ laws enacting sex-separated athletics are indeed consistent with, and do not violate, Title IX. Delivering the opinion, Justice Brett Kavanaugh confirmed that “Title IX’s implementing regulations expressly permit schools to maintain separate teams for ‘members of each sex’” and that “the term ‘sex’ in Title IX cannot plausibly be interpreted to refer to anything other than biological sex.”

Moreover, on the constitutional question, the Court held 6–3 that sex-based classifications advancing safety and competitive fairness for biological women and girls are constitutionally sufficient interests such that states “d[o] not violate the Equal Protection Clause of the Fourteenth Amendment by maintaining female sports teams for biological females.”

This ruling comports with amicus briefs filed by Do No Harm. In our briefs in support of West Virginia and Idaho governor Bradley Little (R), we argued that sex and gender identity are fundamentally distinct and that altering the latter has no bearing on the former. (“Scientific facts do not change with the shifting winds of cultural ideology: An individual’s gender identity does not alter his or her sex.”)

We argued further that the lower court decisions in these cases “reflexively assumed that using puberty blockers and cross-sex hormones to treat gender dysphoria is beyond debate” and had effectively “eviscerat[ed] the entire idea of boys’ and girls’ sports teams.”

As Justice Thomas echoed in his concurring opinion: “Men and boys with gender dysphoria are not women or girls, even if they believe that they are. Sex is an immutable ‘biological’ characteristic; it is binary; and ‘man’ and ‘woman,’ ‘boy’ and ‘girl,’ are the terms that correspond to adults and children of each sex.”

Likewise, the Court specifically noted that even if the premise advanced by the transgender athletes were true — “that at least some biological males who identify as female and take puberty blockers or hormones do not retain physical advantages over biological females” — states would nevertheless be constitutionally justified in maintaining sex-separated sports teams on the basis of the important interests in advancing safety and competitive fairness for the female sex.

Importantly, the Court also noted that the issue of whether or to what extent differences are retained following the administration of puberty blockers or hormones is not a decided question and “is the subject of ongoing medical and scientific debate.” Courts should not take it for granted.

Do No Harm welcomes the Court’s straightforward reasoning and ruling. Yet we also look forward to the inevitable next question, helpfully previewed by a footnote in Justice Kavanaugh’s opinion:

As the plaintiffs, the States, and the United States as amicus curiae all agree, these cases do not present the distinct question of whether, under Title IX and the Equal Protection Clause, schools may allow biological males who identify as female to participate on girls’ and women’s sports teams. That question is currently the subject of litigation in some lower courts. Nothing in this opinion is intended to decide that question.

The Court is, of course, correct. Having now confirmed that Title IX and the Constitution permit states to protect women’s sports from unfair and unsafe incursions by male athletes, courts will have to decide next whether states must do so.

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Another DEI Office Name Change at the University of Arizona College of Medicine-Tucson

In 2024, the Office of Diversity, Equity & Inclusion at the University of Arizona College of Medicine-Tucson (UACOM-T) was rebranded the Office of Access, Community & Belonging.

Since then, the administrative unit has been renamed the Office of Community Engagement & Partnerships.

We look forward to whatever it may be called next.

There is reason for our suspicion that UACOM-T is merely abandoning politically troublesome terminology. To begin with, and as Do No Harm has previously noted, the DEI office’s first name change was largely cosmetic.

While UACOM-T scrubbed several DEI resources from its website during the unit’s first evolution, the pages of the DEI office and the Access, Community & Belonging office contained numerous similarities.

Importantly, both offices were run by the same administrative official, Celina Valenzuela, MD.

Dr. Valenzuela remains the head of the new Office of Community Engagement & Partnerships and retains her title of “vice dean.” In a greeting posted on the office’s first two homepages, she professed that “Inclusive Excellence is fundamental to the advancement of science” and pledged support for “the active recruitment, training, and retention of a medical and research workforce that reflects the demographics of Arizona.”

These DEI-informed attitudes remain despite the office’s second name change. Indeed, they are all over the Office of Community Engagement & Partnership’s online home.

Among the first examples one notices is the new office’s “Land Acknowledgement,” unchanged since its days as the Office of Access, Community & Belonging.

The new office still offers a “Pathways to Success” program for high schoolers, composed, in part, of an event series in which “speakers highlight the importance of … representation and diversity in health care.”

The new office continues to brag that Pathways to Success “[p]rovides students from under-resourced backgrounds with a unique opportunity to explore careers in medicine,” “[e]ncourages [d]iversity in [m]edicine,” and “promote[s] long-term inclusivity.”

Tellingly, the Pathways to Success program is “particularly” for high-school juniors and seniors “[f]rom historically under-resourced communities,” a term of art that makes clear the office’s preference for applicants of certain races and ethnicities.

In its outreach to current medical students, the renamed Office of Community Engagement & Partnerships is similarly committed to the principles of DEI.

Among its sponsored organizations is a Student Council on Community Engagement, which “[p]romote[s] community-responsive care in the curriculum” and “[s]upport[s] [the] recruitment and retention of mission-aligned faculty/staff.”

“Community-responsive care,” while seemingly harmless, brings to mind the activist obsession with “social determinants of health” and the prioritization of “systemic” rather than behavioral threats to patient well-being. “Mission-aligned” thinking in hiring and admissions, meanwhile, is, in many cases, a workaround for decisionmaking based on race.

Also, why is a student-led group so intimately involved with curricular design and faculty recruitment practices? Wouldn’t those be the domain of the institution’s academic leadership and faculty — those entrusted with maintaining professional standards and stewarding the long‑term integrity of the program?

Perhaps most troublingly, through the new Office of Community Engagement & Partnerships, student groups may apply for funding for “student-led workshops or trainings on … advocacy [or] health equity.” While there is obviously nothing wrong with students forming campus groups, should a taxpayer-funded public medical school help pay for advocacy training?

This is the same DEI music sung to the same DEI tune. Only the name of the song has changed.

Yes, UACOM-T has once again renamed its diversity office. But the work goes on.

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Yale’s School of Public Health Is Training Activists, Not Experts

Earlier this month, we lamented the UC Berkeley School of Public Health’s reliance on woke buzzwords and abstractions. A glance at the Yale School of Public Health’s “U.S. Health Justice Concentration” reveals that the problem goes from coast to coast.

Yale SPH introduces its program of study with a number of evidence-free claims:

“Vast, persistent and avoidable health inequalities by race, geography, class, gender identity and sexual orientation are well documented.”

“[S]ystems and processes … perpetuate health injustice in the United States.”

“[P]ast and present systems of privilege and power, related to race, class, gender, sexual orientation and other identities, create unequal burdens on health that are avoidable and unjust.”

There is a kernel of truth in some of these assertions, especially the contention that past racism (e.g., before and during the Civil Rights Era) previously affected health outcomes.

Yet the broader implication — that today’s health “inequalities” are exclusively or primarily the result of oppressive “systems” — begins by disregarding the role that individual behavior plays in patient health.

To name only the most obvious example, smoking, which dramatically increases one’s risk of lung cancer and cardiovascular disease, is not “systemic”; it is personal.

This medical reality seems to be lost on Yale SPH’s curriculum designers. Students pursuing a U.S. Health Justice Concentration must take “SBS 590 Advocacy and Activism,” a course in which they are taught “the theoretical frameworks and the practical applications of community organizing and advocacy as a means of subverting traditional systems of power.”

Among the academic offerings from which they may choose are “SBS 592 Biomedical Justice: Public Health Critiques and Praxis” and “SBS 593 Community-based Participatory Research in Public Health,” classes in which students “analyze and critique public health methodology, discourse, and practice from a health justice framework” and consider “an effective strategy to understanding and addressing health disparities in public health and ultimately achieving health equity,” respectively.

In other words, Yale SPH is interested in producing not public-health experts but professional activists. This is a serious mistake. “Subverting traditional systems of power” may align with ideological goals, but it will do nothing to address the next pandemic.

Things get even worse as one moves down the concentration’s page. Students must take one course that “critically analyzes the roles of history, power and privilege in creating and maintaining health inequities.”

They must take another that “discusses how systems of government and law affect health equity at the local, state, and national level.”

Again, the focus here is on ideological assumptions and agitation. (“EMD 582 Political Epidemiology” is a particularly brazen offender.) Students interested in the fundamentals of public health will need to search outside of this concentration.

Indeed, a look at the U.S. Health Justice Concentration’s student “competencies” list suggests that actual public-health instruction is far from Yale SPH’s mind. Much is made therein of “community organizing,” “power, privilege, and history,” “critical justice,” and “positionality, subjectivity, power and privilege.” Little is made of how diseases spread or how populations adopt healthy behaviors.

As at UC Berkeley, this move away from science and toward political advocacy will please students who see public health as a means to ideological ends. But it may have real health consequences for the rest of us.

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Woke Assumptions at the AMA Hinder Doctor-Patient ‘Trust’

Wokeness in medicine will have ended when its explicit gestures and its implicit values and assumptions disappear. A high-level speech at the AMA’s 2026 Annual Meeting of the House of Delegates reveals how far we are from that goal.

The address in question, by incoming AMA president Willie Underwood III, MD, was at times inspiring. Recalling a defining childhood encounter, Underwood evoked a scene half a century old in which an aunt set him on the path of achievement.

“Willie,” Underwood remembered his aunt saying, “we need a doctor and a lawyer in the family. Your cousin is going to be the lawyer. What does that make you?”

One would need a heart of stone to be unmoved by this optimism and ambition. Yet that is, in part, why other elements of Underwood’s speech were so disappointing.

Looking behind him toward a row of past AMA presidents, Underwood declared that “[t]hey represent historic firsts for the AMA, across race, orientation and gender.”

“Their leadership,” Underwood continued, “represents … the responsibility of this profession.”

This is discouraging thinking. The men and women whom Underwood named — Nancy Dickey, Robert Wah, Patrice Harris, Jesse Ehrenfeld, and Bobby Mukkamala — are exceptionally accomplished individuals, whatever one thinks of their politics. To note only their “race, orientation and gender,” as Underwood did, is to celebrate identity rather than achievement.

Such an ideology has no place in a field where merit must reign.

Neither, for that matter, do Underwood’s recourses to woke clichés:

“[T]he cracks in our health system are … structural failures affecting lives every single day.”

“[O]utcomes are determined more by ZIP code than diagnosis.”

“These are lived realities that I understand as a physician and as a patient.”

“That is why conversations about health equity matter.”

None of these remarks is likely to compromise patient care. But they nevertheless represent a way of thinking that is political and ideological.

Allowed to become habits of mind, these assumptions compromise the institutional integrity of the AMA and its commitment to the “science of medicine.”

Here, in a nutshell, is why the intrusion of leftist political thought into medicine matters. Physicians ought to treat patients as unique individuals rather than representatives of identity groups, pursue objective scientific truth without deference to political narratives, and defend the profession’s commitment to merit, evidence, and excellence against ideological capture.

Doing otherwise jeopardizes patient confidence in the profession. As outgoing AMA president Bobby Mukkamala rightly noted in his own address, “When trust is weakened, every diagnosis becomes harder, every treatment more difficult, and every patient is put at greater risk.”

This is all the more reason to reject the politicization of medicine and recommit the profession to the pursuit of truth over political narratives.

The relationship between Americans and the medical establishment will fully heal only when physicians with public platforms cease to pepper their speech with woke platitudes and presumptions. That hasn’t yet happened.

Trust your doctor? We’d like to. But we’re going to need some help.

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The University of Buffalo Is Teaching Student Dentists DEI

First-year dental students at the University of Buffalo must attend a virtual DEI orientation before arriving on campus. But doctor, I just have a toothache!

The university’s School of Dental Medicine (UBSDM) is “committed to exploring, understanding, and responding to systemic inequities that impact oral health outcomes,” according to its online materials.

As such, UBSDM demands that graduates be “competent in managing a diverse patient population” and have the skills necessary to “function successfully in a multicultural work environment.”

These are not outrageous goals. Working dentists will encounter patients of many different ethnicities, and many dental practices will bring together racially diverse teams.

The problem arises when the practical skill of treating others with respect gives way to the ideological project of what UBSDM calls “equity, diversity and inclusion.”

Put the terms in whatever order you like; DEI remains an extraordinarily politicized framework designed to push a leftist agenda into public and private life.

The evidence is all over UBSDM’s “D1 Orientation to Equity, Diversity and Inclusion” page.

As the orientation commences, students “shar[e]” their “pronouns” before “investigat[ing] structural marginalization as a public health problem that impacts all of us.”

They consider “our collective responsibility to build inclusive communities.”

They “construct and recommend policies and practices we can collectively take to strengthen our commitment to equity, diversity and inclusion.”

Imagine for a moment the situation of a student who has entered dental school with the intention of learning the clinical practice of dentistry and who wishes for none of the ideological indoctrination. Is such a student likely to feel supported when noting that discussions of “structural marginalization” and “collective responsibility” properly belong in philosophy or social‑science classrooms rather than in dental education — that these topics bear no substantive connection to the practical work of improving oral health?

Perhaps such a student would indeed be made to feel the sense of “belonging” that DEI types prize. But we doubt it. At the very least, a student with that belief would likely be swimming against the tide of established opinion.

Consider, for example, the “Selections of Students’ Reflections” with which UBSDM staff have seen fit to adorn their page.

In “Silence is complicit,” a short student poem produced during a previous orientation session, the author describes “[s]ilence that is deafening” and asserts that “[c]hange cannot be brought by silence.”

Another student work, “Roots,” borrows elements of traditional poetic meter to praise DEI:

We all derive from different roots, and It’s
what makes up you and I. We work efficiently
and successfully as a team when we establish
DEI.

Still another, “An Antiracist Dentist,” begins, “I made a commitment to serve the community / not just by ensuring oral health for all / but by understanding true humanity.”

This is bad poetry. Far more importantly, it is a waste of time for tomorrow’s dentists, all of whom need clear, precise, technical training if our children’s teeth are to be cleaned, their cavities filled, and their enamel strengthened.

Doctor, I have a toothache. Is UBSDM producing dentists who can help me?

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Do No Harm Report Addresses the Concerning Rise of ‘Social Determinants of Health’ Ideology in Medical Literature

SALT LAKE CITY, UT: June 24, 2026 – Today, Do No Harm released a report that documents the marked increase in the use of “social determinants of health” (SDOH) ideology and language in medical literature over the last decade. The report raises concerns that, as the volume of medical articles mentioning SDOH increases and the factors discussed under its umbrella expand, the term risks introducing harmful ideologies into the practice of healthcare.

The report, titled “The Expanding Scope of Social Determinants of Health,” reviews articles published in the past decade from some of the most prominent medical journals, including the BMJ, the Lancet, JAMA, the New England Journal of Medicine, and Nature Medicine. The analysis finds that the annual number of SDOH-related articles more than tripled over the last 10 years, that references to race or racism as social determinants of health have surged, and that healthcare is increasingly becoming shaped by radical forces outside the clinic itself.

“The expansion of the social determinants of health framework is a serious cause for concern,” said Ian Kingsbury, Sr. Director of Do No Harm’s Center for Accountability in Medicine. “Introducing new areas outside a physician’s scope is a tool to advance a leftist political ideology rather than allowing providers to focus on high-quality patient care. As the concept of SDOH becomes overly inclusive and addresses complex social and economic issues, we increasingly burden physicians with solving problems far outside their clinical expertise. Do No Harm is committed to ensuring the medical field is not influenced by political agendas and remains focused on recruiting and educating excellent healthcare professionals who can deliver top-tier care.”

Click here to read the full report.

The report’s analysis, done by DNH senior fellow Jason Bedrick, captures the heightened focus on race, racism, and discrimination in medicine today, as well as the increasing tendency of medical articles to devote time and attention to a wide range of policy areas that go beyond their medical expertise.

Do No Harm has commented previously on the flaws of SDOH ideology and has asserted that it is not the role of medical professionals to have a comprehensive understanding of ideological issues or to serve as civic reformers. Simply put, doctors are not public-policy experts and should not behave as such in the medical literature.

Do No Harm, established in April 2022, has rapidly gained recognition and made significant strides in its mission to safeguard healthcare from ideological threats. It has over 50,000 members, including doctors, nurses, physicians, and concerned citizens across all 50 states and 14 countries.

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WPATH Deserves It

Last week, the Federal Trade Commission (FTC) announced a lawsuit against the World Professional Association for Transgender Health (WPATH). The association richly deserves this comeuppance.

The FTC alleges that WPATH “has provided the means for medical providers to make false and unsubstantiated claims to parents in order to sell pediatric medical transition services.”

In plain English, WPATH’s member clinicians have long profited from so-called gender-affirming care for minors, and the association is now accused of misrepresenting the science behind that “care” to keep the dollars flowing.

To begin with, WPATH has spent recent decades positioning itself as the preeminent authority on gender medicine.

In a March 2023 statement, for example, the association referred to the current eighth edition of its “Standards of Care for the Health of Transgender and Gender Diverse People” (SOC-8) as “the foremost evidence-based guideline for the provision of [transgender and gender diverse] healthcare.”

That document, WPATH continued, “is based on the best available science with input from over 100 global medical professionals and experts and represents best-practice guidelines for the provision of gender-affirming healthcare.”

As a result, in part, of this institutional self-aggrandizement, WPATH’s recommendations have been widely adopted by insurers, hospitals, and regulators. Clinicians rely on WPATH’s representations when diagnosing children.

In the U.S. at least, it is not too much to say that pediatric gender medicine is WPATH, and WPATH is pediatric gender medicine.

Were the association an honest broker, we might merely lament its grievous ideological misjudgments. Yet, according to the FTC, WPATH has knowingly made false and unsubstantiated claims about the medical necessity, effectiveness, and safety of sex-denying interventions for minors.

Specifically, the FTC alleges that “[t]he methodology WPATH used to create SOC-8 does not satisfy accepted medical standards of evidence.” In creating its document, WPATH “selected authors who had conflicts of interest” and “made material changes to its recommendations in response to external pressure rather than scientific evidence.”

These are not the allegations of the federal government alone. The New York Times reported only last year that “[i]n fending off attacks on gender-affirming care … WPATH had itself allowed politics to dictate some of its recommendations.”

Moreover, the FTC’s complaint contends, WPATH “misrepresented the quality of evidence underlying its guidelines.” In a 2023 memo to his colleagues, Eli Coleman, MD, chairman of the SOC-8 team, confessed, “[a]ll of us are painfully aware that there are many gaps in [the] research to back up our recommendations.” Nevertheless, those recommendation went forward unamended.

Perhaps most damagingly, WPATH has made unsupportable claims about the juvenile sex-denying interventions from which its member clinicians profited.

According to the FTC, “WPATH represents … that … transition services are medically necessary and effective at preventing suicide in children[;] that puberty blockers are fully reversible[;] that cross-sex hormones improve mental health[;] and that breast amputations are safe, effective, and consistently and directly increase children’s health-related quality of life.”

These claims are false.

As Do No Harm has previously demonstrated, the myth that “sex-change” interventions reduce the risk of suicide is completely unsupported by the evidence.

Experts from the Mayo Clinic have cast doubt on the reversibility of puberty blockers, and the removal of healthy breast tissue through so-called top surgery “creates permanent and disfiguring changes.”

Studies professing to show mental-health improvements for minors who receive cross-sex hormones and other sex-denying interventions are deeply flawed.

Given the known realities of child “gender-affirming care,” it is difficult to see WPATH’s recommendations as anything other than ideologically (or financially) driven.

That’s bad medicine and an abuse of patients’ trust.

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The UC Berkeley School of Public Health Should Stay in Its Lane

Someone throw a life preserver. The UC Berkeley School of Public Health is drowning in woke buzzwords and abstractions.

The problem begins on the school’s landing page. There, site visitors encounter not only such leftist preoccupations as “climate change” and “social inequity” but a misappropriated Martin Luther King, Jr., line manipulated to fit the school’s woke mission.

Despite the fact that the line has become a political cliché in recent years, it is pleasant enough to believe that the “arc of the moral universe … bends toward justice,” as King argued in 1958, borrowing from the 19th-century abolitionist minister Theodore Parker. What is less likely is that it bends toward “health equity,” a concern, like climate change, with which schools of public health signal vogue progressivism rather than scientific seriousness.

A tour through the rest of the school’s website is equally troubling.

The school’s “Purpose,” according to its “Research and Practice” page, is to “conduct research that emphasizes the social determinants of health.”

Yet that theory of medicine, as Do No Harm has previously explained, “confuses social and economic conditions that correlate with poor health outcomes with the actual causes of those outcomes.” To give just one example, poverty may correlate with obesity, but it is obesity itself with which physicians and public-health officials ought to concern themselves, helping patients make lifestyle improvements or, in some cases, choose appropriate pharmacological or surgical interventions.

Elsewhere on the same page, the school improperly conflates a political dilemma with appropriate public-health concerns, implying, for example, that “global access to clean energy” lies within the public-health realm’s reasonable sphere of influence.

It doesn’t. Nor, for that matter, does “help[ing] Asian American men flourish” by giving them “pride in their cultural heritage,” however noble that goal might be.

Things are little better on the curricular side. Among the school’s offerings is a graduate certificate in racism, health, and social justice, the purpose of which is to “provide theoretical, methodological, and applied training at the intersection of public health inequities, racial justice, and social justice.”

Here as elsewhere on the site, the school argues that “social, economic, and political determinants … drive health inequalities and must be confronted to create a more equitable and just society.”

The problem with this line of thinking is that, to the extent these determinants exist, they are the proper remit of voters and our elected representatives, not public-health officials acting under the ostensibly neutral and objective auspices of science. Confusing the two “lanes” will only heighten the public’s distrust of the public-health establishment in the long run.

It is concerning that the UC Berkeley School of Public Health seems unable or unwilling to come to this conclusion.

Americans deserve better: public-health schools that aren’t floundering in the progressive mire.