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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.

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When Foxes Guard the Admissions Henhouse

The fox shouldn’t guard the henhouse. Athletes ought not to referee their own games. And a DEI official has no place on a medical-school admissions staff.

If only Kaiser Permanente’s Bernard J. Tyson School of Medicine (KPSOM) understood that final lesson.

According to the institution’s website, Lindia Willies-Jacobo, MD, currently serves as both senior associate dean for admissions and senior associate dean for inclusive excellence.

That combination should give supporters of merit-based admissions pause.

According to her introduction at a recent event hosted by the National Arab American Medical Association (NAAMA), Dr. Willies-Jacobo’s admissions title is not merely decorative. She actually “oversees the admissions process at KPSOM” (3:19).

Nor are the administrator’s DEI credentials inflated. As the KPSOM website indicates, Dr. Willies-Jacobo was previously assistant dean for diversity and community partnerships and director of the program in medical education-health equity at the UC San Diego School of Medicine for 10 years.

Her stated interests include “healthcare workforce diversity, cultural humility in the practice of medicine, advocacy for underserved populations, and combating health inequities.”

One can easily imagine how these DEI beliefs and admissions-office responsibilities might lead to ethical and legal conflicts in the post–Students for Fair Admissions landscape. To the extent that “healthcare workforce diversity” is the goal, then the admissions process could well become a means by which that target is struck.

This could mean elevating such immutable characteristics as race, gender, or national origin above academic or intellectual merit.

Similarly, if one believes that “health inequities” are prevalent and result from insufficient diversity — and if one is also in charge of a highly competitive medical-school admissions process — then one may be tempted to use the latter to address the former.

As it happens, we do not merely have to imagine these things. Willies-Jacobo discusses them herself in the aforementioned NAAMA video.

According to Willies-Jacobo, KPSOM “now get[s] close to 7,000 applications … for 50 spots” each year (6:00), so it “really is through a mission-aligned lens” that the office judges applicants.

The goal of the admissions team, Willies-Jacobo continues, is to understand the “experiences [applicants have] brought with them throughout [their] journey” (7:18).

Willies-Jacobo and her staff think that admissions success is a matter of “ensuring that [applicants are], in fact, aligned with the mission of the school” (7:25) — a mission that, as expressed in the institution’s formal “Vision,” involves graduates who are “committed to serving a broad range of communities” and are “courageous leaders of change.”

(Additionally, KPSOM’s “values” include “Equity,” promoted by “advancing access, opportunities, and outcomes for members of the KPSOM community.”)

Finally, Willies-Jacobo asserts that KPSOM wants applicants who have “at least begun to think about the concept of advancing equity in health” (7:54).

As the physician-administrator’s own words make plain, her DEI proclivities are clearly seeping into her role leading the KPSOM admissions office.

Indeed, Willies-Jacobo’s reference to “mission align[ment]” should be understood as exactly what it is: a confession that the admissions office is considering applicant criteria that are neither academic nor objective.

The same is obviously true of her reference to applicants’ “experiences” and willingness to “advanc[e] equity in health.” The former is an easy stand-in for race and ethnicity, while the latter is straightforward ideological screening.

To put it another way, it is difficult to avoid the conclusion that the fox isn’t merely guarding the henhouse in the KPSOM admissions office. She’s in charge of it.

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Do No Harm Report Exposes University of Texas System Medical Schools for Hiding Admissions Data

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SALT LAKE CITY, UT: June 16, 2026 – Today, Do No Harm released an analysis by David Puelz, PhD, a professor at the University of Austin (UATX), on Texas medical-school admissions and called for the University of Texas System to stop concealing admissions data from the academic years since Students for Fair Admissions (SFFA).

In 2023, the U.S. Supreme Court ruled in SFFA that racial preferences in college admissions violate the Equal Protection Clause of the Fourteenth Amendment. Following that decision, Do No Harm sent public-records requests to every public medical school in the country — including the seven in the University of Texas System — requesting post-SFFA admissions data. That information should be publicly available and is necessary to verify whether these institutions have ended illegal racial preferences. Regrettably, the seven medical schools in the UT System declined to provide the requested data.

“The silence from the University of Texas System is deafening,” said Ian Kingsbury, Sr. Director of Do No Harm’s Center for Accountability in Medicine. “Dr. Puelz’s in-depth analysis shows that before the Students for Fair Admissions decision, at least some Texas medical schools were heavily discriminating against white and Asian applicants, raising questions about whether race-conscious practices have continued or were rebranded to allow racial favoritism to persist. If they’re in compliance with federal law, why are UT medical schools stonewalling our public-records requests and refusing to provide post-SFFA admissions data? We will pursue every legal, legislative, and public-advocacy recourse until full compliance with the Supreme Court’s ruling is achieved nationwide.”

Click here to read the report.

David Puelz’s analysis examines pre-SFFA admissions at three Texas schools: Texas Tech University Health Sciences Center School of Medicine, UT Austin Dell Medical School, and UT Southwestern Medical School. His findings indicate that, before SFFA, each school preferred black applicants over academically identical white and Asian applicants.

For example, at UT Southwestern, black applicants had 21 times the odds of acceptance compared to white applicants with similar academic credentials.

Do No Harm’s Skirting SCOTUS Part III report showed that, at Texas Tech’s school of medicine, average MCAT scores among accepted students continued to show significant racial disparities after SFFA. Overall, it appears that admissions practices at the institution barely changed after the Supreme Court’s ruling against race-conscious admissions. Whether a similar scenario is playing out at UT Austin Dell and UT Southwestern — and the other UT medical schools — is information to which the public and lawmakers are entitled.

The seven medical schools in the UT System are:

  • UT Southwestern Medical School
  • UT Medical Branch at Galveston
  • UT Health Science Center at Houston
  • UT Health Science Center at San Antonio
  • UT Austin Dell Medical School
  • UT Rio Grande Valley School of Medicine
  • UT Tyler School of Medicine

To read Dr. Puelz’s analysis, click here.

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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HealthStream’s ‘Implicit Bias’ Module Has Improved … But Not Enough

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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.

Crowd,On,Busy,Street.urban,Life.blurred,Defocused,Of,Unrecognized,Crowd,People

UW Medicine’s DEI Office Is Ridiculously Bloated

How many DEI apparatchiks does it take to create a zone of perfect social justice? At UW Medicine, a health system comprising the University of Washington School of Medicine and other medical centers and facilities, the answer is apparently a startling 38.

A glance at the system’s Office of Healthcare Equity (OHCE) website provides few clues about what these highly trained men and women do all day.

Among the office’s boilerplate pronouncements are that “everyone should have the same access and opportunities for the best possible [healthcare] outcomes” and that physicians should work to “eliminate inequities.” Standard stuff.

The office’s work product comprises in large part such typical business as “spotlight series,” newsletters, and “resource fair” participation.

Nor does scanning employees’ titles clear things up.

OHCE lists five workers at the “assistant” level (e.g., assistant dean for equity, diversity & inclusion in research) and a whopping 13 at the level of “director.” Yet what work, for example, does an executive director of workforce inclusion and healthcare system equity actually perform? The answer is left entirely to the imagination.

Ideological preening is certainly on that list of tasks. Between them, OHCE’s 38 employees list 77 pronouns, among them not only “she” and “he” but “they” and “ella.” (Using one’s pronoun list to signal Spanish-language proficiency is a curious development.)

Unique references to “equity” (8), “inclusion” (5), and “diversity” (4) abound in employees’ titles, as does newfangled aspirational lingo (e.g., “transformational research”). Faced with the latter, OHCE’s four project managers must feel as if their titles are positively dull.

Why is this happening?

As the U.S. Department of Education has made clear, educational institutions accepting federal funds may not engage in racial discrimination in their “admissions, hiring, promotion, compensation, scholarships, prizes, administrative support, sanctions, discipline, and beyond” (emphases added).

Nor, at least arguably, may hospital systems that act as de facto federal contractors by accepting Medicare and Medicaid reimbursement.

DEI offices, no matter what they currently call themselves, often contravene this prohibition through practices that cast serious doubt on their adherence to established civil‑rights obligations.

Yet, in the case of UW Medicine’s OHCE, the problem also strikes a fiscal note.

According to publicly available data, the office’s employees have cost the state more than $18 million in salary alone since 2021. Though some OHCE employees may have roles in (and receive some of their pay from) other areas of the system, this figure nevertheless represents a massive expenditure.

If UW Medicine wants to tighten its belt or redirect its funds to actual medical education and treatment, it should markedly trim its OHCE numbers.

If it wants to comply with federal guidance and the spirit of federal civil-rights law, it should shutter the office altogether.

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California Is Re-Upping a Woke Behavioral Health Regulator

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A California therapist is cartoonishly devoted to progressive race and gender orthodoxies despite their lack of grounding in science. Naturally, Gov. Gavin Newsom (D) has just reappointed him to an important medical board.

John Sovec is a licensed marriage and family therapist (LMFT) currently practicing in Altadena. Since 2019, he has served on California’s Board of Behavioral Sciences, a state regulatory agency responsible for licensing and examining LMFTs, licensed clinical social workers, licensed professional clinical counselors, and licensed educational psychologists and for the enforcement of those groups’ professional standards.

Gov. Newsom’s press release makes note of Sovec’s years of private practice as an LMFT, his prior experience as an adjunct professor of postmodern studies, and his party affiliation (“Sovec is a Democrat”).

Unmentioned are Sovec’s radical pronouncements on transgenderism, natal care, and “whiteness,” declarations that ought to disqualify him from work overseeing evidence-based medical practitioners.

Among Sovec’s professional activities is a series of education modules offered by the LGBTQ+ nonprofit OutCare Health. These modules provide striking evidence of Sovec’s ideological commitment to wokeness.

In “Affirming OB/GYN Care for LGBTQ+ Patients – OutTalk,” for example, Sovec instructs participants to “imagine how dysphoric it might be for a trans man to walk into an OB/GYN clinic” and “see mostly females sitting there.” He further laments that “natal care … is one of the most gendered things” and that “having a baby is such a gendered social construct.”

Elsewhere, in “Access to Care for LGBTQ+ Communities of Color: Part III AAPI – OutTalk,” Sovec pledges, “as the host and a white male,” to “de-center [his] voice and … create room for our panelists of people with lived experience to learn and create together.”

Sovec’s LGBTQ+ Healthcare Directory page presents its own problems. There, Sovec promises patients “sophisticated psychological care from an openly queer therapist with lived experience.”

In addition to “clinical expertise” — a good thing — Sovec pledges to provide “embodied understanding” — modish quackery.

These gestures represent wokeness taken to an almost comic extreme. They have no place in a regulatory agency with significant authority over the practice of behavioral healthcare in the Golden State.

Nevertheless, Sovec’s renomination to the California Board of Behavioral Sciences is likely to be confirmed by the state senate, just as his first nomination was in 2019.

That bodes poorly for behavioral health practitioners who want to follow the science, not the politics.

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Trinity Health Is Still Up to Its DEI Tricks

As the “Diversity, Equity, and Inclusion” movement has suffered political setbacks, so many healthcare organizations have attempted to conceal their DEI activities that reformers may find it difficult to be shocked. Still, the work of Trinity Health in this vein is notable for its cynicism.

Trinity Health is one of the largest Catholic health systems in the country, operating hospitals and clinics in 23 states and employing 133,000 people. Until at least July of last year, the system’s “The Common Good” page featured a link to a “Diversity, Equity, and Inclusion Annual Report,” yearly versions of which “highlight[ed] notable achievements … including: diversifying our governing bodies, attracting and retaining a diverse workforce, fostering an inclusive environment, advancing health equity, and supporting diverse suppliers.”

The link to this material has now vanished. However, visiting the old “Diversity, Equity, and Inclusion Annual Report” URL redirects one to an almost identical page titled, simply, “Annual Report.”

The reports themselves seem not to have changed, nor has most of the page’s language. Yet a casual visitor is no longer confronted with the overt reference to DEI.

Nevertheless, there is every reason to believe that Trinity Health’s DEI operations are ongoing.

In the most recent version of Trinity Health’s annual DEI report, CEO and President Mike Slubowski stated in an embedded video that the organization’s commitment to DEI “has never been more important,” that Trinity Health is advancing DEI “at every level of the organization,” and that “the work of D-E-I won’t D-I-E at Trinity Health.”

In the same document, Senior Vice President for Health Equity and Human Impact LaRonda Haller (at that time senior vice president for diversity, equity, and inclusion) stated that DEI was “paramount” to Trinity Health’s mission and that, despite “fierce opposition and backlash,” Trinity Health is “committed to staying the course” in support of DEI because it is “central to our identity, our calling, and our responsibility as a healing ministry.”

At Trinity Health’s MLK Health Equity Symposium 2025, Haller related that Trinity Health is “deeply committed to advancing health equity” (2:51). In the same video, she thanked CEO and President Slubowski and other “senior leaders” for their “relentless dedication to advancing health equity, diversity, equity, and inclusion” (16:40).

This tactic — seeming to back away from DEI while nevertheless pushing it forward — is difficult to characterize as other than intentional. In an April 2024 Catholic Health World article, Haller (at that time LaRonda Chastang) explained that, “[i]f those three letters — ‘D’ period, ‘E’ period, ‘I’ period — are causing people to trip up and I need to talk about it differently, I’ll update my language so that I can bring people along.”

Trinity Health apparently supported Haller’s statements, posting the article on Facebook and noting that Haller “continues to promote DEI in the face of backlash.”

These are not the actions of an organization that is truly backing away from its DEI activities.

At present, Trinity Health operates a Transforming Communities Initiative (TCI), a “5-year, $16 million grant to advance equity in 9 of Trinity Health communities.”

In March of last year, TCI hosted a “2025 Learning Institute” where participants were provided with an “attendee packet” containing numerous references to “racial equity” and one reference to “DEI resources.” The latter fell explicitly under the heading “TCI Expectations for use of grant dollars.”

On page 33, a three-sentence summary describing TCI refers to “health and racial equity” twice.

Participants also received a “TCI Shared Glossary,” a document that defines various DEI buzzwords and pushes a clear pro-DEI position. For example, “racism” is said to involve “one group having the power to carry out systematic discrimination” against another. Members of “disadvantaged” groups thus cannot perpetrate racism by definition.

While Trinity Health is clearly deemphasizing its DEI commitment in its most public-facing materials (e.g., on its website, where a current search for DEI generates only a few hits), digging a little deeper reveals that its DEI activities have not ceased. Indeed, they are alive and well.

That may be good politics, but it is misleading nonetheless.

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The APA’s Radical Division 39 Is a Catastrophe

A division of the American Psychological Association has descended into rank antisemitism. Never mind virtue signaling; this is pure vice.

The APA’s Division 39 is the Society for Psychoanalysis and Psychoanalytic Psychology. Its members are “professionals who identify themselves as having a major commitment to the study, practice and development of psychoanalysis and psychoanalytic psychotherapy.”

A glance at Division 39’s materials reveals a tired preoccupation with leftist buzzwords.

For example, the group’s “Call for Submissions for the 2027 Spring Meeting” invites potential contributors to consider such matters as “colonial domination; imperialism; [and] westernization,” as well as “(dis)ability; capitalism; neoliberalism; social and economic class/mobility; white supremacy; proximity to whiteness; intelligibility; race; gender; sexuality; age; feminist studies; madnesss [sic]; [and] critical race theory.”

Yet these vogue concerns might occasion mere eye rolling were it not for the presence of even less savory commentary. As a note from the conference chair makes clear, this year’s call for submissions was intentionally sent on “Nakba Day,” the May 15 anniversary of “the Nakba of 1948 — an event of mass killing, disablement, and dispossession of the Palestinian people of their homeland.”

This is grotesque behavior.

To begin with, it is historically illiterate. The “Nakba” (literally, “catastrophe”) observed by Palestinians and their sympathizers refers to the 1948 displacement of Arabs from the Holy Land. But this event occurred only because Arab armies invaded Israel, and hundreds of thousands of Jews were thrown out of Arab countries at the same time.

However, even if Division 39’s rhetoric and timing were historically or ideologically defensible, the group would still have no business wading into choppy political waters. The work of the APA is to “promote psychological science and knowledge to benefit society and improve lives.” It is not to engage in preening political commentary.

This is not the APA’s first foray into antisemitism. As materials from the House Committee on Education and the Workforce’s ongoing investigation of the APA allege, “Jewish APA members have reported being harassed and ostracized by their colleagues within the APA and at APA events because of their Jewish identity, their efforts to speak out again antisemitism, and their Zionist beliefs.”

Additionally, the APA “has offered educational credits for members to attend conferences where speakers endorsed ‘violence against Jews and Israelis; antisemitic tropes; Holocaust distortion; minimization of Jewish victimization, fear, and grief; and pathologizing of Jewish people’s connection to their indigenous homeland.’”

Not for nothing did the Anti-Defamation League and the Academic Engagement Network urge the APA to address its antisemitic practices in a May 2025 communication. As that document points out, “APA Division 39 President Lara Sheehi defended the D.C. shooting that killed Israeli embassy staffers Sarah Milgram and Yaron Lischinsky, outrageously describing the attack as a justified response to what she called a ‘genocidal’ state.”

These are not the actions of an organization and division that are thinking clearly. Rather, they illustrate the surrender of an institution to its worst impulses and voices.

The time has come for the APA to clean up its act. American psychologists, their patients, and the public deserve better.

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The DEI Two-Step

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The Supreme Court’s decision in Students for Fair Admissions v. Harvard (2023) did not sever in one blow the head of the DEI goliath. Indeed, as a look back at a 2024 University of Houston panel series makes clear, a number of medical-education leaders who all but promised to ignore the Court are still highly placed in the American medical establishment.

“Justice and Health for All: The Future of Affirmative Action in Legal and Medical Education” took place less than 10 months after the Court’s SFFA decision affirmed that racially biased university-admissions processes “cannot be reconciled with the guarantees of the Equal Protection Clause.”

Like many campus panel discussions held in the wake of that decision, this one contained some doozies.

  • Leon McDougle, MD, at that time chief diversity officer at the Ohio State University Wexner Medical Center, spoke unapologetically about the “holistic review” process employed by his medical school, in which candidates are evaluated on the basis of their “experiences, attributes, and metrics” (22:45). Dr. McDougle also criticized “this master narrative in the U.S. that’s trying to delegitimize Diversity, Equity, and Inclusion and its importance.”
  • Asked whether race should be a factor in medical-school admissions, Charles P. Mouton, MD, in 2024 the executive vice president, provost, and executive dean of the University of Texas Medical Branch John Sealy School of Medicine, responded, dismissively, “How do you define merit?” and complained that “other people” are “trying to tell us what values we should inculcate into our profession in selecting individuals” (16:29). Dr. Mouton further praised medical schools’ emerging “holistic admissions process[es]” that “look at individuals in a broader context” than the traditional indicators of academic success.
  • Geoffrey H. Young, PhD, senior director for Transforming the Health Care Workforce at the Association of American Medical Colleges (AAMC), stressed the need to develop medical-career “pathway programs” prioritizing diversity as early as the kindergarten level (10:55). Among Young’s claims was that “historically marginalized communities” would benefit from increased resources and education on healthcare because “their community may not necessarily understand it.”
  • Speaking about the (largely debunked) benefits of so-called racially concordant care, Marc Robinson, MD, associate program director of internal medicine at the Baylor College of Medicine, insisted that “we can do a lot of training for our workforce, but that is not a surrogate for having a workforce that looks like the community that they’re taking care of” (32:00).

These do not sound like the words of physicians and administrators who are eager to follow the Supreme Court’s guidance (and relevant law) on colorblind admissions. Rather, the language sounds like that of authorities who are determined to implement beloved DEI processes as long as they can reasonably expect to get away with it.

Now contrast these boasts and pledges with the formal statements made by the institutions in question.

  • In May 2025, the Ohio State University College of Medicine announced that it would close its DEI office and “sunset” certain DEI roles to comply with Ohio law.
  • The University of Texas System, of which the John Sealy School of Medicine is part, has similarly pledged to follow Texas law regulating DEI activities at public institutions.
  • While the AAMC has stated that the Supreme Court did not “go so far as to say that no compelling interest exists to consider a person’s race” in medical-school admissions, its guidance nevertheless concedes that “[s]chools should be cautious in treating prospective applicants differently on the basis of racial status.”
  • As for Baylor, President Linda Livingstone declared in 2025 that the private institution would “be sure that we’re in compliance with federal law and that we are respectful of and follow what’s in the Dear Colleague letters” — a reference to the Trump administration’s guidance on how universities must interpret federal law concerning DEI in the wake of SFFA.

Thus do the steps in the dance become evident. To begin with, institutions formally promise to follow federal and state law and Supreme Court jurisprudence.

But also: the actual men and women “on the ground” who insist on DEI practices remain, including possibly McDougle, whose active LinkedIn page still describes him as the Wexner Medical Center’s chief diversity officer despite Ohio State’s DEI rollbacks.

This is not an argument that particular professionals should lose their jobs. If DEI partisans agree to follow the law and abide by that promise, then there is no reason for institutions to dispense with their medical services.

Still, it is difficult to ignore the near-constant drip of stories indicating that medical schools continue to resist merit-based admissions despite legal developments that mandate as much. Something has got to change.

Eventually, a new conclusion may become necessary. If reformers are going to force medical schools to change their ways, we may need some new doctors in charge.

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DOJ: By Its Own Admission, Yale Med School Illegally Discriminates Against White, Asian Applicants

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As Yale celebrated its 325th commencement last week, the institution’s medical school faced new scrutiny for alleged racial discrimination in admissions. The Department of Justice sent a letter to Yale School of Medicine on May 14 notifying it that “the Department finds that Yale continues to intentionally discriminate against applicants based on their race.”

That letter presents evidence that black and Hispanic students were significantly more likely to be admitted than white and Asian students with the same MCAT scores and grade point averages, an outcome that “cannot be explained by a coincidence.” Specifically, “Yale’s use of race resulted in a Black applicant being as much as 29 times higher odds of getting an interview for admission than an equally strong Asian applicant with similar academic credentials.”

Read the full piece at The Federalist.

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Do No Harm Files FCC Comment on Gender-Ideology TV Programming

Yesterday, Do No Harm submitted to the Federal Communications Commission (FCC) a “Comment on Further Empowering Parents to Protect Their Children and Make Informed Choices About the TV Programs Their Children Watch.”

Consistent with its mission, Do No Harm submitted this comment for three reasons, First, to highlight that the current TV ratings system is inadequate to protect children from gender-ideology programming that permeates television media. Second, to recommend appropriate content labels that accurately identify gender-ideology programming. And third, to note the imbalance in makeup of the TV Oversight Management Board (TVOMB), which includes — without counterbalance on, among other things, gender-ideology issues — biased organizations like the American Academy of Pediatrics and the National PTA.

Please read the full comment here or below.

 

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Oregon’s School of Public Health Is Making the Obesity Epidemic Worse

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What happens when parts of the American public-health apparatus are commandeered by ideologues pushing yet another victimization narrative? Thanks to the “Fat Justice Working Group” at the Oregon Health & Science University-Portland State University School of Public Health (SPH), we may soon have an answer.

“The purpose of the Fat Justice Working Group,” its website declares, “is to engage students, faculty and staff … in learning, activities and advocacy to reduce weight stigma and anti-fat bias in ourselves, our School and society at large.”

Beneath that word salad is a meatier agenda: “We imagine a future where public health is openly and firmly committed to ending discrimination and other oppression of people in larger bodies.”

This is sloppy thinking, directly antithetical to the principles of public health.

The National Institutes of Health (NIH), for example, defines its mission in part as “enhanc[ing] health, lengthen[ing] life, and reduc[ing] illness and disability.” By presenting obesity as an “oppress[ed]” identity category rather than a treatable medical condition, Oregon’s SPH makes this work more difficult.

We have been here before. Last year, Do No Harm catalogued efforts by the Lewis Katz School of Medicine at Temple University to downplay the adverse health consequences of obesity.

For instance, the school hosted a presentation entitled “Introduction to Weight Stigma & Weight Inclusive Care,” the purpose of which was, in part, to “promote a non-judgmental and inclusive environment for patients of all body sizes.”

Unbelievably, the presentation made the assertion that “health and well-being are achievable for all regardless of weight.” One need only read the relevant medical literature to grasp the inaccuracy of this claim.

Medical science demonstrates that obesity correlates strongly with elevated mortality. It is often, in the words of a Ghana Medical Journal article, “a major risk factor for the development of several non-communicable diseases, significant disability and premature death.”

Moreover, as Do No Harm wrote last year, obesity is not an immutable condition. In many instances, obese patients “who lose significant amounts of weight have been shown to live longer, with better quality of life.”

None of this means that men and women suffering from obesity deserve public censure or scorn. Physicians and other public-health officials should treat all patients with respect, even as they bring their expertise to bear on conditions that lead to significant medical complications.

In short, the medical establishment needs to help people struggling with obesity to make lifestyle improvements or, in some cases, to choose appropriate pharmacological or surgical interventions. Obese patients need assistance, not a team of social-justice warriors telling them that everything is okay.

Faculty and staff at Oregon’s SPH must know this. Yet the work of the Left is always and everywhere to expand the ranks of the “oppressed,” thus granting political power to those who would “rescue” them.

In medicine, this has often meant fixating on identity and compassion at the expense of patient care. Yet evidence-based medical science should not be deemphasized by those who wish primarily not to give offense.

In the normal course of things, such a tendency is often merely obnoxious. When it helps convince doctors not to tell necessary truths, however, the consequences can be deadly.