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Is ‘Mission-Aligned Selection’ the New Workaround for Race-Based Admissions?

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The Association of American Medical Colleges (AAMC) is changing the language it uses to refer to its preferred admissions strategies, potentially offering a fig leaf to medical education programs intent on engaging in ideologically motivated or racial admissions policies.

Previously, the AAMC had touted the admissions practice of “holistic review,” which prioritizes softer attributes such as personal background and deemphasizes objective measurements of merit and academic aptitude.

But, as Do No Harm has shown, many medical schools that promote holistic review are also admitting minority students at much higher rates than a merit-only review process would typically produce. Specifically, some of these students are less academically qualified than their peers. This raises questions about whether these schools are using holistic review to engage in racial discrimination. It is especially troubling as the AAMC was long a proponent of racial preferences in admissions, even submitting a brief to the Supreme Court to argue that the practice should continue.

In short, holistic review appears to often be a convenient shield that may enable medical schools to continue engaging in racial discrimination. Now, it seems like the AAMC is rebranding the term.

It is doing so largely through instruction on “Mission-Aligned Selection and Retention” (MASR), a framework designed to help medical education programs use “a program’s mission to define merit and identify [applicants’] competencies, attributes, and experiences aligned with program goals.”

MASR “emphasizes individualized review.” It considers not only an applicant’s test scores and grades but his or her “context” and ability to “contribute to the mission” of the institution.

In other words, MASR allows medical schools to consider applicant criteria that are neither academic nor objective. While an applicant’s moral character should absolutely be relevant to the application process, it’s easy to see how “mission alignment” can be used as a proxy for ideological alignment with the political goals of a medical school. And one needn’t be a cynic to worry that such a framework could be used to dodge race-neutral admissions standards.

The Supreme Court anticipated this possibility. Indeed, in the majority opinion in Students for Fair Admissions v. Harvard, Chief Justice John Roberts wrote that “nothing in this opinion should be construed as prohibiting universities from considering an applicant’s discussion of how race affected his or her life, be it through discrimination, inspiration, or otherwise.”

But Roberts continued, “universities may not simply establish through application essays or other means the regime we hold unlawful today.”

As Do No Harm has previously explained, “holistic review” risks exactly that error. The practice “emphasize[s] factors unrelated to objective metrics of academic achievement.” It does so, as the AAMC has previously acknowledged, in order to increase racial diversity within medical schools’ student bodies.

Rebranding “holistic review” as “Mission-Aligned Selection and Retention” does nothing to change this reality. Indeed, the AAMC’s latest guidance features at least as many DEI buzzwords as its previous guidance did, employing such racially loaded terms as “equity,” “systems,” and “community” and urging medical schools to admit students with “a broad spectrum of perspectives and experiences.”

To be fair, the new guidance warns that “programs are prohibited by law from considering an applicant’s race … in making selection decisions.” Yet the AAMC’s guidance opens the door for medical schools to do just that under the guise of “mission alignment.”

Already, the ideology behind AAMC’s new guidance is beginning to show up on medical school campuses. During a recent podcast appearance, for example, Dr. Leila Amiri, associate dean for admissions at the University of Vermont’s Larner College of Medicine, remarked that, because Vermont is a “social justice-directed kind of place, we look for, collect, and invite to join social-justice warriors in our applicant pool.”

This came just after Amiri noted: “We hear ‘mission alignment’ a lot. […] To me, the entire application needs to make sense.”

If MASR is the new thinking determining medical school admissions, then evaluating applicants fairly and objectively will become increasingly difficult. Instead, medical schools should select candidates on the basis of objective merit, not alignment with progressive priorities.

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New Watchdog Report Exposes How Healthcare Providers Can Misrepresent Gender Interventions as Routine Care 

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SALT LAKE CITY, UT: April 30, 2026 – Today, medical watchdog Do No Harm released a new report exposing how healthcare providers may be able to fraudulently skirt medical coding rules to receive insurance reimbursement for so-called “gender-affirming care.”

The report, “Spotting Potential Fraud: How Healthcare Providers May Skirt Coding Rules to Get Paid for Child Sex Changes,” warns how providers can misrepresent the medical procedures they perform to pass off transgender medicalization as routine care unrelated to pediatric medical transitions. The report explains the challenge in exposing this type of deception, as in-depth longitudinal clinical reviews are needed to distinguish legitimate medical care from child sex change interventions.

Do No Harm highlights activist groups like WPATH, Planned Parenthood of Southeastern Pennsylvania, the Campaign for Southern Equality, and QueerDoc for their role in publicly promoting alternative diagnosis codes — unrelated to gender dysphoria — to facilitate billing and insurance reimbursement for so-called “gender-affirming care.”

“Medical diagnosis codes are being subverted by gender ideologues to avoid proper reporting, hide their activism from scrutiny, and enable potentially fraudulent billing practices,” said Kurt Miceli, MD, Chief Medical Officer at Do No Harm. “Groups like WPATH have publicly promoted the use of misleading diagnosis codes, and our report exposes how providers have financial incentives to do so. By hiding transgender procedures behind codes meant for other conditions, providers are — at minimum — skirting guidelines and ethical standards. Our report highlights the need for greater regulatory oversight and medical review to ensure ICD-10 diagnosis codes are not being fraudulently misused.”

The report identifies eight codes that may be used to hide pediatric medical transitions: 1) Hypopituitarism, 2) Other primary ovarian failure, 3) Testicular hypofunction, 4) Precocious puberty, 5) Other specified endocrine disorders, 6) Endocrine disorder, unspecified, 7) Hormone replacement therapy, and 8) Hypertrophy of breast.

Do No Harm has done extensive work and continues to actively work toward establishing distinct medical diagnosis codes for gender transition, desistance, and detransition. This new report urges payors and regulators, particularly in the states that have legislation restricting such interventions on minors, to remain vigilant of the misuse of ICD-10 codes.

Click here to read the full report.

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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Stanford School of Medicine Rebrands DEI Department After DOJ Probe

Following a federal investigation announcement, an elite medical school is quietly altering its online materials.

On March 25, the Department of Justice commenced an investigation into potentially discriminatory admissions practices at the Stanford University School of Medicine. The government seeks applicant-level information (like MCAT scores and GPAs) as well as internal messages about DEI, according to reporting by The New York Times.

Recent alterations to the Stanford Medicine website, such as office name and title changes, suggest that the institution may be attempting to scrub any evidence of its commitment to DEI.

For example, among Stanford Medicine’s administrative units is the Office of Community Health and Engagement (OCHE). As an archived history of the office’s website makes clear, the OCHE was, until at least March 30, the Office of Diversity in Medical Education, “committed to eliminating the nation’s health inequities through patient care, education, research, and advocacy.”

This change appears to be largely cosmetic, as OCHE’s team remains mostly in place.

Felipe D. Perez, previously assistant dean for diversity in medical student education, is now assistant dean for community health and engagement.

Sara Clemente, until recently diversity program manager, is now graduate medical education program manager.

Marisa Madrigal, previously diversity coordinator, has been rebranded as graduate medical education coordinator.

The question is whether new business cards signal an end to DEI operations at the medical school. The available evidence suggests that they don’t.

Later this spring, Stanford Medicine will host as planned the 9th Annual Diversity and Inclusion Forum, designed to help participants become “effective agent[s] for change in diversity, equity, and inclusion in medical education.”

Stanford Medicine’s library proudly displays on its website its voluminous “Multicultural Health” resources, which include extensive material on “cultural competency,” “indigenous health,” “Hispanic/Latine health,” “medical racism & antiracism,” and other preoccupations of the DEI movement.

Although the institution has taken down a website declaring its leadership-development apparatus to be a fit for those interested in “activism and advocacy,” “local health equity initiatives,” and “social determinants of health,” the initiative itself remains active.

Indeed, it is difficult to find any evidence that Stanford Medicine is backing away from its DEI-obsessed activities.

If the institution wishes to recommit to merit-based instruction for all medical students, it will need to make more than cosmetic changes.

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The Dangers of False DEI Dogma

Why, exactly, is DEI so harmful to healthcare?

In practice, of course, DEI often manifests as racially discriminatory hiring, admissions, and recruiting policies; it is definitionally anti-merit and degrades the quality of health services; it treats people as members of specific identity groups rather than as individuals and organizes clinical care accordingly; and it views healthcare institutions as vehicles for social and political change, usually at the expense of clinical excellence.

But beyond these more obvious answers is a deeper issue: its premises simply aren’t true.

The premise of “equity” initiatives, for example, is that racism is embedded into the structural fabric of society and is the primary driver of unequal health outcomes between racial groups.

But the extent to which is a far cry from settled fact. As Do No Harm’s Chief Medical Officer Dr. Kurt Miceli points out, much of the literature on “structural racism” infers causality when there is, at best, only correlation. Tools that purport to measure “racism” instead often track to socioeconomic conditions, confounding attempts to determine causality.

Indeed, much of the research fails to address these confounding factors, proceeding as if the causal effect of racism, whatever that may mean, is obvious.

Is it any wonder, then, that the solutions that stem from this false premise are harmful?

Take a recent course on “health equity” provided to nursing students at Indiana University South Bend that illustrates a more benign example of how healthcare professionals can be inculcated into counterproductive programming.

“Health care inequities are a measurable, systemic, avoidable and unjust difference in health care access, utilization, quality and outcomes between groups, stemming from differences in levels of social advantage and disadvantage,” the course states.

To ameliorate these inequities, the course recommends that healthcare professionals employ skills surrounding “cultural humility,” such as constant monitoring of ones’ own biases.

“Addressing biases is an ongoing process,” the course states. “Recognizing and addressing our biases, while creating an environment where all are comfortable discussing these biases openly, is essential for fostering cultural humility.”

Of course, there is little evidence demonstrating that individual biases actually impact health outcomes. Attempts to measure these “implicit” or unconscious biases fail to predict real-world behavior or even measure “unconscious racism.”

Thus, constant vigilance of one’s own biases is built on an assumption that hasn’t been validated and functions as an ideological directive, not an evidence-based strategy for improving patient care.

Additionally, the course suggests that health equity is downstream of political and structural factors that alter the social and economic conditions of individuals’ lives.

“Understanding the social determinants of health, is an important component of developing cultural humility as is developing trusting partnerships with those we serve,” the course states. “By engaging in these practices, we can create a foundation for health equity and ensure better health outcomes for diverse communities.”

This gestures at another dubious (at best) theory that has become increasingly popular in medicine: the idea of “social determinants of health” (SDOH).

Again, the premise of SDOH is that differences in socioeconomic factors cause disparities in health outcomes between population groups.

Yet, although these factors may well be correlated with disparities in health outcomes, the causal inference is not supported by the weight of the evidence. As researchers have shown, much of the literature on SDOH fails to properly disentangle correlation from causation and infers that social factors “determine” health simply because they correlate with poor health outcomes.

This ignores alternative explanations such as individual decisions which lead to poor health outcomes, and which in turn may lead to the socioeconomic conditions that correlate with those outcomes.

In short, unsubstantiated theories that attempt to explain individuals’ health with vague gestures to societal phenomena do a disservice to medicine by treating healthcare professionals not as healers first and foremost, but as cogs in a large political project.

The focus of healthcare education should be to train future providers to administer the best possible care, above all else.

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Do No Harm Submits Amicus Brief in Support of Detransitioner’s Lawsuit

This week, Do No Harm submitted an amicus brief to the North Carolina Court of Appeals in support of a lawsuit brought by detransitioner Prisha Mosley to hold accountable those healthcare professionals who she alleges subjected her to sex-rejecting interventions as a minor.

Mosley, a biological female, filed suit in North Carolina after receiving cross-sex hormones and having her breasts removed. She alleged her medical providers misrepresented basic facts about pediatric medical transition and deceived her into undergoing these procedures.

The trial court had initially dismissed Mosley’s medical malpractice claim as untimely. But following the dismissal of this claim, the North Carolina legislature enacted a new law that extended the statute of limitations for medical malpractice claims and should have helped paved the way to revive Mosley’s claim. Yet the trial court refused to reinstate her claim and granted summary judgment to the defendants on Mosley’s remaining fraud-related claims.

Do No Harm’s amicus brief urges the appellate court to reverse the trial court, laying out the science and evidence – or lack thereof – on sex-rejecting procedures for minors.

The brief demonstrates that sex-rejecting medical interventions such as cross-sex hormones and surgical procedures lack reliable evidence as methods to “treat” children suffering from gender dysphoria, or psychological distress resulting from the discontinuity perceived between one’s sex and one’s “gender identity.”

The brief cites the Cass Review, the United Kingdom’s comprehensive independent evaluation of gender identity services and the evidence base for youth gender medicine, which found that the research supporting so-called “gender-affirming care” for minors is very weak and of low certainty. Likewise, among other included examples is a recently published Finnish study, which found that sex change interventions failed to improve the mental health of minors suffering from gender dysphoria.

The brief also explains that the only reliable clinical approach for kids suffering from gender dysphoria is psychosocial support, rather than medical interventions.

Do No Harm will continue to support efforts to ensure accountability for, and protect minors from, the harms of so-called “gender-affirming care.”

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Do No Harm Files Civil Rights Complaints Against Two Major Healthcare Systems Over Discriminatory Scholarship Programs

SALT LAKE CITY, UTAH; April 21, 2026 – Today, Do No Harm filed complaints with the U.S. Department of Health and Human Services (HHS) Office for Civil Rights (OCR) against Beacon Health System and Valley Health System for operating discriminatory student healthcare scholarship programs exclusively available to racial minorities. The complaints ask the OCR to thoroughly investigate both programs for apparent violations of multiple federal anti-discrimination laws.

“It is unjust and unacceptable for Beacon Health and Valley Health to use race in determining awards for hands-on learning opportunities,” said Dr. Kurt Miceli, Chief Medical Officer at Do No Harm. “A devoted student, with the skills and desire to learn, cannot be denied participation based on factors as arbitrary as skin color or ancestral background. Political activists who push the idea that only certain racial groups are most equipped to deliver quality care to those in need affirm a demeaning and an inaccurate assumption. We will continue to hold these institutions accountable to the law and root out the brazen race-based discrimination infecting medical education today.”

Beacon Health, a nonprofit healthcare provider that benefits from substantial federal funding, prides itself for “[f]ostering, cultivating and preserving a culture of diversity, equity and inclusion.” Its ‘Underrepresented in Medicine Scholarship’ program offers a student training rotation in family medicine for fourth-year medical students and a generous stipend (among other benefits). While applicants must be in good academic standing at an accredited U.S. medical school, the scholarship is only offered to individuals of select races. Reserved for “traditionally underrepresented racial/ethnic minority group[s],” who Beacon Health presumes have “faced significant socioeconomic disadvantage,” whites and other disfavored racial groups are unlawfully excluded from the opportunity.

Similarly, Valley Health, a nonprofit community healthcare organization that receives a host of federal financial aid and grants, “proud[ly]” offers the ‘Minority Healthcare Scholarship’ to its patients for pursuing careers in medicine, health sciences, or health administration. Recipients receive awards of $5,000. Those interested in applying to this “prestigious” opportunity must be a member of “a minority racial or ethnic group,” a requirement that communicates to individuals of other races that they need not apply, regardless of their academic ability, character, skills, experiences, and perspectives.

Both entities’ programs advance the notion that certain racial groups achieve “diversity” over others; and Beacon Health’s program further asserts that all (and only) certain racial minorities face “disadvantage.” These health systems’ blatant racial stereotypes and race-based exclusions are in direct violation of Title VI of the Civil Rights Act and Section 1557 of the Affordable Care Act (ACA).

Read the complaint against Beacon Health here and the complaint against Valley Health 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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Harvard Medical School Cuts Out DEI References from New Mission Statement

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Last week, Harvard Medical School published an updated version of its mission statement that removed explicit references to DEI.

It’s the latest indication that among medical schools, including elite institutions, DEI is becoming increasingly toxic.

Whereas Harvard Medical School’s previous mission statement included a commitment for the school to “nurture a diverse, inclusive community,” these words are absent from the updated statement, which reads as follows: “To improve health and well-being for all through excellence and leadership in teaching and learning, discovery and scholarship, and service and care.”

According to remarks reported by the Harvard Crimson, Harvard Medical School Dean George Q. Daley said that the school’s DEI commitment had been relocated, and the school had “fully endorsed our commitment to a diverse and inclusive community.”

Indeed, the Harvard Medical School’s “Community Values” page contains the follow language: “We are a diverse and inclusive community that aspires to fulfill and advance our mission through a commitment to our HMS values.”

Though this is not a complete elimination of DEI, it’s a significant shift: the statement referencing DEI in the school’s community values is descriptive, not normative, and includes no commitment.

Moreover, removing the DEI commitment from Harvard Medical School’s mission may signify at least a partial public departure from DEI as an organizing, motivating principle.

As Do No Harm has previously shown, the rise of DEI and identity politics in medical education manifested strongly in schools’ mission statements.

That Harvard is now bucking this trend is an encouraging sign.

Additionally, last year, Harvard Medical School renamed its DEI office and removed its diversity statement, which included commitments to health equity and DEI, as well as pledges to “challenge discrimination,” “address disparities and inequities,” and “actively promote social justice.”

We’re optimistic this latest change is a sign of more reforms to come.

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Do No Harm Urges IRS To Investigate the American Medical Association Foundation’s Tax-Exempt Status

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SALT LAKE CITY, UT; April 8, 2026 – This week, Do No Harm filed a complaint with the Internal Revenue Service (IRS), urging an investigation into whether the American Medical Association (AMA) Foundation should have its tax-exempt status revoked for operating racially discriminatory scholarships.

“Racially discriminatory scholarships are unlawful and morally wrong, to say nothing of the negative impact they have on public confidence in our medical system,” said Kurt Miceli, MD, Chief Medical Officer at Do No Harm. “Based on the evidence in our complaint, we believe the IRS should revoke the AMA Foundation’s tax-exempt status for operating a racially discriminatory program. The AMA’s obsession with identity politics is no secret, and it should be held accountable for allowing race to dictate applicants’ eligibility for valuable and lucrative learning opportunities. If the AMA Foundation wants to retain its federal tax advantage, it must open its scholarships to applicants of all races.”

The AMA Foundation, the philanthropic arm of the American Medical Association, funds and oversees the Physicians of Tomorrow Scholarship program, which provides lucrative scholarships to third-year medical students. Most scholarship awards include prizes of up to $10,000 along with national recognition and access to resources and support. However, as alleged in Do No Harm’s complaint, several of these scholarships explicitly discriminate based on race and violate established public policy and civil rights laws forbidding racial discrimination. Under Supreme Court precedent, having even one unlawful policy under 26 U.S.C § 501(c)(3), including a racially discriminatory policy, makes the entire organization ineligible for tax-exempt status.

Click here to read the IRS complaint.

Background:

The AMA Foundation’s Physicians of Tomorrow Scholarship is an umbrella program encompassing various discrete scholarships. However, several scholarships explicitly hinge eligibility on racial criteria, with two scholarships preferring certain racial minorities over other racial groups and one scholarship preferring certain white racial groups over others.

  • The Dr. Richard Allen Williams & Genita Evangelista Johnson/Association of Black Cardiologists Scholarship awards $5,000 to medical students interested in cardiology, but only if they are “African American/Black.”
  • The Underrepresented in Medicine Scholarship awards $10,000 to winners who are “African American/Black, Latine/Hispanic or Indigenous (American Indian, Native Hawaiian, or Alaska Native).”
  • The Patricia L. Austin Family Physicians of Tomorrow Scholarship awards $10,000 to winners and explicitly requires applicants to be “of Eastern European descent.”

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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When Ideology Replaces Accuracy: The ATS’s Spirometry Shift

In recent years, academic medical societies have increasingly issued recommendations and policy statements that seem motivated less by a commitment to scientific rigor and more by an adherence to fashionable ideologies.

The American Thoracic Society is unfortunately no exception to this trend. Its 2023 decision to abandon race‑adjusted reference equations for spirometry—long a straightforward physiological test—does not necessarily make the test more accurate, may not deliver better outcomes, and does not clearly improve certainty in a tool meant to elucidate lung mechanics. By prioritizing broad ideological narratives over data‑driven, objective measures, recent changes risk undermining the core purpose of this diagnostic test and ultimately fail to improve patient care, exchanging one set of uncertainties for another.

Spirometry measures the volume and flows produced after a forced exhalation from total lung capacity. Measurements include the Forced Expiratory Volume in one second (FEV1), Forced Vital Capacity (FVC) (maximal amount exhaled), and the FEV1/FVC ratio. In the right clinical setting spirometry helps distinguish obstructive from restrictive lung physiology. Whether a value is “normal” depends on reference equations from healthy populations. These equations have always adjusted for height, age, and sex. And for two decades, they also included race-based adjustments given datasets consistently showing average FEV1 and FVC values differing across populations. Ironically, this change was an effort to make the equations, which had originally been based on data from Caucasians, more inclusive by including data from multiple ethnic groups while also having some physiologic rationale by accounting for the smaller Cormic index (smaller thorax for a given standing height) seen in observational studies of individuals of African descent as well as others. This approach, while imperfect, was accepted for diagnosing abnormal physiology.

Flash forward to recent times. In 2023, the ATS moved to eliminate race-based adjustment from the reference equations. Thirty-three workshop participants—drawn from both the ATS Pulmonary Function Test Committee and the ATS Health Equity and Diversity Committee—met over the issue. Thereafter an official statement was produced explaining “why race and ethnicity should no longer be considered factors in interpreting the results of spirometry.” If this change had improved diagnostic precision, it would have been welcome.

From the outset, the ATS statement framed the prior race‑adjusted equations as products of “structural racism,” despite their intent to improve accuracy by incorporating data from multiple populations. More than 90% of workshop participants nevertheless endorsed adopting a race-neutral reference equation, citing non-clinical benefits such as affirming that “race and ethnicity are not biological variables.” At the same time, ATS issued a word of caution within its own statement, acknowledging uncertain effects and potential harms with the new approach. Indeed, the full clinical consequences of removing race from the reference equations remain unknown. What is certain is that this change will reclassify some black patients with previously “low‑normal” values as abnormal, and some white patients previously labeled abnormal as normal.

No doubt, clinicians will still interpret pulmonary function tests (PFTs) in context, but this shift introduces new opportunities for misclassification without evidence that diagnostic accuracy or patient outcomes will improve. A patient with exertional dyspnea, for example, may now appear to have obstructive disease when the true cause is something else, like cardiac disease for example. The ATS document itself warns of potential harm because of the race-neutral equation, including, but not limited to unnecessary workups, inappropriate disease labeling, insurance or occupational consequences, and altered surgical risk assessments.

The central issue is simple: the recent race-neutral recommendations do not clearly improve diagnostic accuracy and introduce a different set of uncertainties into a test whose purpose is to clarify physiology. The change appears driven less by data and more by ideology. It risks undermining the primary function of any diagnostic tool, that is, providing clinicians with the best, most accurate information so they can provide exceptional care to their patients.  While an argument could be made for improving the original reference-equation approach—or even abandoning it all together in favor of alternatives like using patients as their own baseline—any change should be driven by data supporting improved clinical accuracy for individual patients regardless of race, and not a particular political agenda.

Dr. Michael Depietro is a pulmonologist and Do No Harm member. 

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New Do No Harm Report Debunks AAMC’s Racial Concordance Narrative

SALT LAKE CITY, UT: March 31, 2026 – Today, medical watchdog Do No Harm released a new report debunking assertions by the Association of American Medical Colleges (AAMC) about alleged benefits of racial concordance in assessing and treating pain.

The report, “How the AAMC Fails to Read and Correctly Interpret the Research It Cites,” exposes the AAMC’s role in elevating activism over evidence within its amicus brief submitted in the Students for Fair Admissions v. Harvard case over race-based college admissions. The brief cites four unreliable studies to defend the discredited theory that racial concordance, in which patients are treated by doctors of the same race, improves health outcomes.

Yet, as Do No Harm’s report shows, not one of them actually supports the asserted benefit of racial concordance in the treatment of pain.

“Our report exposes the tactics employed by activist medical organizations to infuse racial discrimination throughout all of healthcare,” said Jay Greene, PhD, Director of Research at Do No Harm. “The country’s most prominent medical societies either didn’t read or purposely misrepresented the studies used to justify the debunked racial concordance myth. They failed in their responsibility to describe medical research accurately to the highest court in the land. This dereliction of their duty to honestly assess studies raises doubts about the scientific credibility of these organizations more broadly.”

Do No Harm has previously rebutted the general claim of racial concordance and, throughout the latest report, thoroughly addresses the AAMC’s failure to describe research results accurately.

Click here to read the full report.

Background: 

  • The first study wrongly suggests that white trainees are more likely than non-white trainees to hold false medical beliefs about black patients. However, the study focuses on medical trainees (not independently practicing doctors), never compares black trainees to non-black trainees, never examines the treatment of black patients, and conveniently leaves out data showing non-white trainees were actually more likely than white trainees to hold those false beliefs.
  • The second study concludes that black children with appendicitis are as likely as white children with appendicitis to be given an analgesic but significantly less likely to receive an opioid. This study also does not support racial concordance in pain treatment because it never examines that question.
  • The third study is only a review of research on racial differences in pain treatment. Notably, it presents no original findings and fails to examine whether a physician’s race was associated with differences in the treatment of pain.
  • The fourth study finds that non-minority patients were more likely to receive guideline-recommended analgesic prescriptions than minority patients. However, it never examines whether pain treatment for black patients was any different if their physician was also black. It also did not collect data on pain treatment for white patients.

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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Do No Harm Files Lawsuit Challenging Discriminatory Federal Health Scholarship Program 

SALT LAKE CITY, UT; March 30, 2026 – Today, Do No Harm filed a federal lawsuit in the U.S. District Court for the District of Columbia challenging the Native Hawaiian Health Scholarship Program (“the Program”) administered by the U.S. Department of Health and Human Services (HHS).

“In the last year, the Department of Health and Human Services has made historic strides toward ending racial bias in medicine and restoring meritocracy,” said Stanley Goldfarb, MD, Chairman at Do No Harm. “That this program still exists even after the efforts by this administration to course correct proves just how widespread institutional race discrimination has become. Our complaint challenging the Native Hawaiian Health Scholarship Program is aimed at ensuring well-deserving applicants can qualify to compete for the financial relief the scholarship provides. The criteria in question should be revised so that the program will align with HHS goals to restore excellence and merit in healthcare.”

Read the full complaint here.

Background:

The Program is administered by HHS and provides generous financial aid, including assistance for tuition, living expenses and other costs, for students pursuing certain healthcare careers. In exchange, scholarship recipients agree to provide healthcare services in Hawaii for a couple of years after graduation.

However, to be eligible, applicants must be “Native Hawaiians,” a requirement that is enshrined into federal law. The Program defines Native Hawaiian as a U.S. citizen who is “a descendant of the aboriginal people, who prior to 1778, occupied and exercised sovereignty in the area that now constitutes the state of Hawaii.”

This eligibility barrier is racial discrimination.

Do No Harm represents several of its members in this lawsuit, who, but for their race, would be qualified and competitive applicants. These courageous members are taking a stand because they believe that well-deserving students shouldn’t be denied life-changing opportunities on the basis of race.

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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DEI Mandates No More: The LCME Quietly Removes ‘Bias’ and ‘Equity’ Requirements

Earlier this month, the Liaison Committee on Medical Education (LCME), the main accrediting body for allopathic medical schools, quietly updated its 2027-2028 standards.

The change, unannounced and easy to miss, is enormously consequential: the LCME removed the requirement that medical schools inject DEI-oriented content into their curricula.

Previously, the standards required schools to provide “opportunities for medical students to learn to recognize and appropriately address biases in themselves, in others, and in the health care delivery process,” and to include in their curricula “approaches to reduce health care inequities.”

The new standards, first reported by The Wall Street Journal, omit this DEI language entirely.

This is a massive, massive victory for medical education.

With this change, medical schools will no longer be forced to indoctrinate students into a divisive, discriminatory ideology.

And what’s more, they will no longer have the fig leaf of LCME mandates to justify even more radical DEI-infested curriculum content.

The change is the LCME’s second major update to its standards following President Trump’s executive order directly targeting accreditors for imposing divisive and discriminatory policies on higher education; that executive order mentioned the LCME by name.

In May 2025, the LCME removed Standard 3.3, which forced medical schools to have in place “programs and/or partnerships” aimed at achieving diversity, effectively encouraging racial discrimination.

Additionally, the changes follow Do No Harm’s report exposing accreditors for injecting DEI into medical schools and healthcare education programs through accreditation standards.

Since our report, the vast majority of medical and healthcare education accreditors have ditched or suspended their DEI mandates.

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Do No Harm Submits Amicus Brief Urging Supreme Court to Take Up Case and Reject Any First Amendment Right to Racially Discriminate

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Today, Do No Harm, Students for Fair Admissions, and the American Alliance for Equal Rights filed an amicus brief in the United States Supreme Court in support of a lawsuit challenging the New Jersey State Bar Association’s discriminatory set asides. The case raises an important issue: whether the First Amendment creates a general right to racially discriminate.

The brief urges the Court to grant certiorari in Saadeh v. New Jersey State Bar Association, a case concerning the New Jersey State Bar Association’s racial preference system employed when filling board seats. The bar association, claiming that such preferences are necessary for it to advocate its DEI goals, reserves these seats for lawyers who are “diverse” or from “underrepresented” groups, including, “Black/African American,” “Hispanic/Latino/a/x,” “Asian/Pacific American,” “LGBTQ+,” and “women.”

In October 2021, Rajeh Saadeh, the plaintiff and petitioner in the case, sued the bar association over this quota system, arguing that it violates New Jersey’s antidiscrimination laws.

Though the trial court ruled that the bar association’s quotas were illegal under state law, New Jersey’s appellate court reversed that decision based solely on the First Amendment. According to the state appellate court, forcing the bar association to end such racial preferences would violate the association’s First Amendment rights because it would “significantly burden the expression of its views”—namely the bar association’s “ability to advocate the value of diversity and inclusivity.”

In other words, the court accepted the theory that New Jersey’s bar association had a First Amendment right to racially discriminate. The New Jersey Supreme Court then denied Saadeh’s petition for certiorari.

Do No Harm’s brief explains why this theory is bogus and why it is imperative for the United States Supreme Court to take up this case.

First, the brief highlights numerous examples of cases, including Do No Harm cases, in which defendants accused of illegal racial discrimination have attempted to mount a constitutional Free Speech defense, demonstrating a growing need for the Court to make clear that there is no First Amendment right to racially discriminate.

Then, the brief explains why the logic of a purported First Amendment right to racially discriminate falls apart. Essentially, there is a difference between expressing beliefs and practicing them. The First Amendment protects expression; but antidiscrimination laws forbid racial exclusion and discriminatory practices.

As the brief further explains: “The Free Speech Clause theory” recognized by the New Jersey appellate court and advanced in rising numbers of cases across the country is “not merely novel” but “also incompatible with decades of [Supreme] Court[] precedent and the decisions of most other courts.” In addition, the theory has “no logical stopping point” given that “every entity that discriminates could claim the same ‘expressive’ interest in the bare act of discrimination.”

“The ‘expression’ supposedly found in DEI programs—at bottom, the economic or social advancement of certain racial groups and the exclusion of others—merely restates the fact of race discrimination. Allowing that ‘expression’ to serve as the basis for evading antidiscrimination laws would nullify those laws, for every entity that discriminates could claim the same interest in conveying support for such discrimination.”

Do No Harm urges the Court to grant certiorari.

As defendants scramble to keep unlawful DEI policies in play, many now regularly seek to evade racial nondiscrimination laws and Supreme Court precedent through a purported First Amendment right to discriminate as their “expression.” It is imperative that the Court firmly decide the obvious: DEI activists cannot rely on the First Amendment to racially discriminate.

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Do No Harm Proposes CDC Adopt New Medical Diagnosis Codes for Gender Transition and Detransition

SALT LAKE CITY, UTAH; March 17, 2026 – Today, Kurt Miceli, MD, Do No Harm’s Chief Medical Officer, will present to the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention (CDC) about the need for new medical diagnosis codes (known as ICD-10 codes) for gender transition and detransition.

“Refining the medical diagnosis codes for gender transition and detransition is urgently needed. Currently, the lack of a specific code for detransition makes these individuals effectively invisible to the healthcare system, obscuring their medical needs and limiting real-world research, follow‑up care, and outcome monitoring that responsible practice requires,” said Kurt Miceli, MD, Chief Medical Officer at Do No Harm. “The new diagnosis codes we’re proposing would help generate valuable research data, support evidence-based health standards, and enhance patient care. We commend the CDC for taking important steps toward this goal by accepting for October implementation the code we introduced at the last ICD-10 meeting: gender identity disorder in remission, or desistance. We encourage the agency to adopt our newly proposed codes so that we can further improve the quality of research and care for those suffering from gender dysphoria.”

The CDC meeting will begin at 9:00 a.m. ET. Click here for the agenda and livestream.

Why new codes are needed:

  • To more accurately document an individual’s clinical state to support the appropriate delivery of care
  • To provide clinical data that will support and improve research, quality, and standards of care
  • To inform public health needs in this evolving area of medicine
  • To improve clinician-to-clinician communication within the medical record
  • To give visibility to patients facing these clinical conditions

Do No Harm’s proposed codes aim to more precisely capture the various aspects of gender transition, distinguish those aspects from disorders of sex development, and make sure detransitioners are fully visible to the healthcare system.

These codes include:

  • Personal history of social gender transition
  • Personal history of medical gender transition
  • Personal history of surgical gender transition
  • Personal history of intersex surgery
  • Personal history of unspecified gender transition
  • Personal history of gender detransition

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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A Woke Gamble in Medicine?

Academic Medicine, the flagship journal of Association of American Medical Colleges (AAMC) recently published an article advocating for a lottery-based residency match system to replace the current match system that, in the authors’ words, emphasize “a narrow set of comparative achievements—standardized test performance, publication counts, and honor society memberships.”

The article, written by several authors including the Associate Dean for Admissions at Stanford University School of Medicine, starts out with the premise that this more merit-oriented approach is actually harmful to medical education.

Instead, the authors argue that residency programs should adopt a “modified lottery” system in which applicants who are deemed “qualified” by their medical schools are assigned, through an algorithm, to interview with certain residency programs.

The crux of the argument is as follows:

“We argue that the current residency selection process must be upended to achieve several important aims: facilitating the implementation of [competency-based medical education], promoting a growth mindset among students, eliminating the use of metrics that foster harmful bias, ensuring optimal preparation for patient care, and improving equality within the selection process.”

Notice the sections on “bias” and “equality.”

And here’s the kicker: the authors argue that this process should include diversity objectives so that residency programs can achieve their DEI goals.

“Inclusion of diversity-related programmatic outcomes in the modified lottery process could help align applicants and programs with similar interests in caring for diverse patient populations, advancing health equity, or promoting inclusive practices,” the authors write.

To be clear, it is not the lottery itself that is the issue. Indeed, Do No Harm’s founder Dr. Stanley Goldfarb explained in National Review how, in the context of medical school admissions, instituting a lottery system past a certain threshold of academic achievement would prevent racial preferences in admissions while ensuring that medical schools preserve merit.

Each medical school should announce a minimum MCAT score and undergraduate GPA  necessary for admission, then institute a lottery system for applicants who clear those bars. This approach would not only end racial discrimination overnight — it would also strongly incentivize medical schools to admit the best-qualified students.

Instead, it is the article’s premise that more merit-oriented methods of selection should be devalued, and that the lottery process should be used to achieve DEI goals, that is disturbing. It’s a system in which “good enough” replaces “the best” for selecting into the most competitive training programs.

The authors give the game away elsewhere in the paper, arguing that more achievement-oriented metrics of residency selection “confer demonstrable bias (e.g. racial, ethnic, gender, and/or socioeconomic), potentially limiting the entrance of applicants with identities considered underrepresented in medicine into residency positions.”

How, exactly, merit-based metrics of selection confer bias while consideration of diversity objectives does not is anyone’s guess.

Additionally, the article is remarkably light on details as to what counts as a qualified applicant, instead calling for widespread adoption of a standardized “programmatic assessment.”

“In order for a modified lottery for interviews to be successful, this would require UME institutions to agree upon a set of outcomes to determine qualification and develop rigorous programmatic assessment to ensure those outcomes are met,” the authors write.

But apparently the “standardized test performance, publication counts, and honor society memberships” are excluded from the qualification discussion? This doesn’t make much sense.

In short, the article’s proposal would indeed upend residency selection, but make it much less fair. Objective measures of academic excellence would be devalued, and non-academic considerations would be promoted.

We shouldn’t gamble on the future of medicine like this.

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Detransitioners Are Righting Medicine’s Wrongs

Lobotomies and pediatric gender interventions have a lot in common. Both treatments were developed to address forms of psychological distress, have resulted in patient harm, and sparked concerns surrounding informed consent from a vulnerable population.

But the medical community abandoned lobotomies without legal restrictions, while pediatric gender interventions are being wrestled away from “gender-affirming” clinicians by twenty-seven state bans, multiple federal executive orders and the threat of Medicare and Medicaid defunding.

Despite the similarities, the two interventions have one important difference: pediatric gender interventions are rooted in ideology while lobotomies were not. The medical establishment was able to self-regulate and stop performing lobotomies without legal prohibitions after an increasing number of patients suffered poor outcomes, likely because doctors were not ideologically invested in the procedures. Compelling clinicians to alter a practice motivated by deeply-held beliefs rather than objective evidence has proven to be difficult. But the adverse complications are becoming too obvious to ignore.

A growing population of patients harmed by pediatric gender interventions are redirecting medicine away from ideology and back to objective facts. Detransitioners who were deemed by their clinicians to be transgender and subsequently underwent irreversible procedures before coming to realize that their gender distress was due to something else are the truth serum restoring medical integrity. Legal prohibitions, restrictions in funding, and now a two million dollar judgement in favor of a harmed patient are the inevitable result of belief-directed medicine that failed to right itself.

Shaking clinicians out of their transgender fever dream has been challenging. Queer theory believers unquestioningly affirm children’s musings of gender nonconformity, sometimes leading to life-altering gender interventions. They assert gender is a social construct untethered to biological sex. Children who struggle with gender distress are treated as if they are expressing a distinct and authentic identity — despite its departure from biological reality — and one that must be affirmed without reservation.

This confident conclusion conflicts with standard clinical practice that requires an objective evaluation of a patient’s symptoms and, especially in children, a careful exploration of the psychosocial factors that often underlie gender distress. Yet, in many contemporary frameworks, questioning a child’s newly-declared gender identity is perceived as pathologizing gender nonconformity itself, and therefore discriminatory to those seeking to express an inner sense of self.

In 2023 the American Psychiatric Association’s publishing house released Gender-Affirming Psychiatric Care (GAPC), an exhaustive guide to gender nonconforming patients. This textbook recommends medical and surgical transition as appropriate treatment options for patients of all ages with gender distress, even when significant co-occurring conditions — such as autism, eating disorders, substance use disorders, and serious mental illness — are present.

According to GAPC, some gender-affirming clinicians believe an investigation of a patient’s reported gender distress that delays medical affirmation — which would be required for a comprehensive evaluation — is a form of gender-identity discrimination, and even conversion therapy.

Detransitioners who were subjected to irreversible medical interventions that damaged healthy organs and bodily functions are the unfortunate result of this detour away from objectivity.

This isn’t the first time patients have suffered from ideology infiltrating medicine. The eugenics movement is one such example that led to the coerced sterilization of as many as seventy thousand people. Eugenicists in the early twentieth century sought to improve the human race by limiting the reproduction of people deemed to be “feebleminded,” convincing even the U.S. Supreme Court justice Oliver Wendell Holmes, who famously quipped in his opinion favoring the forced sterilization of twenty-one-year-old Carrie Buck, “Three generations of imbeciles are enough.”

Detransitioners injured by gender interventions are a reminder of how ideological capture of medical institutions can lead to harm rather than healing.

March 12 is Detransition Awareness Day — an opportunity for the medical community to acknowledge the dangers of ideologically-driven medicine and reaffirm a commitment to objective and compassionate care that limits preventable injury.

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The AAMC Changes Course on ‘Cultural’ Competencies

The Association of American Medical Colleges (AAMC) is continuing to walk back some of its more overt references to diversity in its public materials. It’s a sign that the AAMC is moderating the outward manifestations of its long-historied DEI infatuation, even if it hasn’t given up the ideology wholesale just yet.

At some point last month, the AAMC updated the language used in its “Premed Competencies for Entering Medical Students.” These “competencies” refer to the traits and skills that incoming medical students should possess to succeed and become effective physicians.

An archived version of the article, dated February 1, 2026, included a competency titled “cultural humility,” which it defined as the skill in which one: “Seeks out and engages diverse and divergent perspectives with a desire to understand and willingness to adjust one’s mindset; understands a situation or idea from alternative viewpoints; reflects on one’s values, beliefs, and identities and how they may affect others; reflects on and addresses bias in oneself and others; and fosters a supportive environment that values inclusivity.”

Similarly, the page previously included the competency of “Cultural awareness”: “Appreciates how historical, sociocultural, political, and economic factors affect others’ interactions, behaviors, and well-being; values diversity; and demonstrates a desire to learn about different cultures, beliefs, and values.”

Now, “Cultural humility” is known as “Self-awareness,” and “Cultural awareness” has become “Understanding others.”

The definitions of the new competencies do not make direct references to diversity and related concepts.

Furthermore, the AAMC’s resource page on its PREview exam has changed as well.

As Do No Harm previously reported, one of the goals of the PREview exam is to promote “inclusivity” and “level the playing field” for applicants. The exam was also assessed by “experts” in DEI.

“In discussing the exam with our DEI constituents, the sentiment has always been that it would help level the playing field for applicants,” said David Acosta, MD, AAMC chief diversity and inclusion officer, in a 2022 statement.

Previously, the resource page contained the following language: “The PREview exam provides medical schools with a more complete view of each applicant by assessing skills such as resilience and adaptability, service orientation, ethical responsibility to self and others, empathy and compassion, cultural awareness, cultural humility, and teamwork and collaboration, among others.”

The current resource page, however, makes no mention of “cultural awareness” or “cultural humility.”

Of course, the PREview exam itself does not appear to have changed, but it is worth noting that the AAMC is trying to subtly rebrand its purpose after explicitly linking it to DEI just a few years ago.

And once again, if there is truly a change of heart in the AAMC leadership regarding DEI, we should expect the AAMC to publicly state this to be the case.

Until that point, we should remain skeptical.

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The AMA Wants to Have It Both Ways on Gender Ideology

Recently, the AMA investigated one of its continuing medical education courses that was rife with gender ideology and unscientific endorsements of pediatric gender transitions, finding it did not comply with accreditation standards. But the AMA’s handling of the matter reveals the organization is still on board with gender activism.

Here’s the timeline:

In December, Do No Harm Medical Director Kurt Miceli, MD, submitted a complaint to the Accreditation Council for Continuing Medical Education (ACCME) over a course on pediatric gender medicine produced by the American Medical Association (AMA) that is best described as promoting gender ideology.

The complaint explained that the course, titled “LGBTQ+ Patient-Centered Practices,” violates the ACCME’s standards, which require that all educational recommendations for patient care be grounded in current science, supported by clinical reasoning, and presented in a fair and balanced manner.

As Do No Harm previously reported:

  • The course refused to acknowledge the fact that the overall quality of evidence for so-called “gender-affirming care” for minors is very low.
  • It ignored the numerous evidence reviews that have shown sex-denying medical interventions to be an unsupported means of addressing gender dysphoria in children.
  • It failed to properly acknowledge the numerous and substantial risks of these procedures.
  • And it even cited activist groups who seek to push gender ideology in the political realm.

Ultimately, the ACCME initiated an investigation and the AMA took the course down; the link to the course redirects to the AMA’s general CME webpage.

Then, in February of this year, the AMA Education Center sent out an email broadcasting the fact that the course did not meet the requisite accreditation standards.

Figure 1. A screenshot from an email sent by the AMA Education Center.

Here’s the relevant section:

After a recent review, we discovered the activity “LGBTQ+ Patient-Centered Practices” did not fully meet Standard 1 of the Standards for Integrity and Independence in Accredited Continuing Education, specifically subsection 4: “Although accredited continuing education is an appropriate place to discuss, debate, and explore new and evolving topics, these areas need to be clearly identified as such within the program and individual presentations. It is the responsibility of accredited providers to facilitate engagement with these topics without advocating for, or promoting, practices that are not, or not yet adequately based on current science, evidence, and clinical reasoning.”

At first blush, this seems encouraging.

One reading of this statement is that the AMA recognizes that its course was “advocating for” practices that are not based on current evidence.

But surely this conclusion was evident to any reviewer prior to the course’s publication. Why only now, after backlash against the course’s content, is the AMA deciding the course does not fully meet standards? 

What’s more, the AMA email then directs members to sources that it describes as providing “comprehensive, evidence-based guidelines and recommendations regarding appropriate and safe approaches for the problems or symptoms presented during” the course.

In other words, these sources are what the AMA considers authoritative sources of information on pediatric gender medicine. 

Of course, they are anything but.

The listed sources include the American Academy of Pediatrics (AAP) and UpToDate.

The AAP simply has not produced comprehensive evidence-based guidelines on pediatric gender medicine at all.

Instead, it has issued a policy statement, which it reaffirmed in 2023, that it clarifies is “not a comprehensive review of clinical approaches and nuances to pediatric care for children and youth that identify as” transgender. That policy statement includes the claim that puberty blockers are “reversible” treatments for gender dysphoria, a claim that is outright false.

Moreover, the AAP has criticized recent efforts to actually review the evidence behind sex-denying interventions for minors, dismissing the Department of Health and Human Services’ recent evidence review as prioritizing “opinions over dispassionate reviews of evidence.” This is, of course, a complete inversion of the truth.

UpToDate, meanwhile, is a clinical resource that provides clinicians with comprehensive summaries and detailed health information on a broad array of medical topics.

One of its resources is co-authored by Dr. Johanna Olson-Kennedy, a prominent advocate for and provider of so-called “gender-affirming care.” Reportedly, Olson-Kennedy had initially refused to publish the results of a multi-million dollar, federally-funded study which, according to The New York Times, had found that “puberty blockers did not lead to mental health improvements” in children.

UpToDate’s resources do not engage with the wealth of evidence on the harms of child sex change interventions and the corresponding lack of evidence supporting the procedures’ effectiveness.

What’s the takeaway from all of this? 

It seems like the AMA is talking out of both sides of its mouth.

For one, that the AMA believes these sources are authoritative indicates that it still is failing to grapple with the reality that the weight of evidence does not support so-called “gender-affiriming care.”

And second, that the course was created at all, and that it took a complaint to cause serious evaluation of the course’s content, does not inspire confidence in the AMA’s attitude regarding sex-denying interventions for minors.

The AMA’s attempt to distance itself from the more excessive promotions of gender ideology in its course is notable, to be sure.

But much more is necessary.