Despite the widespread backlash against “Diversity, Equity, and Inclusion” (DEI) measures in healthcare, true believers continue to introduce ideology into medical practice. No other takeaway is possible when one examines a course currently available in the “Anti-Racism Coalition” educational series at the George Washington University School of Medicine & Health Sciences (GW SMHS).
That course, “Moving Beyond Bystanding … to Disrupting Racism,” exists, according to its website, to “change racist culture, policies, and practices” in hospitals and other medical institutions.
“No matter what role you have,” the website promises, “this training will allow for you to recognize your responsibility in contributing to an antiracist institutional culture.”
The course’s intellectual framework is the so-called D.I.S.R.U.P.T. model, created by GW SMHS medical educator Maranda C. Ward, pediatrician Olanrewaju Falusi, and student collaborators. In a recent post on the medical-news site MedPage Today, Ward et al. describe D.I.S.R.U.P.T. as “a mnemonic that offers a set of personal and shared considerations for building anti-racist clinical care.”
Among the authors’ specific recommendations is that physicians’ rounds should end with a “bias check”: “Did we consider whether bias influenced this care plan?”
The authors also propose that “[p]atterns in patient satisfaction, readmission rates, or delays in follow-up can be analyzed by demographic group.”
According to Ward et al., the issue of racism in medicine is not merely a matter of a few bad actors. Rather, the authors see it as a systemic and structural issue requiring collective accountability. They note approvingly that training participants “grasped bias as a collective issue” and that “teams can create structured prompts to prevent bias and institutionalized racism.”
This is bad medicine. It focuses on ideology over substance, blaming every racial disparity on bigotry while ignoring genetics, comorbidities, behavior, lifestyle, and other well-documented factors.
Moreover, Ward et al. rely on widely debunked “implicit bias” ideology in the plugging (and, presumably, the designing) of their course, writing that “[r]esearch on implicit bias makes it clear that unconscious stereotypes shape physician behavior.”
The problem with this assertion is that there is no evidence that “implicit biases” explain racial disparities in health outcomes. Moreover, the tests used to evaluate these unconscious but ostensibly ubiquitous prejudices fail to meet widely accepted standards of reliability and validity.
As Do No Harm has previously noted, “a 2013 meta-analysis published in the Journal of Personality and Social Psychology found that Implicit Association Tests (IATs) were ‘poor predictors’ of real-world bias and discrimination.”
Yet these are the very tests on which Ward et al. base their “antiracist” ideology.
Other elements of Ward’s D.I.S.R.U.P.T. defense are just as problematic.
Over and over, the GW professor and her co-designers draw a parallel between antiracist practices and such evidence-based medical developments as hand hygiene.
But such a comparison strains credulity. Hand hygiene is based on testable theories of germ transmission and infection control. Antiracist medicine, by contrast, is based on anecdotes, political theory, and critical social justice.
So, apparently, is GW SMHS’s course. According to the aforementioned MedPage Today article, a two-part D.I.S.R.U.P.T. training “showed improvement in participants’ sense of motivation to respond to racism, responsibility to act, and belief in their ability to contribute to equity work.” These results were assessed via “pre/post-data.”
Yet “pre/post” testing is itself methodologically suspect, as a classic meta-analysis by Victor L. Willson and Richard R. Putnam demonstrates. Across 32 studies, Willson and Putnam found a modest but real average effect: taking a pre-test at all tended to elevate post-test scores, including attitude measures.
In other words, not only is D.I.S.R.U.P.T. based on bad science, but its efficacy on its own terms deserves to be called into question. That its creators haven’t thought to do so is further evidence that their motives are political rather than medical.
At present, physicians taking “Moving Beyond Bystanding … to Disrupting Racism” may receive Continuing Medical Education credits for doing so.
Doctors on the hunt for authentic CME should look elsewhere.
The UC Berkeley School of Public Health Should Stay in Its Lane
COMMENTARY California DEI Public university Commentary Do No Harm StaffSomeone 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.
When Foxes Guard the Admissions Henhouse
COMMENTARY DEI Kaiser Pemanente Bernard J. Tyson School of Medicine Medical School Commentary Do No Harm StaffThe 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.
Do No Harm Report Exposes University of Texas System Medical Schools for Hiding Admissions Data
COMMENTARY Texas DEI University of Texas - Austin School of Medicine, University of Texas Health Science Center Houston McGovern School of Medicine, University of Texas Medical Branch - Galveston, University of Texas Rio Grande Valley School of Medicine, University of Texas Southwestern Medical School Medical School Press Release Do No Harm StaffSALT 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:
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.
HealthStream’s ‘Implicit Bias’ Module Has Improved … But Not Enough
COMMENTARY DEI accrediting organization, Healthcare resource, Nursing organization Commentary Do No Harm StaffMonths 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.
UW Medicine’s DEI Office Is Ridiculously Bloated
COMMENTARY Washington DEI University of Washington School of Medicine Health system Commentary Do No Harm StaffHow 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.
California Is Re-Upping a Woke Behavioral Health Regulator
COMMENTARY California DEI, Gender Ideology State government Commentary Do No Harm StaffA 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.
Trinity Health Is Still Up to Its DEI Tricks
COMMENTARY DEI Health system Commentary Do No Harm StaffAs 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.
The APA’s Radical Division 39 Is a Catastrophe
COMMENTARY DEI American Psychological Association Professional organization Commentary Do No Harm StaffA 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.
Do No Harm and Defending Education File Federal Civil Rights Complaint Against Oregon Agencies for Racial Discrimination
Uncategorized Oregon DEI State government Press Release Executive Do No Harm StaffSALT LAKE CITY, UT: May 28, 2026 – Today, Do No Harm and Defending Education jointly filed a federal civil rights complaint with the U.S. Department of Education’s Office for Civil Rights against two Oregon state agencies for discriminating on the basis of race in programs or activities that receive federal funding.
The complaint alleges that both Oregon’s Department of Education and Higher Education Coordinating Commission violate the Fourteenth Amendment’s Equal Protection Clause as well as Title VI of the Civil Rights Act of 1964 by taking race into account when funding public schools.
“Oregon’s use of student racial demographics to allocate public funding for K-12 schools and universities is immoral and violates the Constitution and federal antidiscrimination law. Political activists have long pushed institutions to support equity over equality, and Oregon’s system of race-based funding to remedy vague claims of ‘societal discrimination’ is a clear example,” said Kurt Miceli, MD, Chief Medical Officer at Do No Harm. “Oregonians deserve to know their tax dollars support equal educational opportunities for all. However, the state’s current system distributes public funding using racial quotas and race-based ‘bonuses’ that prioritize certain student racial demographics while actively disfavoring white and Asian racial groups. Our complaint shines much-needed light on these discriminatory practices, and we look forward to the Department of Education holding Oregon accountable.”
“Oregon’s Department of Education and Oregon’s Higher Education Coordinating Commission appear to be violating Title VI of the Civil Rights Act by administering programs that explicitly discriminate on the basis of race,” said Sarah Parshall Perry, Vice President and Senior Legal Fellow at Defending Education. “The Department oversees more than 1,200 public K-12 schools and over 560,000 students, and it receives more than $150 million annually in federal grant funding. But it operates a Charter School Equity Grants program, which explicitly funds charters that have at least a 65-percent minority population — something that looks very much like an illegal race-based quota. The Commission fares no better, as it awards taxpayer funds to schools based on the number of minority students who graduate from each. That kind of race essentialism is odious to the Constitution, and we look forward to the Department of Education’s investigation into how the state is using its educational funds.”
Oregon’s Department of Education is a state agency that oversees and provides funding to public schools, including public charter schools. Pursuant to state law, the department restricts “Charter School Equity Grants” to schools having at least 65 percent of their student bodies composed of prioritized groups, including certain preferred racial or ethnic groups. Similarly, Oregon’s Higher Education Coordinating Commission is a state agency that distributes funding to Oregon’s seven public universities and 17 community colleges. Through the Public University Support Fund, the commission distributes “bonus” taxpayer funds to schools based on the number of completed degrees by “underrepresented” students, which considers specified, prioritized racial and ethnic groups.
The complaint argues that Oregon’s racially discriminatory funding schemes are based on “amorphous claims of societal discrimination” repeatedly rejected by the United States Supreme Court. Because Oregon’s racial classifications cannot withstand constitutional scrutiny, the state’s discrimination violates the “color-blind” mandate of Title VI and the Equal Protection Clause.
Both Do No Harm and Defending Education have done notable work to rid education of racial discrimination and political bias and instead create a system centered on merit and excellence. This complaint was filed as part of the organizations’ efforts to hold institutions and state government agencies accountable to federal law.
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.
The DEI Two-Step
COMMENTARY Ohio, Texas DEI Private university, Professional organization, Public university Commentary Do No Harm StaffThe 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.
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.
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.
DOJ: By Its Own Admission, Yale Med School Illegally Discriminates Against White, Asian Applicants
COMMENTARY Connecticut DEI Yale University Medical School, Private university Commentary Ian Kingsbury, PhD, Jay Greene, PhDAs 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.
Do No Harm Files FCC Comment on Gender-Ideology TV Programming
COMMENTARY Gender Ideology Federal government Commentary Executive Do No Harm StaffYesterday, 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
COMMENTARY Oregon DEI Oregon Health and Science University Medical School, Public university Commentary Do No Harm StaffWhat 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.
When Advocacy Masquerades as Neurology
COMMENTARY DEI Medical association, Medical Journal Commentary Kurt Miceli, MD[Editor’s note: This piece originally appeared as a letter to the editor in response to the American Academy of Neurology’s (AAN) position statement “A Roadmap to Neurologic Health Equity.” That article is available here.]
It is the opinion of this reader that the AAN’s Roadmap to Neurologic Health Equity takes a one-way view of evidence to advance an agenda that extends beyond neurology, resembling an advocacy group more than a medical society rooted in science and patient care.
The paper, for instance, claims that Black men are “least likely to receive treatment” for headaches. It argues this by citing Burch et al., which reports prevalence—not treatment—data.
Further, Charleston and Burke found “no major racial/ethnic differences in abortive or prophylactic treatment” for migraines in the US ambulatory care setting.
Similarly, for Parkinson disease, the roadmap attributes disparities to “structural barriers,” without engaging other potential contributors. Yet one study cited noted that Black participants may underreport this ailment because they misconstrue parkinsonian symptoms for normal aging. Another offered that lower utilization of deep brain stimulation may, in part, reflect “a clinically appropriate difference.”
Read the full piece in Neurology.
Does the University of Illinois College of Medicine Support ‘Equitable’ Grading?
COMMENTARY Illinois DEI Medical School Commentary Do No Harm StaffThe University of Illinois College of Medicine’s “Diversity, Equity, and Inclusion” page is every bit as politicized, unscientific, and unserious as one might fear. Yet a deeper dive into the page’s resources reveals a grading scheme that, if actually operative, should terrify those eager to see future physicians held to appropriate academic standards.
UICOM has campuses in Chicago, Peoria, and Rockford. According to the Peoria campus’s website, the three branches combined educate one in six Illinois doctors.
Thus, it is no mere curiosity that the institution’s DEI office directs site visitors to such medically irrelevant frippery as a “land acknowledgement.” Nor is it harmless that the DEI website points medical students toward various “DEI Initiatives/Opportunities,” among them the university’s startlingly progressive Gender and Sexuality Center.
Rather, these errors in judgment matter. By introducing ideology into medical education, they blur what ought to be a tight focus on foundational science, clinical skills, and hands-on training.
They may also be paving the way for even more damaging experiments.
Tucked away at the bottom of UICOM’s DEI page is a list of “Resources,” among them “Teaching for Equity and Social Justice.”
Following that link and selecting “Assessment & Grading Practices” then “Equitable Assessments & Grading Practices” brings up a radical scheme whose enactment would seriously compromise authentic academic evaluation.
Specifically, the page in question urges instructors to embrace grading practices that “respect the diversity of students’ social identities as well as the diversity of student interests.”
Such grading practices, the page continues, focus on “reducing assessment biases” — e.g., those that “unfairly penaliz[e] students based on their race, gender, socio-economic status, etc.”
Moreover, the page declares, grading performed in this manner “recognize[s] that students have varying lived experiences and background knowledge.” This language should be familiar to anyone who has previously encountered critical educational theory, a Marxist framework obsessed with power dynamics and systemic oppression.
Among the page’s specific grading recommendations are that instructors should consider “[r]e-assessing [student work] without penalty & [allowing] multiple attempts.” They should consider “[r]ethinking the grading of participation” and “[i]ncorporating personal learning goals.”
Missing from these recommendations is any acknowledgement that medical students must regularly master difficult material that has its source in scientific reality. Students’ “lived experiences” are, in these instances, less important than what (or whether) they have actually learned.
To be clear, the webpage in question was produced by the University of Illinois Chicago’s Center for the Advancement of Teaching Excellence, not UICOM itself. Nevertheless, the College of Medicine promotes this material as a resource and thus presumably affirms the ideology behind it.
UICOM should publicly clarify whether it supports the use of “equitable assessments” in medical-school classrooms. If it does, the institution has a serious problem on its hands.
Do No Harm Sues Racially Discriminatory Doctors’ Directory
Uncategorized New York DEI Press Release Judicial Do No Harm StaffSALT LAKE CITY, UT; May 19, 2026 – Today, Do No Harm filed a lawsuit against the online directory Find A Black Doctor and its owner for violating federal civil rights law by discriminating against physicians based on race. The lawsuit was filed in the United States District Court for the Southern District of New York.
“Racial discrimination in medicine is unlawful and undermines trust between patients and providers,” said Kurt Miceli, MD, Chief Medical Officer at Do No Harm. “By excluding qualified doctors based solely on their skin color, Find A Black Doctor indefensibly robs some physicians of valuable advertising exposure and deprives patients of the opportunity to discover capable providers without regard to race. The idea that patients have better outcomes when treated by doctors of the same race — known as racial concordance — is a pernicious and debunked myth that only sows distrust in the doctor-patient relationship. Do No Harm remains committed to rooting out all identity-based political programs in medicine.”
Find A Black Doctor is an online directory that limits eligibility to black physicians and dentists in active clinical practice. According to Do No Harm’s complaint, the directory bars non-black doctors from valuable advertising exposure and potential opportunities to work with new patients. By design and in effect, it advances a model of racial segregation, prioritizing race over medical skill, judgment, and experience.
Background:
Click here to read the complaint.
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.
GW’s Med School Hasn’t Abandoned ‘Antiracist’ Education
COMMENTARY Washington DC DEI Medical School Commentary Do No Harm StaffDespite the widespread backlash against “Diversity, Equity, and Inclusion” (DEI) measures in healthcare, true believers continue to introduce ideology into medical practice. No other takeaway is possible when one examines a course currently available in the “Anti-Racism Coalition” educational series at the George Washington University School of Medicine & Health Sciences (GW SMHS).
That course, “Moving Beyond Bystanding … to Disrupting Racism,” exists, according to its website, to “change racist culture, policies, and practices” in hospitals and other medical institutions.
“No matter what role you have,” the website promises, “this training will allow for you to recognize your responsibility in contributing to an antiracist institutional culture.”
The course’s intellectual framework is the so-called D.I.S.R.U.P.T. model, created by GW SMHS medical educator Maranda C. Ward, pediatrician Olanrewaju Falusi, and student collaborators. In a recent post on the medical-news site MedPage Today, Ward et al. describe D.I.S.R.U.P.T. as “a mnemonic that offers a set of personal and shared considerations for building anti-racist clinical care.”
Among the authors’ specific recommendations is that physicians’ rounds should end with a “bias check”: “Did we consider whether bias influenced this care plan?”
The authors also propose that “[p]atterns in patient satisfaction, readmission rates, or delays in follow-up can be analyzed by demographic group.”
According to Ward et al., the issue of racism in medicine is not merely a matter of a few bad actors. Rather, the authors see it as a systemic and structural issue requiring collective accountability. They note approvingly that training participants “grasped bias as a collective issue” and that “teams can create structured prompts to prevent bias and institutionalized racism.”
This is bad medicine. It focuses on ideology over substance, blaming every racial disparity on bigotry while ignoring genetics, comorbidities, behavior, lifestyle, and other well-documented factors.
Moreover, Ward et al. rely on widely debunked “implicit bias” ideology in the plugging (and, presumably, the designing) of their course, writing that “[r]esearch on implicit bias makes it clear that unconscious stereotypes shape physician behavior.”
The problem with this assertion is that there is no evidence that “implicit biases” explain racial disparities in health outcomes. Moreover, the tests used to evaluate these unconscious but ostensibly ubiquitous prejudices fail to meet widely accepted standards of reliability and validity.
As Do No Harm has previously noted, “a 2013 meta-analysis published in the Journal of Personality and Social Psychology found that Implicit Association Tests (IATs) were ‘poor predictors’ of real-world bias and discrimination.”
Yet these are the very tests on which Ward et al. base their “antiracist” ideology.
Other elements of Ward’s D.I.S.R.U.P.T. defense are just as problematic.
Over and over, the GW professor and her co-designers draw a parallel between antiracist practices and such evidence-based medical developments as hand hygiene.
But such a comparison strains credulity. Hand hygiene is based on testable theories of germ transmission and infection control. Antiracist medicine, by contrast, is based on anecdotes, political theory, and critical social justice.
So, apparently, is GW SMHS’s course. According to the aforementioned MedPage Today article, a two-part D.I.S.R.U.P.T. training “showed improvement in participants’ sense of motivation to respond to racism, responsibility to act, and belief in their ability to contribute to equity work.” These results were assessed via “pre/post-data.”
Yet “pre/post” testing is itself methodologically suspect, as a classic meta-analysis by Victor L. Willson and Richard R. Putnam demonstrates. Across 32 studies, Willson and Putnam found a modest but real average effect: taking a pre-test at all tended to elevate post-test scores, including attitude measures.
In other words, not only is D.I.S.R.U.P.T. based on bad science, but its efficacy on its own terms deserves to be called into question. That its creators haven’t thought to do so is further evidence that their motives are political rather than medical.
At present, physicians taking “Moving Beyond Bystanding … to Disrupting Racism” may receive Continuing Medical Education credits for doing so.
Doctors on the hunt for authentic CME should look elsewhere.
Newsweek Is Wrong About ‘Racially Concordant Care’
COMMENTARY DEI Medical Journal, News Media Commentary Ian Kingsbury, PhD, Jay Greene, PhDIn 2020, a study published in the Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences (PNAS) made waves in reporting that black newborns were more likely to survive when under the care of black physicians. In a report published by Do No Harm, we speculated that the correlation was spurious. Analysis from economists George Borjas and Robert VerBruggen confirmed our suspicions, and author correspondence retrieved through public-records request suggests that the study conclusion may not have been an oversight but an effort to preserve preferred narratives.
In penning a defense of DEI in medicine, the editors at Newsweek acknowledge that the PNAS study has been debunked. But they cite three other studies that claim to find benefits of racial diversity in medicine, arguing that, based on those studies, there appears to be promise for the hypothesis that racially concordant care is beneficial for minority patients.
That conclusion is incorrect.
First, those three studies must be properly situated within the broader literature. There have been — to our knowledge — six systematic reviews of race concordance in medicine. Systematic reviews consider what the weight and quality of evidence indicate about a research question. When it comes to race concordance, five of six reviews conclude that evidence does not support the concordance hypothesis, while the sixth features easily identifiable methodological errors.
Further, the three studies cited in defense of DEI warrant deep skepticism. As The Economist observed in reporting on the debunking of the PNAS study, “science that fits the zeitgeist sometimes does not fit the data.” We have previously reviewed each of these studies. The problems with all three are fairly obvious once you consider all of the facts.
The first study mentioned involves an experiment in Oakland where black patients were randomly assigned to one of six black or eight non-black physicians before agreeing to undergo preventative health screening tests.
In the first stage of the experiment, patients are shown a photo of a doctor on a tablet and asked about whether they would like to participate in four preventative health screenings. Before meeting with the doctor, patients state which of the screenings they would like to receive. At this stage of the experiment — which provides the strongest, least corruptible test of the hypothesis — willingness to participate in the preventative screenings does not vary according to the race of the doctor on the tablet.
Differences in the Oakland experiment are only observed in the second stage of the experiment, when the doctors depicted on the tablets visit the patients and attempt to persuade them to receive the screenings. At that stage, more patients assigned to visit with a black doctor and who had initially declined the screenings relented and accepted three of the four screenings compared to patients assigned to non-black doctors. The problem is that the second stage of experiment isn’t a test of race: It’s a test of the power of persuasion among six physicians who happen to be black compared to eight who are not. Whereas race would have been salient in the first stage (when patients only saw a photo), it’s impossible to decode whether it was a factor at all in the second stage. Moreover, the study acknowledges that “[t]he doctors, subjects, and field staff were not informed that doctor race was being randomized, though they could have inferred it” (p. 4082). As we wrote in our critique, “If the doctors were aware that the study was examining the effects of racial concordance, which seems likely, it is possible that sympathy with the racial concordance hypothesis would exceptionally motivate the 6 black doctors while undermining the motivation of the 8 non-black doctors to get patients to agree to interventions.”
The second study mentioned by Newsweek involves observing patients across the Military Health System and observing that, for black patients, transferring to a facility with a higher share of black physicians is associated with filling and renewing prescriptions with greater fidelity, as well as lower mortality.
Notably, the concordance effect (i.e., black patients being treated by black physicians) is never assessed directly. Data buried in an appendix clarifies the likely reason. That is, the effect the authors observe is driven by better outcomes among black patients who are served by non-black physicians in facilities with a higher proportion of black doctors. Suffice it to say, the idea that black doctors are no more effective than others at treating black patients but that their presence makes others more effective at treating black patients strains credibility. Precisely why they observe the pattern that they do is unclear, but making logical sense of the data indicates that a higher share of black doctors is the result of something that causes better relative outcomes for black patients rather than being the cause of those better outcomes.
The final study is the easiest to debunk. The authors analyze surveys taken by patients about their experience at a recent outpatient visit. The authors observe and dwell upon the fact that black patients are more likely to give the highest possible score to black doctors on a question about “the likelihood of your recommending this care provider to others” compared to non-black doctors. Notably, however, the average score given by black patients to black doctors doesn’t differ from the average score given to non-black doctors. In other words, the outcome is sensitive to considering only highest possible score versus all other possible scores and falls apart when considering the full range of outcomes. Other seemingly notable findings that are glossed over in the paper are that this same phenomenon is only observed among black patient-provider dyads and that there is no difference for white, Hispanic, or Asian patients when it comes to whether they would offer the most enthusiastic recommendation of a racially concordant provider compared to other providers. Further, the survey features 10 questions, including ones seemingly more important than the recommendation question. For example, it asks about “information the care provider gave you about medications (if any)” and “instructions the provider gave you for follow up care (if any).” The recommendation question was the only one of the 10 in which black patients were more likely to give the highest possible score to black doctors compared to other doctors. Altogether, then, the study fixates on a conclusion that is sensitive to how survey outcomes are operationalized, glosses over the fact that the phenomenon is observed in only one group, and minimizes the fact that concordance benefit is observed in only one of 10 survey questions.
Overall, the evidence is clear: Merit ought to stand alone in determining access to medical school. But you don’t need to take our word for it — just ask black patients themselves. In multiple national surveys, the vast majority of black patients say they have no preference for the race of their doctor. Of course they don’t. Like anyone else, black patients are focused not on race but on getting excellent medical care. And, like anyone else at the bedside, they prioritize technical competence, thoroughness, clear communication, and overall quality far higher than demographics.