If one ever needed proof that medical associations are subject to institutional capture by activists, the American College of Obstetricians & Gynecologists (ACOG) provides it.
Boasting 62,000 members, ACOG is, according to its own materials, “the leading professional membership organization for ob-gyns.”
The association states that it provides “comprehensive, expert-reviewed practice guidelines” to its members and that those practitioners “maintain the highest professional standards and are united in their delivery of exceptional, respectful, science-backed care for patients.”
Yet these encouraging pledges are joined on the same webpage by ACOG’s commitment to “equitable” care, a now-familiar indicator of politicization.
Moreover, the organization’s self-defined mission is to “support our members to improve the lives of all people” — not women — “seeking obstetric and gynecologic care.”
That particular word choice is explained on ACOG’s “Inclusive Language” page, which argues that “[v]aluing, respecting, and affirming an individual’s identity contribute to improved health outcomes.”
Later on the same page, the association declares, “To be inclusive of women and all patients in need of obstetric and gynecologic care, ACOG will move beyond the exclusive use of gendered language and definitions.”
Do No Harm notes with alarm the irreconcilability of the organization’s commitment to “science-backed care” and its assertion that “all people” may benefit from gynecologic medicine. (We concede that gynecologists may occasionally treat biologically male patients for sexually transmitted infections or screen biological men for anal cancer, but that has been the case since well before ACOG’s revision of its mission-statement language. The revision is about transgenderism.)
We note, furthermore, that ACOG’s policies and practices impact not only adult patients but minor children.
Among ACOG’s resources is a committee opinion titled “Health Care for Transgender and Gender Diverse Individuals,” which explicitly concerns both adults and adolescents and which directs site visitors to the radical World Professional Association for Transgender Health (WPATH) “[f]or guidance on the medical and surgical care of transgender adolescents.”
Elsewhere, on its “Adolescent Health” page, ACOG advocates for “privacy and the ability of adolescents to consent to health-care procedures” and argues that “education about … gender … empowers and prepares children, adolescents, and young adults to make educated decisions about their health and their relationships.”
Simply put, the organization’s embrace of transgender ideology is not limited to the “adult” corner of its operations. Minors, too, are necessarily implicated in ACOG’s woke “gender”-related ideas.
On the matter of DEI, the association is little better. As its “Diversity, Equity, and Inclusive Excellence at ACOG” page makes clear, the organization believes it “essential that the culture of our organization, membership, leadership, and fellowship be diverse, equitable, inclusive, and just.”
A “Collective Action Strategy” page condemns the “racial inequities present in our field,” while a statement of policy titled “Racism in Obstetrics and Gynecology” argues that “[r]acism has been and continues to be systemically embedded into our society and the practice of medicine.”
Echoing the totalism to which ideological progressives often fall prey, the second of those pages insists that “[r]acial and ethnic inequities in obstetrics and gynecology cannot be reversed without addressing all aspects of racism and racial bias, including the sociopolitical forces that perpetuate them” (emphasis added).
So much is wrong with these claims that one hardly knows where to begin. Most obviously, they substitute unfalsifiable, quasi-magical forces (“systemic racism”) for matters that physicians are equipped to address (e.g., patient behavior and medical discovery).
They encourage doctors to engage in policy work outside of their realms of expertise, thus lending the authority of medicine to policy prescriptions that may not be reasonable or practical.
Most importantly, they compromise the aforementioned standard of “science-backed care” to which ACOG pledges itself and to which all medical associations should be held.
Happily, the solution to these problems lies in plain sight: ACOG should depoliticize its activities and webpages and return to the irreplaceable business of providing evidence-based obstetric and gynecologic care to women and girls.
Do No Harm joins all who oppose the politicization of medicine in eagerly awaiting such a move.
Opening Statement: The Needs of the Patient
COMMENTARY DEI Medical School Commentary Stanley Goldfarb, MD[Editor’s note: The following essay is adapted from Do No Harm founder Dr. Stanley Goldfarb’s opening statement at the USF Health Morsani College of Medicine’s October 2, 2026, debate, “Does ‘DEI’ Help or Hurt Medicine?”]
Patients deserve the very best care that we physicians can provide. I spent the last part of my 50-year career at Penn’s medical school as an associate dean of curriculum devoted to that end. The selection of students to become physicians is probably the single most important function of a medical school. It is particularly critical because only about one-third of the 55,000 applicants can be accepted into allopathic medical schools. It is a zero-sum game.
What should be the criteria? I believe students should have a keen intellect, a strong work ethic, a strong moral code, and a penetrating curiosity to learn medicine. They should demonstrate their potential through an exceptional performance in undergraduate courses and in the MCAT, the two most effective predictors of performance in medical school, in residency training, and, as recent data suggest, in practice. Race and ethnicity are irrelevant, and using them as characteristics for success as a physician is unfair and illegal.
Holistic admission, according to the AAMC’s model, includes a myriad of factors that appear unrelated to medicine or patient care, including “citizenship,” “distance traveled,” “relationship status,” involvement in “cultural events,” and “sexual orientation.” In addition to these attributes, the model explicitly includes “race” and “national origin,” both of which are prohibited by Title VI of the Civil Rights Act of 1964. At many schools, selecting students for admission to medical school using these criteria has been associated with substantially lower MCAT scores and grade-point averages.
This approach is supposed to produce a student body that is more attuned to patients’ needs, culturally and racially aligned with demographically similar patient groups, and therefore more likely to produce improved healthcare outcomes. What is the evidence that those characteristics are associated with improved clinical care for patients?
The question is not new, and it has been explored in over 60 studies in the peer-reviewed medical literature and has also been aggregated in six systematic reviews. All of these pose the question, “Does racial concordance — that is, does racially matching patients and physicians — lead to better communication, more trust, and better outcomes for patients?”
The answer from this robust medical literature is “no”! Everyone in this room has been or will be a patient, and as patients we expect the best care possible. The race of the caregiver does not improve that outcome.
This is not to deny the reality of healthcare disparities. But they result from poverty, cultural factors, nutrition, and even genetic factors. The argument has been forwarded that these disparities are due to bias on the part of physicians. But studies that claim bias are often fatally flawed.
For example, the most widely quoted study performed on a Florida cohort purported to show that black neonates had a survival advantage if cared for by black pediatricians. This really attributes the worst biases and prejudice to white neonatologists. Imagine being accused of bias to explain a poor patient outcome. This study was even cited by Justice Jackson in the Supreme Court in the case of Students for Fair Admissions v. Harvard as justification for DEI criteria in undergraduate admissions.
But this study was terminally flawed, as it failed to properly account for the lower birth weight of the black neonates cared for in neonatal intensive-care units. Those units are mostly staffed by white doctors, yet the study continues to be cited as the best evidence to promote racial concordance between physicians and patients. Once birth weight was properly balanced, the differences disappeared.
We need a colorblind admission process to medical school. Life experiences and leadership traits are all fine to consider, as long as academic achievement and cognitive ability are the primary criteria. For admission to undergraduate institutions, the dynamic is between the school and the student. In medical school, there is a third agent in the process, the patient, and the patient must always be the prime focus. Academic performance before medical school is the best predictor of success. It should be the key metric that determines admission.
Finally, the use of racial and ethnic characteristics as part of the admissions process diminishes the accomplishments and brilliance of black physicians such as my beloved colleague, the late doctor Marilyn Singleton. She was a leader in American medicine, a graduate of Berkeley law school and Stanford medical school, and a fierce advocate for colorblind admissions to medical school. She always felt that she needed no special accommodations to achieve all that she achieved.
A colorblind, merit-based admissions process at all medical schools will produce diversity as a consequence of the excellence of all of the students who are accepted. This is what has been achieved at the Morsani College of Medicine, and this is what we must strive for in recruiting the future American healthcare workforce.
On Pediatric Transgender Ideology, Don’t Let Politicians Dodge the Biggest Questions
COMMENTARY Gender Ideology Commentary Do No Harm StaffDemocratic candidates in difficult election contests have begun ceding ground on pediatric transgender ideology, with a particular emphasis on young men’s participation in women’s sports. Do No Harm applauds these concessions to reality even as we question their sincerity and note that the more important battle lies elsewhere.
Making the rounds earlier this week was reporting in the Washington Post concerning the politics of youth transgenderism.
According to author Ben Binday, “[s]everal Democrats running in conservative-leaning areas have sought to blunt the effect of Republican attacks on transgender issues by publicly opposing transgender girls playing in girls’ sports.”
Some Democratic candidates have even gone “so far as to refer to transgender girls” — accurately — “as ‘boys’.”
Among the candidates mentioned in Binday’s article are
Sometimes politicians will reverse course on an issue after experiencing a true change of heart. We also know that politicians respond to political expediency.
After all, recent data from the Pew Research Center indicate that 73 percent of Americans are “uncomfortable with transgender athletes competing on sports teams that do not match their sex at birth.” The specter of boys in girls’ locker rooms surely contributed to that number.
There is, too, the matter of previous voting records. As the Washington Post’s coverage acknowledges, Rep. Kaptur previously cast votes “against legislation barring transgender girls from competing in girls’ sports.”
During her time in the Iowa state legislature, Trone Garriott voted against a bill that would have sorted young athletes by biological sex and against banning gender-“transition” surgeries for minors.
As a U.S. Congresswoman representing Alaska, Peltola voted against a measure that would have barred boys from competing in girls’ sports and declared that the bill amounted to “bullying.”
While Acton and Sand have not previously served in legislative capacities, the former still has a “B” grade from the LGBTQ+ advocacy group Equality Ohio despite her recent actions. The latter has previously backed transgender activists’ priorities in general and opposed a bill removing civil-rights protections for “gender identity,” according to reporting by an Iowa ABC affiliate.
The point is this: All candidates, regardless of party, must be held to their election-season promises on the crucial issue of protecting children from harmful “gender” ideology.
Moreover, while progressive candidates’ concessions on youth athletic participation are welcome and refreshing, that issue is not nearly as important as the medicalization of gender dysphoria, a phenomenon that is happening and is, heartbreakingly, far more common than transgender activists acknowledge.
To put it another way, the question of boys in girls’ sports is the public-facing tip of a much larger and more damaging iceberg.
Girls shouldn’t be forced to share courts, fields, and locker rooms with boys, but it is even more crucial that we put an end to “gender-affirming” surgeries and pharmacological interventions in minors.
Until Democrats — and Republicans — unite in opposing that barbarism, the battle over pediatric transgender ideology will not be over.
Live Debate: Does DEI Help or Hurt Medicine?
COMMENTARY EventsMore About This Event
This Friday, October 2, Do No Harm’s founder and board chairman Dr. Stanley Goldfarb will participate in a live debate at the University of South Florida.
The topic will examine merit-based vs. DEI-based admissions in medical schools.
Please join us virtually at 10am EST by clicking one of these livestream links:
YouTube
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No advance registration is required.
‘Covered in Woke’
COMMENTARY Nevada DEI Roseman University College of Medicine Medical School Commentary Do No Harm StaffThe Roseman University of Health Sciences College of Medicine is not just up to its knees in wokeness but entirely “covered.” So said founding dean Pedro “Joe” Greer, Jr., MD, during a startlingly blunt podcast interview uploaded last month.
Launched in 2025, Roseman’s medical school wasted little time before embracing the tenets of DEI, as Do No Harm’s previous coverage of the institution made clear.
Until at least August 8 of last year, the medical school’s ASPIRE Program listed as its “one major goal” “increas[ing] the diversity of the physician workforce by exposing and providing learning opportunities for students traditionally underrepresented in medicine.” (That language has since been removed in favor of an anodyne commitment to “increas[ing] the number of students from Nevada entering the physician workforce” generally.)
A “2021–2026 Strategic Plan” available on the medical school’s website until at least August 24 of last year pledged that “[e]quity, inclusion and diversity are critical to all our endeavors at Roseman COM.” (That document, too, has since been taken down.)
Had not Dean Greer been so forthcoming in his recent remarks about the institution’s continuing commitment to DEI, one might take these excisions as evidence of a new focus on merit and depoliticized medical education.
Alas, that does not appear to be the case. As Greer readily acknowledged, no such change of direction has occurred.
To begin with, Greer used his recent podcast appearance to respond to Do No Harm’s 2025 reporting about his institution:
Later in the same remarks, Greer made clear that his belief in the benefits of doctor-patient “racial concordance” has not been altered by the debunking of that theory:
To that unscientific pronouncement, Greer added, chillingly,
These are frightening words from the founding dean of an American medical school, not only because they indicate an unprofessional refusal to follow the evidence where it leads but because they so plainly reveal a warped set of priorities.
Doctors without “humanism” — perhaps better expressed as empathy or an effective “bedside manner” — do indeed lack an important dispositional characteristic. But doctors who can’t or won’t master medical science will help no one at all.
No, Parents Shouldn’t Be Browbeaten into ‘Affirming’ Their Gender-Dysphoric Children
COMMENTARY Gender Ideology Medical Journal Commentary Do No Harm StaffRarely does a single journal article capture the full range of intellectual errors committed by pediatric “gender” activists. A June 2026 “clinical perspective” in the Journal of the American Academy of Child & Adolescent Psychiatry comes very close.
A mere glance at Michal J. McDowell et al.’s “Using a Cognitive Behavioral Family Therapy Model to Join Caregivers of Transgender and Gender Expansive Youth” is enough to alert the reader that he or she is in strange territory indeed.
At the bottom of page one sits a “Diversity & Inclusion Statement” boasting that “[o]ne or more of the authors of this paper self-identifies as a member of one or more historically underrepresented sexual and/or gender groups in science,” a statement presumably intended to lend additional credence to the work. (We see instead the potential for bias.)
Perusing the article’s figure and table turns up references to the alleged “cognitive distortions” of “caregivers” (e.g., parents) who fail to “support” the trans-identifying youth in their charge.
The main thrust of the paper is that cognitive behavioral family therapy — “an integrative therapeutic approach that emphasizes the family as a system, in which changes in behavior or thought processes of one member can influence the entire family unit” — should be used to change the minds of recalcitrant adults who fail to “affirm their child’s identity.”
Yet underlying this assertion are the typical activist contortions and mischaracterizations of the evidence. The paper offers these in spades.
To begin with, the article misleadingly claims that “[a]ccess to gender affirming care for [transgender and gender expansive] people … including puberty blockers, gender affirming hormone therapy, and gender affirming surgeries, has been shown to provide a multitude of psychological and other benefits.”
Lined up to support this assertion are the individual studies often trotted out by “gender” activists (by Turban, Tordoff, Chen, etc.) but no systematic reviews. No wonder: Nearly two dozen systematic reviews have found no credible evidence supporting the “gender” interventions described.
The article goes on to claim that “access to desired gender affirming hormones during adolescence … has been linked to lower levels of depression and suicidal ideation later in life.” This, too, is unsupported by the myriad systematic reviews that have been undertaken.
The aforementioned Table 1 reframes ordinary parent concerns — that, e.g., the gender-dysphoric child has been influenced by the internet or by his or her peers — as erroneous thinking (“distortions”) that need to be restructured toward affirmation.
Indeed, the article advises clinicians to “guide caregivers in cognitive restructuring to replace distorted or unhelpful thought patterns,” a recommendation that brings to mind the mental-health “treatments” forced on dissidents in, say, Soviet Russia or China during the Cultural Revolution.
Among the paper’s assertions is that a common-sense awareness that a child may regret undergoing surgical or pharmacological “gender” interventions should be dismissed as mere “[f]ortune-telling” — a particularly arrogant claim given that researchers don’t know the true rate of regret among gender-dysphoric adolescents who are allowed or prompted to undergo sex-denying medical “treatments.”
The article urges caregivers to “us[e] their child’s name and pronouns consistently,” to “advocat[e] with school systems,” and to “communicat[e] with extended family members about identity affirmation,” three measures that will inevitably make it harder for the gender-dysphoric child to desist from his or her transgender identification (as historically most gender-dysphoric children naturally do).
To call these recommendations bad is grossly to understate the potential damage caused by equating supportive homes with the mandatory social and medical “transitioning” of children.
The (actual) evidence suggests that the opposite is the case.
If a child presents with gender confusion, parents should remain calm, listen carefully, and provide loving, grounded support while holding firm to biological reality.
They should remember that no child is born in the wrong body and should recognize and limit the negative influences feeding their child’s distress, among them social media, online communities, and peer groups.
Parents in such circumstances should seek help from professionals — not activists — who explore and treat the root causes of gender dysphoria as well as any co-occurring conditions (e.g., depression and anxiety) rather than defaulting to instant affirmation.
Steadiness, honesty, and competent, compassionate mental-health care give children the best chance to work through their confusion without tragically and irreversibly medicalizing their distress.
That McDowell et al.’s new paper takes exactly the opposite tack is more than a little disheartening.
But it is also a useful reminder of what we’re up against.
Another Crack in the Pediatric ‘Gender-Affirming Care’ Armor
COMMENTARY Gender Ideology Medical Journal, News Media Commentary Do No Harm StaffThese are bad times to be scaremongering about the mental health of children denied access to so-called gender-affirming care. A new commentary in the social-science journal Theory & Society further demolishes the narrative that such young people are at increased risk of suicidality.
Do No Harm took up this work recently with our new report “The Effect of State Bans on Gender Interventions for Minors on Teen Suicide Rates.”
There, using multiple statistical approaches, including difference-in-differences models and a national time-series analysis, we found no evidence that state laws preventing providers from experimenting on gender-dysphoric children have increased suicide rates in those states.
Now, a new article, “Causal inference from a single treated state: a peer review of Lee et al. (2024) and the exchange that followed,” takes on the widely repeated 2024 claim that so-called anti-transgender laws result in up to a 72-percent increase in suicide attempts among transgender youth.
As M. Lal, author of the new Theory & Society article demonstrates, that particular “finding” fails to stand up under serious investigation.
Predictably, the “72-percent” claim rocketed around the internet shortly after its publication in Nature Human Behavior, in the article “State-level anti-transgender laws increase past-year suicide attempts among transgender and non-binary young people in the USA” by Wilson Y. Lee et al.
The radical LGBTQ+ activist organization the Trevor Project gave the statistic its own webpage and heralded the study as “groundbreaking” and “first-of-its-kind.”
NPR duly repeated the claim, as did PBS, Time, CNN, and a host of other opinion-making outlets.
Earlier this year, the first significant crack appeared in the “72-percent” figure. Responding to the original Nature Human Behavior article in that same journal, J. Cohn et al. pointed out that the Lee study’s headline finding (“up to a 72-percent increase in suicide attempts”) was driven by Idaho alone, despite the fact that the Gem State contributed only a small sample of respondents and had no “anti-transgender” law in effect during the time period in question.
Though Lee et al. publicly acknowledged Idaho’s “prominent role” in their study in the weeks that followed, they insisted that their “choice of statistical approach was appropriate given the nature of the intervention.”
Lal’s innovation in this months’ new Theory & Society article is to show that Lee et al.’s “principal statistical defenses are incorrect.” Indeed, reliance on a single treated state (Idaho) “renders the [original] paper’s reported uncertainty invalid rather than merely fragile,” and “design problems independent of the single-state issue remain unaddressed by the main study or the follow-ups.”
To wit (and in layman’s terms), Lal’s article demonstrates that the headline finding for 13–17-year-olds rests on such a small group of Idaho respondents that changing just four extreme survey responses within that group could move the underlying result by roughly the size of the reported overall effect.
As Lal concludes, the notion that “increasing access to gender-affirming care ‘could be life-saving’ for [transgender or non-binary] young people … is not supported by” the Lee et al. study.
Given the extent to which cant and propaganda govern the talking points of the pediatric transgender lobby, we are unsurprised by the weaknesses of the study to which activists have so often pointed.
What is more startling is the failure of the news outlets mentioned above to retract their coverage or even to append to their articles an acknowledgement of the original study’s flaws.
The arguments for “affirming” young patients’ gender dysphoria with surgeries, hormone therapies, and puberty-blocking drugs are collapsing all around us.
Mainstream news sites ought to report that.
Do No Harm Files Comment on Department of Education’s Accreditation Innovation and Modernization Proposed Rule
COMMENTARY DEI Federal government Commentary Executive Do No Harm StaffEarlier this week, Do No Harm submitted an official comment to the U.S. Department of Education’s Office of Postsecondary Education in response to the department’s notice of proposed rulemaking, “Accreditation, Innovation, and Modernization: The Secretary’s Recognition of Accrediting Agencies.”
Do No Harm supports the proposed rule.
As the rule’s executive summary makes clear, accrediting agencies “serve as key gatekeepers in determining which institutions may participate in … Federal student aid programs, which currently provide more than $100 billion in Pell Grants and Federal student loans annually.”
Sadly, while existing regulations are meant to ensure that recognized accrediting agencies are “reliable authorities regarding the quality of education or training offered by … institutions,” too many accreditors have abandoned this mission, “shifting their focus away from student achievement to compelling institutions to adopt illegal and discriminatory ideology and practices.”
By “eliminat[ing] requirements not required by statute, including the ‘two-year rule’ for initial recognition of new agencies, prescriptive site visit mandates, unnecessary documentation requirements, and rigid and overly long processing timelines,” the new rule would help to spur competition among accreditors and force legacy agencies to return their focus to the quality of the institutions they oversee.
Do No Harm’s support for the new rule is based on four criteria:
Please read the full comment here or below.
Do No Harm Senior Fellow To Chair the United States Preventive Services Task Force
COMMENTARY Department of Health and Human Services Federal government Press Release Executive Do No Harm StaffSalt Lake City, UT: September 23, 2026 – Do No Harm senior fellow Seth J. Corey, MD, MPH, has been appointed by U.S. Health and Human Services Secretary Robert F. Kennedy, Jr., to chair the United States Preventive Services Task Force. The task force is a “scientifically independent, volunteer panel of national experts in prevention and evidence-based medicine” who work to improve the health of all Americans by reviewing scientific evidence and making recommendations about clinical preventive services.
“We are proud and honored to have Seth appointed to such a prestigious position,” said Stanley Goldfarb, MD, Do No Harm chairman. “Dr. Corey’s clinical expertise and years of experience will prove invaluable for the Preventive Services Task Force. We look forward to seeing the outstanding work he will accomplish on preventive healthcare in America.”
Dr. Corey is a board-certified pediatric hematologist-oncologist in the Departments of Pediatrics and Heart, Blood, and Kidney Research at Cleveland Clinic and the Case Comprehensive Cancer Center and a professor of molecular medicine at Cleveland Clinic Lerner College of Medicine at Case Western Reserve University. He has over four decades of experience providing care for children and young adults and combines clinical expertise with investigative research experience to advance patient-centered, evidence-based care.
Dr. Corey earned his undergraduate degree with honors in biology and the history of medicine from Yale University and his MD and MPH from Tulane School of Medicine and School of Public Health and Tropical Medicine. Following residency at St. Louis Children’s Hospital at Washington University, he completed a fellowship in pediatric hematology and oncology at Boston Children’s Hospital and Harvard Medical School. He completed a post-doctoral fellowship studying cell signaling and metabolism at Tufts University. Dr Corey has coauthored more than 150 original articles, commentaries, and book chapters.
Read Dr. Corey’s full bio here.
Read the HHS announcement 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 26 countries.
Do No Harm Alleges New Evidence on Planned Parenthood’s Potential Medical-Coding Fraud, Urges HHS to Investigate
COMMENTARY Gender Ideology Department of Health and Human Services Healthcare resource Press Release Executive Do No Harm StaffSALT LAKE CITY, UT: September 22, 2026 – Today, Do No Harm sent a letter to the U.S. Department of Health and Human Services’ Office of Inspector General (HHS-OIG) raising allegations of a potential nationwide miscoding scheme by Planned Parenthood related to the cross-sex hormones its affiliates prescribe. Do No Harm submitted a formal complaint detailing the evidence and is asking HHS to investigate Planned Parenthood for potential medical-coding fraud.
“Our investigation suggests Planned Parenthood and its regional affiliates may be perpetrating a nationwide miscoding scheme to conceal services for sex-rejecting procedures and to facilitate improper insurance reimbursements for cross-sex hormones,” said Kurt Miceli, MD, chief medical officer at Do No Harm. “We found over a thousand prescriptions for cross-sex hormones that may suggest a failure to use correct diagnosis codes for an associated medical visit. Given our findings and Planned Parenthood affiliates’ history of publicly declaring their use of seemingly spurious codes, it appears the organization may be practicing what it preaches. HHS has the authority and resources to launch a formal investigation into this potentially fraudulent scheme, and we encourage them to do so immediately.”
Background
Do No Harm worked with a private data broker to analyze Planned Parenthood’s coding practices with respect to claims submissions for cross-sex hormone treatments. This investigation involved examining diagnosis codes from medical claims for office visits at Planned Parenthood affiliates and hormone prescriptions where the prescriber was also associated with Planned Parenthood affiliates.
By comparing medical-claim data with prescription-claim data, Do No Harm identified a set of patients who had prescription claims from a Planned Parenthood–related prescriber within 30 days of an office-visit claim at a Planned Parenthood–affiliated facility.
Findings
Call to Action
A previous Do No Harm report highlighted how activist groups, including Planned Parenthood, publicly promoted alternative diagnosis codes unrelated to gender dysphoria to facilitate billing and insurance reimbursement for so-called gender-affirming care.
Read Do No Harm’s HHS-OIG Complaint against Planned Parenthood 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 26 countries.
More Youth ‘Gender’ Dominoes Fall
COMMENTARY New York, Pennsylvania Gender Ideology New York University, University of Pittsburgh Health system Commentary Executive Do No Harm StaffOne day, Americans will look back in horror on the irreversible surgeries and pharmacological “treatments” to which ideologues in white coats subjected gender-dysphoric children.
Two new agreements between the Department of Justice (DOJ) and major American healthcare systems bring that day closer.
Last Friday, the DOJ’s Office of Public Affairs announced that deals had been struck to end pediatric sex-rejecting procedures at both New York University Langone Hospitals (NYU) and the University of Pittsburgh Medical Center (UPMC).
These deals follow previous agreements with New York’s Mount Sinai Health System, Texas Children’s Hospital, the Cleveland Clinic Foundation, and Connecticut Children’s Medical Center.
Do No Harm’s full list of hospitals that are pausing pediatric “gender-affirming care” in response to Trump-administration actions is available here.
As part of the new agreements, NYU and UPMC will cease performing “gender”-related surgical procedures on minors and will no longer administer puberty blockers and cross-sex hormones to gender-dysphoric youth.
Additionally, the two organizations will pay fines of $8.5 million and $950,000, respectively.
Announcing the two deals, Attorney General Todd Blanche stated that “[t]he Department of Justice is fighting to protect our nation’s children and working tirelessly to reach agreements with hospitals to end so-called ‘gender affirming care’ for minors.”
Referencing potentially fraudulent billing practices of the kind uncovered in a recent Do No Harm report, Blanche added that the “resolutions send a clear message: hospitals that target children in these practices and then fraudulently obtain payment for the procedures will be held to account.”
As Do No Harm argued in our coverage of the DOJ’s August agreement with Connecticut Children’s Medical Center, these victories belong primarily to the children and adolescents who will not now be subjected to irreversible, life-changing interventions based on a damaging ideology.
Those young people need society’s compassion in the form of forbearance and realism, not hasty, politically charged “medicine” based on falsehoods that activists merely wish were true.
As more and more health systems back down from the radicalism that they previously embraced, keeping children safe from that harm will become easier: Fewer hospitals offering pediatric “gender” “care” means fewer patients allowed to undergo it — or manipulated in that direction.
Yet Do No Harm and its allies can’t afford to relax.
As the DOJ’s press release makes clear, the agreements signed in the last several months proceed in part from President Trump’s 2025 direction that the Department of Justice should “prioritize investigations and enforcement actions involving violations of federal law in the provision of so-called ‘gender-affirming care’ to children.”
What one administration can emphasize, another can halt altogether.
Moreover, a future DOJ led by progressive political appointees might interpret differently (or scrap altogether) the deals that are now being struck.
Simply put, to the extent that hospitals are backing off of pediatric sex-rejecting procedures because of pressure blowing in on the political winds, those gestures are reversible.
What is required in the long term is an American public so well-schooled in the horrors of pediatric “gender-affirming care” that healthcare systems cease offering it of their own volition, permanently.
That day is not yet here, but we believe it is surely coming.
Do No Harm Stands with Parents in Supreme Court Case Challenging Washington Laws Aimed at Transitioning Gender-Confused Runaway Minors
COMMENTARY Washington Gender Ideology State government Commentary Judicial Do No Harm StaffLater this year, the Supreme Court will hear oral arguments in International Partners for Ethical Care v. Ferguson, which asks whether parents may challenge Washington state laws that shift decisionmaking authority over “gender transitions” from parents to children and the state. Do No Harm eagerly awaits the case’s outcome.
In our recently filed amicus brief, we further explain the harms the petitioners in the case are seeking to avoid.
In 2023, the State of Washington enacted legislation designed to provide runaway minors with “gender-affirming treatment” without parental knowledge or consent. Despite this novel transfer of power from parents to their children and the state, and its clear violation of parents’ constitutional rights to direct the care and upbringing of their children, the Ninth Circuit ruled that the plaintiffs lacked standing to challenge the relevant Washington laws.
Behind these questions of standing lies a grim reality. The petitioners in this case are the actual parents of children with gender dysphoria but believe in the binary, biological reality of sex. They reasonably fear that, if they enforce their beliefs too sternly, their children will run away and use Washington’s laws to receive sex-denying interventions without parental consent.
Too often, courts overlook exactly what such interventions entail, as proponents of so-called gender-affirming care bury the details beneath a mountain of euphemisms. Our brief attempts to correct this oversight, explaining in forthright terms why the harm the petitioners seek to avoid is indeed a grave one.
To begin with, sex-denying interventions involve the physical manipulation and disfigurement of young bodies through medical and surgical means — all to treat a psychological condition (gender dysphoria) that has no corresponding physical symptoms.
Second, sex-denying interventions frequently cause significant long-term negative health consequences in gender-dysphoric youth, as Do No Harm has previously explained.
Third, recent medical evidence belies the notion that sex-denying interventions are justifiable treatments for gender dysphoria in children. In fact, recent evidence shows that such “treatments” may even exacerbate gender dysphoria’s psychological symptoms.
In sum, the harms from which the petitioners in this case seek to shield their children are damaging interventions falsely disguised as support and care.
Unfortunately, as multiple Justices have more recently observed, the question of legal standing is becoming an excuse for some federal courts to avoid contentious constitutional questions. Do No Harm looks forward to the Court’s resolution of these important issues.
Do No Harm Report Debunks Claim That State Restrictions on Pediatric Sex-Rejecting Interventions Increase Adolescent Suicide Rates
COMMENTARY Gender Ideology State government Press Release Do No Harm StaffSalt Lake City, UT: September 17, 2026 – Today, Do No Harm released a study finding no evidence for the widespread and alarmist claim that state prohibitions on surgeries, puberty blockers, or cross-sex hormones for gender-dysphoric minors increase suicide rates.
The study, titled “The Effect of State Bans on Gender Interventions for Minors on Teen Suicide Rates,” examines the claim that state bans on so-called gender-affirming care for minors lead to spikes in suicides. Employing three distinct analytical models, Do No Harm found no evidence to support the claim.
“The alarmist claim that protecting children from sex-rejecting procedures increases suicide is false,” said Jay Greene, Director of Research at Do No Harm. “We examined the evidence in a first-of-its-kind study of how teen suicide rates were affected by states adopting policies restricting so-called gender-affirming care for children. No matter how you examine the data, the result is consistently clear: These state policies did not increase teen suicide rates. Medical practice and policy must be grounded in evidence, not emotionally manipulative talking points. That principle is all the more critical when it’s a matter of children’s health and well-being.”
Do No Harm’s Three Models:
Do No Harm’s study also debunks the flawed research cited by activists, media, and lawmakers to justify the suicide myth and claiming that “gender-affirming care” is “lifesaving.” These studies have profound methodological limitations and depend on unreliable evidence.
Read Do No Harm’s study 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 26 countries.
We’re Breaking Through
COMMENTARY DEI Medical Journal Commentary Do No Harm StaffPart of Do No Harm’s work of highlighting and counteracting divisive trends in medicine is talking to audiences whom we don’t always reach.
For an organization that means to help shape the conversation around “Diversity, Equity, and Inclusion” (DEI) and youth-focused gender ideology, breaking through to new readers couldn’t be more crucial.
We’re proud to share some of our recent excursions into new territory. Do No Harm’s ideas are landing, and we’ll be partnering with our members and allies to keep up the good work.
• The recent Washington Post article “How Trump administration threats could affect medical school admissions” spends much of its time quoting the talking points of “diversity” proponents — for example, Association of American Medical Colleges chief executive David J. Skorton, who announced in a 2023 webinar that “[l]ives depend on us successfully diversifying the health care workforce.”
Yet the article also quotes our own Ian Kingsbury, senior director of Do No Harm’s Center for Accountability in Medicine, in support of the Trump administration’s efforts to force medical schools to comply with the Supreme Court’s Students for Fair Admissions v. Harvard decision:
• Bloomberg, too, recently quoted one of our experts. In “Trump Asks DOJ to Probe Hospitals Over Trans Health Coding,” Do No Harm’s chief medical officer, Kurt Miceli, MD, explained that “gender ideologues are able to misuse medical diagnosis codes to avoid proper reporting and scrutiny and to enable potentially fraudulent billing practices.” Thus did Dr. Miceli share the central theme of our April report on that subject.
• Miceli also wrote letters to the editor at Neurology and JAMA Network Open earlier this year, making the case in both instances that unscientific narratives of structural injustice are shifting attention away from the proper practice of medicine and medical education. Miceli in Neurology: “Patients would be better served by a roadmap tackling neurologic disease, not political agendas.”
• Miceli’s contributions to STAT and KevinMD do similar work, urging physicians to focus on patients rather than advocacy. An excerpt from the latter is illustrative: “Diverting attention toward broad policy agendas risks diluting medicine’s core mission and for that we will all inevitably suffer.”
• Do No Harm’s Jay Greene, director of research, published his own JAMA Network Open letter earlier this year, explaining why a recent examination of racial disparities in black and white mortality rates suffers from methodological and interpretive problems. “[T]he evidence presented,” Greene writes, “does not sufficiently support the claim that systemic discrimination, via stress pathways, directly shortens lives in Black communities.”
These incursions into new territory matter. Too often, readers of mainstream publications have never heard an authoritative, evidence-based case against the progressive narratives and policy preferences that have come to dominate the American medical establishment.
To the extent that we’re storming those gates, we’re setting ourselves up for even more wins down the road.
That’s news we’re happy to make happen — and to share.
Do No Harm Files CMS Comment on the American Medical Association and Medical Coding
COMMENTARY, Uncategorized DEI, Gender Ideology American Medical Association, Centers for Medicare and Medicaid Services Federal government, Medical association Commentary Executive Do No Harm StaffEarlier today, Do No Harm submitted an official comment to the Centers for Medicare & Medicaid Services (CMS) in response to the agency’s formal reconsideration of the relationship between the American Medical Association (AMA) and the medical coding standards that define clinical practice.
We support this inquiry and urge CMS to treat its Request for Information as the beginning of necessary reform rather than the end.
Federal regulation has long entrenched a single private association’s monopoly over the code set that defines physician services, and the revenue that flows from that monopoly is neither spent for the benefit of patients nor answerable to the physicians the AMA claims to speak for. That alone justifies the agency’s decision to ask these questions and to keep pursuing the answers.
This state of affairs is exacerbated by the fact that the AMA spends freely on political advocacy, using its medical authority to inappropriately prop up its activism.
Patients and the public need a payment system built on codes that align with medical necessity rather than on a copyright that funds activism. Thus, CMS is right to have opened this question, and the answer should not be the current, damaging status quo.
Please read the full comment here or below.
Politics in the Therapy Session
COMMENTARY DEI American Psychological Association Professional organization Commentary Do No Harm StaffOnce upon a time, therapists took care to hide their ideological views from their patients, presenting instead a “blank screen” that allowed the therapeutic relationship to function as intended.
Mark that down as one more casualty of the Age of Wokeness.
Elizabeth Bernstein’s recent Wall Street Journal article “Is Your Therapist Biased? Personal Agendas Are Creeping Into the Therapy Room” provides a useful entrée for the curious reader.
According to Bernstein, more and more therapists have begun to “push their own ideologies, encourage patients toward a path that worked for them, and even judge family members they have never met.”
Bernstein mentions therapist and former professor William Doherty, who argues that “many therapists are getting caught up in trends in both therapy and the culture, including the encouragement of victimhood, estrangements and the broadening of terms like ‘harassment’ and ‘abuse.’”
While Bernstein offers tips for prospective and current therapy-seekers (e.g., “Beware if [mental-health professionals] diagnose someone not in the room”), the reader gets the decided impression that the problem is becoming ingrained.
As clinical psychologist and psychology professor Joel Weinberger tells Bernstein, “It used to be that you didn’t tell your patient your personal view or orientation … [b]ut now there is this view that you do, because you’re sharing good values.”
This ongoing alteration of the therapeutic dynamic is not the first time that politics and ideology have intruded into the field of psychology.
As recent (and not-so-recent) students know, academic psychologists have embraced “liberation psychology,” “decolonial psychology,” and “climate psychology” for years, substituting vogue political grievances for such evidence-based therapeutic modalities as cognitive behavioral therapy.
Commenting on this trend in 2023, Chapman University’s Richard E. Redding remarked that the “political views of psychologists can and frequently [do] color and skew their teaching and research.”
That skew is what we’re observing today: Old-fashioned depression is out; “climate anxiety” is in.
Or consider the output of the American Psychological Association (APA), whose 2017 “Multicultural Guidelines” mention “privilege” and “oppression” more than 40 times each, with “social justice” appearing nearly a dozen times (and nearly a dozen more in the “References” section).
To the extent that therapists allow APA priorities to shape their practices, they will increasingly offer care along progressive ideological lines rather than on the basis of carefully gathered evidence.
Do No Harm covered this phenomenon recently. As we wrote last month, a number of mental-health professionals have begun advertising themselves as fellow activists and openly broadcasting their ideological priors (e.g., “I practice from a feminist and anti-oppressive perspective”).
So much for the blank screen: An activist therapist treating activists is almost certain to affirm when he or she ought to challenge, speak when he or she ought to be silent, or feed patients’ anxieties or delusions when he or she ought to alleviate them.
Sadly, we seem to be moving beyond the age of the apolitical therapist whose focus was on patient well-being, not mutual congratulation or complaint.
For the sake of the profession and patients, we should hope for a return to that standard.
The APA’s ‘Inclusive Language Guide’ Hasn’t Helped
COMMENTARY DEI American Psychological Association Professional organization Commentary Do No Harm StaffFuture historians hoping to understand the Age of Wokeness will turn gratefully to the American Psychological Association’s “Inclusive Language Guide.” As a marker of progressive ideological anxiety and complaint, the 51-page document may be impossible to top.
Updated in 2023, the guide is intended by the APA to “dismantle the destructive hierarchies that have marginalized people from equitable representation and participation in society.”
So confident is the association that “certain terms are harmful to marginalized communities” that it includes a preemptive apology of its own: “We … understand that some of the terms and concepts that are included [in the guide] may be offensive and painful to different groups.”
What is this potentially debilitating language? A number of the words and phrases listed in the opening “General Terms Related to Equity and Power” section have long been a part of the American and international political conversation (e.g., “antisemitism”). Others have been popularized more recently, as theoretical academic discourse has filtered down to newspapers, magazines, public-radio broadcasts, and K-12 classrooms (e.g., “cultural competence”).
None are in any way provocative.
Or perhaps the APA has in mind the allegedly harmful language listed on an accompanying “Term to Avoid” / “Suggested Alternative” chart. There, for instance, readers learn that one ought not to say “mentally ill” when what one really means (or should mean, anyway) is “person living with a mental illness.”
Readers learn that, e.g., “smoker” is no longer in vogue. The preferred linguistic alternative is now “person who smokes.”
We linger on this point because the APA’s exaggerated fear of giving offense is at the heart of its Inclusive Language Guide’s intellectual misjudgments. The document’s very foundation is the unfalsifiable (and therefore unscientific) belief that delicate terminology somehow improves the lot of racial, ethnic, and religious minorities and the physically and mentally handicapped (apologies: we mean “persons with disabilities”).
Because this premise is irredeemably flawed, those committed to it have no choice but to search farther and farther afield for “acceptable” alternatives, as yesterday’s preferred terms inevitably become today’s rank abuse.
Consider, for example, the troubled career of “differently abled,” a phrase that once represented the height of good taste but is now one of the APA’s explicitly named “term[s] to avoid.”
Without question, that phrase has lost its stylishness. To argue that it is actively offensive, however, is to engage in unserious intellectual contortions. It is moral preening, not the mitigation of harm — clubbishness, not profitable advice.
Indeed, one gets the decided impression, reading the APA’s document, that the point is to create and maintain a clerisy rather than to look out for the needs of those whom the APA ostensibly wishes to help. All but the most uncouth members of society know that the phrase “mentally retarded” ought not to be used in polite company. Yet only an elite few know that “special needs” is now outré, as well. Thus does the APA maintain its professional exclusivity.
To be sure, the consequences of this way of thinking are sometimes comic. When, in January 2023, the Associated Press tweeted that writers ought not to “dehumanize[e]” their reporting subjects by referring to, e.g., “the poor, the mentally ill, the French, the disabled, [or] the college-educated,” the French Embassy to the United States jokingly suggested changing its name to the “Embassy of Frenchness in the US.”
“Handi-capable,” another verboten term as of the APA’s 2023 update, was, from the moment of its origination, a seeming parody of woke cluelessness.
Perhaps the APA is right to remind its members and site visitors to “[a]void terms that are condescending or patronizing,” as the final image above declares. Certainly all speakers and writers should treat others with respect.
There is a fine line, however, between that project and the policing of normal, harmless words. In its pursuit of progressive social outcomes, the APA has left that border far in the rear-view mirror.
Behavioral and Biological Factors Related to Perinatal Cardiometabolic Risk
COMMENTARY DEI Medical Journal Commentary Kurt Miceli, MD[Editor’s note: This piece originally appeared as a comment in response to “Intersectional Inequities in Age-Related Risk of Adverse Maternal Cardiometabolic Health,” published in JAMA Cardiology. That article can be read here.]
Elleni Hailu et al. observe that black women are at increased perinatal cardiometabolic risk compared to white women with that risk rising more steeply with age. Their discussion offers a list of theorized interpretations including “structural racism,” “experiences of racism,” “racism-related stress,” “chronic discrimination,” “bias and neglect in health care settings,” & “eco-social theory,” which as per Nancy Krieger, who introduced the term decades ago, “rejects the underlying assumptions of biomedical individualism.”
Yet, individual behavioral & biological factors should be considered to better understand the paper’s observation. Physical activity, diet, & cholesterol, along with genetics, all contribute to cardiovascular (CV) health. Every day of unmanaged risk factors worsens insulin resistance & arterial stiffness, for example, thereby compounding risk with age.
Read the full comment in JAMA Cardiology.
The American College of Obstetricians & Gynecologists Should Abandon Ideology
COMMENTARY DEI, Gender Ideology Medical association Commentary Do No Harm StaffIf one ever needed proof that medical associations are subject to institutional capture by activists, the American College of Obstetricians & Gynecologists (ACOG) provides it.
Boasting 62,000 members, ACOG is, according to its own materials, “the leading professional membership organization for ob-gyns.”
The association states that it provides “comprehensive, expert-reviewed practice guidelines” to its members and that those practitioners “maintain the highest professional standards and are united in their delivery of exceptional, respectful, science-backed care for patients.”
Yet these encouraging pledges are joined on the same webpage by ACOG’s commitment to “equitable” care, a now-familiar indicator of politicization.
Moreover, the organization’s self-defined mission is to “support our members to improve the lives of all people” — not women — “seeking obstetric and gynecologic care.”
That particular word choice is explained on ACOG’s “Inclusive Language” page, which argues that “[v]aluing, respecting, and affirming an individual’s identity contribute to improved health outcomes.”
Later on the same page, the association declares, “To be inclusive of women and all patients in need of obstetric and gynecologic care, ACOG will move beyond the exclusive use of gendered language and definitions.”
Do No Harm notes with alarm the irreconcilability of the organization’s commitment to “science-backed care” and its assertion that “all people” may benefit from gynecologic medicine. (We concede that gynecologists may occasionally treat biologically male patients for sexually transmitted infections or screen biological men for anal cancer, but that has been the case since well before ACOG’s revision of its mission-statement language. The revision is about transgenderism.)
We note, furthermore, that ACOG’s policies and practices impact not only adult patients but minor children.
Among ACOG’s resources is a committee opinion titled “Health Care for Transgender and Gender Diverse Individuals,” which explicitly concerns both adults and adolescents and which directs site visitors to the radical World Professional Association for Transgender Health (WPATH) “[f]or guidance on the medical and surgical care of transgender adolescents.”
Elsewhere, on its “Adolescent Health” page, ACOG advocates for “privacy and the ability of adolescents to consent to health-care procedures” and argues that “education about … gender … empowers and prepares children, adolescents, and young adults to make educated decisions about their health and their relationships.”
Simply put, the organization’s embrace of transgender ideology is not limited to the “adult” corner of its operations. Minors, too, are necessarily implicated in ACOG’s woke “gender”-related ideas.
On the matter of DEI, the association is little better. As its “Diversity, Equity, and Inclusive Excellence at ACOG” page makes clear, the organization believes it “essential that the culture of our organization, membership, leadership, and fellowship be diverse, equitable, inclusive, and just.”
A “Collective Action Strategy” page condemns the “racial inequities present in our field,” while a statement of policy titled “Racism in Obstetrics and Gynecology” argues that “[r]acism has been and continues to be systemically embedded into our society and the practice of medicine.”
Echoing the totalism to which ideological progressives often fall prey, the second of those pages insists that “[r]acial and ethnic inequities in obstetrics and gynecology cannot be reversed without addressing all aspects of racism and racial bias, including the sociopolitical forces that perpetuate them” (emphasis added).
So much is wrong with these claims that one hardly knows where to begin. Most obviously, they substitute unfalsifiable, quasi-magical forces (“systemic racism”) for matters that physicians are equipped to address (e.g., patient behavior and medical discovery).
They encourage doctors to engage in policy work outside of their realms of expertise, thus lending the authority of medicine to policy prescriptions that may not be reasonable or practical.
Most importantly, they compromise the aforementioned standard of “science-backed care” to which ACOG pledges itself and to which all medical associations should be held.
Happily, the solution to these problems lies in plain sight: ACOG should depoliticize its activities and webpages and return to the irreplaceable business of providing evidence-based obstetric and gynecologic care to women and girls.
Do No Harm joins all who oppose the politicization of medicine in eagerly awaiting such a move.