Does your family physician subscribe to politicized ideologies? According to the American Academy of Family Physicians (AAFP), that may not be quite enough to meet the organization’s goals.

Do No Harm has previously covered the AAFP’s obsession with DEI concepts, which have manifested themselves in a blatantly discriminatory ideology. In 2022, Do No Harm flagged materials and presentations from the AAFP’s primary annual event, where the organization held at least 10 sessions on DEI-inspired concepts, pushed a discredited “implicit association test”, and emphasized physicians focusing on a patient’s race rather than their medical needs.

Less than a year later, Do No Harm reported that the AAFP’s Vice President of Medical Education decried the U.S. Supreme Court ruling on affirmative action and called for new ways to discriminate and indoctrinate the next generation of physicians.

Today, it seems like AAFP is at it again. The AAFP’s National Conference of Constituency Leaders—its primary annual leadership event—will be held in April. The AAFP is looking for all participants, but is really interested if you represent “recognized special constituencies”.

One of these constituencies is a member of a minority group, defined as “an active AAFP member who is African American, Asian, Native Hawaiian or Pacific Islander, American Indian, Alaska Native, ethnic Latino, or Other.” Members of these constituencies may be eligible for reimbursements—but only one member per constituency, on a first-come first-serve basis.

And for participants who make it to the conference beforehand, they can join in early on the indoctrination for the pre-conference programming entitled “Advancing Health Equity and Social Justice in Family Medicine: Bridge Care Gaps by Breaking Barriers”.

Aside from their annual conference, the AAFP is also promoting “diversity milestones for program assessment”, a type of scorecard to gauge compliance with DEI-related initiatives. The milestones emerged out of a “Diversity and Health Equity Task Force” spearheaded by the Association of Family Medicine Residency Directors (AFMRD).

Each of the five “domains” identified by the task force for medical education programs—which are “institution, curriculum, evaluation, resident personnel, and faculty personnel”—have controversial and divisive criteria. These include such milestones as: “all evaluators participate in bias training annually”, “curricula in inclusion, antiracism, structural oppression is integrated longitudinally throughout the entire curriculum”, “partners with the community in anti-racist and equity work in the community/population served”, and many more.

Medical education programs are encouraged to self-reflect and score themselves, with the goal of being as committed to DEI concepts as possible. Perhaps ironically, scores of residency programs in the initial pilot assessment averaged at just between 2.0 and 2.65 out of 5, depending on the domain graded. Surely, from the AAFP’s vantage point, there is much more ground for them to cover. [However, even the AAFP fails to practice what they preach. For example, the organization’s Board of Directors has a notable minimum level of diversity.]

Put simply, the AAFP has fully embraced a DEI-rooted ideology that promotes selective discrimination, controversial bias trainings and curricula, and even unfair selective standards for their own conference participants. Family physicians across the country would do well to distance themselves from these concepts and the woke organization that is pushing them.

Many organizations—including in the medical field—make assurances not to discriminate on the basis of race, ethnicity, gender, age, and a variety of other factors. These types of statements are fairly commonplace in both the private and public sector.

However, what is less common is an explicit codification of discrimination included in the very same paragraph as an anti-discrimination statement. Yet, this is precisely the situation with the American Heart Association (AHA).

In one of its funding opportunities for grantees, the AHA is offering a four-year award of up to $4.4 million for organizations addressing the role of inflammation in cardiac and neurovascular diseases. In their applications, potential grantees are supposed to include requests for funding of postdoctoral fellows related to the program. Upon first glance, the idea sounds innocent enough.

In fact, the AHA assures applicants that its aim is to end the treatment of “people inequitably based on race, ethnicity, gender, sexual orientation, age, ability, veteran status or other factors.” But the very next sentence codifies this type of mistreatment by mandating that “at least 50% of the fellows named must be from a racial or ethnic group that is under-represented in science (Black/African American; Hispanic/Latino; Native American or Alaska Native; and/or Hawaiian or other Pacific Islander); or an LGBTQ+ person, or a woman.”

But it does not end there. The AHA goes onto require that “at least 25% of key personnel of the research team must be from groups who are under-represented in science and medicine.”

The AHA’s message could not be any more contradictory: they are against discrimination, except when they are in favor of it.

This type of reverse discrimination and racial balancing has no place in medicine, or in any related field. However, given the AHA’s long history of endorsing DEI and woke concepts, its discriminatory requirements should come as no huge surprise.

A search for “equity” on the AHA’s website brings up nearly 9,000 results, from news articles to health equity guidelines and more. Included in these results is the AHA’s “Office of Health Equity” which is supposedly dedicated to “leveraging diversity, equity and inclusion to drive the AHA’s mission to be a relentless force for a world of longer, healthier lives.”

As part of the AHA’s Office of Health Equity, the organization has issued several position statements on “health equity, social justice and structural racism.” They are also supplemented by several policy positions held by the organization, guided by “principles for addressing structural racism through public policy advocacy”.

For example, the AHA published a more than 14,000-word report outlining a variety of positions held by the organization designed to “advance antiracist strategies”. These include several policies entirely unrelated to health or medical outcomes, such as “advance[ing] policies that support the preservation of trust in and the integrity of our electoral process” and “work[ing] to mitigate implicit and explicit bias among school staff and to examine disciplinary policies and the role of law enforcement in schools”, among others.

Also included in the report is an endorsement of “provid[ing] complementary, culturally concordant prevention services for patients and historically excluded populations.” This is an implicit and buried endorsement of racial concordance in medicine, the disproven idea that patients should see providers of the same race.

Put simply, the AHA’s embrace of politicized concepts runs wide and deep, even encroaching upon areas that are completely unrelated to health and medicine. The codification of discriminatory practices in a recent grant opportunity is merely a symptom of a much deeper problem brewing within the organization.

The AHA is certainly not alone in advancing a woke ideology or incorporating discrimination in its funding opportunities. However, the extent to which these concepts have infiltrated the organization’s mission and operations is a serious cause for concern—and one that deserves careful monitoring going forward.