Racial preferences in faculty hiring and student admissions are a “strategic priority for academic medicine,” the nation’s largest consortium of medical schools says.
The racial priority appears in an open letter to 157 medical schools, academic societies, teaching hospitals and health systems written by David J. Skorton, president and CEO of the Association of American Medical Colleges, and David A. Acosta, the group’s chief diversity and inclusion officer.
Read more at The Washington Times.
University of Minnesota ‘serial offender’ of federal civil rights law, scholar says
The University of Minnesota recently held an event just for “BIPOC students” considering grad school, prompting a complaint to be filed with the Department of Education’s Office for Civil Rights alleging racial discrimination.
As the feds review the complaint’s merits, the university scrubbed the event page and wiped information about the gathering from its website.
Read more at The College Fix.
Do No Harm, a nonprofit that launched last year to oppose diversity initiatives in medicine, has evolved into a significant leader in statehouses seeking to ban gender-affirming care for transgender youths, producing model legislation that an Associated Press analysis found has been used in at least three states.
The nonprofit, not widely known outside conservative medical and political circles, describes itself on its website as a collection of doctors and others uniting to “protect healthcare from a radical, divisive, and discriminatory ideology.”
Read more at AP News.
Aaron and Lacey Jennen’s roots in Arkansas run deep. They’ve spent their entire lives there, attended the flagship state university, and are raising a family. So they’re heartbroken at the prospect of perhaps having to move to one of an ever-dwindling number of states where gender-affirming health care for their transgender teenage daughter, Sabrina, is not threatened.
“We were like, ‘OK, if we can just get Sabrina to 18 … we can put all this horrible stuff behind us,’” Aaron Jennen said, “and unfortunately that’s not been the case, as you’ve seen a proliferation of anti-trans legislation here in Arkansas and across the country.”
Read more at AP News.
The Massachusetts government is recommending the state enact child abuse laws for withholding transgender drugs and surgeries for children.
The Bay State’s “Commission on Lesbian, Gay, Bisexual, Transgender, Queer, and Questioning Youth” released its legislative recommendations for next year, which include going after parents who do not allow their children to pursue cross-sex hormones, puberty blockers, and genital mutilation surgeries.
Read more at the Washington Examiner.
Researchers are ignoring studies on race and medicine that yield ideologically inconvenient results.
The research establishment studying racial disparities in health care has a big problem. It has made a concerted effort to ignore any literature that contradicts the narrative that racial animus underlies the health-care disparities between white and black patients.
As in any field, the more evidence you can cite in favor of your theory, the more acceptance your theory will gain. In medical literature, acceptance of ideas is achieved when other researchers cite the supporting studies for those concepts. In fact, “impact” in the medical literature is judged by frequency of citations.
A most favored hypothesis these days holds that black patients need access to black physicians to receive optimal medical care. This concept is a major motivating force behind the search for greater numbers of blacks to enter the health-care workforce. Unfortunately, the research cited to support it is often disingenuous or, at worst, dishonest.
Read more at City Journal.
The peer-review process is consistently failing to stop bad scholarship on gender medicine.
No policies are more fraught right now than those involving gender transition and children. That makes it all the more important that research on the issue be grounded in the best science, giving policymakers the insight they need to do what’s right. Yet the opposite is happening: the peer-review process, designed to ensure research quality, is failing.
Consider the recent study, “Anti-transgender rights legislation and internet searches pertaining to depression and suicide,” published in December 2022 in PLOS One, a high-impact multidisciplinary journal. The authors claim to show a link between the passage of “anti-transgender rights” legislation and Google searches for “depression” and “suicide,” which could be proxy measures of mental-health distress. They assert that “the passage of a single [anti-trans] bill led to around a 13 to 17 percent increase in the volume of searchers for the word ‘suicide’ within that state” and that “that for every anti-transgender bill passed in a week, there was about a five percent increase in searches for the word ‘depression.’”
Read more at City Journal.
Dr. Stanley Goldfarb of Do No Harm described policy as ‘unconscionable’
A mental health clinic at a Maryland hospital has instituted a policy by which minor patients who identify as transgender could be roomed with other minor patients of the opposite biological sex.
The Behavioral Health Center at Carroll Hospital in Westminster instructed staff to use the preferred pronouns of patients “regardless of their physical appearance, legal name, medical history, etc.,” according to an April 2022 internal policy document obtained by Fox News Digital.
Read more at Fox News.
The New York Times ran a piece Tuesday dismissing the stories of individuals who regret getting transgender treatments as children.
In a piece tiled “How a Few Stories of Regret Fuel the Push to Restrict Gender Transition Care,” the NYT treated detransitioners as a fringe group whose cases that should not be used to restrict sex changes for minors. “Republicans have amplified a group of activists who no longer identify as transgender, overriding objections from transgender people and medical experts,” the piece read.
Read more at the Daily Caller.
A number of blue states have passed laws allowing children to receive transgender surgeries and drugs, often without parental knowledge or consent.
Many of the bills are designed to allow children to pursue such a medical route on their own, require insurance to cover it, and give legal shields to doctors who provide the services.
Read more at the Washington Examiner.
When neutrality isn’t a virtue
OPINION:
About a third of the country is moving toward restoring sanity while another third seems hellbent on getting nuttier. The final third might charitably be described as “neutral.”
On the sane side, Wyoming recently became the 19th state to reserve women’s sports for women.
Read more at The Washington Times.
The program’s goal was to increase diversity in the state’s health care workforce
Quinyatta Mumford credits an Arkansas Minority Health Commission scholarship with affording her the opportunity to finish her doctorate in public health with less stress.
The single mother of three will graduate from the University of Arkansas for Medical Sciences next week and was disheartened to learn the Minority Health Workforce Diversity Scholarship is being discontinued as part of a lawsuit settlement.
Read more at the Arkansas Advocate.
Decision part of agreement in discrimination lawsuit
A scholarship offered to minority college students in Arkansas who plan to enter the health care field is being discontinued as part of an agreement reached in federal court this week.
A lawsuit claiming the Minority Health Workforce Diversity Scholarship offered through the Arkansas Department of Health discriminates against students because of skin color was resolved Monday after the Arkansas Minority Health Commission director agreed to its termination, according to an agreement filed Monday in federal court.
Read more at the Arkansas Democrat Gazette.
Anesthesiologist and Do No Harm Visiting Fellow Dr. Marilyn Singleton joins Fox Business to expand on her argument that medical schools are bringing back racial segregation.
Watch at Fox Business.
A Washington University School of Medicine in St. Louis course trained students on the “power” dynamics between different “social identities” during a lecture titled “Matrix of Social Identity,” according to a presentation obtained by medical watchdog Do No Harm (DNH) and shared with the Daily Caller News Foundation.
The lecture defined the matrix as a “framework” that is “reflective of U.S. culture and society” and that is “helpful for understanding how relationships to power differ,” according to a copy of the slides obtained by DNH. The instructor explained to the medical students that racial discrimination can only be considered racism if the person identifies with a group in a position of “power,” according to the audio shared with the DCNF by DNH that was first leaked online by the Twitter account Mythinformed in February.
Read more at the Daily Caller.
In his four years in office, Gov. Ron DeSantis (R-FL) has set a new conservative playbook for healthcare, from his defiant response to the coronavirus pandemic to his care network to combat opioid addiction.
Beyond the headlines of his war on woke, DeSantis has racked up a policy record that will serve as the foundation for his national political ambitions and expected 2024 White House bid.
Read more at the Washington Examiner.
The Arkansas Minority Health Commission agreed to settle a lawsuit that accused the state government agency of violating federal law by providing a scholarship to exclusively minority students entering the healthcare field.
The lawsuit was filed last month by the medical watchdog group Do No Harm, which said in court filings that the commission was violating federal law prohibiting discrimination on the basis of race. Under the terms of the Monday settlement agreement, the commission agreed to discontinue the scholarship.
Read more at the Washington Examiner.
Medical schools are returning to ‘separate but equal,’ but doctors know we’re all the same on the inside
My mother and father went to segregated schools, separated from Whites because they were Black. They told me, as a child, that they wanted better for me. They got their wish when I went to Stanford University and then the University of California at San Francisco’s medical school, both fully integrated and welcoming. Before they passed away, they firmly believed that the era of separating people by race was over forever.
My parents were wrong.
Read more at Fox News.