The woke domination of American higher education can seem tragically comic when it’s confined to the English department. But when it infiltrates the hard sciences, far more is at stake. Read and wince at how woke politics is about to infect medical education.
A leading medical school association’s new diversity curriculum has sparked claims of discrimination against straight, White male doctors among conservative medical groups.
The Association of American Medical Colleges’ “Diversity, Equity, and Inclusion Competencies Across the Learning Continuum,” published this month, advises faculty and administrators on how to make students consider their “identity, power and privilege” when treating patients.
Students training under the new standards will be required to master the concepts of oppression, White privilege, social risk factors, “race as a social construct,” colonialism and intersectionality — “how one’s personal identities, biases, and lived experience” influence clinical practice.
Read more on the Washington Times.
The Association of American Medical Colleges released new standards for teaching medicine that require students to achieve “competencies” in “white privilege,” “anti-colonialism,” and “race as a social construct,” among other race-essentialist ideas.
“Since the founding of the United States, there have been systemic health and health care inequities grounded in racism, sexism, homophobia, classism, and other forms of discrimination that still permeate our current health system,” the “Diversity, Equity, and Inclusion Competencies Across the Learning Continuum,” which the AAMC released this month, states.
Read more on Breitbart.
Under new curriculum standards, or “competencies,” from the influential Association of American Medical Colleges, medical schools could be required to teach students to identify “systems of power, privilege, and oppression” — systems like white privilege, “heterosexism” and ableism — “and their impacts on health outcomes.”
If implemented, the standards could require students to practice “anti-racism and critical consciousness in health care” and describe how “colonization, White supremacy, acculturation, [and] assimilation” affect health.
Read more on Just The News.
Boost tenure chances by giving classes on LGBT awareness to high schoolers
Indiana University’s medical school will require professors to prove a commitment to “diversity, equity, and inclusion” as part of their evaluations.
The Faculty Steering Committee at the IU School of Medicine voted in favor of legislation “requiring faculty to report activities in diversity, equity, and inclusion.”
The new requirement will be “phased in over the next three years,” according to an announcement from the university.
The College Fix reached out twice via email in the past week to the med school’s executive director of faculty affairs, Neelam Chand, and the media relations team, but neither responded to requests for comment. The Fix asked for an update and what the next steps are for this initiative.
Read more on The College Fix.
Follow the evidence. It’s a foundational tenet of health care, as it is of all scientific inquiry. Yet today’s medical establishment is unwilling to confront the consequences of its attempts to maximize diversity. After years of lowering standards for applicants, medical schools are more diverse than ever before. Yet new studies show that many students are struggling, putting their future patients and careers at risk. Rather than revisit the means by which they are pursuing diversity, however, the medical elite want to double down on their failing course.
The campaign for diversity is long running and has some value, yet the ideological extremism of the past two years has led medical schools to adopt dangerous strategies. To fight supposed “systemic racism,” at least 40 institutions have dropped the requirement that all applicants take the MCAT, the gold-standard test that measures students’ grasp of this life-saving profession. The University of Pennsylvania’s Perelman School of Medicine, where I used to work, now waives the MCAT for a number of applicants each year, primarily from Historically Black Colleges and Universities.
It’s also getting harder to gauge whether graduates are well prepared. The U.S. Medical Licensing Exam, which residencies rely on when picking trainees, recently abandoned objective grading for a pass/fail system, largely on diversity grounds. And calls are growing for post-graduate resident evaluations to be weakened as well. That would let potentially unqualified individuals enter medical practice and endanger patient well being.
Sadly, increasingly vocal student and faculty activists have made clear to the medical establishment that raising concerns about these trends is verboten. Enter three new studies, which show that putting diversity ahead of quality has consequences.
The first study, published in May in the well-respected journal Academic Medicine, found that MCAT scores generally predict student outcomes. Those with lower scores fare worse over their four years in the classroom, and the strong correlation between MCAT scores and student success holds across racial, ethnic, and socio-economic lines. Left unspoken was the criticism of the putsch against the MCAT.
The second study came courtesy of another May issue of Academic Medicine. It looked at minority medical students’ readiness for the profession, as judged by clinical evaluations during their post-graduate residencies, when they begin to work directly with patients. On average, they scored lower on measures of medical knowledge, medical practice, professionalism, and several other essential indicators.
To be clear, many minority students surely excelled, while others brought the average down. The authors attributed their findings to biased evaluators, racist tests, or worse training, but if you put ideology aside, the more likely conclusion is that lower standards for students leads to worse performance by residents.
The final study was published by the news site Stat. In a thorough investigation of post-graduate residencies, it found that black residents “either leave or are terminated from training programs at far higher rates than white residents.” Stat assumes that racism accounts for this disparity, but the other studies point to a simpler and more credible explanation: after struggling in medical school and falling short in key professional indicators, some residents simply lose their positions due to poor performance. As a longtime medical educator, I can attest that no training program would make this difficult and disruptive decision for any reason other than competence and concern for patients.
Such findings should spark a diversity rethink among medical school administrators. They should be deeply concerned that they’re accepting and graduating a growing number of students who may not be ready for the rigors of the profession. They should also be concerned that more qualified students are likely being passed over, leaving patients with a less talented crop of doctors over the long run.
But a rethink is not what medical schools want. That would require questioning the ideological assumption that patients need to see physicians of the same race and gender, an idea contradicted by robust clinical studies. More to the point, it would call into question the entire diversity-industrial complex.
When I recently highlighted the troubling nature of the second study, academic medicine largely rallied to attack me. The chair of the Medicine Department at Penn’s Perelman School of Medicine sent a note to all faculty, trainees, and staff decrying my “racist statements” and recommitting the school to diversity. This ideology runs so deep that I doubt medical schools will put student quality ahead of diversity unless policymakers require it, either by mandating the MCAT for all students or withholding funding from institutions that put skin color ahead of medical excellence.
People of every race and background are fully capable of becoming world-class physicians. Medical schools should seek out the best candidates who are most likely to provide the best care for patients, regardless of what they look like or where they come from. Anything less jeopardizes the very purpose of these institutions. The medical elite may not want to admit it, but their current approach to achieving diversity has a steep cost, and it’s wrong to ask patients to pay it.
Dr. Stanley Goldfarb, a former associate dean of curriculum at the University of Pennsylvania’s Perelman School of Medicine, is chairman of Do No Harm.
The University of California San Diego’s medical school is using critical race theory as a part of its curriculum to educate its students, a report shows.
“The Woke Invasion of Racial Politics into UCSD Medical Education,” a report, by Do No Harm, a group of medical professionals working to “protect healthcare from radical, divisive and discriminatory ideology,” says the medical school has a goal of “dismantling racism” through its curriculum. Aspects of the curriculum include lectures, protests and resources created “primarily in the wake of George Floyd,” according to the report.
Read more on The Daily Caller.
UCSD med school’s racial justice curriculum aims to make medicine’s role a ‘mechanism of social engineering,’ according to report
The University of California San Diego’s top-rated medical school integrates progressive social justice and racial politics into its curriculum in an effort to “expand medicine’s role as a mechanism of social engineering,” argues a new report written by critics of critical race theory.
The 14-page report, released June 21 and titled “The Woke Invasion of Racial Politics into UCSD Medical Education,” was published by Do No Harm and details guest lectures, curricula, protests, events and academic programming that appear to prioritize politics over science.
Read more on The College Fix.
EXCLUSIVE — A scholarship reserved for students who “self-identify as an under-represented minority” has earned the Emory University School of Medicine a federal civil rights complaint that accuses the school of racial discrimination .
Do No Harm, a watchdog group that opposes “radical, divisive, and discriminatory ideology” in the healthcare industry, filed the complaint with the Department of Education’s Office for Civil Rights, alleging that the Emory Urology Diversity and Equity Scholarship Program violates federal civil rights law prohibiting discrimination on the basis of race.
Read more on the Washington Examiner.
This month, medical-school graduates will begin their postgraduate training positions and residencies nationwide. They’ll primarily work at teaching hospitals, which are charged with ensuring that these future physicians uphold the highest standards of patient care. Yet woke ideology is undermining this essential part of medical education in two ways. First, admissions and testing standards are being lowered in the name of diversity and equity. Second, victimization culture is making it harder to give low-performing and unqualified residents the feedback they need to avoid endangering patients.
This decline is being driven by trends in medical school, where activists have pressured administrators to drop strict testing standards on the grounds that testing is racist. At least 40 institutions and counting have given in, dropping MCAT requirements mainly for those who are “underrepresented in medicine.” The University of Pennsylvania’s Perelman School of Medicine, where I served as associate dean, now waives the MCAT for certain applicants from Historically Black Colleges and Universities and several other institutions. Studies show that lower MCAT scores predict poor performance in medical school, a greater likelihood of dropping out, and a lesser likelihood of comprehending the courses that matter most to patient care.
The lowering of standards on the front end of medical school is now matched by less grading at the back end. This year, the United States Medical Licensing Exam’s first section, which residency programs have typically relied on to select candidates, has replaced objective grades with a pass/fail system. The medical-school deans who approved this seismic shift away from merit explicitly did so to allow more minority students to qualify for competitive residency programs.
Residencies are now more diverse, but residents themselves appear to be less well prepared. Studies show that residents of certain races and ethnicities, on average, score worse on clinical-performance assessments. (To be clear, many also excel.) Yet these findings have sparked more calls for lowering standards and eliminating measures that demonstrate competence.
Consider a study published in the prominent journal Academic Medicine in May. It asserted that lower scores by minority residents on evaluations of professionalism, medical knowledge, and readiness for independent practice can be ascribed to only three things: bias from supervising physicians, a worse training environment, or racist testing. At no point did the study authors consider a more obvious conclusion: that lower scores reflect genuinely weaker performance, an unsurprising result of years of lowering standards.
Pointing out the obvious is an unforgivable sin in the activist-dominated world of academic medicine. When I tweeted about the study, I was accused of being a racist, and the chair of the Department of Medicine at my former employer — a friend of many years — sent a department-wide email denouncing my “racist statements.” Apparently, it is no longer acceptable to express concern about trainees who are underperforming and may continue to underperform as clinicians.
My experience points to the most dangerous trend of all. Having retired from academic medicine in 2019, I have the freedom to speak out. Yet the nonprofit I chair that opposes identity politics in health care, Do No Harm, is consistently hearing from physicians who are afraid of giving feedback to low-performing residents lest they be accused of bias. It’s a direct threat to residents’ future success as physicians — and more important, the well-being of their patients.
The harmful consequences are already playing out. An attending physician at a top medical school told us about a resident who left a tourniquet on a patient for too long, causing an above-the-knee amputation — yet the resident received no negative feedback. In another instance, an attending physician believed that a resident came to work in the emergency room while under the influence of drugs, yet after raising the issue, the physician backed down following accusations of racism. Another resident who did not know how to set a broken bone responded with physical threats to an attending physician who tried to step in and help, and the resident and received no punishment in return.
An attending physician at a prominent institution recently told my organization that residents now have the power — and they’re not afraid to use it against the physicians who are supposed to be their supervisors. Physicians rightly worry that administrators will take the residents’ side in a dispute: What they know to be a necessary corrective action, the medical diversity-industrial complex could easily see as grounds for termination. So the physicians often stay silent, except with the most egregious mistakes.
The result is a crisis of excellence across medical education and training. To be sure, the real failure doesn’t belong to unqualified students and residents. Medical schools and training institutions are failing them and society at large. These institutions should be recruiting and educating the best future physicians, many of whom are indeed from diverse backgrounds, and they should never lower standards or refuse to give residents the feedback they need to succeed in this lifesaving profession. If these trends continue, next July will see a larger crop of trainees and residents who are less capable and more likely to harm their patients, with the medical establishment pretending nothing is wrong.
Dr. STANLEY GOLDFARB, a former associate dean of curriculum at the University of Pennsylvania’s Perelman School of Medicine, is chairman of Do No Harm.
Have you ever seen racial discrimination and segregation in health care? I have. And I worry it’s coming to America.
I grew up in apartheid South Africa, where the color of your skin determined everything. Being “colored” — of mixed racial heritage — I was treated as a second-class citizen. And the medical services people like me had access to were third-rate, at best.
The crowded hospitals black and brown people could go to had much longer wait times than whites-only hospitals. The physicians and other medical professionals we could see were trained separately from their white counterparts and not allowed to attend to white patients. Medications and treatments were generally less available because of our skin color.
Add it all up, and racial discrimination limited our chances to lead the healthiest, happiest life.
I left South Africa in 1986 for America. I came here because my children could have the opportunities I never did — including the chance to see the best doctors, go to the best hospitals and get the highest-quality care. And now the discrimination I left behind is threatening American health care, just from a different direction.
The federal government, under the Biden administration, has wholly bought into the claim that health care suffers from “systemic racism.” So it’s pursuing a strategy to embed “anti-racism” into medical principles and practice. While that language may sound positive, it’s simply another name for racial discrimination. No less than anti-racism’s founder, Ibram X. Kendi, has made that clear by saying, “The only remedy to past discrimination is present discrimination; the only remedy to present discrimination is future discrimination.”
Sure enough, the federal government is sowing the seeds of medical discrimination. Since the year’s start, it has paid a “bonus” to physicians who accept Medicare to “create and implement an anti-racism plan.” This is effectively a mandate on all of health care since more than 90% of primary-care physicians are covered and the extra pay is almost impossible to turn down. As physicians try to abide by this policy, they will find it harder and harder to provide equal access to care.
Why? Because Washington explicitly wants to force physicians to focus on their patients’ race, to the point of asking themselves: “What population(s) will I prioritize?” A physician must then create “target goals” and “milestones” for different racial groups instead of focusing on each patient as a unique individual. Such race-based decision-making creates the risk of preferential care based on skin color — which, by the way, is exactly what activists are demanding. It smacks of the very discrimination that led me to leave apartheid South Africa.
What’s more, the federal government recently announced it will collect racial and demographic data on every American patient. This sounds like a national database that puts race at the center of health-care policy. Based on the explicitly discriminatory goals of “anti-racism,” this information will likely be used to push physicians to provide different standards of care for different people. As I know firsthand, once authorities zero in on skin color, it becomes the lens through which they see everything, and it affects the way they treat everyone.
Beyond the Biden administration, there’s a rapidly growing push for patients to see providers who share their skin color. The name for that is segregation, and it will surely hurt the black and brown patients it’s supposed to help. Having grown up in a country that typically required patients and physicians to be of the same racial category, I’m convinced we shouldn’t care what our physician looks like. We should only care that he or she is the most qualified to provide us the personalized medical care we require.
At least two states — Massachusetts and Michigan — mandate that physicians undergo routine implicit-bias training too. The premise is that some physicians are inherently and irredeemably prejudiced against people of different backgrounds. But that merely sends patients the message that they can’t trust physicians who don’t look exactly like them. Not only does that undermine the doctor-patient relationship, it once again pushes health care toward de facto segregation.
I’ve been there before. It should go without saying that what’s happening in America isn’t nearly as awful or total as the apartheid I endured in South Africa. But that doesn’t change the fact that health care is spiraling downward, morally and medically. It’s moving toward racial discrimination and segregation, based on the dangerous claim that these evil ideas are somehow superior. They never are — and Americans shouldn’t have to find out the hard way.
An anti-woke medical group plans to file five civil complaints against universities in Ohio and Indiana for alleged “racist scholarship requirements” in medical programs, according to complaints obtained exclusively by the Daily Caller.
Do No Harm claims that five medical schools offer scholarship programs that “explicitly take individuals based on race.” The organization believes the scholarships are a direct violation of Title VI of the Civil Rights Act of 1964, which bars federal funding from programs that exclude participants based on race, color, or national origin.
Schools allegedly violating the Civil Rights Act include Indiana University School of Medicine, Ohio State University College of Medicine, the University Hospitals Cleveland Medical Center’s Department of Radiology, Nationwide Children’s Hospital, and the University of Cincinnati College of Medicine.
Read more on The Daily Caller.
A new report by the nonprofit Do No Harm found the University of California San Diego School of Medicine has increasingly focused on “diversity, equity and inclusion” efforts in recent years, including incorporating principles of critical race theory into curricula.
“At the institutional level, UCSD’s medical school has created a number of internal bureaucracies dedicated to the ideas of DEI at both the staffing and teaching levels, including in ways that can foster active discrimination and a lower quality in medical outcomes,” writes Do No Harm, a nonprofit focused on stopping the “woke takeover” of health care.
Read more on National Review.
Why is Michigan trying to destroy the doctor-patient relationship with identity politics?
That’s my question as a recently retired doctor who spent 30 years helping Michigan patients through my practice in Toledo, Ohio. I am profoundly offended by the state’s new mandate that I and every other medical professional take “implicit bias training” every year.
Not only does this baseless mandate insult doctors like me, it is also sure to ruin patients’ trust in their medical providers and lead to worse health outcomes for the very people it’s supposed to help.
I have been licensed in Michigan for years, and last month, the state’s licensing board reached out to inform me that I have to take this “implicit bias training” to maintain my ability to practice in the state. I will not be doing so since I retired in April. Yet I am still deeply disturbed at what Michigan is forcing on all my fellow medical professionals.
Michigan has all but accused us of having implicit bias, which the state defines as “an attitude or internalized stereotype that affects an individual’s perception, action or decision making in an unconscious manner and often contributes to unequal treatment.”
While I fundamentally and wholeheartedly refute that I am biased, it is impossible, by design, to convince the state, since my bias is supposedly “unconscious.”
How convenient: I am guilty by definition. And apparently I have no hope for redemption, since the training is a never-ending, annual obligation. The message is that doctor bias is a permanently unsolvable problem, even after mandatory classes year after year.
Michigan couldn’t be more wrong, for many reasons. It provides no proof or documentation that inherent bias exists. For that matter, there’s no proof that implicit bias training works, beyond insulting and punishing doctors.
More to the point, every doctor I’ve ever met treats patients as unique individuals with specific medical needs, regardless of who they are or what they look like. We work hard to relate to our patients, understand their conditions and propose tailored treatments and follow-ups. There’s no bias from them — there’s only a sworn devotion to serve our patients’ best interests.
Besides, in my case, bias is largely impossible. My primary responsibility is the interpretation of medical images, so I never meet most of my patents. I only see their images, along with some clinical information provided by the ordering doctors. I almost never know their race, sexual preference, preferred pronouns or other identities which I am now accused of being biased against.
Yet Michigan still asserts that I and every other health care provider is biased. This accusation will foster bitterness among providers who are already suffering from high levels of stress and burnout. You can bet more doctors will leave the medical profession because of this mandate.
Furthermore, implicit bias training suggests to patients that their providers are treating them less equally and providing them with worse care. This is the most dangerous consequence of all.
Think about it: If you’re told your doctor is biased against you, then why will you go see them? If your unconsciously hateful provider recommends a treatment or follow-up, why would you accept their advice? After all, they’re supposedly predisposed to treat you worse, so you have no reason to see them, listen to them or even access medical care at all.
Under this worldview, the entire medical system is permanently rigged. When something is rigged, you steer clear.
I cannot imagine anything more destructive to health care. Michigan’s mandate is an unjustified and unscientific interference in the near sacred doctor-patient relationship.
Unlike other annual medical training requirements, “implicit bias training” has nothing to do with medicine. But it has everything to do with identity politics and, as such, it will undermine medical care and outcomes for countless people.
It should not be a requirement to receive or maintain a medical license in Michigan — or any state.
Dr. Daniel A. Dessner is a retired radiologist in Toledo, Ohio. He is a member of Do No Harm.
A physician who serves as chair of a woke antiracist organization is alleging that some U.S. medical schools are actively discriminating against white students.
Dr. Stanley Goldfarb filed complaints to the United States Department of Education Office for Civil Rights alleging that five schools are in breach of Title VI of the Civil Rights Act of 1964, which prohibits discrimination on the basis of race, color, or national origin.
He alleges the schools are granting scholarships based on race rather than academic ability – and as a result are discriminating against white applicants as they try and fill their quotas of minority students and demographics, who in the past were previously ‘underrepresented’ within the student body.
A newly filed federal civil-rights complaint accuses the University of Oklahoma of imposing illegal racial discrimination through its practice of offering medical scholarships to students based on race.
The civil-rights complaint was filed on June 1 with the U.S. Department of Education’s Office for Civil Rights by the organization Do No Harm.
“We’re against racism in medicine,” said Dr. Stanley Goldfarb, board chair of Do No Harm. “And when you start dividing students up based on their race, that’s something that we’re against. This scholarship, it specifically says these are the races that are eligible for this scholarship. That’s what we’re against. We want everybody treated equally.”
Read more on OCPA.
EXCLUSIVE – An organization focused on combating antiracism and discrimination in the medical field called Do No Harm filed complaints to the United States Department of Education Office for Civil Rights which accused five medical schools of violating Title VI for allegedly discriminating on the basis of race for various scholarships.
The Civil Rights Act of 1964, or Title VI, prohibits discrimination based on race, color or national origin from any program or activity that receives federal funding. Do No Harm filed complaints to the Office of Civil Rights regarding The University of Florida College of Medicine, University of Oklahoma – Tulsa, University of Utah School of Medicine, University of Minnesota Medical School and the Medical College of Wisconsin.
“This reflects Ibram Kendi’s idea that in order to produce some sort of justification of past discrimination, we engage in current and future discrimination. And we… completely reject this idea,” Dr. Stanley Goldfarb, the board chair of Do No Harm, told Fox News Digital.
“In fact, [the scholarships] are illegal, and they should not occur. And these schools need to really reject this kind of racialist approach to education… and should embark on programs that are fair and equitable to all individuals.”
“If you go back into the 1920s and thirties, it was Jews that were excluded as a definite category. And there was an interesting study done several years ago where someone wrote to the medical schools of the various medical schools around the country, and they acknowledged the fact that they had limited the number of Jewish applicants that they would accept. So… we totally reject this,” Goldfarb said.
“We think that admission to medical schools should be based on merit and merit alone. And that and there are plenty of African-American students who are highly qualified and are worthy of admission to medical school, and they should be admitted to medical school if they so desire to enter medical school – but on the basis of the fact that they’ve achieved what they’ve achieved, not because of some desire to create some sort of quota system in medicine where every medical school class perfectly reflects the population in the United States. And even if one tries to do that… it ends up excluding many people – typically South Asians and East Asian individuals are the ones who end up getting excluded.”
Goldfarb added that he believed some administrators at medical schools were taking more antiracist action at their institutions in order to placate the left-wing mob.
In addition to its growing legal arm, Goldfarb added that Do No Harm also provides rebuttals to antiracist medical literature which he claims contain poor research methods and factually questionable conclusions on its website.
“Our main purpose is to be a voice for people and to let them know that there are those fighting for them to achieve equitable care, the best care available. And if that’s the goal of physicians, then all patients will benefit. And if the goal is to produce a sort of racist discrimination, then some patients will not benefit, while others might benefit. And that’s not fair and that’s not something we support. So we would ask [people] to join us to help lend their voice to the concerns that we have and the goals that we’ve laid out,” Goldfarb said.
Goldfarb added that discrimination is becoming more and more common in the medical field and fears with a scarcity of resources there could be “rationing” in the future on the basis of race if the new initiatives go “unchecked.”
“You know, hospitals are closing all around the country… and that inevitably leads to scarcity of availability of services. So if we have a scarcity of availability of services and some rules based on race, then inevitably we’re going to start to see differential treatments,” he said. “Beyond that, I think it undermines trust that patients need to have in the health care system. You need to go to a physician and think that they’re doing the best for you simply because of the medical problems that you have and not for any other reason.”
The Underrepresented in Medicine Scholarship Program at FCM is open to underrepresented minority students who are pursuing emergency medicine. According to the Association of American Colleges, “Underrepresented in medicine means those racial and ethnic populations that are underrepresented in the medical profession relative to their numbers in the general population.”
“This includes African Americans and/or Black, American Indian, Alaska Native, Naive Hawaiian, Hispanic/Latinx, and Pacific Islander,” FCM said.
“The University is openly flouting those obligations by allocating scholarship and employment opportunities based on race,” Do No Harm said. “In short, the University is prioritizing some medical students over others purely because of their race.”
The Diversity in Pediatrics Visiting Student Elective Award is available only to underrepresented minorities. Awardees receive stipends as well as professional and career development opportunities.
“As the University openly admits—indeed, advertises—students must be ‘[b]elonging to a historically excluded group,'” Do No Harm said.
“In light of the University’s facially discriminatory eligibility standards, we ask the Department to promptly investigate the allegations in this complaint, act swiftly to remedy unlawful policies and practices, and order appropriate relief,” the complaint to the Office of Civil Rights said.
The Visiting Underrepresented in Medicine Student Elective Program “expressly limits eligibility to individuals from specific racial demographics,” according to the complaint. The program offers free housing, a stipend, and interview opportunities.
“The Board must immediately suspend the Program or revise its terms to ensure that applicants of all races receive equal consideration,” Do No Harm said.
“The University’s ‘Underrepresented in Medicine Student Clerkship Grant is a program to ‘support and encourage medical students who identify as underrepresented in medicine (URiM).’ Awardees receive a $2,500 stipend to cover the cost of living expenses, additional travel stipends, and many professional and career development opportunities,” Do No Harm wrote.
“These financial benefits and professional opportunities, however, are strictly limited to individuals of certain races or ethnicities.”
“Medical College of Wisconsin’s ‘2022 Visiting Medical Underrepresented in Medicine (URiM) Student Elective Program’ expressly limits eligibility to individuals from specific racial demographics. The terms of the program—which include free housing, a living stipend, professional mentorship, and interview opportunities—plainly state that the College will only consider applications from individuals who are “African Americans and/or Black, American Indian, Alaska Native, Naive Hawaiian, Hispanic/Latinx, [or] Pacific Islander,” Do No Harm stated. “In short, the Medical College is prioritizing some medical students over others purely because of their race.”
Fox News Digital reached out for comment from the medical schools and received one response. “The Medical College of Wisconsin (MCW) has not been notified of this complaint, and is unaware of its contents or any related investigation,” a spokesman said.
The political distortion of medical research has a sordid history, but it’s unfortunately not just a thing of the past. Today, a popular narrative has taken hold that a racist medical establishment is the reason that blacks have shorter life expectancies, worse clinical outcomes for many diseases, and even excess maternal and infant mortality. The claim is unsupported by evidence, however, and believing it won’t do anything to improve black patients’ health.
Search for the terms “racism” and “medicine” in the National Library of Medicine database, and thousands of scientific publications appear. Journalists and a growing number of doctors regard this as proof of medical discrimination. But most of these studies do not prove any causality; they merely document disparities in clinical outcomes and medical services for black Americans. Nonetheless, they increasingly serve to justify such discriminatory practices as preferentially reserving scarce Covid-19 therapies for blacks.
A rush to find racism typifies most of the many thousands of opinion pieces, original investigations, and review articles on the topic of clinical outcomes for black patients. That literature supports a media that has eagerly adopted the narrative of racism embedded in American health care. The result undermines the trust in medical care needed for successful patient- physician relationships and diverts scarce resources in combating a nonexistent factor in poor health outcomes.
The rules for conducting robust scientific research require scientists to try to disprove their own theories. One can never absolutely prove a hypothesis correct; one can only show that experiments fail to disprove it. The investigator should begin by doubting the hypothesis and do his best to disprove it with carefully designed experiments. Unfortunately, too many studies on medical racism are carried out by investigators who, following the prevailing political trend, set out to confirm their ideas of a racist health-care system. A biased experiment can easily lead to a desired outcome, and emphasizing some results while ignoring others can lead to a faulty conclusion.
Consider a 2022 research article in the highly regarded journal Health Affairs. Titled “Negative Patient Descriptors: Documenting Racial Bias in the Electronic Health Record,” the study uses automated systems to review more than 18,000 electronic medical records. It finds that “bad descriptors” are used in the medical records 2.54 times as frequently in the records of black patients compared with white patients. The headline: “Our findings raise concern about racial bias and possible transmission of stigma in the medical record.”
One might expect that the investigators found that physicians and nurses demeaned or disparaged patients based on their race. So what were the negative words that allegedly show bias? The most common was “refused.” If a patient refused treatment, refused recommendation for a procedure, refused allowing a blood draw, or refused a medication, the authors consider a physician’s or nurse’s writing about the refusal in the medical record an indicator of racism. But that word describes the patient’s actions—it is a fact, not an opinion. Other words that the AI robot found to indicate biases were “not adherent” and “agitated.” Health Affairs highlights this paper in its advertising, but its spuriousness can be discerned only with a close look into its methods and results sections.
Medical research is rife with similar studies. Another study, cited hundreds of times in the medical literature and published in the New England Journal of Medicine, used simulated patient cases to determine whether physicians would assess black patients with chest pain differently from the way they would white patients with similar complaints. The physicians treated black men exactly the same as white men but referred black women less often for cardiac procedures than white women (it is not clear why). Journalists and academics cite this study to support the idea of racism in cardiac care, but they rarely point out that men received equivalent care.
The widespread availability of large databases like the one used by the Health Affairs investigators allows studies of the difference between black and white patients’ utilization of procedures and health outcomes. A notorious example, published in the Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences, used a database from Florida to show that black newborn babies had a greater chance of survival if they were treated by a black pediatrician. A dangerous conclusion might be that patients should seek out physicians matching their own race. If this study is correct, we could be on the path to medical apartheid.
But the study suffers from fatal mistakes. Any study using a large database to assess the cause of death should undertake a chart-level assessment of the circumstances of the patient’s death. A large database is often riddled with errors, as the various entries are made by administrative personnel who are rarely, if ever, trained in health care. It’s a game of telephone: the truth can become hopelessly muddled after multiple rounds. In this paper, the infant mortality data were never checked at the level of the patient’s chart, so it’s impossible to know which doctors actually cared for the patient during any acute event. Moreover, the authors had no way of determining the race of the physician of record besides scanning available photos, and almost 2,000 of the nearly 10,000 doctors in the sample had no photos (they were excluded from the analysis). Finally, it was not clear whether the infants who died had been referred from outlying hospitals to large medical centers because they were already critically ill. If so, the treating physician under whose care the patient died may have received a desperately ill baby with little chance of survival.
These flaws notwithstanding, the study was widely cited in the press as proof of the need for more black physicians. USA Today headlined its story: “Black babies are more likely to survive when cared for by Black doctors, study finds.” The coverage only fed the narrative that racism permeates American medicine.
One could go on dismantling studies like these. But the key finding lacking in any of the studies of racism in medicine is evidence that the countless diversity, equity, and inclusion trainings to which doctors are now subjected would alter patient outcomes. A vast gulf remains between methods of traditional medical research and these alleged remedies. In medical research, cures are proposed and then tested in two populations; if an improvement in outcomes results between the two groups, the therapy may work, and the “null hypothesis” is rejected. But with an antiracist approach to improving medical outcomes for black patients, a cure is proposed, consisting of expensive and time-consuming antiracist training, but the testing step is ignored. One simply must adopt the antiracist cure and implement it widely.
To the extent that medical research exaggerates racism in clinical outcomes, it does a disservice to identifying the real basis for discrepant results. Disparities aren’t always due to discrimination. If a genetic trait is the culprit—for example, increasing susceptibility to chronic kidney disease—then encouraging physicians to become activists will do nothing to improve patients’ outcomes. The failure of antiracist programs to do anything to improve clinical outcomes for black patients will only deepen the frustration of clinicians and the dismay of patients.
Doctors should conduct research and find treatments that work. They shouldn’t treat patients differently based on skin color. Doing so would undermine everything that physicians pledge when they first are called “doctor.”