UCSD med school trains doctors to use critical race theory in health care: report

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.

Emory medical school hit with civil rights complaint for race-based scholarship

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.

Wokeism Is Corrupting Medical Education and Endangering Patients

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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.

Team Biden’s racial discrimination in health care reminds me of South Africa’s apartheid I grew up under

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.

EXCLUSIVE: Anti-Woke Medical Group Calls Out Five Med Schools That Allegedly Have ‘Racist Scholarships Requirements’

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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.

San Diego Med School Has ‘Orwellian Bureaucracies’ Focused on Adding CRT to Curricula, Nonprofit Finds

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.

Opinion: Why it’s dangerous for Michigan to assume I’m biased against my patients

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.

Doctor who chairs woke ‘antiracist’ organization accuses five medical schools of unfairly discriminating against WHITE applicants by only offering scholarships for minorities

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. 

Read the full story in the Daily Mail.

Complaint Alleges Racial Discrimination at OU

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.

Physician accuses 5 US medical schools of discrimination based on Ibram X. Kendi’s tenets, files complaints

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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.”

Florida College of Medicine 

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.”

University of Minnesota Medical School 

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. 

University of Oklahoma-Tulsa School of Community Medicine 

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. 

University of Utah School of Medicine: Division of Otolaryngology 

“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 

“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.

Different Outcomes, Not Different Treatment

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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.”

EXCLUSIVE: Anti-Woke Billboards Plan To Drive Past Harvard Medical School Graduation

An organization dedicated to anti-woke health care is set to drive trucks with anti-woke slogans around Harvard University’s campus and the university’s top teaching hospital ahead of medical school graduation, the Daily Caller learned exclusively.

Do No Harm, an anti-woke health care organization, will drive trucks around Harvard’s campus and near Brigham and Women’s Hospital with a sign that reads, “Tell Harvard Medical School: Racial discrimination is never the answer.”

Read the full article in the Daily Caller.

Critical race theory is being injected into medicine and as a doctor it alarms me

I will not be renewing my medical license in Massachusetts. Last month, I received an email from the state Board of Registration in Medicine informing me that to maintain my license, I must “complete a continuing medical education requirement” on “implicit bias in healthcare.” 

Massachusetts has long been a center of excellence in medicine, so it is particularly distressing to see politics intrude into this life-saving field. I cannot be party to the ideological corruption of my profession, which will injure physicians and patients alike.

Read the full story in Fox News.

Indiana University Medical School Proposes Woke Promotion, Tenure Requirements For Professors

Dr. Stanley Goldfarb, the chairman of an anti-woke medical group called Do No Harm, submitted an official comment to the medical school’s Faculty Steering Committee arguing that the policy is “deeply illiberal.”

“Forcing candidates to declare their support for DEI when so many of them undoubtedly oppose it would compel dishonesty,” Goldfarb said. “Forcing candidates to show a track record of involvement in DEI would compel participation in and allegiance to a belief system. All of this is deeply illiberal and violates [Indiana University Medical School’s] own professed commitment to academic freedom.”

Read more on The Daily Caller.

EXCLUSIVE: Alabama Republican’s Bill Would Ban Government From Forcing Racial Discrimination in Medicare

Rep. Gary Palmer, R-Ala., proposed a bill Thursday that would prohibit health care providers from adopting racially discriminatory policies in their practices at the behest of the federal government. 

The legislation is necessary to prevent the Biden administration from using the government’s Medicare and Medicaid programs to advance the left’s “anti-racist” doctrine, Palmer said in an exclusive interview Tuesday with The Daily Signal. 

“Rep. Palmer is doing American health care a profound favor,” said Dr. Stanley Goldfarb, chairman of DoNoHarm, which exposed the HHS rule.  

“This bill fights the Biden administration’s dangerous effort to force divisive and discriminatory ideas into the doctor-patient relationship,” Goldfarb said. “The White House should be looking for ways to make health care more accessible for all, not pushing doctors to prioritize some patients over others for ideology.”

Read more.

Antiracist ‘radicalization’ in medical field is causing new discrimination: physician

Dr. Stanley Goldfarb, a physician who founded an organization that rebuts the left-wing push for anti-racist medicine, said the new practices incorporated into the field are going to exacerbate the current crisis in health disparities and that it includes discrimination. 

“We have groups of patients whose health is much worse than other groups of patients … And so I think this represents a crisis. And the response … is just the wrong,” the doctor said. 

A view that continues to prevail in the academic medical literature is that health disparities are primarily caused by systemic racism, meaning the health system is not treating specific communities adequately – causing some to suffer poorer outcomes.

“No, the reason we have a crisis is because of personal behaviors, understanding of the risks of illnesses, and access to the health care system. This is the nature of the crisis … It will only get worse if we put all our resources into the wrong solution to the medical problem,” he said. Dr. Goldfab believes that expanding access as well as increasing health literacy in K-12 schools are keys to combating health disparities. 

Dr. Goldfarb rebutted the notion that the medical field is systemically racist, saying, that for doctors “the impulse to do well for patients … – and every physician feels that.”

“We began [Do No Harm] in order to provide a voice for physicians, for patients [and] for any individuals in the health care world who are confronted with [things like] …  institutions demanding that they take on anti-bias training, the creation of protocols that seemed to favor one group of patients over another simply based on their skin color, their race, [or] even … issues … where the government is trying to … bribe physicians into creating anti-racism protocols in their practices in order to increase their payment from Medicare.”

He went on to criticize the anti-racist approach and said it includes discrimination. 

“The language of anti-racism is Ibram Kendi’s language. And he’s spoken to the idea that past discrimination … requires future discriminations in order to make some sort of equity achieved,” he said. “This undermines the whole idea of a trusting physician-patient relationship. And that’s what we’re trying to combat.”

He continued, “there are individuals who actually believe that these kinds of racist approaches are going to benefit patients. But in fact, they’re wrong. They’re really wrong. And they haven’t considered the … consequences of these kinds of ideas.”

Fox News reported Monday that the majority of America’s most prestigious medical schools are pushing ideas related to critical race theory (CRT). 

“This sort of radicalization that we’ve seen occur in colleges has manifested itself now in medical schools,” Dr. Goldfarb said. “Many medical educators now get degrees from schools of education, which are hotbeds of basically – to call it by its real name – Marxist-sort-of-thinking about health care and about society in general.”

As a result of this new push, Dr. Goldfarb said that he is observing medical schools undergo “a decline in quality.” 

Critical race theory-related ideas found in mandatory programs at 39 of top 50 US medical schools: report

“Last month, nonprofit organization Do No Harm was launched to fight back against radical progressive ideology in the healthcare industry while promoting fairness, equal access, and the best, most personalized treatment for every patient.

A recent Marist Poll, sponsored by Do No Harm, found a mere 28% of Americans feel elevating race or ethnicity as a more significant risk factor over medical history in determining the type of treatment prescribed for patients would be beneficial

Defenses of CRT-associated materials have ranged from outright denying CRT is being taught, to claiming that the underlying ideas are key to creating an inclusive educational environment.” Read the full article in Fox News.

Doctor Reveals How Woke Health Care Providers Affect You

Woke activists have infiltrated nearly every institution of American life. From academia to Hollywood, the radical left has successfully marched its way to power.

Most dangerously, the left has infiltrated an institution where people’s very lives are at stake: health care.

Woke health care “just goes against medical ethics,” Dr. Stanley Goldfarb says. “The tradition in medicine is to give treatments to patients who need them. And if you had to make a decision based on scarce resources, you gave it to the patient who would benefit the most from it.”

Goldfarb, a kidney specialist, is chairman of the board at Do No Harm, a national association of medical professionals that, against the backdrop of the COVID-19 pandemic, pushes back against woke activists in the health care system. He also is author of the new book “Take Two Aspirin and Call Me by My Pronouns: Why Turning Doctors Into Social Justice Warriors Is Destroying American Medicine.”

Goldfarb joins “The Daily Signal Podcast” to discuss the consequences of woke ideology in medicine and how we can bring health care back from the cliff.

We also cover these stories:

  • A whistleblower reveals that the FBI has launched several investigations into parents who protested or spoke out against their schools’ education policies.
  • Seven protesters dressed as characters from “The Handmaid’s Tale” march around a cul-de-sac where Supreme Court Justice Amy Coney Barrett lives.
  • The governors of Virginia and Maryland call on the Justice Department to provide better security for Supreme Court justices in light of ongoing protests in front of their homes.
  • Amid record-high gasoline prices, the Biden administration cancels three planned oil and gas lease sales.

Listen to the podcast on The Daily Signal or read the lightly edited transcript:

Doug Blair: My guest today is Dr. Stanley Goldfarb, chairman of the board at Do No Harm, a national association of medical professionals pushing back against woke activists in the health care system, as well as author of the new book “Take Two Aspirin and Call Me by My Pronouns: Why Turning Doctors Into Social Justice Warriors Is Destroying American Medicine.” Dr. Goldfarb, thank you so much for joining me today.

Dr. Stanley Goldfarb: Well, thank you very much for having me.

Blair: Yeah. I want to start with a question that might have some unpleasant implications for people who are going through the American health care system. How does wokeness and social justice in medicine impact the care that patients are receiving?

Goldfarb: Yeah, and I think that’s a very important question because it does, I think, illustrate really how this problem may evolve in the future. So, there are at least two really good examples that I can give you where it speaks to this issue.

The first one is a little bit historic now, and it has to do with the fact that some of the treatments for COVID-19 were very scarce when they first were made available. And decisions were made by several institutions, states—even New York state, for example—that individuals who came from what were called traditionally oppressed minority groups would get preference for access to some of these scarce treatments, such as monoclonal antibodies, simply on the basis of their skin color.

It didn’t matter whether they really were high risk from a medical perspective, they were seen to be high risk because of historical problems in the community.

So this was an example where there really was the possibility for a white patient who actually qualified and needed a medication would not get access to it if there was a black patient who didn’t necessarily need the treatment, but who had a higher standing because of an algorithm that gave certain points based on individual skin color.

So you got two points out of the three or four that you needed to get the treatment if you were the right racial group. And obviously, this just goes against medical ethics. It goes against, I think, what most people would think makes any sense. The tradition in medicine is give treatments to patients who need them. And if you had to make a decision based on scarce resources, you gave it to the patient who would benefit the most from it.

Another example has come in the way that patients are admitted to the hospital. So, several years ago, about three or four years ago, one of the Harvard hospitals did a study, which claimed that black patients were being admitted to different parts of the hospital for the treatment of heart failure compared to white patients. And they decided that this must be on the basis of racial bias. And they decided that they would offer only to black patients the opportunity to pick which part of the hospital they want to be admitted to.

Now, it turns out the study was really flawed because, in fact, the reason that patients were being admitted to differential places in the hospital was because of their underlying medical conditions, not because of their race. And it made much more sense to send the patients to the units that they sent to patients.

The white patient who had this heart condition, heart failure tended to have needs that were best served in the cardiology floor. Whereas the black patients who tended to have their heart problems on the basis of their kidney disease, these were dialysis patients who needed fluid removed because of their inability to excrete fluid. They were served much better … on a general medical floor where the dialysis treatments could be more easily coordinated.

So this was another example [of] a flawed study in a group of individuals who had this idea that they were going to see everything through a racial lens. And in doing the study, the investigators even said they were using critical race theory as the lens in which to operate. This led to a differential treatment of patients based on woke principles. And critical race theory, to sort of sum it all up, was with Dr. Ibram Kendi’s idea that past discrimination requires future discrimination. And this was going to be an example of future discrimination.

So here are just two examples—and there are others that I could cite where this has actually become ingrained in the health care system and has real, very unfortunate consequences.

The last one I’ll mention is that the federal government has published a proposal and it’s actually a final rule in Medicare that Medicare physicians will get a bonus if they install anti-racism practices in their practice. So in other words, if they come up with a plan for treating patients differential based on their skin color, they will actually be benefited.

Now, these are examples that I think most people would find really outrageous—is the only word for it—and not based on medical needs, but based on ideology, really, is the basis for these kinds of initiatives.

Blair: Do we see that this was something that was brewing a long time ago or was it spurred on by events like the death of George Floyd, some of these other Black Lives Matter events that might have spurred this type of thing on?

Goldfarb: I go into this in my book to a certain extent. It really traces back almost to [Karl] Marx’s principles that were developed back in the middle of the 19th century.

It had its full flower after World War II when there was a sociologist priest, Ivan Illich, [who] wrote a book called “Medical Nemesis,” where he sort of talked about many of these issues—about the way that modern medicine wasn’t dealing with prevention enough, wasn’t dealing with community health enough, was focused more on treating illness rather than prevention.

What grew out of that was sort of a movement, kind of a new age movement that we should train doctors more on how they interact with people, how they communicate, rather than on these treatments of illnesses with scientific principles, because these kinds of communication approaches and preventative approaches would be more effective for communities. And they are important, but what the real role of the physician is is to treat the individual patient who has an individual problem.

So it arose at that point, but it was quite clear that George Floyd’s killing led to this tremendous outpouring of sentiment about these issues. And many hospitals and academic medical centers, medical schools declared that, in fact, they had been racist in the past and they needed to expunge any racist tendencies that they may have. They’ve now embarked on all sorts of programs to have physicians take anti-bias training.

And so I think … that event, George Floyd’s killing, certainly led to an outpouring of interest in these kinds of initiatives.

Blair: Obviously, in the title of your book, you mentioned that doctors are turning into social justice warriors and how that is destroying the concept of American medicine. Can you expand a little bit on how doctors themselves are becoming more like social justice warriors?

Goldfarb: Well, that’s what’s being proposed more and more in medical education, that medical students who are the future physicians become advocates for these various social initiatives. And the reason I think it … poses such risk to American health care is because, in fact, physicians don’t know anything about these issues that they’re being asked to be advocates for.

We’re not trained to be social workers, which is really what this is about. We’re not trained to improve housing. We’re not trained to improve transportation issues for people living in poor areas. We’re not trained to change the availability of foods in various neighborhoods. We’re not trained to deal with the consequences of fossil fuel utilization by people as their energy source.

So we’re spending more and more time in medical curricula on these topics, but the impulse to do this is not so much that they really influence anyone’s health in a direct way that physicians can act on, but rather, I think it would be useful for the people that advocate for many of these social issues to have doctors as part of their advocacy core.

When someone walks out there with their white coat on and their stethoscope and starts talking to you about the dangers of climate change, that changes the discussion about climate change. And I think that’s really been the motivation to try to generate more social activity on the part of physicians.

Blair: Right. You talked a little bit about critical race theory is something that might be being taught to medical students. I guess, does that impact the care that they’re giving in person? I know we talked a little bit about some of the things that like state and local governments have done specifically during the pandemic, but are we seeing that the actual care that patients are receiving—like the medications they’re receiving—are impacted by the fact that their doctors are going through these types of programs?

Goldfarb: I would, again, I point back to the COVID story where you’ll see this when there’s scarcity. When there’s scarcity, then we start to see decisions being made now based on some of these racial issues, as opposed to the pure medical sort of issues.

So I think that was the most egregious example of it, but I think what the real concern here is sort of what kind of trust are patients going to have in the health care system if they’re told that the system is racist?

Are black patients going to be willing to go see white doctors if they’re told or go to academic medical centers that just announced their anti-racism practices in order to combat the racism that they’ve been manifesting in the past? Are they going to lose trust in the health care system because of that?

And I think what we’ve seen with the hesitancy of black patients to take the COVID vaccines has been part of the manifestation of the endless drumbeat about racist practices that have been present in the health care system.

And so I think the dangers of this are predominantly changing the healthcare system into one in which there’s going to be an emphasis on these racial characteristics of patients and a treatment differential that’s going to go on because there’s been such an emphasis on these kinds of practices.

So I think it’s a future risk more than a present risk, but again, ever since the George Floyd killing, there’s been such an increase in training medical students in these areas that I think is going to become more and more manifest as time goes by.

My institution, the University of Pennsylvania, just appointed one of the physicians to be the associate dean for health equity. Well, health equity in the wokest sort of terminology really means we’ve got to make sure that the outcomes are equal. And the only way we’re going to get the outcomes to be equal is if we give black patients some sorts of advantages over white patients in order to make up for past discrimination.

So I think we’re early in what the impact of all this is going to be. I’m hoping that we’re early in the impact of where all this is going to be because I’m hoping that we can prevent this from undermining American health care.

Blair: Now, it’s not just race that is being kind of inappropriately highlighted in these new sort of woke medical dictionaries and woke medical ideology. It’s also gender ideology. So, in the title of your book, obviously, you mentioned “call me by my pronouns,” which references a lot of this gender ideology that we’re starting to see infiltrate into medicine. How has that impacted the way our health care system treats patients?

Goldfarb: Yeah, well, this all really began about, oh, maybe 10 or 12 years ago when health care had the capacity to block the development of puberty. And this whole question really revolves, not so much around whether individuals have a choice to become transgender, to change their gender as adults. I mean, this is something that people have a right to do if they want to make such a decision and they have the resources to do it.

The question has been what to do with children and to children who express some so-called gender dysphoria, where they aren’t convinced that they’re of the right gender. This is a very common sort of and fleeting feeling that many children have. And then it disappears. Should these children be exposed to drugs that might influence their sexual development and their reproductive capacity as future adults?

And I think that’s where the real danger is in this new movement because it’s advocating for children to make decisions about this that they’re really unable to make. And it’s even putting parents in a very difficult position because those of them that decide that their children really should receive these agents are taking a great risk.

And so, as an individual and as my own particular view of it, is that’s really the danger point. We just don’t have enough information to know which children might actually benefit from such treatment. There may be children that would benefit from such treatment, but clearly there’s been an explosion in the use of these drugs. And it isn’t at all clear whether the data underlie that.

What needs to be done are studies that explore whether in fact there’s a greater risk of self-harm, of depression, of suicide in children that are not given these medications and allowed to transition to another gender when they have this gender dysphoria.

And it’s a very controversial point. European countries have been very, very hesitant. And in fact, many of them have decided that physicians should not be given the opportunity to use these drugs on children to prevent puberty from developing so that they can decide whether they want to actually become transgender individuals as they reach adulthood.

So that’s really where I think that the area may impact American health care in a great way, is whether children are going to receive these medications or not. And I think it’s a very controversial area that needs a tremendous amount of study to clarify it.

Blair: Now, as we begin to wrap-up here, I want to know, is our system able to recover from this? Can we … salvage the sort of health care element out of this and get rid of the woke stuff? Or is it too far gone? Do we need to start looking at what we can do to kind of bring it back from the brink?

Goldfarb: I think it’s early. I’m very hopeful. We’ve started this organization Do No Harm as well. I mean, part of my reason for writing the book was to try to raise awareness of some of these issues. And our organization is a member organization. We have a website, donoharmmedicine.org, and its goal is to really alert physicians, alert patients that these issues are starting to develop in academic medical centers and medical schools.

I don’t think it’s too late. I think there’s real opportunity. I think some of these governmental initiatives, like I mentioned before this extra payment for anti-racism protocols, these are early in development.

And I think that raising awareness about these issues, having a public debate about these issues, making sure that people understand the ethical basis for some of these decisions, or the lack thereof, I think will go a long way.

I think that politicians will start to become aware of these issues and start to introduce legislation that will make it clear that we should not treat people in a discriminatory fashion. We should not have racial discrimination in health care, whether it benefits white people or benefits black people, it should not occur. And I think it’s not too late to prevent it from taking a real foothold in American medicine.

Blair: That was Dr. Stanley Goldfarb, chairman of the board at Do No Harm, a national association of medical professionals pushing back against woke activists in the health care system, as well as author of the new book “Take Two Aspirin and Call Me by My Pronouns: Why Turning Doctors Into Social Justice Warriors Is Destroying American Medicine,” available now wherever books are sold.

Dr. Goldfarb, very much appreciate your time.

Goldfarb: Thank you so much. Bye-bye.