A former Ivy League medical school dean pledged to fight “woke healthcare” in a Wall Street Journal editorial on Tuesday, launching a network for doctors and students who resist the fast-growing idea that American medical practices are systemically racist.
Dr. Stanley Goldfarb, a former associate dean of curriculum at the University of Pennsylvania’s Perelman School of Medicine, wrote that he decided to start “Do No Harm” after finding more than 2,700 recent papers on “racism and medicine” listed in the National Library of Medicine database.
The papers reflect a growing trend in medical schools and residency training programs to blame poorer health outcomes for minorities on the “systemic racism” of White physicians giving inferior care to people of color, the physician said.
“Yet the most commonly cited studies are shoddily designed, ignore such critical factors as pre-existing conditions, or reach predetermined and sensationalized conclusions that aren’t supported by reported results,” Dr. Goldfarb writes in the op-ed.
Dr. Goldfarb, who earned his M.D. from the University of Rochester in 1969, said the “widely discredited” Implicit Association Test has fueled a growing trend of schools training doctors to be “social activists” rather than treat patients without regard to skin color.
That 1998 psychological test suggested that subconscious and unconscious racial bias influences the way White professionals treat people of color.
In a statement emailed to The Washington Times, Dr. Goldfarb said Do No Harm will be a support network for medical professionals and students who fear that speaking out against these identity politics theories in doctor’s offices “will damage their careers.”
“I’m confident that most physicians oppose what’s happening to our profession and want to see a course correction,” Dr. Goldfarb said in the email.
“We want to stop this infiltration of politics in the healthcare system and particularly into medical education before it impacts quality and access to care,” added the doctor, who is the new group’s chairman.
The American Medical Association did not respond on Tuesday to a request for comment.
But in a statement on its website, the AMA defends its “strategic plan to embed racial justice” in the medical profession within the next three years — an idea that the professional association of doctors and students said began an annual meeting in 2018.
The AMA pledges in the statement to “play a more prominent role in the current national reckoning on equity and justice” by using its “training platforms, programs, advocacy, communication and marketing infrastructure” as “levers for change.”
“Getting to equity and justice necessitates a sense of urgency and ambition,” the AMA statement declares.
This idea has spread quickly across the medical field.
Dr. Goldfarb’s op-ed on Tuesday also quotes the New England Journal of Medicine promoting a new “commitment to understanding and combating racism as a public health and human rights crisis,” as well as Health Affairs planning to “dismantle racism and increase racial equity” in healthcare.
It further notes the medical students’ group White Coats for Black Lives has demanded that reparations for slavery be inserted into their curriculum.
Kristina Rassmussen, a former chief of staff for Illinois’ former Republican governor Bruce Rauner, will serve as executive director of Do No Harm, which declined to disclose its funding or donors.
She said in a statement Tuesday that the group’s members fear politicizing medicine could fuel “reverse discrimination” rather than heal racial divisions within poor communities that have been underserved in the health care industry.
“Woke discrimination hurts the people it claims to help, and we’re focused on making healthcare better, fairer, and more accessible for all,” Ms. Rasmussen said.
• Sean Salai can be reached at ssalai@washingtontimes.com.
Please read our comment policy before commenting.