Physician, former Member of Congress, and IWF board member Nan Hayworth talks with Dr. Stanley Goldfarb, former Associate Dean for Curriculum at the University of Pennsylvania School of Medicine, about the experiences with “woke” politicization of academic medicine that inspired him to found Do No Harm.
TRANSCRIPT
Dr. Nan Hayworth:
Hi, I’m Nan Hayworth and I am a board certified ophthalmologist, former member of Congress for the 19th District of New York, and privileged to be a member of the Board of the Independent Women’s Forum. And I am extremely privileged to host this episode of She Thinks with Dr. Stanley Goldfarb, who is a board certified kidney specialist, former professor and associate dean for curriculum at the University of Pennsylvania School of Medicine. And now as of April, I believe it is, of 2022, the founder of Do No Harm, which is an organization that is designed to return rigor to medical curricula and physician training and rescue it from the clutches of woke depredations. And I’m going to ask Dr. Goldfarb in just a second to expound on that for all of our listeners. So Dr. Goldfarb, I also send best wishes from my husband who served with you on an admin advisory committee a number of years ago.
Dr. Stanley Goldfarb:
Oh, yes.
Dr. Nan Hayworth:
He was very glad that I was going to be speaking with you. So welcome, Dr. Goldfarb. Tell us, I am a member and supporter of Do No Harm, but if you can explain to our listeners exactly what Do No Harm is, what inspired you to found it, and what your aims are?
Dr. Stanley Goldfarb:
Sure, thank you. It’s wonderful to be with you and to be with independent women who are, I think, the only kind of women there should be. So that’s great. So maybe I should start a little bit with how I got here and then I think it’ll make sense with what we’re doing.
So this all started back in, actually about 2017, when I was finishing up my career at Penn. I’d been there for almost 50 years or so at that point. And I was, as you said, the associate dean for curriculum and managing all the medical students learning activities and guiding the faculty and all that in the way they were presenting the information. And a woman who was my boss, and I’ve had many women bosses who I’ve thought have been fantastic.
And she was kind of pushed out because she had been in that position for a long time, even though she was incredibly successful. Another woman was hired, she came in from, she had been at the University of Connecticut to run the educational program at Penn. And she brought with her a worldview that I was really quite unfamiliar with, which was that medicine should have a much greater social dimension to it and should be much more involved in issues like climate change and food security in the community and housing. Things that I thought were weird actually because we didn’t know anything about those issues and had no expertise in teaching about them.
But anyway, she pushed that. When I pushed back, she told me one day, “There’s too much science in our curriculum anyhow.” And at that point I was moved out of my position because I clearly was someone who didn’t agree with her. Now in that final year that I served under her, it became clear to me that this was going on around the nation. This was not unique to Penn, but this was a force that was being inserted into medical education that was going to make it look more like social work school than it was a hard science, learning how to care for sick people.
And I thought this was very peculiar. And ultimately one day I read in the Wall Street Journal that 42 medical schools had courses in climate change. I had pushed back against a faculty member that wanted to do that at Penn. And I wrote a letter to the editor of the Wall Street Journal. He wrote back saying he didn’t even know about that article, but he said, “Why don’t you write an op-ed?” So I wrote an op-ed in 2019, it was titled “Take Two Aspirins and Call Me By My Pronouns” by the Wall Street Journal. And this led to an explosion in something called Med Twitter where people denounced me.
Dr. Nan Hayworth:
I’m familiar with it.
Dr. Stanley Goldfarb:
Yeah. Oh, okay. Petitions were signed that I should be thrown out of Penn. And mind you, the only thing I was advocating at that point was that we were teaching too much about social issues in the curriculum. That we needed to return to hard science. And the reason I thought it was a problem was because there’s only so many hours in the day and if you spend more and more time on these topics, then you have less time to learn about urology, for example. We didn’t even have a course in urology per se. There wasn’t enough time in the curriculum, students could take it as an elective. And yet we had required teaching about some of these social issues.
So I became a pariah at that point. People that I had worked with for years refused to look at me in the hall. Fortunately I was kind of at the end of my time because I didn’t have to put up with this much. And I went on sabbatical and on that sabbatical I wrote a book. The book has come out. The book had the same title. The publisher liked the title even though I thought it was…
Dr. Nan Hayworth:
It’s a great book.
Dr. Stanley Goldfarb:
Well, thank you.
Dr. Nan Hayworth:
I have it.
Dr. Stanley Goldfarb:
That’s great. I never liked the title because I thought it was… I really wasn’t concerned much with gender issues, although now we are a bit more as I’ll discuss.
Dr. Nan Hayworth:
Yes.
Dr. Stanley Goldfarb:
So I wrote the book and then it was quite clear, were we going to do anything about these issues? And that’s where we come to the present and Do No Harm. And through some serendipity, I was able to work with individuals that had great experience in some of these advocacy activities and how to really start to make change, particularly in the realm of K -12 education, where they had been fairly successful, and we started Do No Harm. And fortunately we’ve been well resourced.
So we’ve had lots of opportunity to both have our ideas published in the lay media and also have had the opportunity to push in certain ways about trying to change some of these issues. So to tell your audience exactly what we’re for, we’re for the elimination of all discrimination in healthcare. And I was just actually before our podcast listening to the arguments in front of the Supreme Court about the Harvard and UNC case and whether there ought to be affirmative action in admission to Harvard or University of North Carolina.
And the same arguments really pertain to medical school. But medical school, it’s a little bit different because now it’s not just our job is to train people that are going to be ready to go out and to work in the business world or whatever world. We’re training people that are going to have people’s lives in their hands. And I think it’s incumbent upon us when we think about these issues of what opportunities do we want to have for students as to what the students are going to do with those opportunities?
And in this case, I’ve always thought about medical education as there was the school, there was the student, and there was a third person in the room and that was the patient. And whatever we did, we had to worry about what was the best thing for the patient, not just what was the best thing for the student. I care about the students but their welfare is not number one. Number one is the patient’s welfare. And some of these discriminatory activities that are going on in medicine are what we’re fighting against. So Do No Harm, the first thing we did after we launched was we sued the federal government because we see that the legal system is a potential part of the toolbox that we need in order to make changes and to push back against these…
It’s really Critical Race Theory being introduced into medical education and medical care, that whites are oppressing blacks and that’s the reason that there are disparities. We agree there are disparities in health outcomes. We just don’t believe that they’re a function of the way blacks are treated once they enter the healthcare system. The problem is access, not how they’re treated once they’re in a healthcare system. And to decide that you’re going to focus on how they’re treated in the healthcare system, you’re going to waste a lot of time and effort. So the first thing we did was we sued, and stop me whenever I’m going on too much.
Dr. Nan Hayworth:
No, this is fascinating. I’ve got, of course all these thoughts are tumbling through my head because I find your arguments compelling and your courage incredible. So I want to talk a little bit more about those in just a moment. But please do tell us about your lawsuit and where it stands right now.
Dr. Stanley Goldfarb:
Well actually we have three lawsuits, so I’ll go through them quickly. But the federal government one I think is in lots of ways the most important because back in the end of 2021, Medicare issued a set of rules. They do that every year where they have something called the quality improvement program that primary care physicians use when they’re billing Medicare for the care of Medicare patients. And if they do certain activities they can get bonuses. And the activity that they decided would be useful would be to create anti-racism protocols in primary care practices. And anti-racism is a nice word. And people have created lots of words that sound wonderful. But in fact anti-racism speaks specifically to discriminatory practices. It says okay, 150, 200 years ago blacks were treated terribly in the United States. True. And therefore we need to discriminate today about what happened at that time. And we need to discriminate in the future to remedy any discriminations we have today. That’s the mantra of Ibram Kendi, one of the gurus of the so-called the anti-racial…
Dr. Nan Hayworth:
He’s got a very profitable industry going right now.
Dr. Stanley Goldfarb:
And that’s an important point that I think comes up again and again is who’s getting rich off the fat of the land here with these activities. So we initiated a lawsuit about this saying that because we had two practitioners, one in Kentucky and one in Mississippi who said, I don’t want to discriminate against my patients. And that’s what’s really being called for here. You’ve got to come up with a plan where blacks are going to be treated differently than whites. And we want these people, as you and I as physicians, want to treat everybody the same and be colorblind. In medicine, it’s really important. There may be parts of life where it might be different, but in medicine it can’t be different. It’s got to be everybody’s treated the same.
Dr. Nan Hayworth:
Exactly.
Dr. Stanley Goldfarb:
And so these two [inaudible 00:11:30].
Dr. Nan Hayworth:
That’s the way you and I were trained.
Dr. Stanley Goldfarb:
Absolutely. We were also trained not to see people as parts of a group. We were trained to see them as individuals. And this speaks to every person who walks in whose skin is a little darker than mine I have to treat because they’re part of some group of dark-skinned people, which I find incredibly insulting and absurd.
Dr. Nan Hayworth:
And treat white people differently because they’re white.
Dr. Stanley Goldfarb:
Yes, exactly. So we sued the federal government and it’s interesting that Secretary Becerra, who is the Secretary of Health and Human Services was testifying in front of Congress, and Congressman Palmer from Alabama said to him, “What do you think about this?” And he said, “We don’t do that.” And then he had to show him the rule. He had to hold it up because he didn’t even know what rule they had published. So clearly the bureaucracy is pushing through these sorts of things under the approval of the administration.
Dr. Nan Hayworth:
It’s ubiquitous.
Dr. Stanley Goldfarb:
So we sued them and now we have eight states. Attorney generals have joined in the lawsuit and we’re not the parties to it. Do No Harm is not harm, but its members are, and its members have standing to make this case. So this is working its way through the court. So this’ll be an important lawsuit but the courts, the wheels of justice grind slowly. So it will probably take a while for this to be manifest. We have two other lawsuits going just to mention it.
And the reason I focus on this is because again, Do No Harm’s goal is to do things, not just to advocate and not just to make the public aware of something but actually to accomplish change. So the other lawsuit is against an interesting organization is Health Affairs. Now Health Affairs is an interesting story too. I think your listeners might find this amusing. So Health Affairs is a journal that is called the Bible of health policy. It’s a very important journal. And as Do No Harm was being formed, we became aware of an issue that they put out saying that they were going to go full bore on anti-racism.
And that meant examining every aspect of their activity as a scientific journal and make sure they had reviewers that represented minority groups and even authors that represented minority groups. And we wrote this up as a blog post on our website, which is donoharmmedicine.org, one word. And one day actually I was on vacation, I was sitting at a pub in Ireland and I got this email from the editor saying, what evidence do you have, that’s what we want to do. And I just wrote back a link.
That’s all I put in my email, which is a link to his own article which declared that that was exactly what they were going to do. Well now, and I didn’t hear back from him, we fast forward about three months and we as from Do No Harm, tried to put ads in various medical journals asking, youp hysicians reading these medical journals, have you experienced discrimination in healthcare? Because if you have, we’d like to hear about it. Obviously the discrimination we’re talking about is this treating people differently based on race.
Dr. Nan Hayworth:
Yes.
Dr. Stanley Goldfarb:
Everybody rejected it except Health Affairs. Health Affairs took the ad and published it and then the editor, Dr. Weil, wrote a long editorial on their online edition saying what jerks we were because we were adopting this position and how clever they were because they were taking our money for the ad and they were going to use that money to do whatever they wanted. Well one of the things they wanted to do with that money, and it was a very long piece that he wrote telling how terrible we were because we were pushing against discriminatory practices in medicine and discriminatory practices in science, which make absolutely no sense whatsoever.
Dr. Nan Hayworth:
But that’s what they’re going for.
Dr. Stanley Goldfarb:
No –
Dr. Nan Hayworth:
Going for all of it.
Dr. Stanley Goldfarb:
Going for all of it. You’re absolutely right. So then we found that on their website, on Health Affairs website, they have a fellowship that is specifically aimed at people that are not white or Asian. You can apply for this fellowship as long as you’re not white or Asian. And this fellowship entitles whoever gets it to an experience in medical publishing and in article reviewing and all the sorts of things that a young practitioner might be a PhD student or an MD student would find really attractive. But whites are excluded, Asians are excluded. So we sued them over that and they’ve come back and first they were interested in settling this thing, but then they decided no, they’re going to fight us. And the argument that they’re using, which is, I just read today, that Aaron Sibarium in the Washington Free Beacon is writing about this because their argument back to us is they have a first amendment right to discriminate.
Dr. Nan Hayworth:
Wow.
Dr. Stanley Goldfarb:
Mind you, something that in the past liberals and progressives felt was awful that people couldn’t say, I have a right to discriminate. I have a right to discriminate against blacks, against Jews, against Catholics, against anybody I want because I have the right of free speech. They now are saying that’s their right to discriminate because they think they’re doing something good.
Dr. Nan Hayworth:
Well we have a Supreme Court justice now, Justice Brown Jackson who has argued, I think it was a couple of weeks ago, that the 14th Amendment specifically enshrines racial preference on the part of the federal government. She’s actually making that argument.
Dr. Stanley Goldfarb:
It’s a wonderful country and people have a right to make their arguments and ultimately…
Dr. Nan Hayworth:
She’s a Supreme Court justice.
Dr. Stanley Goldfarb:
And ultimately the Supreme Court will weigh in on it and we’ll see where they come down. But anyway, and we’ll see how this case works, because this case may turn out to be a really interesting case where that particular theory will get tested again. Apparently the Boy Scouts used that theory years ago to say why they excluded gay people from becoming members of the Boy Scouts. And it was apparently an accepted argument then back in God knows how long ago, but in the last 50 or 60 years, that was an acceptable argument. And today it’s not acceptable.
Dr. Nan Hayworth:
So much of it hinges, I think, on whether or not something’s considered a public entity or a private entity if they’re entirely privately funded like a private club. And I don’t know what Health Affairs’ sources of revenues are, but if they’re government revenues. And of course it gets to the argument and the phenomenon that of course you talk about so well in your book and other writings. What I, taking my cue from President Eisenhower’s reference to the military industrial complex ,we have in America an education government complex, and I would contend also a medicine government complex and Do No Harm is acting at the intersection of those two to make everybody aware of what is happening to skew these institutions, if you will, or these systems such as they are incredibly important aspects of our society toward a very specific philosophy. And you’re right about the march through our institutions, a lot of folks refer to it as the March of Marxism through our institutions.
Dr. Stanley Goldfarb:
Yes, yes, exactly.
Dr. Nan Hayworth:
Tell me Dr. Goldfarb because of course our listeners are no doubt involved in healthcare. Some of them probably practice in some way or provide in some way. And of course we’re all patients or relatives of patients. What do you fear? You talk about it in your book and you’re so cogent and so spot on. What do you fear the consequences will be of diverting attention from merit and from the science of human biology, which is the specific remit of the physician. And this is certainly the argument that I make and that you make. We have physicians who are extremely expensive to train and to educate, and they should be working to the top of their qualifications and their certification, which have very specifically, you can be as aware of socioeconomic and sociological phenomena as you like and of history as you like. But eventually you are going to have to intervene on a patient and administer them a medication or a therapy or do a procedure on them. What should our listeners be looking out for? What do you want to [inaudible 00:20:29]
Dr. Stanley Goldfarb:
One of our senior fellows is a woman Benita Orr, and she is South African. She’s a black woman from South Africa. She immigrated to the United States and she’s passionate about this because she lived through real medical apartheid. She lived through this, the circumstance where white people went to white doctors, black people went to black doctors, black people had much less access to healthcare. So their care was much worse because of that. So that’s really an end game here. And mind you, that is the preferred end game. There’s a big movement afoot that we should train more black doctors, not because of any reason, except that this is the only way black people are going to get good healthcare. And mind you, there is absolutely no valid evidence for this. There are hundreds of papers that claim this, but every time we look at them and we’ve written up some of them that we have on our website, it’s just nonsense.
It’s just nonsensical. There’s no real data to support that. They find a disparity and they blame it on the fact that white doctors are discriminating against black patients, having implicit bias, which is another nonsensical notion. So that’s the fear. The fear is that we’re going to have white people go into the hospital and say, I only want a white doctor. And that happens sometimes and we tell them, look, find another hospital. That’s the way you feel. We’re not playing that game, but that game is going to become the rule if these people have their way. So that’s the great fear, that we’re going to just divide society more and more rather than integrate society. And when you really think about it, the whole idea of this business is so crazy. I know one of, I think Supreme Court Justice Alito was asking one of the presenters at the court today says, okay, you want to divide people on race.
Suppose a student says, I have one grandparent that’s black, does that count? I suppose I have a great-grandparent that’s black. Does that count? One. Where does this end? We have a country where there’s increasingly an intermarriage between people of different skin colors. Where are we going with this? This is all really just a ridiculous thing. And I think the point you made before Nan, about the fact that there’s money, underline this, is a big, big part of it. People are making their… University of Michigan has 142 people in its diversity program there. Everybody’s getting a lot of money pushing this stuff. And this is not good for America. And that’s what bothers me the most. I’m at the end of my career, I’m getting to the end of my life. I don’t want to leave my grandkids a life where this racial crap becomes something that they have to deal with. I had to deal with it when I was a student in 1965 leaving college. And it’s so wonderful you don’t have to deal with it now. I went to Princeton and the reason I say this…
Dr. Nan Hayworth:
You’re a Princetonian as well, Dr? So am I.
Dr. Stanley Goldfarb:
Oh well, terrific. Well, so Princeton every year has something called the P raid at the time of graduation. And you stand there and you watch class after class march down. So the classes of my era watched down everybody’s white old men.
Dr. Nan Hayworth:
Of course.
Dr. Stanley Goldfarb:
Then it comes in the fifties and we start to see a few, then all of a sudden women appear, which obviously you and I think benefited from because I think it’s been a wonderful thing. And then suddenly the faces start to change and by the time you get to the current group, there’s a tremendous heterogeneity of people and that’s the way it ought to be. And that’s the way America is. And you don’t look at someone nowadays about their skin and they’re trying to make the claim that this is still going on and this is responsible for any economic dislocations or anything. And it’s all nonsense. It really is absolute nonsense. So anyways.
Dr. Nan Hayworth:
And I’ve been so disappointed in, you’ve described of course the approach of the medical establishment overwhelmingly highly, highly politicized now. Academic medicine is gone for the moment in my humble estimation until people like you lead it back to a better place. But I was on the National Annual Giving Committee for Princeton. I don’t even give a dime to Princeton anymore. I’m so disgusted by the fact that in the summer of 2020, they assumed that the reason for what happened, the terrible things that happened in Minneapolis, were prima facie evidence of systemic racism. And that now we had to atone for that. There was no sense of inquiry, no sense of open-mindedly looking at phenomena in our society without deliberately blocking off a specific set of influences that shall not be discussed. And I thought it was antithetical to the purpose of the academy.
Dr. Stanley Goldfarb:
No, I agree. I agree. Let me just go back to this business of Princeton because you could argue, and I try to look at both sides of the argument. You could argue, well look, Goldfarb, you’re making the case for affirmative action. And there was a case, there was a time, there was a point, and the famous injunction by the Supreme Court was that this was when they did the Grutter ruling, which affirmed affirmative action was about 25 years, we need this.
And then things will be okay, well we’re pretty much there and we are there and the times have changed. And now there are plenty of brilliant black kids who could get into Princeton, who should get into Princeton on the merits. And you’re absolutely right, you made the point before that doesn’t this undermine the black kids that really deserve to be there and are there because of their academic achievements and their brilliance and their hard work.
And you can turn around and say, yeah, but they were there because somebody decided they were going to get a leg up compared to a white kid. And this undermines their achievements as well, which is just another incredible downside of it. And I think people like Glenn Loury and John McWhorter have figured this out. These brilliant people don’t tell me I got to my position because of my skin color. I got to my position because of my brains. And that’s the way it should be. And that’s…
Dr. Nan Hayworth:
Exactly, exactly. And don’t expect me to behave differently as a scholar or as an intellect because I am of a certain race or a certain gender or whatever my demographic may be. And the concern that I have as someone who obviously I’m sure Princeton was broadening its horizons when it looked at candidates like me in the seventies, but merit was still at the top of the criteria. You could not succeed but by merit. And what concerns me about the house of medicine is that as you so cogently describe it in your book, merit, the actual intellectual ability to apprehend and comprehend an enormous amount of very complex and nuanced information, a fund of knowledge that must be mastered, a way of reasoning that must be mastered, that is being disregarded in order to accommodate. Because as you say, the time is short. Four years fly by in medical school to accommodate this enormous body of material that is, as you say, really entirely peripheral to the purpose of training physicians.
Dr. Stanley Goldfarb:
I remember that the woman that I mentioned that became the vice dean at Penn one day when I was having this, one of my many arguments with her, and I have great respect for her, she’s a smart woman and all but had this argument with her and she said, Well whatever they don’t know they can look up. And I thought, that’s really the problem here, because they’re not going to know what they don’t know. And I think one of the examples that happened at the time of the beginning of the pandemic is all these first year residents were thrown into caring for patients and they were totally overwhelmed.
They had no idea because they really weren’t, had much demanded of them in medical school. Now, I believe in residency programs, they start to learn to be doctors, but by the time they finish, they’re being trained much more as technicians than as really clinical scientists who are going to approach every patient with insights and awareness and subtlety and nuances, which is really what you have to do. Instead, they’re going to think, okay, in your case might be, here’s a vision problem, I’d do X, in my case it might be here’s a kidney number I’m going to do Y.
And they’re being deprived of learning really deep understanding of the mechanisms underlying the clinical problems that apply across fields. Whether you’re an orthopedic surgeon or neurosurgeon, even a psychiatrist, you need to understand these basic mechanisms so you can deal with new developments, new diseases and new medications. And I don’t think it’s just goofy for me to make these arguments, which Twitter has claimed they had this famous thing called the Goldfarb Challenge. It’s infamous, I guess.
Dr. Nan Hayworth:
I didn’t see that.
Dr. Stanley Goldfarb:
[inaudible 00:30:01] because it was things like, my patient can’t pay for their medication, but I understand how the loop of Henley works. And that went on, they had multiple examples like this and I said, okay, fine, I understand it’s important that the patient can’t… what are you going to do about the fact that the patient can’t? What are you going to bring to the table?
And what it always is, is I’m going to refer them to the social worker and that’s the correct answer. And that’s the end of it. [Inaudible 00:30:29] two lectures about why poverty is terrible. And every time you have a patient that can’t afford their medicine, ask them about their medicine, ask them if they can get to the doctor’s office. And that’s really what you can contribute to their care. And then send them to the social worker, which I did all the time and I didn’t need six to eight months of solid teaching and social work in order to accomplish that.
Dr. Nan Hayworth:
No, you have to be able to do that triage. And indeed you do need to be able to view your patient not merely as a series of chemical reactions or anatomical systems, but as a whole person. Every great doctor does that. But that does not mean that it’s not at least as important to understand exactly how that body works and what makes it work and what happens when you do what you do. If you don’t understand biochemistry, you’re really at a loss as to how you’re going to predict and interpret what happens to a patient when you make an intervention. Just to me, it’s insanity on stilts as so many of these things are.
But Dr. Goldfarb, eventually, and I’ve said this and yes, it’s apocalyptic, but when do we see the American public really awakening broadly? I think we’re starting to see it with K-12 education, which is heartening. But when we see bridges collapsing, when we see airplanes falling out of the sky because the pilots haven’t been properly trained and vetted, when we see patients dying because they were not given the proper care, where do you think the American public, how far do you think this will go before people actually start to take notice? Not withstanding your herculean efforts, of course.
Dr. Stanley Goldfarb:
Yeah. Well no, I think it’s a good question. I gave a lecture to a group that was meeting up in Canada this weekend in Nova Scotia called Free Speech in Medicine. And they were terrific. And they asked some of the very good questions you’re asking. That was one of the questions they asked. And it’s a tough one because the progressive language and thought processes have so captured medical education. And medicine is one field as you know where the academic world has tremendous power because academic medical centers contain both medical schools and also the leading healthcare delivery institutions in the same place. And they’re very much under the thrall of what really is a progressive ideology here. Now why they have it, we can talk about, but when’s it going to change? I think it’s going to fall of its own weight. And I think this idea that there are tremendous Marxist characteristics to this whole thing where there’s an authoritarian way.
This is the way you need to think. And to me, one of the encouraging things is that those systems always fall of their own weight. People hate the authoritarian part. People are going to be more and more angry when they have to tell the promotion committee in a medical school why they have encouraged diversity when in their hearts they know I want to hire the best postdocs. I don’t want to hire someone just because of their skin color, even though they may be perfectly fine. There’s someone better who’s coming from Nova Scotia or is coming from Nigeria or wherever the hell they’re coming from. And I want to hire the best and smartest person I can get my hands on and that’s what I want. And I really don’t care about this stuff because I’m trying to do science. I’m not trying to do social work here. And so I think that’s an encouraging long-term trend.
I think the short-term, I think it’s going to require a political dimension to it and Do No Harm has a pretty robust legislative agenda. We’re meeting with various state legislature representatives and governors and attorneys general and giving them, I’m sorry, model legislation. For example, we think that the public ought to know exactly what criteria used to accept people into state-funded medical schools.
And you made the point before that a lot of these legal approaches need to be based on them accepting government money. And many state medical schools exist in states that have, and again, we’re not partisan here, but states that have Republican governors and legislatures where they have some willingness to listen to these arguments. So we’ve done that. I’ll raise another issue here, which we started to talk a little bit about. But I think another example of how you can make a difference is in Florida, the Florida Board of Medicine and osteopathic medicine just met last Friday.
And they have decided to ban gender affirming care for children. And we played a strong role in this. Now I have no expertise in treating children that have gender dysphoria. I do as a person, as a father, as a grandfather, find the notion that a 12 year old or an eight year old is going to be able to make any rational decisions about something as irreversible is taking hormonal therapy, potentially irreversible. I know it’s controversial about puberty blockers. It’s certainly irreversible about surgical procedures. And so we marshaled our membership and turns out we had a lot of members of Do No Harm who were pediatric endocrinologists and endocrinologists. And they wrote in and they wrote the most moving statements. Many of them said, I cared for these children. I stopped doing it because I think it’s crazy what we were doing. We don’t have any data to support that this is the right thing to do to these kids.
And all these European countries like Finland and England and Sweden and the Netherlands have decided not to pursue this therapy anymore because it’s just… So, it ended up, the Florida Board voted just to prevent children from receiving these medications. And in Europe, it’s only part of a clinical study. But here the point was, it wasn’t that we were against any child ever undergoing this, but the idea that as soon as a child makes these claims that you should support them, that’s what gender affirming care is, is insane. And because what they need at that point is to go into intense psychological treatment and they need to go into psychotherapy. People need to understand why they’re making this choice because many of them are just depressed or many of it is, the question is whether this is some sort of social contagion that’s occurring with some of these kids.
Dr. Nan Hayworth:
I think it is. Yeah. I think it is.
Dr. Stanley Goldfarb:
And you need to…
Dr. Nan Hayworth:
Including among the parents.
Dr. Stanley Goldfarb:
Yeah. Oh, absolutely. Yeah, I know. And that’s the problem. Some of the parents, they want to do the best for their kids, no doubt about that. They think they’re doing the best, but we have all these kids that are de-transitioning. And in medicine, we always are balancing risks and benefits and we don’t know the risks for an individual child. And how can we go ahead and recommend something that we do not know what the long term outcome is really going to be. Now we may be able to tell them, you have a 20% chance you’re going to change your mind. Do you want to go through with this?
You have a 50% chance you’re going to change your mind. I don’t know what the number is, but that’s a number you must know before you can go ahead and recommend these treatments to a child. And it may be that 50% will benefit and 50% will be irreversibly harmed. And then society, the medical world needs to make a judgment about this. But what’s happened is they’ve made a judgment. This is a good thing based on I think politics, again. Based on [inaudible 00:38:28]. Not based on science.
So anyway, I’ve raised that simply because it’s an example of how we can change things. We’ve got to go to the legislatures, we’ve got to go to those folks at the state level because states govern medical care and tell them that for example, any time a hospital decides to have a discriminatory policy, they have to publish it. And that the state is going to say that discriminatory practices in medicine where one group is favored over another. Harvard had advocated for a program, which is sort of an interesting story too. So they did a study as an example of pushing back and what you have to push back against in the legislature. So they did a study in Brigham and Women’s Hospital where they found that if they looked at patients that came into the emergency room with heart failure, they found that 45% of the black patients that came in got sent to a cardiology ward.
And 57% of white patients with the same diagnosis went to a cardiology ward. And they saw that as evidence of bias. Now, most doctors I talked to say, well, what kind of patients were they? Well, so it turns out the white patients had much more of specific [value 00:39:47] of heart disease and arrhythmias, which would require cardiology procedures. And many more of the black patients had chronic kidney disease and were on dialysis. So dialysis patients come in all the time, their volume overloaded, fluid overloaded because they can’t excrete it. And their treatment is a dialysis treatment, which is often much better organized to be done in the hospital on a general medical floor. So I looked at the study and I said, well, I don’t understand these statistics, which were very complicated, but it seems to me that’s not enough to make the claim of bias. But Harvard did bother them.
They went ahead and instituted a program where if a heart failure patient comes into the Brigham now, there’s a prompt on the computer that says, remember that we’ve treated black patients differently than white patients in the past. See if that patient wants to go to a cardiology floor. They were going to make that requirement, but then they realized that was probably a bridge too far. Well, and just to point out, we wrote to that, the study authors and asked them for the data so that we could look at it more carefully, but they refused to send it to us. They said it’s confidential, even though in their article they say they’ll make it available to anyone who wants the data.
Dr. Nan Hayworth:
Dr. Goldfarb, that actually brings up what I wanted to talk with you about, which is, especially when you mentioned Florida, I think Florida has an amazingly talented surgeon general. Note well that he is a black American, Dr. Joseph Ladapo, probably the best state surgeon general in the country. And yet he has been condemned roundly by political figures, by the regime media, as I call it, because he has been pragmatic and straightforward about using data to guide decisions, including decisions about mandatory COVID vaccination in young people. My question being this, what do we do about the culture of suppression and silence of condemnation, of cancellation that has become so pervasive? I view it as part and parcel of the march toward what they hope will be the victory of Marxism. I think intersectionality is crucial to that. Everyone gets co-opted, everyone becomes vulnerable. Everyone could be in the star chamber, but what do we do about that culture of suppression?
Dr. Stanley Goldfarb:
Yeah. Well, I just got suppressed, so I can tell you I was an editor in chief of Up To Date, which is a widely used… Yeah, they just fired me for my views. Somebody wrote an article in STAT News, which just attacked me of being a racist.
Dr. Nan Hayworth:
STAT News is, I think, very left leaning.
Dr. Stanley Goldfarb:
Yeah. Oh yeah. Well, whatever, this is this young man’s opinion. And they acted upon it and called me and said, “It’s hurting our brand.”
Dr. Nan Hayworth:
And we have no guts at all.
Dr. Stanley Goldfarb:
And I said, oh yeah, you’re right. I should resign. I don’t want… You’ve been good to me. And then I said, No, that’s ridiculous. I didn’t do anything wrong. So I just said, you fire me if you have to fire me. And they fired me. So, yeah, I’m sorry. I went off [inaudible 00:43:05]. So that…
Dr. Nan Hayworth:
No, not at all. No, because you are right. It’s a perfect example. There was zero merit in your being fired by Up To Date. It was not about your clinical work, the clinical standards, the inherent merit according to the standards of a profession. And yet you were fired because your politics didn’t please someone. This is disgusting. And of course we see it all the time. Independent Women’s Forum has very vigorous efforts I’m proud to say. We have our entire legal division devoted to challenging these sorts of injustices, calling them out, challenging them. But for our listeners, I personally think one of the most important things we can do is even if we feel as though we’re a tiny drop in an ocean, get involved, speak as freely as you can speak for your friends and colleagues who cannot speak. And I wondered what you think about that kind of [inaudible 00:44:11].
Dr. Stanley Goldfarb:
Absolutely. I think, and that’s why our organization is a membership organization, which allows us when people are actually dealt with unfairly and the legal system comes down on them to consider. I mean, we can’t sue everybody under every instance here, but we get a lot of tips in, and we’ve tried to help individuals. But the legal system is part of the way we need to approach this. It’s just not enough to be advocates. We need to see laws passed that say this kind of activity is terrible. For example, there are a bunch of schools now that require these DEI statements, diversity, equity, inclusion statements for people to be promoted. So that is a freedom of speech question. If they don’t believe that what they should be doing in their physics lab is promoting diversity, but that they believe they should be promoting the best experiments in physics, they may feel I’m being coerced into saying something that I really don’t believe in. That’s un-American. It just is.
Dr. Nan Hayworth:
Absolutely.
Dr. Stanley Goldfarb:
So I think that’s an important part. But one of the things that happened in that meeting up in Canada that I mentioned was a young woman came up, I remember her name, but I won’t repeat it here, I don’t want to get her in trouble. But she said she’s a psychiatry resident and what can she do to speak out? And I said to her, you’re not going to like what I say, but I don’t want you to speak out because I’m worried about you. You’re going to get ground down by this. And I think it’s more people like me who towards the end of their careers that don’t have much to lose. I still have stuff to lose. I have friends and I have friends of professional associations and all. For example, they took my name out of the history of the renal division at Penn. I was co-director of the technology division. They took my name out of the history, which I thought was amusing.
Dr. Nan Hayworth:
That’s straight up malice.
Dr. Stanley Goldfarb:
Yeah, no, it’s just ridiculous. But I think it speaks more to how petty they are rather than-
Dr. Nan Hayworth:
Of course it does. You’re right, Dr. Goldfarb. But that’s the kind of… Ooh!
Dr. Stanley Goldfarb:
It just makes them look foolish. We’ll get back. We’ll have our day. But…
Dr. Nan Hayworth:
It’s so leftist though. That’s what they do. That’s why they tear down statues and rename and negate and threaten, and threaten. And they use the lethal force of government, which I always remind my friends, and it sounds apocalyptic, but it’s true. The defining property of government versus enterprise versus private citizenry is that government has lethal force. Government can kill us. Because [we call 00:46:53] policing power. So everything that resides in government ultimately has that force behind it. And I think one of the biggest problems that we have, probably the foundational problem is that ever since the 1930s, we’ve put more and more and more, including virtually the entirety of medicine when it comes right down to it, most of it, 90%, whatever it might be, and of education in the hands of the government.
Dr. Stanley Goldfarb:
Yeah, absolutely.
Dr. Nan Hayworth:
They wield extraordinary power. And that makes it very difficult for those of us who want to challenge. But I am heartened by what you’re doing. You are definitely making a real impact on the public discourse, and it’s gratifying to see you on all these different outlets. We have just a couple of minutes left, Dr. Goldfarb and I thank you so much for everything that you’re doing and for your time with us today. What can we do? What can we independent women do most directly to help further the mission of Do No Harm?
Dr. Stanley Goldfarb:
Yeah. Well, I would say two things. One is, but thank you for your kind words. I feel like I’m just getting it off my chest more than anything else. So it’s very therapeutic.
Dr. Nan Hayworth:
Well, we’re grateful that you are.
Dr. Stanley Goldfarb:
But one thing, I think joining us or there are other membership organizations, we’re one, you’re another one that if people join us, that gives us more power. And we’re looking for a national presence here that, for example, so we can do what we did in Florida, call on physicians to write in and give testimony for supporting positions that the legislators need doctors to come and tell them, yes, it’s okay. You can get rid of something that’s really a terrible view. And the other thing is, I think organizations like ours need to think about getting together. I think we need, I’m not a big fan of doing things through alliances because you need to have your own people and your own approaches. But occasionally there’s a role for the UN. It happens once a decade or once every hundred years or so. But there are times when everybody getting together and condemning activities and having multiple organizations do it from all, across the political spectrum can be very, very useful.
But I think people need to… There are organizations out there like ours, like yours, that have the wherewithal to make a difference. We have legal representation, you have legal, we have public relations firms. We have real capacity to get our ideas out there and they need to join us. We’re not looking for their contributions. I mean, that’s fine. I think it’s a wonderful thing when they do. But what we’re really looking for is their support and their emotional support and political support and willing to commit themselves and stand up. For this Florida effort that we had, we had doctors say, I was afraid to speak out, but I realized I had to speak out. And I think other people start to feel like that, we’ll have power. And this is the way movements start. And I’ll say one other thing that we’re doing that I hope people will look at our website is that we are trying to attack the evidence.
They talk about the evidence shows, but when you examine the evidence that the left puts forth to argue for some of these things like concordance between doctors’ race and patients’ race, we find that the evidence is awful. And it in fact doesn’t support the contentions at all. So we’re trying to go through important papers, and we’ve done this a little bit on our website to argue against these kinds of ideas as well. So I think the public can do a lot, and I think joining in organizations that are starting to step up is really probably the best place to start.
Dr. Nan Hayworth:
Absolutely. Well, and our listeners and viewers can find you at donoharmmedicine.org. Dr. Goldfarb?
Dr. Stanley Goldfarb:
Wait, one word, donoharmmedicine.org. Two m’s in a row there. Do no harm and medicine.
Dr. Nan Hayworth:
Yeah, but it’s good. It’s good. I am proud to be, as soon as I discovered you, I signed on and I did [inaudible 00:51:04].
Dr. Stanley Goldfarb:
Oh, that’s great. Well, thank you. We appreciate that very much. Yes.
Dr. Nan Hayworth:
The thanks go to you. It’s very easy to sign up, but really your work exemplifies what we do. And I agree with you. We talk about intersectionality in a condemnatory way in terms of the march of Marxism, but it is true that we all do synergize with each other. And when we can convene in places like this and others, our voices definitely are magnified. We punch way above our weights. So Dr. Goldfarb, I want to thank you for everything you’ve done and urge all our viewers to go to donoharmmedicine.org and be aware of the work of this incredible organization and continue to support it. So thank you, Dr. Goldfarb.
Dr. Stanley Goldfarb:
Thank you so much. It was great talking with you.
