The Daily Signal - Doctor Reveals How Woke Activists Have Infiltrated Medicine

Episode Date: May 13, 2022

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 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. Hosted on Acast. See acast.com/privacy for more information. Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices

This is the Daily Signal podcast for Friday, May 13th. I'm Virginia Allen. And I'm Doug Blair. Woke activists have infiltrated nearly every institution of American life. From academia to Hollywood, the radical left has successfully marched through them all. But most dangerously, the left has infiltrated an institution where people's very lives are at stake, health care. Dr. Stanley Goldfarb is chairman of the board at Do No Harm, a National Association of Medical Professionals, pushing back against woke activists in the health care system.

He's also author of the new book, Take 2 Aspirin and Call Me By My Pronounds, why turning doctors into Social Justice Warriors is destroying American medicine. He joins the show today to discuss the consequences of woke ideology and medicine and how we can bring health care back from the cliff. But before we get to Doug's conversation

with Dr. Stanley Goldfarb, let's hit our top news stories of the day. A whistleblower has revealed that the FBI has launched several investigations into parents who protested or spoke out against their school's education policies. According to a letter by House Judiciary Committee ranking member Jim Jordan and other Republicans on the committee, the FBI has been investigating parents it determined could be a threat. You may remember that in September 2021, the National School Boards Association sent a letter to the Biden administration asking for help

investigating parents who protested school policies or curriculum at school board meetings. Attorney General Merrick Garland directed the FBI and the Department of Justice to investigate the alleged threats. What we are learning now is what and who the FBI has been investigating. The information shared by the whistleblower and released by Representative Jordan and Representative Mike Johnson of Louisiana showed that the FBI interviewed a mom who told her school board, were coming for you. Someone alerted the FBI to the comment, claiming the mother was a threat because she owned guns and is a member of the Parental Rights Organization, Moms for Liberty. The FBI also interviewed an individual who had filed a tip, claiming that a dad who owned guns and is opposed to school mass mandates fit the profile of an insurrectionist. When the person who filed that tip was questioned, they admitted they had no specific information.

or observations of any crime threats. Representatives Jordan and Johnson wrote in the letter Wednesday that although FBI agents ultimately and rightly determined that these cases did not implicate federal criminal statutes, the agents still exerted their limited time and resources investigating these complaints. This valuable law enforcement time could have been expended on real and pressing threats.

Protests in front of the houses of Supreme Court justices continue, but seem to be getting smaller. On Wednesday, a group of seven protesters dressed as characters from The Handmaid's Tale marched around a cul-de-sac where Justice Amy Coney-Barrant lives. The Daily Signal was on the scene as the protesters walked in front of the Justice's home and spoke with some of them. Virginia asked one activist if he believed America would resemble the Handmaid's Tale if Frow was overturned. Take a listen. That if Roby Wade is overturned, that society will succumb to something like the Handmaid's Tale? Yeah.

In what way? The right to your own body, do what you want with your own body, is about the most personal freedom you can have. I also spoke with one of the justices' neighbors and asked how he felt that they were protesting in front of her home. This was his response. Do you think it's inappropriate for them to protest in front of the house? Of course it is.

Do they have the right to protest or should they be going somewhere else? Yeah, they have the right to protest, but not in front of someone's house. They live here. This is where she lives. Absolutely. So do you have anything to say to the protesters? Just what I just said. They shouldn't be doing this.

Go home and get a family. The protesters left after around 10 minutes. We will keep you posted on any other. protests that crop up, so make sure you're subscribed to the Daily Signal on social media if you aren't already. And all of those protests outside the homes of the Supreme Court justices have led the governors of Virginia and Maryland to call upon the Justice Department to provide security for the justices. Maryland Governor Larry Hogan and Virginia Governor Glenn Yonkin have sent a letter to Attorney General Merrick Garland. The governor cite a federal law in the letter, which makes it

illegal to picket and parade near a judge's home with the intent of influencing any judge. The governors say, while they are taking measures to ensure the safety of the justices, it is up to federal law enforcement to take the lead and provide sustained resources to protect the justices and ensure their residential areas are secure in the weeks and months ahead. On the heels of ballooning gas and energy prices, the Biden administration has decided to cancel three planned oil and gas lease sales. The sales would have been for resources located in the Gulf of Mexico and Alaska. Fox Business reported that according to Department of Interior spokeswoman Malicia Schwartz,

a mix of apathy from oil companies towards a lease and legal obstacles led the sales to be next. A statement released to the outlet read, due to lack of industry interest in leasing in the area, the department will not move forward with the proposed Cook Inlet OCS oil and gas lease sale 258. The statement continues, the department will also not move forward with lease sales 259 and 261 in the Gulf of Mexico region, as a result of delays due to factors, including conflicting court rulings that impacted work on these proposed lease sales. Now stay tuned for my conversation with Dr. Stanley Goldfarb as we discuss wokeness in American health care. Virginia Allen here, I want to tell you about the most popular resource on the Heritage Foundation website,

The Guide to the Constitution. More than 100 scholars have contributed to create a unique line-by-line analysis of our Constitution. The guide is intended to provide a brief and accurate explanation of each clause of the Constitution as envisioned by the framers and as applied in contemporary law. There has never been a more important time to have an understanding of our founding document. So if you want to learn more about the Constitution, go ahead and visit heritage.org. or simply search for heritage guide to the Constitution. 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 activist in the health care system, as well as author of the new book, Take Two Aspirin and Call Me By My Pronounds, Why Turning Doctors into Social Justice Warriors is destroying American medicine. Dr. Goldfarb, thank you so much for joining me today. Well, thank you very much for having me. 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 whokeness and social justice in medicine impact the care that patients are receiving? 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. 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 greater, 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 had been 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. Right. 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 body. 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 patients 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 to be on a general medical floor where the dialysis treatments could be more easily coordinated. So this was another example where 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, you know, critical race theory to sort of sum it all up was with Dr. Abram Kennedy'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, you know, very unfortunate consequences. The last one I'll mention is that, you know, 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 differentially 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. 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? You know, I go into this in my book to a certain extent. It really traces back, you know, almost to 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, even Illich, 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, of a new age movement that we should, you know, train doctors more on how they interact with people, how they communicate, rather than on these treatment 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 to treat the individual patient who has an individual problem. So it arose at that point. But it was quite clear that George Floyd 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-biased training. And so I think that event, that event, his George Floyd killing certainly led to an outpouring of interest in these kinds of initiatives. 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? 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 risks 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 at

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 Corps. You know, when someone walks out there with their white cone on and their thethoscope 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 a physician.

Right. You talked a little bit about how 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, especially 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? Well, I would, you know, again, I point back to the COVID story where, you know, you'll see this when there's, when there's scarcity. When there's scarcity, then we start to see decisions being

made based on now 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, you know, 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 have 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, you know, the dangers of this are very, predominantly, you know, changing the health care 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 an increase in training medical students in these areas,

then I think it's going to become more and more manifest as time goes by. My institution, the University of Pennsylvania, just appointed one of the positions to be the associate dean for health equity. Well, health equity in the woken 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, you know, 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 all this is going to be because I'm hoping that we can prevent this from undermining American health care.

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? Yeah, well, you know, this all really began about, oh, maybe 10 or 12 years ago, when healthcare 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 should 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, you know, so as an individual, and 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, of self-harm, of depression, of suicide, and 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. The European countries have been very, very hesitant. And in fact, many of them have decided that physician 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. 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?

I think it's early. I'm very hopeful. You know, 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, do no harmmedicine.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 we'll go a long way. I think that, you know, 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. 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 2 Aspirin and Call Me by My Pronounds,

why turning doctors into Social Justice Warriors is destroying American medicine. Available now, wherever books are sold. Dr. Goldfarb, very much appreciate your time. Thank you so much. Bye-bye. And that'll do for today's episode. Thanks so much for listening to The Daily Signal Podcast. Be sure to subscribe to the Daily Signal podcast on Google Play, Apple Podcasts, Spotify, and IHeartRadio. And take a moment to leave us a review and a five-star rating on Apple Podcasts and encourage others to subscribe.

Thanks again for listening, and we're back with you all on Monday. The Daily Signal podcast is brought to you by more than half a million members of the Heritage Foundation. The executive producers are Rob Blewey and Kate Trinko. Producers are Virginia Allen and Doug Blair. Sound designed by Lauren Evans, Mark Geinney, and John Pop. For more information, please visit DailySignal.com.