How DEI Ideology Undermines Medicine: Dr. Stanley Goldfarb

I thought we had an Innovative curriculum but a new Vice Dean for medical education came in and she said your curriculum is way out of date and we need to be teaching the students to understand Community issues they need to to understand social justice issues and I became very concerned because to me the purpose of the medical school was to teach them to take care of sick people it wasn't to cure the community that's a an important job it's just not the job of the practicing physician Dr Stanley Goldfarb is the board chairman of of Do no harm which has been fighting to remove Dei ideology in healthcare and stop the use of the gender affirming care treatment method for minors it's a procedure that's being done without evidence that it's beneficial it it really is an experimental procedure he's a board certified kidney specialist and professor ameritus and former associate dean of curriculum at the University of Pennsylvania School of Medicine Physicians are not being taught to be contrarian about these things it's just not taught in medical school this is American thought leaders and I'm Yan Kell Dr Stan goldar such a pleasure to have you on American thought leaders Yan it's great to be with you today we're interviewing at an interesting time there's going to be a new Trump Administration this probably has a significant impact on federal policy when it comes to the issues that Do no harm covers so why don't we just dive into that what what jumps to your mind immediately here so I think that the biggest opportunity that we see right off the bat is to have some sort of national program that prevents this gender affirming care from being instituted in children and I think we're trying to determine how we can best go about doing that but it's going to take some Congressional cooperation here and it's going to be a tough fight but I think it's really important to save children from something that's been many often mutilating and certainly has robbed many children of having normal lives whether they be gay or not gay is sort of irrelevant the question is can they live their lives without being under you know lifelong medications or even surgical procedures that are really quite mutilating let's dig into that for those that might be uninitiated in this we're talking about gender Fring care that's an approach to medical care you just you know very briefly kind of frame what your understanding of this is and and why it's such an issue well this all began in Europe in the 19 1980s and the notion was since there were transgender adults that felt like part of their difficulties in life was that they didn't look like the gender that they were interested in really pursuing that if children who were going to be transgender individuals would have this opportunity to have changes made while they're going through puberty before they go through puberty that they would look much more like the sex that they were in interested in being so the impulse was to do something that was beneficial for people that seemed to be struggling with their identities in this way and it was realized that there were medications that were available that time that would prevent children from going through puberty and at the same time sex altering uh hormones such as estrogen or testosterone depending on the sex could be applied so that at the end of puberty the children would look much more like the gender that they supposedly wanted to be in that would make their their lives better and this was begun in the Netherlands they initially did studies to suggest that when children went through this it was typically children that were otherwise seemed to be pretty high functioning in terms of their psychological profiles they weren't depressed supposedly they they were relatively high functioning individuals who had always through their childhood years felt like they needed to be in a different body and so these children were were put on these medications and supposedly they did well with this new approach this led a a number of European countries to begin this process and this was going on around Europe and then a physician from the United States saw this and brought it to Boston tron's hospital and it became something that was that was pursued in the United States and that was I think in around 2008 and after that this exploded and it exploded in the United States for a couple of reasons one was there were a bunch of Physicians who R rapidly adopted this approach and the second thing was social media so these children started to communicate there there were peer groups that were that developed and then there was a great movement um by certain activists to sort of push this idea that children would benefit from this that children knew what gender they needed to be in that children were born in the wrong body and that this whole process took off it took off to the point where there are now today over a hundred gender clinics in the United States that are treating these children in this fashion now the problem here was twofold one is the notion that children know what they should be doing when they're going through their childhood adolescence anyone who has children who knows children when they're going through early puberty it's a it's a time of great uh discomfort for many children and uh a time of of really you know personal unrest if you will so the idea that children could give informed consent on an issue like this seemed really sort of unlikely I mean it's it's a confusing time I remember you know basically so very confusing the other problem was that um these Physicians became there there were some transgender individuals who became very very active in pushing this idea and trying to convert children to down this path the problem was that nobody really did the research to show what the real consequences of this treatment would be whether it would be beneficial whether these children that had this idea that they could change their genders change their sexual characteristics that this would make them happy and it became sort of uh something that was uh an example of of medicine that was looking for the evidence to support it and yet these experimental approaches were being pursued in in young children and then people started to ask the question you know is this is this really beneficial is this helping or hurting children and research started to come out and the first thing that the research showed was this initial experience that was in Netherlands where these children seemed to benefit could not be reproduced the other thing that was found was that many of the children that was started down these paths in Europe and then in the United States had a lot of psychological problems to begin with it was a very high rate of autism there was a high rate of depression many of these children have been abused so suddenly the picture became not of children that had some biological basis for feeling that they were in the wrong gender the wrong sex but rather very vulnerable children that were struggling with psychological problems and this change this medical change was held out to be a cure for their psychological problems when there really wasn't evidence that in fact that would be the case and since that time Studies have just not supported that this treatment really helps children and we do know that it changes children and we know that in some cases it really hurts children particularly children that have had surgical procedures they've had their gen genitals altered they've had new genitals created it's really an attempt to use plastic surgery to change someone's external appearance as if that really changes their basic biological characteristics it's turned out that the European countries where all these ideas began have now looked after they have a 20 or so year experience and have done evaluations and have found you know we've made a big mistake here we should not have been pushing this on children it isn't clear that we've benefited children and in fact many of them have shown quite clearly that children are harmed by this Finland the head of um the psychiatric program for these children in Finland came out very strongly as one of the early uh individuals who was an expert in this area treated hundreds and hundreds of these children said you know it turns out we've harm these children now there's been a cohort of individuals children who have gone through this process and realized they made a terrible mistake they're called D transitioners their children who have decided they want to go back and live their lives as they were orig originally intended as God's children to live their lives either as men or as women and yet now they're left with the residue of the treatments that they got in case of children that had surgical procedures there are young women who have lost their breasts their breasts were removed there are men who have lost their genitalia and they're left with you know all of the residue that is associated with having taken these hormones and taken these puberty blockers which prevented them from going through puberty and there are complications associated with these medications as well I think there are now five European countries that have said we're not going to expose children to this these treatments except under very specific research protocols it's not going to be something that's automatically allowed on children they're not going to be affirmed if they come in and say that they want to have such treatments in the United States we're still fighting this battle because there is no Central Authority so many of these clinics are continuing to process children through these Pathways and our organization very recently released a database called stop the harm database and we're able to have this database because whenever a procedure is done on a child or on an adult there's a a billing code that's generated and again the medical side the difficulty there is that it's a procedure that's being done without evidence that it's beneficial it it really is an experimental procedure and we know from other studies in the past that when these children who have expressed these desires to change their to young boys to wear dresses for example if they're allowed to go through puberty the vast majority of them over 85 to 90% of them will then go on to live a normal life they may be gay individuals whatever but they haven't had to be exposed to all these medications surgical procedures and they generally come to grips with the life that they they really that were intended to have if they're allowed to go through puberty so this issue of stopping puberty and changing children at that point prevents a normal part of development and is produces you know some of the psychological problems that we're now starting to see in these D transitioners and we think the number may be as high as 30 to 50% of children who start down this path determine that they're not going to take the medications at some point determine that the surgeries were a mistake and that's you know a terrible tragedy that this cohort of children now exists so Dr goldar just one quick sec we're going to take a quick break and we'll be right back and we're back with Dr Stan goldar chair of the board of Do no harm you're a nephologist and you you of course have a you know l a lot of knowledge in this area how is it that you kind of fell into this yes this all started Do no harm the organization that I I helped found back in April of 2022 this all started in my role as the associate Dean for curriculum in pens medical school I had had a career as an academic physician I had done research and I was I spent the the last 13 years of my career there as running the medical school curriculum and meeting with the students and developing courses and making sure that they were learning what they should be learning I thought we had a pretty good medical school it was highly ranked number two in the country behind Johns Hopkins or Harvard everybody there was sort of musical chairs about which was the top few medical schools in the country I thought we had an Innovative curriculum but a new Vice Dean for medical education came in the one who ID worked with for many years uh retired from her post and a new one came in and she said your curriculum is way out of date and we need to be teaching the students to be to understand Community issues they need to to understand social justice issues they need to have a very very different orientation and you have there's too much science in the curriculum she actually made that statement to me at that point I became very concerned because to me you know the purpose of the medical school was to teach them to take care of sick people it wasn't to cure the community that that is that's an important job it's just not the job of the practicing physician it's public health workers jobs and politicians jobs Physicians need to really focus on caring for people preventing Illness but also uh treating illness when they find it I was kind of the heterodox person in the in the group I was eventually forced out and then one day I saw that an article in the Wall Street Journal that there was 40 medical schools had courses in climate change and I became more aware that these social issues with being presented in medical schools around the country through her forcing me to to interact with other medical schools around the country and I wrote a letter to the editor of the Wall Street Journal and the editor said I don't I don't know about this article but I pointed out there was such an article and he said why don't you write an oped about because you're an Insider really and you know what's going on there and I wrote this oped it was called by The Wall Street Journal take two aspirin and call me by my pronouns now the article had nothing to do with gender issues at that point it had to do with the fact that I thought Medical School curriculum had not become rigorous enough and that there was too much time spent on these social issues to the to the the harm of learning about surgical issues medical issues and so on there was a huge uproar over this um medical Twitter there's something called Med Twitter it went crazy and it said that you know I didn't know what I was talking about and this this these social issues were what drove healthc care the school then denounced me and then the Wall Street Journal wrote an oped wrote an editorial about my oped saying I guess he was right because the outpouring of criticism suggested that I really had hit a nerve so at that point you know then I went on to write a book about this because I was really annoyed about all this but the same title yeah I didn't like the first title I didn't it wasn't my title it had nothing to do with gender at that point but the Wall Street Journal gets to write the title to the beds and that's what they used and I think actually the title was so provocative that it was it was part of the reason there was such a response to it but then the question was what can we do about these issues and should I just sit back and and I had the opportunity through some some friends and some philanthropists that were interested in some of these issues to start an organization Do no harm that would sort of fight back against some of this and point out how the curriculum in medical school had deteriorated and point out how identity politics we're starting to produce real harm in healthc care and we can talk about some examples of that I must say many of our donors said to me what about this gender stuff why are children being put through this and I frankly like many Physicians I wasn't really that aware of what was going on so that led us to look into the issue and it became quite clear that there was a great Harmony between the issues about Dei and identity politics and Healthcare this was another example of identity politics these children were putting in were put into this category of trans kids whether or not they had individual characteristics that suggested that their treatment ought to be very different than getting put on puberty blockers or sex changing hormones but they were put in this in this group and uh it became quite clear that there needed to be sort of this legislative e effort that we talked about earlier in this way because there was just no way to control the whole process unless there were laws that were going to stop it I'm very much against governmental laws intervening in healthcare and the way Healthcare is practiced but sometimes you have to step up when you find that there really are problems and the problems aren not being dealt with by the medical community but they're being they're they're just going on and on and we have unfortunately over the years many examples of the medical community adopting procedures and and practices that turn out to be terrible the great example of this is lobotomies for children that were that had psychological problems a man won the Nobel Prize in medicine for lobotomies and it turned out to be a catastrophe and there are many other examples like this Marty MCC who's a well-known physician at John sson just written a book where he goes through many examples he called the book is called Blind Spot about how Physicians have a blind spot about many issues and and he goes through many examples of medical conditions that have been really handled very poorly by the medical establishment and need to be treated and have been treated very differently Do no harm started uh and um and we've had this Tri tripartite approach to things one has been the legislative one we talked about we've tried to inform the public I I've in interviews like this with some leading organizations and finally we've instituted a bunch of lawsuits typically in the area of identity politics where organizations medical schools and other and even companies have programs that excluded white and Asian students from participating for for example in the description of the program these are frankly illegal they they go against civil rights laws they go against the 14th Amendment and so we've instituted lawsuits and we have 11 lawsuits now and three others pending and I we can describe some of the details of those and we've sent about 150 letters to the office of civil rights because of programs in various medical schools if you send letters to the office of civil rights they will do in the Department of Education they will do investigations even if you don't have standing the lawsuits that we filed our members we have it's a membership organization we have 15,000 members and our members if they would want to apply to such a program and are excluded the it conveys to us to be able to support them and Sue on their behalf organizations that have been engaged in practices we've sued fiser had a an employment program that excluded whites and Asians from a very rich program of mentoring and employing and and um supporting further education and again in the program description whites and Asians should not apply you know Marty McCary I'll I'll just tell our viewers that fairly recent guest on the show about this amazing book blind spots so we'll I'll encourage people to watch after they watch this interview also on the point of the the Nobel prize winning researcher who who you know created the labotomy As I understood and this is another guest I had on the show I can't remember who right now but explained to to me that subsequent to everything happening the researcher who invented the other body went out and actually looked to try to see the impacts of his work and in many cases you know a lot of harm had been done to the people but he was unable to recognize it in people you this is I guess this is a common St known story in in medical schools I don't know I I hadn't heard it but to the point of people maybe not being able to say what have I done in in this type of a context yes you know unfortunately the group think is a very powerful uh kind of phenomenon where um it's very hard to go against the tide of opinion and in medicine we there aren't that many things that we really know based on hard science there's an awful lot of opinion that's present as the way people should be treated and it it often takes some sort of pivotal study to make the change and pivot studies are hard to do they're expensive to do and there needs to be sponsors that are willing to take them on so unfortunately and I think one of the problems in medical education that I'm particularly concerned about is that Physicians are not being taught to be contrarian about these things you know we've just come through a pandemic where recommendations were made take the for example masks you know we have multiple studies now that show that masks simply do not work in the covid pandemic and the literature is quite clear in this yet we still have recommendations being made about mask because well it makes sense mask recovery but it it doesn't work and so it doesn't matter what makes sense it what questions is and unfortunately in medical education now I think there's a real deficit of training young Physicians to to think critically this way I think they need to learn much more about psychology how people develop these false ideas and refuse to confront reality and they don't learn enough about the scientific method they don't learn enough about how you evaluate statistics they don't learn enough about how to evaluate a medical study what are the weaknesses in the study if in a particular question what's the best experimental design it's just not taught in medical school and yet Physicians need to be able to do that and that that was again my concern about the way the medical school curriculum was being designed because it it focused on getting students out in the community so they could deal with some the social problems in the community their time needed to be spent on learning how to evaluate the medical literature and that's a very that's not an easy do it it's a and the students in fact are not that interested they want to go and I keep saying they want to play doctor they want to go out and act like Physicians when in fact they need to sit in the classroom and learn things that are maybe even boring but but crucial if they're going to be a successful cohort of of healthcare workers as physicians in the United States and I think that's part of the lesson of mccary's book is that Physicians need to know when when the literature comes out and a new idea appears to look at it critically to have to be open-minded and not closed-minded about it and to think critically about these issues well Dr Stan Goldfarb it's such a pleasure to have had you on thank you so much I really enjoyed it thank you all for joining Dr Stan Goldfarb and me on this episode of American thought leaders I'm your host Yan Kell [Music]