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Jan. 11, 2025 - Epoch Times
22:53
How DEI Ideology Undermines Medicine: Dr. Stanley Goldfarb
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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we had an innovative curriculum, but a new vice dean for medical education came in and she said, your curriculum is way out of date and we need to be teaching the students to understand community issues.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 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 an important job.
It's just not the job of the practicing physician.
Dr. Stanley Goldfarb is the board chairman of Do No Harm, which has been fighting to remove DEI ideology in health care 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 really is an experimental procedure.
He is a board-certified kidney specialist.
And Professor Emeritus 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 Jan Jekielek.
Dr. Stan Goldfarb, such a pleasure to have you on American Thought Leaders.
Jan, 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 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 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-friendly care.
That's an approach to medical care.
Very briefly kind of frame what your understanding of this is and why it's such an issue.
Well, this all began in Europe in the 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 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 at that time that would prevent children from going through puberty.
And at the same time, sex altering 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 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 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 put on these medications, and supposedly they did well with this new approach.
This led 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 Children's Hospital, and it became something 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 rapidly adopted this approach.
And the second thing was social media.
So these children started to communicate.
There were peer groups that developed.
And then there was a great movement 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 100 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 time of great discomfort for many children and a time of really 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 a confusing time, I remember, you know, basically.
Very confusing.
The other problem was that...
These physicians became, there were some transgender individuals who became very, very active in pushing this idea and trying to convert children 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 something that was an example of medicine that was looking for the evidence to support it, and yet these experimental approaches were being pursued in young children.
And then people started to ask the question, you know, 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 were started down these paths in Europe and then in the United States had a lot of psychological problems to begin with.
There was a very high rate of autism.
There was a high rate of depression.
Many of these children had 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.
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 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.
Clearly that children are harmed by this.
Finland, the head of the psychiatric program for these children in Finland, came out very strongly as one of the early...
Individuals who was an expert in this area treated hundreds and hundreds of these children and said, you know, it turns out we've harmed 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 detransitioners.
They're children who have decided they want to go back and live their lives.
As they were 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 all of the residue that is associated with having taken these hormones and taking 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 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 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 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 young boys to wear dresses, for example, if they're allowed to go through puberty, the vast majority of them, over 85 to 90 percent 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 really 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 this produces, you know, some of the psychological problems that we're now starting to see in these detransitioners.
And we think the number may be as high as 30 to 50 percent 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. Goldfarb, 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 Goldfart, Chairman of the Board of Do No Harm.
You're a nephrologist, and you, of course, have 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 helped found back in April of 2022. This all started in my role as the Associate Dean for Curriculum.
Penn's Medical School.
I had a career as an academic physician.
I had done research, and I spent 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, 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 I had worked with for many years, 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 understand community issues.
They need to understand social justice issues.
They need to have a very, very different orientation than 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'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 treating illness when they find it.
I was kind of the heterodox person.
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 were being presented in medical schools around the country through her...
Forcing me 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 know about this article, but I pointed out there was such an article.
And he said, why don't you write an op-ed about, because you're an insider, really, and you know what's going on there.
And I wrote this op-ed.
It was called...
Buy the Wall Street Journal, take two aspirins, 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 the medical school curriculum had not become rigorous enough and that there was too much time spent on these social issues to the harm of learning about surgical issues, medical issues, and so on.
There was a huge uproar over this.
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 these social issues were what drove health care.
The school then denounced me, and then the Wall Street Journal wrote an op-ed, wrote an editorial about my op-ed 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.
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 op-eds, and that's what they used.
And I think actually the title was so provocative that 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 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 health 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 in health care.
This was another example of identity politics.
These children 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 group.
And it became quite clear that there needed to be Sort of this legislative 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 are not being dealt with by the medical community, but they're just going on and on.
And we have, unfortunately, over the years, many examples of the medical community adopting.
There are procedures and practices that turn out to be terrible.
A great example of this is lobotomies for children 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 McCary, who's a well-known physician at Johns Hopkins, has just written a book where he goes through many examples.
The book is called Blindspot, about how physicians have a blind spot about many issues, and he goes through many The 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 and we've had this tripartite approach to things.
One has been the legislative one we talked about.
We've tried to inform the public.
I've been in interviews like this with some leading organizations.
And finally, we've...
We instituted a bunch of lawsuits, typically in the area of identity politics where organizations...
Medical schools and even companies have programs that excluded white and Asian students from participating, for example.
In the description of the program, these are frankly illegal.
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 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, 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 Pfizer, had an employment program that excluded whites and Asians from a very rich program of mentoring and employment and supporting further education.
And again, in the program description, whites and Asians should not apply.
Marty McCary, I'll just tell our viewers that a fairly recent guest on the show about this amazing book, Blind Spots.
So I'll encourage people to watch after they watch this interview.
Also, on the point of the Nobel Prize-winning researcher who created the lobotomy, as I understood, and this is another guest I had on the show, I can't remember who right now, but explained to me that subsequent to everything happening, the researcher who invented the lobotomy went out and actually...
Looked to try to see the impacts of his work.
And in many cases, a lot of harm had been done to the people, but he was unable to recognize it in people.
I guess this is a common known story in medical schools.
I don't know.
I hadn't heard it, but to the point of people maybe not being able to say, what have I done in this type of a context.
Yes.
You know, unfortunately, groupthink is a very powerful kind of phenomenon where it's very hard to go against the tide of opinion.
And in medicine, 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 often takes some sort of pivotal study to make the change.
And pivotal 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.
We've just come through a pandemic where recommendations were made.
Take, for example, masks.
We have multiple studies now that show that masks simply do not work in the COVID pandemic.
And the literature is quite clear on this, yet we still have recommendations being made about masks.
Because, well, it makes sense, the mass recovery, but it doesn't work.
And so it doesn't matter what makes sense.
And unfortunately, in medical education now, I think there's a real deficit of training young physicians 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?
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 was, again, my concern about the way the medical school curriculum was being designed, because it focused on...
Getting students out in the community so they can deal with some of the social problems in the community.
Their time needed to be spent on learning how to evaluate the medical literature.
And that's not an easy thing to do.
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 crucial if they're going to be a successful...
Cohort 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 the literature comes out and a new idea appears to look at it critically, 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.
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