Medical Journals: No Longer Dedicated to the Pursuit of Truth
Since their conception, scientific medical journals and their editors have had a unique responsibility to their authors and readership to carefully review and publish articles in the pursuit of truth. Unfortunately, many have now succumbed to pressures from those who believe that concerns about race are primary. Here are three examples.
The Journal, The Proceedings Of the National Academy of Sciences (PNAS) in 2020 published a paper titled, “Physician-patient Racial Concordance and Disparities in Birthing Mortality for Newborns.” This article formed the basis of a friend of the court brief by the Association of American Medical Colleges (AAMC), in effect stating that for black newborns having a black physician enhances their survival. The methodology of the study and its conclusions have been severely criticized (Ref.1,2,3). The question arises as to why PNAS would publish such a flawed article? Perhaps because it conformed to the present obsessions about race as a group, excluding individuality? Medical journals in our society are held in high esteem, and the editors should have realized that with the present obsession with race, the lay press would jump on an inappropriately published race-based article. If the criteria for publishing scientific articles were based strictly on quality and the search for truth, this article, because of serious flaws, would never have been published.
However, this article and the AAMC brief apparently misled the newly appointed Supreme Court Justice Ketanji Brown Jackson in her dissent in the 6-3 Supreme Court decision against affirmative action, SFFA v. Harvard and SFFA v. UNC, to quote these erroneous results.
The Journal of the American Heart Association (JAHA) succumbed to race activists by retracting an article titled, Diversity, Inclusion, and Equity: Evolution of Race and Ethnicity Considerations for the Cardiology Workforce in the United States of America from 1969 to 2019, by Doctor Norman Wang. It was retracted NOT because of poor science but because the data revealed that affirmative action over fifty years had not significantly increased the number of minority cardiologists. Dr. Wang suggested that individual qualities and not immutable inherited characteristics should be the criteria for which individuals should be encouraged to become cardiologists. The problem is not that minorities are deliberately excluded; the problem is that academic success in grades K-12 by minorities in this country is limited, thus causing fewer qualified candidates. The journal not only retracted the paper but openly begged for forgiveness. The University of Pittsburgh, in response to the controversy, demoted Dr. Wang. He filed a lawsuit against JAHA and the university for violating his constitutional free speech rights (Ref. 2,4). The University of Pittsburgh was removed from the suit in 2022 because of its intentional protective legal structures (Ref.5). A recent essay reviews this case and has no mention of the suit against the journal (Ref.6).
The New England Journal of Medicine published an editorial on implicit bias in which the author suggests the value of a system in place at her university of a group of “experts” to address any perceived racial bias and, when appropriate, enforce retraining (Ref.7). This is despite recent work questioning the validity of detecting implicit bias and the industry built around it. (Ref.8).
In summary, in the case of PNAS, publishing an obviously flawed article that found its way into a Supreme Court dissent revealed that the journal was more interested in promoting what it thought to be a social cause than in being true to its mission of publishing high-quality research. Everyone suffers from this editorial malfeasance, the authors, the readership, and the public. The American Heart Journal retracted a study that was NOT intrinsically flawed but questioned the premise that the low representation of minority cardiologists is due to racial bias. Retracting the paper was certainly NOT in the pursuit of truth. The opinion essay in the NEJM uses the nebulous criteria of intrinsic bias and endorses a “thought control” system, revealing more about the political activism of the journal, sacrificing its mission of the pursuit of scientific truth. Hopefully, this racial obsession will eventually fade, and our medical journals will return to being reliable sources for the growth of knowledge in medicine.
- Ted Frank, Justice Jackson’s Incredible Statistic, WSJ, July 5, 2023, available at: https://www.wsj.com/articles/justice-jacksons-incredible-statistic-black-newborns-doctors-math-flaw-mortality-4115ff62
2. Katie Herzog, What Happens When Doctors Can’t Tell the Truth? The Free Press, June 3, 2021, available at: https://www.thefp.com/p/what-happens-when-doctors-cant-speak?utm_source=substack&utm_medium=email
3. Rob Picheta, Black newborns more likely to die when looked after by white doctors,CNN, August 20, 2020, available at: https://www.cnn.com/2020/08/18/health/black-babies-mortality-rate-doctors-study-wellness-scli-intl/index.html
4. Norman C. Wang, Diversity, Inclusion, and Equity: Evolution of Race and Ethnicity Considerations for the Cardiology Workforce in the United States of America from 1969 to 2019, JAHA, March 24, 2020, Retracted August 2020 – only partially available at: http://ow.ly/Djpy30quNDO
5. Pitt removed completely from lawsuit by Norman Wang, University Times, September 9, 2022, available at: https://www.utimes.pitt.edu/news/pitt-removed-completely
6. Anish Koka, M.D., Affirmative Action in Medicine: A Forbidden Debate? Newsletter, April 10, 2023, available at: https://anishkokamd.substack.com/p/affirmative-action-in-medicine-a
7. Janice A. Sabin, Tackling Implicit Bias in Health Care, NEJM, July 14, 2022, available at: https://www.nejm.org/doi/full/10.1056/NEJMp2201180?logout=true
8. Lee Jussim, 12 Reasons to be Skeptical of Common Claims About Implicit Bias, Psychology Today, March 28, 2022, available at: https://www.psychologytoday.com/us/blog/rabble-rouser/202203/12-reasons-be-skeptical-common-claims-about-implicit-bias
There’s a website that might interest you, if you don’t already know about it:
https://retractionwatch.com/
Retraction Watch covers academic papers retracted for any number of resaons.
They have a link to retracted COVID-19 papers alone, nearly four hundred.
Agreed, cogent arguments should be cogent arguments and not jingoistic. And Steve, you need to write for this blog.
Why? The whole of medical publishing has undergone the same revolution as the AMA and the Boards. The major publishers are corporations which publish work largely subsidized by the NIH or Pharmaceutical industry behind a massively lucrative firewall separating the Bug Players from the peon Local Doctors. Just obey the abstract, chump. As the journals transmogrified from national physicians forums for debate into corporate loudspeakers, the controllers of the journals far from the physicians’ perspective have free rein to dictate the Party Line. Look at the embarrassing COVID literature. When HIV hit, the researchers began to rally around DISCOVER BETTER TREATMENT. Now, it’s OBEY THE KNOWING. The road to serfdom in medicine has been long traveled.
Let’s all bow to Nantucket and thank Obama for tearing open the slowly healing race wound, causing great bleeding and pain, resulting in situations presented here. All Hail Barry!
This comment dismays me greatly. We seem to join into an uneducated mob sneering at the Greay Enemy. There is no Emmanuel Goldstein worthy of the Five Minutes Hate. Raging at the Devil didn’t work in Salem.
And besides, Obama lives on Martha’s Vineyard..