A prominent medical watchdog group is pushing back against a widely cited study claiming racially diverse medical facilities improve outcomes for Black patients, arguing the research is being used to justify race-based diversity, equity and inclusion (DEI) policies despite failing to prove its central claim.
Do No Harm, a nonprofit organization focused on opposing ideological influence in medicine, released a report Tuesday disputing a recent study by economists Michael Frakes and Jonathan Gruber that suggests increasing the share of Black physicians in military medical facilities leads to better outcomes for Black patients.
The Do No Harm study takes issue with the findings by alleging several flaws, including that Frakes and Gruber’s “The Effect of Provider Diversity on Racial Health Disparities: Evidence from the Military” measures changes in health outcomes when patients are transferred to bases with different proportions of Black doctors, but argues it never directly measures whether Black patients treated by Black doctors fare better than those treated by non-Black doctors.
The report stresses that the authors’ design looks at facility-level shares of Black physicians rather than one-to-one patient-doctor racial matching.
In a press release, Do No Harm summarizes their critique into three core problems with the study: it never actually tests whether Black patients fare better when treated by Black doctors, it downplays findings showing Black patients achieve their best outcomes when treated by non-Black doctors at facilities with more Black physicians, and it relies on speculative explanations for those results while failing to rule out non-racial factors that could account for the outcomes.
“We cannot allow politically motivated activists to push debunked racial theories that have no positive impact on patient care,” Jay Greene, director of research for Do No Harm, said in the press release.
“Studies like this are designed to codify DEI doctrine to pave the way for re-establishing affirmative action and enshrining race-based hiring. The report ignores the very question it purports to answer: whether black patients actually fare better with black doctors. Our report systematically exposes the study’s shoddy methodology and baseless conclusions. Americans of all races and backgrounds deserve high-quality medical research, not political ideology disguised as science.”
Do No Harm argues that the new study appears designed to influence judicial and policy debates, noting that Frakes and Gruber themselves say their findings could shape discussions about affirmative action in medical school admissions amid pending court decisions.
The Do No Harm critique concludes that, on the basis of the evidence presented by Frakes and Gruber, there is not a scientifically supported case for using racial concordance as a rationale for maintaining racial preferences in medical education and hiring.
“Advocacy groups wishing to maintain racial preferences in medical hiring will almost certainly cite the Frakes and Gruber study in future court cases and legislative debates about the issue,” the report’s conclusion reads.
“Frakes and Gruber consciously produced their study with this use in mind. But as is often the case with advocacy-oriented research, this study is not a reliable basis for making policy decisions. The Frakes and Gruber study appears scientifically rigorous and is authored by economists from high-status universities, but a closer examination of its methods, results, and motivation reveal it to be scientifically unsound and an abuse of academic authority.”
Fox News Digital reached out to Frakes and Gruber but did not receive a response.
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