#kurt miceli

[religion-is-a-mental-illness]

By: Howard Fenn & Kurt Miceli

Published: Feb 8, 2026

The president’s recent push to send federal health care dollars directly to individuals, rather than insurers, reflects a broader demand for transparency and effectiveness in how public funds are used. Government‑funded medical research, which forms the foundation of much clinical care, also requires such scrutiny. In recent years, academic medicine has advanced a nebulous theory of “structural racism” that echoes the 19th‑century miasma idea which blamed disease on “bad air.” Despite scant evidence, studies attempting to validate this vague framework have multiplied, often funded by largely unaware taxpayers. Refocusing federal research dollars on rigorous science and evidence-based care is essential to correcting this trajectory.

But how did this happen? The construct of “structural racism” was virtually absent from medical literature until a decade ago. Since then, it has become the default explanation in academic medicine for differences in health outcomes across racial and ethnic groups. Its rise accelerated during the 2020 anti-racism zeitgeist, which swept through corporate boardrooms and university administrations while also becoming a core ideological pillar of Black Lives Matter and other political movements.

Academic medicine was no exception. This philosophy quickly gained favor in medical education, academic health centers, elite journals, and professional associations, eventually influencing federal agencies that distribute research monies.

The result: a surge of grant-funded studies built on the premise that racism causes health disparities. Of the nearly 2,300 articles indexed under the term “structural racism” in PubMed, the US National Library of Medicine’s database of leading biomedical and health journals, 95% were published after Jan. 1, 2020. In 2025 alone, PubMed lists 400 such papers – nearly four times the total published before 2020.

Supporting this proliferation has been a tsunami of federal taxpayer dollars coming from the National Institutes of Health. From 2020 to 2025, an NIH database search finds nearly 750 projects mentioning “structural racism” in their abstracts, costing almost $533 million in total. More than 70 of those projects were funded in 2025 at just under $40 million – significantly down from 2024’s 220+ projects totaling $150 million, but still far above 2020, when only 12 projects received a little over $12 million in aggregate. Before 2020, the NIH had funded just 10 such projects at a combined cost of $4 million.

Funding patterns across NIH’s 27 Institutes and Centers from 2020 to 2025 make clear that ideology, not medical science, drove much of this growth. The largest investments came from the National Institute on Drug Abuse ($147 million in total funding), National Institute on Minority Health and Health Disparities ($70 million), and National Institute on Aging ($57 million), each pouring substantial resources into “structural racism” research.

In 2025, for example, NIDA supported a project under the Healthy Brain and Child Development National Consortium that identified “structural racism” as a risk to babies before and after birth, alongside more recognizable factors like maternal health, toxic exposures, and child abuse – thereby conflating an abstract, ill-defined, and ideological social theory with measurable, scientific variables as a threat to child development.

Also in 2025, NIMHD funded the Clinical Research Scholars Training (CREST) program, a “health-equity focused” initiative created in part due to NIH calls for research on “the impact of structural racism and discrimination on health disparities.” Eligibility for this program was limited to those deemed “underrepresented in biomedical research.” All others need not apply.

And just last year, a NIA-funded project invoked “interrelated systems of structural racism” and “race-specific stress” as risk factors for Alzheimer’s disease and cognitive decline, diverting attention and resources away from well-established contributors such as genetics, medical conditions, lifestyle and environmental factors, and core biological mechanisms like amyloid plaques and tau tangles.

Unfortunately, a commitment to science gave way to ideology years ago. Under Francis Collins, the NIH “acknowledged and committed to ending structural racism,” without even defining the concept itself. “Structural racism” was accepted despite its questionable validity and lack of explanatory power. With vague boundaries and mechanisms difficult to measure, claims of “structural racism” far exceeded the empirical evidence. Nevertheless, the idea was accepted wholesale and used to justify a wave of DEI initiatives, effectively recasting the NIH as an “anti-racist” institution in the Ibram Kendi mold. Objective science was no longer sufficient; the agency was expected to take an activist stance.

Proponents embraced this shift, seeing an opportunity to move health research from “individual-level risk, health behavior, and functioning” to “structural level concepts” with “structural racism” specifically named. Research dollars supported tools like the Structural Racism Effect Index to “guide policies and investments to advance health equity.” The incentives were clear: Few researchers – early-career or established – would decline funding in an area where the NIH was heavily investing, especially when that support could provide a route to publication in top journals.  

Yet the instruments used to quantify “structural racism” expose a basic flaw: They don’t measure racism. The SREI’s nine dimensions, for example, largely track socioeconomic conditions – wealth, income, housing, employment. In practice, a high score identifies communities facing poverty. Even researchers linking SREI scores to hypertension, obesity, smoking, and low physical activity concede they “cannot make causal inferences.” These health risks may result from poverty, contribute to it, or arise from entirely different causes. Labeling them as products of “structural racism” adds no explanatory value, miscasts economic hardship as race-based, and downplays individual responsibility. It overshadows far more consequential drivers of outcome disparities, including access to care, personal choice, medical comorbidities, and genetics.

Nonetheless, no alternative explanation for health disparities has received anywhere near the same attention in leading medical journals – such as The New England Journal of Medicine, Lancet, and JAMA – as “structural racism.” This concept has been treated as settled fact, with disparities alone offered as proof: If disparities exist, racism must be the cause. Likewise, many medical organizations have reinforced this view through policies and position papers that embed an anti-racism framework into scientific inquiry.

But change is in the air. The NIH’s recent miasma-like fixation on “structural racism” is finally clearing, and under Director Jay Bhattacharya the agency is refocusing on its core mission of funding rigorous, evidence-based science rather than ideology-driven research. This shift will direct scarce taxpayer dollars toward work grounded in medical science and its practical application – research that can genuinely improve health rather than feed political currents. This course correction is timely, and while sustained effort in 2026 will be needed to fully restore the NIH to its rightful mission, taxpayers can take comfort: America’s leading biomedical and medical science research institute will once again prioritize their dollars and their health.

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Howard H. Fenn is a clinical psychiatrist certified by the American Board of Psychiatry and Neurology with additional qualifications in geriatric psychiatry. 

Kurt Miceli serves as chief medical officer for Do No Harm, a membership organization representing health-care professionals, patients, and policymakers focused on keeping identity politics out of medicine.

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Wouldn't it be easier to just study the best ways to align everyone's chakras?

[religion-is-a-mental-illness]

The CDC Can Help Those Disfigured by ‘Gender-Affirming Care’ - WSJ

By: Kurt Miceli

Published: Sep 9, 2025

Chloe Cole had a difficult adolescence. As a result, she became a victim of unethical medical experiments, which left her with injuries that can’t be healed.

As Ms. Cole, 21, tells it, she was a tomboy as a child. She didn’t like “girly” things, and when she started puberty early—8 or 9, she has testified—she got unwanted attention from boys. Like many kids in the early to mid-2010s, she spent a lot of time on social media and videogames, which led her to online communities that told her she was really a boy.

She came to believe that she was born in the wrong body. When she was 12, “I came out as transgender in a letter I sat on the dining room table. My parents were immediately concerned. They felt like they needed to get outside help from medical professionals, but this proved to be a mistake.” The doctors pushed Chloe and her parents to accept the lie that she could become a boy.

Over the next three years, she was given hormones to delay puberty, then testosterone, then a double mastectomy. She was told the treatments would help her, yet her mental health deteriorated. When she was 16, she realized that she had always been a girl. But she had no path back to healing and hope, because the medical establishment not only encourages “gender transition” but refuses to acknowledge it can ever be a mistake.

Ms. Cole has physical and mental scars that will be with her for the rest of her life. She doesn’t recognize herself when she looks in the mirror. She isn’t alone. Nearly 14,000 kids received what is euphemistically called “gender-affirming care” between 2019 and 2023 alone, and an unknown yet growing number profoundly regret it. Their existence—and their urgent medical needs—must be brought into the light.

On Wednesday I will deliver a presentation to the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention about the urgent need to help people like Ms. Cole. I will call on the CDC to create a real classification system to identify and help patients who suffer from an attempt to change their sex, so they can receive the care they deserve and benefit from real medical research. Without such classifications, the medical system treats these patients as if their problems don’t exist.

The CDC maintains the U.S. version of an international database that contains approximately 70,000 medical diagnosis codes. Doctors use them to document patients’ conditions and tailor treatments. Researchers use them as a standardized tool to classify and analyze health conditions and outcomes, which are necessary steps for ultimately improving care. These codes can be amusingly specific, like “burn due to water-skis on fire” and “pecked by chicken.”

There are codes for patients who try to change their sex—but no codes that speak to regret over the irreversible consequences that follow an attempted sex change or remission in the belief that the patient was born in the wrong body. This makes it impossible to identify how many people are “detransitioning,” and more difficult for researchers to help them, because standardized codes are vital for studying real-world data.

I propose six new diagnosis codes that would help patients like Ms. Cole get the care they deserve. One would recognize a patient’s history of reversing an attempted sex change. Another would acknowledge the medical distress that patients may suffer after getting such treatments.

Transgender activists will oppose this proposal. They scoff at the premise that anyone wishes to undo a sex change. In 2022 one activist told a congressional committee that this “isn’t a real thing.” They also point to surveys showing that hardly any kids regret the effects of hormones and surgeries. But these surveys tend to focus on short-term data, suffer from bias, or both. They also fly in the face of other research and common sense.

Researchers have found that about 80% of kids who believe they’re born in the wrong body ultimately abandon that belief, so long as they don’t receive medical treatment. Other studies have found that most of these kids are actually gay. Activists and physicians steal children’s identities when they push them to take experimental chemicals and undergo irreversible surgeries—and then erase their experiences by denying the possibility of regret.

The thousands of children who’ve tried to change their sex need help. So do the parents, who are often pressured by medical professionals as well as activists to let their kids take this road. As more kids try to become something they aren’t, the number who come to regret their decision will undoubtedly grow. People like Chloe Cole need the government’s help to get acknowledgment of the injuries they’ve suffered and the care they need as a result.

Dr. Miceli is medical director of Do No Harm.

[ Via: https://archive.today/1GL0M ]