Leading Medical Journals Care More About DEI Than Major Diseases

In his novel The Magic Mountain, Thomas Mann describes wealthy European consumptives who retreat to a sanitorium high in the Swiss Alps, convinced that thin air aids in treating pulmonary tuberculosis. In their self-contained community, they affirm their faith in contemporary medical practices while delaying the demands of life in the “flatlands.”

Medical researchers, it seems, are retreating to a sanatorium of their own. Based on our analysis, leading medical journals increasingly lean left and are abandoning scientific principles in service of progressive ideology.

We began by conducting a keyword search of every article published in the JAMA Network—a group of 13 medical journals affiliated with the American Medical Association—between April 1 and May 31. The phrase “diversity, equity, and inclusion” appeared 56 times, more often than atherosclerosis (45) and osteoporosis (16). Another progressive-coded term, “inequity,” showed up 99 times—more than asthma (75) or opioid use disorder (65).

Phrase Searched	Number of Results
chronic kidney disease	128
inequity	99
asthma	75
opioid use disorder	65
structural discrimination	61
diversity, equity, and inclusion	56
congestive heart failure	53
atherosclerosis	45
structural racism	36
historically marginalized group	33
osteoporosis	16
intersectionality	13

To assess the political valence of the articles, we performed a qualitative review of the 56 DEI papers. We asked two free online artificial intelligence chatbots—xAI’s Grok 3 and Microsoft’s Copilot—to rate the political bias of each of those articles on a scale from -5 (strongly left-leaning) to 5 (strongly right-leaning). We instructed the AI systems to assess each article according to various criteria, including language, framing, tone, and policy implications. We then averaged the chatbots’ scores.

The results revealed a decided left-wing slant. The average score across all 56 articles was -2.02. Seven scored -3.5 and six scored -3. Not one article leaned right.

What explains these findings? One potential explanation is that the network’s editors believe their readership is predominantly left-wing. That assumption was made plain in a recent editor’s note, published in response to the National Institute of Health’s cap on indirect costs. “Many JAMA readers hope that the NIH and HHS will lose these legal cases,” the note read, “and that the new 15% indirect cost rate will be struck down.” Fiscally conservative readers may have had a different view.

These findings reflect a broader leftward shift in medical research—one that has contributed to the scientific establishment’s erosion of rigor and objectivity. This shift threatens the foundations of the profession, the integrity of research, and the quality of medical education.

DEI-inspired scientific studies are often plagued by poor design: sampling bias, lack of proper control groups, leading survey questions, and circular reasoning. Researchers frequently treat incidental associations as proof of causation. These methodological flaws are baked into published papers, which then get cited, flaws and all, by others. Over time, some DEI-based studies acquire unwarranted credibility and authority.

Take Brad Greenwood and colleagues’ research from 2020, which claimed that “newborn-physician racial concordance”—meaning the child and the doctor are the same race—“is associated with a significant improvement in mortality for Black infants.” But the original authors failed to control for babies with very low birth weight. When Manhattan Institute researchers replicated the study, they found that racial concordance had no such effect. Nonetheless, the original study has received more than 800 citations, including 21 by articles within the JAMA Network.

Another study with similar left-wing premises has also made the rounds. Kelly Hoffman and colleagues claimed in a 2016 paper that “Black Americans are systematically undertreated for pain relative to white Americans.” Their conclusion was based on a sample of 194 medical students and 28 residents, with no attending physicians included except for “10 experienced physicians,” whose recommendations served as the benchmark against which sample participants’ knowledge was evaluated.

In one of the paper’s two case vignettes, these physicians identified narcotics as the appropriate pain management for kidney stones. Had they consulted the 7th edition of Tintinalli’s Emergency Medicine Manual from 2012, however, those physicians would have known that NSAIDs are the “primary analgesic of choice” for that condition, not opiates. While this error calls into question the study’s conclusions, the paper nevertheless has been cited over 3,000 times, according to Google Scholar.

Residents of the academy’s Magic Mountain are sustained by skewed evidence and increasingly disconnected from reality. They would do well to step away from the illusion of certainty and return to the foundations of scientific inquiry—rigorous debate, objective analysis, and a plurality of perspectives.

Photo: Maskot / DigitalVision via Getty Images