Say a prayer for public health. Medical education, practice, and policy are heavily influenced by academic journals, and in a new report, I document a disturbing trend. Medical students have dramatically increased their publication of research – if you can call it that. Academic journals are now awash in low-quality woke screeds written by young people who haven’t even finished their training. It doesn’t bode well for the health and well-being of the American people.
Consider a 2022 piece published in the influential journal Academic Medicine. The authors, three students at the Indiana University School of Medicine, developed a survey of their peers. They “found that medical trainees are unsatisfied with their exposure to LGBT+ health topics,” a direct condemnation of the curriculum at the institution that accepted them. Yet that curriculum was developed by experts and practitioners with significant experience. Perhaps they know – and students don’t know – what deserves attention in medical education.
It would be one thing if nobody read the medical students’ piece. But many did. The federal PubMed database shows that it was cited nearly as often as the typical study funded by the National Institutes of Health. The medical students have likely contributed to the rise in “LGBTQ+ health teaching” across graduate medical education in recent years, which necessarily displaces education focused on critical topics like learning basic medical science.
This example isn’t a one-off. I found that, in the early-to-mid 2000s, medical students were rarely, if ever, published in academic journals. Between 2000 and 2006, no year had more than 17 publications with a student author. Between 2007 and 2012, the number of studies written by medical students per year fluctuated between 17 and 58. Yet by 2022, that number rose to 932. While the number of student-authored studies fell modestly to 735 in 2025, that’s still far above the historical norm.
It would be one thing if medical students were conducting high-quality research, and to be sure, some are. But I also analyzed how often their papers used woke terms like “equity,” “disparities,” “race,” “racist,” “racism,” “diversity,” and “inclusion.” Twenty-five years ago, most years saw zero such papers authored by medical students. But in 2023, nearly 25% of student publications covered woke topics. Over the last five years, the average is 21%.
A quintessential example is a 2025 study by students at the University of Texas Medical Branch John Sealy School of Medicine, the state’s oldest medical school. Writing in the Journal of Medical Education and Curricular Development, the student authors argued for “Reforming Medical Curricula to Support Indigenous Students and Reduce Healthcare Disparities.” Yet far from providing original analysis or reasoning, they merely summarized a dozen articles they read out of over 200 they identified on the topic. They didn’t even identify the studies, so their research can’t be replicated.
Why are medical students suddenly so active in academic journals? They aren’t addressing meaningful issues, and there’s no evidence that patient outcomes suffered before the sudden deluge of politicized pieces. More likely, the wokeification of K-12 and undergraduate education has convinced many of these graduate-level trainees to become more vocal about combatting perceived injustices – silence is violence! It’s also true that medical authorities have pushed these students to publish more often, regardless of research quality.
In foundational pre-clerkship courses, more than 80% of M.D.-granting schools now use pass/fail grading, as does the first and most important part of the U.S. Medical Licensing Exam. Without numerical grades to document their excellence, medical students are now engaged in what’s been described as a “research arms race” to impress residency program directors. Publishing shoddy woke research has nothing but potential upsides for the students.
But the rise of subpar research from woke trainees has downsides for the rest of us. Their publications can exert influence on what’s taught in medical schools, what’s practiced in doctors’ offices, and what’s legislated and regulated by health officials. Woke ideology has already contributed to a decline in standards and achievement for medical students; now they’re spending more time pushing that ideology on the rest of medicine. Everyday Americans will never read the latest woke screed published in academic journals, but it nonetheless threatens their health and well-being.
