In the past week, the American Medical Association has begun pushing radical left-wing talking points — including promoting the “importance” of transgender medical procedures and claiming that the body mass index metric (BMI) has caused “historical harm” through supposedly being used for “racist exclusion.”
The American Medical Association (AMA) was founded in 1847 and has grown to become a lobbying group for over 270,000 physicians and medical students. According to a 2022 report from the New Yorker, “Since 1998, the A.M.A. has spent $462 million on lobbying, an amount exceeded only by the expenditures of the U.S. Chamber of Commerce, the National Association of Realtors, and the American Hospital Association.”
Now, the organization has moved beyond lobbying for important medical issues, instead attacking an important health metric that is used to help people better understand their weight, BMI — which can predict potential health issues and comorbidities.
According to the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention, BMI is defined as: “Body Mass Index (BMI) is a person’s weight in kilograms (or pounds) divided by the square of height in meters (or feet). A high BMI can indicate high body fat. BMI screens for weight categories that may lead to health problems, but it does not diagnose the body fatness or health of an individual.”
Meanwhile, in a June 13 paper titled “Use of BMI alone is an imperfect clinical measure,” the AMA condemned the use of BMI for supposed “historical harm.”
While claiming that “BMI is an imperfect measure because it does not directly assess body fat,” the AMA Council on Science and Public Health report stated: “Numerous comorbidities, lifestyle issues, gender, ethnicities, medically significant familial-determined mortality effectors, duration of time one spends in certain BMI categories and the expected accumulation of fat with aging are likely to significantly affect the interpretation of BMI data, particularly in regard to morbidity and mortality rates. Further, the use of BMI is problematic when used to diagnose and treat individuals with eating disorders because it does not capture the full range of abnormal eating disorders.”
According to The Hill, “The report led the AMA House of Delegates to adopt a policy recognizing issues with BMI for its historical harm, use for ‘racist exclusion,’ basis on previous generations of non-Hispanic white individuals and lack of gender and ethnicity considerations.”
The left-wing business news website Quartz previously outlined the motivation behind claims that the BMI metric is “inherently racist and sexist” — arguing that “when Belgian mathematician Adolphe Quetelet developed the index in the 1830s, he did so using data from European white men.”
Following their decision to attack the essential health metric, the AMA also advocated for dangerous and irreversible transgender medical procedures — noting that they will fight for so-called “gender-affirming care” for transgender people, which includes procedures such as hormone treatments, puberty blockers, and even transgender surgeries.
The AMA House of Delegates passed the Endocrine Society’s resolution on June 12, which included a vow to “protect access to evidence-based gender-affirming care for transgender and gender-diverse individuals.”
The organization cited supposed political attacks on “gender-affirming care” as cause for concern, likely referring to legislation in numerous states prohibiting the dangerous procedures from being performed on minors. According to the AMA, it is the medical community’s responsibility to provide supposed “evidence-based care.”
“In the resolution, the AMA committed to opposing any criminal and legal penalties against patients seeking gender-affirming care, family members or guardians who support them in seeking medical care, and health care facilities and clinicians who provide gender-affirming care,” the AMA vowed. “The AMA will work at the federal and state level with legislators and regulators to oppose such policies and collaborate with other organizations to educate the Federation of State Medical Boards about the importance of gender-affirming care.”
However, the organization did claim that “medical intervention is reserved for older adolescents and adults” — despite the fact that numerous doctors and hospitals around the country have openly admitted to performing these procedures on minors.
“Major medical organizations also agree on waiting until an individual has turned 18 or reached the age of majority in their country to undergo gender-affirming genital surgery,” the AMA wrote.
In response to the AMA’s latest claims, physician Suneel Dhand argued in a tweet that the organization was completely “captured and corrupted by industry and business interests.”
Here’s a statement from the American Medical Association, the nation’s biggest— and like most others, comletely captured and corrupted by industry and business interests.
This statement would be UNTHINKABLE in many other advanced western nations from a medical organization pic.twitter.com/U3umZXWtSf
— Suneel Dhand MD (@DrSuneelDhand) June 11, 2023
