Latest news with #PatientSafetyNetwork
Yahoo
27-05-2025
- General
- Yahoo
Federal judge orders Trump administration to restore some research on women's health and transgender mental health issues
A federal judge ruled on Friday that the Trump administration must restore medical research articles from a government database, which were removed for promoting 'gender ideology,' per The Christian Post. The authors of the articles, Harvard medical researchers Gordon Schiff and Celeste Royce, sued the Trump administration over the removal of their research from the Patient Safety Network, according to The Harvard Crimson. One of the articles in question was removed for commenting on the diagnosis of endometriosis, an often-debilitating medical condition, for women, transgender and non-gender-conforming individuals. Another paper was removed for commenting on the importance of recognizing groups at risk for suicide, stating that young people, veterans, men, Indigenous, lesbian, gay, bisexual, transgender and queer groups are at particular risk. Massachusetts District Court Judge Leo Sorokin argued that the articles' removal violated the First Amendment. 'This is a flagrant violation of the plaintiffs' First Amendment rights as private speakers on a limited public forum,' he stated according to The Christian Post. 'Because irreparable harm necessarily flows from such a violation, and the balance of harms and the public interest favor the plaintiffs, the motion for a preliminary injunction is allowed in part.' In January, President Donald Trump issued an executive order titled 'Defending Women From Gender Ideology Extremism and Restoring Biological Truth to the Federal Government.' The order described Trump's intention to 'defend women's rights' and only officially recognize two genders. Also in January, Trump issued an order titled 'Protecting Children From Chemical and Surgical Mutilation.' The order stated that medical professionals across America are 'maiming and sterilizing a growing number of impressionable children' who desire to change their genders. To carry out these orders, the Trump administration scrubbed thousands of data entries concerning LGBQ and transgender physical and mental health from national databases. Entries about contraception, HIV and women were also removed. Multiple federal judges have granted injunctions against Trump's executive orders, including allowing transgender medical operations to go through for young people and requiring that related medical research be restored to government databases.
Yahoo
24-05-2025
- Health
- Yahoo
Harvard doctors' research articles must be restored after Trump admin sued
Research articles written by two doctors at Harvard Medical School must be restored after they sued the Trump administration, the American Civil Liberties Union said Friday. The research was previously on the Patient Safety Network, a federal website for doctors and medical researchers to share information about medical errors, misdiagnoses, and patient outcomes, the ACLU said in a statement. Two articles, one called 'Endometriosis: A Common and Commonly Missed and Delayed Diagnosis,' the other called 'Multiple Missed Opportunities for Suicide Risk Assessment in Emergency and Primary Care Settings,' were previously removed from the Patient Safety Network. The initial article, co-authored by plaintiff Dr. Celeste Royce, had a sentence about diagnosis in transgender and gender-nonconforming people, the ACLU stated. The other article, co-authored by plaintiff Dr. Gordon Schiff, incorporated a sentence about heightened risk in LGBTQ+ communities. 'This type of wholesale, non-evidence-based removal endangers everyone's safety,' Schiff said in the statement. 'Censoring information about transgender people or anyone a politician does not like, who have documented increased risks of negative health outcomes, is antithetical to the very mission of public health. It also has a clear ripple effect on each and every patient, whose doctors are now unable to review unbiased information about how to better care for all.' President Donald Trump signed an executive order in January, shortly after taking office, that directed federal agencies to remove all statements that 'promote or otherwise inculcate gender ideology,' the ACLU's statement read. This was followed by guidance issued by the Office of Personal Management, which told agencies to '[t]ake down all outward facing media (websites, social media accounts, etc.) that inculcate or promote gender ideology.' The Trump administration is 'putting a culture war above the rights of clinicians and the public's need for accurate, adequate health information,' Royce said in the statement. 'The very foundations of medical research and trust in medicine are at risk if the government can pick and choose what kind of research gets halted or published.' Royce and Schiff, represented by the Media Freedom and Information Access Clinic at Yale Law School, the ACLU and the ACLU of Massachusetts, argued in the lawsuit that the deletion of the research violated the First Amendment. It also violated the Administrative Procedure Act by removing articles without a reasoned basis 'The takedown of these articles is nothing short of an assault on science,' Scarlet Kim, the senior staff attorney at the ACLU, said in the statement. 'The First Amendment protects against the removal of our clients' research solely because the government disagrees with its message. The government cannot suppress medical knowledge because it acknowledges the existence of transgender people,' Kim continued. 'The Trump administration's attempt to do so violates the First Amendment and flouts the very mandate of PSNet to improve patient safety.' On Friday, a federal judge issued that the articles must be restored within seven days. It also must be 'complete, unaltered versions.' The removal of the research came as the Trump administration had several cuts to programs and departments across the federal government. This also included those that go against his executive orders on LGBTQ+ people, including one defining two genders and a military ban on transgender service members, among other orders. 'This is a victory for our clients, for free speech, and for scientific integrity,' said Kim. 'The First Amendment protects against the removal of our clients' research solely because the government disagrees with its message. PSNet's mandate is to provide information that protects patients – the government can't pick and choose which information to share based on ideology.' Latest Trump attack on Harvard is 'most serious' yet, former school president and Harvard critic says PHOTOS: Luke Combs wraps up Night 1 at 2025 Boston Calling T-Pain gets Boston Calling sprung on Night 1 (Photos) PHOTOS: Megan Moroney kicks in some country to get Boston Calling 2025 rolling Read the original article on MassLive.
Yahoo
10-02-2025
- Health
- Yahoo
Samizdat for Science
How can we prevent our suicidal patients from killing themselves? That's an important question for a primary-care physician like me. I am often in the position of trying to assess—in 15 minutes or less—which patients need urgent treatment. The type of guidance that might help me can be found in a paper that was published in 2022 on PSNet, the Patient Safety Network, a federally funded initiative. 'Few considerations are more critical,' the authors wrote, 'than identifying a person at risk for taking their own life.' On January 31, however, the authors of that paper received a notice that their peer-reviewed article had been struck from the PSNet website. Apparently, it violated Executive Order 14168, 'Defending Women From Gender Ideology Extremism and Restoring Biological Truth to the Federal Government,' signed by Donald Trump on his first day in office. In addition to being a physician, I happen to be a woman, so I was curious why women needed defending from an analysis of how health professionals might better help suicidal patients. In the paper, the authors reminded clinicians to keep in mind which patient groups are known to be at higher risk, citing peer-reviewed data: 'High risk groups include male sex, being young, veterans, Indigenous tribes, lesbian, gay, bisexual, transgender, queer/questioning (LGBTQ).' The acknowledgment of transgender people, however peripheral, was apparently enough to invite the ax. The memo came out on a Wednesday, and agencies had until 5 p.m. on Friday to scrub their websites—as well as their agencies, grants, contracts, and personnel—of anything that might 'promote or inculcate gender ideology.' As a result, hundreds of government websites were shorn of articles, pages, and data sets about transgender issues, along with information on contraception, HIV, and abortion. Much of the information that was stripped came from the CDC website, but even pages on the Census Bureau and the National Park Service sites came down. The tech-news publication 404 Media has estimated that more than 2,000 data sets have disappeared from government websites since Trump took office. Coupled with other recent actions—pulling out of the World Health Organization, muzzling communications from government health agencies, stopping funding for overseas programs that treat HIV and malaria, drastically cutting NIH research funding—the Trump administration is signaling its contempt for evidence-based science and doing so in a way that demonstrates its sweeping disregard for human health and life. Federal agencies and employees may be required, for the moment, to follow these guidelines. But the path for nongovernmental medical and scientific organizations is clear: Every hospital, university, professional medical organization, residency program, scientific organization, and nursing and medical school needs to insist that these data remain accessible to the public. The science and health-care communities must also work together to make available all of the expunged data. This is beginning to happen: Individual researchers, doctors, students, and self-declared data hoarders have been racing to download as much of these crucial data as possible. Efforts such as the Internet Archive, the Library Innovation Lab Team, the End of Term Archive, and other groups to archive and host public data can prevent the erasure of years of scientific progress, and, by preserving this information, create a kind of scientific samizdat. As of yet, major medical and scientific organizations have not formally stepped into the void. Doctors for America has filed a lawsuit over the expunged data, claiming that the actions were unlawful and endanger the lives of Americans. But bigger groups such as the American Medical Association and the American Association for the Advancement of Science remain on the sidelines. A week after the initial purge, the agency that hosts PSNet was informed that the paper could be reposted on condition that the words transgender and LGBTQ be removed. The senior author rightly refused, stating that the researchers would remove those terms only if the Trump administration could cite verified data demonstrating that LGBTQ and trans communities did not have a higher risk of suicide. In that case, they would issue a correction. The fact the government would interfere with scientific work at this level at all is startlingly authoritarian. The Trump administration may feel that winning the election grants it the authority to alter science to its liking. It may even get nongovernmental institutions to temporarily parrot the party line by threatening to withhold funding. But the scientific community needs to stand its ground. Doctors and nurses have a particular responsibility, because we have sworn oaths to put patient welfare first. As Dr. Steven H. Woolf succinctly put it in a recent editorial: 'We must draw the line when the science is clear that a policy will increase the risk of disease, complications, or premature death.' The legal challenges to Trump's executive orders are piling up, though it will take time for these actions to grind through the courts. Fortunately, the medical and scientific communities need no such delay to determine our course of action. Commitment to patients and to scientific inquiry is our unequivocal guiding principle. Article originally published at The Atlantic
Atlantic
10-02-2025
- Health
- Atlantic
Samizdat for Science
How can we prevent our suicidal patients from killing themselves? That's an important question for a primary-care physician like me. I am often in the position of trying to assess—in 15 minutes or less—which patients need urgent treatment. The type of guidance that might help me can be found in a paper that was published in 2022 on PSNet, the Patient Safety Network, a federally funded initiative. 'Few considerations are more critical,' the authors wrote, 'than identifying a person at risk for taking their own life.' On January 31, however, the authors of that paper received a notice that their peer-reviewed article had been struck from the PSNet website. Apparently, it violated Executive Order 14168, 'Defending Women From Gender Ideology Extremism and Restoring Biological Truth to the Federal Government,' signed by Donald Trump on his first day in office. In addition to being a physician, I happen to be a woman, so I was curious why women needed defending from an analysis of how health professionals might better help suicidal patients. In the paper, the authors reminded clinicians to keep in mind which patient groups are known to be at higher risk, citing peer-reviewed data: ' High risk groups include male sex, being young, veterans, Indigenous tribes, lesbian, gay, bisexual, transgender, queer/questioning (LGBTQ).' The acknowledgment of transgender people, however peripheral, was apparently enough to invite the ax. The memo came out on a Wednesday, and agencies had until 5 p.m. on Friday to scrub their websites—as well as their agencies, grants, contracts, and personnel—of anything that might 'promote or inculcate gender ideology.' As a result, hundreds of government websites were shorn of articles, pages, and data sets about transgender issues, along with information on contraception, HIV, and abortion. Much of the information that was stripped came from the CDC website, but even pages on the Census Bureau and the National Park Service sites came down. The tech-news publication 404 Media has estimated that more than 2,000 data sets have disappeared from government websites since Trump took office. Coupled with other recent actions— pulling out of the World Health Organization, muzzling communications from government health agencies, stopping funding for overseas programs that treat HIV and malaria, drastically cutting NIH research funding —the Trump administration is signaling its contempt for evidence-based science and doing so in a way that demonstrates its sweeping disregard for human health and life. Federal agencies and employees may be required, for the moment, to follow these guidelines. But the path for nongovernmental medical and scientific organizations is clear: Every hospital, university, professional medical organization, residency program, scientific organization, and nursing and medical school needs to insist that these data remain accessible to the public. The science and health-care communities must also work together to make available all of the expunged data. This is beginning to happen: Individual researchers, doctors, students, and self-declared data hoarders have been racing to download as much of these crucial data as possible. Efforts such as the Internet Archive, the Library Innovation Lab Team, the End of Term Archive, and other groups to archive and host public data can prevent the erasure of years of scientific progress, and, by preserving this information, create a kind of scientific samizdat. As of yet, major medical and scientific organizations have not formally stepped into the void. Doctors for America has filed a lawsuit over the expunged data, claiming that the actions were unlawful and endanger the lives of Americans. But bigger groups such as the American Medical Association and the American Association for the Advancement of Science remain on the sidelines. A week after the initial purge, the agency that hosts PSNet was informed that the paper could be reposted on condition that the words transgender and LGBTQ be removed. The senior author rightly refused, stating that the researchers would remove those terms only if the Trump administration could cite verified data demonstrating that LGBTQ and trans communities did not have a higher risk of suicide. In that case, they would issue a correction. The fact the government would interfere with scientific work at this level at all is startlingly authoritarian. The Trump administration may feel that winning the election grants it the authority to alter science to its liking. It may even get nongovernmental institutions to temporarily parrot the party line by threatening to withhold funding. But the scientific community needs to stand its ground. Doctors and nurses have a particular responsibility, because we have sworn oaths to put patient welfare first. As Dr. Steven H. Woolf succinctly put it in a recent editorial: 'We must draw the line when the science is clear that a policy will increase the risk of disease, complications, or premature death.' The legal challenges to Trump's executive orders are piling up, though it will take time for these actions to grind through the courts. Fortunately, the medical and scientific communities need no such delay to determine our course of action. Commitment to patients and to scientific inquiry is our unequivocal guiding principle.
