Doctors, Leave Your Politics at the Clinic Door

Physician-initiated activism has surged in recent years. The pandemic only exacerbated the trend. Have we crossed a boundary? Has medical education forgotten history and started repeating its mistakes? Can we rebuild trust with all our patients, not just the ones who share our politics?

Consider two recent examples.

At the American Diabetes Association’s (ADA) meeting this year, attendees distributing an editorial criticizing the administration’s research budget cuts were forcibly removed, banned from the conference, and threatened with arrest. The backlash was immediate: resignations, public outrage, an apology video from ADA’s CEO, Charles Henderson. Much attention has been paid to this incident instead of what should be the main focus of the organization: diabetes research, care, and cures.

Meanwhile, the World Medical Association has been called on to bar the Israeli Medical Association from its ranks, and the British Medical Association has pushed to rescind a widely adopted definition of antisemitism.

These aren’t isolated incidents. They’re symptoms of a profession that has stopped asking narrower, more urgent questions: Should a practicing physician who is seeing patients be promoting personal politics within that space? Should medical conferences be about medicine or geopolitics?

Plenty of physicians run for office, serve on boards, push policy. Fine. That isn’t the issue I’m calling out. The issue is what happens in the exam room and at the podium of a professional conference.

Some argue advocacy is part of the job. Surgeon Alan Rogers, MBChB, MMed, MSc, points to physicians like Neil Aggett, MD, and Paul Farmer, MD, PhD, and argues that doctors in conflict zones “not only treat the injured but also bear witness to the humanitarian atrocities of war” — making advocacy for healthcare access “inherently political” when care is restricted by occupation or conflict. A family physician, Brinda Sarathy, MD, made a similar case in 2025, writing that physicians should “embrace the complex responsibilities that extend beyond the exam room.”

With respect to those views, I think we’re losing our way. Advocating for your patient and providing the best possible care is well within the Hippocratic and Osteopathic Oaths, and the Oath of Maimonides. It’s another matter to present your political views, tacitly or openly, while treating a patient or to let those views impact care. That erodes the sacred trust between physician and patient.

History offers a sharper warning. In the early-to-mid 20th century, eugenics pervaded medicine, not just in Germany, but it was taught in American and British medical schools too. When Nazism rose, physicians joined the National Socialist Party early and in disproportionate numbers, according to a 2012 study in the International Journal of Law and Psychiatry. Rudolf Ramm’s medical ethics textbook, which reframed the physician’s duty as service to the state rather than the patient, was mandatory reading for German and Austrian medical students. Ethical advances suffered; the good of the “Volk” (people) was placed above the welfare of the individual patient. This led to atrocities, then the Nuremberg Doctors’ Trial, then the Nuremberg Code, which governs research ethics to this day.

We have seen physicians refuse to treat patients over religion or political belief. Social media has only made it worse. As the bioethicist Thomas Huddle wrote, “Medicine is not (or ought not to be) politics, and political advocacy is not professional work.” Blending the two, he argued, “will undermine the necessary distinctiveness of who physicians are and what they do.” There’s a real difference between advocating for your patient and advocating for a cause.

So, what’s the fix? Let the profession keep drifting or take a step back and reclaim the honor medicine once held?

We need to get back to basics and focus only on treating the patient. There is no room for political activism in the clinical setting or in professional organizations, and physicians should think twice before turning to social media on hot-button issues.

On my first day of medical school, Max Gutensohn, DO, an icon of osteopathic medicine, walked to the blackboard and wrote three rules: The patient comes first. If you forget rule one, reread it. There are no other rules. Follow these, he told my class, and you’ll be an excellent physician; everything else is book knowledge and experience. He added one more piece of advice, one I’ve carried for 40 years: “Leave your politics at the door; there is no room for this within our noble profession.” That was before social media existed. It has never been more true than today.