Dr. James Nuzzo, a friend of CTA (see his recent CTA podcast interview), has recently carried out an investigation into the deployment of woke concepts in the medical research literature. Anyone perusing recent academic journals specialising in therapy and mental health cannot fail to notice the increasing numbers of papers clearly informed by Critical Social Justice. It is very helpful to now have some empirical data from the associated field of medical literature that indicates support for this anecdotal experience and provides a more granular picture of this phenomenon. James has helpfully written a summary of his research below and he provides a link to his much more detailed report on Substack.
Investigating the Prevalence of Woke Medicine Concepts
Like many readers, I have been concerned about the excessive, politically-motivated, and unhelpful focus on group identity characteristics of patients (i.e., Woke Medicine). Many of us have sensed that the research literature in this space has grown exponentially in recent years, but I am unaware of previous attempts to quantify it. When did it all start? Has Woke Medicine peaked? Are some Woke Medicine concepts more popular than others? These were some of the questions that motivated my recent report, “Woke Medicine Terminology, 2000-2024.”
In the report, I presented results from searches of over 50 Woke words and phrases in the titles and abstracts of research articles indexed in PubMed. With some guidance from James Lindsay’s Plain-Language Encyclopedia of Social Justice Terminology, I searched for various words and phrases related to race, sex/gender, epistemology, hate and violence, etc. Examples of terms that I searched included “antiracism,” “birthing person,” “Black Lives Matter,” “climate justice,” “decolonize,” “gender bias,” “George Floyd,” “health equity,” “Indigenous knowledge,” “intersectionality,” “lived experience,” “microaggressions,” “positionality,” “safe space,” “social justice,” and “white supremacy.”
The graphs that I generated show trends in use of these Woke terms between 2000 and 2024. Below is one of example graph. It displays the number of articles indexed in PubMed that included “transgender,” “cisgender,” “LGBTQ,” “queer,” and other gender and sexual identity words in their titles or abstracts. Use of most of the words increased noticeably between 2019 and 2021, followed by further increases each until 2024, which is when the analysis ended. The word “transgender” exhibited its initial exponential increase between 2015 and 2016 – a few years before the other words and phrases. In 2024 alone, the word “transgender” appeared in the titles or abstracts of 2,697 articles indexed in PubMed.
When all the graphs in the report were considered in total, the overall trend was an exponential rise in use of Woke terminology in articles indexed in PubMed between 2019 and 2020. My speculation is that this result correlates with three events that occurred around the same time: the COVID-19 pandemic (January 2020), the death of George Floyd (May 2020), and the 2020 U.S. presidential election (November 2020). Increased government funding into these areas also likely played a role. Moreover, the election of Donald Trump in 2016 was probably what raised the temperature within academia such that when the events in 2020 took place, the water boiled over, and we entered a more established state of Woke Medicine.
By James L. Nuzzo, PhD, is an exercise scientist and men’s health researcher. Dr. Nuzzo has published over 80 research articles in peer-reviewed journals. He writes regularly about exercise, men’s health, and academia at The Nuzzo Letter on Substack. Dr. Nuzzo is also active on X @JamesLNuzzo.
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