Abdul El-Sayed, the Democratic Senate candidate in Michigan, has emphasized his experience as a public health official serving the everyman, but his public health scholarship argues against American values in academic jargon.
"The single biggest problem that I've tried to bend my time and energy to solving is the fact that too many people in this country don't get the health care they need and deserve," he said on the campaign trail on Tuesday, citing his experience as the top public health official in Detroit and Wayne County.
But El-Sayed's academic work in public health has a more narrow focus. Several of the peer reviewed papers he has coauthored argue that when Arabs live in ethnically identical enclaves in America they have better health. El-Sayed's papers often argued that "acculturation," an academic term for adopting a nation's values and ways of life, causes the health of Arabs in America to decline.
The papers suggest that white neighbors pose a health hazard.
"It's pretty radical in the sense that it seems to be basically advocating Arab separatism and isolation by couching it in pseudoscientific terms," Ian Kingsbury, senior director of the Center for Accountability in Medicine at Do No Harm, told the Daily Caller News Foundation.
The El-Sayed campaign did not respond to requests for comment.
El-Sayed argued that Arab residents living with mostly other Arabs saw fewer low weight births than Arabs living among whites by comparing Dearborn to other areas of Michigan in a 2010 paper.
"As ethnic minority persons live and work in the USA and interact with the white majority, they acculturate," the paper reads. "In doing so, they may acquire cultural features from the majority that may" lessen protection against giving birth to low weight babies.
Echoing the same theory, El-Sayed argued in a 2008 paper that Arab mothers in Michigan did not have low weight births due to post-Sept. 11 discrimination because of social cohesion among a dense population of Arabs.
"They may be more socially cohesive and more likely to benefit from positive health effects," the paper reads.
A third 2009 study comparing the lifespans of Arabs and whites recommended more research on the impact of American assimilation on Arabs' health.
A fourth 2011 paper states that Arabs in America face "pressure to acculturate out of fear of discrimination" — cultural factors that encourage assimilating to American life — which may lead to worse health outcomes.
But in a departure from prior papers, the 2011 article argues that Arab culture is less healthy than white culture, invoking broad stereotypes about Arabs like the idea that they have "a more corpulent image of beauty."
Indeed, some researchers say that these sorts of epidemiology studies give an Ivory Tower shine to crude ethnic stereotypes.
"Culture is implicitly understood in this research to be a cluster of nebulous characteristics carried by ethnic group members," a 2003 criticism reads. "Such dogma exists in the field of racial and ethnic studies, which because it is highly ideological, is not subjected to the usual conceptual and methodological scrutiny."
Kingsbury also questioned other details about the research methods. In the 2010 paper, in order to examine whether the density of Arabs in a community affected health, the authors controlled for assimilation factors like immigration status.
"It's like measuring the quality of a baseball team and controlling for hitting, catching and pitching," Kinsgbury said.
El-Sayed and his coauthor acknowledged some limitations, including the fact that the authors did not account for socioeconomic factors other than the mother's education level. Maternal income was not considered. But the team did not show how adding and subtracting certain variables affected the analysis.
"The reality is that this is lousy scholarship that does not support the conclusion that he makes," Kingsbury said. "The state of scholarship across health disciplines, but especially in public health, is so unbelievably appalling. The gatekeeping that is supposed to be going on in the peer review process is so much tilted toward ideological conformity rather than rigor."
Other experts defended the work.
"He has published with a very esteemed public health expert, Dr. Sandro Galea. Sandro, whom I happen to know and respect, and is now the dean of the School of Public Health at Washington University," said Sally Satel, a senior fellow of the American Enterprise Institute, to the DCNF. "These papers look sound to me."
Galea did not respond to a request for comment.
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