I am a lot of different things to a lot of different people, but there is one thing that I have always stood out for and started out doing since high school: leading movement, starting initiatives, community organizing, and empowering people! And I have done so freely!
I can remember my earliest childhood years having just a fascination with healthcare, hospitals, and big glass buildings. I was always fascinated by the pristine neatness, the amazing people attempting to save and keep people healthy using their brilliant minds and charm, and just the overall sense of being cared for and seen. The reverence for this institution has been glorified in nearly every city within the U.S. and outside of the U.S., across second and third-world countries, and certainly to the average person who has benefited from it. And for people who are especially in their greatest state of need, at their most vulnerable, these individuals are often seen as the heroes, saviors, life-givers, soul-connectors. They get to be with people in their most intimate and vulnerable state. In most of the United States, this is the closest thing to being a mystical, other-worldly experience; it is the closest contact to the paradigm of the natural vs. supernatural, and the tension between life and death. It is incredible to think modern medicine has created systems that have been venerated, and how uniquely everyone in the U.S. experiences it.
I also distinctly remembered marveling at a Healthcare Administrator of a sitcom at three years old in a state of awe, and with some number of medical series later, like Royal Pains, Watson, and others, capturing my attention. At the same time, ironically, I also had the worst possible experience in pediatrics, which ended up destroying not just my comfort with healthcare, but also revealed what undergirds the surface of a system and how easy it is to destroy and traumatize people through it under the disguise of ‘good’ or of a necessary form of evil. So, I became terrified of setting foot in any clinic or hospital. It became a dynamic of what can go wrong at a state where things do go wrong. After this experience, I avoided healthcare like the plague and sought hard to find ways to exist in the world without it, how exactly to escape it.
Truthfully, to this day, although I have worked in hospitals and clinics, I would not set foot inside one unless I knew AND trusted the person I was seeing. I believe that most people share the same sentiments. Trust cannot be demanded.
The problem lies when there are differences in understanding of truth, a lack of love, and a lot of noise over almost every topic in healthcare, requiring a reexamination of body, soul, and spirit and their interconnection. What heals vs. what harms. But this literally also starts with clearing up “science,” re-examining what is “pseudoscience,” restructuring ethics, and medical ethics to the core by radically committing to not harm AND to do good.
This institute is not a passion project or mission. It’s my calling, and it is a movement born out of the real need to ‘Heal Science’ to usher in genuine healthcare reforms.
Here’s my professional, formal bio:
Diana Lutfi, JD, MSHCM, CPHQ, is a legal and bioethics scholar, independent policy consultant, and advocate of patients’ and providers’ rights. Marked by a history of public service, Diana founded sustainable high school programs as a student and pioneered a TEDx Youth movement in Southern California. She founded and taught a large (100+ students) credit-bearing worldviews course at UC Berkeley as an undergrad for four consecutive semesters. During the pandemic, Diana successfully challenged and changed Colorado Nursing Board rules, decreasing the red tape around reinstatements and personally guiding 50+ active emergency licensed nurses to regain active licenses. Diana has avidly worked to protect patients’ rights, helped physicians write policy proposals (successfully accepted by their medical societies), and authored a Supreme Court amicus on behalf of the larger detransitioners community (cited by Justice Thomas). In her past career, Diana was a nonprofit manager, events specialist, human-subject researcher, healthcare administrator, educator, and project consultant. She has extensively investigated issues around access, autonomy, bodily integrity, and coercion in healthcare. Most recently, Diana authored two letters coalescing 100+ Detransitioners, Advocates and Academics for Robert F. Kennedy Jr (5000+) which led to the founding of Healing Science Policy Institute, a grassroots community initiative and DC-based think tank to “Heal Science,” defend health freedom, and protect scientists, physicians, alternative providers, and others seeking to discuss controversies, find truth, and reform our healthcare system.