CisMedicine – TransMedicine
While The Once and Future Immunity about vaccines for RSV was being drafted last week, the Cass Review on Gender Medicine hit the news headlines. Cass trenchantly critiques gender medicine as it has been practiced in the Western world in the last decade. These 2 items intersect as hopefully this post will make clear.
Trenchant though it was, the 400+ pages of Cass were tame compared to Kathleen Stock’s 6 page take on it – How a Cult Captured the NHS.
If the rapidly increasing rates of teenage girls wanting to transition and the toxic debate surrounding gender medicine have concerned you, Stock’s account is easier to grasp than Cass. Some headlines have encapsulated the Stock message in even briefer form – it’s time to Follow the Evidence and not the Ideology.
Stock outright says Cass has pulled her punches. She has spent time explaining what Evidence Based Medicine is when she could just have said – ‘at least in young people, this transition stuff is nuts’.
Had Cass been asked to give a view about drilling holes in skulls to let the demons out, as once used to happen, would she, Stock asks, have said we need to run proper studies and get follow up data and only if the follow up data demonstrate benefits should we embark on treatments like this?
Why was Cass forced to argue that we need follow up data to justify what we are doing? Why can’t she just say this is plain crazy – as we do with Female Genital Mutilation?
Others have pitched the issues in terms of Where are the Adults?
The Stock answer is because Gender Medicine is a Cult – something Cass can’t say. The rapidity with which transgender issues engulfed teenage girls in the last decade, who were almost untouched by a previous 5 decades of transgender medicine and the toxicity of the debate do conjure up something cult-like.
Operational Criteria for a Cult
Stock lists criteria for a Cult.
- Initiates share in a new transcendent truth
- A small group gate-keep access to this truth
- There are symbols or phrases only initiates fully understand
- Initiates abandon traditional support systems
- They are love-bombed by other cult members
- Expressed hatred for any who question the truth helps cult bonding
She adds another element. Gender Medicine Clinicians (GMCs) justify an unwillingness to participate in outcome studies on the basis that treating people as research objects rather than people risks damaging important clinical relationships.
GMCs, Stock says, aim at fixing a young person’s soul and once this is done they take no responsibility for adverse health events. Extrapolating from this updates of an old saying – ‘The operation was a success, pity the patient died’ – she says, if GMCs can’t spot a harm, they cannot be told to First Do No Harm
There is a sense that both sides view Judgements of Harm as Value Laden. Science apparently views itself as a domain striving to avoid contamination by value-laden subjectivity – a domain Cass reaches for.
Ideology
Ideology today implies a biased point of view. A selective culling of the facts to fit a point of view. Ideologies overlap with religious belief systems, even cults, rather than science.
Ideology originally meant the science of having ideas – a step on the road from philosophy to psychology. Dealing with the differences between the ideas of science and other belief systems were its raison d’être.
Is Evidence not Ideology a call to science or an Ideological badge?
E not I stems from and is underpinned by Evidence Based Medicine (EBM – 1991). Standard histories of EBM-1991 contrast a turn to making clinical judgements on the basis of evidence generated to deal with specific situations rather than following the views of medical authorities, which EBM-1991 advocates held to be value-laden and subjective.
A belief system’s myths of origin, however, may be at odds with its practices.
An alternate account of the origin of EBM-1991 stresses the role of Eli Lilly’s defense of Prozac against charges it can trigger suicidality. A series of 1990 reports from clinicians claimed that, using traditional approaches to establishing causality, it was evident that Prozac could trigger suicidality – God Does not Role Dice, Should Doctors.
The traditional clinical approach used challenge-dechallenge-rechallenge (CDR), dose responsiveness, responsiveness to antidotes and a consensus between patient and doctor on the lack of a comparably convincing alternate explanation, to establish causality. This approach can be characterized as Evident Based Medicine (EBM -1990). It hinges on evidence specific to a case.
Lilly argued that case reports of suicidality on Prozac were anecdotal and the plural of anecdotes is not data. The original phrase was the plural of anecdote is data – otherwise Google wouldn’t work. Randomized controlled trials (RCTs), Lilly also claimed, are the science of cause and effect.
The RCTs Lilly appealed to were not designed to investigate whether Prozac could cause suicidality. Despite not being designed to establish cause and effect, and a design that hid some suicidality, there was an excess of suicidal events on Prozac compared to placebo. When company breaches of FDA regulations were reversed, this excess was statistically significant.
EBM-1991, as practiced by Lilly and all companies developing all drugs since, offers general views. Even if conducted by angels, and independent, RCTs point to average effects in non-existent people, rather than offer specific clinical evidence.
Clinical trials are treatment trials rather than drug trials. We can easily tweak RCTs, for instance, to show antidepressants causing or apparently preventing suicide. Or tweak an RCT so that it can use a problem like suicidality a drug causes to hide the suicidality that drug might cause – See God and Dice.
Company studies, in addition, permit no access to study data. Guideline makers don’t have the data. Regulators only have a notional access to data. Many company studies are not reported. All reported studies are ghostwritten. In these the patients may not exist. A significant proportion of negative studies are reported as positive in the most prestigious medical journals. Regulators and editors know this but say nothing.
The bulk of EBM-1991 evidence is of this kind. Calls to Follow the Evidence not the Ideology is the Ideology. EBM-1991 is a Trans-Medicine, a cuckoo in the nest of what was Cis-Medicine – Evident Based Medicine.
The Trans-Medicine Cult
- Initiates share in a new transcendent truth
The original medical advocates of EBM-1991 appear to have believed their approach reached for something that transcended clinical particulars. Today’s adherents heed this supposedly transcendent evidence rather than the reports of their patients because they will fail their professional examinations, be excommunicated, otherwise. Or cast into outer darkness by medical regulators or the management of health service companies if they don’t.
EBM-1991 pitches randomization as a miracle that transubstantiates unavoidably hazardous chemicals into sacraments – something that can only benefit and cannot harm.
- A small group gate-keep access to this truth
No doctors have access to the data that underpins their practice. They take what they are told on trust.
Those of us seeking the sacraments can only access them through Medical Guardians at the Gate, just as likely to be disciplined as Clerics might have been if they strayed from a sanctioned truth.
- There are symbols or phrases only initiates fully understand
Only the initiates of EBM-1991 understand the miraculous properties of randomization. Austin Bradford-Hill who ran the first RCT did not believe in this miraculous property. He thought randomization was simply a method of fair allocation. When it came to deciding on the effects of a drug, a good clinical interview was more important for him and if randomization got in the way of that it should be discarded.
Louis Lasagna, who introduced RCTs into the 1962 Food and Drugs Act, did not believe in the randomization at the heart of EBM-1991. His view was that at best RCTs tell a doctor about average effects in non-existent people – they do not tell a doctor how to treat the person in front of them.
Few doctors realize company ‘studies’ are assays designed to get a license and secure marketing share – Health’s Illusions. Designed to capture clinical practice. They are not designed to inform clinical practice and they go out of their way to hide harms.
- Initiates abandon traditional support systems
The traditional support system for doctors was a case conference where colleagues were invited to suggest other ways to explain the case being reported and ideally ways to test differing explanations – as in the cases that gave rise to EBM-1990. The goal of a conference was to come to a consensus view. Follow-up reports were encouraged if new evidence came to light that might confirm the provisional view or lead to a revision.
The cases that formed EBM-1990 were reported in medical journals, creating a Case-Law medicine. They are no longer reported there. These case reports of harms are now almost the only medical evidence that meets legal and scientific criteria for evidence – full access to all pertinent data. Company studies are essentially Hearsay.
Doctors previously had a free supply of Drugs and Therapeutics Bulletins and alerts about new drugs and possible hazards but these stopped two decades ago and have been replaced by Guidelines, built on a ghostwritten literature, which only mention the benefits of treatments and not their harms.
- They are love-bombed by other cult members
Many physicians, especially those with some academic credentials or aspirations are recruited by pharmaceutical companies to be Key-Opinion-Leaders (KOLs). This requires no work – the material they talk to is prepared for them. Articles with their names on them are ghostwritten. They are invited to speak at attractive locations – getting business class travel and often being chaperoned around. For simply letting their name be used they receive substantial remuneration.
Those with whom they liaise from pharmaceutical companies or PR companies will know all about their personal lives, the names of family members etc and company folk routinely enquire about the wellbeing of the KOL’s significant others – as friends might. They will know the KOL’s sexual or other predilections. Everything possible is done to massage the ego of those chosen to spread the good news of salvation.
- Expressed hatred for any who question the truth helps cult bonding
There are ginger-groups, astroturf patient groups, public relations agencies and others employed to spread disinformation about those who might attempt to question the data presented about medicines particularly the data on harms.
The establishment endorses the sacramental nature of prescription drugs. Louis Appleby, responsible for steering the British Suicide Prevention Ship, views thinking psychotropic drugs can cause harm is a cult-belief.
June Raine, recent CEO of the British drugs regulator, brushed aside family concerns about the permanent sexual dysfunction Accutane causes, with a ‘Doctors can surely fix that – they can even convert men into women’.
There is a climate of fear at odds with the openness of science. Lawyers for BMA/BMJ AMA/NEJM advise against publishing material that might displease pharmaceutical companies – Silencing Doctors.
EBM-1991 is Evidence Phobic. It obliterates real people who fail to respond to treatment or suffer adverse effects, in favor of an unsullied image of non-existent average fictions.
The Mythic Basis of EBM-1991
EBM-1991 is underpinned by a myth – namely that we are using chance to control bias. The modus operandi of Science, in contrast, from its seventeenth century origins, has been to use bias to control chance. A jury of observers with a range of biases viewing an experimental event, were invited to come to a consensus as to what they had witnessed and its likeliest testable explanation.
We began to collect statistics on population or group events in the nineteenth century aimed at accounting for stochastic aspects of social, physiological, chemical or physical events.
Statistical tests claiming to control chance only emerged in the twentieth century. Their claims hinge on appropriate applications of models. Company RCTs primarily deploy two inappropriate models.
The model underpinning statistical significance tests hinges on an expert whose views are invariably correct. This model clearly has no place in clinical practice and almost all medical statisticians call for its elimination. Initially statisticians called for a replacement of statistical significance with a confidence interval model.
Confidence intervals aimed at managing nineteenth century telescope measurement errors. This model is rarely appropriate in clinical studies as the heterogeneity of clinical populations, clinical disorders and our responses to medicines is not a matter of measurement error.
These tests gave rise to the myth that using them we use chance to control our bias. The appeal of this claim lies in our concern to make something as important as therapeutic poisoning (giving medicines) or mutilation (surgery) bias-free.
Surrendering our judgements as to what we have seen and how to explain it to an algorithm, however, is not a way to manage our bias. We would not let a jury in a legal trial come to a verdict by turning to an algorithm. Science, as noted above, aims at a consensus on real events. Most of our biases have some basis in reality. When asked to practice according to company figures we are being asked to adjust our practice to something with almost no basis in reality.
Worse again, most EBM-1991 trials give drugs for risk factors rather than diseases – because that’s where the money is. ‘This drug works’ means it has an effect on a marker that will make companies money rather than save or enhance lives. Almost no company studies that regulators approve for license purposes show lives saved.
Fear in a Handful of Numbers
In 1860s France, people began to weigh themselves on scales. Ten years later a new disorder was described – anorexia nervosa.
Fasting, previously linked to aspirations for holiness, began to transition into a realm shaped by notions of health and beauty. Doctors began to replace religious figures as the appropriate people to consult.
In the 1920s, eating disorders became epidemic as public weighing scales had attached plates giving ideal weights for height and sex.
In the 1960s, weighing scales migrated into our bathrooms and eating disorders dramatically increased.
These increases in Western settings fueled speculation about toxic factors linked to the role of women in the West. While these may play a part, weighing scales are a driving factor and eating disorders have now spread to other cultures.
Osteoporosis was described at the same time as anorexia nervosa. It remained rare, only diagnosed when it led to otherwise inexplicable fractures and not otherwise impinging on the lives of women.
In the 1980s, companies marketing bisphosphonate drugs gave free bone scanners to clinics, knowing that even the smallest amount of variation outside a norm would lead to prescriptions of their drugs. Osteoporosis diagnoses mushroomed. One third of women over 50 are now affected, and rather than hike or swim, they take their pills and do less and less. Magazines for teenage girls feature articles on this condition lying in wait for them.
We now have a lot more hospitalizations for serious fractures from abnormally thickened bones. Our health service companies, or NHS, employ staff to run bone scan services – we employ staff to sell company drugs to us.
Measurements have facilitated interactions between medicine and eating disorders for over a century and osteoporosis for several decades. Measurements can motivate and be used to achieve things, such as a four-minute mile. They can also capture our attention maladaptively. If we cannot measure all aspects of our lives and integrate these into a metric that lets us know how we are doing overall, we risk being derailed.
Operationalism
An incoming computer linked operational tide from the 1950s began to replace medical diagnoses with markets for blood pressure, lipid, glucose and other measurable risk factors.
This tide was noted in other domains of life. Herbert Marcuse was concerned at the uses corporations might put figures to, and the risks that metrics might empty out culture and make us all unidimensional. Michel Foucault, in contrast, saw an opportunity to deploy metrics to replace government from the top down with governance from the bottom up.
Operationalism impacted on psychiatry in 1980 with DSM-III, whose criteria were explicitly designated as operational. While DSM told clinicians their judgement needed to be brought to bear on the use of criteria, a formula that 5 out of 9 features are consistent with a diagnosis of X did an end-run around professional judgement.
The combination of operationalism and measuring instruments (rating scales) has produced epidemics of conditions like Autistic Spectrum Disorders (ASD), ADHD and Rapid Onset Gender Dysphoria. The rapidity with which these conditions sweep in suggests that both the minds of professionals and those who consult them have become plastic.
Recent reports about Generation Sicknote starkly illustrate the eclipse of psychiatrists as professionals. The data now indicates that the 18-35 age generation are more disabled than people over the age of 35 – see The Great Silence for more on this graph. This new sick cohort have mental rather than physical problems.
Dashboard Nervosa
The Covid pandemic brought dashboards into play, an operation that transformed the public into an individual and created a Dashboard Nervosa. Displaying figures for rates of infection, hospitalization and death dragooned public opinion behind the task of getting the figures back to normal. It coarsened debate and generated hostility toward anyone, even pregnant women, who might doubt the means proposed to restore normalcy.
The same dashboards play a part in social media exchanges. Participants see the extent to which their views are appreciated, the extent that is to which they reflect what some group finds acceptable.
A recognition of the influence of Pandemic and Social Media Dashboards might have can be traced back to the political discovery a century ago of the dynamics of crowds. Business quickly realized the same dynamics might underpin fashions.
An increasing ability to create fashionable Gifts, added to the algorithms that transform a Gift into the answer for our latest concern can make these dynamics difficult to resist.
Doctors Bearing Gifts
Shipwreck of the Singular outlines a transition from a world where bettering ourselves focussed on holiness, to one which spoke of authenticity and now to one centred on health. The same dynamics apply across all domains.
Cults arose as offshoots from established ‘religious’ belief systems. Similar phenomena can now be seen in health. Those questioning their gender are called on to choose salvation now and transition and to beware those who might lead them astray.
Religions offer us a chance to delegate our narcissism to a God, or a transcendent truth assisted by earthly intermediates – Holy Books, Offices of the Inquisition, Magisteria, and clerics. Health offers medicines’ regulators, like FDA, leading journals, and doctors through which the sacraments are made available – with neither our medical clerics nor we the public knowing much about the extent to which Health’s Illusions can deceive.
Religious sacraments, relics or rituals could only do good. Health has a problem – its sacraments, its Gifts – which is the German for poison – as Paracelsus said can harm. Giving drugs aims at bringing good out of evil (a poison) – an exercise that ethicists and moralists balk at contemplating.
Mentioning that our role is bringing good out of the use of a poison leads progressives, hoping to realize an earthly paradise by levelling up access to medicines, to hiss and block their ears.
Established religions, for good or bad, acted like the central pillar that kept Japanese pagodas up. They created a space, within which we could debate and exercise our judgement – a space for adults. At their best they supported rationality and even science.
As the magic of technology replaced the magic of religion, a tent pole replaced the pillar holding a space up in which we could debate and contest things. The pole was held up by ropes on either side with equal and opposite pulls from teams on Left and Right.
Both pillar and pole have collapsed in the face of operationalism and claims that only numbers offer a rationality that counts – a rationality that knows the price of everything but value of nothing, and leaves no place for Adults. The cynicism this engenders has flattened two centuries of differences between Left and Right and any space in which values count.
Rather than holding a space open for Adults to tackle the trickiest of all problems – brining good out of evil – like financiers at the time of the financial crisis. doctors now operate from a position of moral hazard. We should know our products come with terrible risks and should tell people about these, especially the many we put on meds who have nothing wrong with them. We neither tell them nor when they are harmed stand with them and acknowledge our role in what has happened to them – we look the other way.
Because they are prescription only, doctors are the consumers of drugs. Companies figure doctors rarely have a thought in their heads not put there by them. They see doctors as more naïve consumers than teenagers facing a rack of designer clothes.
We have a pharmaceuticalization crisis with drugs chasing drugs leading to falling life expectancy and fertility rates to rival 2007’s financialization crisis, where money chased money while poverty rose.
It’s not just our chemicals that wipe out the ability to make love along with sperm counts. For us to get chemicals, doctors have to make us sick. They and we conspire to do this – in an attempt to fill a vacuum left by the disappearance of religion.
The original phrase here was Augustine’s ‘our hearts are made for thee O Lord and cannot rest until they find their rest in thee’.
It is difficult to blame individual doctors when professional associations, like the RCPCH or RCPsych, the AAP or APA, have become little more than retail outlets for pharma companies – The Once and Future Immunity, RCPsych: Suicide Note, and Sex, Death and the RCPsych.
Pharmaceutical company business models would have us all sick with multiple conditions. The dynamics of operationalism now mean we can expect other fashions to succeed the gender medicine fashion. In Korea, and elsewhere, it seems fashionable to foreswear having children with fertility rates falling among younger women to the lowest (0.6) in the world.
We need a Review, not just of an incidental fashion like Gender Medicine, but of the broader dynamics. The Gender Medicine debates have left some wondering – Where have the Adults Been?
The phrase Adults in the Room is linked to Yanis Varoufakis’s account of the Greek financial crisis, in which the rationality of financial numbers, we call neoliberalism, was pitted against the wellbeing of a patient/country.
Several decades ago, some doctors noted that the public were transitioning from seeing the Magic of medicine as lying in a doctor who might use pills to seeing the Magic as lying in pills like Prozac.
The Magic of Science applied to clinical medicine must lie in an attempt by doctor and patient to come to a consensus. Is a Cis-Medicine, like this, possible in a world dominated by Trans-Medicine?
The idea that objectivity comes from a consensus among biased observers on how best to explain a case may offer a pointer. Just as we need Pharma input into treatment induced injury cases, gender dysphoria cases need observers who, Hilary Cass-like, are willing to concede that transitioning may sometimes be appropriate, with diagnoses hinging on consensus and an openness to revision in the light of new evidence.
In a Flat World, we need spaces where Adult, Scientific, conversations can happen.
I think it won’t always be possible to come to a consensus but can be an acceptable provisional consensus which openly admits the limitations on a ‘best we can do for now’ basis .
David Bohm was a physicist who had an interest in the possibilities of not necessarily coming to a consensus but of gathering people together in groups who consciously attempted to put aside the idea of defending a position or theory, in open discussion.
. That rarely takes place in scientific institutions . His Bohm groups have survived and expanded but it would be impossible to think they could be set up in a non hierarchal un corrupted – watered down manner in any of our health institutions.
Bohm Dialogue (also known as Bohmian Dialogue or “Dialogue in the Spirit of David Bohm”) is a freely flowing group conversation in which participants attempt to reach a common understanding, experiencing everyone’s point of view fully, equally and nonjudgmentally. This can lead to new and deeper understanding
S
Thanks for this comment that’s directly on the money.
I resisted the temptation in this post that was too long anyway to point out that SSRIs are puberty blockers and who knows what happens to a child before, in early or mid-puberty who’s genitals go numb – who do they turn to? Is there an Adult who might understand what could be going on? Unlikely – perhaps nearly certainly no.
I think great medical folk, concerned medics, doctors alarmed at the epidemics miss the way in which we have been highjacked and our concerns get used to promote EBM-1991 – which acts to pour oil on the flames.
D
The transgender cult is the ultimate in disease-mongering. People born with perfectly normal, healthy bodies are told they need fantastically expensive medical interventions all throughout their lives. And for what end? Leaving aside the question of whether someone born with a perfectly normal healthy male or female body would want to change his or sex, the fact remains that this cannot be done. No human being, no mammal has ever changed it sex. That has never happened — not even one time in the history of the universe.
The choice is not between being male or female. The choice is between being a normal healthy male or a mutilated one.
Some day this transgender cult will be a thoroughly repudiated as medicinal bleeding, lobotomy, insulin coma, clitoridectomies as a cure for female masturbation, and hysterctomies as a cure for hysteria.
And when that happens, the people who went along with this will just proclaim “the science changed” and breezily grant themselves absolution, just as Piers Morgan did in regards to the modified RNA shots.
Patrick
Strong words and its a topic that generates strong feelings. But we have moved beyond disease mongering. When DM came up as a concept first – Bipolar Disorder, Social Phobia etc were being actively sold by companies as ways to sell pills. This is not what’s happening with Autistic Spectrum Disorder or Rapid Onset Gender Dysphoria or even ADHD in Europe.
We have crossed some threshold where once teens were focused on having a meaningful life in terms of some religious or other social structure and then moved on to having an authentic life and now have moved to have something intensely bodily individual – Eat Vegan, Go to the Gym, Take Zoloft.
The message from social media suggests a sharing of collective experience with others but there is less engagement with others – folk seem increasingly to be a collection of anonymous anomie’d units and like the cartoon says this anomie gives rise to a Wish to be Sick – to have a label for discontent.
Hard to know where it will end – feels more like with a whimper than with a bang
D
Nothing to see here, says Australia
Australia Ignores Mounting Evidence Against Child Gender Treatments
https://vision.org.au/news/australia-ignores-mounting-evidence-against-child-gender-treatments/
The Australian Christian Lobby (ACL) says federal and state governments are continuing to ignore mounting evidence against suppressing puberty in children with gender dysphoria. The UK’s recent release of a landmark report into the medical treatment of such children known as the Cass Review exposed an extreme lack of clinical evidence to support the practice, and a worrying risk of harm to minors.
The British Medical Journal also recently published a report that found the use of puberty blockers and cross-sex hormones in children to be “incompatible with medical ethics” and stated that the evidence used to inform pro-gender-affirming guidelines was “inconclusive and unacceptable”.
These reports have prompted the UK and Ireland to instigate bans on the use of puberty blockers. The Netherlands which pioneered their use 30 years ago is now having second thoughts and calling for fresh research. Belgian pediatricians and psychiatrists are also questioning their use while France, Finland and Sweden are under increasing pressure to ban the blockers.
Scotland’s NHS is the latest medical authority to pause prescribing puberty blockers. The Sandyford Clinic in Glasgow also said new patients aged 16 or 17 would no longer receive cross-sex hormone treatments until they were 18.
The ACL’s National Director of Politics Wendy Francis declared after the Scottish announcement that: “The writing is on the wall for Australian gender clinics. Every delay now only deepens the scandal. The very institution meant to be protecting Australian children is stubbornly ignoring evidence that they are doing the very opposite. To the detriment of our nation’s vulnerable children, Australian gender clinics have adopted a stubborn unwillingness to consider the UK’s landmark Cass Review of gender services for under-18s.”
“The clear indications from this review is that the use of puberty blockers on children is a dangerous experiment and should be stopped immediately before more children suffer lifelong consequences. For the many Australian families who have been negatively impacted by the ‘affirmation model’ of treatment, the refusal of clinicians and politicians to follow the global research is unconscionable. Australian children deserve the same high level of care that is being recommended for gender dysphoric children in nations such as the UK, the Netherlands, Belgium, France, Finland and Sweden.”
“While the world moves away from the use of gender medicine now known to cause harm in children, Australia seems to be adamant that there’s nothing to see here.
Federal Health Minister, Mark Butler, has tried to sidestep the Cass Review’s findings by claiming Australian gender clinics follow different treatment pathways to the UK. Given the gravity of this issue, this fabrication is disgraceful.
Australia’s model of care is based on (what was) the UK’s model, and promotes the use of puberty blockers, cross-sex hormones, and other ‘affirmation’ measures as a
first point of care for children,” Ms. Francis asserted.
“Australia must stop kowtowing to the likes of ACON which is, in effect, a government-funded activist body, and start paying attention to the evidence. Our delay is setting more children up for irreversible harm”, she concluded.
The ACL is advocating for an immediate nationwide suspension on puberty blockers and cross-sex hormones for minors, and for an urgent independent inquiry into the outcomes of ‘gender-affirming’ healthcare for children.
Fads come and go for the kids, but the medicating of children creeping up the tree of the adults is pretty hot stuff. The amounts of antidepressant prescribing to children is through the roof with too many dangers for their long-term.
We saw this when the jibby-jabs, originally designed for the older generation, trickled down to toddlers and babies, and that is extremely bad news.
RSV for pregnant ‘people’; where is that going to end.
It would be a mistake to think Australia is any different. Eight years ago the BMJ carried articles saying puberty blockers and cross sex hormones should be given instantly to any child who even had a whiff of an idea they might need to transition. The British General Medical Council brought out a policy endorsing this and making it a crime to say anything untoward about these treatments or for any other doctor to go against the recommendations of a gender specialist.
The Australians may have taken their lead from the progressive Brits, who to some extent led the way on a lot of this.
D
It isn’t just about selling drugs. It’s about creating a compliant citizenry.
People who need — or believe they need — huge amounts of fantastically expensive medical interventions all throughout their lives are very unlikely to rock the boat.
Agree with a lot of this – but is there a they who are doing this to us – or living under a tyranny of numbers are we doing it to ourselves. Of course there are those who are profiting in this scenario but I don’t figure they had the foresight to see that going down this route would lead to the outcomes we now have. Perhaps I’m wrong
D
Is there a meeting in the middle, here…
Things were going wrong way before Covid reared its head. But after Covid was there a massive shift in peoples’ perceptions.
So many well-informed tried to raise warnings and were censored by youtube, twitter, facebook, etc. and that is still going on.
Censorship to speak out became a no-no. It was not allowed.
Populations had to comply and there was no answer-back.
You couldn’t travel, you had to comply or lose your job, any injuries were dismissed.
It was a catch-all for all.
It was all extremely heavy-handed by politicians, the police and people largely had to do as they were told, or else…
The Covid Inquiry has become a national joke.
My point is are people naturally servile and are they frightened easily.
Have psychiatrists and GPs been given too much power.
ADHD has pills and the kids will take them.
Bipolar has a massive choice of pills; bipolar is a polarizing point –
The ‘average’ psychiatrist and GP, is fuelling the ‘want’ for pills, without data, without any proof the drugs are successful, and with the full backing of Health Systems and most Politicians.
‘They’ encompasses many strands; and it is ‘squirrelling’ them out ‘bit by bit’ which David has done for decades, but it is an uphill task when largely nobody in positions of influence replies.
It is a really bad deal when acceptance has become so high profile, and it has gone the way it has gone without seeing any curbs on the horizon.
The transgender/gender r thing has become a political ‘hot potato’; so thank god for J.K. Rowling
J.K. Rowling
@jk_rowling
·
3h
‘In years to come we will look back at the damage done to children with incredulity and horror.’
Dr David Bell, whistleblower at the discredited Tavistock gender clinic
J.K. Rowling@jk_rowlingApr 21
No objective truth or scientific fact will shake a fundamentalist. There’s literally no limit to the nonsense they’ll speak, the lies they’ll tell or the derision they’ll brave rather than question the faith around which they’ve organised their lives.
Annie
My point is the same thing could be said of Louis Appleby or most presidents of APA, RCPsych or whoever – the main criterion for saying we are not a cult or enablers for what has become a Cult now is for the mainstream to say – we are bigger than you.
JK Rowling’s – they will brave any derision. Would that doctors would brave derision for saying these drugs can harm and my patient has been harmed and what are you going to do about it. There is no evidence at present that any College or Professional Association is going to question the current faith or perhaps what might be better called the current modus operandi
David
I guess we could say that Pharma have achieved a Disease Mongering goal. They no longer have to go out and sell diseases – just like Automobile makers no longer have to go out and sell cars – Urban Living like Healthy Living is now built around an assumption you need Cars and Drugs
Original Ill-Health or At Risk Status has replaced Original Sin
D
What is interesting about this film ‘Playing God’ is not just the harrowing stories, but how they are fighting back, and, the lawyer, who has many very strong things to say, such as:
“All the medics and the doctors I have spoken to, apart from a handful, haven’t read, bothered to read it, read their code, employment contracts, certainly haven’t bothered to read the specific guidance about the law of informed consent, its like who do these people think they are…….
https://www.ukcolumn.org/video/playing-god
Anna de Buisseret
@AnnadeBuisseret
I am a senior Employment lawyer specialising in discrimination law, disability discrimination inc. mental health discrimination and human rights
https://twitter.com/AnnadeBuisseret
D
Re Your comment above ‘Is there an Adult who might understand what could be going on?
This article perfectly illustrates how how children and youngsters are being sacrificed and used for shameless political and medical ping pong
Health
Cass gender report: Scottish Government defends decision to inform young people of puberty blockers pause before public
Following the publishing of Dr Hilary Cass’ report, which studied gender identity services for young people in England and which provided recommendations for the NHS in England, the Scottish Government has faced demands to follow the UK Government in implementing the recommendations.
Joseph Anderson
Published 23rd Apr 2024, 15:02 BST
The Scottish Government has been accused of being more concerned with “holding together their fragile pact with the dogmatic Greens” than the healthcare of vulnerable young people, according to the Scottish Conservatives, as the government outlined its response to the Cass review.
It comes as the minister for public health, Jenny Minto, appeared before the Scottish Parliament and said it was right that young trans people and their families were the first to hear of a temporary ban on puberty blockers, rather than elected representatives.
Following the publishing of Dr Hilary Cass’ report, which studied gender identity services for young people in England and which provided recommendations for the NHS in England, the Scottish Government has faced demands to follow the UK Government in implementing the recommendations.
The Sandyford clinic in Glasgow is Scotland’s only facility for trans young people. Picture: John Devli
At Holyrood, Ms Minto faced repeated questions from opposition politicians as to the Scottish Government’s position on Dr Cass’ recommendations.
Among the report’s 32 recommendations are a call for gender services to operate “to the same standards” as other health services for children and young people, with “a holistic assessment” of people referred, including screening for neurodevelopmental conditions such as autism, and a mental health assessment.
England’s health service is urged to review its policy on giving children masculinising or feminising hormones from the age of 16, urging “extreme caution”.
Dr Cass, a retired consultant paediatrician, said there “should be a clear clinical rationale for providing hormones at this stage rather than waiting until an individual reaches 18”.
Ms Minto told the chamber that the Scottish Government is taking the report into consideration, but stressed that Dr Cass’ review investigated gender identity services in England, and as such the recommendations were tailored to England’s healthcare system, not Scotland’s.
The minister for public health added that “it is not for politicians nor civil servants to make clinical decisions about clinical pathways”, and that “these decisions should always be made carefully, based in the best evidence available and be made only by clinicians responsible for providing such care”.
Both NHS Greater Glasgow and Clyde and NHS Lothian, where Scotland’s two gender identity clinics are located, have announced a temporary halt on prescribing puberty blockers to young trans people while a pilot study in England is carried out.
The pause will not affect the small number of young people in Scotland, who are currently prescribed puberty blockers for gender dysphoria, which numbers around 70, nor the much larger number of children prescribed puberty blockers for precocious puberty.
Ms Minto added it was “absolutely correct” that NHSGGC and NHS Lothian “took time to speak to all the young people who be impacted by this”.
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In a question to Ms Minto, the Scottish Green’s Gillian Mackay said: “Many young people will be concerned about the effect of last week’s decision to pause the prescription of hormones on their healthcare journey, and our solidarity should be with them. We need to work as quickly as possible to ensure that the concerns of the clinicians are resolved so that they can provide this care with confidence.”
Ms Mackay also called for the Scottish Government to follow the suggestion of the charity Scottish Trans, which said Scotland could set up its own research study.
Speaking after the ministerial statement, Ms Mackay added: “The last few weeks have been really hard for a lot of LGBTQ+ people, and trans people in particular. They are seeing their rights being treated like a political football.
“We have worked closely with the Scottish Government to ensure that our focus is on finding a way through the current issues, including the pause, and on delivering long-term sustainable funding for gender identity services.”
“As well as passing the buck to the health board for the decision to pause puberty blockers to new patients, this statement does not confirm whether the government will implement any of the 32 Cass review recommendations, nor does it address the cut to gender care services.
“This nationalist coalition claims that it supports young people experiencing gender distress, yet members of its own government have publicly dismissed the findings of an evidence-based, expert report.
“Today’s exercise in kicking the can down the road and stalling for more time, shows that the SNP are more concerned with holding together their fragile pact with the dogmatic Greens, than the healthcare of vulnerable young people.
“Parents and young people need a meaningful response to Cass, and an assurance that ministers will follow the science, rather than ideology.”
S
Why do you suppose they are not following the Science when it comes to giving psychotropic drugs to children – there is no science to support it. Why are doctors who agree with what you are saying here preening themselves on puberty blockers but failing to recognize that puberty blockers are not the rotten apple in the barrel and all will be fine once they are located and thrown out – the entire barrel is rotten.
I wrote to the GMC and Royal College about the transition issues 8 years ago and got no reply. There was a headlong rush into dishing out the meds at the time. As Patrick notes in his comment – we will look back at this period in amazement, perhaps with disgust, but its not diseases being mongered by pharmaceutical companies, its something to do with us and until we get to grips with this, these events are going to recur and recur and …
D
Whenever we hear the ‘follow the science’ mantra we should be very wary – look what happened during the Covid epidemic ‘Science’ has become a dirty word used to try to intimidate and silence us
Dr David Cartland
@CartlandDavid Apr 24
Disgusting
https://twitter.com/CartlandDavid/status/1783019732926382489