The Threat Facing Medical Science

The Return of the Witchdoctor

The medical profession stands before the Rubicon.  Either it will defend and stand firm for science-based medicine, or it will not.  If it does not, then the West will progressively return to the witch-doctors.  The latest challenge to the profession comes in the form of trans-genderism.  

Here is what's going down:

Reasonable people would be mystified, if not repelled, by the statements and actions of a leading researcher into transgender treatment. In a study funded by a $5.7 million grant from the National Institutes of Health (NIH), researchers including Dr. Johanna Olson of Children’s Hospital Los Angeles are supposedly evaluating use of puberty blockers and cross-sex hormones on dysphoric children.

As I’ve written with a coauthor, however, the study is fundamentally skewed toward the conclusions transgender activists desire: it contains no control group of subjects who will be spared these drugs, and will expire after five years, long before many negative effects may surface.  [Jane Robbins, The Federalist]

It seems that Dr Olson is more a sales person than a serious scientist.  A fundamental rule of selling is that one must give the client or prospective buyer what they want.  Olson insists that this is the only right way to proceed with transgender teens.

Olson had 68 surgically diminished girls fill out her “novel” scale (which she acknowledged could be bogus) between one and five years after their surgery. Thirty-three of these girls were under 18 at the time of surgery. Two were only 13 years old, and five were only 14. Assuming these mastectomies weren’t all performed by the same very busy surgeon, that means there are multiple doctors out there willing to mutilate underage girls.

From the survey results Olson concludes that gender-dysphoric girls who have their healthy breasts surgically removed are happier than those who don’t. She also concludes they almost never regret the decision.

At least, they don’t acknowledge regret for a few years. Since the mean age for postsurgical participants was 19, with none older than 25, a cautious researcher would hesitate to draw any long-term conclusions about satisfaction. But the data limitations don’t deter Olson from trumpeting the “positive outcome of chest surgery.” 

Olson has donned the garb of a salesperson, laying aside the labcoat of a medical scientist.  Any, anyway, she tells herself the risks of being wrong on this are very low.  Why.  Well, if it turns out she and her cohort are wrong, the girls can always get a reversal.  Nothing is permanent, you understand.

. . . Olson simply denies that young teenagers have any less capacity for decision-making than do adults. Listen to her statements at a conference in California: “So what we do know is that adolescents have the capacity to make a reasoned, logical decision.”

Here’s another eye-popping claim from her: “Actually, people get married when they’re under 20. Actually, people choose colleges to go to. Actually, people make life-altering decisions in adolescence. All the time. All the time. And honestly, most of them are good.”

In a breathtaking dismissal of possible regret, Olson also said, “And here’s the other thing about chest surgery: If you want breasts at a later point in your life, you can go and get them.” Well, then. One wonders if Olson takes the same attitude toward regret over the permanent sterilization effected by cross-sex hormones and a gonadectomy. After all, if one later comes to desire children, one can “go and get them” from other sources.

That such reckless researchers are allowed access to vulnerable children is shocking. That there are so many of them is tragic. That their activities are financed with tax dollars is scandalous. But welcome to the new world of agenda-driven research. How many lives will be destroyed before sanity revives?

Agenda-driven research?  Indeed.  And the agenda is to return to the destructive ignorance of the village witchdoctor.  Will the science of medicine survive?  Unlikely--at least until the drivers of the current antinomianism are exhausted.

Count Olson firmly in the camp of true science deniers. To them, rejecting the biological reality of every cell in the body is a perfectly rational decision. The possibility of underlying psychological influences—a possibility glaringly obvious to any objective observer—doesn’t enter the picture.  [Emphasis, ours]