The Corruption of Medicine
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Unexpectedly! The Wall Street Journal ran a shocked —shocked!— story yesterday headlined, “Healthcare Premiums Are Soaring Even as Inflation Eases.” How could this happen after Obamacare, the inaptly named “Healthcare Affordability Act?” If I didn’t know better, I’d think whenever government arrives to help, it just makes things worse, like a bumbling relative with a creative idea to save money by re-plumbing the septic tank ourselves.
The Journal’s figures showed that, despite its alleged “easing” of inflation, the average family is now paying roughly $25,500 in annual healthcare premiums. In other words, the average family is buying the healthcare industry a Honda Civic every single year.
Thanks, Obamacare!
Not only that, but the government is also spending more on America’s healthcare than any government ever has in human history. Not only that, but even with all this investment in “health care,” all-cause mortality continues increasing and American life expectancies continue decreasing. CNN, two days ago:
That headline evidences a stunning short-term reversal. As recently as 2021, for example, a Princeton University study optimistically predicted that “if the current pace of progress in life expectancy continues, most children born this millennium will celebrate their 100th birthday.” Win some, lose some.
Nothing to see here! Move along. Headline from the New Atlas, in March:
Setting aside other obvious causes, in 2024, half of Americans are prediabetic or diagnosed with Type II diabetes, compared to only 1% before the rise of the medical-industrial complex. Two-thirds of us are obese, and an astonishing 77% of our young people suffer from intractable health conditions precluding military service.
The good news though is that our public school system is focused on correcting the deplorable legacy of hatred toward cross-dressers. So there’s that.
To me, one of the most puzzling and mysterious features of life in 2024 is that fact that you can show your Democrat relatives these kinds of figures, and they will insist that even more government is the only answer.
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Lawfare cuts both ways, just like gender surgery. The New York Times ran an encouraging story yesterday headlined, “Texas Attorney General Sues Doctor Over Treatment for Transgender Minors.”
A new 2023 Texas law recently upheld as constitutional by the state’s Supreme Court makes it illegal for healthcare providers to “affirm the child’s perception of the child’s sex if that perception is inconsistent with the child’s biological sex.”
In other words, Texas doctors aren’t allowed to make confused kids even more confused.
Under Texas’s new 2023 law, the state can revoke doctors’ medical licenses if they prescribe puberty blockers and hormone therapies to children as transsexual aids. On top of that, the law allows doctors to be sued personally for damages. I heard a rumor that the law almost included a provision requiring noncompliant doctors to receive all the banned treatments they prescribed.
This week, Texas Attorney General Ken Paxton sued the first doctor under the 2023 law. The lawsuit alleged that Dr. May Lau, a pediatrics professor at UT’s Southwestern Medical Center, has treated 21 kids with hormone blockers since the law passed and even worse, she “falsified medical records, prescriptions and billing records to represent that her testosterone prescriptions were for something other than transitioning a child’s biological sex or affirming a child’s belief that their gender identity is inconsistent with their biological sex.”
So Dr. Lau is — allegedly — a forgerer, liar, fraudster, and a danger to children. I’m not exaggerating. The lawsuit described the so-called doctor as “a scofflaw who is putting the health and safety of minors at risk.” Neither Dr. Lau nor Southwestern Medical Center answered calls for comment. In other words, the Times gave her a chance to deny it, but she clammed up. Probably under the advice of counsel.
Perhaps AG Paxton should consider adding claims for criminal insurance fraud, since one suspects that bleeding-hearted Dr. Lau and the oh-so-charitable Southwest Medical Center were not working for free. In fact, one suspects their gender-bending operation was on the lucrative side.
Paxton’s complaint asks for an order compelling Dr. Lau to stop breaking the law under threat of jail, and a money judgment of $10,000 per violation ($210,000).
It’s worth reflecting on the irony that all the people currently howling in outrage, such as the ACLU, are the very same people who, about ten minutes ago, also howled in rage demanding cancellation of doctors prescribing harmless ivermectin for covid infections.
There’s an ocean of difference between the two cases. Mainly, that no democratically-elected legislature anywhere ever voted to outlaw ivermectin. Ivermectin was never banned by law, not even for covid treatment.
In fact, the only authority anti-ivermectin state medical boards could rely on was a single horsey tweet by the jackasses at the FDA — a tweet the Fifth Circuit later ruled was illegal medical advice the FDA wasn’t allowed to give in the first place.
In other words, so-called liberals are all-in for de-credentialing doctors who provide legal services to willing patients, but then decry lawsuits against doctors who willfully break the law and then cover up the evidence.
In even more good news, the Times reported that over half the states (26) now have total or partial bans on medical gender-bending for children. The U.S. Supreme Court will hear a challenge to Tennessee’s ban this upcoming term.
I realize everyone has their favorites, and believe me, I am not counting any chickens, but … how about Ken Paxton for U.S. Attorney General?
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In an astonishing development, the New York Times was the only corporate media platform to run this story. I’m starting to think someone high up at the Times is questioning the trans agenda. The Times’ article was headlined, “U.S. Study on Puberty Blockers Goes Unpublished Because of Politics, Doctor Says.”
In 2015, hyphenated-doctor Johanna Olson-Kennedy received a broad, multimillion-dollar grant to research the beneficial effects of castration drugs on children’s emotions. She launched a nine-year study of 411 kids who received so-called “puberty blockers,” which permanently prevent their secondary sexual characteristics from developing, and which trans advocates claim make kids with gender dysphoria happy.
Johanna expected to confirm that hypothesis. She is a trans activist and has often been an expert science witness in high-profile trans cases. But the results of Johanna’s study unexpectedly went the other way.
After two years, the kids in the study showed no improvement in their mental health. Although Johanna would later claim this was the result of the kids starting and ending equally happy, the Times noted that in an earlier paper describing the study’s beginnings, Johanna’s team reported over 25% of the kids in the study were clinically depressed or even suicidal. Not happy.
But ever since that first introductory paper, as the years have gone by, Johanna’s team has never again published their findings. When the Times asked her why not, Johanna explained, “I do not want our work to be weaponized.” She expanded on that, adding she was worried her study’s results could be used in court to argue that “we shouldn’t use blockers because it doesn’t impact” transgender adolescents.
In other words, no matter how hard they tried, they cannot find any improvement in the study’s heavily drugged kids.
Harry Potter author and women’s rights activist J.K. Rowling made the obvious sarcastic point:
Quibblers will argue Rowling got it wrong, since what we know about Johanna’s unpublished study suggests the kids came out even-Steven. But Rowling is right, since that metric only counted mental health. It didn’t account for all the other problems transitioning kids face.
For just one example of many, boys given puberty blockers face permanent shrinkage, since their package remains forever child-sized. They are usually left with what the doctors call, and I am not making this up, a “micro penis.” Those are two words that should never go together. Obviously, boys who de-transition will not enjoy living with a micro penis. It’s not good for their kidneys, either.
But that’s not even the stupidest part. Fake vaginas are made by hollowing out and “inverting” (don’t ask) the male member. But if the member is micro-sized, doctors can’t make a fake vagina out of it. It’s not deep enough. There’s not enough skin there to do anything useful. So giving boys puberty blockers ensures a bad result from their “gender-affirming surgery.”
You will have to explain how any of that makes sense to trans advocates, because I cannot. I think it must have something to do with a related condition called, “micro brain.”
That being said, there’s a second ugly facet to this tarnished story. What does this self-censorship say about our credentialed class? What does it say about the whole academic publication racket that withholding politically inconvenient results is considered business as usual? How many scientific studies are never published because of politics?
Why do scientists pretend like the academic journals are some kind of sanctified source of unbiased science?
I feel like everyone involved in the academic enterprise knows about all these problems but hides it from the rest of us, since if we really knew how things work, we would pay even less attention to scientists.
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Another medical field (Psychiatry) sold out to big Pharma.
The Left’s New Approach: Hide the Science
Forget following the science.
Now it’s about hiding the science—at least when it comes to experimental gender transition medical procedures for children.
“U.S. Study on Puberty Blockers Goes Unpublished Because of Politics, Doctor Says,” blares a New York Times headline earlier this week.
This study, which involved putting 95 children struggling with gender dysphoria on puberty blockers, was led by Dr. Johanna Olson-Kennedy, a physician at Children’s Hospital Los Angeles who has long been involved in promoting experimental medical treatments for minors.
It would seem that the study, which followed the children for two years, didn’t have the results Olson-Kennedy was looking for.
“The leader of the long-running study said that the drugs did not improve mental health in children with gender distress and that the finding might be weaponized by opponents of the care,” states the article’s subhed.
That’s a major finding—and one that the public deserves to have access to.
After all, the argument for providing these experimental medical treatments for children is that they will help the children’s mental health. That was seen as a pro that for some outweighed the cons of puberty blockers, which pose health risks along with the unknowns about the long-term effects of delaying a young person’s development.
But this data won’t be released because “the findings might fuel the kind of political attacks that have led to bans of the youth gender treatments in more than 20 states, one of which will soon be considered by the Supreme Court,” writes New York Times reporter Azeen Ghorayshi, summarizing Olson-Kennedy’s reasoning.
In other words, when it comes to how to medically treat children suffering from gender dysphoria, it’s not about the science. It’s about the ideology—and ensuring that ideology triumphs in American law and all states.
I’m at UCLA and I just met Clementine, who recently detransitioned.
When she was 12, Johanna Olson-Kennedy at the Children’s Hospital of Los Angeles put her on puberty blockers.
At 13, she was put on testosterone.
At only 14 years of age, she was given a double mastectomy!
Clementine had suffered sexual abuse, and that was the source of great trauma, and is why she didn’t want to be a girl.
Johanna Olson-Kennedy didn’t care about that. Within 30 minutes of her first appointment she was told she needed to go on puberty blockers, or she might kill herself.
Her parents were told they could have a dead daughter or a live son. This is standard practice at gender clinics. The only way they can justify this child abuse is to say that kids will die if they don’t do it.
Testosterone caused psychosis so Clementine went off it at 17.
She has now just turned 20, and can probably never have kids. She’s trying to get reconstructive surgery but insurance companies only want to pay for destruction of children’s bodies, not reconstruction.
I hope Clementine sues, and helps to bring down this industry, but mostly I’m incredibly thankful for her bravery in speaking up.
If you don’t believe this is happening. please listen to her story.