Don't Let a Good Scandal Go to Waste

An op-ed at The Hill

Photo by OCG Saving The Ocean on Unsplash

I realize we’re busy talking about the Big Issues like inflation, affordable housing, education…oh, wait, sorry, we’re just talking about Biden and Trump. But anyway, we should not let the recent WPATH/Johns Hopkins/HHS scandal die down.

Here’s an op-ed at The Hill that I hope is shareable with those who don’t yet realize the level of misinformation that families have ingested, and made decisions based on.

Imagine that, in the past decade, many young people developed a serious illness — one that had previously been rare.

Let’s say there’s no consensus about how to diagnose or treat it, nor any way to discern who would grow out of it naturally or for whom it would be permanent.’

Still, some parents and providers passionately support a specific, highly invasive medication. So does an advocacy group that creates the guidelines most Americans follow. That group engages an evidence-based medicine center at an esteemed university to conduct systematic reviews — the highest method of evaluating evidence, which tells us if the findings can be trusted and mapped onto the larger population.  

But the systematic reviews find that the quality of research is very low; the true effects of the treatment are likely to be markedly different from the estimated effects. The medication may end up harming more kids than it helps, in devastating ways, and we can’t predict who would benefit.

Read the rest at The Hill.

Gracias.