Medicine's War on Childhood

Noticing The Pattern...

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Primum non nocere. First, do no harm. A tenet of medical ethics dating to Hippocrates, the saying underscores the need to weigh the pros and cons of any intervention. Do not amputate a limb to address a papercut; do not snuff out a patient to shrink her birthmark. Seems straightforward. Why then has this ethic been abandoned? No, abandoned is too kind – inverted is more like it. If there is one unifying theme in the medical establishment’s approach of late, it is this: do harm first.

Let us begin with the sobering triad of chemical castration, genital mutilation, and imposed infertility. Or, as it is celebrated at a children’s hospital near you, “affirmation.” Set aside the metaphysical morass surrounding questions of existing in the “wrong” body. You don’t need to know “what is a woman?” to understand the seriousness of the transitioning process. Are such irreversible, life-altering actions an appropriate match to the gravity of the diagnosis?

Gender dysphoria is described in the authority on psychiatric diagnosis, the American Psychiatric Association’s Diagnostic and Statistical Manual of Mental Disorders. To be precise, gender dysphoria is introduced in the 2013 DSM-5, the fifth version of the DSM to come out in the past 70 years; apparently, the previous four versions weren’t that authoritative after all. I’m sure we’ve got the depths of the human psyche fully plumbed this time around. In the first two editions of the DSM, the concept of gender identity does not even rate a mention. In fairness, that was decades ago; enough time has now passed to castrate with confidence. True, the APA kept its categorization of homosexuality as a mental illness through three editions over almost forty years, but they do feel sorry about all that. If it turns out, by DSM-6 or DSM-7, that they made another little oopsie with gender dysphoria, I’m sure the official apology will be heartfelt.

Believe it or not, it gets worse. Not only is mainstream medicine on board with life-altering, irreversible treatment for a brand-new, poorly-understood condition in a field famous for rapidly fluctuating diagnostic categories, they have not even looked into alternative interventions. Affirmation is the only option. Treating gender dysphoria similarly to an acknowledged mental illness like anorexia, with therapies aimed at helping a child accept her body, is a big no-no. Even stepping back and giving the child some time to work things out on her own, aka watchful waiting, is deemed an “outdated approach” by the American Academy of Pediatrics because “critical support is withheld.” You can’t take your daughter to a counselor who tries to help her feel better about her body; you can’t patiently wait for her to grow into womanhood; turning her into a boy is the only acceptable path. Do harm first.

Affirmation is not the only reckless experiment we are conducting on children. Millions have been granted transient protection against a disease which poses them no harm, thanks to a vaccine of unknown risk. I do not know if the Covid vaccine poses dangers to children. I do know that the people approving its use have no idea, either. As one FDA advisor infamously put it, “we’re never going to learn about how safe this vaccine is unless we start giving it.” I understand playing fast and loose with side effects when lives are at risk, such as in the elderly population, but with healthy kids? In fairness to the original FDA review process (which has since been abandoned as, you guessed it, insufficiently affirming), the advisory panel members were admirably forthright about their doubts. Unfortunately, memory of those misgivings was fast mislaid. In my own neighborhood, even as more information about the increased risks and decreased benefits of pediatric covid vaccination is discovered, my fellow pediatricians are firing their healthy patients for declining a third Covid jab. Do harm first.

The back-to-back blows of affirmation and vaccination demonstrate that most pediatricians have abandoned the practice of weighing costs and benefits. What made them think they could get away with such disregard? Well, for the straightforward reason that they’ve been doing it for decades.

While not as controversial today as a third covid booster for your puberty blocked teen, the spread of stimulant treatment for ADHD seems in retrospect a blueprint for the medical establishment’s war on childhood: pick a questionable problem, treat with powerful and expensive drugs of unknown safety. Like gender dysphoria, the diagnosis of ADHD shrinks from sunlight. Don’t take my word for it, I’m no expert. Do you know who was? Dr. Keith Conner, the inventor of ADHD, a man who dedicated his career to popularizing its treatment. It was a career he would come to regret; by the time of his death, he had become an outspoken opponent of stimulant overuse, which he called a “national disaster of dangerous proportions.” His meticulous research estimates the rate of ADHD in children at 1-2%; in practice today, it is a diagnosis carried by 20% of boys, with some states reaching rates close to 30%. To quote this “Father of ADHD,” “disease-mongering and ruthless advertising by big Pharma had fed an eager medical system with false data.” Sound familiar? On the bright side, since drugs like Ritalin have been around for decades, we have a much better sense of their long-term dangers than we do with experimental vaccines or gender therapies, right? About that… to quote one 2016 study, “despite its prevalent use among children and adolescents, little is known about lasting effects of methylphenidate on the developing dopaminergic system.” To borrow a phrase, we’re never gonna learn about how safe it is to have millions of children on daily brain-altering pharmaceuticals for years at a time unless we start prescribing them. Do harm first.

How to explain this inversion of Hippocratic tradition? Allow me to hazard a guess. While historians know little about the life of Hippocrates, it’s unlikely that he held much Pfizer stock. Had he been invested heavily in primitive pharmaceuticals, his teaching may have had a different bent: “first, never prescribe the cheaper generic.” I am open to alternate theories. All I know is that when it comes to inexpensive, generic interventions for well-established conditions, like antibiotics for ear infections or steroids for bronchiolitis, there is an abundant body of research looking into whether the long-term harms of treatment outweigh the short-term benefits. Whenever the diagnosis is questionable and the intervention highly lucrative, on the other hand, America’s children get transformed into guinea pigs. First ADHD, then affirmation, then vaccination. As Ian Fleming put it, “Once is happenstance. Twice is coincidence. Three times is enemy action.”