Med School Misinformation Course Misinforms on Puberty Blockers, ‘Gender-Affirming Care’
A new class being offered at the University of Chicago’s Pritzker School of Medicine purports to teach the next generation of doctors how to dispel medical misinformation, but a recent article on the class suggests it may be doing the opposite.
The course, Improving Scientific Communication and Addressing Misinformation, was designed to teach “tomorrow’s health professionals how to tackle things in a way that reaches the public where they’re at,” Dr. Vineet Arora, a course instructor and the dean of medical education at the school, told the Chicago Tribune.
Sara Serritella, who co-teaches the class with Arora, said that they aim to level the playing field and “make it a fair fight” between experts and those who would propagate falsehoods about public and individual health.
But even in the Tribune‘s glowing profile of the course, the tension between this apparent mission and the real world consequences of overconfident “anti-misinformation” campaigns quickly becomes glaringly apparent.
As part of their coursework, students are tasked with creating an infographic that dispels medical myths, and one project cited approvingly by the newspaper tackled those surrounding “gender-affirming hormone care.”
According to the Tribune, the student “wrote in his infographic that use of puberty blockers — medication that can be used to temporarily suppress puberty in transgender and gender nonconforming children — can ‘give families time to explore their child’s gender and gather information without causing distress to the child’ that can sometimes be brought on by puberty. He wrote that, ‘If stopped, puberty will resume normally as the sex assigned at birth.’”
The problem is that almost all of the information described as being conveyed in the infographic is subject to vigorous scientific debate, and so doesn’t lend itself to the binary “misinformation” vs. “information” framework embedded in the curricula.
Puberty blockers have traditionally been employed in the treatment of children hoping to stall the onset of precocious puberty (“when a child’s body begins changing into that of an adult (puberty) too soon,” per the Mayo Clinic). The use of such medication in children struggling with gender dysphoria only recently supplanted the “watchful waiting” method previously used to address such situations.
Indeed, while puberty blockers have recently been prescribed as a first step for younger patients questioning their gender, medical opinion across the Western world is, if anything, trending toward a more skeptical view. Earlier this year, the United Kingdom closed its Tavistock gender clinic after a review conducted by Dr. Hillary Cass found that its “clinical approach and overall service design has not been subject to some of the normal quality controls that are typically applied when new or innovative treatments are introduced.”
Among the issues identified by Cass is the fact that rather than serving as a “pause button,” as the University of Chicago student and other activists claim, puberty blockers tend to be an affirmative step on the road toward permanent transition.
In over 95 percent of cases where puberty blockers are used, opposite-sex hormone treatment is later pursued, according to the Cass report. In a large majority of pre-pubescent cases of gender dysphoria where puberty blockers are not used, symptoms subside.
Cass also cites “the unknown impacts on development, maturation and cognition” on children who are “not exposed to the physical, psychological, physiological, neurochemical and sexual changes that accompany adolescent hormone surges.”
The U.K. is just one of several countries to backpedal away from the “pause button” theory of puberty blockers.
In February, Sweden’s National Board of Health and Welfare offered new guidelines almost entirely phasing out the use of puberty blockers in minors, allowing for their employment only in “exceptional cases.”
“Based on the results that emerged, the National Board of Health and Welfare’s overall conclusion is that the risks of puberty-inhibiting and gender-affirming hormone treatment for those under 18 currently outweigh the possible benefits for the group as a whole,” read the new recommendations.
Similarly, Finland’s Council for Choices in Health Care has determined that pubertal suppression should be considered only if a pre-pubertal case of gender dysphoria has “intensified during puberty,” as “the first-line treatment for gender dysphoria is psychosocial support and, as necessary, psychotherapy and treatment of possible comorbid psychiatric disorders.”
And in France, the National Academy of Medicine submitted that “if France allows the use of puberty blockers or cross-sex hormones with parental authorization and no age limitations, the greatest caution is needed in their use, taking into account the side effects such as the impact on growth, bone weakening, risk of sterility, emotional and intellectual consequences and, for girls, menopause-like symptoms.”
Why, then, does the Pritzker School of Medicine’s course on misinformation categorize these medical opinions — at minimum, mainstream, if not majority-held — as false?
Complicating the answer to that question is the fact that one of its primary benefactors and namesake, the Pritzker family, has poured millions of dollars into pushing transgender ideology in academia and medicine. Illinois governor J. B. Pritzker’s devotion to the cause is so complete that he has signed into law a bill setting the standard that “by the end of the second grade, students should be able to . . . discuss the range of ways people express their gender.”
Arora and Serritella, the professors who teach the course, were both contacted for comment on the underlying issue of puberty blockers, their course’s role in teaching students to distinguish between misinformation and points of legitimate debate, and the potential conflict of interest caused by the Pritzker family’s funding of the school.
The Pritzker School itself responded to these requests for comment with the following statement: “This course is intended to help medical clinicians who work in a wide range of specialties develop effective ways of communicating accurate health information for patients and other audiences.”
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