https://www.nationalreview.com/news/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.