RUTHFULLY YOURS

https://www.nationalreview.com/2025/04/wokeness-in-medicine-hasnt-been-cured-yet/

The same people and institutions who have spent years degrading the practice of medicine in service of their ideological goals are still at it.

If America is a patient and wokeness is a disease, then the surface-level prognosis has been looking good for the first few months of 2025. The leading edge of leftist opinion, defined by nothing so much as its insistence on institutional omnipresence, is seemingly in retreat. After Donald Trump’s executive order purging DEI from the federal government, companies are dropping their own programs. So are some universities.

Examine the patient more closely, however, and the sickness is still evident. The medical field provides many examples. Medical school accreditors and hospitals are still pushing DEI. The American College of Obstetricians and Gynecologists, which often advances left-wing causes disguised as medical advocacy, still receives federal funding. And three years later, Richard T. Bosshardt is still stuck in wokeness’s waiting room.

Bosshardt is a plastic surgeon who objected to the 2020 embrace of DEI orthodoxy by the American College of Surgeons, of which he was (and, allegedly, remains) an official member. Bosshardt sought clarity about the organization’s declaring itself afflicted by structural racism, among other things. His effort garnered considerable attention and support within the ACS. That is, until the organization’s leadership unilaterally banned him from the internal forum where he had been making his case. All this proceeded in defiance of ACS’s own disciplinary process.

https://www.city-journal.org/article/gender-medicine-trans-identifying-minors-wpath

Gender medicine is riddled with contradictions. On the one hand, clinicians frame “gender dysphoria” as a clinical diagnosis that demands “medically necessary” treatments. On the other, they often adhere to the “gender incongruence” model, which holds that having a cross-sex identity is not a medical problem, but instead a normal expression of “human diversity.” Consequently, they argue, access to surgeries and hormones should not be conditioned on the experience of “sex distress.”

These contradictions have human costs. Newly released videos, featuring Johanna Olson-Kennedy and Rob Garofalo—prominent gender clinicians and members of the World Professional Association for Transgender Health (WPATH)—underscore the dangerously muddled logic of gender medicine and reveal how practitioners undermine their supposed “standards of care.”

In March, journalist Ben Ryan released videos of Olson-Kennedy, a gender clinician at Children’s Hospital Los Angeles, training mental-health providers on how to treat “sex-distressed” youth. In one slide, Olson-Kennedy notes that what separates the affirmative model—which emphasizes supporting and validating a person’s “gender identity”—from other historical ways of treating sex distress is that it “follows the child,” meaning treatment eligibility flows from the child’s identity claim, which is not subject to dispute.

“Follow the child” is predicated on two assumptions: that a child has accurate self-knowledge and that “gender identity” is immutable. Olson-Kennedy claims that everyone has a gender identity, which is not subject to social influence and is stable by age four. Later, however, she contradicts herself. “Not everybody who has this experience in childhood is going to continue to identify as a different gender,” she says.

https://www.city-journal.org/article/drugs-harm-reduction-safer-supply-opioids-denver-sweden-uk-canada
Adam Zivo is director of the Canadian Centre for Responsible Drug Policy.

Last August, Denver’s city council passed a proclamation endorsing radical “harm reduction” strategies to address the drug crisis. Among these was “safer supply,” the idea that the government should give drug users their drug of choice, for free. Safer supply is a popular idea among drug-reform activists. But other countries have already tested this experiment and seen disastrous results, including more addiction, crime, and overdose deaths. It would be foolish to follow their example.

The safer-supply movement maintains that drug-related overdoses, infections, and deaths are driven by the unpredictability of the black market, where drugs are inconsistently dosed and often adulterated with other toxic substances. With ultra-potent opioids like fentanyl, even minor dosing errors can prove fatal. Drug contaminants, which dealers use to provide a stronger high at a lower cost, can be just as deadly and potentially disfiguring.

Because of this, harm-reduction activists sometimes argue that governments should provide a free supply of unadulterated, “safe” drugs to get users to abandon the dangerous street supply. Or they say that such drugs should be sold in a controlled manner, like alcohol or cannabis—an endorsement of partial or total drug legalization.

But “safe” is a relative term: the drugs championed by these activists include pharmaceutical-grade fentanyl, hydromorphone (an opioid as potent as heroin), and prescription meth. Though less risky than their illicit alternatives, these drugs are still profoundly dangerous.

The theory behind safer supply is not entirely unreasonable, but in every country that has tried it, implementation has led to increased suffering and addiction. In Europe, only Sweden and the U.K. have tested safer supply, both in the 1960s. The Swedish model gave more than 100 addicts nearly unlimited access through their doctors to prescriptions for morphine and amphetamines, with no expectations of supervised consumption. Recipients mostly sold their free drugs on the black market, often through a network of “satellite patients” (addicts who purchased prescribed drugs). This led to an explosion of addiction and public disorder.

https://www.afterbabel.com/p/eating-disorders-social-media?utm_campaign=email-half-post&r=8t06w&utm_source=substack&utm_medium=email

Introduction from Jon Haidt and Zach Rausch:

In Chapter 6 of The Anxious Generation, we examined the connections between social media use and adolescent mental illness, with a focus on depression and anxiety. We outlined six reasons why social media harms girls more than boys: (1) girls spend more time on visual social media platforms like Instagram and TikTok; (2) they have a heightened vulnerability to visual social comparisons; (3) relational aggression is more prevalent among girls; (4) girls face greater pressures toward perfectionism; (5) they are more susceptible to the interpersonal spread of emotion; and (6) they encounter an increased risk of sexual harassment and online predation.

Throughout the book, we focused on anxiety and depression as the main categories of mental illness for which we found clear evidence of harm from heavy social media use. We mentioned eating disorders just a few times, especially in the story of Alexis Spence. But if you look at the list we just gave of six ways that social media affects girls, you can see that there may be multiple channels through which social media can push girls into eating disorders (some of which are classified as anxiety disorders).

We’ve been meaning to learn more and say more about links between social media and eating disorders. We were pleased, therefore, when Morteza Dehghani—a friend of Jon’s at the University of Southern California—introduced us to his colleague Kristina Lerman, who had just written a paper on the topic. Kristina is a Research Professor in the USC Computer Science Department, and she is a Senior Principal Scientist at the USC Information Sciences Institute. She was trained as a physicist, and she now uses her quantitative skills to study networks, crowdsourcing, and patterns in large datasets derived from social media activity.

Her recent paper is titled “Safe Spaces or Toxic Places? Content Moderation and Social Dynamics of Online Eating Disorder Communities.” Written with four colleagues, it is currently under review at EPJ Data Science, and you can read it online here.

https://www.americanthinker.com/blog/2025/03/jay_bhattacharya_s_promise_on_vaccine_safety.html

Dr. Jay Bhattacharya is best known for his dissent from the establishment during the pandemic response. He famously — some may say infamously — drafted, signed, and fervently supported the Great Barrington Declaration, which opposed Draconian-style lockdowns and mask mandates. Dr. Bhattacharya warned of the long-term consequences these policies would inflict on mental and physical health. He predicted a surge in cancer cases due to delayed diagnoses, as well as an economic downturn that would far outweigh any perceived benefits of quarantining the entire population. Instead, he advocated a more targeted approach: protecting high-risk individuals while allowing low-risk populations to sustain economic and social stability.

Unfortunately, his predictions proved correct. Cancer diagnoses surged post-lockdown, with many cases detected at later stages. The lockdowns and subsequent economic interventions, such as stimulus checks, have wreaked havoc on the economy.

Dr. Bhattacharya’s appointment to the National Institute of Health (NIH) has sparked controversy, particularly among those on the political Left. One of the most contentious aspects of his leadership is his call for additional studies on vaccine safety, including potential links to autism. The medical establishment has long dismissed this topic.

From a purely data-driven perspective, the case for new vaccine studies may seem unnecessary. Vaccines are among the most rigorously tested medical interventions, backed by not only decades of research but also historical accounts of their success. As Senate Minority Leader Mitch McConnell aptly pointed out, he witnessed the transformative power of the polio vaccine firsthand. Given the prevailing public distrust in scientific institutions, revisiting vaccine safety — if only to reaffirm their efficacy — could be crucial to restoring confidence.

ttps://www.city-journal.org/article/jay-bhattacharya-nih-senate-confirmation-hearing-covid-pandemic

Jay Bhattacharya’s confirmation hearing in the Senate last week was as close as we may ever get to a formal surrender in the long war over Covid-19 pandemic policies. While some public-health officials, academics, and journalists continue to defend the Covid restrictions and oppose Bhattacharya’s nomination to direct the National Institutes of Health, Democrats at the hearing unanimously abandoned the fight against his supposedly “fringe” ideas.

Bhattacharya, a Stanford professor of medicine and economics, had been a leading opponent of Covid measures supported by Democrats on the committee, including the Biden administration’s vaccine mandates for federal employees and for workers at private companies. One of the senators, Edward Markey of Massachusetts, had been so worried about the “dangerous” policies in Florida and other states that he advocated a national mask mandate in 2020 and introduced legislation to prod recalcitrant states. Last week, however, Markey and his Democratic colleagues studiously avoided discussing the mandates or any issue related to Covid. Pandemic? What pandemic?

Instead, they used their time to rail at Donald Trump and Elon Musk, leaving it to the committee’s Republicans to address the most consequential public-health edicts ever imposed on Americans. The Republican senators catalogued the costs of the lockdowns, the learning loss from school closures, and the ineffectiveness of the restrictions. They praised Bhattacharya for coauthoring the Great Barrington Declaration opposing lockdowns and school closures, and they thanked him for his court testimony opposing mask mandates for students. They criticized social media platforms’ censorship of his views and the smear campaign egged on by Anthony Fauci and the former NIH director, Francis Collins, who dismissed Bhattacharya and his coauthors as “fringe epidemiologists.”

“You showed incredible courage in speaking the truth about Covid-19 when much of the rest of the world stayed silent about it,” Indiana senator Jim Banks told Bhattacharya. “It’s remarkable to see that you’re nominated to be the head of the very institution whose leaders persecuted you.” Banks then asked him to define the role of the NIH director during a pandemic.

“The proper role of scientists in a pandemic is to answer basic questions that policymakers have about what the right policy should be,” Bhattacharya replied.

https://www.spiked-online.com/2025/03/07/the-vindication-of-a-heretic/

He might not be as brash as Elon Musk. He might not wield his sword of reform with as much gleeful abandon as Donald Trump does his. Yet Jay Bhattacharya, Trump’s pick to run the National Institutes of Health (NIH), is nonetheless fighting an essential fight. His target? Scientism. The tyrannical trend whereby ‘science’, in his words, ‘stands on top of society and says “You must do this, this and this or else”’. He wants to restore science’s older, nobler goal of providing people with ‘knowledge and freedom’. Everyone who values reason should hope he succeeds.

Bhattacharya gave us a glimpse of his beliefs at his Senate confirmation hearing this week. In his humble, professorial style – anyone hoping for a rerun of RFK’s fiery confirmation hearing will have been sorely disappointed – he outlined his plans for the NIH. He wants it to be a freer, more open-minded place. For too long, he said, scientists at the NIH and elsewhere have displayed a ‘lack of tolerance for ideas that differed from theirs’. Now, under me, there’ll be ‘a culture of respect for free speech in science’, he promised.

That Bhattacharya is even heading to the NIH, never mind taking it over and shaking it up, is extraordinary. He was a target of its invective once. In 2020, he went from being a ‘low-profile researcher at Stanford University’ – in the snooty words of the Guardian this week – to being a headline-making heretic. His blasphemy? He co-authored the Great Barrington Declaration, which posited that ‘focussed protection’ of the elderly and vulnerable might be a better way to combat Covid-19 than the blanket shutdown of society.

The stake was readied. Insults flew. He was damned as ‘dangerous’, ‘reckless’, ‘fringe’. That last slight came from the NIH itself. Its then director, Francis Collins, fired off an email in October 2020 branding Bhattacharya and his ilk as ‘fringe epidemiologists’. Collins called for a ‘quick and devastating’ rebuttal of their dissenting declaration. That shameful cry for scientists to act like a latter-day priestly elite, to go out and issue ‘devastating’ edicts against the Barrington apostasy, is no doubt what Bhattacharya had in mind when he told the Senate that the NIH has become infected by ‘a culture of cover-up, obfuscation and a lack of tolerance’.

Now, amazingly, the heretic is taking power. The man on the ‘fringe’ is off to the beating heart of scientific endeavour: the NIH is the world’s largest public funder of biomedical research, with an annual budget of more than $47 billion. The only thing being ‘devastated’, Mr Collins, is the old NIH that you and others helped to turn into a political machine. But Bhattacharya’s mission is less one of personal vengeance than of scientific restoration. He told his hearing that he wants to bring back ‘the very essence of science’ to the NIH. And what might that be? ‘Dissent’, he said.