RUTHFULLY YOURS

https://www.wsj.com/articles/second-thoughts-on-gender-affirming-care-american-academy-pediatrics-doctors-review-medicine-a7173276?mod=opinion_lead_pos9

The American Academy of Pediatrics said last week that it will commission a systematic review of the evidence for pediatric sex-trait modification, known euphemistically as “gender-affirming care.” This marks a turning point in the battle over the controversial medical protocol. To those who favor evidence-based rather than eminence-based medicine, it is a step in the right direction.

But it is a small step. Two key questions: Will the systematic review follow a transparent, impartial scientific process? And what should the AAP do in the meantime?

In explaining the decision to commission a systematic review, the AAP’s CEO, Mark Del Monte, said that the academy’s board “has confidence that the existing evidence is such that the current policy is appropriate. At the same time, the board recognized that additional detail would be helpful here.”

If the AAP’s position is that it is “confident” the systematic review will vindicate its position and merely add “additional detail,” that raises suspicions about the honesty and independence of the process and shows the need for strong guardrails against AAP influence over the inquiry.

The AAP is, first and foremost, a trade union. “Professional medical association” is a less apt description than “association of medical professionals.” Teachers unions care about education but give their own and their members’ interests priority over those of students. So too the AAP has strong incentives to defend its own interests and those of member doctors—especially those who have publicly endorsed or facilitated sex-trait modification—even when that is harmful to patients.

The AAP and prominent members have consistently assured policy makers and judges that sex-trait modification is safe and effective and based on strong science. Insurance companies have based their coverage decisions on these claims. Democrats have used them to cast opponents as bigots. The Biden administration regularly cites the AAP in its efforts to guarantee minors unfettered access to hormonal drugs and life-altering surgery. Parents have accepted AAP claims and agreed to allow doctors to disrupt their children’s natural puberty, flood their bodies with synthetic hormones, and amputate their healthy breasts.

https://www.city-journal.org/article/san-diego-state-universitys-dei-litmus-test

Last year, San Diego State University conducted a search for a cancer biologist as part of an initiative focused on increasing faculty diversity. While ideal candidates’ expertise could be in tumor biology, cancer immunology, or other areas of hard science, they would also be expected to demonstrate a focus on health disparities and a commitment to diversity. SDSU required each applicant to fill out a form describing their contributions to “building inclusive excellence”—their version of the now-ubiquitous “diversity statement.”

Through a public-records request, I have acquired SDSU’s “building inclusive excellence” form. It symbolizes a remarkable statement of the university’s priorities and demonstrates how even the most high-stakes areas of scientific research must now genuflect to social justice.

The form, published on the National Association of Scholars website, requires candidates to describe their “inclusive excellence” contributions across eight categories, which include “demonstrated knowledge of barriers for underrepresented students and faculty within the discipline,” “demonstrated commitment to teaching and mentoring underrepresented students,” “demonstrated commitment to integrating understanding of underrepresented populations and communities into research,” and “research interests that contribute to diversity and equal opportunity in higher education.”

Far from being merely a symbolic nod toward diversity, these criteria have teeth. Per SDSU’s hiring guide, the chief diversity officer appoints separate “Building Inclusive Excellence” screeners, who examine candidates’ “inclusive excellence” contributions. Screeners won’t advance candidates to the final stage unless they meet two criteria. Departments can appeal a screener’s decision, but only with the approval of both the chief diversity officer and the provost. In other words, even cancer biologists now risk limiting their job prospects unless they demonstrate a commitment to DEI.

https://amgreatness.com/2023/08/02/gender-confirmation-surgery/

“Accredited medical professional groups agree that gender-affirming care is medically necessary, safe, and effective for trans and non-binary youth,” proclaimed Admiral Rachel Levine last October. Back in March, the U.S. Assistant Secretary for Health ramped up that claim.

“President Biden supports you. I as the Assistant Secretary for Health will support you and I talk about this topic, everywhere I go, to get the word out,” said Levine, a Harvard grad and medical doctor. “I am positive and optimistic and hopeful that the wheel will turn after that and that this issue won’t be as politically and socially such a minefield.”

That endorsement invites a closer look at “gender affirming care,” which as NBC noted, “commonly includes cross-sex hormones, puberty blockers, and gender reassignment surgeries.”

Dr. Maddie Deutsch, Associate Professor of Clinical Family & Community Medicine at the University of California – San Francisco (UCSF), and Medical Director for UCSF Transgender Care, reviews the “choices, risks, and unknowns associated with feminizing hormone therapy.” Taking higher doses of hormones, “will not necessarily bring about faster changes, but it could endanger your health.” Those pondering the hormone therapy might wonder what form the endangerment could take.

https://www.city-journal.org/article/censorship-and-the-public-health-establishment

Perhaps symbolically, on July 4 a federal judge in Louisiana enjoined a long list of federal officers, including White House press secretary Karine Jean-Pierre, from communicating with social media companies in efforts to suppress speech. The government’s machinery for working hand-in-glove with Google, Meta, and (pre-Elon Musk) Twitter to determine jointly what facts and messages can be shared with the public concerning the Covid-19 pandemic came to a dead stop.

Not unexpectedly, after days of Beltway insiders describing the ruling as the reckless product of an uninformed rural judge, the Biden administration asked the Fifth Circuit Court of Appeals to stay the injunction, which it has done. For the White House and executive agencies, the ability to control speech online is apparently too great a political tool to give up without a fight.

Judge Terry Doughty’s injunction had determined that the plaintiffs in the case were likely to show that public health officials had conspired with social media platforms to censor empirically established facts about Covid-19: its origins, how it spread, what individuals could do to protect themselves, and the efficacy and dangers of the vaccines. In doing so, those officials impinged on Americans’ right to expect the truth from their government.

From virtually the beginning of the pandemic, the federal government adopted a “take no prisoners” strategy on controlling information about Covid. When Francis Collins, then head of the National Institutes of Health, and Anthony Fauci, chief Covid advisor to Presidents Trump and Biden, found their mistaken belief that everyone was equally susceptible to Covid challenged, they set out to silence dissent.

Scientists who argued that the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention should focus its preventive efforts on more vulnerable populations, including those over 65, found their posts removed from social media platforms by nameless operatives prompted by government liaisons, several of whom are named as defendants. The justification, without any evidence or explanation, was that their views constituted “misinformation,” an Orwellian characterization encouraged by federal officials, according to Judge Doughty.

https://www.frontpagemag.com/faucis-unlawful-tenure/

Xavier Becerra, Joe Biden’s Health and Human Services Secretary, failed to reappoint 14 National Institutes of Health directors, including Dr. Anthony Fauci, director of the National Institute of Allergy and Infectious Diseases (NIAID), charges a July 7 letter from the House Energy and. Commerce Committee. The failure could have “grave implications” for the actions of Dr. Fauci during his “unlawful tenure.”

According to Section 2033 of the 21st Century Cures Act, titled “Increasing Accountability at the National Institutes of Health,” Fauci’s five-year term expired on December 21, 2021. Fauci continued as NIAID boss until retirement on December 31, 2022 and, “if Dr. Fauci was never reappointed, every action he took is potentially invalid.” (emphasis added)

During that time, Fauci served as Biden’s chief medical adviser and “regularly attended high-level meetings” with policy makers “including the National Security Council and the intelligence committee.” Fauci “awarded a new grant to EcoHealth Alliance” despite unanswered concerns about possible double billing of USAID and NIH for the same research.

Fauci also failed “to produce laboratory notebooks and other records from the Wuhan Institute of Virology,” the Chinese lab Fauci funded to perform gain-of-function research that makes viruses more lethal and transmissible. That Fauci “exercised and amassed all of this authority and influence without being duly reappointed. . .  demonstrates how ineffective HHS is a managing its component agencies and how little accountability currently exists.”

According to the committee, the failure to reappoint Fauci and the 13 others “jeopardizes the legal validity of more than $25 billion in federal biomedical research grants made in 2022 alone.” All told, the losses are far more extensive, and Dr. Fauci was kept in a position he never should have had in the first place.

https://issuesinsights.com/2023/07/20/fdas-approval-of-a-new-alzheimers-drug-is-a-real-but-very-modest-advance/

The Food and Drug Administration on July 6 granted full approval to the first therapy for Alzheimer’s that slows the cognitive decline associated with the disease. That “first” is good news, because it validates a therapeutic approach that has long been in doubt, but more important, it benefits patients afflicted with a terrible disease. 

The approval is hardly a breakthrough, however: The benefits of the drug, Leqembi (lecanemab) are meager; it does not restore lost function; it is expensive and administered intravenously every two weeks; and there are occasionally severe side effects. Nevertheless, my neurologist friends tell me that they’re being inundated with inquiries about Leqembi from Alzheimer’s patients and their families.

Alzheimer’s disease is an irreversible, progressive brain disorder that afflicts more than 6.5 million Americans. It slowly destroys memory and cognitive skills and eventually, the ability to perform even simple tasks. Although the specific causes of Alzheimer’s are not fully understood, it is characterized by changes in the brain, including the formation of various abnormal structures that result in loss of neurons and their connections. 

The FDA had previously granted Leqembi accelerated approval based on a “surrogate endpoint” short of demonstrated clinical benefit, based on its ability to reduce amyloid plaques, or clumps, in the brain, a hallmark of Alzheimer’s. As a postmarketing condition of the accelerated approval, the drug manufacturer, Eisai, was required to conduct a clinical trial to confirm the anticipated clinical benefit of Leqembi.  Safety and efficacy were evaluated in a Phase 3 multicenter, randomized, placebo-controlled clinical trial that included 1,795 patients.

That confirmatory trial, which was reported earlier this year in the New England Journal of Medicine, showed that in patients in the early stages of the disease, the drug slowed cognitive and functional decline modestly – perhaps by about five months – over 18 months compared with placebo.

https://www.wsj.com/articles/the-doctor-wont-see-you-now-psychology-white-supremacy-politics-9a3c32b5?mod=opinion_lead_pos5

A patient came to a clinic where I worked a few years ago. He was looking for help with depression but also told his therapist that he was feeling frustrated after having lost out on a research fellowship. The patient, who was white, felt the reason was affirmative action. The therapist was Arab. A group of psychiatrists, social workers and psychologists discussed the case at a clinic-wide meeting and came to an apparent consensus: Confront the patient and tell him that if he didn’t overcome his biases, he would be transferred elsewhere. They argued that it would be unfair for a clinician of color to have to provide therapy to a “racist” patient.

The same ideologies that have infiltrated education, medicine and the legal profession have also invaded mental healthcare. The American Psychological Association has decried “traditional masculinity.” The Journal of the American Psychoanalytic Association published a paper describing “Whiteness” as a “malignant, parasitic-like condition.” Two years ago, a prominent psychiatrist speaking at Yale shared her fantasies of killing white people. Recently, the president of the APA’s division of psychoanalysis said that therapists should “center Palestine . . . as a central working tenet of any clinical praxis.”

These attitudes are more common than one might imagine. The most recent APA psychoanalysis conference, which has in the past focused on the practice of therapy, was absorbed by identity politics, such as “the white supremacist within” and “psychic colonization,” to quote two panel titles.

Emerging empirical research shows the problem is widespread. One forthcoming study charts a more than 500% increase in politically slanted communiques at the APA from 2000-02 to 2017-19. A 2018 study showed that psychology departments, like most of academia, have extreme bias, with almost 17 registered Democratic professors for every one Republican. The bias is larger at higher ranked schools, and most Republican academics report higher rates of self-censorship.

https://www.americanthinker.com/articles/2023/07/biden_trying_to_kill_short_term_health_insurance.html

President Biden has taken to the airwaves to sell his plan to crack down on short-term health insurance policies, which he terms “junk.” Taking away the right to choose is not only bad healthcare policy, it runs counter to the spirit of freedom on which this country was founded. 

The history of short-term, limited duration (STLD) policies is straightforward. In order to coerce Americans to use only government approved (Washington controlled) taxpayer-subsidized policies, the Affordable Care Act of 2010 (ACA) included the individual mandate, an order for all Americans to purchase insurance. Washington restricted STLD policies to non-renewable 3-month plans. The Trump administration expanded public choice by allowing such policies up to 12-months in duration and renewable for three years. Millions of Americans used this affordable vehicle to cover themselves and their families, giving them a viable alternative to expensive and restrictive ACA insurance with its “auto-renewal.”  

Biden wants to quash STLD insurance policies making them illegal, calling them a scam and junk. 

Americans are free to buy junk bonds, including government ones. We are free to buy junk stocks and junk cars. Many happily attend junk events. Shouldn’t the public be able to decide what is junk versus jewel, what is scam and what is savior? Individual Americans are better judges of how to spend their money than Washington. 

In the 2012 challenge to the ACA, NFIB v. Sebelius, the Supreme Court struck down Obama’s individual mandate saying it was unconstitutional to force Americans to purchase what the government commanded them to buy. Now Biden wants to do an end-run and force the public to buy only what Washington allows. If Americans want to have medical insurance, Washington wants to mandate what Americans must purchase. 

Health insurance, any insurance for that matter, is a way to manage risk. A person pays an insurance company a comparatively small amount of money to hedge against the chance the person will need to expend a large amount of money when something unexpected happens, such as a housefire, a flood, or an automobile accident with injuries. Never mind that insurance premiums are already a very large expense, with the average family set to expend $30,065 on healthcare costs this year. More than 80 percent will go to insurance companies.