RUTHFULLY YOURS

https://www.city-journal.org/article/hhs-pediatric-gender-medicine-review-wpath

One of President Trump’s first executive orders was the provocatively titled “Protecting Children from Chemical and Surgical Mutilation.” The order directed federally funded insurance programs to end coverage of pediatric sex-trait modification and barred hospitals receiving federal funds from performing such interventions. It also instructed the Department of Health and Human Services (HHS) to conduct a review of the evidence and ethical considerations surrounding pediatric gender medicine.

That review, “Treatment for Pediatric Gender Dysphoria: Review of Evidence and Best Practices,” was released earlier this month. It is already being described as America’s Cass Review, the landmark gender-medicine review published last year in the United Kingdom.

This report is long overdue. While European health authorities in countries like Sweden, Finland, Norway, and the U.K. have moved away from the “gender-affirming” model and toward cautious psychological support for gender-dysphoric children, American institutions have only become more entrenched in the model despite growing evidence of the harm and weak benefits.

The HHS report breaks this trend, providing a comprehensive and sober reevaluation of the science, ethics, and clinical practices in pediatric gender medicine. At more than 400 pages, with chapters on history, terminology, evidence, ethics, and clinical realities, it is the most thorough and ambitious document of its kind in the United States.

The report’s central findings are clear and direct: gender-affirming interventions such as puberty blockers, cross-sex hormones, and surgeries are supported only by low- or very low-quality evidence, while the potential for irreversible harm is substantial. Risks include sterility, sexual dysfunction, impaired bone-density and brain development, psychiatric comorbidities, and surgical complications. The report rejects claims that gender transition reduces suicidality, finding no high-quality evidence to support this oft-repeated assertion. In line with international reviews, it concludes that psychotherapy should be the first-line treatment for youth with gender dysphoria.

https://www.americanthinker.com/articles/2025/05/autism_an_ignored_medical_crisis.html

The dramatic rise in autism prevalence over the past few decades is nothing short of alarming.

What exactly is autism? I ask this because when I was a child, it was so rare that none of us had ever heard of or known anyone with it.The Autism Speaks website defines autism thus:

Autism, or autism spectrum disorder (ASD), refers to a broad range of conditions characterized by challenges with social skills, repetitive behaviors, speech and nonverbal communication. 

A few decades ago, autism was rare, but then it rose meteorically. “Reported rates of autism in the United States increased from < 3 per 10,000 children in the 1970s to > 30 per 10,000 children in the 1990s, a 10-fold increase.”

Since the 1990s, we have seen another tenfold increase. According to the Centers for Disease Control, autism affects an estimated 1 in 31 children and 1 in 45 adults in the United States today.

In just two generations, the prevalence of autism has risen 100-fold. Was there a similar explosion for any other medical or public health condition?

Can this 1,000 percent increase be explained by genetics, as some doctors suggest? 

A 100-fold increase in two generations—roughly 40 years—defies the principles of genetic evolution, which operates on timescales spanning centuries, not decades. This unprecedented rise points to environmental factors, including food additives, medicines, vaccines, and other toxins, as the primary drivers of the autism epidemic.

Genetics likely plays some role in autism. Twin studies suggest that autism’s heritability ranges from 60% to 90%, indicating a strong genetic component.

However, genetic changes do not occur quickly enough to explain a 100-fold increase in prevalence within two generations, only two reproductive cycles.

Evolution through genetic mutation and natural selection is a gradual process that often requires thousands of years to produce significant changes at the population level.

No one would attribute the increase in obesity, diabetes, and other chronic diseases over the past few decades to genetics instead of environmental factors like diet and exercise. Autism is exhibiting a similar trend.

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.