Health
1,000 UK doctors condemn medical association’s push to lift puberty blocker ban for minors
From LifeSiteNews
1,000 senior doctors signed an open letter to the British Medical Association after it lobbied for the NHS to lift a ban on puberty blockers for children following the Cass Review, which found the drugs were harmful.
On August 1, the British Medical Association (BMA) – the United Kingdom’s doctors’ union – called on the government to lift the ban on puberty blockers for minors. Weirdly, the BMA also stated that in their view the implementation of NHS England’s Cass Review should be “paused” despite the fact that, as the BBC noted, the review “took four years to carry out and was widely welcomed by the medical establishment in the U.K.” The BMA called the Cass Review’s recommendations – based on “the largest and most comprehensive review” on the subject seen, looking at 237 papers from 18 countries – “unsubstantiated.”
A spokesperson for the Department of Health and Social Care responded to the BMA, firmly rejecting both the request and the claim, stating, “The Cass Review is a robust report backed by clinicians and firmly grounded in evidence. NHS England will be implementing Dr. Cass’s recommendations so that children and young people get the safe, holistic support they need. We do not support a delay to vital improvements from the NHS to gender services.” Even the leftist Guardian ran an editorial criticizing the BMA’s position, stating, “The BMA’s stance on puberty blockers defies the key principle of medicine: first, do no harm.”
READ: FDA official recommends approval of puberty blockers despite suicide risk for gender-confused youth
As it turns out, there are plenty of physicians who are very unhappy with the BMA’s move – and they are now making their voices heard. This week, 1,000 senior doctors from across the U.K. published an open letter addressed to Professor Philip Banfield, chairman of the BMA.
“We write as doctors to say, ‘not in my name,’” the letter reads. “We are extremely disappointed that the BMA council had passed a motion to conduct a ‘critique’ of the Cass Review and to lobby to oppose its recommendations. The passing of the motion was opaque and secretive. It does not reflect the views of the wider membership, whose opinion you did not seek. We understand that no information will be released on the voting figures and how council members voted. That is a failure of accountability to members and is simply not acceptable.”
The open letter further emphasizes that the Cass Review “is the most comprehensive review into healthcare for children with gender related distress ever conducted” and urged the BMA to “abandon its pointless exercise” of attacking and opposing the recommendations. “By lobbying against the best evidence we have, the BMA is going against the principles of evidence-based medicine and against ethical practice.”
Among the signatories to the letter are 23 former or current clinical leaders at royal colleges, as well as the heads and former heads of some royal colleges.
The British Medical Association is the only main medical organization to oppose the Cass Review; all others have backed it. For example, Professor Sir Stephen Powis, NHS national medical director, stated, “These plans set out in detail how we will establish a fundamentally different and safer model of care for children and young people. The work Dr. Cass has undertaken has been invaluable in helping us shape the new service offer, and we have already begun our transformation of these services by opening two new regional centres this year.” Banfield responded on behalf of the BMA council to say that the points made in the letter would be considered during their ongoing evaluation.
As Josephine Bartosch observed, “it is becoming increasingly clear that the BMA is dangerously out of step with the medical consensus. The Cass Review has sent ripples across the world, and from lawsuits in the U.S. to a change of tack across Europe – medics are increasingly acknowledging that what is a crisis in youth mental health cannot be cured by changing bodies.”
New documentary produced by the Canadian Centre For Responsible Drug Policy features a 25-year-old student who purchased thousands of diverted “safer supply” opioids.
The Centre For Responsible Drug Policy, parent organization of Break The Needle, has launched its first mini-documentary: “Government Heroin.” The film follows the story of Callum Bagnall, a 25-year-old student from London, Ontario, who purchased thousands of opioid pills diverted from government-funded “safer supply” programs. Callum recounts how rampant fraud has turned these programs into a an abject disaster, leading to new addictions and immense profits for organized crime.
The film also features Joanne, his anxious mother, as well as Dr. Janel Gracey, an addiction physician whose clinical experiences make it obvious that safer supply is causing a wave of relapses and getting teenagers hooked on “government heroin.”
Subscribe to Break The Needle. Our content is always free – but if you want to help us commission more high-quality journalism, consider getting a voluntary paid subscription.
From the Brownstone Institute
No data is 100% secure, and this is mental health data. Data that might be extremely embarrassing, career-damaging, or has the potential to disrupt family relationships. Remember, no one knows what new laws, regulations, or more might come to pass years from now.
True Story: The Health app built into iPhones is now collecting as much personal information on the mental health of each and every one of us as they can get a hold of.
Yet, a search on Google and Brave yielded no results on the dangers of sharing such information over the phone or the internet. Seriously, no single MSM has done an article on why such data sharing might be a bad idea?
To start, in sharing such data, you aren’t just sharing your information; iPhone knows exactly who your family members are. In many cases, those phones are connected via family plans.
iPhone mental health assessments not only ask questions about your mental health but can also infer the mental health status of family members, as demonstrated by the image publicly shared by phone on the benefits of a phone mental health assessment.
What could possibly go wrong?
Although the iPhone has historically been known to keep user data “safe,” this is not a given, and there have been hacks and data breaches over the years.
CrowdStrike happened – from just a simple coding error. In 2015, all of my confidential data given to the DoD and the FBI in order to get a security clearance was harvested by the Chinese government, when they hacked into the government’s “super-secret,” and “super-secure” government data storage site. In response, the government offered me a credit report and monitoring of my credit score for a year. Yeah – thanks.
The bottom line – no data is 100% secure, and this is mental health data. Data that might be extremely embarrassing, career-damaging, or has the potential to disrupt family relationships. Remember, no one knows what new laws, regulations, or more might come to pass years from now. This type of information should not be harvested and stored.
Stay Informed with Brownstone Institute. Sign up for updates.
Furthermore, trusting that Apple will never sell that data or pass it off to research groups is very naive. In fact, mental health data is already being mined.
Apple has partnered with various health organizations and academic institutions to conduct health-related studies, such as Harvard T.H. Chan School of Public Health, Brigham and Women’s Hospital, and the University of Michigan on various health studies. Apple also collaborates with the University of California, Los Angeles (UCLA) on a Digital Mental Health Study. This study likely utilizes data collected through Apple devices to investigate mental health patterns and outcomes. Trusting that the user identifiers have been completely stripped before that data is passed on is a risk that one takes when entering such information into an iPhone.
“Connect with resources.”
So how does Apple benefit? At this time, it appears that Apple is selling advertising of various mental health services by “connecting” services to people’s phones. Apple writes that “These assessments can help users determine their risk level, connect to resources available in their region, and create a PDF to share with their doctor.”
That might mean that if one presses the depressed button in the mental health assessment, Apple will place ads on the search engine for anti-depressants or physicians that prescribe them.
Why would that example be relevant, and which pharmaceutical companies might benefit?
iPhone has developed their mental health assessment with an “educational grant” from Pfizer!
Pfizer manufactures and sells Zoloft, Effexor, Pristiq, and Sinequan formulations. Together the sales revenue for these drugs is in the billions each year:
From 2015 to 2018, 13.2% of American adults reported taking antidepressant medication within the past 30 days, with sertraline (Zoloft) being one of the most common. Even off-patent, there were 39.2 million prescriptions filled with an annual sales revenue of 470 million.
Effexor XR is an antidepressant medication that was originally developed by Wyeth (now part of Pfizer). In 2010, when the first generic version of Effexor XR was introduced in the United States, the brand name product had annual sales of approximately $2.75 billion. By 2013, due to generic competition, Pfizer’s sales of Effexor XR dropped to $440 million.
According to IMS Health data, in 2016, Pristiq (desvenlafaxine) had annual sales of approximately $883 million in the United States, although sales appear to have fluctuated over the years.
The bottom line is that Pfizer is not supplying educational grants to develop mental health assessment software for Apple out of the “goodness of their heart.” Mental health inventions via medication are a big business, and these companies are looking to profit.
This is just one way that Apple is using surveillance capitalism by data mining mental health status and then selling access to that data to Big Pharma, Big Tech, physician and insurance companies, etc.
How this information, which once released or leaked, can never be returned with privacies intact, will be used in the future is unknown.
If the setting for sharing research on health conditions has not been deactivated, this information will go into a database somewhere. It is only Apple’s assurance that your identification has been stripped from the data. Further, your mental health information will be uploaded to the cloud and will be used as a behavioral future. To be shared, packaged, sold, used to influence your decision-making, etc.
I am wary of the highly profitable industry that has been built up around “mental disorders.” Over the years, the American Psychiatric Association and the fields of psychology and psychiatry have hurt individuals and families by both classifying diseases and disorders incorrectly and by developing treatments and therapies that were and are dangerous. Many are still in use. Here are a few examples:
- There are estimates that 50,000 lobotomies were performed in the United States, with most occurring between 1949 and 1952. In 1949, the Nobel Prize in Physiology or Medicine was awarded to António Egas Moniz for his development of the lobotomy procedure.
- Homosexuality was classified as a mental disorder in 1952 with the publication of the first Diagnostic and Statistical Manual of Mental Disorders (DSM-I) by the American Psychiatric Association (APA). It was listed under “sociopathic personality disturbance.” This classification remained in place until 1973.
- Selective Serotonin Reuptake Inhibitors (SSRIs) are a widely prescribed class of antidepressant medications. There is a link between SSRIs and increased risk of violent crime convictions, and other research has shown an increase in self-harm and aggression in children and adolescents taking SSRIs.
- The APA supports access to affirming and supportive treatment for “transgendered” children, including mental health services, puberty suppression and medical transition support.
- The APA believes that gender identity develops in early childhood, and some children may not identify with their assigned sex at birth.
- Asperger’s syndrome was merged into the broader category of autism spectrum disorder (ASD) in the DSM-5 in 2013. Since then, a large number of people have faced discrimination and barriers to entry into higher-paying positions. Children handed such a diagnosis also can suffer a lack of confidence in their ability to manage relationships effectively, which can easily carry on to adulthood.
These are just a few of the many, many ways the American Psychiatric Association and the fields of psychology and psychiatry have gotten things very wrong.
- A survey of more than 500 social and personality psychologists published in 2012 found that only 6 percent identified as conservative overall, implying that 94% were liberal or moderate.
- At a 2011 Society for Personality and Social Psychology annual meeting, when attendees were asked to identify their political views, only three hands out of about a thousand went up for “conservative” or on the right.
The liberal bias in psychology influences findings on conservative behaviors.
To bring this back to the use of software applications and the iPhone mental health app in particular, be aware that these software programs are being developed by people with a liberal bias and who will view the beliefs of conservatives negatively. What this means for future use of this data is unknown, but it can’t be good.
If you do choose to use the mental health applications, which mainstream media has nothing but praise for, be aware – there are alligators in those waters.
But sure that the data sharing mode, particularly giving data access to researchers is turned off. But even then, don’t be surprised if your phone begins planting messages about the benefits, SSRIs, or other anti-depressant drugs into your everyday searches. Or maybe your alcohol use or tobacco use data will be used to supply you with advertisements on the latest ways to reduce intake or how to find a good mental health facility. These messages may very well include neuro-linguistic programming methods and nudging, to push you into treatment modalities. But honestly, it is all for your “own good and for the benefit of your family.”
Now, the iPhone and the watch can be valuable tools. The EKG, blood oxygen, and heart rate monitoring are fantastic tools for those who suffer from cardiac disorders. I have found them to be extremely helpful.
My wife, Jill is often motivated by getting more walking steps each week via her iWatch tracker.
Just be aware that these programs can be invasive. Data is never 100% secure and it is being used. We just don’t know all the details.
Republished from the author’s Substack
Author
‘They’re Gonna Pay For It’: A Texas Billionaire May Be About To Force Greenpeace USA Into Bankruptcy
Canadian pandemic bill wants to regulate meat production, develop contract tracing
Why You Shouldn’t Fret Much Over Russian Election Interference
There are no licensed COVID shots for kids under 12 – but CDC wants babies to get 3 Pfizer shots by 9 months
-
Brownstone Institute1 day ago
iPhone Now Collects Your Mental Health Data
-
Censorship Industrial Complex2 days agoJordan Peterson agrees to social media ‘training’ mandate to defend free speech for all Canadians
-
Daily Caller1 day agoBiden Admin Touts Reduction In Border Crossings While Flying In Hundreds Of Thousands Of Migrants
-
Daily Caller1 day agoShoplifting And Vehicle Thefts Soared As Haitian Migrants Poured Into Ohio Town, Police Data Shows
-
Daily Caller2 days agoBP Dumping Key Green Energy Business
-
COVID-192 days agoTrial for Freedom Convoy leaders ends, verdict may take 6 months
-
Christopher Rufo1 day agoIndependent reporter takes on CBS News for contradicting his report “Cat Eaters of Ohio”
-
Economy1 day agoIf Canadian families spent and borrowed like the federal government, they would be $427,759 in debt