"Dr Stathis argued that if youth gender medicine were to be criticised as “experimental”, that label should also be applied to most treatments used by child and adolescent psychiatry because low-quality evidence was the norm."
I suspect most treatments do not sterilize the young person or commit them on a pathway to lifetime hormone usage which takes their body out of normal operating conditions (with increased mortality, heart disease, immune disease, bone density harm....etc.).
The evidence of benefit is shaky if at all there beyond anecdotes but the harm is significant. It's time to start walking this back, physicians....
why do they expect their evidence review to give anything that Sweden and NICE didn't get? They're reproducible, that's the whole point....they can actually start acting on it!
Kudos and gratitude to brave Dr. Spencer! Where are the rest of the clinicians and if you are one... how are you going to explain to people in 5 years why you weren't at her side right now?
One of the reasons that most psychiatric medications are used 'off label' and that there is only low quality evidence in children and adolescents is because they have not been tested in clinical trials. The reason given for that is that there are serious issues around informed consent from children and adolescents. For years the only medication that had been tested (for children and adolescents) in clinical trials was imipramine, an anti-depressant, used in the treatment of nocturnal enuresis. Not sure that that has changed but happy to be corrected. The issues around informed consent still exist.
I cannot see that consent is an acceptable excuse. All cancer treatments in children have been proven in double blind randomised controlled trials. If they can do it with cancer drugs there is no excuse for not doing them for psychiatric drugs or puberty blockers.
"Dr Stathis argued that if youth gender medicine were to be criticised as “experimental”, that label should also be applied to most treatments used by child and adolescent psychiatry because low-quality evidence was the norm."
I suspect most treatments do not sterilize the young person or commit them on a pathway to lifetime hormone usage which takes their body out of normal operating conditions (with increased mortality, heart disease, immune disease, bone density harm....etc.).
The evidence of benefit is shaky if at all there beyond anecdotes but the harm is significant. It's time to start walking this back, physicians....
why do they expect their evidence review to give anything that Sweden and NICE didn't get? They're reproducible, that's the whole point....they can actually start acting on it!
Kudos and gratitude to brave Dr. Spencer! Where are the rest of the clinicians and if you are one... how are you going to explain to people in 5 years why you weren't at her side right now?
It’s hard to know what the true state of medical opinion is because people are afraid.
One of the reasons that most psychiatric medications are used 'off label' and that there is only low quality evidence in children and adolescents is because they have not been tested in clinical trials. The reason given for that is that there are serious issues around informed consent from children and adolescents. For years the only medication that had been tested (for children and adolescents) in clinical trials was imipramine, an anti-depressant, used in the treatment of nocturnal enuresis. Not sure that that has changed but happy to be corrected. The issues around informed consent still exist.
I cannot see that consent is an acceptable excuse. All cancer treatments in children have been proven in double blind randomised controlled trials. If they can do it with cancer drugs there is no excuse for not doing them for psychiatric drugs or puberty blockers.