The Alabama legislature passed a bill Thursday criminalizing sex change treatments for children including puberty blockers, cross-sex hormones and sex-change surgeries.
The bill, if signed by Gov. Kay Ivey, would treat the castration of children and other sex-change treatments as Class C felonies which, according to Politico, carry a penalty of up to ten years in prison for medical practitioners.
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Just a few years ago, concepts such as “white supremacy,” “systemic racism,” and “structural intersectionality” were not the standard fare of prestigious medical journals. These are now the guiding ideas in a February special issue of “Health Affairs” that focuses on medicine and race.
Featuring nearly two dozen articles with titles such as “Racism Runs Through It” and “Sick and Tired of Being Excluded,” as well as a poem called “Identity,” the Washington, D.C.-based, peer-reviewed journal analyzes racial health disparities not through biology, behavior, or culture, but through the lens of “whiteness,” along with concepts such as power, systems of oppression, state-sanctioned violence, and critical race praxis – a sampling of terms that come up in the February issue.
Health Affairs, dubbed by a Washington Post columnist as “the bible of health policy,” represents something much more ambitious than woke virtue signaling. Its February issue reflects the effort of newly empowered “anti-racist” scholars to transform concepts that are still considered speculative and controversial – and some say unprovable – into scientific fact. This growing effort to document, measure, and quantify racism is being advanced by other high-profile publications, including The New England Journal of Medicine, The Journal of the American Medical Association, and Scientific American, which last year ran articles entitled “Modern Mathematics Confronts Its White, Patriarchal Past” and “Denial of Evolution Is a Form of White Supremacy.”
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California doctors who object to assisted suicide are fighting an amended state law that implicates them in their patients’ intentional deaths.
They are suing California officials, including Attorney General Rob Bonta, Department of Public Health Director Tomas Aragon, and Medical Board members to block SB 380, which made it easier for patients to commit suicide under the End of Life Options Act that took effect in 2016.
The original law issued a broad exemption for healthcare providers, granting them a liability shield for “refusing to inform” patients about their right to physician-assisted suicide and “not referring” patients to physicians who will assist in their suicides.
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Major technology companies and social media platforms have removed, suppressed or flagged the accounts of over 800 prominent individuals and organizations, including medical doctors, for COVID-19 misinformation, according to a new study from the Media Research Center (MRC).
MRC’s Free Speech America CensorTrack, an initiative that monitors acts of censorship across online platforms, identified over 41 instances between March 2020 and February 2022 in which doctors, scientists and medical organizations were censored, according to the results of a study shared with Daily Caller News Foundation.
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Toothbrushing is a mindless activity that most of us have on autopilot, but in infinitesimally rare circumstances, it can result in a medical emergency.
Late last week, Drs. Gary G. Ghahremani and Katherine M. Richman, both radiologists at the University of California-San Diego Medical Center, published a paper in the journal Emergency Radiology detailing eight different accounts of adults ingesting toothbrushes. These cases join about fifty others previously reported in the medical literature.
All of the instances Ghahremani and Richman describe occurred at the UC-San Diego Medical Center between 2002 and 2015. Five of the patients, all of them with psychological disorders, intentionally swallowed toothbrushes, while the other three patients accidentally did so. In two of the accidental instances, the toothbrush’s head snapped off as a result of overly vigorous brushing.
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The Biden administration proposed giving bonus payments to physicians who acknowledge systemic racism as the primary cause of health differences between racial groups and incorporate so-called “anti-racism” into their medical practices.
The move to pressure healthcare professionals to repeat the claim that racial health disparities are caused by racism and not lifestyle choices is part of a broader, years-long push to hardwire “race Marxism” into the medical field. The effort stretches from medical schools and research institutions to patient care and medical administration, with potentially devastating effects for patients and the healthcare system as a whole.
“Race Marxism,” analogous to “anti-racism” as popularized by Ibram X. Kendi, seeks to promote equal outcomes across racial groups, as opposed to a “colorblind” approach which favors equal opportunity and does not take race into account.
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The Biden Administration is planning to offer bonuses to any doctors who “create and implement an anti-racism plan” in their medical facilities, according to the Washington Free Beacon.
The directive was issued under new rules from the Department of Health and Human Services (HHS), which aim to update Medicare in order to “reflect changes in medical practice.” As of January 1st, doctors involved in Medicare can increase reimbursement rates by holding “clinic-wide reviews” of their facilities’ “commitment to anti-racism.” HHS notes that, in such surveys, race must be defined as “a political and social construct, not a physiological one.”
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Evolving research on COVID-19 interventions calls into question whether bureaucrats, administrators and licensing boards are “following the science” by mandating vaccines and masks and threatening medical professionals for challenging pandemic orthodoxy.
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Doctors can now prescribe puberty blocking medication to children under the age of 16 without a judge’s approval, Britain’s Court of Appeals ruled on Friday.
The decision reverses last year’s ruling that children seeking gender reassignment aren’t mature enough to give informed consent to take puberty blocking medicine, the Associated Press reported. The decision said that doctors should seek court approval before prescribing the medication because the drugs were still experimental.
The Tavistock and Portman National Health Service (NHS) trust, Britain’s only gender identity development service (GIDS) for children, appealed last year’s ruling, the AP reported. The Court of Appeal sided with the trust Friday, ruling it was “inappropriate” for the high courts to issue their guidance, and it was up to the doctors to “exercise their judgment” regarding patients’ consent.
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Top U.S. health officials told the White House pandemic coordinator on Thursday to scale back the Biden administration’s plan to administer the coronavirus booster shots to individuals in September, The New York Times reported.
Dr. Janet Woodcock, the acting commissioner of the Food and Drug Administration (FDA), and Dr. Rochelle P. Walensky, the director of the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention (CDC), told White House Coronavirus Response Coordinator Jeffrey D. Zients that they need more time to collect and analyze the necessary data relating to the booster shots, The New York Times reported.
The doctors told Zients that their agencies might be able to determine whether to recommend boosters for recipients of the Pfizer-BioNTech vaccine in the coming weeks, according to the Times.
The two doctors presented their argument to Zients at a meeting on Thursday. It is unclear how Zients responded to the news.
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More than 500 U.S. physicians sent a letter to President Donald Trump describing the coronavirus shutdowns as a “mass casualty incident” with “exponentially growing negative health consequences” to millions of non-COVID-19 patients nationwide.
The letter is signed by Simone Gold, M.D., an emergency medicine specialist in Los Angeles, followed by eight pages of doctors who have signed on to the letter.
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The New York Times on Tuesday reported: “The numbers the health officials showed President Trump were overwhelming. With the peak of the coronavirus pandemic still weeks away, he was told, hundreds of thousands of Americans could face death if the country reopened too soon.”
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I can’t wrap my head around all that I’ve done to myself in the last two years, much less the “help” that some health care professionals have done to me.
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In my medical training, a fellow physician tried to convince me that my liberal leanings on health care were misguided. While I firmly believed that the government had an important role in providing access to medical care—particularly to the underserved—my colleague argued that the government’s role in, well, anything, should be practically nonexistent.
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Last week, the administrator of the Center for Medicare and Medicaid Services, Seema Verma, spoke at The Heritage Foundation on the effect “Medicare for All” would have on American health care.
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