What is worse than using drugs experimentally on children? Using those drugs and not even gathering or collating the data to make a study. It's not even an experiment, is it?
That’s awful not to research medical practice on children and in combination with institutional capture can get really dangerous.
Concerns have long been raised around consent by parents and whistleblowing clinicians, that children and young people are being left without adequate professional emotional support, while they are at risk of being groomed by an affirmative online culture and lobby organisations.
The Trusts should have raised the alarm themselves, long ago, that the growing authoritarian culture was pushing their clinicians towards either treating in fear of criticism by outside organisations or towards treating kids politically-based on political views not evidence.
The trusts should have ensured they were gathering evidence properly, to satisfy themselves that the clinicians were not deviating from norms of their role. They left themselves vulnerable to accusations of poor practice and let down patients by not insisting on basic follow up.
The culture surrounding this is dangerous because partly as a result of lack of public funding for CAMHS, the specialty team potentially underserves psychological need at the same time as it is in favour of offering permanently-affecting physical interventions to help, allegedly also deviating from proper safeguarding practice (see Sonia Appleby case), while it offers experimental care with a cosmetic aim.
Good medical practice treats each individual individually according to their needs, and takes account of the culture around the patient let alone around the staff, and takes proper account of the patients’ age or drug-induced immaturity while operating a service for children who are asked to make decisions that would affect them permanently with no concrete evidence to weigh up.