No other patient population dictates the terms of their care.
I believe that a significant part of our current problem lies in the fact that swathes of extremely vulnerable people, children and adults, many who are neuro-diverse / neuro-atypical, mentally very unwell or otherwise vulnerable have been "empowered" to dictate what kind of services they would like, as if they were consumers selecting the brand of food they prefer from a supermarket.
This has clearly happened in the case of many people who identify as trans but has also happened in the case of many extremely mentally unwell people who have influenced public money to be spent on yoga, mindfulness and quack therapies (many of which are delivered by cults).
Discourses around "empowerment" and "patient choice" have been misused to divert public finding towards charlatans, grifters and psychopaths who are only to happy to conduct harmful experiments on children and vulnerable adults.
The issue of the BMA’s strange shift from evidence based skepticism to snake oil promotion was covered in the excellent, highly recommended 1996 BBC documentary series Strange Days featuring the rationalist, skeptical narrator / presenter Catherine Bennett
The episode on alternative therapies can be seen here and is worth watching in its entirety, however, for those pushed for time the highly relevant part is at 8.08 when Bennett questions where the public can go to obtain proper medical advice.
Bennett questions why the BMA changed its 1986 dismissal of so called alternative medicine as primitive beliefs and outmoded practices, almost all without basis to a 1992 report “Complementary Medicine; new approaches to good practice” in which alternative therapies were described as complementary medicine and deemed worthy of research and respect.
at 8.42 Bennett interviews the disgraced and extremely controversial figure, the then Head Of Ethics of the BMA, Dr Fleur Fisher, about how this change could have happened.
Dr Fleur Fisher’s response is absolutely fascinating and highly relevant to this issue.
She says Quite frankly, I think the main driver here has been the development of a much more consumer awareness in the NHS. Patients are consumers of healthcare and they have been actually voting with their feet and they’ve been going to osteopaths, chiropractors, homeopathy, acupuncture…
Central to this issue is the extent to which the “empowerment” of patients to choose the treatments that they prefer has been used as a Trojan horse divert precious public funding, including NHS resources, away from where it is needed and into the coffers of mountebanks, charlatans, grifters and criminals.
Most patients do not know what their best treatment options are. Training to be a medical doctor takes many years and most patients have only a rudimentary grasp of medicine. Fake information about medicine is rampant across social media and fake news websites and publications.
When we look at mental health the issue is even more concerning with many unproven therapies provided on the NHS and many properly trained and accredited NHS psychiatrists, psychologists and psychotherapists promoting pseudoscientific charlatanry such as “energy therapy”, EMDR and NLP.
The advent of the “wellness” industry has complicated things further.
The point that I am making is that the outrageous experimentation on children as part of GIDS is just one very visible pimple on the arse of a much larger beast.
Vulnerable people of all ages are being harmed physically and emotionally by being provided with treatments that they demand, even if such treatments are unproven, experimental and dangerous.