Junk science

[MondayYogurt]

Absolute belter of a sentence from Siddhartha Mukherjee's book The Gene: An Intimate History:

Junk science props up totalitarian regimes. And totalitarian regimes produce junk science.

He is talking about the Nazis and Soviets but of course, we're living under a different one now.

Anyway, heartily recommend this book (and his previous one on cancer).

Ive been wondering about that.

Who is advising Stonewall on the sciencey bits? Do they have experts, or just people who can google badly?

I always used to wonder how Germany got captured by such an extreme ideology as Nazism
I understood it was through propaganda and initially must have started off less extreme, but I still couldn't really imagine how so many people could have believed the nonsense...

But now with what we are witnessing with this gender nonsense, I can totally understand how it could have happened. Good god.

I keep thinking of the Islamic Universities which dominated knowledge in the Middle Ages. Then along came an intolerant version of the religion and purity was valued above truth.

@MondayYogurt

An Economist article about activist doctors urging GPs to prescribe cross-sex hormones to remove the final remnants of gate-keeping from gender medicine is an example of the junk science being imposed on medicine

snip

The pilot [gender] clinics aim to bring this affirmative approach to gps. The Indigo clinic in Manchester, for example, will be staffed by gps who will train others to prescribe hormones without detailed psychological evaluation. It describes itself as “a service designed by and for trans and non-binary people...”

snip

"...the Royal College of Physician's ethics committee have expressed concerns to The Economist about it. They say they raised questions and were ignored, a claim denied by the head of the committee. Alasdair Coles, a professor of neurology at Cambridge University, was on the committee until 2019, when it discussed the course, and he heard a presentation from its organisers. “We did not get the sense that gender medicine was open to scrutiny or self-criticism on standard medical criteria, such as side-effects and long-term outcomes,” he says.

www.economist.com/britain/2022/02/19/activist-doctors-are-urging-gps-to-prescribe-cross-sex-hormones

It shows how doctors are not necessarily to be believed.