New mental health analysis of Tavistock pb trial

[WarriorN]

Bbc report by Hannah Barnes

It doesn't mention their sex though

It appears to be more around the way the data was interpreted and as only 44 children is a very small sample size.

Children on puberty blockers saw mental health change - new analysis www.bbc.co.uk/news/health-66842352

Paper (not yet peer reviewed)

www.medrxiv.org/content/10.1101/2023.05.30.23290763v3

Curiously this piece by Hannah Barnes is listed under Health but not LGBT on the BBC.

Big questions should be asked of the ethics committee that approved the trial. I remember they went ‘REC shopping’ and were their some dubious links in the committee that gave them their approval?

Well worth reading the whole preprint linked above, particularly the methods and discussion, which give great contextual information about the methods used in the reanalysis and the shape of the findings within what is published from other child mental health cohorts in the UK.

In any other area of healthcare, the only time you’d use a medication with such little information and unknown risk/benefit ratio is when the patient is critically ill and all other treatment options have been exhausted. The idea of using such a medication in physically healthy children, and before assessing and treating co-morbidities, would be unthinkable to doctors in any other speciality.

why this isn’t being shouted from the rooftops is a mystery.

You can draw conclusion about outcome - improved, no change, worsened - but what you can’t do is draw conclusions about the cause of those outcomes.

So even with all the attendant issues about not being able to draw conclusions,

44 children were given an untested drug without proper trials and controls, where the drug is known to be a potential cause of major health issues, in the name of improving mental health as a more serious risk outweighing the potential physical damage caused. It's one of those moments where I look at a sentence I've just typed and think - bloody hell, I just typed that sentence and am leaving it there without having kittens about all the extreme things wrong with it because I've become that inured!

One third of children experienced no benefit - in the context of all the possible risks and future outcomes.

More than one third of children deteriorated in their mental health on top of all the other possible risks and future outcomes.

And less than a third benefitted.

Here's a major medication, untested, for your child, and it could cause a lot of future issues, we don't really know, but it's supposed to be the answer for their mental health issues. One in three kids gets worse, one in three kids doesn't notice a difference, but your kid might be third kid who gets some benefit along with the risks. And this is supposedly better than other options which are currently at risk of being banned for being 'conversion therapy', such as talk based approaches.

It defeats belief.

And less than a third benefitted.

It is not possible to say a third benefitted from the drug. You can only say a third had better mental health at the end of the followup period compared to baseline. It might still be worse than it would be if they hadn’t taken the drug.

That is why their fake suicide stats are so vital; it is the only way they can justify the treatment.

Very true.

Exactly, because there is no control group.

We just don’t know if the proportions of improved/declined/no change would be the same in a similar group of patients who did not receive the drug. And that is the massively important missing bit of information.

But why the desperation to justify the treatment?

why is it so important to do this to these children?

The trial was initially rejected by the ethics committee, but was then submitted to another ethics committee which approved it.

The proposal—“Early pubertal suppression in a carefully selected group of adolescents with gender identity disorder” —was rejected by the NHS Research Ethics Committee, on the grounds that it was not a proper randomized trial
and therefore could not yield valid results (GIDS 2019b). The revised proposal (Viner 2010) argued that a randomized trial was not practical. Just as importantly, perhaps, it was submitted to a different Research Ethics Committee. This Committee approved the experiment in February 2011.

https://users.ox.ac.uk/~sfos0060/Biggs_ExperimentPubertyBlockers.pdf

Also discussed here:
https://www.transgendertrend.com/tavistock-experiment-puberty-blockers/

Good question.

Because without treatment, around 80% desist.

Yes.

Children are being given powerful drugs with potentially very severe side effects, based on fuck all evidence.

Could that be it? Is it that it’s essential to have significant numbers of trans children?

I don't know, Bernard.

I think there is a story/narrative/myth being strenuously defended.

I do find it strange that PBs are so vigorously fought for.

Because the existence of 'trans children' is necessary for late transitioning males. They insist that they were just like those children, and they claim to wish that they had had this treatment. This is in order to encourage the acceptance in society of late transitioning males. They are utililising these children for their own ends.

Of course if anyone engages their brain for a moment it's clear that a little boy who likes to wear a princess dress and play with dolls is nothing like a middle-aged male who gets off on wearing his wife's underwear. But we're expected to ignore that inconvenient fact.

As one such late transitioning male put it: Trans children "demystify it and take the sex right out of the trans experience.” It's all about sanitising a paraphilia.

I would also suggest that a significant number of children being given PBS is important to parents who pioneered this, like Suzie Green. It makes her actions more mainstream and justifiable

and i am also sure that there are some medical professionals who just like doing things to others to see what will happen. The fact that this is all experimental would actually be a draw for them