Helen has written a new article that I think is really interesting and worth reading:
https://thecritic.co.uk/post-truth-medicine/
'…with the discovery of microorganisms and the invention of vaccines, antibiotics, anaesthetics and all the other weapons with which doctors now fight disease, save lives and ease pain. Few women die in childbirth any more; most children survive into adulthood. And doctors get the credit. Polls around the world routinely rank them as the professionals people trust most.
Underpinning this trust is the scientific method, especially the clinical trials that weed out promising ideas that don’t work, or that do more harm than good. The profession’s continuing failures, such as the millions of women worldwide fitted with vaginal mesh for prolapse before the rate of complications became too high to ignore, gain so much attention precisely because they are the exception rather than the rule.
But not in gender clinics, which offer a post-truth charade that relies on the signs and symbols of evidence-based medicine — consultations, diagnoses, drugs and surgeries — whilst subverting its spirit. They trade on the trust hard won by the medical profession at large, like counterfeiters who pass fakes in a market that has been lulled into a false sense of security by the sophisticated anti-forgery measures those counterfeiters have worked out how to circumvent.'