Disinformed Consent
How Public Health Killed the Ethical Foundation of Modern Medicine
Public health in America covers a lot of ground. Anthony Fauci, who is technically a medical doctor and not a public health authority, often acts as a public health official, as does Bill Gates, who has no medical credentials of any kind and, as a matter of fact, never even graduated college. Public health people—both those with scholarly credentials and those just assuming the roles of public health authorities—pontificate on everything from clean water to social media, traffic accidents and loneliness, gun violence and HIV prevention, suicide and maternal health. A good public health official has never met a problem that he didn’t think he could solve, mostly by spending a bunch of taxpayer money on grants to himself.
What these many and self-important public health officials have yet to realize is that public health has died of a self-inflicted wound.
It has to do with informed consent, an ethical policy that public health and much modern medicine rarely practices but ardently praises. Informed consent is the idea that no drug, therapy, or medical procedure should be administered to you until you know what the potential risks and benefits are and have a chance to ask questions. Informed consent also has to inform you that your participation in a clinical study or taking a particular medicine or treatment is voluntary. According to informed consent you cannot be coerced or incentivized to take or refuse the treatment. (So much for moms promising rewards for kids who take their medicine … that violates informed consent.) Informed consent be communicated to you in clear terms, appropriate to your level of understanding. It’s sort of like the Terms & Conditions you see on websites, except you’re supposed to be able to understand them.
In actual practice, there is usually an informed consent form (a written document) but there can also be pamphlets or tablet presentations that explain the treatment as well. The format may even be a short talk given by a nurse or educator. Patients are to be allowed to have several sessions with the healthcare team before they’re asked for a final decision. If the patient agrees, in the end, an informed consent form is signed. In order to be ethical, the clinical team cannot coerce, cajole, encourage, or badger the signature out of a person.
This is why ethicists say that children cannot give informed consent—they don’t know enough. Medical ethics require that parents give informed consent on behalf of their minor children and, if children are old enough to understand at least some of what’s going on, the children can give informed assent. Informed assent is like informed consent, but it requires that the child sign a document that spells out the risks and benefits in age-appropriate language. It also requires the child be told at a level he or she can understand what the procedure is, what the risks are, what options are available, and also be given the chance to ask questions.
In California, laws are being considered that would circumvent parents in offering gender-affirming care for school children. That’s a clear violation of public health policies and ethics. If children can get medical treatment—particularly a serious and potentially irreversible treatment—without parental informed consent, our ethics have been flushed down the toilet. I guess it’s down in the sewers with our Build Back Better money and all the money Pete Buttigieg took ($8B) to not build car chargers.
This serious assault on informed consent it nothing new. In fact, public health in America has been built largely on Disinformed Consent. People are tricked into studies with risks they are never told about.
The Tuskegee Syphilis Experiment
You may have heard of the Tuskegee Syphilis Experiment. It all started in 1932 when 600 Black men in Macon County, Alabama, were recruited to enter a study. They weren’t even told the name of the study or that the study was set up to observe the “natural course” of syphilis. In 1932, syphilis was incurable. However, the U.S. Public Health Service at the time decided it would be a good idea to observe how syphilis progressed in untreated men. There was no clear objective for the study other than to just see how people succumbed to this venereal disease.
Who paid for this feckless, rambling, and harmful study with no endpoints? Why the U.S. Public Health Service, which means taxpayers. Government bureaucrats took taxpayer money to harm American citizens.
Of the men they recruited into the study, 399 actually had syphilis and 201 men did not. The men who did not have syphilis acted as controls. At no time was anyone told about syphilis. The men were told they had “bad blood.” Some say the men who entered the study were coerced or intimidated by powerful white physicians in lab coats who basically told them they had to join the study. They got meager compensation. On days they were to appear for a blood draw, they got a nice hot meal, which was a sufficient enticement for some in this desperately poor community. They also had free burial insurance. The idea was to observe the men until they died and they to conduct an autopsy.
In 1947, no thanks to the Tuskegee Syphilis Experiment, a cure was found for syphilis. Penicillin could get rid of this contagious disease. But remember nobody told the men that this was a syphilis study. The treatment was never offered through the study. If the men had known they had syphilis, they might have been able to get a shot of penicillin, but nobody in the study knew they had syphilis.
Not only did some of the men die of syphilis or its complications, as they lived years with the untreated disease, they infected spouses and girlfriends and passed the disease on to their children.
The study had no clear objective (most studies have a data-driven goal), so it just kept on and on for years. They were gathering data, but it was never published in a meaningful way. On October 19, 2023, it was announced that the National Library of Medicine has digitized the data, but I have had trouble finding the actual data. All I can find is the announcement that it exists. I don’t know anyone who has ever seen the data.
In the 1960s, a guy named Peter Buxton found out what was going on in Tuskegee and sounded the alarm, saying this study was unethical. The Public Health Society took the matter under investigation and after thoroughly investigating themselves decided it was no problem to continue the experiment. So on it marched.
(Here’s a clue: never let crooks and scoundrels investigate themselves.)
Buxton was so flummoxed by this outright violation of ethics that he went to journalists, who back in those days did not all get their stories prewritten by the government. (If this had happened today, no mainstream media would have dared pick up the story!) But Jean Hiller of the Associated Press ran with the story and in July 1972, the story caused such public outrage that the study was stopped.
It wasn’t public health that stopped the Tuskegee Syphilis Experiment, it was a reporter and public outrage. In 1973, Congress got around to having hearings and small settlements were paid out ($10M total) and guidelines were issued saying you can’t experiment on humans without telling them what you’re doing and you can’t deny them treatment for a disease without their permission.
And with the lightning speed characteristic of American government, in 1972 then-President Bill Clinton issued an apology to the men in the Tuskegee Syphilis Experiment. Of course, a lot of them were dead by then. By 2004, the last man in the program had died. It is an outrage that the results of the study which caused so much suffering and so many needless deaths didn’t matter. There was no point to studying the natural course of syphilis. We knew what it did and, besides, after 1948, if you contracted syphilis you got a shot of penicillin.
And that’s the absolutely gut-punching reality of American public health. These men were denied an effective treatment for syphilis… why? For no reason. The study, like so much of public health, was pointless except to be cruel.
The Guatemala Syphilis Experiment
And this wasn’t the first time American public health pulled stuff like this. A little bit after the Tuskegee Syphilis Experiment started, the U.S. led the Guatemala Syphilis Experiment. It would be amazing if you had ever heard of this. Public health soon learned that it’s more effective to offshore cruelty than to practice it on American soil.
It started in 1946 and lasted to 1948 (remember, penicillin was available in 1947). Dr. John Charles Cutler for Tuskegee fame was recruited to lead this study, which was a thousand times worse than its American predecessor.
In this case, Cutler and his crew infected 1300 human beings with syphilis. Naturally, they got no informed consent. Guatemalans were just rounded up and infected so that Cutler could see if treatment worked. Among those who entered the study were soldiers, sex workers, mentally ill people, prisoners, and orphans, that is, people who had no one looking out for their rights. No one was told what was going on. No one was asked if they wanted to be infected with a disease. No one had the opportunity to learn risks and benefits.
Results from this study were also not published and no one knows whether some of the alleged treatments worked or not. The study continued to around 1953. In 2010, the U.S. government apologized to Guatemala, which actually had agreed to allow the U.S. to do the study. News about this study swept under the rug. Almost no one knows about it. Who ran it? Why, our friends at the Public Health Service.
Details of what was done in Guatemala are too grisly to share. The point is that no one was informed, much less did anyone consent.
One guy involved in the Guatemalan Syphilis Experiment was Dr. John Mahoney. Mahoney is rightly famous for his work with penicillin as a cure for syphilis. He went on to head the World Health Organization (WHO) in 1948. However, it is important to remember Mahoney’s big life event was suggesting that the Guatemalan citizens recruited into this study not be told they were going to be infected with a potentially deadly disease.
That’s how you get into the WHO, you have to be willing to violate human rights in the name of public health. And other big name involved in this Guatemalan nightmare was Johns Hopkins University, often called the pre-eminent medical university in the country. Yeah, pre-eminent for being ghouls.
Attempts to sue Johns Hopkins University for $1B (774 plaintiffs) for its involvement in the Guatemalan tragedy was rejected at first by a Supreme Court decision that maintained that corporations could not be held accountable for human rights violations outside the United States. However, the case is still being wrangled over by a District Court ruling stating that the doctors involved in the Guatemalan study were not acting on behalf of corporations. In 2019 (remember this study started in 1946) a U.S. Federal Court in Maryland has said that Bristol-Myers Squibb, Johns Hopkins University, and the Rockefeller Foundation can be sued for the $1B. Stay tuned. Talk about obscure news. I do not think that has been to court yet. (It’s hard to find news reports about human rights violations committed by former WHO officials on behalf of American public health.)
COVID and Dr. Fauci
All of this brings me to the fact that you can’t trust public health.
Remember when Tony Fauci told us we had to distance 6 feet apart during COVID? Now he says that was just an arbitrary decision, based on no science.
Remember when he claimed, “I am the science!” Well, apparently he wasn’t the science, he was just a pack of lies surrounded by mendacity wrapped in bacon.
There was no scientific evidence that supported masking children, but he demanded it.
There was no scientific reason to close the schools, but gnomish Dr. Fauci demanded it.
There was no scientific basis to vaccinate little kids and babies, but Dr. Fauci insisted. He said it was safe. Turns out it wasn’t.
And remember Dr. Deborah Birx, the scarf lady. She has publicly admitted that during the COVID crisis when she—as as public health expert and medical doctor—deliberately misled Donald Trump with her advice.
What about informed consent? Were we allowed to learn about the virus, its possible treatments (ivermectin and hydroxychloroquine come to mind)? Were we allowed to decide if and where we would mask? Were we given options? Were we told we did not have to comply? No. Fauci and his minions used COVID to destroy informed consent.
Transitioning Minors and Adults
This brings me to transitioning of minor children and adults in what are called “gender-affirming procedures” or transsexual medicine. An organization called the World Professional Association for Transgender Health (WPATH) threw the “informed consent model” out the window. They determined it wasn’t an ethical policy or a pillar of American healthcare, it was just an idea, a model, a paradigm, just a crazy and old-fashioned way we used to do things. Who needs ethics when you have Big Pharma behind you?
WPATH initiated the “standard model of care” to replace informed consent. No one asked them to jettison informed consent and replace it with something else, they’re just helpful like that.
Before we go much further, I must caution you that WPATH is a lunatic group of people (apologies to actual lunatics who may be less dangerous to society than WPATH). Let me tell you what they recommend.
Psychologists and other mental health professionals are to determine the patient’s gender dysphoria “independent of the patient’s verbal claim.” In other words, the expert decides what you want. So a WPATH-anointed expert can look over a man and say, “Hey, you’re a woman!” and start their voodoo. Not only does the patient have no informed consent, the patient has no say!
WPATH admonishes healthcare professionals not to pay much attention to what patients say since they are “possible invalid sources of information.” You can’t get informed consent from a patient, since they don’t know what they’re talking about.
And what happened to “my body, my choice”? If you have gender dysphoria, you may not have a choice if you run into the WPATH doctors.
While mental health professionals play a role in gender-affirming procedures, WPATH says that a doctor prescribing hormones is allowed to make that mental health evaluations without that specific academic or professional expertise if he or she is experienced in transgender health. Second opinions? You don’t even need a first opinion any more!
No one has formally or academically proposed a challenge to the current approach of gender-affirming care without informed consent. This points to the abysmal failure of public health and our healthcare system to stand up for ethics, informed consent, and the rights of patients to participate and make decisions about their own care.
When children take hormone therapy or undergo so-called gender-affirming surgery, they may agree to it without fully understanding the effects of these treatments or the fact that some of these interventions may be irreversible. It is hard to imagine that an adolescent fully understands the ramifications of irreversible infertility or the devastation of major surgical complications.
Many surgical procedures for transsexuals have very high rates of complications that are not fully disclosed to adult patients and may not even be mentioned to minor patients. In many areas, such as California, efforts can be made to keep the parents from having any say in such decisions, meaning no one is looking out for the child’s interest. (Some side effects of these procedures are that urinary, defecation, and sexual systems get mixed up a little. A man who undergoes surgery to get a vagina may have a complication, whereby the contents from his intestines leak out the designer vagina. Some people undergo the surgery as a healthy person and come out with a colostomy bag.)
More and more de-transitioners are appearing who report that they did not understand what was going on or that no one told them that some of the changes they experienced as a result of the interventions were permanent.
Bear in mind that transgender health is a very new subject and is not widely taught in medical school—or at all. There are few serious studies of the condition. We do not know the effects of counter-sex hormones on children or the long-term effects of such treatments into adulthood. Many physicians doing these surgeries have been trained in Thailand or other nations where these procedures are common.
Johns Hopkins (whom you may remember from such hits as the Guatemalan Syphilis Study) supports the WPATH method, and it adds that mental health professionals are not needed to “verify” gender dysphoria. All that is needed is an experienced healthcare professional to tell the patient what to expect with hormone therapy and then get them so sign what they call a “consent form.” Tricky. They ditched the word “informed” because information is the last thing that gender-affirming care is about. All they do is tell the patient what to expect—not inform them about risks, dangers, pitfalls, or other options, much less that they have the right to refuse or to think it over some more.
What about people who attempt to undo those gender-affirming procedures? They’re so plentiful they even have a name: de-transitioners. WPATH says there is “scant” evidence about this, although they might try looking on the internet. The Associated Press says the number of those who regret their decision is about 1%, using the Dr. Fauci policy of making random stuff up. In 2021, a peer-reviewed study by Turban et al found 13% de-transitioned. There is very little research in this field and I suspect gender-transition regret is far more common than currently believed.
The Society for Evidence-Based Gender Medicine said that de-transitioning typically occurs about 5 years after the start of the transition and is usually based on a recognition by patients that whatever gender issues caused them to want to transition were not alleviated by the transition. Many organizations that are quick to provide support and encouragement to those who want to transition have no interest in helping de-transitoners. Fifty-one percent of those who detransition say they felt a lack of support during the process.
A New York Times story about a 17-year-old girl who transitioned and had a double mastectomy said that no one along the whole continuum of care ever asked her why she wanted to transition or why she had feelings of depression. No one asked about prior childhood trauma (she had been sexually abused as a young child) or her sexual orientation. She maintained that the healthcare workers just assured her: there was one thing to do and that was transition—it would help.
This has led to the creation of a new category of “rapid onset gender dysphoria.” This is gender dysphoria that comes on suddenly, usually in tween or teenage girls. These young people never expressed any gender concerns at all when, suddenly, they insist that they are a different gender. While this phenomenon has been observed, it has not been studied seriously, and we do not know what causes it or how to fix it. Is it a true condition or is it perhaps a social contagion? Teenage girls can be very susceptible to peer pressure (look at the Swifties) and many cases of rapid onset gender dysphoria happen in groups of friends. It is my understanding that it is rare to see an isolated case of rapid onset gender dysphoria—it’s a group thing. But should we rush to transition these young people?
A very famous gender clinic in the UK called Tavistock recently shut down. The staff there protested that they were under pressure to affirm gender care and not ask any questions that might get to the root of the patient’s issues, especially if getting to the root of the problem might result in not transitioning. It’s almost like they were funneling people into harmful and unnecessary surgeries just to make money.
A radical American therapist in Oregon named Stephanie Winn proposed an extreme solution: she said in 2021 that gender studies experts and those giving gender care should pay attention to people who de-transition. She thought medicine could learn a lot about gender-affirming care by studying what did not work in some patients. This has led to numerous attacks. In 2022, the Oregon Board of Licensed Professional Counselors and Therapists launched an investigation into Winn, which was dismissed, although Winn meanwhile no longer sees any patients.
Imagine the nerve! A scientist seeking evidence!
Few media outlets or support groups (except Conservative ones) care about the de-transitioners. And there is a strict political line in the sand. Some de-transitoners say that their change of heart about a transition paralleled a political conversion. And it’s no secret that Conservatives approach gender care conservatively, while liberals approach it with reckless abandon.
Liberals and gender ghouls are also the first to use the old argument, “Do you want a live daughter or a dead son?” It is emotional blackmail of the highest degree to bully parents into supporting a potentially dangerous medical transition by saying their failure to obey the gender clinic will cost their child his or her life.
But that’s what we have now instead of informed consent.
Informed consent has literally been thrown out the window in American medicine. While those conducting clinical trials for new medications for high blood pressure or migraines are often held to ridiculous standards for providing highly documented, thorough, multi-page informed consent paperwork to do their FDA-mandated clinical trials, public health often throws those concerns out the window when it comes to mutilating the bodies of healthy children and young adults.
They didn’t even consider informed consent for Guatemala and Tuskegee, letting patients literally die. And they don’t use informed consent for gender transitions. Gender transition—which includes hormonal therapy and may include numerous and irreversible surgeries—may be the most radical type of medical and psychological procedure there is.
It is life altering.
It is also difficult and can be painful.
Many transitioners have multiple surgeries.
It has a very high rate of complications.
Those who start down this pathway become lifelong patients of Big Pharma.
Many lose their ability to reproduce and some become anorgasmic.
It’s not a trifling procedure. But a kid who can’t legally get a tattoo or buy cigarettes can sometimes start down this path with nothing but applause and support from the left.
They say it’s brave.
No, it’s insane. Liberals always get those two things mixed up. You know what’s brave. Speaking the truth.
Public health, of course, is not going to intervene. They’ll talk to you about climate change, abortion, monkeypox (oh, excuse me, mpox), and why you have to get rid of your guns … but they won’t intervene for the restoration of informed consent.