Health Care

With so many people on the organ transplant waiting list, the ethics of organ donation have begun to buckle. These proposals are not only unethical, in my opinion; in some cases they also treat donors as objects rather than subjects. Each and any of them could undermine the public’s already thin trust in the organ transplant system, which would be a catastrophe. But an ethical way forward has also been researched assiduously, and it is beginning to bear fruit: xenotransplantation, that is, the use of pigs’ organs, genetically altered to be more compatible with humans. Early experiments offer cause for optimism. Recently, a woman who was dying of kidney failure received a pig kidney, and she seems to be doing well. Read More ›

The medical establishment continues on its march to irrelevance. In the current edition of The Lancet, a Yale history professor named Timothy Snyder inveighs against what he apparently sees as totalitarianism of contemporary health policies. Frankly, it’s mostly gobbledygook. Take the lede, from “Health and Freedom”: We are free as bodies, or not at all. And so health care is a right, one of the most basic. Huh? Snyder then castigates all of Western civilization as essentially thousands of years of continual tyranny: Plato put us all in a cave. In the darkness of the succeeding two millennia and more, western philosophy has had trouble seeing—and feeling—what needs to be seen and felt. A long history of empire and slavery, from that moment Read More ›

It is increasingly clear that there is little scientific basis for administering puberty blockers to gender-dysphoric youth. Consequently, many European countries have now effectively banned their use outside of official studies. Now, the New Zealand Ministry of Health has similarly found that there is a “dearth” of evidence supporting blocking normal adolescence in youngsters who feel that their gender is different from their sex. The New Zealand study reviewed all the literature on the question published before September 30, 2023. In other words, it was a study of the findings of published studies. First, it found that studies claiming that puberty blockers helped ease depression were of very poor quality. From “Impact of Puberty Blockers in Gender-Dysphoric Adolescents” (my emphasis): Impact of puberty blockers on Read More ›