Commentary
​Two blazing political controversies are destroying our trust in the integrity of medicine. One is, thankfully, mostly in the past—the COVID-19 pandemic emergency. The second is ongoing and growing increasingly bitter: How to best care for children who “feel” that they aren’t the sex they were born.
These are different debates, but they share certain commonalities. Both issues involve the suspicion that officially preferred policies are more ideological than scientific. Both involve intense efforts by the establishment institutions to squelch heterodox opinions. Both have seen the erosion of the scientific method through the suppression of dissenting points of view. Both controversies have become so mired in partisan politics and culture war argumentation that it’s difficult to separate the wheat of truth from the chaff of propaganda….