One unreviewed paper is not clinical evidence
Dr Helen Webberley on Times Radio: the gender debate, with Jo Coburn, Times Radio
If you can find a study that shows a harm, that's enough to act on. One paper, however small, is evidence, and doctors who ignore it are ignoring the science.
What I was pushing back on there is the idea that a single paper with a handful of cases carries the same weight as the peer-reviewed guidelines that clinical practice is actually built on. It doesn't. Medicine works by looking at the whole body of evidence, properly reviewed, replicated, scrutinised, not by finding the one study that points where you want to go and holding it up as proof. Eight people, or seven, or even seventy, in an unreviewed paper is not a clinical standard. The standards of care that guide gender-affirming treatment exist precisely because the evidence behind them has been tested in a way that one convenient study has not.
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