The patient is missing from the debate on their own care
Dr Helen Webberley on Times Radio: the gender debate, with Jo Coburn, Times Radio
The debate about puberty blockers and trans healthcare is a legitimate public conversation that everyone has a right to weigh in on. Mathematicians, statisticians, politicians, and journalists should all have a say in what medical treatments individual patients can access.
What I was pointing to in that clip is something that has troubled me throughout my career: the person actually asking for the treatment has been written out of the conversation entirely. In 33 years of medicine I have never seen another condition where non-medics get to decide, at a population level, what a patient and their doctor are allowed to discuss. That is not how medicine works anywhere else. It is a doctor and a patient, a diagnosis or a request, and a conversation between the two of them. The moment we hand that conversation to people with no clinical relationship to the patient, we have stopped doing medicine and started doing something else entirely.
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