Lupron Fraud in BC at the PHSA
your tax dollars fund pharmaceutical experiments on kids
Happy Canada Day And July 4th long weekend everyone! Paywall has been removed.
Fraud: the deliberate separation of the public from their money through deceit or misrepresentation of facts or intention; a theft which occurs because the victim gave their money willingly under false pretences.
Why is the BC Provincial Health Authority actively promoting the off-label use of a chemical castration drug1 for the treatment of psychological distress in children and adolescents? Why is a reproductive hormone analogue being used as psychiatric medication? Why do paediatric endocrinologists need a practitioner exemption to obtain a Special Authority for Lupron PharmaCare coverage when Central Precocious Puberty is already one of the criteria for Special Authority? Why are paediatric endocrinologists authorised to prescribe Lupron, a chemical castration drug, under Plan G, as in Psychiatric Medication Coverage Plan G?
Why are BC taxpayers paying for this experimental use of a reproductive hormone analogue? Is this honestly the least invasive + least costly treatment for psychological distress in children? The evidence says otherwise.
What does Canadian law say about promoting prescription medication?
Section 9(1) of the Food and Drugs Act states, No person shall label, package, treat, process, sell or advertise any drug in a manner that is false, misleading or deceptive or is likely to create an erroneous impression regarding its character, value, quantity, composition, merit or safety. Health Canada lists the following examples of contravening Section 9(1): omitting or downplaying risks, overstating the effectiveness, promoting unauthorized health products or indications (off-label): promotion of a health product prior to market authorization is not permitted because the terms of such authorization have not been established and the proposed indication(s) for use have not been verified, misleading drug comparisons. (Government of Canada website). In plain language this means it is illegal to promote a drug falsely, this includes for off-label uses, and off label promoting also includes overemphasizing effectiveness and misleading comparisons.2
NB: My investigation revealed that, according to its Annual Report, BC Children’s Hospital Foundation receives funds from AbbVie, the maker of Lupron.3
What’s this mean, vis-à-vis Lupron for BC kids with gender dysphoria?
The BC Provincial Health Authority promotes Lupron as a remedy for delaying puberty in kids with gender dysphoria because it is indicated for delaying puberty in kids with precocious puberty— this is a misleading comparison
The BC Provincial Health Authority misleads the public and practitioners with claims that Lupron will provide relief of adolescent psychiatric distress
The BC Provincial Health Authority fails to provide adequate warnings about the adverse effects and experimental nature of Lupron in children
The BC Provincial Health Authority gives paediatric endocrinologists carte blanche to prescribe Lupron for children without the required clinical indication under a plan designed for coverage of psychiatric patients.
This kind of blows my mind so let me recap.
We have the BC Children’s Hospital promoting Lupron as a treatment for children with Gender Dysphoria. The rationale being, it’s already used to delay puberty in kids with precocious puberty, so why not just use it to delay puberty in kids without any pituitary abnormalities? This ignores the fact that Lupron is not authorized by Health Canada for treatment of Gender Dysphoria. Also that it’s a violation of Section 9(1) of the Canada Food and Drugs Act to promote an off-label use of a medication. Gender activists have infiltrated paediatric medicine and claim that gender affirmation saves kids’ lives by blocking “wrong” puberty.4
Plan G + Special Authority practitioner exemption for pediatric endocrinologists = Gender Medicine in BC that “save kids’ lives”
Yes, we are still promoting that blatant lie that children will suicide themselves if they do not receive puberty blockers. Gender Affirmation Medicine activists seem unfazed by the mounting evidence against their chemical castration as a suicide prophylaxis claims. Gender affirming care DOES NOT prevent suicide and emotionally blackmailing families with suicide when they don’t want to consent to gender affirmation constitutes medical bullying + coercive control as well as malpractise, not lifesaving primary health care. AbbVie, manufacturer of Lupron, donates to the BC Children’s Hospital, which promotes an off-label use of Lupron.
Question for Gender Medicine Activists :: If Lupron is indeed a life saving drug for adolescents with gender dysphoria, why hasn’t the AbbVie sought FDA/Health Canada approval for that clinical use?
I notice the website of the BC Children’s Hospital Gender Clinic lists the pager number of the 24-hour on-call emergency endocrinologist and I wonder, how many young people has the gender dysphoria contagion driven to suicidal ideation? When did endocrinologists begin treating psychiatric patients? Psychiatry has a sh1tty track record when it comes to physical and surgical treatments of emotional and psychological distress + imbalance.
Remember when we thought inducing severe hypogyclemia was a great remedy for schizophrenia? Remember when we thought sticking a knitting needle up someone’s nose or through the corner of their eye and severing a connections between the prefrontal cortex and the thalamus was a great treatment for mania and breakdowns? Remember when we thought removing women’s reproductive organs was a great treatment for anxiety and depression because the wandering womb was menacing?
Yes, we thought some very stupid sh1t in the not too distant past. Not to mention we still think shocking the brain with high voltage will provide relief from depression with no adverse effects. Despite the demonstrated severe motor neuron death and devastating sequelae it brings. Yes, we are still doing that and refusing to acknowledge the iatrogenic harm we cause with these treatment modalities we concoct. Paging Herr Doktor Victor Frankenstein. This is why we learn history, isn’t it? Maybe let’s learn from our mistakes, as a species? Please, could we?
79% of all off-label prescriptions in Canada lack evidence of efficacy and 75% of medicines prescribed to kids are off-label, according to a report of the Senate of Canada Standing Committee on Social Affairs, Science and Technology.
Recent valid + reliable evidence does not support blocking puberty as a suicide prophylaxis and this has caused Scandinavian countries as well as The Netherlands and the UK to dramatically rethink their treatment regime of children presenting with the symptoms of gender dysphoria. Sex Matters published a technical paper which showed no benefit to gender affirming medicine over a placebo. Dr. Michael Biggs of Oxford’s Department of Sociology wrote about the UK evidence and the experimentations done at the UK’s Tavistock Clinic.
The United Kingdom: Tavistock and Keira Bell
In describing the outcomes at the UK’s Gender Identity Development Service (GIDS) which operates the now controversial Tavistock Clinic, Biggs wrote:
there was no statistically significant difference in psychosocial functioning between the group given blockers and the group given only psychological support. In addition, there is unpublished evidence that after a year on GnRHa children reported greater self-harm, and that girls experienced more behavioural and emotional problems and expressed greater dissatisfaction with their body-so puberty blockers exacerbated gender dysphoria.
GIDS took very preliminary flimsy evidence from Dutch studies and based treatment policy upon that — applying the gender dysphoria diagnosis and treatment algorithm to children with wildly varying conditions and symptomology from the Dutch study. Says BBC investigative journalist Hannah Barnes, who wrote about the Tavistock scandal,
And I think what you saw, what they did was they started to apply an albeit quite limited evidence base from these two early Dutch studies, which only allowed young people who had lifelong gender dysphoria, a very stable, supportive environment in which they lived and who was psychologically stable. They applied that to a completely different cohort of young people. And they didn't pause to reflect on what was happening. I think at the same time, not all of this was their fault. There was very limited oversight, if any, from the Central National Health Service that was commissioning them.
In 2019 Keira Bell took the NHS to court, claiming that minors lacked the capacity to consent to puberty blocking medications. The case triggered the Cass Review of GIDS and, in December of 2020, the English High Court ruled in Keira’s favour. The ruling forced a more open discussion about the use of GnRHa in children with gender dysphoria, and was overturned on appeal, with the Supreme Court denying any further appeal by Bell. Keira feels she won a victory even though the appeals court overturned her ruling — she started a global conversation, inspired other young women to follow in her footsteps around the world, and she shone a light in a dark corner of medical practise. Dr. Cass completed her review, recommending the closure of Tavistock in favour of a decentralised system of care delivery.
“It is a fantasy and deeply concerning that any doctor could believe a 10-year-old could consent to the loss of their fertility.” — Keira Bell
The day of the English High Court’s ruling regarding the ability of adolescents to consent to gender affirming care was the day Ellen Page announced her plans to become Elliot Page. No one in North America heard anything about Keira Bell’s case that day from mainstream media because Ellen-Elliot Page sucked all the oxygen from the room. How much does Hollywood influence popular and political opinion in North America?
USA - Chloe Cole files the first gender medicine lawsuit
After being exposed for hours at a time to online transgender influencers, Chloe developed the erroneous idea that she was a boy. When Chloe informed her parents that she thought she was a boy, her parents didn't know what to do and promptly sought guidance from the Defendants. Defendants immediately affirmed Chloe in her self-diagnosed gender dysphoria. They did not question, elicit, or attempt to understand the psychological events that led her to this belief, nor did they seek to evaluate or appreciate her multi-faceted presentation of co-morbid symptoms.
— Affidavit of Chloe Cole
In November of 2022 Chloe’s lawyers filed a notice of intent to sue and in February of 2023 Chloe filed her suit. In March 2023 the LA Times wrote about Chloe’s lawsuit that, The context of Cole’s lawsuit bears close scrutiny. It’s part of a concerted right-wing attack on LGBTQ rights, in which the health of transgender youth is exploited as a pretext for bans on gender-affirming care. It resembles the right-wing attack on abortion rights, another movement that cynically masquerades as an effort to improve healthcare but actually exposes millions of Americans to injury and death for strictly partisan purposes. In furthering its obvious pro-gender affirmation political stance, the LA Times also wrote about what it deemed misleading or inaccurate [descriptions of] developments in the gender dysphoria treatment field in Chloe’s complaint, such as “negative results” from the use of puberty blockers and hormones “caused” the shutdowns of a transgender clinic at Johns Hopkins Hospital in 1979 and Britain’s Tavistock Gender Identity Development Service more recently.
So, let’s recap. Chloe Cole encountered online information luring her into thinking she might be transgender when she was a vulnerable confused teenager. She announced to her parents she was a boy and her parents sought medical advice. The medical advice affirmed Chloe’s self diagnosis of gender dysphoria and promptly placed her on puberty blockers at age 13 and gave her a mastectomy at the age of 15. A year after losing her breasts Chloe realised she might want to breast feed one day and also that she would never be a boy, and at the age of 18 she decided to sue her doctors for the iatrogenic harm she suffered.
The LA Times describe this as a right-wing attack on LGBTQ rights.
How is suing your primary care provider for medical negligence an attack on gay and trans rights?
How is holding the medical profession to clinical standards of Do No Harm an exploitation of transgender youth?
How did chemically castrating a vulnerable and distressed 13 year old and then amputating her healthy breasts at age 15 promote LGBTQ rights?
Maybe Michael Hiltzik, author of that LAT piece, can answer those questions?
Across the United States activists + medical professionals + politicians have gathered to challenge gender affirming care aka sex changes for children. Several states have either passed law or are considering legislation to criminalise child sex change, including the prescribing of GnRH agonists like Lupron to kids for gender dysphoria treatment. Republican states have taken the opportunity to promote their repressive Christian supremacist anti-gay politics under the guise of child safeguarding whilst Democrat states have taken the opposite position, choosing to override parental safeguards and destroy the parent-child bond in a push for promote gender affirmation at any cost, including removing children from parents who question whether affirmation is the right treatment option for their kids.
What Does Lupron do to Young Brains?
“Reproductive hormones quite literally shape brain architecture as well as subsequent sensitivities … [and] … There is virtually no element of neural function that is not regulated by reproductive hormones,” states a paper on the Neurobiology of Sex Differences and Affective Disorders in Neuropsychopharamcology. Sex hormones regulate many and perhaps all neural processes during critical periods of brain development such as puberty, including synaptic pruning of the medial amygdala, which is a major threat detection and aggression modulation centre in the downstairs brain. Changes in cognition and learning style that occur with puberty happen as a result of changes in brain structure during growth surges. Reproductive hormones feature critically in the structural and functional development of the brain and we cannot begin to comprehend what we have done to growing brains by introducing them needlessly to a powerful endocrine hormone to please pathocratic activists. This topic warrant it’s own essay, which is forthcoming.
A recent piece by Chris Rufo features an interview with a Blue-state doctor about transgender medicine and captures succinctly the grave harm of gender affirming care for children: because [GnRHa] simulates the activity of this hormone [GnRH], it shuts down the activity of the hypothalamus. How can we state with certainty that the supposed improved mood from gender affirmation hormone therapy will outweigh the profound and as yet not entirely understood resultant changes to adolescent brain structure + function? How can we say that a child has received affirming therapy when we have injected her with a chemical that has structurally altered her brain via physiologic pituitary desensitisation and hypothalamic stunting in an effort to pause puberty? How can we say that using powerful endocrine hormones and experimental surgery to mimic to opposite sex in a child affirms said child?
Gender affirmation activists use euphemism to describe their care approach to children and they employ moral absolutes when required to engage transparently and show evidence for their hyperbolic claims. No debate they say smugly. I reject this line of reasoning and health care policy development and I again ask,
Why is the BC Provincial Health Authority actively promoting the off-label use of a chemical castration drug for the treatment of psychological distress in children and adolescents? Why are BC taxpayers paying for this experimental use of a reproductive hormone analogue? Is this honestly the least invasive and costly treatment for psychological distress in children?
Let me end with an example from my own life. I cannot get a Special Authority for ionised progesterone versus gender affirmation patients can get a Special Authority for Lupron. My Progesterone costs about 15% that of Lupron and has a far higher and scientifically-evidenced efficacy rate and is it a clinical indication not an identity affirming medication, meaning I have a proven physiologic requirement for this medication not just a feeling that I want affirmed. Still, I pay for my medication because it is not the least expensive form of progesterone, the Special Authority was rejected on this reasoning, even though ionised progesterone is more effective for mitigating menopausal symptoms that the cheaper alternative because of it’s biosimilarity. It seems illogical to me to craft different rules for different people like this under the guise of equality, it doesn’t feel very equal to me. It tells me politics governs clinical health policy decisions and not compassion + not material reality + not medical science. When did excellence of care stop taking precedence?
Maybe we didn’t know better in the past. We definitely know better now.
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Lupron is the AbbVie brand name for Leuprorelin, a Gonadotropin Releasing Hormone analogue or agonist; GnRH is a hypothalamic hormone which triggers the production of sex hormones in the body; GnRHa is a synthetic hormone which binds to the GnRH receptors in the brain, interrupting the production of sex hormones in the body, in the process slowing the hypothalamus and desensitising the pituitary gland. Leuprorelin is 20 times stronger than endogenous GnRH.
Such as the misleading comparison between delaying puberty in kids that have Central Precocious Puberty and delaying puberty in kids with gender dysphoria
The most recent annual report to include a list of corporate donors is 2015/6, the latest annual reports do not disclose this information in publicly available information.
This is one of the lies that gender medicine promotes — there is no such thing as “wrong” puberty.