Health

FIRST, DO NO HARM:

Christians welcome decision to pause puberty blockers trial (Christianity Today, 2/23/26)

Simon Calvert is Deputy Director at The Christian Institute, which has opposed the trans agenda for well over two decades. He was among the critics welcoming the pause while urging the government to go further and cancel it completely.

“It is dangerous and immoral to use children as guinea pigs for drugs that we already know are harmful for them and useless at treating gender dysphoria,” he said.

“In the overwhelming majority of cases, childhood confusion about gender typically resolves during puberty. So these drugs block the very process which relieves that confusion.

“We must hope and pray this outbreak of common sense is permanent and that the trial never goes ahead.”

Puberty blockers for people under the age of 18 questioning their gender have been banned in the UK since 2024.

James Esses, a therapist and leading campaigner against the puberty blockers trial, recently joined with other opponents to launch High Court action aimed at stopping the trial from going ahead.

He said, “This is a huge victory but now we must compel them to abandon it completely. This poison must never enter another child’s body.”

BRITAIN’S TUSKEEGEE STUDY:

What happens next after the MHRA halts puberty blockers trial? (Hannah Barnes, February 22 2026, Times uk)

Dr — now Baroness — Hilary Cass’s four-year inquiry into NHS youth gender services painted a shameful picture of what had taken place at the now-closed gender identity development service (Gids) at the Tavistock in north London. All under the eye of NHS England, politicians and healthcare regulators. Youth gender medicine was “an area of remarkably weak evidence,” Cass said. There was “no good evidence on the long-term outcomes of interventions to manage gender-related distress”.

Among the most damning of her observations, though, was that the NHS had allowed the routine prescribing of puberty-blocking drugs to gender-distressed children for a decade, without any robust data to support that decision. […]

Perhaps the most surprising omission from the protocol, was acknowledgment that puberty blockers are highly unlikely to be a standalone treatment. Rather, they are part of a pathway towards medical transition. And with that comes a very real risk of infertility. There is no evidence that blockers on their own impact fertility (partly because so few children have come off the drugs, and gender clinics haven’t bothered to try to find them). But worldwide studies show in excess of 90 per cent of those who commence treatment with puberty blockers continue on to masculinising or feminising hormones. Early puberty blockade followed immediately by hormones means there is no opportunity for children’s eggs or sperm to mature.

The MHRA — which approved this trial in the first place — has now acknowledged these points, and more. “The expected effects of the drugs include the sterilising effect of puberty blockers followed by cross sex hormones,” the regulator said unequivocally in a letter to KCL. Treatment with puberty blockers beyond a year could “result in persistent and potentially permanent bone structural change,” it added. A government spokesperson described the MHRA’s intervention as raising “new concerns — directly related to the wellbeing of children and young”.

Let’s be clear, these concerns are not “new”. They have been raised in recent months by concerned medics, ethicists, clinicians and journalists. And they have been known for years.

TEST LESS:

99% of adults over 40 have shoulder “abnormalities” on an MRI, study finds (Beth Mole, Feb 17, 2026, Ars Technica)

In a study published in JAMA Internal Medicine this week, 99 percent of adults over 40 were found to have at least one abnormality in a rotator cuff on magnetic resonance imaging (MRI). The rotator cuff is the group of muscles and tendons in a shoulder joint that keeps the upper arm bone securely in the shoulder socket—and is often blamed for pain and other symptoms. The trouble is, the vast majority of people in the study had no shoulder problems.

In other words, it’s normal.

HEAL THYSELF:

Exercise can be as effective as medication for depression and anxiety – new study (Neil Munro, James Dimmock, Klaire Somoray, Samantha Teague, February 10, 2026, The Conversation)

We found exercising had a high impact on depression symptoms, and a medium impact on anxiety, compared to staying inactive.

The benefits were comparable to, and in some cases better than, more widely prescribed mental health treatments, including therapy and antidepressants.

SUCK IT UP, BUTTERCUP:

‘What I see in clinic is never a set of labels’: are we in danger of overdiagnosing mental illness? (Gavin Francis, 10 Feb 2026, The Guardian)

Research tells us that the human brain hasn’t changed much in the past 300,000 years, and mental suffering has surely been with us for as long as we have experienced mental life. We are all vessels for thoughts, feelings and desires that wash through our minds, influencing our mental state. Some patterns of feeling are recognisable across the millennia, but the labels we use to make sense of the mind and of mental health are always changing – which means there’s always scope to change them for the better.

The subject is important, because according to modern psychiatric definitions, the 21st century is seeing an epidemic of mental illness. The line between health and ill-health of the mind has never been more blurred. A survey in 2019 found that two-thirds of young people in the UK felt they have had a mental disorder. We are broadening the criteria for what counts as illness at the same time as lowering the thresholds for diagnosis. This is not a bad thing if it helps us feel better, but evidence is gathering that as a society it may be making us feel worse.

We have developed a tendency to categorise mild to moderate mental and emotional distress as a necessarily clinical problem rather than an integral part of being human – a tendency that is new in our own culture, and not widely shared with others. Psychiatrists who work across different cultures point out that, in many non-western societies, low mood, anxiety and delusional states are seen more as spiritual, relational or religious problems – not psychiatric ones. By making sense of states of mind through terms that are embedded in community and tradition, they may even have more success at incorporating our crises of mind into the stories of our lives.

Pretend illness beats personal responsibility.

TWO POTS A DAY JUST TO BE SAFE:

2 to 3 Cups of Coffee a Day May Reduce Dementia Risk. But Not if It’s Decaf. (Pam Belluck, Feb. 9, 2026, NY Times)

People who drank that amount for decades had lower chances of developing dementia than people who drank little or no caffeine, the researchers reported. They followed 131,821 participants for up to 43 years.

decaf is a tool of Satan.

MIND? BODY? NO PROBLEM:

A study hints positive thinking could strengthen vaccine immunity (Simon Makin, 1/30/26, Science News)

Increasing activity in a brain region that controls motivation and expectation, specifically the brain’s reward system, is linked with making more antibodies after receiving a vaccine. The finding suggests these boosts were related to the placebo effect, researchers report January 19 in Nature Medicine.

“Placebo is a self-help mechanism, and here we actually harness it,” says Talma Hendler, a neuroscientist at Tel Aviv University. “This suggests we could use the brain to help the body fight illness.”

NOT JUST SHOWER CURTAIN RINGS?:

US projects to 3D bioprint livers, hearts and kidneys using immune-matched cells (Mrigakshi Dixit, Jan 13, 2026, Interesting Engineering)

The project targets patients suffering from acute liver failure. These are people caught in a race against the clock.

In the human body, the liver is the only organ capable of complete regeneration, but it needs time to heal. Usually, the time runs out before the healing begins.

“The goal is to create a piece of liver tissue that you can use as an alternative to transplant,” explained Adam Feinberg, professor of biomedical engineering at CMU and the project’s principal investigator. “The liver we are creating would last for about two to four weeks.”

That month-long window will allow the patient’s own liver to reboot.

If successful, the patient keeps their original organ, and a precious donor liver — currently a rare and finite resource — becomes available for someone else.

KNOWN KNOWNS:

Why sports stars who head the ball are much more likely to die of Alzheimer’s, Parkinson’s and motor neurone disease (Jasmin Fox-Skelly, 1/06/26, BBC)

The dangers of contact sports have actually been known about for almost 100 years. In 1928, US pathologist Harrison Martland published a scientific article arguing that, “for some time, fight fans and promoters have recognised a peculiar condition occurring among prize fighters which, in ring parlance, they speak of as ‘punch drunk’.”

Symptoms included a staggering gait and mental confusion, and were most common in “fighters of the slugging type, who are usually poor boxers and who take considerable head punishment”. In some cases, punch-drunkenness progressed to dementia, later classed as “dementia pugilistica” – a type of dementia occurring in boxers who have experienced repeated head injury.

At first, it was thought the problem was confined to boxing. But in recent decades that understanding has changed. In 2002, West Bromwich Albion and England soccer player Jeff Astle died at the age of 59 following a diagnosis of early onset dementia. In the US meanwhile, American football player Mike Webster died suddenly age 50 after experiencing cognitive decline and other Parkinson’s-like symptoms. In both cases, examination of the sports stars’ brains showed they had died from chronic traumatic encephalopathy (CTE) – a more modern term replacing the diagnosis of dementia pugilistica.

Always fun when tobacco advocates claim no one knew the cancer risks of smoking and then you read an old novel referring to cigarettes as coffin nails.