Process
Status Items Highlights Done See section below Claims None Questions None Output None
Highlights
id1002596214
The whole point of medical licensing boards is to distinguish acceptable medical viewpoints from conjecture and bunk—and that does, often, require regulating what doctors can and cannot say. You can’t, for instance, tell a child “go kill yourself” as a medical therapy, even if that is your monstrous viewpoint. You can’t tell a kid to start smoking cigarettes to fit in with the other kids at school. You can’t tell a kid who is falling asleep in class to buy some cocaine and have a bump in the bathroom during free period. You can’t do these things even if you are a talk therapist and all you do is talk about it instead of prescribing the smokes or the coke. You can’t give medical advice that is wrong, no matter how much you pray that it is right.
id1002596250
our medical system unravels as various licensed healthcare professionals—talk therapists, psychiatrists, and presumably anyone else who claims to utilize speech when administering treatments to patients—start broadly wielding their newfound constitutional right to provide substandard medical care.
id1002596419
Kagan is wrong in at least two ways. First, she’s making the exact same mistake that Gorsuch is: suggesting that conversion therapy is still a matter of medical “debate.” There is no debate: Conversion therapy is harmful. So say the medical professionals with the authority to draw that conclusion. We shouldn’t have to allow something that is harmful in order to protect something that is helpful. You don’t have to let people bring an emotional-support leopard on a plane because you let them fly with their house cats. Different things are different and can be treated differently.
id1002596586
Thanks to this ruling, a medical license means… nothing going forward. Getting the advice of a doctor is now the same as asking the Internet or tuning in to “Dr. Phil.” According to the Supreme Court, doctors have just as much of a First Amendment right to offer untested and untrue medical theories as politicians, Uber drivers, or your grandma from the Old Country.