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Culture War Roundup for the week of November 11, 2024

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Do patients ask for these? What's the ratio of people who actually need them versus just think they need them? Are their side effects? Are they bad? Are the risks something that someone can easily understand and make informed decisions based off of? Are patients willing to try safer and more effective interventions first?

What's the evidence base and recommendations, how sure are we about them? Are their bad actors involved who are incentivizing certain behaviors? What is the level of excess supplementation that production can carry?

How many of these questions can you answer?

If you can't answer the analog of those questions for an item of auto repair, does that mean we have reason to ban people from doing it?

My read is that all of those things are directly in the vein of "they can hurt themselves" and "there is still possible value in expertise", not externalities. It's telling that you started with the one example of a clear externality, and as soon as we took that off the table, you completely abandoned the externality argument. Or should I pull a you and say, "If you want to continue this conversation please explain what testosterone stewardship and why it's important, or argue why it isn't." Because if that's not a thing, you're jumping to an entirely different class of argument and not even bothering to acknowledge it.

The point is Chesterton's Fence.

You know nothing about medicine or the risks and benefits of what you are proposing. Medicine is not auto repair.

That's kind of important.