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Why did we decide to stop (most) further study of lobotomies? The inventors of the procedure won a Nobel Prize for it! At some point it seems we decided that it wasn't actually worth it, as far as I can tell.
I think it's a hard question, honestly, even before the pediatric ethics complications. How do we decide what experiments are reasonable to run on people? Definitionally, sometimes experiments find negative outcomes, and if we never run such experiments, we never find ways to make things better. To me, at least, there needs to be some level of reasonable confidence on the theory for why a potentially-harmful, irreversible experiment would be likely to succeed, and clear consent to participate.
Medicine isn't my wheelhouse, but the repeated failure to turn what should be lots of test data into verifiable claims of strong evidence suggests that the evidence isn't as glowing as the rhetoric would require. Which colors me cynical about much of the whole movement, but that's just my opinion.
The main reason is that we invented neuroleptic drugs that worked. It's cheaper and easier to treat a raving, flagrantly psychotic schizophrenic with antipsychotics instead of surgery, and you don't have to cause nearly as much collateral damage.
They made violently mad lunatics docile. While risking destroying higher cognition, being dangerous surgery, and so on. The drugs sometimes suck donkey cock, but they're better than that. Lobotomies were also often used for people who weren't violent lunatics, just to make them easier to handle, which certainly didn't help their reputation.
These days, in rare cases, we perform surgeries like stereotactic cingulotomy, which is a far more targeted technique of cutting or destroying aberrant parts of the brain. Same theory as lobotomy, if you squint, but nowhere near as messy. Works okay, if nothing else does.
I happen to share that opinion, presuming you're talking about gender affirming/reassignment care.
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