What Are You Going To Do?

The conservatives are applauding this flight of doctors out of their states… “Don’t let the door hit you on your way out!

“Unbearable”: Doctors treating trans kids are leaving Texas, exacerbating adolescent care crisis

Texas doctors fear a new era of government intrusion into medicine as lawmakers ban transition care for kids following prohibitions on abortion.

Texas Tribune

By William Melhado

July 17, 2023

At least once a day Dr. Ximena Lopez sees a parent crying in her clinic. They’re crying because Lopez just told them they need to find a new way to get transition-related care for their children — by leaving Texas or sourcing treatments outside the state — because the state outlawed these treatments for trans youth.

After a yearslong barrage by activists and lawmakers, the state has won the battle against the use of transition-related care, like puberty blockers and hormone therapies, for transgender youth. While the war over this health care remains in question — and a legal fight to block the new law begins in Texas — clinics have closed and some doctors have stopped providing this care.

"The reason why I'm leaving Texas is that it's unbearable for me,” Lopez said. “It's so devastating that I just can't bear living in a state where I feel oppressed and where I'm just seeing my patients suffer."

We don’t think about the pressure the new laws are creating for doctors. They are not in it just the money but they also care about their patients. They grieve and have empathy for their patients.

In light of the state’s ban on gender-affirming care for kids, The Texas Tribune spoke with over half a dozen doctors who practice this type of medicine about the fear of losing their jobs, scaring away medical providers from working in Texas and — most importantly — revoking this critical health care for transgender children.

[…]

Many said Texas was treading into a new era of medicine — marked by restrictions to gender-affirming care and reproductive health care — one in which the government tells doctors how and who they can treat.

What the legislators don’t understand is that these doctors do not just treat transgender children but all children. They are Pediatric Endocrine doctors and they treat children with diabetes, they treat thyroid gland diseases, Pituitary gland and Adrenal gland diseases, and many more juvenile endocrine diseases in children. What are you going to do when you cannot find a doctor who will treat your child because you all chased them out of state? Also OB/GYN doctors are fleeing the states.

"We're building a generation of providers that just, unfortunately, won't receive the level of training that they need in order to take care of patients in the ways that they need to be taken care of,” Vasudevan told the Tribune. “That's a hard pill to swallow.”

If you are a medical student would you go to a state where you can’t lean about emergency reproductive health and medially necessary abortions.

He added that, like the state’s ban on abortions, this legislation will make it more difficult to recruit medical professionals to do business in Texas.

“There has been a chilling effect of the Legislature getting involved in the doctor-patient relationship and attempting to prevent physicians from providing the evidence-based and medically necessary care to their patients,” Cooper said. “Physicians know best how to care for their patients, not the Legislature.”

These legislators they have blinders on, they are so hyper-focus on us that they don’t see the big picture!

During medical school, García worked with providers in the GENECIS program, including Lopez, where he saw the positive impact the clinic had on patients and their families. He wanted to continue doing that important work, by providing gender-affirming care to trans people.

To do that García has decided to leave Texas.

What are you going to do when you cannot find a doctor?