Do you see parallels between this "Bad Surgeon" and today's "gender-affirming care" doctors?
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What can we learn from Paolo Macchiarini, aka Dr. Death, when it comes to how we think about and talk about the problems with “gender medicine?”
Paolo Macchiarini was a thoracic surgeon with a bright future ahead of him. But when he tried to go from “super-surgeon” to god-like miracle man, things went terribly wrong. Macchiarini has been the subject of a podcast called “Dr. Death” a Peacock show of the same name, the Netflix show “Bad Surgeon,” as well as other books, shows, and articles.
In promoting the new dramatization of “Dr. Death” on Peacock NBC tells the story in this article. Here is the crux of it:
Macchiarini, 65, is an Italian doctor who rose to fame in the medical community due to his innovative techniques using tracheas from deceased donors. He is credited with performing the first synthetic organ transplant in 2011, according to Vanity Fair, which appeared to solve the problems of organ rejection and a lack of donor organs.
"He was called the 'super-surgeon' and was at the forefront of an exciting field that involves growing new body parts in the lab," Alexander wrote in an article for The Daily Beast in 2018. "He was lauded by some of the world’s top scientists, doctors and institutions, he’d published in the most esteemed medical journals and he worked at the Karolinska Institute, the place that awards the Nobel Prize in medicine."
Macchiarini implanted artificial windpipes in at least eight patients between 2011 and 2014, according to Science. All but one died, and the one patient that did not die had the implant removed, according to Science.
Most medical innovations, even ones we totally take for granted today, started out as experimental medicine. Many of us probably know someone who was diagnosed with cancer and received “experimental treatment.” However, there seems to be a huge difference between this and what Paolo Macchiarini was doing.
The NBC article goes on to say:
Four of Macchiarini’s colleagues at the Karolinska Institute filed official complaints against him in 2014, alleging he wrote papers that deliberately left out serious complications that arose in his transplant patients, according to the Karolinska Institute.
Similar to the way detransitioners are ignored by their doctors today, Macchiarini refused to acknowledge, learn from, or accurately report on the negative outcomes of his procedure. He just kept doing it.
So the question for this week is, have you seen any of these shows, books or podcasts about Dr. Macchiarini? And do you see any parallels between what Macchiarini was doing, and the current state of gender medicine? And is there anything we can learn from this?
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I watched Bad Surgeon, but haven’t seen or listened to Dr. Death. There were definitely parallels I saw with Paolo and some of the gender medicine. One aspect was how he performed his experimental procedure on patients who were suffering terminal illnesses. But, of course, he didn’t say his methods were totally experimental, or ask them to sacrifice themselves for science. He told these patients and their families that he was their only hope. He treated them like throw away people. And he abandoned them as soon as he was done operating on them. Short term follow up showed success, but long term follow up showed awful failure--including death. And all the while he felt he was a genius. Many parallels to the key figures in gender medicine. Highly recommend parents watching it with your ROGD kids (if they’re not too young) to introduce some critical thinking around medical interventions.
So many! I kept thinking of Dr. Sidhbh Gallagher. I have a hard time imagining my way into the head of someone who would look at the lack of evidence here and go ahead and perform these procedures. It doesn't seem an accident that clinicians involved in this don't want to treat detransitioners.