When were they going to write a paper about the breast bud removal portion?

 

 

As was mentioned in the post Dr. Diekema did hide the breast bud removal, when Dr. Carole Marcus criticized the doctors’ paper for its omission of Ashley’s breast bud removal, Dr. Gunther and Dr. Diekema wrote in their reply, “ Breast bud removal was a completely separate request and raised a different set of issues that were unrelated to growth attenuation.”

 

So they maintain it was a paper reporting the growth attenuation part alone. OK, if they say so. But then, where’s another paper about breast bud removal?  They were obviously aware that breast bud removal raised a set of issues. Unrelated to growth attenuation they might be, but issues none the less. The doctors were also aware that the issues were ethically knottier than those raised by growth attenuation. Ashley’s father reports in his blog that the breast bud removal part of their request was “the biggest challenge” to the doctors and the ethics committee. Certainly they couldn’t write a paper on the growth attenuation part of what had been done to Ashley and go without writing another on the part that they knew was ethically more challenging than growth attenuation. When were they going to write the paper?

 

With the estrogen therapy, they may have wanted to wait till they made sure about its safety from side effects, but if the breast bud removal was a simple, “minor” surgery as they assert it is, there seems to be no reason they had to wait after Ashley’s surgery to write a paper and report this very unique application of a medical procedure. They had more than two years to do so before they wrote the growth attenuation paper and even after that, they had two more months before Ashley’s father reported it in his blog.

 

When were they going to write a paper about the breast bud removal portion, if they were going to report it at all?