Marcy Darnovsky at the Psychology Today blog reviews Normal at Any Cost: Tall Girls, Short Boys, and the Medical Industry’s Quest to Manipulate Height, noting the high cost of trying to fix children’s “height problems” through drugs. Notes Darnovsky,
In recent years, [the girls that were treated with with huge amounts of DES (diethylstilbestrol) and other estrogenic hormones to accelerate puberty and thus stop their growth] have begun to find each other on the Internet and compare their stories and health histories. It turns out that many hated the pills and the extra emphasis on their height, and that as adults they have experienced higher than average rates of reproductive problems, including infertility, ovarian cysts, endometriosis, and miscarriages.
Occasionally, height-fixing treatments have gone really bad. Beginning in the early 1960s, pediatric endocrinologists treated children – mostly boys – for short stature using human growth hormone harvested from the pituitary glands of cadavers. About 200, most of them in France, contracted “mad cow” (Creutzfeldt-Jakob) disease and died as a result.
What’s wrong with Mother Nature Father God determining these benign characteristics in children and leaving well enough alone?
