Thread by @Ffion_M_Lewis

Tavistock’s ‘1000 Families’ Lawsuit: A Thread

I am very late to the game here but I did some research that makes this claim even funnier than originally thought.

I’ll be linking my sources at the end, I’d also recommend checking out @truesolicitor ‘s thread on this topic. (1/?)

On the 11th of August, The Times published the article below. As the website is paywalled, readers were unable to read the entire article without paying.
(A free archive link to the article available in @truesolicitor ‘s thread)
(2/?)

I’d suggest that the article’s title is intentionally misleading. A quick glance on Twitter and you can see hundreds of users genuinely believing that Tavistock is currently facing a lawsuit from 1000 families.

This isn’t true - the number is an estimate.

(3/?)

I was curious about where they got this number from, so I did some digging.
The firm wants to represent those harmed by the prescription of puberty blockers. The article itself states that Tavistock has seen a total of 19,000 patients since 1989.
(4/?)

So they’d already need over 5% of all patients since 1989 to join them.

…Except that Tavistock only started prescribing blockers in 2011.

Using Tavistock’s own numbers (plus an estimate for 2021-22 using those numbers), you end up with around 18,000.

18,000 referrals.
(5/?)

Not 18,000 patients - 18,000 referrals.

Their own website also states they’re only now seeing people referred in 2019 (thanks, waiting list!), so we can remove around 5500 people from that.

So we’re left with around 14,500 referrals - still not patients yet!
(6/?)

It’s actually pretty difficult to find the number of individual patients Tavistock has seen - we do know that, in May 2022, they offered 50 patients their first appointments. Using that as an average, we have 600 a year, and 6600 overall.
(7/?)

These numbers are very much estimates, so let’s be generous and call it 7000 patients since 2011.

Already you see how ridiculous that original ‘1000 families’ claim is - that’s almost 15% of all of their patients.

Now let’s talk blockers.
(8/?)

Not all of those patients would go on to get any sort of hormonal treatment. Fortunately we do know how many of them were referred to endocrinologists, the next step to achieving that treatment.

1089.
(9/?)

In a study by Butler et al (2022) (linked at the end of the thread), every endo referral to both clinics used by Tavistock were assessed. Of those 1089, only 217 were under 16.
I don’t know if you can be offered blockers past the age of 16 so I’ll talk about both groups.
(10/?)

16+ first:
Of the 915 patients referred, 701 received hormonal treatment.
4 of them started, and then chose to stop.

Of the 217 under 16s, 166 received treatment.
2 started and then chose to stop.

A grand total of 867 patients.
(11/?)

Those numbers include both the prescription of blockers and hormones - the exact breakdown isn’t available, so let’s assume every single one of them got puberty blockers, even those well past puberty.
(12/?)

These numbers also only started in 2008 - so let’s use the average numbers to account for the period between 2001 and 2007 - another 434.

We’re being generous here - the number of GIDS referrals pre-2008 were significantly lower, and so this number is likely far lower.
(13/?)

So the total estimate: all patients who got hormone treatment, assuming they all got puberty blockers, is 1301.

And this firm believes that 1000 of them were so unhappy with this that they would join a lawsuit against GIDS.
(14/?)

But that study also shows the number of those patients who detransitioned - the people who would be most likely to join these lawsuits.

20 under 16, 35 over 16.
That’s the number of patients who detransitioned after starting blockers in the UK.
(15/?)

Let’s not forget to add the (generous) average for the period between 2001 and 2007 - another 28.

A grand total of 83.
(16/?)

So even if every single one of those detransitioners who received blockers were willing to join a lawsuit, even if they were all comfortable joining a suit run by a firm with pretty abysmal reviews, that’s still not even 10% of their estimate.

And even then, we’re assuming that those hypothetical patients got those hormones “without adequate consideration or proper diagnosis”.

Papers are expected to be sent to the High Court within 6 months, so we’ll have to wait and see.

(18/18)

Sources:
Times Article: thetimes.co.uk/article/tavist…
Archive Link: archive.ph/2022.08.11-073…
Butler Study: adc.bmj.com/content/early/…

If you read until the end, thank you!!! I’d genuinely also like to know if Tavistock and their endo clinics give puberty blockers to those over 16 - if you have experience in that area plz drop a reply!
#Tavistock #tavistocklawsuit #PogustGoodhead

Also, they don’t explicitly say the suit only covers prescribing hormones, but could
“rushed into treatment without the appropriate therapy and involvement of the right clinicians” and “suffered life-changing and … irreversible effects” refer to anything else provided by Tavi?

Correction, thanks to @emiliab71:
I mixed up dates and thought blocker prescribing started in 2001 not 2011, so I added 10 years worth of patients by mistake!
The number of detransitioners remains the same, but the actual number of patients receiving blockers is abt 682, not 867.