Silence the doctors, harm the children

Medicine was never meant to follow ideology. It was meant to follow evidence, ethics, and the simple promise embedded in the Hippocratic oath: first, do no harm.

Yet across Australia today, many doctors and nurses feel that promise is under threat. Not from lack of science, but from a growing culture where questioning policy can cost you your career.

Our members are telling us this clearly. In a national survey of more than 18,000 health professionals, Almost 100% said medicine has become politicised, and the vast majority said they do not feel safe participating in good-faith, evidence-based clinical debate.

That should alarm every Australian.

When clinicians are afraid to question policy, medicine stops being science. It becomes state compliance.

The dangerous shift from safety to censorship

Regulators exist for one reason: protecting patients.

But increasingly, practitioners see regulators drifting away from investigating unsafe clinical practice and toward policing speech.

The recent regulatory action against Queensland academic psychiatrist Professor Andrew Amos illustrates this outrageously disturbing shift. Despite no allegation of patient harm or unsafe clinical practice, restrictions were placed on his ability to speak publicly about paediatric gender medicine following complaints from activists.

Regardless of anyone's view on the issue itself, the principle should be obvious. Doctors must be free to debate medicine.

Without open scientific debate, evidence cannot evolve. Safety cannot improve. Mistakes cannot be corrected.

Instead of encouraging scrutiny, the current system appears to punish it.

And when regulators begin deciding which scientific views are acceptable, they stop being guardians of patient safety and become arbiters of pseudo science.