A Brave New, Tall World

Big Pharma has recently begun a major push to encourage more use of growth hormones to spur growth in children with "idiopathic short stature" - i.e., naturally short kids. Use of such hormones on such children is economically, medically, and morally questionable, as Stephen S. Hall describes in this New York Times Magazine piece, which raises all kinds of questions about what you would be willing to do for (or to) your children.

Most of the problems with the treament, Hall shows, stem from the fact that the drive to increase children's stature is grounded on the assumption that short kids suffer more teasing and bullying, have more self-esteem issues, and are generally less happy. Not only is there no serious evidence of this, however, there is good evidence that short kids are no less happy than kids of normal height. And on top of that, using growth hormone to treat naturally short children will have a strange and unsettling sociological side effect:

Increasing the height of children at the first percentile, of course, merely creates a new population of children falling into the bottom percentile and thus a new population potentially eligible for treatment. As one medical journal noted in an editorial, "This may be the only circumstance in which treatment of one group of children creates illness in another previously healthy group."