Is therapist free speech more important than patient survival? Letter to the Editor

In his Oct. 19 letter, “ Is conversion therapy protected speech? ,” George W. Dent Jr. uses distractions to pointedly ignore the evidence that conversion therapy is associated with a substantial increase in the suicide rate. He wants us to see this as just a political dispute between two equivalent views. He apparently thinks that the free speech of therapists is more important than the survival rate of the patients. That is profoundly immoral.

Has the gentleman never heard of “First, do no harm”?

William Bruml,

Cleveland Heights