Growing Boys Pay $50k To Be One Inch Taller

You know when you’re watching the news and the story being reported is so wacky you have to check to make sure you didn’t somehow switch to The Daily Show? Or you’re reading a factual piece in the New York Times and you’re absolutely convinced that you must have accidentally picked up The Onion?

Well, the latter experience pretty well sums up a recent Times book review about the insane lengths some parents go to to control their kids’ heights. I had no idea this was such an impassioned–and lucrative–field.

In her summary of the new book Normal at Any Cost, reviewer and doctor Abigail Zuger summarises the history of height control since the 1950s, when girls were widely prescribed a synthetic form of oestrogen that would hasten the onslaught of puberty and therefore prevent the girls from being too tall (oh, the horrors of a woman above a diminutive 5′4”!)

Due to a cancer link with the drug, it was–mostly–taken off the market, though Zuger hypothesizes that the real reason growth-stunting drugs fell out of disuse amongst girls was that a new generation of female athletes and supermodels made tall cool.

But boys are still thought to be at high risk for miserable lives should they fail to tower over their female peers. According to Zuger, “[The tiny boy] still battles stereotypes and a host of dire (if unproved) psychological predictions; tens of thousands of boys (and some girls) in this country receive injections of human growth hormone, the pituitary secretion pivotal to the complex hormonal cascade that mediates height.”

The average one or two inches of height that results from these injections comes at a steep cost: $US50,000 per inch. And pharmaceutical companies are more than happy to argue to insurers that this small boost in stature is necessary for “normal” development.

Being a short man in this society must be hard, considering how appearance-obsessed we are. But it’s certainly no handicap–think of Andrew Carnegie and Danny DeVito, both of whom barely surpass five feet. As Zuger rhetorically asks, “Psychologically, will children be helped more by the possibility of extra inches than they are hurt by the implication that they are defective, disappointments to their parents for failing to ‘perform biologically’?”

What do you think? Would you ever get height-enhancing hormone treatments for your son if your insurance would pay for it?

Photo: New York Times