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I've been asked why I'm so skeptical when it comes to health and medical science. My answer is because I've spent many hours studying medical history, and I've seen how much damage doctors have done over the centuries. If you were to select a patient-doctor consultation at random from all the ones that have happened throughout history, your odds are probably better of selecting one in which the doctor harmed the patient than one in which the doctor helped the patient. That is certainly true if you only look at consultations happening before the year 1900.
It's a shame that medical history generally isn't part of the curriculum in medical school. If it was, maybe doctors would be more humble about what they know, and what they don't know. If I were to design a medical school curriculum, I would make the first five to ten weeks of medical school an in-depth course in medical history, with a particular focus on all the mistakes doctors and scientists have made through the centuries, and why they made those mistakes. To quote a well worn cliché, those who don't know history are doomed to repeat it.
Personally, I wear my skepticism as a badge of pride. If I were to seek out a doctor for some medical condition I was suffering from, I would want that person to be a natural skeptic.
I would want someone who won't believe something just because that's what they were taught in medical school, or because it's what they heard from a salesperson working for a pharmaceutical company.I'm going to present four different cases from recent history, that I think show clearly why it's important to be highly skeptical when it comes to the area of health and medicine. Things can often seem to be very beneficial after a few early studies, or because common sense suggests they should be beneficial. Then when more data comes in, sometimes decades after a certain treatment has become the "gold standard" of therapy, it becomes clear that the intervention is actively harmful. In some cases, millions of people have died prematurely as a result of the intervention by this point. When this happens, when something goes from being the recommended therapy to turning around 180 degrees and becoming something that doctors recommend against, it is known as a medical reversal. Unfortunately, medical reversals are common.
Another thing that I think is unfortunate is that scientific methodology is not really something that is taught in school. People even leave university with very limited training in scientific method. This causes the large majority of the population to be unable to weigh scientific evidence themselves, and it makes them totally beholden to the opinions of others. That's why I try to use this blog to educate in scientific method. Science, just like democracy, thrives when lots of people are able to examine different pieces of evidence and think for themselves.
Anyway, let's get to the four cases.
Lobotomy was first developed in the 1930's by Portuguese neurologist Egas Moniz, and further refined by two American doctors, neurologist Walter Freeman and neurosurgeon James Watts. A lobotomy is basically a surgical intervention in which parts of the frontal cortex of the brain are destroyed. It was developed as a treatment for psychiatric disorders, based on the hypothesis that destroying parts of the frontal lobe would allow destructive mental patterns to "reset" themselves.
After his first surgeries in 1935, Moniz presented a case report of twenty psychiatric patients. He claimed that a third were significantly improved in their underlying psychiatric illness, while a third were mildly improved, and a third were unimproved. None were apparently harmed. This claim was immediately countered by the psychiatrist that had provided the patients to Moniz, who responded that all the patients had suffered a "degradation" of personality.
The frontal cortex is responsible for complex goal oriented behavior, self-control, and higher order thinking, pretty much the things that separate humans from other animals. So, knowing what we know today about the function of the frontal lobe, destroying large chunks of it is likely to turn a person in to an apathetic, lethargic zombie. And this is what happened to the people who were lobotomized, as was clear early on to those who cared to look.
In spite of the limited evidence of benefit, and early suggestion of harm, the procedure was taken up enthusiastically in several parts of the world. By 1949, when lobotomies were at their most popular, thousands of people were being lobotomized around the world each year. That same year Egas Moniz was awarded the Nobel prize in medicine for his efforts.
Then the truth started to catch up with the hype. It became clear that somewhere between 5% and 15% of all patients undergoing lobotomy were being killed by the procedure, either dying on the operating table or shortly after surgery. It was not uncommon for arteries in the brain to become accidentally nicked, resulting in major intracranial bleeding and strokes. When this didn't kill outright, it often resulted in severe physical handicaps.
It also became more widely known that, although the patients might become more "placid" after the procedure, they were hardly being cured. People who had been institutionalized before the procedure, continued to be institutionalized after the procedure. Few people were able to function independently after undergoing a lobotomy.
So lobotomies gradually fell out of favor, although they were still being carried out on patients in some countries as late as the 1980's.Let's move on to our next medical reversal. Starting in the 1960's, public health authorities around the world started recommending that parents have their babies sleep on their stomachs. The recommendation was not based on any scientific studies, rather it was based on "common sense", that all too frequent destroyer of lives.
There were multiple hypotheses floating around that together constituted the basis for the recommendation. One was that it would decrease the risk of hip dysplasia, another was that it would prevent scoliosis, a third that it would decrease the risk of aspiration of milk (accidentally getting milk in to the airways), a fourth that it would prevent babies developing "flat heads".
In the late 1980's, observational data started to appear suggesting that prone sleeping was causing a huge increase in the number of children dying of cot death, a.k.a. SIDS (Sudden Infant Death Syndrome).
Children sleeping on their bellies appeared to be around 500% more likely to die of SIDS than children sleeping on their backs.Pretty much over night, government health authorities switched from recommending that babies sleep on their bellies to recommending that they sleep on their backs. And virtually over night, the rate of cot death dropped. Dramatically. Here in Sweden, the number of children dying of SIDS decreased by 85% over the course of a few years.
How many children died unnecessarily during the few decades in which prone sleeping was being recommended by public health authorities? Probably millions.It amazes me how keen government agencies often are to offer recommendations based on little or no evidence, especially when we have such clear examples of situations in which this has resulted in mind-boggling harm. If only public health professionals bothered to follow the first credo of the medical profession, which is "first, do no harm".
Let's move on to our next case.
Non-steroidal anti-inflammatory drugs (NSAID's) have been around for a long time. Aspirin was invented in the 1890's, and ibuprofen has been around since the early 1960's. One problem with these drugs, which has been recognized since the early days, is that they can cause stomach ulcers. In fact, over-use of NSAID's is one of the most common reasons for emergency hospital admissions due to bleeding ulcers.
The reason for this side-effect is that NSAID's block an enzyme called cyclo-oxygenase, generally shortened to just COX (another name for NSAID's is COX-inhibitors). There are two different versions of COX, COX-1 and COX-2. All the early NSAID's are unselective COX-inhibitors. In other words, they block both COX-1 and COX-2.
At some point it was discovered that the entire positive effect that comes from NSAID's, in terms of decreasing inflammation and pain, comes from their inhibition of COX-2, while inhibition of COX-1 is responsible for the side effect of increased bleeding. This naturally led drug companies to seek to develop specific COX-2 inhibitors, that would decrease inflammation, but not cause stomach ulcers.
In 1999, the first two COX-2 selective inhibitors came on the market, rofecoxib (a.k.a. Vioxx), produced by Merck, and celecoxib (a.k.a. Celebrex), produced by Pfizer. They instantly become some of the best selling drugs in the world. Of the two, rofecoxib was much better at blocking COX-2 specifically, and thus far less likely to cause stomach ulcers.
After a few years on the market, signals started to appear that rofecoxib was associated with a heavily increased risk of heart attack and stroke. In fact, people taking rofecoxib had something like a 300% increased risk of having a heart attack compared with people taking non-selective NSAID's. Merck's initial response was, unsurprisingly, to try to put the lid on this information. But by 2004, the cat was well and truly out of the bag. In the face of mounting criticism (and lawsuits), Merck chose to withdraw the drug from the market.
By that point, 80 million people had been treated with rofecoxib and around 100,000 people had suffered unnecessary heart attacks.I'm going to end with a slightly more personal example. On my first day of medical school I was told about a fantastic new treatment that had been developed at my new place of study, Karolinska Institutet, and its associated hospital. The developer of the new treatment was a surgeon called Paolo Macchiarini, and the treatment was a stem-cell coated synthetic windpipe. The windpipe could be transplanted in to people who had damaged their windpipes in accidents, or who had to to have their windpipes removed due to cancer. The idea was that the synthetic windpipe would meld with the surrounding tissues and grow in to a fully functioning new windpipe.
Paolo Macchiarini had been head-hunted by Karolinska Institutet in competition with several other top universities. He seemed a shoo-in for the Nobel prize.
The synthetic windpipe transplant surgeries had started in 2010. The first people to be operated on all died relatively soon afterwards, but there was a lot of media hype around them anyway, probably due to the feeling that this was a revolutionary technology, and probably also due to the fact that Machiarini was an excellent salesman.
Since the people he operated on had an annoying habit of dying, Machiarini supposedly felt that he needed healthier specimens to operate on. Thus far, all the people had been suffering from end-stage diseases that would have killed them in the near future even without the surgery. Maybe they were just too sick to begin with to truly benefit?
So he found some people who weren't actually dying. In 2012 he put synthetic windpipes in to two people who lived with chronic tracheostomies (breathing tubes in the throat) after car accidents, and one in a woman who had suffered accidental damage to her trachea during an earlier surgery. In 2013 he put a synthetic windpipe in to a two-year old who had been born without one. These people were perfectly healthy otherwise, and they were young.
The synthetic windpipes didn't work. The stem cells didn't turn in to functional epithelium, as had been hoped. The synthetic windpipes became seeding grounds for bacteria and were attacked by the immune system. They failed to meld with the surrounding tissues.
They literally fell apart within months. And the patients died.What is particularly galling is that there was no need for the synthetic windpipes. Windpipes could have been taken from cadavers instead. In fact, Machiarini had started out doing surgeries with windpipes from cadavers, which had on the whole been successful, but had then chosen to switch over to synthetic windpipes, apparently because it seemed more high-tech and was therefore more likely to generate media attention.
The entire exercise was a PR-stunt, primarily intended to speed Paolo Machiarini on the path to a Nobel prize.By the time I first heard of the synthetic wind pipes, on my first day of medical school in September 2014, things were already starting to come apart.
The patients were dying like flies - even the ones who had been healthy before their surgery. Yet Machiarini was continuing to publish articles in prestigious scientific journals, in which he claimed that the stem cell treated synthetic windpipes were holding up well, and integrating with the surrounding tissues, just as planned.Everything came crashing down very suddenly, in 2016, when Swedish public television aired a documentary that told the truth about Machiarini's surgeries. Apart from making clear that the surgeries were nowhere near as successful as was being claimed, it became clear that
Machiarini had never tested any of his synthetic windpipes on animals before moving on to humans(!), and it also surfaced that colleagues at Karolinska University Hospital had tried to blow the whistle on Machiarini two years earlier, in 2014, but had been threatened in to silence by the leadership at the university and the hospital.I guess this last case isn't really a medical reversal, since the synthetic windpipes never actually became standard practice. But I think it's an interesting cautionary tale.
There are lots of charlatans out there, masquerading as serious scientists. Some of them get discovered early on, like Paolo Machiarini, and some of them don't get discovered until decades have passed and many people have had their lives ruined, like Egas Moniz.
My main point from these cases is that
doctors and health authorities harming patients is not even remotely something that is in the distant past. We're not talking blood letting here, a practice that resulted in millions of unnecessary deaths, but that doctors thankfully stopped doing on a regular basis two hundred years ago.
Serious medical reversals have happened in the recent past, and they will happen again. They are particularly likely when new interventions get rushed out based on scant evidence.
Reader Comments
I wager this "vaccines" will have no noticeable side effects - until the trigger is pulled. For the great culling.
If you think the vaccines are not causing massive adverse effects and deaths already, then you are definitely NOT paying attention. Check out National Vaccine Information Center here: nvic.org, and Children’s Health Defense here: childrenshealthdefense.org, for a start.
Everything we need, we already have.
Yet, we do not realize this. We are all in search mode.
This is the point of everything, why we struggle. We want our 'abundance'. Where is it?
Even evil people do. Even evil people. Maybe even it seems, especially evil people, filled with greed. They are really busy!
And so we create maps, individually and jointly, to aid us and guide us. To our abundance, to our real worth.
And they often do.
But no map is the actual territory. That is an impossibility.
And if the map becomes too 'good', too precise, it becomes evil. It is an imitation craftily posing as the reality.
And many people are lost. Worse than before.
Remember this.
Try to remember.
ned,
out
A thing the shamans did already thousands of years ago.
All the rest is pretense and business. At our expense ...
When I developed an ulcer, I was put on Tagamet, and before the day was out I had a hyper reaction to it. Got my adrenaline pumped up so high I felt I could punch a hole completely through the bedroom wall. As it was I had to have the plaster damage repaired. Scared the bejezus out of me and never took another dose.
I've had the same "advice problem" both within and without my profession. People ask and then run off to do what they wanted in the first place. I cannot enumerate the number of times I warned upper management of the consequences of their decisions. Every time they discounted my prognostication, and every time their choice came back to bite them. Lost a really good job because of their shortsightedness. Company went belly up.
The best of my offerings was while working for a Kodak subsidiary. Management was looking for product ideas to infuse new revenue into a dying company. I told them, make a non-invasive mammogram machine that renders 3D images, and all the women in the world would beat a path to their door. They laughed me out of the conference room. About a decade later 3D color xray mammography was introduced into the market. The only thing it didn't do was perform the test painlessly. Meanwhile, Kodak went into bankruptcy about two years after my product suggestion.
As re citemidine, while I've heard of LOTS of problems with all of the others (e.g., Prilosec, et al.), you're the first I've ever heard of who had an adverse reaction to it; so be it. No one has identical personal chemistry and you know that.
Ulcers? Yep! Me too. God I hated Maalox! When tagamet came out, I never used it again. Of course I still use baking soda.
Keep in touch.
Did you see my posts on the tsunami in NZ? Your thoughts there would be appreciated. Thanks!
Best of the Web: 10 years on from Christchurch disaster, powerful earthquakes strike off New Zealand (UPDATES)
Comment: This keeps happening. In the last couple of years, strong quakes have been occurring on or very close to significant anniversaries (from the point of view of the afflicted country)......RC
I really don't know where to begin with your tsunami comments. What topic(s) did you have in mind?
Thus, it's a rare drug RC's had problems with per the standard PC narrative. Indeed, it ain't been made, and if it has, RC has no desire to expand those previously achieved greater than visible horizons.
As re tsunami, I believe that I was referring to my comment there which began: HOWEVER: I might have been referring to one of my other comments on the sundry SOTT articles re that NZ quake and tsunami. Here's that one again.
Best of the Web: 10 years on from Christchurch disaster, powerful earthquakes strike off New Zealand (UPDATES)
Comment: This keeps happening. In the last couple of years, strong quakes have been occurring on or very close to significant anniversaries (from the point of view of the afflicted country)......RC
I gather from the types of coincidental phenomena discussed on the matter of quakes (and other topics) there's a certain proclivity to explain natural events by way of human intervention. First off, from what little I've learned about geology, it takes an hellacious amount of energy to trigger a quake. Something that HAARP transmitters cannot do. (RF radiation has been my bread and butter since 10yoa).
What CAN and so far has been well observed, is the sun's activity, which is modulated by the planetary orbital cycles. The fact that those cycles as well as the sun's interact, producing harmonic interaction, bears upon the observed "coincidences" of recent Pacific Rim quakes.
From an historical perspective on quakes caused by volcanic action, look at the chart here: [Link] Click on the graphic in lower left pane window.
For solar cyclic phenomenon, go here: [Link] here: [Link] and here: [Link]
RC
AFA the nuke goes, they all leave residue, whether they are a dirty bomb or an EMP. So where's the evidence post event? No dead fish? No underwater radioactivity? No messed up shoreline? Such info is conspicuously missing from the Vialls article.
I went to the USGS to get a summary of underground nuke testing [Link] They claim there were no overlays between sensory response and bomb tests in the Mojave, 1950+. It is interesting for me to observe that the Mojave test site is roughly half way between LA and St George, Ut. I was born in St George, and lived there until 2½. My family had been there since 1944. There was no talk of earth quakes or tremors during that period while we lived there. There was however, a blow hole nearby my older siblings used to go play in that was rumored to be radioactive. My suspicion is that the real reason for the taboo was it was a dirty geothermal vent that could suck people down when it evacuated. That region is known to be ancient volcanic upthrusts. Also, there are mountain ranges of considerable size between LA and the Mojave, as also Mojave and St George. 250 miles is not all that far away to feel tremors. So if nukes going off in the Mojave one would think could be felt that far away. But seismic testing in recent years reveals only localized tremors, and they apparently did not propagate beyond the mountain ranges.
I grew up in Utah. Experienced a couple of quakes there. They propagated along the valley floor fault lines for a couple of hundred miles in one instance. I used to own a house located a block away from the major fault in the area. I also lived in Indio, CA during 1968 when they had a 6.8 quake ripple up from the south. Rock & roll everything just like being on water. Again, that was all old lake bed area like in Utah so propagation over long distance travels easily. I was also in Ketchum ID in 1959 when the Alaskan quake hit. I slept through it, but the next day there was enough damage in the resort areas north to divert our vacation.
As for the Sumatran trench blast, I would expect to get predictable results of that magnitude they would really have to know their local geology. Going deep that close to the shore it seems to me would produce more of a cloud burst than a tsunami. A 9 Mton nuke resisted by an equal weight of water comes out to 554 cubic acres. That's not much water to inundate anything except nearby. And where an unbound water region is concerned, water can absorb a humongous amount of energy. If the Sumatran quake really attained 9.0, there would have been no need for a tsunami to trash the place.
Here's a video of an actual oceanic nuke detonation: [Link] They don't say how big the bomb is, just that it is apparently much closer to the surface than in the cited article. Notice that most of the force travels upward, rather than radially. What radial travel there is originates in the atmosphere. Anyone experienced at canonball diving knows you have to hit the surface just right to get a good plume, and the bulk of the energy is vertical rather than horizontal.
I take the article with tongue in cheek. Most of it is speculation and I'm very skeptical of his assertions. Short of real hard data with such things I'm a "Wait & Seeist".
My father was an E.E. working at Edwards and Vandenberg in the early 1960's and we then lived in the Mojave (Lancaster). Was a super magical place and time. There's a poem that my father wrote about an early ground test on the Titan SRB's that for many years was displayed and shared amongst those launching them. (As you know, back then a bulletin board was literally that.)
I've only 'enjoyed' one earthquake. I had just started work in L.A. and was going through training for my employer/federal gov. entity. We were on the very top of an~22 story building. (It was the first time I'd ever been in a 'skyscraper' as I'd never been beyond any fourth floor. That's what growing up here was like.)
I'd always expected that an EQ would be kinda like one of our rocket launches which would rattle one's windows and doors. Thus, I was super surprised to feel the entire 'skyscraper' transform itself into a small boat floating and swaying above a tsunami.
Finally: I have so much learned the hard way to be a skeptic that for me, that article, specifically with JV's death, still raises questions. I guess one could look up the USMC disprotions and USN ship locations, but what difference would it make? It would be hard for me to distrust more what used to be my government.
RC
As re the upward blast, it seems that the idea to plant a nuke to launch and maximize a tsunami would be best and almost cost the same to simply plant it as deep as possible.
Funny. Your dad an EE. What I used to do, although most of my experience was tied to mfg. There it became evident fairly quick that "coincidences" pop up all the time. By guess, I'd say roughly half of such events were caused by people being what they are--lazy. And lazy people tend to make repetitive, stylisitc decisions that result in fiascos which most often have a ripple effect. Sometimes I would swear people were psychically connected, both locally and trans-nationally. To be suspicious of JV's expiring at the pinnacle of those events would require for me a measurable more amount of details. Same with the guy who invented the PCR test.
OTOH, I have heard so many people claim McCarthy was an extremist who saw a Communist under every door in Washington. Such people do not know more of the facts, and that is McCarthy WAS onto an infestation of "Communists" in the Federal government. I've read the documents and the research. Even defector Arkady Shevchenko who wrote Breaking with Moscow , published 30 years later detailed how infested the Fed was. And then there's the Jew Benjamin Freedman, ex protégée to Bernard Baruch who also tried to warn the public back in McCarthy's day.
Ahh I need to shut up and go make dinner.