During my medical training, one of my attendings who did a fair bit of teaching used to parrot the same 3 bits of advice. He rose to relative prominence as the first Chief Cancer Control Officer of the American Cancer Society and I remember my interactions with him as generally favorable. His advice was spot-on, in a humorous way.
His 3 points of advice:
1. Eat plants - okay, few would argue 25 years later that this is largely good advice
2. Estrogen replacement is a fountain of youth - Oopsies! Turns out it increases the risk of breast and uterine cancer as well as cardiovascular disease. So...that bit of advice changed maybe 15 years ago now.
3. Half of all we teach you in medical school will be proven wrong.
Kudos to our instructor as 1 and 2 proved 3 correct - though a small sample, for sure. The third point is the most important advice you can give in medicine - "This is my best advice with the information available to me now".
No hubris that we are always right.
This disinformation nonsense is anti-science. Arguing that the science is settled is only true until disproven. The first step in the scientific method is the observation that something is not as it should be based on prior assumptions and knowledge. This leads to a hypothesis that is counter to the common belief, and then to a study (or studies) pursuing the truth.
Anti-science is denying the scientific method, not denying those using it. The thought that medical boards are going to police when and how the "truth" can be challenged is an almost unthinkable premise. You want more doctor shortages? Start slapping the wrists of those willing to challenge convention by trying to move the needle of knowledge. Watch the rats continue to jump from the sinking ship.
Laughing at Rachel here. A few weeks ago a guy In our industrial neighborhood was chest banging to me that he was *proud* that he was triple vaxxed. I asked him if he took the flu vaccine every season. He says “ hell no!”. Ok I’m doubting his intelligence at this point. Yesterday he walks up the alley all masked up , low energy body language. He stops 15 feet away. “ I have COVID” he says. I want to laugh, but I humor him a little bit. I said, “ I thought you were vaxxed?…. so the vaccine doesn’t work?”. Then he got angry with me, “ of course you can get it if you vaxxed!” Ok. I asked what the symptoms were. “ like a bad cold” he replied. “ but I took got some Tamiflu and it helped.”
WTFing bloody hell! I’m going insane surrounded by STUPID people!!!!
Just figured out why billy boy gates has announced to the world that he has Covid and will be self isolating… he wants to keep a low profile while the WHO announces to the world that they are going to take away the sovereignty of member nations regarding medical decisions… since he owns them!
Being in health care, this is a critically important piece of writing. Few outside of health care, realize that their trusted physicians, ARNPs, nurses, pharmacists were required to be "on message" irrespective of how erroneous, at the risk of immediate and permanent suspension of license. Older health care professionals simply walked away. Younger professionals with significant educational debt, mortgages, families faced a choice of immediate penury (if the license is permanently suspended on grounds of dishonesty, moral turpitude - which were the enabling statutes by which the licenses were taken, any other employer in another field would assume a serious felony). And, if the CDC were tracking tweets/etc of our congressmen and senators, one can be sure that state health boards were tracking doctors and others. Meryl Nass is an exemplar of this situation - a la Russian tactics, her health board not only suspended her license but is also requiring a comprehensive psychiatric evaluation from one of their own (You're not only a de facto felon, but also crazy). Furthermore, health care providers and all related associates were in many states required to be vaccinated in order to continue to hold their licenses. But to this day we do not know how many CDC, FDA, NAID staff were vaccinated! Nor were any key players in this dictatorial tragedy required to do so to hold their positions.
The real tragedy of this in concert with other health care dictatorial policies, is the literally tens of thousands of unnecessary deaths that occurred owing to withholding of virtually any medical intervention, save remdesivir and vents, neither with any reasonable research based track record of efficacy regarding this virus. In addition to all of those who died or were permanently disabled by adverse vaccine events, another topic that is disallowed by by CDC, FDA, FSMB.
Where I live life is completely normal except for two pockets of insanity. One is Costco and the other is church. Half the people I see at my Costco are masked. It is not required to mask at Costco. It is not required to mask anywhere in the county. Literally no one in my suburb community masks But wearing a mask to Costco is a popular fashion choice.
At church it is the kids who mask. I understand the brainwashing that created this despicable habit. I do not understand the absence of pushback to teach "You do not need to do this!"
Our society is greatly corrupted by charlatans and cowards. Thank God for cats with attitude!
Ok, Downton Abbey fans, one of the surprising moments to me was the moment when *someone* was dying (I don’t know - maybe you haven’t seen it and still want to?) and a character declares, how can that be? It’s the 20th, for crying out loud! Or something to that effect. As in, everyone thinks they’re so evolved that they KNOW. We should be immortal by now, right??
A lethal dose of aluminum is safe for babies, right? As long as you don’t inject their brains. It’s totally fine. It doesn’t travel anywhere else in the body. Right???
My father-in-law was a microbiologist in a lab in CA for decades. He recently retired. He said to me very recently, the secret is, we really KNOW NOTHING.
But sure, let’s pretend we do and squash open debate and innovation. It’s just people’s lives we’re dealing with. (It’s why some of us have exhausted the medical system and have turned to, say, homeopathy for help. And surprise, surprise, the homeopath is the only one to make some headway on complicated issues. As if humans have been around for millennia and not brand new creatures as of the year 2000.)
There's some bad kitty litter that needs cleaned out in the public health field. Here in Michigan all kinds of medical professionals will have to complete "implicit bias training" in order to stay licensed. Acknowledge your white privilege or you can't treat patients! Take a vax or you are fired! What is next? This is such a slippery slope we are going down at breakneck speed. I couldn't have more disdain for the public health and regulatory officials.
I have to admit I sardonically chuckle a bit over the people who think the COVID response was terrible but then go ahead and pop a statin because they think LDL causes heart disease. As was stated above, you need to be highly suspicious of doctors. These people are simply legal drug pushers for pharma, an industry that has no intention of actually curing people because people who are healthy would kill profits.
After COVID is there any doubt that almost all doctors simply do what they're told - "Push this drug or else you'll be fired and lose your license". And they even fool themselves into believing the crap so they can still tell themselves they're the good guy who just wants to help people. Yeah... no.
If you want to head down the rabbit hole a ways take a gander at this book by a favorite doctor of mine (a guy who actually thinks for himself and has the balls to talk about it) about heart disease. Everything you think you know is a lie.
Here’s a question. Take any Country - how many people have to be vaccinated to prevent one CoVid death, at what cost, at what risk? The USA FDA value of a statistical life is $7.9 million, so if vaccinating a population costs more than the value of lives saved, particularly if the lives saved are 82 year old with comorbidity and will expire within 12 months anyway.
Those who emote about ‘even one life saved’, and ‘you can’t talk about money when Human life is involved’ should consider we need money to do things, including medical care. The money we spend on ‘even one life saved’ isn’t available to spend on saving other lives.
Currently there are 6.4 million people on the NHS waiting list in the UK, the backlog from keeping hospitals empty to ‘save’ CoVid victims and staff self-isolating to ‘save lives’. A significant proportion of that 6.4 million will die because we know many of them are cancer cases.
Emote that.
Currently CoVid vaccination reported, confirmed deaths UK exceed 2 000 and rising. These are young, healthy individuals. That is a cost of about $16 billion - to save what? There is then a difficult to calculate additional cost of non-fatal injury requiring medical treatment, loss of time from work or long term disability.
It is estimated that adverse drug reactions are under reported by a factor of ten.
So the real cost of CoVid vaccine (that don’t work anyway) is enormous… and rising.
And if the indirect long term effects discussed here are elsewhere turn out to be real, the bill will be incalculable.
I realise talking about vaccine death and injury is disinformation, antivaxxer talk, and must be stopped.
As you note this kind of insanity is a longstanding history in medicine. What is different is that this "misinformation board" is overtly saying what has been somewhat well understood about medical boards: stay in line or there will be consequences to your ability to "practice".
And it's called "practice" for a reason, right?
Lat night we had dinner at a restaurant. I ordered a salad with my meal, as I often do (yes I know that is stuff is what food eats). When it arrived I scanned the table for a shaker of salt but none was to be found. So I had to ask for salt. "Oh we don't put out salt because it is bad for you" but being a friendly restaurant the brought be some anyway. This "it's bad for you" is a perfect example of not only medical organizations getting it wrong, but how difficult it is to kill the myths once adopted by the AMA. Anyone who cares to research the topic finds quickly that the AMA guideline for "low sodium" began with a story (and I mean story, not study) in the NEJM reprinted by the AMA which cited a study which claimed to find a correlation between reduced salt and reducing hypertension. Dig only one level into it, as in read the cited study, and you find the story gets it all wrong: the study, which observed dozens (!) of patients with a very specific type of hypertensive pathology found that lowering sodium "correlated" with a reduction in hypertension while it found this insignificant as it did nothing to address the underlying pathology of which hypertension was a symptom. Dig a bit further and you realize the "correlations" was in fact invalid, mathematically, as there were no controls. Subsequent studies that included larger samples and control groups subsequently found no correlation, even in that very specific population. Did NEJM or AMA change the recommendations based on the actual science? Not yet...almost 5 decades after.
In those 5 decades volumes of studies have shown the dangers of low-sodium diets. Blanket "recommendations" can be like that. Especially when based on flawed understanding of the source material. As a non-medical professional who knows how to read a scientific paper (and do the math that medical researchers seem unable to do so often), I am not a credible source for what is "right" but I can with some confidence point out the flaws in the math and inconsistencies in the logic.
How can you trust a professional organization such as the AMA, or state run medical boards, who continue to endorse "Body Mass Index" as a metric of health? The average athlete is "overweight" by BMI and a really healthy athlete is "obese" by there metric. I challenge those MDs who believe in this metric to walk up to an NFL player and tell them "you are obese". It makes no sense but that's what the "guideline" tells them.
You are so right about incrementalism. It is extremely powerful. What changed in 2020 was the size of the increments. 2021 abolished any pretense of subtle. I have for decades warned people that "reasonable restrictions" does not lead to a slippery slope: that is a cliff and once you step off it all feels fine until the last second when you hit bottom.
Initially ineptitude seemed like a reasonable explanation at the beginning of all this but it has become increasingly impossible to believe that now (unless incompetence can morph into something more sinister). I also think that for many normies, for lack of a better word, the 'pandemic' is over as they've been 'allowed' to resume somewhat of a normal existence . The problem is that they're not watching the slow viral creep of authoritarianism closely enough. The continued actions of these 'authorities' leaves little doubt of that in my estimation.
'Authority' is not synonymous with wisdom, knowledge or ethics. It's simply become a self-ascribed label fortyrants.
No, no. Hell no. This is not the way. We cannot live free like this. We are at war. They have unleashed a bioweapon upon us. We have not asked for this. And we cannot stand for it. The time to stand is now!
Are there practical examples of resistance that someone can share? It seems whatever we're doing is not enough because this evil is marching on and growing. Voting has been corrupted. Protesting can be hijacked. Petitions feel especially weak. How do we wrest the power away from the wicked?
During my medical training, one of my attendings who did a fair bit of teaching used to parrot the same 3 bits of advice. He rose to relative prominence as the first Chief Cancer Control Officer of the American Cancer Society and I remember my interactions with him as generally favorable. His advice was spot-on, in a humorous way.
His 3 points of advice:
1. Eat plants - okay, few would argue 25 years later that this is largely good advice
2. Estrogen replacement is a fountain of youth - Oopsies! Turns out it increases the risk of breast and uterine cancer as well as cardiovascular disease. So...that bit of advice changed maybe 15 years ago now.
3. Half of all we teach you in medical school will be proven wrong.
Kudos to our instructor as 1 and 2 proved 3 correct - though a small sample, for sure. The third point is the most important advice you can give in medicine - "This is my best advice with the information available to me now".
No hubris that we are always right.
This disinformation nonsense is anti-science. Arguing that the science is settled is only true until disproven. The first step in the scientific method is the observation that something is not as it should be based on prior assumptions and knowledge. This leads to a hypothesis that is counter to the common belief, and then to a study (or studies) pursuing the truth.
Anti-science is denying the scientific method, not denying those using it. The thought that medical boards are going to police when and how the "truth" can be challenged is an almost unthinkable premise. You want more doctor shortages? Start slapping the wrists of those willing to challenge convention by trying to move the needle of knowledge. Watch the rats continue to jump from the sinking ship.
Laughing at Rachel here. A few weeks ago a guy In our industrial neighborhood was chest banging to me that he was *proud* that he was triple vaxxed. I asked him if he took the flu vaccine every season. He says “ hell no!”. Ok I’m doubting his intelligence at this point. Yesterday he walks up the alley all masked up , low energy body language. He stops 15 feet away. “ I have COVID” he says. I want to laugh, but I humor him a little bit. I said, “ I thought you were vaxxed?…. so the vaccine doesn’t work?”. Then he got angry with me, “ of course you can get it if you vaxxed!” Ok. I asked what the symptoms were. “ like a bad cold” he replied. “ but I took got some Tamiflu and it helped.”
WTFing bloody hell! I’m going insane surrounded by STUPID people!!!!
Just figured out why billy boy gates has announced to the world that he has Covid and will be self isolating… he wants to keep a low profile while the WHO announces to the world that they are going to take away the sovereignty of member nations regarding medical decisions… since he owns them!
Being in health care, this is a critically important piece of writing. Few outside of health care, realize that their trusted physicians, ARNPs, nurses, pharmacists were required to be "on message" irrespective of how erroneous, at the risk of immediate and permanent suspension of license. Older health care professionals simply walked away. Younger professionals with significant educational debt, mortgages, families faced a choice of immediate penury (if the license is permanently suspended on grounds of dishonesty, moral turpitude - which were the enabling statutes by which the licenses were taken, any other employer in another field would assume a serious felony). And, if the CDC were tracking tweets/etc of our congressmen and senators, one can be sure that state health boards were tracking doctors and others. Meryl Nass is an exemplar of this situation - a la Russian tactics, her health board not only suspended her license but is also requiring a comprehensive psychiatric evaluation from one of their own (You're not only a de facto felon, but also crazy). Furthermore, health care providers and all related associates were in many states required to be vaccinated in order to continue to hold their licenses. But to this day we do not know how many CDC, FDA, NAID staff were vaccinated! Nor were any key players in this dictatorial tragedy required to do so to hold their positions.
The real tragedy of this in concert with other health care dictatorial policies, is the literally tens of thousands of unnecessary deaths that occurred owing to withholding of virtually any medical intervention, save remdesivir and vents, neither with any reasonable research based track record of efficacy regarding this virus. In addition to all of those who died or were permanently disabled by adverse vaccine events, another topic that is disallowed by by CDC, FDA, FSMB.
Boom! Goes the El Gato dynamite.
Where I live life is completely normal except for two pockets of insanity. One is Costco and the other is church. Half the people I see at my Costco are masked. It is not required to mask at Costco. It is not required to mask anywhere in the county. Literally no one in my suburb community masks But wearing a mask to Costco is a popular fashion choice.
At church it is the kids who mask. I understand the brainwashing that created this despicable habit. I do not understand the absence of pushback to teach "You do not need to do this!"
Our society is greatly corrupted by charlatans and cowards. Thank God for cats with attitude!
Ok, Downton Abbey fans, one of the surprising moments to me was the moment when *someone* was dying (I don’t know - maybe you haven’t seen it and still want to?) and a character declares, how can that be? It’s the 20th, for crying out loud! Or something to that effect. As in, everyone thinks they’re so evolved that they KNOW. We should be immortal by now, right??
A lethal dose of aluminum is safe for babies, right? As long as you don’t inject their brains. It’s totally fine. It doesn’t travel anywhere else in the body. Right???
My father-in-law was a microbiologist in a lab in CA for decades. He recently retired. He said to me very recently, the secret is, we really KNOW NOTHING.
But sure, let’s pretend we do and squash open debate and innovation. It’s just people’s lives we’re dealing with. (It’s why some of us have exhausted the medical system and have turned to, say, homeopathy for help. And surprise, surprise, the homeopath is the only one to make some headway on complicated issues. As if humans have been around for millennia and not brand new creatures as of the year 2000.)
The Bad Cat strikes again!! Love you!
Another inspiring entry by EGM - "HAHAHA...NO!" my new philosophy....
There's some bad kitty litter that needs cleaned out in the public health field. Here in Michigan all kinds of medical professionals will have to complete "implicit bias training" in order to stay licensed. Acknowledge your white privilege or you can't treat patients! Take a vax or you are fired! What is next? This is such a slippery slope we are going down at breakneck speed. I couldn't have more disdain for the public health and regulatory officials.
The entire medical establishment has now defined itself as a religious organization devoted to witchcraft. Don’t trust them.
I have to admit I sardonically chuckle a bit over the people who think the COVID response was terrible but then go ahead and pop a statin because they think LDL causes heart disease. As was stated above, you need to be highly suspicious of doctors. These people are simply legal drug pushers for pharma, an industry that has no intention of actually curing people because people who are healthy would kill profits.
After COVID is there any doubt that almost all doctors simply do what they're told - "Push this drug or else you'll be fired and lose your license". And they even fool themselves into believing the crap so they can still tell themselves they're the good guy who just wants to help people. Yeah... no.
If you want to head down the rabbit hole a ways take a gander at this book by a favorite doctor of mine (a guy who actually thinks for himself and has the balls to talk about it) about heart disease. Everything you think you know is a lie.
https://www.amazon.com/Clot-Thickens-enduring-mystery-disease/dp/1907797769/ref=sr_1_1?crid=U6XRI4FTRIDD&keywords=the+clot+thickens+malcolm+kendrick&qid=1652543335&sprefix=the+clot+thickens%2Caps%2C281&sr=8-1
Here’s a question. Take any Country - how many people have to be vaccinated to prevent one CoVid death, at what cost, at what risk? The USA FDA value of a statistical life is $7.9 million, so if vaccinating a population costs more than the value of lives saved, particularly if the lives saved are 82 year old with comorbidity and will expire within 12 months anyway.
Those who emote about ‘even one life saved’, and ‘you can’t talk about money when Human life is involved’ should consider we need money to do things, including medical care. The money we spend on ‘even one life saved’ isn’t available to spend on saving other lives.
Currently there are 6.4 million people on the NHS waiting list in the UK, the backlog from keeping hospitals empty to ‘save’ CoVid victims and staff self-isolating to ‘save lives’. A significant proportion of that 6.4 million will die because we know many of them are cancer cases.
Emote that.
Currently CoVid vaccination reported, confirmed deaths UK exceed 2 000 and rising. These are young, healthy individuals. That is a cost of about $16 billion - to save what? There is then a difficult to calculate additional cost of non-fatal injury requiring medical treatment, loss of time from work or long term disability.
It is estimated that adverse drug reactions are under reported by a factor of ten.
So the real cost of CoVid vaccine (that don’t work anyway) is enormous… and rising.
And if the indirect long term effects discussed here are elsewhere turn out to be real, the bill will be incalculable.
I realise talking about vaccine death and injury is disinformation, antivaxxer talk, and must be stopped.
As you note this kind of insanity is a longstanding history in medicine. What is different is that this "misinformation board" is overtly saying what has been somewhat well understood about medical boards: stay in line or there will be consequences to your ability to "practice".
And it's called "practice" for a reason, right?
Lat night we had dinner at a restaurant. I ordered a salad with my meal, as I often do (yes I know that is stuff is what food eats). When it arrived I scanned the table for a shaker of salt but none was to be found. So I had to ask for salt. "Oh we don't put out salt because it is bad for you" but being a friendly restaurant the brought be some anyway. This "it's bad for you" is a perfect example of not only medical organizations getting it wrong, but how difficult it is to kill the myths once adopted by the AMA. Anyone who cares to research the topic finds quickly that the AMA guideline for "low sodium" began with a story (and I mean story, not study) in the NEJM reprinted by the AMA which cited a study which claimed to find a correlation between reduced salt and reducing hypertension. Dig only one level into it, as in read the cited study, and you find the story gets it all wrong: the study, which observed dozens (!) of patients with a very specific type of hypertensive pathology found that lowering sodium "correlated" with a reduction in hypertension while it found this insignificant as it did nothing to address the underlying pathology of which hypertension was a symptom. Dig a bit further and you realize the "correlations" was in fact invalid, mathematically, as there were no controls. Subsequent studies that included larger samples and control groups subsequently found no correlation, even in that very specific population. Did NEJM or AMA change the recommendations based on the actual science? Not yet...almost 5 decades after.
In those 5 decades volumes of studies have shown the dangers of low-sodium diets. Blanket "recommendations" can be like that. Especially when based on flawed understanding of the source material. As a non-medical professional who knows how to read a scientific paper (and do the math that medical researchers seem unable to do so often), I am not a credible source for what is "right" but I can with some confidence point out the flaws in the math and inconsistencies in the logic.
How can you trust a professional organization such as the AMA, or state run medical boards, who continue to endorse "Body Mass Index" as a metric of health? The average athlete is "overweight" by BMI and a really healthy athlete is "obese" by there metric. I challenge those MDs who believe in this metric to walk up to an NFL player and tell them "you are obese". It makes no sense but that's what the "guideline" tells them.
You are so right about incrementalism. It is extremely powerful. What changed in 2020 was the size of the increments. 2021 abolished any pretense of subtle. I have for decades warned people that "reasonable restrictions" does not lead to a slippery slope: that is a cliff and once you step off it all feels fine until the last second when you hit bottom.
Initially ineptitude seemed like a reasonable explanation at the beginning of all this but it has become increasingly impossible to believe that now (unless incompetence can morph into something more sinister). I also think that for many normies, for lack of a better word, the 'pandemic' is over as they've been 'allowed' to resume somewhat of a normal existence . The problem is that they're not watching the slow viral creep of authoritarianism closely enough. The continued actions of these 'authorities' leaves little doubt of that in my estimation.
'Authority' is not synonymous with wisdom, knowledge or ethics. It's simply become a self-ascribed label fortyrants.
I'm not religious but they can all go to hell.
No, no. Hell no. This is not the way. We cannot live free like this. We are at war. They have unleashed a bioweapon upon us. We have not asked for this. And we cannot stand for it. The time to stand is now!
Are there practical examples of resistance that someone can share? It seems whatever we're doing is not enough because this evil is marching on and growing. Voting has been corrupted. Protesting can be hijacked. Petitions feel especially weak. How do we wrest the power away from the wicked?