Is Modern Medicine Science (with a
capital "S")?
Vaccinations are in the news. Everyone’s taking sides and using
their best arguments to paint the "other side" as idiots.
Anyone who even questions the safety or efficacy of vaccinations
is immediately grouped in with climate deniers and called an anti-vaxer
at best, or an idiot at worst.
I’ve heard it said that anti-vaxers are actually more informed
than the vaxers, but the vaxers fight back, arguing that the anti-vaxers
have been informed by fringe science and quacks.
I love the term quack because historically, the first one to
scream "QUACK!" is usually the biggest quack. When the AMA was
formed in 1847, they were amazingly candid in admitting that they
formed because they were going broke competing with other forms of
medicine, but they also had an agenda. Topping that agenda was to
hunt out quacks.
The main treatments used by these physicians at that time were
burning, blistering, bleeding, and prescribing a medicine whose main
ingredient was mercury; these were the people calling herbalists
quacks. You can read more in our article,
The
History of Quackery.
Contrary to what "medicine" wants us to believe, the issue of
vaccines in not black and white.
First off, no medical procedure is 100% safe.
Take aspirin. It’s considered a safe pain reliever and a safe
blood thinner, if used in low doses. Doctors and advertising
recommend daily aspirin therapy to prevent heart disease. Yet they
don’t seem to tell you that you’ll up your chances of a hemorrhagic
stroke by some 40%.
I’ve just received two health and wellness newsletters that point
to two recent studies concerning the dangers of aspirin therapy. Do
these studies make the news? Sometimes. Do doctors tell their
patients? Sometimes. Does everyone know the dangers of daily aspirin
therapy? Not even close.
Here is an excerpt from one of the newsletters:
…
new information ―
published in the online version of the journal Heart
― dropped a bombshell.
Overall, low-dose aspirin probably does
more harm than good. At least it does if you’re a woman. [©
Copyright 2015 Discovery Health Publishing, Inc. All Rights
Reserved.]
Here is a tiny syllogism for you.
If SCIENCE = FACT
And FACTS HAVE CONTEXTS,
Then SCIENCE HAS CONTEXTS.
What this means is that for science to be perfectly true, it must
consider the contexts; the whole truth and nothing but the truth.
Facts cannot be debated. Contexts can be debated. And facts that
aren’t really facts can be debated.
One more thing before we continue. Science is methodology.
Doctors and scientists like to point out that science is
reproducible. The problem with relying on this concept alone is that
bad methodology is also reproducible.
Let us take the famous "Echinacea Study" that was published in
JAMA as an example of "bad" methodology.
Children took a pill form of leaf echinacea for a period of six
months. The study was conducted by physicians with no knowledge of
the use of echinacea, no knowledge of herbalism. Their conclusion: "Echinacea
purpurea, as dosed in this study was not effective in treating
URI symptoms in patients 2 to 11 years old, and its use was
associated with an increased risk of rash." [JAMA, Dec 2003; 290:
2824 - 2830]
The reason for the study is that people "claim" that taking
echinacea shortens their colds and makes their (URI; Upper
Respiratory Infections) symptoms slighter.
The questionable methodology used:
1. quality of echinacea;
2. length of time the echinacea was given;
3. lack of blood samples taken.
To elucidate on these, the quality of a product is always
important to the outcome, as is the dosing and "method" used in
taking the echinacea. Herbalists will tell you that highest quality
echinacea is a tincture made using all parts: root, leaf, and
flower. The most effective method of taking this tincture is
sublingual.
The length of time the product was used is also very important in
this study, because historically, one does not use echinacea for a
period longer than two weeks. Why not? Because its effectiveness
drops and side effects can occur. Herbalists use the metaphor of
starting a car: Once the car starts, you don’t keep turning the key.
Finally, blood tests were never taken for CD4 and CD8 counts that
would have demonstrated an increase or decrease in T-Cells.
The fact that this study could be reproduced has nothing to do
with sound science; not when the methodology is off.
The Vaccination Debate
Free Speech TV recently
(02/05/15) aired a great
segment on vaccinations. I find Free Speech TV wonderfully objective
in giving both sides to an issue equal time, while not letting
either side get away with anything.
On the anti-vax side (though she is not an anti-vaxer; she’s
someone who wants people to be free to make informed choices) was an
attorney by the name of Mary Holland. Mary is a graduate of Harvard
and holds a law degree from Columbia University. She is a human
rights lawyer who is a research scholar at NYU School of Law. She
has also co-authored (along with Louise K. Habakus) a book titled,
Vaccine Epidemic. You can find a short review and summary of
the book at the
Weston Price site.
It’s an interesting little piece that I’d like to talk about
for a bit.
A term we are hearing lately is "herd immunity." Here’s an
excerpt from the article:
The concept of herd immunity is used to
justify vaccination mandates. However, the book exposes the
many flaws in this unproven theory. Habakus states, "What is
most troubling about the theory of herd immunity is that the
original basis for its validity has nothing to do with
vaccines. People observed a protective effect in the
community when a sufficiently high number of individuals
contracted the wild form of a disease and secured lifelong
immunity ….
Those who know me know I can’t let something like this go past me
without checking it out, and so I eventually found this article that
does substantiate the claim about the "original basis" for herd
immunity:
Herd Immunity: History, Theory, Practice.
Oh, and by the way, an unproven theory is called an hypothesis.
On the vax side was Dr Paul Offit, a pediatrician specializing in
communicable diseases and is considered a leading expert on
vaccines, immunology, and virology. He is also credited with saving
hundreds of thousands of lives, world-wide, because of the rotavirus
vaccine he co-invented. In other words, he is not just a doctor,
he’s a research scientist.
In the segment Mary Holland had her say, and then Dr Offit came
on. He attacked Holland’s arguments saying that the studies she says
don’t exist actually do exist; that she must think there’s an
international conspiracy to hide the truth. (My words, not his; I’m
paraphrasing).
But then the moderator, Amy Goodman, pointed out that Dr Offit
refused to debate Mary Holland, which had been their original
objective; to have these two face off.
Dr Offit wanted to respond to this, saying, "I think that it’s
not important to have a debate about the science with someone that
clearly doesn’t know the science. I’m sorry, Ms Holland
misrepresented the science again and again and again. I don’t think
that in any way helps your viewer. I don’t think it’s fair to have a
debate with two sides represented where only one side is really
supported by the science. I’d like to think we’re beyond that."
What should be noted is that his reasons for not debating are
because of all the things she said earlier on the program, but he
had refused to debate her prior to going on the program and hearing
what Holland had to say.
Also, in my opinion, he takes an elitist’s stand on the science,
claiming that she doesn’t understand it, as if lay people have no
grasp of the magical methods of the scientific community.
In the end, what this really looks like is he refused to debate
an attorney. She claims the studies don’t exist mainly because the
studies that do exist were conducted by the pharmaceutical companies
that made the vaccines; much akin to putting the fox in charge of
the hen house. Additionally, much of the science Offit supports is
based upon epidemiological studies, which are the worst studies in
medicine because the statistics can be manipulated and the data can
be cherry picked.
What Dr Offit didn’t want to do, it appears to me, was to have
his "science" scrutinized and torn apart by a woman qualified to
cross examine him.
From my knowledge of science, I know that if it is good science,
it is unassailable. Even a bad study can be replicated. As for
science not being open to debate, well that’s something many would
love for us to believe, but is far from the truth.
Even the Germ vs Terrain debate from over 100 years ago is back
in the forefront as it is now known that 90% of our DNA is not ours
but belongs to the "germs" infesting our bodies.
And what about global climate change; is that open to debate?
Sure. I’d love to see the debate, because the climate change deniers
will be beaten into the ground by the overwhelming evidence that
climate change is not only real, but humans are helping it along.
Everything is open to debate. Let the facts speak for themselves.
Let the contexts of those facts be debated. Let the debates begin.
What Constitutes Good Science?
The gold standard of science is the randomized controlled, double
blind study, referred to as an RCT (randomized controlled trial).
Randomized means once the person has been qualified to be in the
study (the qualifications are part of the methodology and can
manipulate the outcome; for example, elderly are often disqualified
because they tend to die before studies finish), that person is
randomly assigned to one of the groups, the experimental or control
group. However, there are studies involving more than two groups. By
random, you could say it’s a flip of a coin.
The advantages of this type of study are obvious. We find out
what works and what are the side effects. The disadvantages are that
oftentimes the results are limited to the experiment and hard to
validate in the real world. This is where the Heisenberg, or
uncertainty, principle comes into play, in that the observer seems
to influence the outcome.
The greatest disadvantage to this type of study is a conflict of
interest, which happens to be the loudest valid criticism leveled at
the pharmaceutical industry, because they are often ones who test
their own products.
An ABC news report from June 12, 2002 illustrated this problem
when it revealed that drug studies funded by the pharmaceutical
interests have a 90% chance of showing effectiveness, while studies
funded by sources outside the industry have only a 50% chance of
favorable results. [McKenzie J. Conflict of interest? Medical
journal changes policy of finding independent doctors [transcript].
ABC News. June 12, 2002]
In the Hierarchy of Evidence, the only thing more trustworthy
than an RCT is a collection of RCTs that all point to the same
conclusion, called a meta-analysis.
In the Hierachy of Evidence, on the rung directly below RCTs sits
the Cohort Study. This is that study you often hear about in which a
group of people with some commonality were followed around for a
number of years to determine something. The Framingham Heart
Study is probably the most famous of cohort studies, in which "a
total of 2090 men and 2641 women members of the original cohort,
free of a history of atrial fibrillation, between the ages of 55 and
94 years" were evaluated for up to 38 years.
Many cohort studies are accomplished by giving people a
questionnaire to fill out. Their answers are fed into a computer and
relationships are discovered that we mere humans would take years to
discover. One of my favorite examples of a cohort study is one out
of UCLA Medical School in which they found that if a pregnant mother
ate, on the average, a hotdog a week during her pregnancy, her child
had a 50/50 chance of being diagnosed with a brain tumor prior to
his/her 15th birthday. (You can see why it’s my favorite. Whoda
thunk?)
Finally we have case studies and then case reports. A case report
is basically anecdotal evidence reported by a "doctor." In itself, a
case report is not conclusive, but it could initiate a more rigorous
investigation. One thing modern medicine tries not to admit is that
many anecdotal accounts do eventually add up to something
substantial.
In our ancient history, primitive peoples learned their medicine
from anecdotal evidence that added up over a period of time. The
study of herbal medicine came about this way, as did Traditional
Chinese Medicine. The first "science" on this planet was the "Tao"
or the way. It was the science of observation.
Is Modern Conventional Medicine Science?
We’ve come full circle back to our original question.
We like to think our medicine is based in science. We want to
believe this. Many, many people actually do believe this
unquestioningly. But sadly, because of the influence of money on our
medicine, that belief in the science of medicine is a religious
belief, as it has little foundation in actual fact.
For some people, if you tell them that medicine is not 100%
science, their reaction is the same as if you had attacked their
religion.
There are many papers written on the Religion of Modern Medicine,
including one at this site:
Modern Medicine: The
New World Religion by Olivier Clerc.
Another thesis equating medicine to religion is found in the
book, Confessions of a Medical Heretic, by M.D. Robert S.
Mendelsohn. In it, Mendelsohn argues that modern medical therapies
are often more dangerous than the diseases.
In 1978, the now defunct Office of Technical Assessment published
the results from their study in a paper called:
Assessing the Efficacy and
Safety of Medical Technologies.
In it, they concluded that just about 20% of conventional
medicine is backed by the gold standard of Randomized Controlled
Trials. For example, in medicals school, doctors today are taught
pharmaceutical medicine for the most part. You have a disease and
you have a pharmaceutical cure. Sure, those drugs are backed by
studies, which were done by the drug companies (conflict of
interest). But as to the care of an actual patient, in medical
school, old doctors pass onto young doctors their own practices that
have worked for them, but have never been put to the rigors of
"science."
When a doctor gets out into society to practice his art, s/he
oftentimes falls into the same rut as most other physicians. With
nearly 10,000 drugs to choose from, they
prescribe from a list that might be 20 to 30 names long; their favorites.
I’ve discovered another paper published by the Office of
Technical Assessment right before congress closed their doors in
1995. Why they closed we’ll never know, but I’ve read some of the
congressional debates, and it seems that our representatives didn’t
like the truth very much. How could anyone attack our health care
system that cost more than any other in the world and gave us
results equal to those of a third world nation?
The paper is,
Health Care Technology and Its Assessment in Eight Countries.
I tried to download the paper but Adobe Acrobat tells me the
paper is damaged. It is readable only online, and this is the
only site where it is available free of charge.
Others have written about this paper but because they are blinded
by their hatred of modern conventional medicine, they tout some very
incorrect claims about this paper. One thing they claim is that the
paper again reiterates that modern medicine is only 20% science. It
does not. It does, however, talk about many things in medicine that
are prescribed not because of studies, but because of a
cost/risk/benefit analysis. With the costs of our medicine going
through the roof, this is something you’d expect, but again,
"science" takes a backseat.
What the paper did bring up is, well, you can read it for
yourself:
In 1990, life expectancy at birth in the
United States was 71.8 years for men and 78.8 years for
women, among the lowest of the OECD countries. The 1990
infant mortality rate was 9.2 per 1,000 live births, which
puts the United States in the bottom half of the
distribution among all developed countries (129). These poor
statistical showings have been the focus of political
frustration in the face of high spending for health care.
What this tells us is that we’re paying more and getting less.
And the paper quotes testimony from a representative of the AMA
in congress:
… clinical policy analysis and judgments
are better made—and are being responsibly made— within the
medical profession. Assessing risks and costs, as well as
benefits, has been central to the exercise of good medical
judgment for decades. The advantage the individual physician
has over any national center or advisory council is that he
or she is dealing with individuals in need of medical care,
not hypothetical cases.
So how’s that working out for us?
Before presenting you with the numbers, let me just say, we the
people are losing this war. Medicine has sway in this country like
no other "business." They can kill you, maim you, and injure you and
get away with it. We hear all the time how we have to stop frivolous
lawsuits to bring the cost of medicine down. But law suits amount to
less than 2% of the total price tag. When you lose a family member
or a limb, that is not a frivolous law suit, but should we pass tort
reform, that will be treated as a frivolous law suit.
A few years ago we wrote in our article,
Health Care for Dummies:
Dr Carolyn Dean MD, ND,
author of
Death By Modern Medicine,
after analyzing government databases and peer review journals
concluded thus: "I found that 784,000 people are dying annually,
prematurely, due to modern medicine, intervention." She adds that
this too is a low estimate due to the medical monopoly
under-reporting, or as the adage goes: A doctor buries his mistakes.
Since her book, Dr Dean got together with Gary Null, PhD, Martin
Feldman, MD, Debora Rasio, MD, and Dorothy Smith, PhD to further
investigate the dangers of conventional medicine and published their
results in this article: "Death by Medicine."
[ I’ve
placed a copy of this article at
our site because so many of these articles move about and seem to
get lost.]
The paper starts off: "Something is wrong when regulatory
agencies pretend that vitamins are dangerous, yet ignore published
statistics showing that government-sanctioned medicine is the real
hazard."
The paper does not bury the lead; right away it tells us the
following:
This fully referenced report shows the
number of people having in-hospital, adverse reactions to
prescribed drugs to be 2.2 million per year. The number of
unnecessary antibiotics prescribed annually for viral
infections is 20 million per year. The number of unnecessary
medical and surgical procedures performed annually is 7.5
million per year. The number of people exposed to
unnecessary hospitalization annually is 8.9 million per
year.
The most stunning statistic, however, is
that the total number of deaths caused by conventional
medicine is an astounding 783,936 per year. It is now
evident that the American medical system is the leading
cause of death and injury in the US. (By contrast, the
number of deaths attributable to heart disease in 2001 was
699,697, while the number of deaths attributable to cancer
was 553,251.5)
Given the above, we must acknowledge that there is science and
there is medicine. Science works and can be replicated. If we say
that medicine is working, we are turning a blind eye to its dismal
failure rate.
Thus we can only conclude at this point in time that medicine is
not science; medicine is a business.
Medicine as Business
Health Care Technology and Its Assessment in Eight Countries
has the following finding:
Evidence from randomized clinical
trials is usually but not always a necessary ingredient for
a positive determination (i.e., that the benefits
sufficiently outweigh the risks). No randomized trials of
laparoscopic cholecystectomy were available, but OHTA
analysis argued that the "risk/benefit ratio of the
procedure was similar or superior to that of the open
procedure" and recommended that it be approved for coverage.
[page 306]
The study basically states that if medicine was science/evidenced
based, we would have better outcomes: "Research over the past decade
also has continued to highlight the poor state of evidence in health
care practice, reflected in high variability in practice styles and
high levels of marginally beneficial care." [page 311]
The bottom line of any business is profit. No wonder it’s called
the "bottom line." When medicine is run like a business, not only do
we get a level of care that is substandard, we get "health care
rationing" and "price gouging."
Explicit use of cost-effectiveness
criteria for allocating health care resources has been more
problematic, primarily because there is no widely accepted
cut-off for a level of cost-effectiveness that demands or
excludes coverage. The concept of cost-effectiveness is,
from a political perspective, difficult to separate from
health care rationing, which is roundly rejected by most of
the U.S. public.
… As an example, the cost of care for
patients with no insurance is partially offset by inflated
charges billed for services provided to patients with good
coverage. [page 312]
Medicine run as a business is not medicine run as a science.
For-profit hospitals do not make money unless the beds are full.
I remember one of my sources telling me how the head of one of the
largest HMOs in America (he refused to tell me his name since it
would blow his anonymity) said at a meeting: "Running a hospital is
like running a whore house. You don’t make money unless the beds are
full."
Filling the beds and trying to keep costs down is a business
angle. Focusing on actual care takes a back seat. Thus, hospital
medical errors are in the news today because they’re suddenly the
third leading cause of death in the US, and this comes from the main
stream media.
Medical errors leading to patient death
are much higher than previously thought, and may be
as high as 400,000 deaths a year, according to a new
study
in the Journal of Patient Safety. [Hospital
medical errors now the third leading cause of death in the U.S.]
Theory vs Practice
Medical theory is based, mostly, in actual science. The practice
of medicine, as we’ve seen, not so much.
When a physician prescribes three or more disparate drugs, all
of the double-blind studies fly out the window. Nobody knows what all
three drugs will do because they were never studied together. And
many, many patients are on more than just three drugs. Our elderly
population is entirely over-drugged.
One of my sources was a nurse at an elderly care home. She
reported to me that a new, young doctor took over the home and
started slashing drug use.
In case you are unaware of this simple concept, here is something
to chew on: The organ most affected by drugs is the brain.
Within a very short time, the residents were interacting better,
living more vibrantly, and smiling more. The drooling and sitting
for hours ended.
They had been dosed into zombiehood, she told me.
Doctors are like pilots.
There’s a great story from NASA about the early astronauts. They
were chosen from a short list of our best pilots. Pilots love to
fly. They don’t like being flown. They did not like sitting in a
capsule with nothing to do, so the NASA engineers built levers,
buttons, and gauges that did nothing but keep them busy, giving them
something to do, while the aircraft flew itself or took its orders
from the people on the ground.
Doctors don’t like doing nothing. When patients show up with an
upper respiratory infection, doctors want to do something, so many
prescribe antibiotics. The problem with this is that the CDC says
that 90% of these infections are viral and antibiotics do nothing
for viral infections. And yet 40% of the 50 million prescriptions
written each year are for upper respiratory infection, which can
contribute to drug-resistant superbugs. Over 80 thousand people die
yearly from nosocomial infections, or infections they picked up in
the hospital. Because hospitals flagrantly under-report, we don’t
know which percentage of those were from drug-resistant superbugs.
Dr John Goffman, physician and scientist, lost his government job
when he reported the deadly effects of nuclear power plants. Tell
the truth; lose your job.
Before he died, he warned the American public that we were using
way too much radiation in our medical practices. He claimed that
x-rays, CT scans, and mammography contributed to 75% of the new
cancers diagnosed yearly and even contributed to an increase in
heart disease. Before he died, he warned us that ionizing radiation
would cause 100 million premature deaths from 2006 to 2016.
And what about women’s health care? You should all know that the
term hysterectomy comes from the root word, hysterical, I hope.
Dr. Adriane Fugh-Berman [http://www.pharmedout.org/aboutus.htm]
is a stern critic of modern medicine who can only dream of a day
that science replaces the superstition most doctors hold concerning their
female patients.
I Googled her name and a key word and found this page from one of
the books on
Google Books:
One of our advisors, Dr Dan Harper, reported to us about an
unpublished cohort study in which it was revealed that only 9% of
oncologists took chemotherapy for their cancers. Are doctors
anti-chemo?
The biggest medical fraud perpetrated on the American public is
Statin Drugs. No study has ever shown that cholesterol causes heart
disease, and people with high cholesterol live longer than people
with low, "in the proper range" cholesterol levels. Nine billion
dollars a year is spent on these drugs because of a horrible "lipid
hypothesis" that was created from cherry-picked data.
Medicine is not science. Medicine is a business.
So Where Does This Discussion Leave Us
There’s enough information above to show that our medical system
is deeply flawed, that it is less than scientific, and that despite
the facts, many people worship at the altar of modern medicine
religiously.
To end the debates and disharmony concerning vaccinations, we
have our work cut out, and I shall outline what must be done.
- Stop dividing us into groups. Vaxers, ant-vaxers,
anti-science; these are all inflammatory terms. We have to stop
taking sides and calling the other side names. We’re all idiots
when it comes to the whole truth. We all know just a part.
- Medicine must admit that it is flawed; that no
procedures are 100% safe, that doctors are not gods, and
that solid science is forever working to improve its numbers.
- Drugs and vaccines must be tested by (with testing funded
by) agencies outside the pharmaceutical industry; agencies that
can be objective.
- The ingredients of things we put into our bodies must be
known. We fought a long time to remove mercury from our
vaccines, but now we have aluminum? How safe is that?
- Science, like justice, is supposed to be blind. We’ve become
a society where we’ve convinced ourselves that inorganic
chemicals, radiation, and surgical procedures will keep us
healthy, ignoring the most simple and most fundamental
foundation of health and wellness: diet and lifestyle. If
science is truly blind, then it must test things outside that
realm of inorganic chemicals, radiation, and surgical
procedures, and those tests must be conducted by an objective
agency of the people, hence the government.
- The people must be informed. Medicine is famous for
under-reporting its screw-ups, and rules that have no teeth in
them are never followed. Medicine must come out of the closet
and bring the facts into the light of day. People, when they
know the facts, when they know they’re not being lied to, make
better choices.
And how do we come full circle on the vaccine debate?
Besides adequate testing and informing the public of the real
risks, problems, etcetera, the main problem with vaccinations is
that they are given together in multiples, not for the benefit of
the patient, but for the sake of the doctor, the sake of the clinic;
it’s just easier. Studies on the safety of multiple vaccines were
either conducted by or paid for by the pharmaceutical interests, and
because of the "conflict of interest," they are questionable.
The public has a right to:
- know what’s in vaccines;
- get them separately with enough time between for the child
to heal;
- have the safety and efficacy determined by an agency outside
the pharmaceutical interests;
If we’re going to trust the science, then the science must be
trustworthy.
Post Mortem
Dr Paul Offit (mentioned above) is, obviously, a brilliant and
caring physician.
Forbes quoted him thus: "You work in a hospital and you watch
children die from preventable disease ─ it
makes you passionate."
I would like to respond to this, "When you discover that modern
medicine kills half a million people a year (low estimate), it
really makes you passionate."
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