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:

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.

A term we are hearing lately is "herd immunity." Here’s an excerpt from the article:

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.

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.

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:

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:

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:

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.

Health Care Technology and Its Assessment in Eight Countries has the following finding:

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."

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 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.

I Googled her name and a key word and found this page from one of the books on Google Books: