Recent discussion with my new oncologist: what do you think about the idea of using repurposed drugs to treat my cancer? After all there are numerous studies and trials going on using ivermectin with success and it’s non toxic. . Her answer: What’s ivermectin?
I think we need to become more responsible for our own health and not take a tablet at the first sign of a symptom. In order to understand completely what is going on you need to identify the underlying problem and what is causing it in the first place. As you say taking a medicine to reduce your symptom can mask what is going on in your body and may cause a more serious condition further down the road. I now realise taking a medicine to reduce physical or emotional problems is not the answer, we know our bodies best and should try and work to reverse the cause of the problem if possible before resorting to pharmaceuticals. It takes time, work and a lot of reading but it is the much safer option.
Frankly, I almost never go to see a doctor. But if I do, my preference is that they be close to my age. Then I can evaluate how they care for themselves. Are they overweight, fit, healthier than me? What do they do to care for themselves? 99% of the time, they are in *much* worse shape, in comparison. Most don’t know a thing about nutrition, or exercise physiology, for starters. If they’re setting a broken bone, or putting in some stitches for a wound that needs that, fine. But as soon as they reach for the PDR, or mention statins or what have you, it’s over.
Your money is better spent on good quality clean food, water, and a handful of supplements.
It’s been a while since there has been either competence or integrity in medicine and medical doctor’s knowledge and for this reason all patients will suffer under a deteriorating quality of care.
“It is simply no longer possible to believe much of the clinical research that is published, or to rely on the judgment of trusted physicians or authoritative medical guidelines. I take no pleasure in this conclusion, which I reached slowly and reluctantly over my two decades as an editor of the New England Journal of Medicine.” - Marcia Angell
I think what's strange is not that doctors keep up with papers, but the assumption the public has that doctors know everything going on. No one really seems to read studies and yet most people assume that others are.
Journalists have to have read a study that they covered, even when the article they publish is also published on the exact same day that the study was published, right? The same goes for news outlets, doctors, scientists, whatever their title is most people don't bother reading anything.
The main problem we seem to be having these days is the duality of ignorance and arrogance. We have a ton of people who know very little but they sure as hell will act like they know it all!
The harsh reality is that most people are scientifically illiterate, can't pick apart, studies, and rely on heuristics and being told what to do and think rather than be provided the mechanisms to help them think for themselves.
This has been something that has bothered me a lot in recent months, and I'm not really sure what can be done about it.
I tell people that doctors are important to have around for stitches, setting breaks, and car accidents, but know nothing about nutrition or healing. They only know drugs to cover up symptoms, and cutting out or off troublesome parts of bodies. The ones who DO read journals are reading the title and the summary/conclusion. Opinion meant to spin the results.
I met a doctor that tried to tell me that eating a high amount of fruit and vegetables can be used to lower blood glucose levels.When I explained to her that high carbohydrate diets cannot do that with many patients she responded "I never used the word carbohydrate"....I then realised she did not know what a carbohydrate was...she then said "If you will not listen to me.."..I told her I was listening and she made no sense and left..
My wife is a medical doctor, family medicine, and I know this is true. Not to be a justifier, but in order for her to do a fairly good job with keeping up with her patients, she must spend at least 60 hours a week or more, 50 weeks per year, and in the 2 weeks she has "off", she is generally on the phone with patient issues for 10 to 20 hours per week. On top of that, her medical board here in Canada forces her to do lots of paperwork, 80% of which is totally unnecessary, which takes dozens of more hours every year. Then, on top of that, she has to fulfill the required Continuing Medical Education courses which take about 30 or 40 more hours. The Canadian government does not pay enough for her to hire additional office staff to do the busy work, and so reading research papers is not even a possibility. I'm not in favor of the government managing anything, but since that is the way it is here in Canada, if they want doctors to have time to truly keep on top of everything that is truly important, they need to get their priorities and listen to the doctors without the doctors being threatened against "rocking the boat". Additionally, a huge percentage of what the government now requires the doctors to spend time learning is the "woke" agenda doctrines instead of medical issues.
I know that in the USA, doctors are often treated in similar manners by their state medical boards and must comply with ludicrous requirements from insurance companies which care more about making money than they do helping people get well.
This has been obvious as parents confront their physicians about the childhood vaccination schedule in the United states. Doctors get defensive and angry, because they don't have the knowledge that parents who questioned the vaccine schedule based on scientific studies do.
Thank you for bringing up Eric Topol and "public intellectual" Sam Harris! I remember coming across a tweet from Topol during the pandemic where he linked to a table from this Nature article (https://www.nature.com/articles/nrd.2017.243#Sec10) trying to use the table as an argument that these mRNA-based vaccines are not experimental. I actually bothered to look at the Nature article and noticed this interesting part of the article:
"Several different mRNA vaccines have now been tested from phase I to IIb clinical studies and have been shown to be safe and reasonably well tolerated (Tables 2, 3). However, recent human trials have demonstrated moderate and in rare cases severe injection site or systemic reactions for different mRNA platforms22,91. Potential safety concerns that are likely to be evaluated in future preclinical and clinical studies include local and systemic inflammation, the biodistribution and persistence of expressed immunogen, stimulation of auto-reactive antibodies and potential toxic effects of any non-native nucleotides and delivery system components. A possible concern could be that some mRNA-based vaccine platforms54,166 induce potent type I interferon responses, which have been associated not only with inflammation but also potentially with autoimmunity167,168. Thus, identification of individuals at an increased risk of autoimmune reactions before mRNA vaccination may allow reasonable precautions to be taken. Another potential safety issue could derive from the presence of extracellular RNA during mRNA vaccination. Extracellular naked RNA has been shown to increase the permeability of tightly packed endothelial cells and may thus contribute to oedema169. Another study showed that extracellular RNA promoted blood coagulation and pathological thrombus formation170. Safety will therefore need continued evaluation as different mRNA modalities and delivery systems are utilized for the first time in humans and are tested in larger patient populations."
Thanks very much for this article. Medical doctors have huge workloads, including - as Mike wrote - numerous demands which are not directly paid for. They frequently have to make important decisions based on very limited and perhaps unreliable information, about the patient and whatever diagnostic category they are considering.
I think that many doctors are also exceedingly wary of nutritional supplements in general. A quick look at a physical store or online retailer of supplements reveals hundreds, probably into the thousands, of different supplements. I imagine that doctors frequently have to work with patients who tell them about supplement X, with an enthusiastic and necessarily brief description of their research (such as it is, more likely to be based on YouTube or some dodgy web site than an article in a journal indexed in PubMed https://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pmc/journals/). Not wanting to get into an argument about the supplement, they try to help the patient with the techniques they are familiar with - typically profitable or well-known drugs, vaccines or (mRNA / adenovirus vector) quasi-vaccines.
The patient - who may or may not be well informed - consequently feels disrespected and that their doctor is beholden to mainstream medical profession groupthink. With rare exceptions, I think this is a valid assessment.
I think medical doctors are the most insecure of all professionals. Their profession is much more than a career and an income. They join and cannot leave an important, long-established and (at least until recently) widely respected caste of society. They cannot just leave Medicine and work in a hardware store, or become a stockbroker - everyone would want to know what terrible things they did in order to be expelled from their profession.
If a doctor even briefly mentions something which is beyond the pale for the majority of his or her colleagues, he or she will forever be thought of as a (sound made by ducks). This is especially so if he or she treats patients in ways which fly in the face of professional guidelines and usual practice. Then, they will no longer be respected, included socially or have patients referred to them. They may lose their job and/or be disbarred from working by the medical board which certifies them.
So doctors are subject to a particularly oppressive, lifelong, regime of groupthink. Not only their income, but their career, lifelong calling and their social standing are threatened if they step out of line. Please see the 2017 "Perfect Garden" illustration by Pawel Kuczynski: https://www.pictorem.com/106761/perfect%20garden.html .
I suspect many live in fear that they will come to believe something which, if expressed in public or to other doctors, would threaten their entire career.
So reading journal articles carefully is not going to be a high priority. Most doctors would rather focus what limited time they have on their families.
Also, in many fields, a lot of the research articles are of low quality. There are numerous research articles on vitamin D, but many are just rehashes of mistaken beliefs, such as "vitamin D is a hormone", or that "vitamin D regulates the immune system". How to choose which journal articles to spend an hour or two reading, including following some of the references?
Here is my mini-pep-talk on vitamin D.
The most important nutritional deficiency is vitamin D3, which can't be fixed with food, since no food - fortified or not - has more than a trace of it. UV-B light on ideally white skin can create plenty of it, but this is not generally available all year round to people who live far from the equator. UV-B damages DNA, so raising the risk of skin cancer.
Please see the research articles on 25-hydroxyvitamin D (made in the liver from vitamin D3) and the immune system, cited and discussed at: https://vitamindstopscovid.info/00-evi/. The immune system can only function properly with 50 ng/mL (125 nmol/L = 1 part in 20,000,000 by mass) circulating 25-hydroxyvitamin D. Without proper vitamin D supplementation or recent extensive UV-B exposure on ideally white skin, most people have half or less than this. Those with brown or black skin who live far from the equator and who do not properly supplement vitamin D3 typically have even lower levels all year round.
The above page begins with recommendations from New Jersey based Professor of Medicine Sunil Wimalawansa on how much vitamin D3 to take, as ratios of body weight, with higher ratios for those suffering from obesity. These are Prof. Wimalawansa's recently slightly simplified version of the recommendations in his 2022 article in Nutrients: https://www.mdpi.com/2072-6643/14/14/2997. This will attain at least the 50 ng/mL 125 nmol/L level of circulating 25-hydroxyvitamin D the immune system needs to function properly. This is higher than can be attained with the very small government-approved supplemental intake quantities of vitamin D3, which at best can attain about the 20 ng/mL 50 nmol/L level which the kidneys need to regulate calcium-phosphate-bone metabolism.
This failure of the Th1 cell's intracrine signaling system was due primarily or wholly to inadequate supplies of 25-hydroxyvitamin D based.
Most doctors and immunologists have never heard of this intracrine signaling system, which is entirely within a single cell. Many immune cell types rely on this for their ability to respond to their changing circumstances. This has never been explained in a tutorial fashion in a peer-reviewed journal article. Please see the explanation at: https://vitamindstopscovid.info/00-evi/#02-compounds .
I learned this lesson the hard way, but it saved my life...Bottom line is that doctors are mechanics, not scientists, but there is a great deal of information on the internet that will help you make the right choices...As someone with a science background, I find the ignorance of doctors on some very important matters, like vaccines, horrifying...
I can't believe all the vaccines drs are putting into young children. I would be afraid to have a child nowadays. It is not clear that vaccines do what they claim. How are they made? How are they stored? As soon as the covd hoax started, I said "oh that's to get rid of Trump." I was attacked by now former friends that I would cause people to die. Unbelievable. People have no critical thinking skills.
a profession bought out by for profit health ppp corporations, medical examiner boards and bigpHarma give no time for doctors to read anything but the most basic elements of the charts as they herd people through the chutes for slaughter.
and now the idea of HIPPA, such a huge deal in the industry two decades ago is being sold to any buyer on the market for our biometrics🤬
Recent discussion with my new oncologist: what do you think about the idea of using repurposed drugs to treat my cancer? After all there are numerous studies and trials going on using ivermectin with success and it’s non toxic. . Her answer: What’s ivermectin?
I think we need to become more responsible for our own health and not take a tablet at the first sign of a symptom. In order to understand completely what is going on you need to identify the underlying problem and what is causing it in the first place. As you say taking a medicine to reduce your symptom can mask what is going on in your body and may cause a more serious condition further down the road. I now realise taking a medicine to reduce physical or emotional problems is not the answer, we know our bodies best and should try and work to reverse the cause of the problem if possible before resorting to pharmaceuticals. It takes time, work and a lot of reading but it is the much safer option.
Frankly, I almost never go to see a doctor. But if I do, my preference is that they be close to my age. Then I can evaluate how they care for themselves. Are they overweight, fit, healthier than me? What do they do to care for themselves? 99% of the time, they are in *much* worse shape, in comparison. Most don’t know a thing about nutrition, or exercise physiology, for starters. If they’re setting a broken bone, or putting in some stitches for a wound that needs that, fine. But as soon as they reach for the PDR, or mention statins or what have you, it’s over.
Your money is better spent on good quality clean food, water, and a handful of supplements.
Take care of yourself. Heal thyself.
It’s been a while since there has been either competence or integrity in medicine and medical doctor’s knowledge and for this reason all patients will suffer under a deteriorating quality of care.
“It is simply no longer possible to believe much of the clinical research that is published, or to rely on the judgment of trusted physicians or authoritative medical guidelines. I take no pleasure in this conclusion, which I reached slowly and reluctantly over my two decades as an editor of the New England Journal of Medicine.” - Marcia Angell
I think what's strange is not that doctors keep up with papers, but the assumption the public has that doctors know everything going on. No one really seems to read studies and yet most people assume that others are.
Journalists have to have read a study that they covered, even when the article they publish is also published on the exact same day that the study was published, right? The same goes for news outlets, doctors, scientists, whatever their title is most people don't bother reading anything.
The main problem we seem to be having these days is the duality of ignorance and arrogance. We have a ton of people who know very little but they sure as hell will act like they know it all!
The harsh reality is that most people are scientifically illiterate, can't pick apart, studies, and rely on heuristics and being told what to do and think rather than be provided the mechanisms to help them think for themselves.
This has been something that has bothered me a lot in recent months, and I'm not really sure what can be done about it.
Thank you. The honesty is refreshing.
I tell people that doctors are important to have around for stitches, setting breaks, and car accidents, but know nothing about nutrition or healing. They only know drugs to cover up symptoms, and cutting out or off troublesome parts of bodies. The ones who DO read journals are reading the title and the summary/conclusion. Opinion meant to spin the results.
They can do better
I met a doctor that tried to tell me that eating a high amount of fruit and vegetables can be used to lower blood glucose levels.When I explained to her that high carbohydrate diets cannot do that with many patients she responded "I never used the word carbohydrate"....I then realised she did not know what a carbohydrate was...she then said "If you will not listen to me.."..I told her I was listening and she made no sense and left..
My wife is a medical doctor, family medicine, and I know this is true. Not to be a justifier, but in order for her to do a fairly good job with keeping up with her patients, she must spend at least 60 hours a week or more, 50 weeks per year, and in the 2 weeks she has "off", she is generally on the phone with patient issues for 10 to 20 hours per week. On top of that, her medical board here in Canada forces her to do lots of paperwork, 80% of which is totally unnecessary, which takes dozens of more hours every year. Then, on top of that, she has to fulfill the required Continuing Medical Education courses which take about 30 or 40 more hours. The Canadian government does not pay enough for her to hire additional office staff to do the busy work, and so reading research papers is not even a possibility. I'm not in favor of the government managing anything, but since that is the way it is here in Canada, if they want doctors to have time to truly keep on top of everything that is truly important, they need to get their priorities and listen to the doctors without the doctors being threatened against "rocking the boat". Additionally, a huge percentage of what the government now requires the doctors to spend time learning is the "woke" agenda doctrines instead of medical issues.
I know that in the USA, doctors are often treated in similar manners by their state medical boards and must comply with ludicrous requirements from insurance companies which care more about making money than they do helping people get well.
Dietitians aren't any better than doctors. Possibly worse. https://hardingapril.wordpress.com/2018/01/01/updating-practitioners-as-knowledge-changes-the-discouraging-case-of-dietitians/
Thank you Joomi!
This has been obvious as parents confront their physicians about the childhood vaccination schedule in the United states. Doctors get defensive and angry, because they don't have the knowledge that parents who questioned the vaccine schedule based on scientific studies do.
Thank you for bringing up Eric Topol and "public intellectual" Sam Harris! I remember coming across a tweet from Topol during the pandemic where he linked to a table from this Nature article (https://www.nature.com/articles/nrd.2017.243#Sec10) trying to use the table as an argument that these mRNA-based vaccines are not experimental. I actually bothered to look at the Nature article and noticed this interesting part of the article:
"Several different mRNA vaccines have now been tested from phase I to IIb clinical studies and have been shown to be safe and reasonably well tolerated (Tables 2, 3). However, recent human trials have demonstrated moderate and in rare cases severe injection site or systemic reactions for different mRNA platforms22,91. Potential safety concerns that are likely to be evaluated in future preclinical and clinical studies include local and systemic inflammation, the biodistribution and persistence of expressed immunogen, stimulation of auto-reactive antibodies and potential toxic effects of any non-native nucleotides and delivery system components. A possible concern could be that some mRNA-based vaccine platforms54,166 induce potent type I interferon responses, which have been associated not only with inflammation but also potentially with autoimmunity167,168. Thus, identification of individuals at an increased risk of autoimmune reactions before mRNA vaccination may allow reasonable precautions to be taken. Another potential safety issue could derive from the presence of extracellular RNA during mRNA vaccination. Extracellular naked RNA has been shown to increase the permeability of tightly packed endothelial cells and may thus contribute to oedema169. Another study showed that extracellular RNA promoted blood coagulation and pathological thrombus formation170. Safety will therefore need continued evaluation as different mRNA modalities and delivery systems are utilized for the first time in humans and are tested in larger patient populations."
Thanks very much for this article. Medical doctors have huge workloads, including - as Mike wrote - numerous demands which are not directly paid for. They frequently have to make important decisions based on very limited and perhaps unreliable information, about the patient and whatever diagnostic category they are considering.
I think that many doctors are also exceedingly wary of nutritional supplements in general. A quick look at a physical store or online retailer of supplements reveals hundreds, probably into the thousands, of different supplements. I imagine that doctors frequently have to work with patients who tell them about supplement X, with an enthusiastic and necessarily brief description of their research (such as it is, more likely to be based on YouTube or some dodgy web site than an article in a journal indexed in PubMed https://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pmc/journals/). Not wanting to get into an argument about the supplement, they try to help the patient with the techniques they are familiar with - typically profitable or well-known drugs, vaccines or (mRNA / adenovirus vector) quasi-vaccines.
The patient - who may or may not be well informed - consequently feels disrespected and that their doctor is beholden to mainstream medical profession groupthink. With rare exceptions, I think this is a valid assessment.
I think medical doctors are the most insecure of all professionals. Their profession is much more than a career and an income. They join and cannot leave an important, long-established and (at least until recently) widely respected caste of society. They cannot just leave Medicine and work in a hardware store, or become a stockbroker - everyone would want to know what terrible things they did in order to be expelled from their profession.
If a doctor even briefly mentions something which is beyond the pale for the majority of his or her colleagues, he or she will forever be thought of as a (sound made by ducks). This is especially so if he or she treats patients in ways which fly in the face of professional guidelines and usual practice. Then, they will no longer be respected, included socially or have patients referred to them. They may lose their job and/or be disbarred from working by the medical board which certifies them.
So doctors are subject to a particularly oppressive, lifelong, regime of groupthink. Not only their income, but their career, lifelong calling and their social standing are threatened if they step out of line. Please see the 2017 "Perfect Garden" illustration by Pawel Kuczynski: https://www.pictorem.com/106761/perfect%20garden.html .
I suspect many live in fear that they will come to believe something which, if expressed in public or to other doctors, would threaten their entire career.
So reading journal articles carefully is not going to be a high priority. Most doctors would rather focus what limited time they have on their families.
Also, in many fields, a lot of the research articles are of low quality. There are numerous research articles on vitamin D, but many are just rehashes of mistaken beliefs, such as "vitamin D is a hormone", or that "vitamin D regulates the immune system". How to choose which journal articles to spend an hour or two reading, including following some of the references?
Here is my mini-pep-talk on vitamin D.
The most important nutritional deficiency is vitamin D3, which can't be fixed with food, since no food - fortified or not - has more than a trace of it. UV-B light on ideally white skin can create plenty of it, but this is not generally available all year round to people who live far from the equator. UV-B damages DNA, so raising the risk of skin cancer.
Please see the research articles on 25-hydroxyvitamin D (made in the liver from vitamin D3) and the immune system, cited and discussed at: https://vitamindstopscovid.info/00-evi/. The immune system can only function properly with 50 ng/mL (125 nmol/L = 1 part in 20,000,000 by mass) circulating 25-hydroxyvitamin D. Without proper vitamin D supplementation or recent extensive UV-B exposure on ideally white skin, most people have half or less than this. Those with brown or black skin who live far from the equator and who do not properly supplement vitamin D3 typically have even lower levels all year round.
The above page begins with recommendations from New Jersey based Professor of Medicine Sunil Wimalawansa on how much vitamin D3 to take, as ratios of body weight, with higher ratios for those suffering from obesity. These are Prof. Wimalawansa's recently slightly simplified version of the recommendations in his 2022 article in Nutrients: https://www.mdpi.com/2072-6643/14/14/2997. This will attain at least the 50 ng/mL 125 nmol/L level of circulating 25-hydroxyvitamin D the immune system needs to function properly. This is higher than can be attained with the very small government-approved supplemental intake quantities of vitamin D3, which at best can attain about the 20 ng/mL 50 nmol/L level which the kidneys need to regulate calcium-phosphate-bone metabolism.
See also See et al. 2021 https://www.nature.com/articles/s41590-021-01080-3 , summarised at https://vitamindstopscovid.info/00-evi/#chauss regarding Th1 regulatory lymphocytes from the lungs of hospitalised COVID-19 patients failing to transition from their pro-inflammatory start-up program to their anti-inflammatory shutdown program, despite detecting the condition to do so.
This failure of the Th1 cell's intracrine signaling system was due primarily or wholly to inadequate supplies of 25-hydroxyvitamin D based.
Most doctors and immunologists have never heard of this intracrine signaling system, which is entirely within a single cell. Many immune cell types rely on this for their ability to respond to their changing circumstances. This has never been explained in a tutorial fashion in a peer-reviewed journal article. Please see the explanation at: https://vitamindstopscovid.info/00-evi/#02-compounds .
I learned this lesson the hard way, but it saved my life...Bottom line is that doctors are mechanics, not scientists, but there is a great deal of information on the internet that will help you make the right choices...As someone with a science background, I find the ignorance of doctors on some very important matters, like vaccines, horrifying...
I can't believe all the vaccines drs are putting into young children. I would be afraid to have a child nowadays. It is not clear that vaccines do what they claim. How are they made? How are they stored? As soon as the covd hoax started, I said "oh that's to get rid of Trump." I was attacked by now former friends that I would cause people to die. Unbelievable. People have no critical thinking skills.
a profession bought out by for profit health ppp corporations, medical examiner boards and bigpHarma give no time for doctors to read anything but the most basic elements of the charts as they herd people through the chutes for slaughter.
and now the idea of HIPPA, such a huge deal in the industry two decades ago is being sold to any buyer on the market for our biometrics🤬