“In a World Far Away and a Long Time Ago”
It was here, 2017….
Something strange happened a few years ago, and it has made a big difference to every one of us. As momentous as it was, it was all but unnoticed by most of us. Perhaps some predicted it…. But we all felt it. And it has intensified.
It was not that there were no warnings. There were, but they were dismissed as either wrong or not important. We were too busy doing other things. But that didn’t change reality. While many “on the fringes of medicine” had warned of a looming disaster, they were dismissed as crackpots or quacks. We missed the fact that the skeptics were actually a major part of the problem.
Let me explain with a reference to two articles that appeared in respected medical journals. The first one was “Evidence based medicine manifesto for better healthcare: A response to systematic bias, wastage, error and fraud in research underpinning patient care” by Carl Heneghan, Kamal R. Mahtani, Ben Goldacre, Fiona Godlee, Helen Macdonald and Duncan Jarvis and appeared as an editorial in the publication, BMJ-Evidence Based Medicine in 2017:
https://ebm.bmj.com/content/22/4/120.long
The authors were affiliated with the University of Oxford’s Centre for Evidence Based Medicine and the British Medical Journal and their manifesto was truly remarkable for a number of reasons. It is a savage indictment of medical research and publishing stating, and referencing supporting studies to show:
· Significant systematic bias, error and waste
· Most published researching is misleading to at least some degree
· Poorly managed commercial and academic vested interests
· Failure to take into account the patient perspective in research questions and outcomes
· Poorly designed trials with lack of transparency and independent scrutiny
· Failure to follow the research protocol and/or stop early
· Ghost authorship
· Publication and reporting biases
· Overinterpreted or misused results
· Uncorrected errors and even fraud
· Conflicts of interest of authors and sponsoring organizations
Three years later, a disturbing article that appeared in The American Journal of Medicine by Gyorgy Baffy and associates from Boston warned that titanic changes in the world of medical publishing had occurred:
https://www.sciencedirect.com/science/article/abs/pii/S0002934319306606
Scientific and medical publishing has a unique business model and multiple stakeholders with conflicting interests. The massive increase in publication and the digital revolution have revolutionized the undertaking. This is a business, not just an academic undertaking. The conflict between profit and truth may make publishing a very tangled and complex proposition. Baffy and associates closed their article with the following warning:
Start-up information companies continue to offer new ways to manage rapidly growing databases of scientific information, while technology mergers and acquisitions abound. Because the use of complex digital tools and rapidly growing electronic databases require advanced computing skills, Internet-based mega-companies such as Google (Mountainview, Calif), Amazon (Seattle, Wash), Facebook (Menlo Park, Calif), and Apple (Cupertino, Calif) may become interested in spearheading further transformation and outcompete current stakeholders in scholarly communication and develop more user-friendly tools. Such developments could potentially lead to a few large entities controlling the gateways to scientific knowledge, a sobering thought (emphasis added).
Unfortunately, that “sobering thought” has become undisputed reality. Those organizations actively participated in limiting medical information to the public during the recent Great COVID Disaster:
This post by the FDA on Twitter, now X, seems to be unambiguous:
https://twitter.com/US_FDA/status/1429050070243192839
A few days ago, the FDA amazingly admitted in court that physicians had the right to prescribe Ivermectin for patients suffering from COVID and they never forbade its use. The strong statement “Stop it!” was only a “recommendation”.
https://covid19.onedaymd.com/2023/08/doctors-can-prescribe-ivermectin-for.html
Left-leaning organizations attempted a massive spin cycle to control the damage:
If you fell for “It all depends on the meaning of the word ‘is’”, you will fall for this one too…
Yes, there was a time when the stakeholders in health and healthcare were the patient and the caregiver. Unfortunately, that time is now only the field of historians. It may have been mostly true ten years ago….maybe even five years ago, though that is even in doubt. The important thing is that IT IS NOT TRUE NOW! As a physician who earned his MD in 1975, it gives me no pleasure to say that…
I am sure we physicians bear some, if not the majority, of the blame for that happening. We were too busy taking care of patients to actually ADVOCATE FOR THEM. It was too much of a bother to fight those other stakeholders who gradually took control of healthcare as a means to an economic, political and ideological end.
Now it is too late for us. As Pogo once famously said:
“We have met the enemy and he is us.”
https://library.osu.edu/site/40stories/2020/01/05/we-have-met-the-enemy/
It is hard for me to reconcile the collective actions of academic medicine and the major medical professional organizations on so many of the critical health and healthcare issues facing the public today. We are on the wrong side of just about every issue. If medicine expects people to trust them again, the solution is deceptively simple:
Stop telling lies and start telling the truth. Put the patient first and the “herd, Big Pharma, Big Tech and Big Politics last. Follow the ideals contained in the Hippocratic Oath. We are not entitled to respect….we must earn it.
Unfortunately, the force to accomplish this must come from outside of medicine as I do not believe we as a profession have the capacity for critical thinking, the courage, the integrity, the ethics or the moral reasoning ability that will be required.
Certainly, some individual physicians DO have those qualities. They are the ones being vilified by Big Pharma, Big Tech and Big Politics for their very noticeable stand for patients during the Great COVID Disaster. I am privileged and honored to know some of them. They are the heroes who will, someday, be recognized for their actions.
If you know any of them, thank them, as they are fighting for you.
Be warned big pharma is buying up natural therapy companies/ manufacturers. The I- herb brand has dozens of companies under their umbrella. The majority is f Vitamin C on the market is made in China from GMO corn. I also came at a post the other day where a guy claims he has found the vaccine technology in his Ivermectin. Dr Ana Mihlacea on Substack has also found the technology in n insulin, dental anaesthetics and Dexamethazone. For those who are not aware allopathic medicine is becoming a war zone.
We have been forewarned. Not just in the medical profession, but with just about everything. The warnings, admonitions have been out there. For instance, take President Eisenhower's speech warning of the Military-Industrial-[Medical] Complex of 1962 (?). Take the "predictions" of a ('Corona virus') "pandemic". For at least 60+ years, the warnings, predictions, hints have been out there. We have been too busy to see them or too content to heed them. Shame on us. Now we need to resist and take action. Just hope that enough people will awaken and join us in time-- before everything collapses.