What Ever Became of “Precision Medicine”?
A Casualty of the Great COVID Disaster
Bill (not his real name) was a few years ahead of me in high school. He was a likable guy and was gifted both academically and athletically. Our paths didn’t cross much because of our age differences, but we reconnected years later. We were in the same profession of reconstructive surgery, and we collaborated on several cases where our complementary skill sets were useful in tackling some challenging cases.
Bill continued to be physically active and exercised regularly. He felt terrific, but on a routine physical, his cholesterol was a bit elevated, so his physician started him on a statin. This was back in the days when virtually nobody knew about the importance of CoQ 10 and how statins depleted the body of this coenzyme vital for muscle metabolism…especially cardiac muscle metabolism.
Like many people, Bill had some muscle pain after starting the drug but was told by his physician not to worry, as this was normal at first. So, he trusted his doc and went about his normal routine. He also took a trip to Colorado, and at altitude he suffered a massive heart attack. He survived, but it was career-ending for him.
You see, unbeknownst to anybody, Bill had a rather rare mitochondrial dystrophy. The mitochondria are the little engines in our cells where metabolism actually takes place. This is where CoQ 10 is so important. It was known in 1990 that statins decreased levels of CoQ 10, and concern was voiced regarding possible cardiac complications:
https://pubmed.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/2247468/
A 2003 letter in The Lancet reported that “an alarmist letter” from the International Coenzyme Q10 Association had been sent to various regulatory agencies warning of possible problems with statins, but this was dismissed by the authors because of the very rare risk (in their opinion) of problems:
https://www.thelancet.com/journals/lancet/article/PIIS0140-6736(03)12877-2/fulltext
I have attempted, without success, to find this “alarmist” letter. An excerpt, however, can be read here:
https://www.afibbers.org/forum/read.php?9,76054,76068#msg-76068
In that same forum post is another post on the same topic mentioning that “Dr. Graveline” had reported that a combination of statin and CoQ10, had actually been patented but never brought to market because of possible negative connotations for statins.
And that could be very important for the Pharmaceutical Industry. Annually statins were a billion-dollar industry for them:
https://www.statins.news/2019-04-08-statins-a-billion-dollar-industry-costing-millions-of-lives.html
A search for Dr. Graveline’s report was also unproductive. However, these patent applications:
https://patents.google.com/patent/US5316765A/en
are MOST interesting. These are patents for just such a combination, issued to the Karl Folkers Foundation for Biomedical and Clinical Research. From the US 5316765A patent application:
As noted, the present invention comprises the heretofore overlooked and very serious side effect of lovastatin and other HMG-CoA reductase inhibitors for depressing body levels of coenzyme Q10. Lowered coenzyme Q10 levels have been found by the present inventors to result in a corresponding depression of cardiac function, or the pumping of blood by the heart throughout the body. Circumvention of this death-threatening side effect was found by the present inventors to exist in the clinical administration of a formulation of coenzyme Q10 either (1) concomitantly with an HMG-CoA reductase inhibitor, such as melvinolin (i.e., lovastatin) or (2) by independent formulations of an HMG-CoA reductase inhibitor and coenzyme Q10 by an appropriate dosage schedule for the selected HMG-CoA reductase inhibitor and coenzyme Q10 (CoQ10).
In 2006, researchers at the State University of New York at Buffalo reported on potential damage from statins in patients with underlying metabolic muscle disease, and that these genetic mutations were probably higher than recognized:
https://pubmed.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/16671104/
The use of CoQ 10 to forestall the complications of statins is controversial. Studies on both sides of the issue can be found. Many of them are related to the specific formulation of the CoQ 10 supplements used.
But that is incidental for the purposes of this discussion. It is unclear if Bill’s pre-existing mitochondrial dystrophy could have reasonably been found ahead of time. The disease is so rare that testing every patient prior to the use of statins is unreasonable. However, should his muscle pains have been investigated in more depth? Possibly. Should statins even be prescribed for asymptomatic patients with minimal elevations of cholesterol? I don’t know. Should they even be prescribed for ANYONE?? I don’t know. But I DO know that if Bill had not taken the statins, he still would most likely be clinically active today. He was one of the “rare unfortunates” and just collateral damage to so many of my colleagues in today’s medicine.
But it wasn’t always like that. Indeed, before the Great COVID Disaster, there was a whole movement to introduce “Personalized” or “Precision” Medicine”. It recognized that “one size does not fit all” in medicine. There was indeed an optimum for each individual, and this movement attempted to find that.
https://pubmed.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/22536618/
https://hdsr.mitpress.mit.edu/pub/y7r65r4k/release/4
https://www.news-medical.net/life-sciences/The-Past-Present-and-Future-of-Precision-Medicine.aspx
https://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pmc/articles/PMC5989714/
This was in the days before the madness that infected medicine with the onset of COVID 19. Patients were stratified by individual risk/benefit analysis. Pharmacogenetic testing could identify which patients needed more or less than a given drug, or even if it was not expected to be helpful. Examine this 2016 quote from Issam Zineh, Director of CDER’s (Center for Drug Evaluation and Research) Office of Clinical Pharmacology:
To understand the promise of pharmacogenomics, let’s look at the way we currently treat patients. If you see your doctor for high blood pressure for example, he or she is going to give you any of a number of blood pressure medications, based on very little information about what's going to work for you. In fact, there may not be any rationale for why you're getting that particular medication other than that your insurance covers it or the doctor has samples available. If the medication doesn't work in four to six weeks, you may be switched to another medicine, or get another medication added on top of the first.
We’ve learned that this trial-and-error approach leads to patient dissatisfaction, poor clinical outcomes, and greater expense, especially for chronic diseases. But in many situations this empirical approach is the best approach we have. Personalized medicine aims to streamline clinical decision making by using biological information available through a genetic test or biomarker, and then saying, "based on this profile, I think you're more likely to respond to Drug A or Drug B, or less likely to have an adverse reaction with Drug C.” The idea is to get patients on the right medication and to get them on it sooner.
Makes a lot of sense, doesn’t it? This sounds like real “Science” not what was forced on everyone the past few years. Well, it made a lot of sense to medicine back then, including academic medicine. Numerous academic institutions jumped on this idea:
https://precisionmedicine.bwh.harvard.edu/
https://www.mayo.edu/research/centers-programs/center-individualized-medicine
So, why wasn’t “Precision Medicine” used when we really needed it? Why did the Public Health agencies demand that the only rule for dealing with COVID was: 1) social distance; 2) wear a mask; 3) sicken at home and only go to the hospital when you couldn’t breathe, where you would be given Remdesivir and placed on a ventilator?
Why was every attempt at doing exactly what the above 2016 concept from Issam Zineh at the FDA not only ignored, but vilified and physicians who attempted to follow true “precision medicine” and save lives pounded with the “one size fits all” idiocy that precision medicine initially tried to stop? Why did the entire healthcare industry attempt to stop rational care, which perfectly fit the goal of precision medicine?
https://pubmed.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/33387997/
Why do our Public Health and academic elite still insist that they did the right thing? That is an unanswered question. And we must persist in asking it until we get an answer.
Now there seems to be an attempt to dress precision medicine in the wraps of DEI:
https://hms.harvard.edu/news/precision-driven-health-equity
But that seems hollow, at least to me. It denies the existence of individual physiologic variables but affirms individual sociologic variables. Somehow the critical thinkers must point out this hypocrisy if we are ever to move forward. If this new “reimagined” definition of Precision Medicine were to be adopted, people like my colleague Bill would still be victimized by our continued ignorance. This limitation of precision medicine to sociology just celebrates that ignorance. That is not science….
If the Great COVID Disaster didn’t kill Precision Medicine, it appears DEI will.
Precision medicine has not been practiced in this country for more than a century. The Rockefellers gained control over allopathic medicine early on and have shaped the trajectory of it ever since. The book, Murder by injection is a clear blueprint of this fraud against humanity. They control all the levers of medicine to include the Universities, labs, et al. Is it any wonder that we are the most injected people on the planet with the worst health outcomes. How is it that we rank well below some developing countries while being jabbed against every possible pathogen imaginable. Many of these illnesses are not fatal and in fact increase our natural immunity to others and yet they have been added to the childhood vaccine mandates. The harm they have caused is beyond measure and yet they continue to add more. One thing that I find bizarre is the phony field of virology as no virus has ever been proven to exist. This is not conjecture it is fact. Not isolated or mapped out genetically, no electron microscopic photo of a virus has ever been viewed, ever! So, do not be surprised that a fraud like covid or any of the other lab created pathogens have been released and called a virus. Even polio is not a virus! See the pattern here! Medicine has grown into the Tierney that Dr. Benjamin Rush warned about 200 years ago. No science is being practiced by the scientific method, and yet it is called science. If you look at the evidence, it is plainly science fiction, not science. This is a long-awaited elite eugenics dream come true. Culling the useless eater from the planet, and what better way than with fear of a deadly virus that is going to kill you if you do not get the jab. All these scenarios have been rehearsed before being implemented. If you have not seen event 201 then you missed the tell. They are working on the next fake pandemic as we speak. It is the plan for a one world government, one currency, worldwide governance or worldwide socialism. The WEF and their minions say it openly and yet no one bothers to listen. Claus Schaub, Noah Hariri state exactly what is going to happen, you will own nothing and be happy, you will cease to be human, and you will be monitored 24-7 without privacy. Translation= a slave. This is the method they are using to gain control and the jabs will either kill you or sterilize you. This is happening now as fertility and sperm counts are down drastically in the human population, miscarriages galore like never before. We can talk about this ad infinitum except we do not have this much time before we are caged. If people do not wake up and red pill they will remain in the matrix. A lifetime of brainwashing has left this society helpless to critical thought, and all they prayer in the world will not magically change anything, action and knowledge are what is needed now. I asked a doctor to show me proof of a virus. He said it is in the medical journals. No, it is not. Just like the PCR test is not a test to detect anything that is active in your body so not a diagnostic test at all and yet this is what passes as science. The common cold is a form of covid, not a virus but a pathogen of some sort, no virus has ever been seen, ever in history and yet they say they do and built an entire so-called discipline called virology around a lie that is virology. To all you flat earthers and moon made of cheese believers, you need to question everything, this is what real science does. It never settles for a priori truth ever. The verry nature of science calls, demands that someone question the so-called proof. Steven Hawking disproved his own finding with the Hawking paradox, he was not going to settle for his postulate. He could have but he practiced real science by questioning his own findings. Question everything all the time, and stop listening to the experts and fear mongering monsters who are lying to us all.
Great piece Russ!