There is a clear and present danger that threatens the many benefits scientific medicine brings to the American people. The link goes to an article in the New England Journal of Medicine this week that says American politicians are substituting their opinion and politics for the judgement of state medical boards that set the standards for scientific medical practice. I have quoted extensively from the article because it is so well written and this journal is one of the most reliable. “In response to the Covid-19 pandemic, however, state lawmakers have embraced measures that could seriously undermine boards’ ability to carry out these functions.
Apr 10, 2023·edited Apr 11, 2023Liked by William H Bestermann Jr MD
The real problem is the abuse of trust by the people who are in the position of power to do their job base on scientific evidence and merit. They are not, and have NOT been. These people, like Anthony Fauci, have abused their authority to profit from their obedient constituents, make harmful sometime deadly decisions which hurt the ordinary citizens. This has been ongoing for more than five decades. People have had enough. A fundamental reform, and transformation of a new system that is just, truly evidence and merit based, honest, and fair is urgently needed.
Admiral William McReaven has just written a book on leadership that I am reading-- The Wisdom of the Bullfrog. He says "There are two components to trust: character and competence. You may initially trust someone if you know them to be a man or woman of sound character. But if the fail to deliver on their promises, if they are shown to be incompetent in handling the affairs of the business, then after a while you lose trust in them." Great leaders like the admiral are servant leaders. He talks about the code at the service academies. "A cadet does not lie, cheat, or steal, or tolerate anyone who does." Of course, we all fall short of the mark but that is the standard that creates great leaders in our armed forces. The effectiveness of our healthcare depends on facts, science, data, evidence, integrity, and competent leaders. We will not be trusted until we deserve it.
The academic "echo chambers" must perpetuate falsehood and lies and promote these as "science" to sound credible and authoritative. The enforcement arm of this monopoly is the state-level medical society boards; they, too, are part of the same echo chamber to promote ineffective and baseless drugs and procedures, neglecting their harmful effects. Americans pay 4 trillion plus dollars, the highest in the world, for their "healthcare" to the American Legacy Medical racket monopoly. What do we get? 99% of the devices have no safety and effectiveness evidence, and 93% of prescription drugs fall into the same harmful and indefensible position. Adding insults to the injuries, American Allopathic Medicine is ranked the third killer of Americans following heart disease and cancer. Continued ruthless efforts to sustain the unsustainable is that insanity has kept the broken system together.
Why does Truth need a Gatekeeper? Or do we believe that laypersons are not responsible for themselves?
Personally I trust myself more than any FDA or State level pol to make my health decisions. When I want medical advice, I hire my trusted medical provider and purchase their medical expertise. Isn't this really how most want the medical system to work...without all the middlemen?
Thanks Bill. I do believe that a trusting relationship between your provider and you must be the foundation of all medical care. Providers don't have the time or resources to generate studies of treatments tha=t work and treatments that don't work. They depend on others to generate that evidence. Take the example of heart artery disease. Our entire system still functions as if opening arteries will prevent heart attacks and death but there is a mountain of scientific evidence that proveds that is not the case. There is another mountain of evidence that proves best practice medical treatment will reduce mortality after a heart attack ten-fold compared with the care that most people receive. Most Americans don't have access to best practice medical treatment. Many people in this country with stable heart artery disease see their provider who recommends a stent. You should be able to get advice from your provider based on the best science. In many places in America that is not happening.
Hi, Bill. I guess my response to yours is that we may not have a choice about country versus county (state). The trend I’m describing is already well underway, I think. Regressive states will shape their cultures in opposition to progressive states, and people will move where they feel safe and able to prosper. I would hope that federalism would not die completely, so that, for example, the FDA would have jurisdiction and say in all the states with respect to drug safety. And yet, perhaps not even this will endure the separatism I am foreseeing. In Texas, certain drugs will be ruled “unsafe,” and in others, like Maine, they will be ruled “safe.”
Thanks David. I think we ignore the distrust of Americans regarding our health system at our own peril. They are right not to trust it. It does not serve them. Care is not patient-centered. Science and scientific evidence is very complicated. The people who are lashing out don't understand the problem. It took me a long time to realize how serious the problem is. The only answer I can come up with is to make our institutions more trustworthy. I am working to do my bit to make medicine more trustworthy. I have no conflicts of interest and I am doing my best to help laymen understand the science and the issues. That is my pledge to my readers.
The union has made us strong and I hope you are wrong but I am terribly afraid that you are right. If we follow that path it will make our country much weaker.
I agree. The system is broken and in much need of repair. This pandemic brought this to light in many ways. In our state, we had DOH run amuck and off the rails going after doctors and nurse practitioners for their off label use of Ivermectin. They backed off me personally when I pointed out it was one of the guidelines in the NIH that was published in July of 2021 and updated again in September of 2021. I was one of the few researching and investigating multiple modalities since I knew the absolute risk reduction of the mRNAs was 1.2% based on the Brown paper published in January 2021. If we can not trust the NIH and other governing boards, then who can we trust. I suspect most physicians were practicing according to what their administrators wanted and requested and very few, if any, were even aware of these NIH guidelines.
In my opinion, these guidelines should have been made known and available to ALL practicing physicians especially in light of the fact we were dealing with a “novel” virus and multiple modalities were needed and should have been encouraged. I suspect 90% of your readers were not even made aware of these NIH guidelines. I would love to know as we lost none of the 3000+ we treated with the various NIH guideline protocols. Guidelines are there for a purpose, but it still takes a critical mind to make the ultimate and best decision for the sake and well being of our patients.
I have followed COVID and focused my attention on the most reliable scientific data from the Journal of the American Medical Association and the New England Journal of Medicine.
There is no scientific evidence of ivermectin efficacy and patients should not waste their time and money on in. The controlled clinical trials have been done. We should only use multiple modalities that are proven to work.
Patients who received a booster after their second shot were one tenth as likely to die of COVID compared with those who did not get a should. When there is reliable data, that must be our guide.
Apr 10, 2023·edited Apr 11, 2023Liked by William H Bestermann Jr MD
The issue is, for decades now, 90+% of the "peer review published" trials are flawed, fraudulent, and cherry-picked to fit preordained narratives of the paymasters of the medical industrial complex. These lies have enabled the unaccountable plundering via the "lates-stage-sickness-seeking-profittering" of the legacy American Medical Kabuki Dance Theatrics sponsored by the American Medical Industrial Complex. These so-called "evidence" must be replicated, and validated independently with ALL the datasets "used" or "unused" in the analysis. Let people decide, report, debate, and conclude, not by the paid operatives or propagandists of the industry through the revolving doors of the DC swamp.
I don't agree with that premise in your first sentence. I do agree that industry sponsored studies are often flawed, but I have have participated in clinical trials myself. I have worked with others who have done clinical trials. I have discussed the optimal medical therapy trials with a leader who led the effort. Clinical trials are the only reason we KNOW that opening arteries in stable patients does not work and that optimal medical therapy dramatically reduces risk. I am all in on improving the science but we must do that with calm arguments based on reason. Better science is the only way to better health at lower cost.
Bill, I derived this decision from my long experience critically evaluating the published research work. Others have independently concluded as such: Professor John Ioannidis at Stanford, Marcia Angell, former Editor in Chief of the world renowned New England Journal of Medicine. They both claim the same. Only 10% are actually acceptable, most due to the investigators common sense approach to research and the nature of the topic.
Belive me, Bill, this was a very dificult personal decision for me to make. It took a deep soul searching to get here. Imaging this, I was denying most of what I learned from 20+ years being a physician. As a self-procalined "Recovered Physician," here is my personal journey to recovery and ultimate freedom navigating through the world of the corrupt medical peer review research and publishing system: https://open.substack.com/pub/mcgdoc/p/the-journey-to-freedom-of-a-recovered?r=q7iae&utm_medium=ios&utm_campaign=post
First, let me quote from the first woman editor-in-chief of the famous New England Journal of Medicine
“It is simply no longer possible to believe much of the published clinical research 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 [28]
Next, from Professor John Ioannidis, Professor of Medicine (Stanford Prevention Research), of Epidemiology and Population Health, and, courtesy of Statistics and Biomedical Data Science, in his Medscape interview, titled “Most research is flawed; let’s fix it.”, he stated the following:
“Most of, nearly 90%, the four to five million peer review published papers in medicine, nutrition, economics, genetics, etc. are flawed. These papers have near-zero value in advancing science. Slightly more than ten percent are based on good evidence or mostly common sense.”
I respect your viewpoints but in my little part of the USA, I have not lost one family member, friend or acquaintance from the COVID disease. However, since 2021, 8 personal friends of mine have been injured by death or a life altering disease- after getting the experimental COVID shot. Eight personal friends of mine are not here or the same anymore because of the “reliable scientific data”.
Again, you make my point. We cannot design healthcare around opinion. We must design it around science and facts. That is the key difference. Opinion vs proven facts.
Nope. Not in my families experience. My brother and his wife caught COVID and were very sick. Doctor denied any treatment. We got them on ivermectin and less then 24 hours later they were 90% better.
That is not the way science works. That is an anecdote, a narrative, a story--an individual experience. That can happen by chance. Billions of dollars are wasted every year on treatments that don't work but make sense. For example, people who have chest pain due to heart artery disease often have heart artery blockages. Doctors found out that opening the artery relieved the pain. They thought that meant that opening the artery would prevent heart attack and sudden death. Later studies showed that heart attacks occur when a cholesterol deposit in an unblocked part of the artery ruptures and starts a clot that blocks the artery. They learned that people on best medical therapy had one fourth as many heart attacks. They studied thousands of people who were on best medical treatment with and without a stent. The stent did nothing to keep them from having a heart attack. The ONLY way to know if ivermectin works in COVID is to take hundreds of people with COVID, give half of them Ivermectin and half of them a sugar pill that looks just like the real thing. The pills are randomly assigned so that the doctors and patients don't know who gets what. Then, weeks later, they break the code so that they can interpret the effect of Ivermectin in COVID. That is how science works. That study has been done for Ivermectin.
"CONCLUSIONS
Treatment with ivermectin did not result in a lower incidence of medical admission to a hospital due to progression of Covid-19 or of prolonged emergency department observation among outpatients with an early diagnosis of Covid-19."
I’ve seen ivermectin work fantastically first hand.
And I no longer trust the science or most medical communities and journals.
The highly regarded doctors have been censored so there is no discussion to get to honest answers and actual data and facts from the other side. I feel this says a lot. I appreciate you not censoring my opinions.
I sure wish people would open their eyes and see the truth.
Thank you. I wanted to circle back around. One of the first things I tell ALL my patients is that only 20% of studies are solid RCTs that we can hang our hat on almost each and every time. The remainder of the studies can be challenged, but even the 20% need to be scrutinized. Having worked as a sub PI for a prestigious research center in Seattle for nearly 10 years, I saw the fraud behind the curtain in the 1990s. I challenge each and every study and therefore I invite my patients to challenge me freely and openly. I am sure this study https://c19ivm.org/desorthenin.html as well as the ones you listed will be debated and discussed next week at the 2nd FLCCC conference as there will be a gathering of researchers and clinicians from around the globe. There is a signifiant loss of trust in US medicine after how this pandemic was poorly managed. US medicine pushed a drug that at best had only a 1.2% absolute risk reduction and now they are promoting it for children that have a 0.0003% of dying should they happen to get this virus. This is absolute lunacy and even Dr Paul Offit, the father of vaccines is coming out against this insanity.Trust in US medicine is severely broken and it will take decades to restore it. It will start with humility and checking one’s pride each and every time one steps in with a patient. My one regret is that at the age of 24, I didn’t sound the alarm at what I was seeing at the research level. It has now come full circle and perhaps eyes are now opening.
As you say "Perhaps the most substantial threat to expertise is that members of the public are coming to believe that facts don’t exist — that all facts are political and therefore a matter of opinion.” It seems as if we are being carefully taught to question facts. - since the first comments in 2017 regarding "alternative facts." I always thought facts were facts.
Thanks Janice. This is a site devoted to science and it is apolitical. I am always conscious of issues that may represent distortions or conflicts of interest. That said, many Americans are upset because our institutions, including scientific medicine, don't serve them. They are correct. Institutions are not serving them. The answer is to make the institutions better, but opportunistic politicians discredit science and facts so they can substitute alternative facts. They have succeeded with too many people. Politicians should stay out of science but set the rules and regulations that promote transparency and reduce conflicts of interest. The rich and powerful politicians who complain most loudly about the swamp ARE the swamp.
Bill: So glad you are writing about this troubling trend, a clear and present danger as you say. But not to everyone. People in those states where buying and carrying guns is encouraged, where vaccinations are optional, where doctors’ and nurses’ decisions are usurped by politicians in favor of no-nothing laws — these folks will increasingly be at risk of unnecessary diseases, gun deaths, higher than expected mortality, impoverished infrastructures for air and water safety, and sub-standard health care practices. Not everyone in those states will have the wherewithall to move to states where science is still respected and practiced as the basis of public health. But I think we’re already starting to see migration occur out of the affected regions, both of doctors and nurses, but also of young people, citizens who worry about the health of their school age children. This seems inevitable to me. It’s certainly a chief reason that I moved to Maine from North Carolina, and in my case specifically because of the unhealthy conditions imposed on the population from pig farms and polluted waters. More recently, I’ve heard from others much younger than myself, folks with small children, moving away from Tennessee and Florida. It remains to be seen how this might change the nature of our country in the coming decades.
Thanks David. It is always great to hear from you. This post is based on an article from a doctor and an attorney published in the New England Journal of Medicine. Everyone can follow the link and satisfy themselves that it comes from the most respected scientific source. Our lives are longer, healthier, and easier because of the scientific and industrial revolutions. I think your observations are important. This threat to science is a threat to the security and prosperity of the entire country. It is important that we do all we can to help our friends and neighbors understand.
Perfect! You have made my case like no one else could! I practice internal medicine for over 40 years. I was medical director of an ICU for eight years in a town where half the people were dying of heart attacks and strokes. I faced many spouses and told them their husband or wife had could not be saved. That was very emotionally charged work. I sent hundreds of patients to have bypasses and stents. Then I learned in 1995, that opening arteries in stable patients does not prevent heart attack or sudden death. Can you imagine how I felt? I was shocked. I was blown away. It made so much sense. How could it not work? But the science was sound. I have since learned if you treat patients with heart artery disease with best practice medical treatment, one tenth as many people die in ten years compared with usual care--the care that most people receive. I did that work for hundreds of patients and led a team that did that work in a large medical practice. VERY few of our patients had heart attacks. You are right to be upset. There is a terrible problem in our system that harms everyone. Our system is still focused on opening arteries and almost no one has access to best practice medical treatment. That is why I write in this space so frequently. We are coming from the same place, but abandoning science will only make things worse. I am well-known and well regarded in preventive cardiology. No one has censored me. We should all join hands to develop a scientific medicine community that serves Americans better. We could have better health for one fourth the cost.
No, these are facts. There are no evidence of safety and effectiveness efforts at all, Bill. Expert opinions dominate the clinical decision-making. Most of the time, they are not able to provide data for independent replication and validation at all. Legacy medicine is a racket, as described by the great Dr. Robert H, Lustig.
This is why I decided to take the matter on my own, walked away from my day-to-day clinical duties, and embarked on my long and arduous journey to create the Multifunction Cardiography Technology Platform.
No, the scientific method has nothing to do with this systematic corruption. The people who believe they own or “represent science” have utterly failed to obey the laws of the Scientific Method. As you said: “Show us the data!” Right, show us the data, the entrance re data, without cheery picking. Unfortunately, my decades of deep dive in the “leterature”, what I found is contrary to that principal. The scientific method has been adulterated by the “trusted experts” of the legacy medical industrial complex. A fundamental fix is desperately had urgently required to save our profession.
Drug trials sponsored by industry are often set up to show benefit for their drug. Proponents of a particular drug present their data in the best light and so it is always wise for the buyer to beware. The 99% figure condemns the system and everything in it and is misleading.
This has been the moda operandi of the "key opinion leaders/investigators" from the Ivy League Inistitutions of majoe drug trials. They cherry pick the data to fit the preordained narratives of the paymsters of the medical indutrial complex with the sole purpose to drive drug sales. They get millions of dollars, and ineffective drugs with potential harm are push upon the unwitting public. They hide the data and keep them in secret to deny public access for independent validations and re-examinations. The Statin drugs produce minimus benefits, the stents and the bypass surgeries produce NO benefit at all when they are compared to concervative medical theapies, in the mean while, hundreds of billions are wasted. This is why I call this out to awakedn everyone. Time to stand up and say "NO" to this systematic injustice and abuse.
I am gald the we agree. There has been NO tranparcney, honesty, and replicable data sharing with the independent voices. The extablishment has stifled decending voices and supprssed contrarian views to protect their invbestments, patienst can be damned. We ALL have the civl duty to right this deep systematic injustce.
What has the legacy analod mecial intdustrial complex establishment given us? 99% of the devicses and procedure and 93% of the pharmceuticals they seel are without proven evindence of safety and effectiveness. They have NEVER been held accpuntable. Noone has. These are FACTS,
I think that you’re right. In the short term our country will be weaker, and yet there could be benefits over the long haul to a period of separation of states. There is a fine book “If the South Had Won the Civil War,” by MacKinley Kantor, that describes in great detail what this situation might have looked like, and why it might not have been all bad. We don’t have a healthy union now. We are divided and a divided house will indeed fall, as Lincoln said. In fact, we have come perilously close so very recently.
The real problem is the abuse of trust by the people who are in the position of power to do their job base on scientific evidence and merit. They are not, and have NOT been. These people, like Anthony Fauci, have abused their authority to profit from their obedient constituents, make harmful sometime deadly decisions which hurt the ordinary citizens. This has been ongoing for more than five decades. People have had enough. A fundamental reform, and transformation of a new system that is just, truly evidence and merit based, honest, and fair is urgently needed.
The legacy system is badly broken, bill.
The system is utterly broken. The National Academy of Medicine laid out a guidebook for change that is very solid, but our leaders have ignored it.
https://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/books/NBK222271/
Admiral William McReaven has just written a book on leadership that I am reading-- The Wisdom of the Bullfrog. He says "There are two components to trust: character and competence. You may initially trust someone if you know them to be a man or woman of sound character. But if the fail to deliver on their promises, if they are shown to be incompetent in handling the affairs of the business, then after a while you lose trust in them." Great leaders like the admiral are servant leaders. He talks about the code at the service academies. "A cadet does not lie, cheat, or steal, or tolerate anyone who does." Of course, we all fall short of the mark but that is the standard that creates great leaders in our armed forces. The effectiveness of our healthcare depends on facts, science, data, evidence, integrity, and competent leaders. We will not be trusted until we deserve it.
The academic "echo chambers" must perpetuate falsehood and lies and promote these as "science" to sound credible and authoritative. The enforcement arm of this monopoly is the state-level medical society boards; they, too, are part of the same echo chamber to promote ineffective and baseless drugs and procedures, neglecting their harmful effects. Americans pay 4 trillion plus dollars, the highest in the world, for their "healthcare" to the American Legacy Medical racket monopoly. What do we get? 99% of the devices have no safety and effectiveness evidence, and 93% of prescription drugs fall into the same harmful and indefensible position. Adding insults to the injuries, American Allopathic Medicine is ranked the third killer of Americans following heart disease and cancer. Continued ruthless efforts to sustain the unsustainable is that insanity has kept the broken system together.
How long are we going to tolerate this???
Why does Truth need a Gatekeeper? Or do we believe that laypersons are not responsible for themselves?
Personally I trust myself more than any FDA or State level pol to make my health decisions. When I want medical advice, I hire my trusted medical provider and purchase their medical expertise. Isn't this really how most want the medical system to work...without all the middlemen?
Thanks Bill. I do believe that a trusting relationship between your provider and you must be the foundation of all medical care. Providers don't have the time or resources to generate studies of treatments tha=t work and treatments that don't work. They depend on others to generate that evidence. Take the example of heart artery disease. Our entire system still functions as if opening arteries will prevent heart attacks and death but there is a mountain of scientific evidence that proveds that is not the case. There is another mountain of evidence that proves best practice medical treatment will reduce mortality after a heart attack ten-fold compared with the care that most people receive. Most Americans don't have access to best practice medical treatment. Many people in this country with stable heart artery disease see their provider who recommends a stent. You should be able to get advice from your provider based on the best science. In many places in America that is not happening.
Hi, Bill. I guess my response to yours is that we may not have a choice about country versus county (state). The trend I’m describing is already well underway, I think. Regressive states will shape their cultures in opposition to progressive states, and people will move where they feel safe and able to prosper. I would hope that federalism would not die completely, so that, for example, the FDA would have jurisdiction and say in all the states with respect to drug safety. And yet, perhaps not even this will endure the separatism I am foreseeing. In Texas, certain drugs will be ruled “unsafe,” and in others, like Maine, they will be ruled “safe.”
Thanks David. I think we ignore the distrust of Americans regarding our health system at our own peril. They are right not to trust it. It does not serve them. Care is not patient-centered. Science and scientific evidence is very complicated. The people who are lashing out don't understand the problem. It took me a long time to realize how serious the problem is. The only answer I can come up with is to make our institutions more trustworthy. I am working to do my bit to make medicine more trustworthy. I have no conflicts of interest and I am doing my best to help laymen understand the science and the issues. That is my pledge to my readers.
The union has made us strong and I hope you are wrong but I am terribly afraid that you are right. If we follow that path it will make our country much weaker.
I agree. The system is broken and in much need of repair. This pandemic brought this to light in many ways. In our state, we had DOH run amuck and off the rails going after doctors and nurse practitioners for their off label use of Ivermectin. They backed off me personally when I pointed out it was one of the guidelines in the NIH that was published in July of 2021 and updated again in September of 2021. I was one of the few researching and investigating multiple modalities since I knew the absolute risk reduction of the mRNAs was 1.2% based on the Brown paper published in January 2021. If we can not trust the NIH and other governing boards, then who can we trust. I suspect most physicians were practicing according to what their administrators wanted and requested and very few, if any, were even aware of these NIH guidelines.
In my opinion, these guidelines should have been made known and available to ALL practicing physicians especially in light of the fact we were dealing with a “novel” virus and multiple modalities were needed and should have been encouraged. I suspect 90% of your readers were not even made aware of these NIH guidelines. I would love to know as we lost none of the 3000+ we treated with the various NIH guideline protocols. Guidelines are there for a purpose, but it still takes a critical mind to make the ultimate and best decision for the sake and well being of our patients.
I have followed COVID and focused my attention on the most reliable scientific data from the Journal of the American Medical Association and the New England Journal of Medicine.
There is no scientific evidence of ivermectin efficacy and patients should not waste their time and money on in. The controlled clinical trials have been done. We should only use multiple modalities that are proven to work.
https://www.nejm.org/doi/full/10.1056/nejmoa2115869
Patients who received a booster after their second shot were one tenth as likely to die of COVID compared with those who did not get a should. When there is reliable data, that must be our guide.
https://www.nejm.org/doi/full/10.1056/NEJMoa2115624
The issue is, for decades now, 90+% of the "peer review published" trials are flawed, fraudulent, and cherry-picked to fit preordained narratives of the paymasters of the medical industrial complex. These lies have enabled the unaccountable plundering via the "lates-stage-sickness-seeking-profittering" of the legacy American Medical Kabuki Dance Theatrics sponsored by the American Medical Industrial Complex. These so-called "evidence" must be replicated, and validated independently with ALL the datasets "used" or "unused" in the analysis. Let people decide, report, debate, and conclude, not by the paid operatives or propagandists of the industry through the revolving doors of the DC swamp.
I don't agree with that premise in your first sentence. I do agree that industry sponsored studies are often flawed, but I have have participated in clinical trials myself. I have worked with others who have done clinical trials. I have discussed the optimal medical therapy trials with a leader who led the effort. Clinical trials are the only reason we KNOW that opening arteries in stable patients does not work and that optimal medical therapy dramatically reduces risk. I am all in on improving the science but we must do that with calm arguments based on reason. Better science is the only way to better health at lower cost.
Bill, I derived this decision from my long experience critically evaluating the published research work. Others have independently concluded as such: Professor John Ioannidis at Stanford, Marcia Angell, former Editor in Chief of the world renowned New England Journal of Medicine. They both claim the same. Only 10% are actually acceptable, most due to the investigators common sense approach to research and the nature of the topic.
Belive me, Bill, this was a very dificult personal decision for me to make. It took a deep soul searching to get here. Imaging this, I was denying most of what I learned from 20+ years being a physician. As a self-procalined "Recovered Physician," here is my personal journey to recovery and ultimate freedom navigating through the world of the corrupt medical peer review research and publishing system: https://open.substack.com/pub/mcgdoc/p/the-journey-to-freedom-of-a-recovered?r=q7iae&utm_medium=ios&utm_campaign=post
28. Marcia Angeles, the first woman editor-in-chief of the famous New England Journal of Medicine: https://www.bmj.com/rapid-response/2011/11/02/drug-companies-amp-doctors-story-corruption
27. John Ioannidis, “Most Research is Flawed; let’s fix it.” https://www.medscape.com/viewarticle/898405
First, let me quote from the first woman editor-in-chief of the famous New England Journal of Medicine
“It is simply no longer possible to believe much of the published clinical research 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 [28]
Next, from Professor John Ioannidis, Professor of Medicine (Stanford Prevention Research), of Epidemiology and Population Health, and, courtesy of Statistics and Biomedical Data Science, in his Medscape interview, titled “Most research is flawed; let’s fix it.”, he stated the following:
“Most of, nearly 90%, the four to five million peer review published papers in medicine, nutrition, economics, genetics, etc. are flawed. These papers have near-zero value in advancing science. Slightly more than ten percent are based on good evidence or mostly common sense.”
― John Ioannidis [27]
I respect your viewpoints but in my little part of the USA, I have not lost one family member, friend or acquaintance from the COVID disease. However, since 2021, 8 personal friends of mine have been injured by death or a life altering disease- after getting the experimental COVID shot. Eight personal friends of mine are not here or the same anymore because of the “reliable scientific data”.
In my opinion, I think your data is incorrect.
Again, you make my point. We cannot design healthcare around opinion. We must design it around science and facts. That is the key difference. Opinion vs proven facts.
Nope. Not in my families experience. My brother and his wife caught COVID and were very sick. Doctor denied any treatment. We got them on ivermectin and less then 24 hours later they were 90% better.
That is not the way science works. That is an anecdote, a narrative, a story--an individual experience. That can happen by chance. Billions of dollars are wasted every year on treatments that don't work but make sense. For example, people who have chest pain due to heart artery disease often have heart artery blockages. Doctors found out that opening the artery relieved the pain. They thought that meant that opening the artery would prevent heart attack and sudden death. Later studies showed that heart attacks occur when a cholesterol deposit in an unblocked part of the artery ruptures and starts a clot that blocks the artery. They learned that people on best medical therapy had one fourth as many heart attacks. They studied thousands of people who were on best medical treatment with and without a stent. The stent did nothing to keep them from having a heart attack. The ONLY way to know if ivermectin works in COVID is to take hundreds of people with COVID, give half of them Ivermectin and half of them a sugar pill that looks just like the real thing. The pills are randomly assigned so that the doctors and patients don't know who gets what. Then, weeks later, they break the code so that they can interpret the effect of Ivermectin in COVID. That is how science works. That study has been done for Ivermectin.
"CONCLUSIONS
Treatment with ivermectin did not result in a lower incidence of medical admission to a hospital due to progression of Covid-19 or of prolonged emergency department observation among outpatients with an early diagnosis of Covid-19."
https://www.nejm.org/doi/full/10.1056/nejmoa2115869
That is the difference between belief and knowledge. We owe it to patients to be certain that treatment is based on knowledge.
That study was incorrectly done. They did not use the same health, age, demographics of people in the study.
There are fifteen studies of ivermectin use in COVID in thousands of patients. See the link below.
https://jamanetwork.com/journals/jama/fullarticle/2801828
These fifteen studies have proven Ivermectin does not help in COVID. It is settled science.
I’ve seen ivermectin work fantastically first hand.
And I no longer trust the science or most medical communities and journals.
The highly regarded doctors have been censored so there is no discussion to get to honest answers and actual data and facts from the other side. I feel this says a lot. I appreciate you not censoring my opinions.
I sure wish people would open their eyes and see the truth.
Thank you. I wanted to circle back around. One of the first things I tell ALL my patients is that only 20% of studies are solid RCTs that we can hang our hat on almost each and every time. The remainder of the studies can be challenged, but even the 20% need to be scrutinized. Having worked as a sub PI for a prestigious research center in Seattle for nearly 10 years, I saw the fraud behind the curtain in the 1990s. I challenge each and every study and therefore I invite my patients to challenge me freely and openly. I am sure this study https://c19ivm.org/desorthenin.html as well as the ones you listed will be debated and discussed next week at the 2nd FLCCC conference as there will be a gathering of researchers and clinicians from around the globe. There is a signifiant loss of trust in US medicine after how this pandemic was poorly managed. US medicine pushed a drug that at best had only a 1.2% absolute risk reduction and now they are promoting it for children that have a 0.0003% of dying should they happen to get this virus. This is absolute lunacy and even Dr Paul Offit, the father of vaccines is coming out against this insanity.Trust in US medicine is severely broken and it will take decades to restore it. It will start with humility and checking one’s pride each and every time one steps in with a patient. My one regret is that at the age of 24, I didn’t sound the alarm at what I was seeing at the research level. It has now come full circle and perhaps eyes are now opening.
As you say "Perhaps the most substantial threat to expertise is that members of the public are coming to believe that facts don’t exist — that all facts are political and therefore a matter of opinion.” It seems as if we are being carefully taught to question facts. - since the first comments in 2017 regarding "alternative facts." I always thought facts were facts.
Thanks Janice. This is a site devoted to science and it is apolitical. I am always conscious of issues that may represent distortions or conflicts of interest. That said, many Americans are upset because our institutions, including scientific medicine, don't serve them. They are correct. Institutions are not serving them. The answer is to make the institutions better, but opportunistic politicians discredit science and facts so they can substitute alternative facts. They have succeeded with too many people. Politicians should stay out of science but set the rules and regulations that promote transparency and reduce conflicts of interest. The rich and powerful politicians who complain most loudly about the swamp ARE the swamp.
Bill: So glad you are writing about this troubling trend, a clear and present danger as you say. But not to everyone. People in those states where buying and carrying guns is encouraged, where vaccinations are optional, where doctors’ and nurses’ decisions are usurped by politicians in favor of no-nothing laws — these folks will increasingly be at risk of unnecessary diseases, gun deaths, higher than expected mortality, impoverished infrastructures for air and water safety, and sub-standard health care practices. Not everyone in those states will have the wherewithall to move to states where science is still respected and practiced as the basis of public health. But I think we’re already starting to see migration occur out of the affected regions, both of doctors and nurses, but also of young people, citizens who worry about the health of their school age children. This seems inevitable to me. It’s certainly a chief reason that I moved to Maine from North Carolina, and in my case specifically because of the unhealthy conditions imposed on the population from pig farms and polluted waters. More recently, I’ve heard from others much younger than myself, folks with small children, moving away from Tennessee and Florida. It remains to be seen how this might change the nature of our country in the coming decades.
Thanks David. It is always great to hear from you. This post is based on an article from a doctor and an attorney published in the New England Journal of Medicine. Everyone can follow the link and satisfy themselves that it comes from the most respected scientific source. Our lives are longer, healthier, and easier because of the scientific and industrial revolutions. I think your observations are important. This threat to science is a threat to the security and prosperity of the entire country. It is important that we do all we can to help our friends and neighbors understand.
Perfect! You have made my case like no one else could! I practice internal medicine for over 40 years. I was medical director of an ICU for eight years in a town where half the people were dying of heart attacks and strokes. I faced many spouses and told them their husband or wife had could not be saved. That was very emotionally charged work. I sent hundreds of patients to have bypasses and stents. Then I learned in 1995, that opening arteries in stable patients does not prevent heart attack or sudden death. Can you imagine how I felt? I was shocked. I was blown away. It made so much sense. How could it not work? But the science was sound. I have since learned if you treat patients with heart artery disease with best practice medical treatment, one tenth as many people die in ten years compared with usual care--the care that most people receive. I did that work for hundreds of patients and led a team that did that work in a large medical practice. VERY few of our patients had heart attacks. You are right to be upset. There is a terrible problem in our system that harms everyone. Our system is still focused on opening arteries and almost no one has access to best practice medical treatment. That is why I write in this space so frequently. We are coming from the same place, but abandoning science will only make things worse. I am well-known and well regarded in preventive cardiology. No one has censored me. We should all join hands to develop a scientific medicine community that serves Americans better. We could have better health for one fourth the cost.
Please do the right thing for our families, friends, and all our patients. That's the oath!
The truth must be told and upheld.
No, these are facts. There are no evidence of safety and effectiveness efforts at all, Bill. Expert opinions dominate the clinical decision-making. Most of the time, they are not able to provide data for independent replication and validation at all. Legacy medicine is a racket, as described by the great Dr. Robert H, Lustig.
This is why I decided to take the matter on my own, walked away from my day-to-day clinical duties, and embarked on my long and arduous journey to create the Multifunction Cardiography Technology Platform.
So you believe that scientific medicine is invalid? How would you fix it? Is it beyond fixing?
No, the scientific method has nothing to do with this systematic corruption. The people who believe they own or “represent science” have utterly failed to obey the laws of the Scientific Method. As you said: “Show us the data!” Right, show us the data, the entrance re data, without cheery picking. Unfortunately, my decades of deep dive in the “leterature”, what I found is contrary to that principal. The scientific method has been adulterated by the “trusted experts” of the legacy medical industrial complex. A fundamental fix is desperately had urgently required to save our profession.
Drug trials sponsored by industry are often set up to show benefit for their drug. Proponents of a particular drug present their data in the best light and so it is always wise for the buyer to beware. The 99% figure condemns the system and everything in it and is misleading.
This has been the moda operandi of the "key opinion leaders/investigators" from the Ivy League Inistitutions of majoe drug trials. They cherry pick the data to fit the preordained narratives of the paymsters of the medical indutrial complex with the sole purpose to drive drug sales. They get millions of dollars, and ineffective drugs with potential harm are push upon the unwitting public. They hide the data and keep them in secret to deny public access for independent validations and re-examinations. The Statin drugs produce minimus benefits, the stents and the bypass surgeries produce NO benefit at all when they are compared to concervative medical theapies, in the mean while, hundreds of billions are wasted. This is why I call this out to awakedn everyone. Time to stand up and say "NO" to this systematic injustice and abuse.
I am gald the we agree. There has been NO tranparcney, honesty, and replicable data sharing with the independent voices. The extablishment has stifled decending voices and supprssed contrarian views to protect their invbestments, patienst can be damned. We ALL have the civl duty to right this deep systematic injustce.
What has the legacy analod mecial intdustrial complex establishment given us? 99% of the devicses and procedure and 93% of the pharmceuticals they seel are without proven evindence of safety and effectiveness. They have NEVER been held accpuntable. Noone has. These are FACTS,
Sorry. That is overstated. There is ample evidence of what works. Our leaders have chosen not to do it
I think that you’re right. In the short term our country will be weaker, and yet there could be benefits over the long haul to a period of separation of states. There is a fine book “If the South Had Won the Civil War,” by MacKinley Kantor, that describes in great detail what this situation might have looked like, and why it might not have been all bad. We don’t have a healthy union now. We are divided and a divided house will indeed fall, as Lincoln said. In fact, we have come perilously close so very recently.