Let's Agree to Disagree
If you think our medical system is doing a bang-up job, perhaps we aren't watching the same movie.
***I’m traveling again this week so I hope you enjoy this gently upcycled post. It’s been nearly a year since I wrote it, but it’s no less relevant today. I’ll be back next week with fresh, new color commentary (and paid subscribers will still get their weekend book excerpt). TIA for your patience and support.
This week on this very platform, I wrote a post about the media’s deafening silence on the #DiedSuddenly phenomenon. It’s a hard case to argue, frankly, as a) there’s undeniable proof it is happening at exponentially-above-normal rates around the world, and b) you won’t hear a peep about it in the news.
As always, 99% of the comments were in support of my stance. (I’m not suggesting I’m spot-on 99% of the time, incidentally; I’m merely pointing out that my subscribers tend to be of like mind. You know, since they subscribe.) But there’s always at least one outlier; a well-intended lone wolf who seemingly swings by to defend Pharma, call me delusional for not buying into the carefully crafted hype, or both.
This week it was Linda, a retired RN supposedly, whose publicly posted comments included the following:
“Lots of meritless speculation & paranoia here, which likely will continue ad infinitum thanks to the misinformation that’s spread like wildfire in the last 2 years. Very sad.”
[Author’s note: I can only pray my “misinformation” continues to spread like wildfire! Trust me, I’m not doing this for my health or my sanity.]
“I predict that more people will reject their doctors’ recommendations, take only herbal supplements instead of vetted medication and die of treatable cardiac disease or cancer.”
[Author’s note: I predict—hopefully—that Linda is correct! Also I’m assuming the “vetted medication(s)” the self-proclaimed expert is referring to are the clot shots and remdesivir or one of the many cardiovascular therapies Pfizer added to their arsenal when they acquired Arena Pharmaceuticals and not ivermectin or hydroxychloroquine. Just a hunch.]
“‘Turbo cancers,’ ‘needle rape,’ etc are sarcastic, made-up terms coined by anti-COVID vaccine or anti-mRNA vaccine folks, even some self-important non-expert doctors, they are not medical terms.”
[Author’s note: All words are made up, Linda. ‘Turbo cancer’ is simply a way of describing the new and unprecedented rates at which cancers are progressing. Call them Quantum Computer Cancers, Peregrine Falcon Cancers, Bugatti Chiron Super Sport Cancers, Usain Bolt Cancers, or nothing at all. Doesn’t matter; they’re happening.]
“Post-vaccine clotting disorders and cardiac inflammation, both of which were quickly addressed and appropriately managed (I'd be happy to tell you how), occurred in specific populations, YES, but not in the numbers and percentages you're throwing out there. WAY exaggerated.”
[Author’s note: Yes, please, Linda. Tell me how post-vaccine clotting and cardiac inflammation have been appropriately managed. Better yet, tell it to the 21,917 post-COVID jab heart attack victims currently documented in VAERS.]
“You're welcome to your own opinion but it should be based on evidence—even some of the "evidence" about drugs like Ivermectin and HCQ is MIXED. MIXED evidence is evidence... it's evidence that there IS NO evidence.”
[Author’s note: I wrote an entire book about the bastardization of science, which I will excerpt briefly below for Linda’s convenience.]
“Girlfriend [yes, she called me girlfriend], I don't ‘believe’ what I do based on propaganda but on personal experience in studying research in graduate school and afterward in my work and teaching. And in 42 years of working with physicians and other nurse specialists who know what they're doing and are great teachers. Research validity and reliability standards don't ever change.”
[Author’s note: Hahahahahahaha.]
In Linda’s defense, she did call Fauci a lying idiot. Twice.
In our book The War on Ivermectin, my co-author Dr. Pierre Kory opens with a description of the man he calls “Old Pierre,” a book-smart but clearly brainwashed dude who sounds a lot like, well, Linda. Dr. Kory self-reflects:
Old Pierre believed that the elite, esteemed medical journals represented the best of scientific thought and study. The Lancet or the New England Journal of Medicine said so? It was settled then. Old Pierre religiously read the New York Times from cover to cover, because it was the paper of record; the arbiter of truth. If you wanted to know what was really going on, you read the Times. Period. He voted for Biden (although in his defense, he wasn’t exactly a fan and never put a BIDEN-HARRIS ring around any of his social media profile photos), trusted the government (I know!), and actually believed that public health agencies were committed to safeguarding and improving . . . wait for it . . . public health. He knew—knew, I tell you!—that vitamins were a scam and that hospitals were life-saving centers of care, compassion, and excellence. Old Pierre dutifully lined up for his own annual flu shot and followed the childhood immunization schedule to the letter with his three daughters.
Dr. Kory summarizes his former self thusly: “He was a clueless sonofabitch.”
I encouraged Lone Wolf Linda to read the book (she won’t) in the hopes that she might begin to understand or at least acknowledge the psychological manipulation she has we all have been subjected to. I responded to her claim that “research validity and reliability standards don’t ever change,” with the following passages (edited lightly for brevity):
Dr. Marcia Angell, the long-time editor-in-chief of the New England Journal of Medicine, resigned over twenty years ago after two decades in the post. She left because of what she described as the rising and indefensible influence being exerted by Pharma at the prestigious journal and its powerful affiliate societies.
Back then.
Dr. Angell wrote a remarkable book about the widespread corruption she witnessed. In The Truth About Drug Companies: How They Deceive Us and What to Do About It, she wrote:
Now primarily a marketing machine to sell drugs of dubious benefit, big Pharma uses its wealth and power to co-opt every institution that might stand in its way, including the US Congress, the FDA, academic medical centers and the medical profession itself.
In her book, Dr. Angell brilliantly and unapologetically summarized the sorry state of the medical industrial complex:
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.
Further, Angell had no qualms pointing out something that’s becoming clearer by the year: sick care is big, big business. In fact, Angell wrote, “In 2003, the profits of the top 10 big Pharma exceeded that of the cumulative profits of the other 490 Fortune 500 Companies.”
Let those numbers sink in for a moment.
This deep-seated corruption is hardly new. The late Dr. Arnold Relman, another former editor-in-chief of the NEJM, said this in 2002: “The medical profession is being bought by the pharmaceutical industry, not only in terms of the practice of medicine, but also in terms of teaching and research. The academic institutions of this country are allowing themselves to be the paid agents of the pharmaceutical industry. I think it’s disgraceful.”
Perhaps doctors Angell and Relman were superspreaders of “meritless speculation and paranoia,” too. Or maybe, just maybe, our medical system has been broken for far longer than most folks—particularly those practicing inside of it, presumably with good intentions, a leap I’m willing to make for Linda—would like to believe or admit.
Let’s say you’ve got a suspicious looking mole, but you’re too scared to get it checked. Or you know you’re living beyond your means, but you can’t bring yourself to check your bank balance. Your willful denial doesn’t make that mole benign or prevent your account from running into the red. In fact, avoiding reality only allows these problems to fester, multiply, and spiral out of control.
The same goes for peeking under the hood of our sick care system. The sooner we expose its failing, compromised engine, the sooner we can sell it for scrap and rebuild a safe and reliable ride.
The War on Ivermectin is available on Amazon and anywhere else kickass books are sold.
Isn’t it great that with the cost of everything, at least you’re living rent free in these people’s minds?
Amen to that. Too bad it will never happen in my lifetime (I am 66 soon to be 67). But hope springs eternal. For now you are literally on your own in deciding how to live a healthy life. The medical profession is good at acute care. IE it can fix broken bones or repair a damaged mitral valve etc etc. But for lifestyle adjustments that would extend and improve your health forget it. Keep up the good fight.