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Personal medicine or population medicine: which will it be for you?
Personal medicine starts with you and your doctor discussing what is the best care for you. After considering long-term medical effects as well as financial costs, you and your provider decide what to do.
Population medicine means that some panel, committee, or group determines what it consider cost-effective for a population. That could be an insurance company or a government agency. Medical care that is deemed ”cost-effective” is authorized and therefore available for use.
Medical care adjudged not cost-effective for the population is…well, not: not authorized, not paid for, and therefore not available for use in patients (other than some who might be connected enough to get waivers). This is what is known as practicing medicine for the mean, the middle, or the system. Others call it rationing.
Population medicine is health care practiced by bureaucrats and administrators, ostensibly for the welfare of a population. By contrast, personal medicine is health care practiced by doctors and nurses for the welfare of individual persons.
You choose: personal medicine or population medicine. If you ignore this question, the choice will be made for you (in your best interest, of course).
Universal health care countries such as Canada, Great Britain, and New Zealand overtly practice population medicine. Each government claims that it knows best. The government decides what works and what does not. The former is approved, and the latter is unavailable. Father knows best and decides what is best for the mythical average patient.
However, as scientist Stephen Jay Gould personally proved by surviving “terminal” lung cancer for over twenty years, there is no “average” patient. What is best for the average patient in a large statistical population is often not best for any individual person.
Providers do not treat mythical patients. They treat real people, with names, families, and multiple responsibilities. In our culture, ethical standards for good health care require doing the best possible for each individual patient. In America, the patient knows best, not “Father” in the guise of government.
To see population medicine in action, check out the online article “If I lived in New Zealand, I’d be dead.” The author reports that she had an unusual form of breast cancer for which approved therapies in New Zealand (where she lived) did not work. A new but expensive anti-cancer drug — Herceptin — had shown great promise. Though her doctor and she wanted that drug, it was not approved by the government and therefore was not authorized for payment. Fortunately, she had the money to pay out-of-pocket for the Herceptin, did so, and lived to tell her tale. Most people would not have the money and would simply have died.
The U.S. currently has the worst of both worlds. In the popular mind, there is personal medicine. However, the patient is disconnected from his or her money. There is also a strong incursion of population medicine, which the Obama administration’s Affordable Care Act increases dramatically. Both insurance companies and government agencies — i.e., Medicare and Medicaid — authorize (pay for) what is cheapest for them, not what is best for the patient. The result is a constant struggle between provider and payer, with the patient caught in the middle, bouncing around like a pinball, with no ability to decide his own care.
(A friend and adviser suggested that I call population medicine what it effectively is: political medicine. I decided to stick with population medicine, as the focus here is considering the question of in whose best interest is the medicine being practiced, and only after that, who is practicing the medicine?)
The ACA — the disingenuously titled Patient Protection and Affordable Health Care Act of 2010 — establishes an independent agency called IPAB, or the Independent Payment Advisory Board. IPAB will review all expensive medical therapies and decide which are deemed cost-effective and which are not. ”Not cost-effective” treatments would become unavailable for use by Medicare and Medicaid patients. Even if there is good reason to believe that one of those treatments is the best possible for you or your child, sorry, Charlie!
IPAB was modeled after another disingenuously titled British agency with the acronym NICE (National Institute for Clinical Excellence). Their population medicine-based “clinical excellence” produced age limits for certain treatments such as kidney dialysis (not cost-effective after age 55) and heart surgery (over age 65). These treatments are much more costly than Herceptin and beyond the financial reach of 99% of the population.
In Canada, even the 1% who might be rich enough to pay for such treatments cannot access them. Any attempt to use non-approved therapies, even if paid for by the patient, is severely punished.
Let’s return to the question up top. Which do you want: personal medicine or population medicine? If you choose not to decide, or fail to make your choice very obvious to your representatives, you know what will happen.
Now you need to consider two related questions. 1) In population medicine, is there any personal responsibility for a patient to protect his or her health? 2) In population medicine, what incentive does the consumer (patient) have to economize — to behave responsibly in the financial sense?
Those who grow weary of daily needle-delivered doses of certain medicines may soon have a new option: researchers at the Massachusetts Institute of Technology have spent 15 years developing an implantable microchip that will do the job – sans the mean poking. Human trials started last year in Denmark, and the results of the in-body test were published in the Feb 15 online edition of Science Translational Medicine. From pacemakers to artificial hips, people are getting used to having new technology placed in their bodies, but imbedding microchips still raises hackles.
People living with type 1 diabetes know the importance of maintaining their regimen of insulin injections. Women suffering from osteoporosis, on the other hand, do not feel the results of missing treatments as readily as diabetes patients. The osteoporosis hormone therapy cannot be swallowed as a pill because it works when sent into the body in specific, discrete amounts, as would be provided by an injection rather than through steady time-release capsule that can be swallowed. According to the Los Angeles Times, 70 percent of osteoporosis patients don’t keep up with their daily hormone therapy injections.
“Compliance is very important in a lot of drug regimens, and it can be very difficult to get patients to accept a drug regimen where they have to give themselves injections,” says MIT professor Michael Cima. “This avoids the compliance issue completely, and points to a future where you have fully automated drug regimens.”
The team at MicroCHIPS, the company that the MIT researchers helped form, used their wirelessly controlled implanted microchips to deliver the Eli Lilly & Co’s hormone teriparatide to eight Danish women aged 65 to 70 over the course of 4 months. In one of the cases, the microchip did not properly release the drug and that woman did not complete the study. The other seven women, however, showed measurable improvement in bone formation.
The chip contains a collection of pinprick-sized reservoirs of the drug of interest, capped with a layer of gold nanoparticles that dissolve when hit with an electrical current, releasing the drug into the system. The chip itself is the size of a small coin, inserted under the skin near the waistline and programmed to empty its minuscule wells of hormone on a specific time schedule. While the chip reportedly causes no discomfort, the bodies of these women did recognize the chip as foreign and covered it with a fibrous coating. This minor encapsulation did not prevent the drug from being released into the system.
MicroCHIPS hopes to eventually offer chips that can hold hundreds of doses, and the company will spend the next several years refining this technology and working toward FDA approval.
“You could literally have a pharmacy on a chip,” says MIT professor Robert Langer, who cofounded MicroCHIPS. “You can do remote control delivery; you can do pulsatile drug delivery; and you can deliver multiple drugs.”
While the microchip would never hold high enough doses of insulin to serve diabetes patients, it could conceivably be used to monitor blood sugar and release the hormone glucagon into a patient’s system to raise blood glucose levels when they dropped too low. Treatments for multiple sclerosis or infertility could be delivered according to doctor’s orders without the problems associated with skipping doses. Pain medications could be released without the risk of accidental overdose. (According to the Centers For Disease Control, 475,000 emergency room visits in 2009 were the result of prescription drug misuse, and most of the 36,000 drug overdose deaths in 2008 were caused by prescription drugs.)
MicroCHIPS is not alone in health-related microchip technology. Positive ID Corp – the company behind VeriChip – announced last July that it had finished the development of its GlucoChip, a glucose-sensing microchip that would monitor the glucose levels of diabetics.
Hackles:
As convenient as this technology may be, people are still leery about putting microchips into their bodies. Implantable microchips have been previously offered for health purposes, but were rejected by the American general public.
In 2004, the U.S. Food and Drug Administration approved the implantable VeriChip, a radio frequency ID (RFID) tag. VeriChip was marketed as a way to quickly identify patients brought to the hospital unconscious or in other ways incapacitated. The chip, placed under the skin in the upper right arm, gave doctors quick access to patient identity and medical records.
Serious privacy concerns conquered the marketing of VeriChip in America, however, where many worried the technology would eventually lead to mandatory chipping of citizens for identification purposes. Others saw the microchip as a step in the desensitization that would lead to global acceptance of the Mark of the Beast.
Other countries have not held microchips with the same level of suspicion. Even before VeriChip was approved by the FDA, the chip was marketed in Mexico as a tool for identifying children and potentially rescuing them from kidnappers. In October of 2011, Positive ID announced that the Israel Defense Forces had made a VeriChip order to help with “emergency situations and disaster recovery…”
The medical convenience of microchipped medication may or may not win out over the concerns of wary citizens, but as technology continues to provide new ways of dealing with old problems, we may see more silicon offered to our bodies than comes from a simple day at the beach.
Yes, it’s that cut and dried. Actually, they are saying you die quicker than if you eat, say, nuts; but die you will and you better stop eating that steak and hamburger if you want to live a long life.
Eating red meat — any amount and any type — appears to significantly increase the risk of premature death, according to a long-range study that examined the eating habits and health of more than 110,000 adults for more than 20 years.
For instance, adding just one 3-ounce serving of unprocessed red meat — picture a piece of steak no bigger than a deck of cards — to one’s daily diet was associated with a 13% greater chance of dying during the course of the study.
Even worse, adding an extra daily serving of processed red meat, such as a hot dog or two slices of bacon, was linked to a 20% higher risk of death during the study.
“Any red meat you eat contributes to the risk,” said An Pan, a postdoctoral fellow at the Harvard School of Public Health in Boston and lead author of the study, published online Monday in the Archives of Internal Medicine.
[...]
Eating a serving of nuts instead of beef or pork was associated with a 19% lower risk of dying during the study. The team said choosing poultry or whole grains as a substitute was linked with a 14% reduction in mortality risk; low-fat dairy or legumes, 10%; and fish, 7%.
I would gladly trade a year or two for a steak cooked to perfection on my grill or prime rib at Lawry’s. That’s life – making your own choices and then living with them.
This study will not make the National Cattlemen’s Beef Association very happy. “Beef – It’s What’s For Dinner” has been a smashing success as a marketing program. No doubt the vegans and vegetarians will get a boost from this study.
Methicillin-resistant Staphylococcus aureus (MRSA), a particularly vicious staph infection that plagues hospitals, may have gotten its obstinate resistance to antibiotics from the routine of giving antibiotics to farm animals, according to a new study by researchers at Northern Arizona University. MRSA has become a major epidemic that has become more drug-resistant as it has spread. While most people normally have a bit of Staphylococcus bacteria on their skin, certain MRSA strains are lethal and difficult to treat when they get into the bloodstream.
According to the study, published by the American Society for Microbiology, the vicious new strains of MRSA did not develop in hospitals as previously thought; it appears the superbug started as a somewhat mild-mannered staph bacterium that jumped into the pig population. Later, when it eventually passed back to humans, it returned with a bad attitude and resistance to the major antibiotics generally used to treat staph infections. Researchers compared the genomes of humans, barnyard fowl and pigs from 19 countries to trace MRSA’s emergence, and the habit of giving livestock antibiotics as a matter of course has been credited with the development of this tenacious killer.
The big issue is that the common use of antibiotics in meat animals has killed off weaker versions of bacteria, while allowing stronger, antibiotic resistant strains to survive and reproduce additional difficult-to-kill offspring.
“The most powerful force in evolution is selection. And in this case, humans have supplied a strong force through the excessive use of antibiotic drugs in farm animal production,” said Paul Keim, a co-author on the study and director of Northern Arizona University’s Center for Microbial Genetics and Genomics. “It is that inappropriate use of antibiotics that is now coming back to haunt us.”
The CC398 strain of MRSA is in almost half of all the US food supply meat, according to the American Society for Microbiology. Most of the time the staph bacteria are killed when people cook their food well, but thoroughly washing counters and cutting boards after meat has touched them is a real priority.
“Our findings underscore the potential public health risks of widespread antibiotic use in food animal production,” said Lance Price, NAU faculty member and director of the Center for Food Microbiology and Environmental Health at the Translational Genomics Research Institute. “Staph thrives in crowded and unsanitary conditions. Add antibiotics to that environment and you’re going to create a public health problem.”
According to the CDC, about 19,000 of these people died of MRSA infections in 2005. About 94,000 persons contracted their first serious MRSA infection that year, 86 percent of which while in healthcare facilities. A 2010 CDC study published in the Journal of the American Medical Association did show that health care facilities have been more successful in fighting MRSA since then. The number of invasive (life-threatening) MRSA infections declined 28 percent between 2005 and 2008, and rates of MRSA bloodstream infections fell almost 50 percent during the 10 years from 1997 to 2007.
At the same time, MRSA continues to be spread outside of health care facilities as well. Anytime large numbers of people live or work together in crowded conditions – dormitories, or correctional or athletic facilities – there is a greater risk for MRSA to spread quickly. Childcare workers and students who participate in wrestling are susceptible for instance. Locker rooms have been tagged as spreading grounds for these bacteria. It doesn’t just hit high schools either; even NFL players have picked up MRSA.
People should not panic, though. “It’s a good idea to avoid that level of fear, because it’s costly and it scares people unnecessarily,” Elaine Larson, professor of epidemiology at Columbia University’s Mailman School of Public Health. The best thing to do is take precautions when sharing facilities with large numbers of people. Wash clothes and duffel bags regularly after visiting the gym. Don’t share towels or razors or other items that touch the skin. Keep wounds covered.
With the advent of antibiotics more than half a century ago, scientists predicted the end of death and suffering from infectious diseases. During the past 30 years, however, we have witnessed the reemergence and geographical spread of well-known diseases, including tuberculosis, malaria, and cholera, often in more virulent and drug-resistant forms. Infectious diseases are the leading cause of death worldwide, and the third leading cause of death in the United States.
Doctors have taken great pains to warn their patients to take antibiotic regimens all the way through to the last pill, to ensure that all bacteria are killed and the few strongest are not left to live and breed. We listen, and then we hunt down new antibiotics to battle the superbugs and take care not to let the bugs get resistant to those too. Yet, while we work to fight off these killers in our hospitals and homes, we are systematically creating super bacteria on our farms – in the name of good health.
Herbal remedies and natural medicine have grown popular these days. A mass of consumers are willing to try anything that will keep them free of the big pharmaceutical companies and handful of prescription medications along with their long lists of side-effects. At the same time, while much of alternative medicine is based in cultural and historical treatments for common ills, there are aspects to certain forms of “natural” remedies that fall into the spiritual and quasi-religious categories and have little to do with the actual benefit of the medicines themselves. Consider homeopathy, which has become a billion dollar industry despite the shaky evidence for its benefits.
There are currently homeopathic remedies that claim to treat every manner of illness under the sun. The very word “homeopathy” sounds soothing and healing, as though Grandma’s rose hip tea and warm blankets can be found in each bottle. Homeopathy, however, has nothing to do with “home” remedies, but comes from the root words for alike and suffering and works on the principle that “like cures like.” It’s a philosophy of medicine that goes back more than 200 years to a time before knowledge of bacteria and chromosomes.
Homeopathic Medicine:
In the late 1700s, the German physician Samuel Hahnemann found that the medicines used in his day were just as likely to harm his patients as help them (have times changed?). He therefore began a systematic effort to try remedies of his own design. He developed the hypothesis that people with certain symptoms could be treated by the very items that caused those same symptoms in healthy people. For instance, if a person had burning eyes and a runny nose, one should treat him with an onion – since exposure to a cut up onion causes people’s eyes to burn and noses to drip. Hahnemann’s idea was that “like cures like.” Stinging nettles cause burning stinging pain, therefore they should be used to treat illnesses involving burning, stinging pain.
Sometimes it worked; onions helped treat common colds. He encountered a problem with this approach, however, discovering that certain “remedies” that caused negative effects in healthy people turned out to be just plain toxic in ill people as well. Not giving up, Hahnemann would dilute these substances and instead try the dilutions on the ill patients. Claiming success, in 1810 he published his Organon of the Rational Art of Healing, followed by other works. He eventually would dilute the remedies so extensively, none of the original substance would have remained in the dilution water. Yet, Hahnemann believed that the energy left from that diluted substance was all that was necessary to make it work in leading the body back to health.
That was two hundred years ago, nearly 70 years before Robert Koch spied the anthrax bacterium under his microscope lens. Hahnemann lacked knowledge of bacteria and viruses, of genetic mutations, and of the importance of certain cofactors in biochemical pathways. He did not fully understand why certain remedies worked and why others didn’t. He did the best science he knew at the time, but the reasons for his successes may not have been what he thought they were.
Today, we have much less excuse. We know the antibacterial effects of garlic. We recognize that if cayenne helps defeat a fever, it is because it causes an increase in circulation, allowing the body to clean out toxins and helping the immune system to work more efficiently, not necessarily because cayenne is hot and fevers are hot. Cayenne increases the metabolism, is rich in Vitamins A and C, and has the complete B complexes, all of which help the body to function as it should. Yet, if homeopathic practitioners treated people with cayenne or garlic or aloe or olive leaf extract or a hundred other herbs and botanicals in moderation, and if the remedies did people good, it would not ultimately matter why these treatments worked. The questionable aspect of homeopathic remedies is that they’ve been diluted to the point that there’s none of the purported medicinal material left, but only the sugar filler.
The Vital Force:
Hahnemann had the idea that the point of good medicine was not to heal the body, but to kick-start the body’s own self-healing. He had a point. The body has an amazing ability to conquer infection and disease. Hahnemann’s manner of promoting this self-healing, however, was somewhat unorthodox. He would dilute his remedies repeatedly, shaking vigorously with each dilution, until there was unlikely anything to be left of the original medical element. It was the “vital force” of the medicine that was important – the energy imprint it left on the water in the dilutions – not the actual material itself. Hahnemann believed that health was the result of a well-tuned vital force. The purpose of remedies was merely to get the vital force back in shape. As Hahnemann said in his book Organon, #12,, “It is only the pathologically untuned vital force that causes diseases.”
Hahnemann’s ideas persist to this day. The result is that sugar tablets are fed to the world’s consumers as homeopathic remedies. Consider the math. Homeopathic remedies are derived from plants or minerals that are diluted in pure water or alcohol and shaken. If they cannot be dissolved in either of these, they are ground finely and diluted in powdered milk sugar. They are diluted by millions and trillions of times. Dilutions of 1: 10 are labeled by the Roman numeral X, and every time a 1:10 dilution of a material is made, a number gets tacked to the front of that X. So, a 1:1000 dilution would be designated as 3x, and a 1:1,000,000 would be labeled 6x. Dilutions of 1:100 are labeled by the Roman numeral C, and a dilution of 3C would indicate a 1:1,000,000 – for three consecutive 1:100 dilutions. There are homeopathic items currently on the market labeled as 30C. To have even one molecule of the original substance would require a container holding 1060 molecules of water, which would have to be 30 billion times the size of the Earth.
A popular homeopathic item on the shelves is Boiron’s oscillococcinum, sold as an alternative for treating flu-like symptoms. Preposterous as it sounds, 12 doses of oscillococcinum – active ingredient “Anas barbariae hepatis et cordis extractum 200CK” (extract of wild duck liver and heart) – diluted to 200C sells at Target for $19.95. (Ducks are considered a source of the flu, and since homeopathy teaches that “like cures like”, duck liver is expected to do the trick to cure the flu.) It has been supposedly diluted 100200 times, but it is not the duck liver itself that gives the oscillococcinum its power to fight the flu, the homeopath explains, it is the memory, the vital force, the energy of the duck liver imprinted on the lactose sugar pill. This sounds a bit like snake-oil dressed in a sugar coat. It makes little sense at all, even if duck liver were the best vital force enhancer in existence.
Spiritual Forces:
Not to say that spiritual forces do not play a role in health. The Bible indicates that they do. Jesus healed the woman with a spirit of infirmity in Luke 13, saying in verse 16, “And ought not this woman, being a daughter of Abraham, whom Satan hath bound, lo, these eighteen years, be loosed from this bond on the sabbath day?” In Mark 9:17-29, Jesus heals a young man with a spirit that has made the man deaf and dumb and has tried to destroy him since he was a child. Spiritual forces can certainly have an effect on health. Solomon even notes that one’s attitude can affect one’s health, saying in Proverbs 17:22 , “A merry heart doeth good like a medicine: but a broken spirit drieth the bones.”
Not all ailments can be cured by “positive thinking”, but a cheerful, hopeful outlook does help. This can even be seen in the placebo effect, in which people who receive what they think is medicine improve, even when there’s not medicine present. It is suspected that much of the “benefits” of homeopathy have been just this – the placebo effect, along with a combination of appropriate care, like getting plenty of rest, fluids, and good nutrition.
The difficulty with homeopathy is not in determining whether there is an untouchable vital force that these remedies help jump-start. The trick is for the seller of homeopathic products to explain which particular item’s memory is doing the jump-starting. Random dust particles made of skin bits and fly feces and mite eggs and mouse hair are able to settle in those super diluted vats at some point (unless homeopathic remedies are made in air-tight rooms by workers wearing hazmat suits), so why should the “vibrational energy” of the no-longer present duck liver molecules have any impact at all? Why does duck liver trump the vibrational energy of microscopic dried snot flakes or airborne bacteria – both often also involved in the flu?
The Studies:
Many studies have been done on homeopathic remedies, making the case that they do work. However, a 1990 article in Review of Epidemiology found 37 out of 40 randomized trials evaluating homeopathic treatment to have been badly designed, and of the three that were set up well, only one gave homeopathy a thumb’s up. The article’s authors concluded that homeopathic remedies had the same effectiveness as placebos. Again, in December 1996, the Homoeopathic Medicine Research Group (HMRG) finished an evaluation of controlled homeopathic treatment trials. The expert panel concluded that of 184 studies, only 17 were designed well enough to be taken seriously, and of those, none had a large enough sample base to say anything significant about whether homeopathy worked for specific illnesses and conditions.
Confronted with these facts, some believers will continue to promote homeopathic medicines. Certain sufferers swear by them, and they are free to spend their money buying remedies like Boiron’s oscillococcinum. However, before jumping into the latest medical fad – or medical philosophies that have survived 200 years – it is always wise to do hard homework (and sometimes to translate the “active ingredients” in pills before swallowing them).
An important meta-analysis published today in the prestigious British Journal of Psychiatry demonstrates that nearly 10% of mental health problems in women are directly attributable to abortion. ”Abortion and mental health: quantitative synthesis and analysis of research published 1995-2009,” by Priscilla Coleman of Bowling Green University, shows that women with an abortion history have an 81% increased risk of mental health problems and 155% increased risk of suicide. This meta-analysis combines 22 studies of 877,181 women, 163, 831 of whom have had abortions. A meta-analysis is an especially powerful type of study because it includes a large number of subjects, and by combining studies is much more reliable than a single study.
This review, which is larger than any study to date, contradicts the recent and biased and less systematic review by the American Psychological Association, which fails to find a relationship between mental health problems and abortion. The new meta-analysis also contradicts the stance of the American College of Obstetricians and Gynecologists (ACOG), which has been silent on the mental health impact of abortion in its official publications despite overwhelming evidence over the last two decades of abortion’s adverse effects.
The egregious cover-up of abortion complications is an aspect of “the abortion distortion.” Elites in charge of professional organizations actively suppress legitimate research on the harms of induced abortion because of political bias or worse. One of the most notorious examples of “the abortion distortion” was the revelation that Supreme Court Justice Elena Kagan actually wrote part of ACOG’s position statement on partial birth abortion while working as deputy assistant for domestic policy for Bill Clinton.
This new review in a prestigious psychiatry journal sheds important light on the mental health of women. For example, South Korea not only has had a major increase in suicide but also holds the world record for the highest rate of female suicide. This country is also called “the abortion paradise” because at least 43.7% of pregnancies end in abortion. Suicide of young women is also a significant public health problem in China, which compounds the harmful psychological impact of abortion by governmental policy of forced abortion. The most sobering finding in the Coleman review is found in the section on “Population Attributable Risk,” (PAR), in which the PAR for suicide was found to be 34.9%. PAR estimates the proportion of deaths in an entire population that could be prevented if the cause of death is eliminated (in this case abortion as the cause of suicide in women). By so powerfully linking abortion to mental health problems, the Coleman study helps us comprehend the magnitude of the damage done to entire nations by reckless, permissive abortion policies.
Mary L Davenport, MD, FACOG, is President, American Association of ProLife Obstetricians and Gynecologists www.aaplog.,org and Medical Director, Magnificat Maternal Health Program, www.mmhp.org
The National Academy of Sciences issued a press release on its study of studies of vaccines. It is already being used to bash the “anti-vaccine” crowd. For example, Ron Bailey, the non-libertarian libertarian who also believes in anthropogenic global warming and a global carbon tax, headlined his article on the piece, “For Pete’s Sake, Go Get Your Kids Vaccinated Already!”
And from the NAS’s own press release:
“With the start of the new school year, it’s time to ensure that children are up to date on their immunizations, making this report’s findings about the safety of these eight vaccines particularly timely,” said committee chair Ellen Wright Clayton, professor of pediatrics and law, and director, Center for Biomedical Ethics and Society, Vanderbilt University, Nashville, Tenn. “The findings should be reassuring to parents that few health problems are clearly connected to immunizations, and these effects occur relatively rarely. And repeated study has made clear that some health problems are not caused by vaccines.”
But do you know what the study actually concluded? Here is the money shot, from the press release’s penultimate paragraph.
“It did not examine information that would have allowed it to draw conclusions about the ratio of benefits to risks.”
Here is the list of “vaccine-related adverse effects” culled from the NAS press release.
Fever-triggered seizures
Brain inflammation
Brain swelling
Pneumonia
Hepatitis
Meningitis
Shingles
Chickenpox
Anaphylaxis (an allergic reaction)
Fainting
Inflammation of the shoulder
Joint pain
Oculo-respiratory syndrome characterized by conjunctivitis
Facial swelling
Mild respiratory symptoms
The NAS also concludes, “In many cases of suggested vaccine-related adverse outcomes, there is too little evidence, or the available evidence offers conflicting results or is otherwise inadequate to draw conclusions.”
Nowhere in the NAS press release did I find any numbers for the frequency of adverse effects – X effects out of Y vaccinations. But the leading sentence of the press release was this:
“An analysis of more than 1,000 research articles concluded that few health problems are caused by or clearly associated with vaccines.”
There you have it: “few.”
As the person, or parent of the person, getting the vaccine, I want to know two numbers for informed consent: (1) chances of dying or adverse effects with the vaccine and (2) chances of dying or adverse effects without the vaccine.
This NAS study quantified neither. For the first, it provided only qualitative values of “few” or “rarely.” In fact, it admitted that we cannot “draw conclusions about the ratio of benefits to risks” based on this study. Then why should this be comforting? Are the possibilities of pneumonia, hepatitis and meningitis comforting to you?
By the way, the adverse effect of chickenpox was a potential result of the vaccine against chickenpox.
Say it loud, say it proud: please pass the salt. All those people hectoring me all those years to cut back on salt have been pushing phony advice, according to a major new study. Sophie Borland in the UK Daily Mail:
Research involving nearly 6,500 people concluded that there was ‘no strong evidence’ that lowering levels in the diet reduced the risk of heart disease or premature death.
In fact it found that cutting back on salt actually raises the likelihood of death in some patients with heart problems.
The researchers from Exeter University say that the benefits of cutting back on salt may have been ‘overestimated’.
They also point out that there are other important lifestyle factors such as eating fruit, taking exercise, following a low-fat diet and not smoking which will also affect the health of an individual.
Frankly, I never believed that a substance my mindy, body, and palate craved, a substance it needs for life itself, could be all that bad. Food tastes better “well seasoned” (as they say on the cooking competition reality shows). Why would we be given this incentive if it were bad for us? Neithe God nor nature usually works that way. The imperial Chinese government financed itself in large part by a salt monopoly or salt tax, so vital is salt to survival. I love salty meals, salty snacks, and even salt water taffy.
I’ve lived through many food scares in my day, from eggs being bad for you, to alar, to coffee, and others I paid so little attention to I have forgotten them. The food scolds just don’t have that much credibility in my mind. Having done a doctorate in sociology, I am familiar with the ways in which statistical evidence-based studies can be designed and managed in such a way as to confirm the investigator’s presuppositions.
Germs. They’re on everything. Doorknobs. Faucet handles. The insides of hamster cages for children at McDonald’s. Municipalities chlorinate their water supplies, and dairy farmers pasteurize the milk from cows. Teachers regularly use Clorox wipes and supply their students with with Purell in an effort to slaughter unwanted microbes. Killers like cholera, typhoid and tuberculosis are no longer major problems in Western cities. Yet, in our obsession with making ourselves germ-free, we’ve forgotten that vast majority of bacteria in the world are beneficial. They’re not just good, they’re vital, and when we kill them off in our crusade against the harmful varieties, we leave ourselves open to different kinds of problems.
Bacteria are not evil. In fact, bacteria do a huge host of useful things from digesting our waste to making vitamins. Bacteria are a blessing, and life on Earth depends on them. Consider the following, which is just a short list:
Intestinal bacteria: Scientists have identified about 400 different species of bacteria living in our stomach and intestines. If we lived on a deserted island sans pasteurization, toxic chemicals, chlorine or antibiotics, we might have trillions of these little guys in our guts, doing the things they do best. Bacteria like bifidobacteria, lactobacilli, and Escherichia coli break down foods that we can’t and provide necessary vitamins for us as a result. What’s more, their presence in our digestive system hold down the growth of dangerous pathogens.
What! We all thought E. coli was a monster out to cause internal hemorrhaging and death. No. A few harmful E. coli strains get all the attention, but E coli is a common member of our intestinal flora and provides us with Vitamin K and B-complex vitamins. The harmful E. coli varieties were produced when viruses inserted their DNA into the E. coli genetic codes, making those particular bacterial strains dangerous for human consumption.
Anti-Cancer Protection: Bacteria like Clostridium acetobutylicum naturally produce sodium butyrate, which has anti-cancer characteristics. First, it lowers an enzyme called Cox-2, which has been found to cause pre-cancerous inflammation. Second, cancer cells reproduce rapidly because the gene that would force them to self-destruct has been “turned off”. The sodium butyrate turns that gene back on, and the cancer cells die.
Certain Lactobacillus casei strains improve the activity of Natural killer (NK) cells, helping the body’s natural ability to fight off cancer. NK cells in the immune system go around like Sheriff Matt Dillon, taking out cells that are cancerous or infected with a virus.
Streptococcus thermophilus has been credited with diminishing the small-bowel damage done to rats who had undergone chemotherapy. It also possesses anti-cancer and anti-tumor benefits and is a natural antibiotic.
Streptomyces parvulus naturally fights the spread of malignant tumors by producing the compound borrelidin. Borrelidin inhibits angiogenesis – the growth of new blood vessels from existing blood vessels. Angiogenesis is important for healing wounds, but it is also a key part of a tumor’s going malignant.
Nutrient Cycles in Nature One of the most important things that bacteria and other microorganisms do is recycle important elements. Different types of creatures need different forms of carbon, nitrogen, and oxygen. Bacteria are instrumental in the carbon cycle, the nitrogen cycle, photosynthesis and the release of oxygen into the air.
In the carbon cycle, photosynthetic bacteria “fix” CO2. That is, they take it out of the atmosphere and use it to build themselves. While feeding other creature up the food chain, cyanobacteria (and planktonic algae) also do the majority of the work of photosynthesis on Earth, taking in CO2 and releasing O2 into the air. Cyanobacteria and algae are responsible for at least 50 percent of the O2 production on the earth.
Other bacteria breakdown our garbage. Whether in sewage treatment or in compost or landfills, or in the decomposition of dead things in the woods, bacteria do the vital job of breaking things back down to their component parts, and releasing CO2 back into the air.
Bacteria are also vital for fixing nitrogen, taking N2 from the atmosphere, where it is abundant, and convert it to the form of NH3 (ammonia) which animals and plants can use. They replenish the nitrogen in the soil for plants that are unable to absorb the nitrogen they need from the air.
The cyanobacterium, Synechococcus, is an all-around useful organism responsible for about 25 percent of primary production in marine environments. It is also good at nitrogen fixation and oxygenic photosynthesis and is so involved in the carbon, nitrogen and oxygen cycles.
Fighting Bad Breath and Cavities: The beneficial bacteria Streptoccocus salivarius K12 strain produces a natural protein that stops the growth of the bacteria that makes your breath stink.
Some bacteria even fight cavities. S. salivarius M18 naturally destroys the hostile Streptococcus mutans bacteria and converts the urea in our saliva into ammonia. Ammonia is basic, and therefore neutralizes the lactic acid that eats holes in our tooth enamel. S. salivarius M18 also makes an enzyme that can dissolve the gooey dextran that holds plaque together.
Other Useful “Pests”: Bacteria aren’t alone in their usefulness. Mycorrhizal fungi have been recognized as beneficial to many plants, including agricultural crops like rice and potatoes. It lives in the roots, symbiotically helping plants absorb phosphate and increasing the plants’ ability to withstand drought and fight off pathogens.
Dr. Ian Sanders at the University of Lausanne, Switzerland has been working to develop strains of mycorrhizal fungi that can significantly increase crop yields while reducing the amount of phosphate fertilizers added to fields. Phosphate runoff into the water supply is one of the major agricultural impacts on local ecology, creating huge algae blooms in downstream water. The algae blooms absorb oxygen and other resources, killing off other natural wildlife, filling lakes and bays with killer green ooze. If farmers can use a little fungus to get that phosphate into agricultural crops instead of the water runoff, both farmers and local watersheds would have fewer headaches.
And The List Goes On: A host of bacteria are known to improve the immune system and reduce allergies, fight irritable bowel syndrome, digest cellulose in the guts of grazing animals, and keep ponds clean.
Despite all our science, we continue to experience a large number of illnesses, and allergies are more common today than ever. Perhaps our problem is not that our antibiotics are too weak. God knew what He was doing when He created bacteria in the first place. Perhaps the answer to our illnesses is not more Purell. Instead, maybe we just need to encourage our kids play in the dirt more often.
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