A couple of weeks ago, I wrote carefully to you all, explain the distortions of studies which ignored the “sick user” effect. It seems like more people are dying of a therapy, whereas in fact they are taking the therapy because they already have a problem.

This latest study (Oct 10^th 2011) ignored it royally and came to a disastrous conclusion. You might think they INTENDED to make vitamin and mineral substances look bad!

At the very least, it’s a childish conclusion.

In women aged 55 to 69 years, several widely used dietary vitamin and mineral supplements, especially supplemental iron, may be associated with increased risk for death, according to data from the Iowa Women’s Health Study, published in October 10 2011 issue of the Archives of Internal Medicine.

Not all “vitamins” were bad, but several, it is claimed, were: notably multivitamins, vitamins B₆, and folic acid, as well as minerals iron, magnesium, zinc, and copper.

Self-reported use of dietary supplements increased substantially between 1986 and 2004. In addition, supplement users had a higher educational level, were more physically active, and were more likely to use estrogen replacement therapy.

A total of 15,594 deaths were reported up to December 31, 2008, representing about 40% of the initial participants. The use of multivitamins overall was associated with 2.4% increased absolute risk for death, it said.

Vitamin B₆, folic acid, iron, magnesium, and zinc were associated with about a 3% to 6% increased risk for death, whereas copper was associated with an 18.0% increased risk for total mortality when compared with corresponding nonuse.

In contrast, use of calcium was inversely related to risk for death (hazard ratio, 0.91; 95% confidence interval, 0.88 – 0.94; absolute risk reduction, 3.8%).

“Although we cannot rule out benefits of supplements, such as improved quality of life, our study raises a concern regarding their long-term safety,” the authors add.

In a related editorial, it was claimed that the current study adds “to the growing evidence demonstrating that certain antioxidant supplements, such as vitamin E, vitamin A, and beta-carotene, can be harmful.”

In fact there is no such evidence: just the constantly raked over fiasco of the 2007 JAMA study. It purported to find that antioxidants were not only ineffective but were actually dangerous and caused increased deaths. The press were on it straight away, of course, hooting that supplements were likely to kill you.

What was fatally flawed about this study was that the researchers, for some unknown reason in defiance of logic, excluded all studies where no deaths took place. What? It’s a way of saying “we’ll exclude every study that showed supplements and antioxidants were quite safe”.

Do you smell a rat? I do.

In any case, this silly current study is way out of step with tens of thousands of papers pointing to the many health and longevity benefits of supplementation. These too are never referred to. It’s as if they conveniently didn’t exist.

ONE WORD OF CAUTION: Iron is definitely dangerous to some people. Those with iron overload syndrome, a common but rarely diagnosed condition, face rapid death due to fulminating bacterial infections. Their immune system is powered down by iron (genes for iron overload affect about 40% of the population).

This study was partially supported by the National Cancer Institute and the Academy of Finland, the Finnish Cultural Foundation, and the Fulbright program’s Research Grant for a Junior Scholar. One study author is an unpaid member of the Scientific Advisory Board of the California Walnut Commission. The other authors and editorialists have disclosed no relevant financial relationships.

Arch Intern Med. 2011;171:1625-1634.

There are no known shark viruses!

Now attention has focused on a possible reason: squalamine, a compound unique to sharks. It has proved to be a promising treatment for hepatitis and other viral diseases, researchers say.

Squalamine has not yet been tested as an antiviral agent in humans, but it has been given to hundreds of people in clinical trials designed to test its usefulness for other conditions.

Georgetown University Medical Center researcher Michael Zasloff, MD, PhD, and colleagues first discovered squalamine almost two decades ago while studying sharks in hopes of finding new, naturally occurring antibiotic agents.

Now squalamine is made synthetically, without needing to kill sharks.

New research by Zasloff has confirmed that it had “unambiguous” activity against viruses that attack cells in the liver and blood, including those that cause hepatitis B, C, and D, yellow fever and dengue fever.

The study appears online in the journal PNAS Early Edition.

How Does It Work?

Actually, it’s very interesting: squalamine does something no other compound can: it changes the electrical balance within cells, eliminating certain positively charged proteins that are bound to the negatively charged surface of the cells’ inner linings. That helps protect the cells that line the liver and blood vessels from infection, Zasloff says.

The result is that squalamine acts fast to stop viral replication by clearing the body of the invading virus within hours.

Because it works by making the host tissue less receptive to infection instead of directly targeting the virus, viral resistance may not be an issue.

Let’s hope this idea of the soil not the seed catches on elsewhere in medicine, eh?

Is Squalamine Safe?

Not necessarily. Reported side effects were few but electrical potential in cells is a vital part of life. Indeed, it is the definition of life: cells without electrical potential are dead. We are programmed at a basic level to maintain a gradient of electric charge over our cell membranes.

So it is very surprising that there wasn’t significant toxicity with this compound.

[REFERENCE: Zasloff, M. PNAS Early Edition, published online Sept. 19, 2011]

Pick’s disease, is a rare neurodegenerative disease that causes progressive destruction of nerve cells in the brain. Symptoms include loss of speech (aphasia), and dementia. The disease progresses and patients often die within two to ten years.

A defining characteristic of the disease is build up of tau proteins in neurons, accumulating into silver-staining, spherical aggregations known as “Pick bodies”, after named after Arnold Pick, a professor of psychiatry from the University of Prague who first discovered and described the disease in 1892.

The symptoms of Pick’s disease include difficulty in speech and thinking, behavioral changes, impaired regulation of social conduct (e.g. breaches of etiquette, tactlessness, dis-inhibition), passivity, inertia, over-activity, pacing and wandering. The changes in personality allow doctors to distinguish between Pick’s disease and Alzheimer’s disease.

Nobody knows the real cause but inflammation accelerates degenerative change, for sure. I never had a case but I did have some Shy Drager’s, another kind of miserable neurodegenerative condition (but worse, because the whole body is involved).

What I suggest here is good for Alzheimer’s, motor neurone disease, ALS, Pick’s and Shy Drager.

The first two are crucial:

1. IV glutathione (has to be IV). See David Perlmutter’s site on this: http://www.brainrecovery.com
2. Hericium erinaceus mushroom. It has a powerful nerve growth factor (grows new neurones).

Also remove inflammatory foods of all kinds, as described in my book DIET WISE. (http://www.dietwisebook.com) This is essential and I have had more “miracle” turnarounds from this one thing than any other medical treatment I know—bar NONE.

Oil is good, as Joanne found with the coconut oil. Omega-3s quell inflammation and you must stop inflammation in this person’s body as far as you can. Read Udo Erasmus’s book; it’s as good as any, even though he’s not an MD.

Wobenzym is good for quenching inflammation too. Wobenzym, as its name suggests, is an enzyme formula, brilliant at killing inflammation and digesting and mopping up the metabolites of that. It has uses, even in cancer.

If ever I start to fall apart (God forbid!), this page contains what I want done on me, whether it’s Alzheimer’s, Pick’s, Shy Drager etc.!

That’s DANGEROUS in my book (hospitals are the last place you want to be).

So they’ve withdrawn flu vaccine recommendations for kids, right?

Not likely: there’s money in them thar hills! You think out of your crazy mind that they would let go of a cash cow, just because it hurts kids and does not fulfill it’s commercial claims? No way.

Enough sarcasm. What’s the calm, scientific position?

In a paper at the at the 105th International Conference of the American Thoracic Society in San Diego (May 19, 2009), research following 263 children over eight consecutive flu seasons was presented, testing whether flu vaccine was effective in reducing the number of hospitalizations. The children were evaluated at the Mayo Clinic in Minnesota. Each child was from six months to 18 years of age and each had had laboratory-confirmed influenza, between 1996 to 2006.

The investigators determined who had and had not received the flu vaccine and who did and did not require hospitalization. Records were reviewed for each subject with influenza-related illness for flu vaccination preceding the illness and hospitalization during that illness. There was especial interest in the status of children with asthma.

They found that children who had received the flu vaccine had three times the risk of hospitalization, as compared to children who had not received the vaccine.

Moreover, in asthmatic children, there was a significantly higher risk of hospitalization in subjects who received the TIV, as compared to those who did not (p= 0.006). TIV vaccine (trivalent inactivated flu vaccine) has unknown effects on asthmatics.

But all’s well in the accounting department; we can ignore these inconvenient facts, according to Avni Joshi, M.D., of the Mayo Clinic in Rochester, MN. “This study was aimed at evaluating the effectiveness of the TIV in children overall, as well as the children with asthma, to prevent influenza-related hospitalization.”

“While these findings do raise questions about the efficacy of the vaccine, they do not in fact implicate it as a cause of hospitalizations,” said Dr. Joshi. “More studies are needed to assess not only the immunogenicity, but also the efficacy of different influenza vaccines in asthmatic subjects.”

So, the usual cant of “more studies needed”, giving the manufacturers years more of profits.

Meantime, the CDC’s Advisory Committee on Immunization Practices (ACIP) and the American Academy of Pediatrics (AAP) continue to recommend that you put your child at TRIPLE THE RISK by stupid and worthless flu vaccines. The National Asthma Education and Prevention Program (3rd revision) is right up there with the clowns and criminals, recommending annual flu vaccination of asthmatic children older than six months.

Ooops, back to the sarcasm again… Sorry!

Well, predictably, that set off a cascade of pseudo-science, clinging to the old beliefs. There was no counter-science; just opinions from die-hards. But I’m sharing this with you, just to show how hard and furious these fights are, with truth being the first casualty of war, as the old saying goes.

What is so wrong is the PRETENSE of science that is used to jack up one person or another’s opinion. In this case a couple of toadies came forward with the necessary hatchet-job. In a Comment published in the July 30, 2011 issue of the Lancet and the press release that accompanied it, Dr Feng J He (Queen Mary University, London, UK) and Dr Graham A MacGregor (Wolfson Institute of Preventive Medicine, Barts, London, UK) claim that the pro-salt study “reflect poorly on the reputation of the Cochrane Library and the authors.”

You kidding me? The science must be wrong and the facts withdrawn because it would reflect badly on someone else’s reputation? What kind of science is that?

It’s not science. And notice that, this is how these things work: they did NOT reply to the journal that published the Belgian study (JAMA). Instead they went to the press and another rival journal to stick in their blow for ignorance.

This is bad protocol and not the way true science is conducted. Debate is OK (up to a point) but not running rings round somebody and getting pals in the media to stab your rival in the back! Shame, shame, you British doctors: that’s NOT cricket, bedamn! Waterloo, playing fields of Eton School, and all that…

The point about what the new study found was that it was LONG-TERM; all previous studies supposedly telling us salt was bad for us looked at no more than days or weeks and found that salt raised blood pressure. No previous study, to my knowledge, ever looked at whether long-term salt increased mortality.

So the Belgian study was a myth buster; but the myth won’t go away: it’s cemented in by pseudo-science and opinion.

In fact doctors He and MacGregor “reanalyzed” the same data but combined the people with no hypertension and those with raised blood pressure. They also omitted the heart-failure trial group.

Sounds like straightforward massaging of figures, to get the result you desire!

Call that science? I don’t.

MacGregor uses typical methods of obfuscating. He attacks the quality of the study, but offers little to support his assertion. He makes sweeping claims without supporting them. He then falls back on one of the grand standards for those who don’t really have good evidence to support their contentions: They make clear that their view is the popular one.

So would it surprise you to know that the salt industry was in there somewhere? Of course not!

Asked why their comment was sent to the Lancet rather than one of the two publications in which the original Belgian paper was published, MacGregor cited the need for a swift, high-profile response.

“Obviously this is somewhat urgent–this caused headline news around the world, and the [salt-industry trade association] SALT Institute has a huge amount on its website about this,” he said. “We wanted to get this correction in [print] very quickly and get it some publicity, because it’s obviously totally wrong to claim salt reduction is not beneficial.”

Doctors He and MacGregor declare they have no conflicts of interest (except an addiction to B*S* perhaps?)

I couldn’t believe my eyes when I read this! I know that here in the USA doctors go totally overboard on ordering lab tests. It’s called “defensive medicine”, meaning they do it to avoid getting sued for negligence, not because these tests are necessary half the time.

The US is a country that is driven by greedy, predatory lawyers. Any doctor who even says hello to another human being is at risk of being sued (it’s happened). There is a joke here that lawyers are not so bad on the whole; it’s just 98% of them getting the other 2% a bad name…

But when this defensive medicine has become so crazy they are taking so much blood from the patient for lab work that anemia results… What?

It’s true, apparently. According to a study in the Aug. 8 online edition of the Archives of Internal Medicine, one in five patients who are hospitalized for heart attacks develop moderate to severe anemia because so much of their blood is drawn for routine diagnostic tests! One in five!

So is that a problem? You bet. A patient already debilitated is losing the most vital life force fluid we have; the result is very predictable: patients feel AWFUL and mortality is increased. Lab tests are KILLING patients. That’s when is stops being a joke.

People with anemia have too-low numbers of the red blood cells that carry critical oxygen to different parts of the body. These patients already have poor blood perfusion, because the primary pump (the heart) is malfunctioning… As I said, the consequence is predictable.

The study authors looked at electronic medical records for almost 18,000 patients who’d had a heart attack at one of 57 U.S. hospitals. While all had normal hemoglobin levels when they were admitted, 20% developed moderate-to-severe anemia by the time they left the hospital.

The risk of anemia rose 18% for each 50 milliliters (mL) drawn. There were also differences in the amount of blood drawn from hospital to hospital.

The study did NOT look at whether the tests were appropriate or needed, only how much blood was drawn. The researchers could not therefore say the tests were unnecessary.

But it all goes as fuel to one of my number one live-longer dictums: if you want a long and happy life, STAY AWAY FROM DOCTORS!

[Aug. 8, 2011, Archives of Internal Medicine, online]

Now a scientific test is called SNOT and I’m sure it’s no coincidence! It stands for the modified Sinonasal Outcome Test-16 (SNOT-16) is used as a tool to evaluate the efficacy of treatments in adults with acute rhinosinusitis (snotty nose).

Apparently it works well as an assessment! At least, according to the results of a randomized controlled trial reported in the August issue of Archives of Otolaryngology–Head and Neck Surgery.

SNOT-16 measures symptoms (e.g. headache, cough, and nasal obstruction) and limiting functional impairment (e.g., fatigue, difficulty sleeping, and concentrating).

Without an effective measure of success, otolaryngologists are more or less working blind, so this validation of SNOT-16 is important for them.

Spanning 10 community practices in St. Louis, Missouri, a randomized controlled trial was performed to examine the effects of antibiotic treatment of acute rhinosinusitis among 166 adults diagnosed clinically by standardized criteria. Age range was 18 to 70 years; 36% were men, and 78% were white.

At baseline, participants completed the modified SNOT-16 by both face-to-face and telephone interviews. At 3, 7, and 10 days, the modified SNOT-16 was completed by telephone interview only.

The SNOT-16 was easy to use and completed in less than 5 minutes.

Pass me a handkerchief, I think I’m going to sneeze! That’s also a valid way of clearing the snot, I think!

[Arch Otolaryngol Head Neck Surg. 2011;137:792-797]

We know—or we think of—orthodox medicine as pretty clueless, right? We know that; but orthodox doctors don’t.

In fact, the truth is, some do. I was once very much part of orthodoxy (we,, for about 3 years!), before I jumped the fence. But there are good and true doctors still inside the fence, trying to make it right. I honor them and you should too.

They stick it out, through thick and thin, knowing that the vast majority of their colleagues are clueless, don’t care and don’t WANT to know any better (that’s why I walked out on it all).

So how often does medical consensus turn out to be wrong?

In a quote that has become part of medical school orientations everywhere, David Sackett, often referred to as the “father of evidence-based medicine,” once famously said to medical students and doctors:

Half of what you’ll learn in medical school will be shown to be either dead wrong or out of date within five years of your graduation; the trouble is that nobody can tell you which half–so the most important thing to learn is how to learn on your own.

Sackett, to be sure, was making an intentionally wild estimate when he said “half.” A fascinating study out today in the Archives of Internal Medicine gives a clue as to the real figure. It’s not as high as 50% but it is SHOCKING because it’s proven, not just an opinion.

The authors of the study, from Northwestern and the University of Chicago, looked at a year’s worth of studies in the New England Journal of Medicine (NEJM) that “made some claim with respect to a medical practice.” There were 124 such studies, and 16 — that’s 13 percent, or about one in 8 — constituted reversals.

A reversal meant that it was no longer considered proper or safe to do what was once “correct” medicine. Doctors had reversed their position, from what was stated to be scientific, evidenced-based  medicine (you know, the kind of crap they like to beat alternative practitioners over the head for not having!)

It’s almost like Russian roulette, with a 1:6 chance of getting it “wrong” (dead)!

As these authors note:

Reversals included medical therapies, invasive procedures and screening tests. In several cases, current guidelines were contradicted by the study in question, in other words a complete 180 degrees turnaround.

The results mean that a good chunk of current medical practice is likely to be reversed over time. And although that doesn’t mean all of those original papers should be retracted (they were probably fine at the time), it does mean doctors must be far more humble about what they consider the “correct” thing to do.

In the current state of arrogance, you would think it’s all covered; there is an answer (or a drug) for everything; it all makes sense. But then that would mean patients never died, wouldn’t it?

The reality is that for a long time, there has been a pervasive problem in modern medicine.  Namely, that new technologies and therapies are being adopted, without clear evidence that they work. This is often under extreme pressure—or outright lies—from the pharmaceutical industry and its tricky spokesmen. Then later, the truth us allowed to emerge and it was being done wrong all along. But at whose expense? The patients’ of course.

Often these corrections are very slow in coming; meanwhile Big Pharma or the extensively wealthy surgeons and other profiteers, go on milking the system, fully aware it’s all wrong. But disguising their misfeasance under the banner of “accepted practice” or “evidence based” or, more usually, just consensus view.

The latter is not very comforting, of course. If you spent time in jails you would also find people there with a consensus view that murder and robbery were acceptable practice (evidence-based even?)

All this violates the fundamental rule of good medicine, which is ‘first do no harm’.  First, there is harm to the patients who underwent the therapy during the years it fell in favor, and second, the harm to future patients until there is a change in practice. And lastly, there are the diffuse harms, such as loss of trust in the medical system.

So how long do these kinds of reversals typically take?

No one so far has looked at how long practices survive before they are ‘reversed.’  The authors of this study argued that it has changed over the years, and reversal probably happens faster now (though still pretty slow).

Then there is the fact that, even when a contradictory paper has shown clearly that modern methods are damaging, there is STILL a delay in its acceptance and adopting new methods. Up to a decade, according to John Ioannidis (professor and chairman at the Department of Hygiene and Epidemiology, University of Ioannina School of Medicine as well as tenured adjunct professor at Tufts University School of Medicine and Professor of Medicine and Director of the Stanford Prevention Research Center at Stanford University School of Medicine). He published a paper called Persistence of Contradicted Claims in the Literature.

10 Years is totally unacceptable.

Of course, it doesn’t mean doctors who use evidence that is later shown to be wrong have bad intentions. (In fact, as long as they’re using evidence, they’re ahead of some physicians.)

SOURCES:

[The Frequency of Medical Reversal, Arch Intern Med. 2011;0(2011):archinternmed.2011.295v1-2.]

Arch Intern Med. Published online July 11, 2011. doi:10.1001/archinternmed.2011.295

See also the Retraction Watch page here:

http://retractionwatch.wordpress.com/2011/07/11/so-how-often-does-medical-consensus-turn-out-to-be-wrong/#more-3192

It’s a vaccine designed to immunize a person against the “high” that is induced by heroin. Taking the drug will no longer help the addict get their accustomed thrill and so, it is hoped, he or she will quit the habit relatively easily.

See, vaccines work; not all—but you’d think when reading the tirades by ignorant and medically untrained fools on the Internet that all vaccines were evil and didn’t work any way.

I’ve said many times that I am happy there is a rabies vaccine, while living in the world. For its development Louis Pasteur deserves credit and acclaim for all time. Those who rant against his supposed cupidity are themselves twisted, jealous and big time liars.

The idea of a vaccine, as Pasteur showed, is that if you “inoculate” (usually means injected but not necessarily) a person or any other immune-competent animal with an antigen substance, the body can often be persuaded to produce an antibody, which will destroy it.

So if you choose wisely, like a killed off form of a deadly pathogen, the body produces the antibody anyway, so when the live pathogen happens along, the body is ready armed with a known antibody in its armoury.

All well in theory; but not nearly so easy in life. But on the whole it’s a good strategy—a bit like homeopathy, actually, where you use a little of the bad stuff to teach the body to deal with it and survive.

In holistic medicine, a little goes a long way. The overall principle is that less is more!

The only trouble with vaccines is the filthy manufacturing practices, that sometime make the vaccine more dangerous than the disease. But that’s another story.

Back to the heroin vaccine…

It’s been produced at Scripps Research Institute, California and appears very effective. Scripps has already been working on vaccines to block addiction to tobacco and cocaine.

But the new heroin vaccine appears much more powerful. It targets both heroin and a chemical produced by its breakdown.

Addicted rats that were given the vaccine were less likely to self-administer more heroin, in contrast to the ones that did not get the vaccine (the “control” rats). All of the control rats continued pressing levers to get more heroin, the investigators found.

The findings were released online in advance of print publication in the Journal of Medicinal Chemistry.

The question remains: will it work in humans? We don’t know yet.

[SOURCE: The Scripps Research Institute, news release, July 20, 2011]

There is an illogical supposition that, because foods feed and nourish us, therefore they must all be safe. But I have seen foods cripple people, kill them early, make life tragically miserable, cause chronic pain and disease, paralysis, destroy mental function, make people violent and ruin social skills, to name just a few problems.

And I’m not talking about junk foods: I’m talking about wholefoods, fresh and organically grown.

Neither is this just a matter of food allergies, though that’s what we used to call it. Today we know that a lot of it is genetic incompatibility to certain foods. Due to some tiny variation in a gene, the person cannot digest and utilize the food safely like the rest of us: it becomes toxic to them. This can apply apply to ANY food and I am often asked with amazement about the lady who had severe colitis for 22 years, just because of an intolerance of lettuce. Once she gave up the “healthy” salads, she made a full recovery!

But I have 10,000s of cases like that. It’s an almost unversal phenomenon; it’s just that people are not being told what to look for or what to do.

The trouble is: most people who are being made sick by foods don’t even realize it! That’s where “Diet Wise” comes in…

Authors who publish set diet plans (The Blood Group Diet, The Metabolic Type Diet, The South Beach Diet, etc.) are missing an important point which is that NO set plan is–or could be–right for everyone. Some might be suited but others will be made very ill on the same plan and be forced to abandon it, because they react adversely to the recommended foods.

All the rave testimonials which are collected and published are, naturally, from those who are suited by the allowed foods. Those who are made sick are never published–of course! That would affect the author’s royalties!

The unsuspecting public are tricked into believing such-and-such a diet is good (“Look at the results people are getting!”), the buy the book; sales soar; it becomes a “successful diet”; therefore more people buy it and the nonsense continues.

So many millions of these diet books are sold, it’s an almost overwhelming task to try to educate people to the truth. Even health practitioners don’t seem to understand it at all. But duty requires me to try valiantly and I shalln’t give up on spreading the important message as widely as I can.

If you want to learn why I think choosing the right foods is important, how you do it, and why it is INTELLIGENT to do so, get yourself a copy of “Diet Wise”, right now ($19.95 plus shipping).

The content won’t change much at all, even with the new title, so you won’t be missing out!