52 replies to this topic

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What Causes Disease?

For humans, as large complex animals, invasion and colonisation by infectious parasitic agents is the basic problem in life

Doctors Without Borders: Ebola virus is “totally out of control” in West Africa

Cases of enterovirus D68 (EV-D68) are exploding all across the country with nearly 20 states reporting dozens of cases. The outbreaks are growing so quickly that the Centers for Disease Control are lagging far behind announced cases.

Ebola has revealed that the CDC is a disaster

The CDC has been criticized for its careless response to the importation of Ebola into the U.S. via “index patient” Thomas Eric Duncan, but the last 24 hours have been instructive about how the CDC has responded to that criticism. Rather than functioning like a group of first responders in a crisis, the CDC much more closely resembles a federal bureaucracy managing a public relations disaster.

Incompetence and excuse making are fundamental traits which the public has become accustomed to seeing in federal agencies and the bureaucrats who manage them, but first responders addressing an acute crisis are supposed to behave differently. If the public does not believe the federal government can get their arms around this Ebola crisis, the public will start taking matters into their own hands.


http://hotair.com/ar...-is-a-disaster/

[Rogerdodger]

Doctors are people.
There are good ones and bad ones.
I know some very good ones. Not just good at doctoring, but they are very good, caring people.
I could list many examples.

But they also have to follow a protocol of best practices or could lose a lawsuit and even lose their license.
You might want to address the legal system to give them some leeway.

doctors want to be treated when they are near death (they want no CPR, no ventilator, no dialysis, no surgery, no chemotherapy, no feeding tube, no antibiotics, nothing except pain medicine)

Seeing mortality on a daily basis, they might be a bit more realistic about death and dying than a general public living in denial, refusing to let go and family members ready to sue somebody for their loss.

As far as the CDC, just like FEMA, VA etc... it's just another Big Government bureaucratic failure.

Edited by Rogerdodger, 16 October 2014 - 03:15 PM.

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​Joan Rivers‘ daughter has selected a powerhouse Manhattan ​law ​firm ​and will file a multimillion-dollar medical malpractice and wrongful death lawsuit against the endoscopy clinic where ​the legendary comedian lapsed into a coma ​during a routine throat procedure,


http://pagesix.com/2...7098.1414398848

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David Wootton argues, from the fifth century BC until the 1930s, doctors actually did more harm than good.

"For 2,400 years patients have believed that doctors were doing them good; for 2,300 years they were wrong." The unsparingly pessimistic view of the overwhelming failures of doctors is that of David Wootton, a professor of history who has written "Bad Medicine: Doctors Doing Harm Since Hippocrates"

Are we moving back to normal? - when the net effect of medical interventions is negative?

In "The Doctor's Dilemma," Bernard Shaw describes the world of medicine as it was in England in 1906 - which was a world where physicians and surgeons and apothecaries did - overall - more harm than good.

Then there was a period in the mid twentieth century - say 1925-1975 - when the numerous immunisations were developed for fatal diseases, surgery and anaesthesia greatly improved, and antibiotics, steroids, hormones and a host of other medications were discovered, and ECT was introduced and made safe in psychiatry.

But it seems more and more like that 25-75 era was just a blip in the long term trend in history, of medicine doing more net-harm than good - because nowadays there are very few real breakthroughs, and these are swamped by new treatments that are worse than old treatments, and treatments that always cause side effects (as all treatments do) with extremely little chance of benefit.

The difference is that now there are many effective and beneficial interventions 'on the books'; but due to the medicalisation of life and overtreatment of (non-) disease, these effective interventions are swamped - and their effect increasingly overwhelmed - by harmful interventions.


http://charltonteach...al-doctors.html

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British Medical Journal: Too Much Medicine Is Bad for Our Health

This is a David vs Goliath struggle. The forces that benefit from massive overdiagnosis can martial hundreds of billions of dollars a year to promote and protect it. The forces supporting rational medical decision making have access to just a few million dollars a year. The smart money is betting on the big bucks and the status quo.

The evidence is compelling that we in the developed countries (especially the US) are overtesting for disease, overdiagnosing it, and overtreating. Wasteful medical care of milder or nonexistent problems does more harm than good to the individual patient, diverts scarce medical resources away from those who really need them, and is an unsustainable drain on the economy.

The causes of medical excess are many and powerful. Here is a truncated list:

• With very few exceptions, the early screening and intervention touted by preventive medicine has turned out to be an oversold, dangerous, and expensive flop.

• Lowering the thresholds of disease definitions has identified diseases that don't exist. The dream was that getting there early would help prevent the development of severe heart problems, hypertension, diabetes, osteoporosis, and a score of other illnesses. The reality is that getting there too early misidentifies too many people who are not really at risk and then subjects them to needless and harmful tests and treatments

• The technology is out of hand. If we do enough CT scans we can find structural abnormalities in just about everyone. But most findings are incidental and don't have any real clinical meaning.

• Doctors have gotten into the habit of ordering huge batteries of laboratory tests and treating the results while ignoring what is best for this particular patient. There needs to be retraining of those already in practice, a change in how medicine is taught to new doctors, and a realignment of financial incentives to promote best care, not excessive care.

• Except for hospice care, it has become almost impossible to die in a dignified, humane, and cost effective way. Hospitals have become frenetic torture chambers that make dieing much worse than death and cost an obscene fortune.

• Tame and shame Big Pharma. Stop the direct to consumer advertising that is allowed only in the US and New Zealand. Prohibit all Pharma contributions to professional associations and consumer groups. Regulate and make transparent all the marketing ploys used to mislead doctors. Force the publication of all clinical research trial data.

• Recognize that all existing medical guidelines that define disease thresholds and make treatment recommendations are suspect. They have been developed by experts in each field who always have an intellectual conflict of interest (and often enough also have a financial conflict of interest) that biases them toward overdiagnosis and overtreatment in their pet area of research interest. New diagnostic standards are as dangerous as new drugs and need the same careful and independent vetting to tame unrealistic diagnostic enthusiasm.


http://www.huffingto..._b_3920844.html

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The big story this week is that butter is good for you, after all.

It all goes back to some now discredited ‘research’ conducted in the 1950s by an American dietician called Ancel Keys. Keys postulated that the key to a healthy diet was to pursue a “Mediterranean” lifestyle – high on olive oil, low on saturated animal fats.

Keys’s research was seized on eagerly by the Nanny State and their allies in the medical and food industries. From 1957 the American Heart Association began targeting animal fats as public enemy number one. In 1977, fat-avoidance became US government policy with the launch of the McGovern dietary guidelines. Britain later followed suit.

Not all experts in the field, however, were persuaded by the ‘evidence’ that animal fats were the problem. As early as 1977 Dr George Mann, in the New England Journal of Medicine, described the cholesterol myth as ‘the greatest scam in the history of medicine’.

In 1997, a massive trial of 350,000 men at high risk of heart disease found that drastically cutting down their cholesterol and saturated fat consumption did not improve their survival prospects. Worse, according to an earlier study in Finland, men who continued to follow a low-saturated-fat diet were twice as likely to die of heart disease as those who didn’t.

http://www.breitbart...l-warming-then/

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The Delusion of Health Care - Health doesn’t require care—illness does.

The most important task for the doctor may be to help people to deal as effectively as possible with the diseases that beset them. Note that nowhere in this scenario is “health” provided, maintained, or cared for. And anyone who claims to practice preventive medicine is either a charlatan or a fool.

A disease is a physical and/or biochemical alteration that causes one or more bodily organs or organ systems to malfunction. Some diseases can be cured but hardly any can be prevented. Effective prevention has only been achieved with some of the infectious diseases and this has been accomplished largely through public health measures such as provision of clean water, improved waste treatment and disposal, chemical eradication of insects that carry disease, etc. Antibiotics and vaccinations have also played important roles in this regard.

The problem is that, aside from the infectious diseases, very little is known about the causation of disease. This is especially true for the ubiquitous degenerative diseases that afflict all of us as we grow older—predominantly cancer and atherosclerosis with the latter being the chief underlying cause of heart attacks and strokes.

Everyone would like to think they have some control over their health and that “clean living” should be rewarded. It would be nice if wishing could make it so. But, unfortunately, there is no evidence that passes scientific muster linking good health to either diet or exercise.

That’s not to say that a sensible diet and a reasonable amount of exercise can’t make people feel better. They can. But there just isn’t any scientifically credible evidence that they can prevent disease nor is there any biologically plausible mechanism by which they might do so. Unfortunately the belief that lifestyle alteration can prevent disease provides a pseudoscientific rationale for totalitarian regulation of individual choice by the government and the hordes of busybodies who yearn to control the behavior of others.

http://junkscience.c...are/#more-68659

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How Choose to Doctors Die

It’s Not Like the Rest of Us, But It Should Be

Almost all medical professionals have seen what we call “futile care” being performed on people. That’s when doctors bring the cutting edge of technology to bear on a grievously ill person near the end of life. The patient will get cut open, perforated with tubes, hooked up to machines, and assaulted with drugs. All of this occurs in the Intensive Care Unit at a cost of tens of thousands of dollars a day. What it buys is misery we would not inflict on a terrorist. I cannot count the number of times fellow physicians have told me, in words that vary only slightly, “Promise me if you find me like this that you’ll kill me.”

Antibiotics extend the suffering of the dying.

Throughout history, death has seldom been dignified or pleasant for humans. The main causes of death in later life have been infectious diseases, starvation, predation/ poisoning and (especially for men) violence and accidents.

The single most important reason why modern people survive for so much longer than in the past is antibiotics. These (and the related antiviral and anti-fungal drugs; also a range of hygienic practices involving antiseptics and disinfectants) mean that humans can survive for many months or years even when very sick, e.g. suffering from advanced cancer or advanced degenerative diseases (such as dementia, Parkinson's disease, strokes and heart disease).

If you are chronically ill or old and want to avoid a prolonged twilight existence of increasing dependency but regard the idea of assisted suicide/ assisted death/ euthanasia with abhorrence; then there are two main things which you should consider.

1. The first and most important is completely to avoid using antibiotics, antivirals, antifungals, antiseptics and the like.

Under ‘natural’ conditions, germs are going to be the commonest cause of death in ill humans, and infection will cut short prolonged sickness and helplessness.

Since everyone will die sooner or later of something or another, we need to remember that preventing one kind of death now, merely means ensuring another kind of death later - and perhaps a much nastier death.

2. Do not use any heroic life-saving measures such as cardioversion/ defibrilliation, ventilation or intensive therapy.


http://charltonteach...-and-terry.html

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In cancer science, many "discoveries" don't hold up

During a decade as head of global cancer research at Amgen, C. Glenn Begley identified 53 "landmark" publications -- papers in top journals, from reputable labs -- for his team to reproduce. Begley sought to double-check the findings before trying to build on them for drug development.
Result: 47 of the 53 could not be replicated. He described his findings in a commentary piece published on Wednesday in the journal Nature.

Some authors required the Amgen scientists sign a confidentiality agreement barring them from disclosing data at odds with the original findings. "The world will never know" which 47 studies -- many of them highly cited -- are apparently wrong, Begley said.

Part way through his project to reproduce promising studies, Begley met for breakfast at a cancer conference with the lead scientist of one of the problematic studies.
"We went through the paper line by line, figure by figure," said Begley. "I explained that we re-did their experiment 50 times and never got their result. He said they'd done it six times and got this result once, but put it in the paper because it made the best story. It's very disillusioning."

Scientists in the United States spend $28 billion each year on basic biomedical research that cannot be repeated successfully. That is the conclusion of a study published on 9 June in PLoS Biology that attempts to quantify the causes, and costs, of irreproducibility.

Concerns about reproducibility in biomedical research have increased over the past decade, partly in response to a 2005 study by Ioannidis that found scientific journals to be biased towards publishing flashy, positive results. And researchers at pharmaceutical companies have reported that their attempts to replicate the conclusions of peer-reviewed papers fail at rates upwards of 75%


http://www.nature.co...d=NEWS-20150611

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What Causes Disease?
For humans, as large complex animals, invasion and colonisation by infectious parasitic agents is the basic problem in life

For example, it is likely that the mid-twentieth century epidemic of heart disease was caused by some infectious agent - not known;

As well as the damage from micro-organisms and parasites, there are problems with the body's 'immune' reactions to these invaders - and these probably cause another whole set of 'autoimmune' diseases; which may include eczema, asthma, rheumatoid arthritis

What about Diet?

It seems that humans can live a full lifespan on a huge range of diets, so long as the food does not contain too much poisonous or infectious stuff.

The most striking thing about diet is how little dietary components matter to life expectancy, so long as there is enough food.


http://charltonteach...s-of-thing.html

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• Lyme disease is one of the fastest growing illnesses in the Western World
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• 300,000 cases a year are diagnosed in the US; 65,000 a year in Europe

 

Humans can become infected after being bitten by an infected tick. 

However, as Ixodes ticks can also transmit other bacteria and viruses, it can be hard to diagnose Lyme disease.

This is because it is one possible illness among the potentially large number of infections that may have been contracted as a result of the tick bite, meaning it often goes untreated.

But it’s not just ticks we have to worry about. Lice, fleas, and mosquitoes have also been found to contain Borrelia. 

Worrying, Borrelia bacteria may also be transmitted from person to person through saliva, organ transplants, blood transfusions, sexual contact or breast milk. 

It has also been suggested that Lyme disease could be transferred to a foetus via the placenta, however this has yet to be proven.

 

 

 

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