Melatonin Madness

'Bloody awesome': 

how melatonin is helping children fall asleep 

Many parents will be only too familiar with the problem of children tossing and turning for hours before they finally go to sleep. Rather than put up with it, a growing number of families are turning to prescribed melatonin to help children fall asleep. For many it’s a revelation ... 

Adults who have trouble getting to sleep or need to reset their body clocks to deal with jet lag or shift work have long sworn by melatonin, a synthetic version of the natural hormone that regulates your sleep rhythm. Now there’s enough evidence about safety and efficacy that doctors are prescribing it for children too, usually in low doses.

So said an article that appeared in today's Brisbane Times. As to whether it's safe for children, there has been no long term studies (18 to 24 months seem to have been the longest) so who knows? The pineal gland produces melatonin naturally so the idea of its long term administration to children is disturbing. Common sense suggests that some disturbance to the proper functioning of the pineal gland would result if this practice were to continue over a long period of time.

The headline atop this newspaper article however, presents the practice in a very positive light. This is yet another instance of mainstream media conniving with big pharma and big medicine to induce parents to purchase unnecessary medication for their children. In Australia, a prescription is necessary to purchase melatonin although in other countries it can be bought over the counter. It is regarded as a food supplement rather than a medication and so quality control and restrictions on its distribution are more lax.

The promotion of this supplement is purely for profit: doctors benefit because they need to write the script, pharmacists benefit by dispensing it and the manufacturers benefit by selling it to the pharmacists. Consider this glowing endorsement of Melatonin from a manufacturer:

Andrew Harb, general manager at wholesaler Medisca, said melatonin was a “godsend” for the whole family. One study done with children with autism showed children taking melatonin were getting to sleep half an hour earlier than those taking a placebo and this was measurably reducing stress for their parents.

It's a nice deal: induce autism via vaccinations and then buy Melatonin to combat some of the side effects. One is reminded of the similarly vaccine induced Attention Deficit Hyperactivity Disorder (ADHD) and the Ritalin that is prescribed to combat it. Hooking a child on Ritalin, Melatonin or whatever is a major goal of Big Pharma because it is likely to reap financial benefits for the lifetime of the individual.

Meanwhile, note the headline of this article:

Caesarean rates soar with doctors 

'less prepared to take risks'

At the midwifery expert had some telling comments to make on this shameful statistic and to disabuse those who think it has anything to do with doctors being "less prepared to take risks":

Professor Hannah Dahlen, a midwifery expert at Western Sydney University, said evidence suggested episiotomies were medically necessary in only about 10 per cent of cases – for example when the baby’s heart rate was at a critical level. “It’s not a minor operation. It causes people emotional distress. It causes them physical distress,” she said. “I haven’t done an episiotomy in 15 years and I’m still a practicing midwife. You don’t need to do them, except in rare circumstances.” Professor Dahlen said that private obstetricians in particular were encouraged to schedule more caesareans and inductions to avoid being called out every night of the week. She said obstetricians should be forced to declare their individual statistics “so we do identify the obstetricians with 90 per cent caesarean section rates – and they do exist in the country”.

How did things get to this point? Mothers are now given vaccinations while they are pregnant. The baby may well be induced or delivered by caesarean, and the vaccinations begin immediately after birth. The growing infant continues to be jabbed with a bewildering variety of vaccines for the next four years and beyond. It is likely to receive several unnecessary doses of antibiotics and other medications that are deemed necessary, including Melatonin. Yet, the reasons for the epidemics of Autism, Asthma, Allergy and ADHD remain a mystery supposedly to the medical profession. As Heather Fraser writes in her book "The Peanut Allergy Epidemic":

The mantra might well be:

VACCINATE 

MEDICATE

EDUCATE

One is reminded of the lyrics to "Mad World" that was sung originally by Gary Jules:

MAD WORLD 

All around me are familiar faces
Worn out places, worn out faces
Bright and early for their daily races
Going nowhere, going nowhere
Their tears are filling up their glasses
No expression, no expression
Hide my head, I want to drown my sorrow
No tomorrow, no tomorrow 

And I find it kinda funny, I find it kinda sad
The dreams in which I'm dying are the best I've ever had
I find it hard to tell you, I find it hard to take
When people run in circles it's a very very
Mad world, mad world 

Children waiting for the day, they feel good
Happy birthday, happy birthday
Made to feel the way that every child should
Sit and listen, sit and listen
Went to school and I was very nervous
No one knew me, no one knew me
Hello teacher, tell me what's my lesson
Look right through me, look right through me 

And I find it kinda funny, I find it kinda sad
The dreams in which I'm dying are the best I've ever had
I find it hard to tell you, I find it hard to take
When people run in circles it's a very very
Mad world, mad world
Enlarge your world
Mad world

And so children, weakened and damaged by vaccinations, fluoridation, medication, are sent off to school and that's another nightmare ... perhaps it's time for children to get their own back. If you don't laugh, you have to cry.

The Big Picture

I was watching a YouTube video about the recent mysterious limousine accident in the United States. In the comments, I read the following:

KILL TV. Get past the cognitive dissonance & simply accept that the establishment & so called "government" are nothing but a glorified crime syndicate. Then it all makes sense & eliminates the need to endlessly analyze & speculate about TV "news". Even when local tragedies are real, you've got to realize there's a reason why some events get massive attention & others in different places are never even mentioned on mainstream news.

Quite an insightful overview I thought. It's easy to get bogged down in delving into this or not suspicious event and lose sight of the big picture which essentially is that we live in a psychopathocracy (the rule of persons who lack a basic ability to empathise with others, to feel their pain or to feel guilty about harming them) or at best a kakistocracy (a system of government which is run by the worst, least qualified, or most unscrupulous citizens. The word was coined as early as the seventeenth century). 

I've written about psychopathocracy before: see this blog post (in May of 2008).

On further investigation, KILL TV turned out to be a new initiative aimed at bypassing Internet censorship (double click to enlarge image):

Here is a link to a video describing what the website is all about. At the moment, the founders are trying to collect US$150,000 to start things up. I've left my email address and will be notified of developments. 

Yesterday 108Morris108 made a reference to Chabad Lubavitch. I'd not heard of the group before so I had to do some investigation. I watched the following video that sheds some light on the influence that this group has in the world. Their influence is impressive.

Now that I'm aware of the group and their influence I can follow their activities more closely.

A Peanut Allergy Vaccine?

An article appeared in Medical News Today in April about a vaccine that is being developed in an attempt to suppress peanut allergies in children. It begins:

The Centre for Disease Control and Prevention (CDC) deem food allergies "a growing food safety and public health concern." 

They estimate that 4–6 percent of all children in the United States are affected by food allergies, though other reports reveal that percentage to be much higher. 

Of all food allergies, those to peanuts are the most common. 

Food allergies do not yet have a cure, and allergic reactions can prove fatal. In fact, the only way to "prevent" allergies is to stay away from the allergen.

 The article goes on to say that:

A new study, however, offers hope for people with peanut allergies, as a vaccine that has been two decades in the making has just been proven successful in mice. 

The research — which has now been published in the Journal of Allergy and Clinical Immunology — was carried out by scientists at the University of Michigan in Ann Arbor. They were led by Jessica O'Konek, a researcher at the university's Food Allergy Centre. 

O'Konek and team explain that food allergies are caused by a faulty immune reaction, wherein the body overproduces antibodies called Immunoglobulin E (IgE). 

This occurs as a result of a skewed immune response from immune cells called T helper 2 (Th2). In the new research, the scientists hypothesised that rerouting these Th2 cells might help to regulate the allergic immune response. 

To test this hypothesis, O'Konek and colleagues sensitised mice to peanut proteins so that their immune system produced IgE antibodies and their Th2 cells behaved in the same way that they would in an allergic reaction. 

When exposed to peanuts, the rodents thusly sensitised developed the same allergic symptoms, such as itchy skin and obstructed breathing, as humans. 

The researchers then administered the rodents one dose of the nasal vaccine per month for 3 months, and they measured their allergic response 2 weeks after the final dose. 

The vaccine successfully protected the rodents from exposure to peanuts, with tests showing decreased activity of the Th2 cells, as well as decreased IgE antibodies.

Food allergies have exploded in prevalence and incidence over the past two decades or so but there is seemingly no thought been given as to why this might be so. Could the reason be the damage caused to the immune systems of young children by vaccinations? The dramatic increase in the number of vaccines since 1960 is dramatically portrayed below (double click to enlarge):

A little investigation led me a book called The History of the Peanut Allergy Epidemic by Heather Fraser that was published in 2010. Here the review of the book that I came across. To quote directly from her book:

Medical literature has illustrated that the only means by which mass allergy has ever been created was by injection. With the pairing of the hypodermic needles and vaccines at the close of the 19th century, allergy and anaphylaxis made their explosive entry into the western world. Serum sickness from this new procedure was the first mass allergic phenomenon in history. Epidemic allergy to penicillin reminiscent of the ‘days of serum sickness’ emerged with its mass application following WWII. And with it came peanut allergy. Penicillin was administered using POB, the Romansky peanut oil formula. The continued use of refined peanut oil in drugs and vaccine adjuvants resulted in the slow growth of the allergy primarily in children until the late 1980s when its prevalence exploded. Extensive and sudden changes to childhood vaccination precipitated the new mass allergy to peanut.

Here is a recent video from January of 2018 in which she talks about the experiences that led her to write the book.

The influence of her book and her ongoing campaigning to make vaccination a choice seem to have had little effect on the medical establishment as this current push for a peanut allergy vaccine demonstrates. 

Well, it's depressing but hardly surprising. The following quotation from the same review is a good note to end on. 

Vaccines had proved to be very profitable for the pharmaceutical companies in the early years of the 20th century and, once they had been protected from litigation by those who believed they or their children had been damaged by vaccination by the Vaccine Injury Compensation Programme, the pharmaceutical companies ‘went back into’ vaccine manufacture with a will. 

But this time there was an added bonus. 

Although the connection between the two was never made, the increase in allergy across the board during the 1970s and 80s, including potentially fatal anaphylaxis, offered a whole new market to pharmaceutical companies and, indeed to the food industry. 

The development of the Epipen in the 1980s, delivering the only known antidote to an anaphylactic attack, proved to be a commercial goldmine while managing allergy presented endless opportunities for new drugs and new treatments 

Meanwhile, the ‘freefrom’ food industry (now, in 2010, worth billions of dollars world wide) was born – creating foods which would be free of peanuts, nuts, dairy, wheat and any of the any food products which were thought to cause allergy. 

I managed to get hold of Heather Fraser's book via the Internet Archive and I'm currently reading it online. Here is quote from the book:

The key phrase is "each society and every civilization creates its own diseases" struck a responsive chord in me. I thought of the Romans poisoning themselves with lead pipes and drinking vessels. The heavy metal poisoning causes by purgatives in the nineteenth century and now the autoimmune diseases exacerbated by vaccinations. I'll report further on the book once I finish it.

OVERDIAGNOSIS

It's was refreshing to read something this morning from the Medical Mafia, reported in the Brisbane Times, that makes some sense. It came from Australia's Chief Medical Officer Professor Brendan Murphy who said about overdiagnosis in the medical profession:

(it is) "a significant issue in all countries with advanced health systems. We know harm can come from overdiagnosis,” Professor Murphy said, from causing undue anxiety and labelling people with stigmatising disorders, to serious adverse effects from unnecessary aggressive or invasive treatments. There is no doubt we need some sort of approach to address it.

The Brisbane Times article goes on to say that:

Overdiagnosis is exposing healthy people to tests and treatments that are at best useless, and at worst trigger aggressive procedures with devastating side effects, a formidable alliance of peak doctors colleges, researchers, advocates and public health experts warned. 

The alliance - forged by the Wiser Healthcare research collaboration - is developing a world-first national action plan to curb overdiagnosis across the medical spectrum, from Attention Deficit Hyperactivity Disorder (ADHD) to cancer. Reversing the harms of too much medicine was becoming a healthcare priority, members of the emerging alliance wrote in the Medical Journal of Australia on Monday.

The Wiser Healthcare collaboration states that:

Wiser Healthcare is a research collaboration involving The University of Sydney, Bond University, Monash University and international colleagues. We investigate the cause and size of the problem and test new solutions, in the areas of cancer, cardiovascular disease and musculoskeletal disorders, with a particular focus on overdiagnosis caused by imaging (like CT scans and MRI scans), testing biomarkers (for example, blood tests like the Prostate Specific Antigen test), and genetic tests. Here you can find out about our plans, read our work, see the evidence about overdiagnosis, and get help to make decisions, whether you are a clinician, policymaker, or citizen considering your own healthcare.

There's clearly no plans to address the scourge of vaccinations but at least it's a start. What it will achieve actually however, remains to be seen. At least the issue is being discussed and advice given to prospective victims of overdiagnosis. Here is some advice that is offered:

Keeping it short 

Short questions that have been shown to improve the quality of information that doctors provide about treatment options: 

What are my options?
What are the possible benefits and harms of those options?
How likely are each of those benefits and harms to happen to me?
What will happen if I do nothing? 

Choosing Wisely 

Questions recommended by the Choosing Wisely organisation in Australia, to help avoid unnecessary tests and treatments: 

Do I really need this test, treatment or procedure?
What are the risks?
Are there simpler, safer options?
What happens if I don’t do anything?
What are the costs?

The Choosing Wisely organisation professes to be helping healthcare providers and consumers start important conversations about improving the quality of healthcare by eliminating unnecessary and sometimes harmful tests, treatments, and procedures. It is facilitated by NPS MEDICINEWISE that purports to be making Australia more medicinewise, through digital health and data insights, health professional education and reliable health information for consumers.

The authors of the MJA Perspective wrote:

Cultural beliefs that more tests and treatments were always better, financial incentives to diagnose and treat in the health system and increasingly sensitive diagnostic technologies detecting minor abnormalities were likely major drivers of overdiagnosis. 

Doctors’ cognitive biases and the fears that they might miss something, coupled with the public’s expectation that the clinicians should “do something” also fed overdiagnosis.

Of course, there will be immediate reactions from those medical areas that feel threatened:

Chief executive of Cancer Council Australia Sanchia Aranda said any moves to curb overdiagnosis must not undermine national screening programs and the benefits of early detection. 

 Here is the link to the MJA article and also a link to some information about Alan Cassels (his website at www.alancassels.com doesn't seem to be working). This is some information taken from the footnotes to a YouTube video which I just watched and which I've embedded below:

Alan Cassels has been immersed in pharmaceutical policy research and healthcare journalism for the past 23 years, mostly studying and writing about how prescription drugs are regulated, marketed, prescribed and used. His niche is in exposing the large gap between the marketing and the science around prescription drugs, medical screening and other forms of disease creation. His books include Selling Sickness: How the World’s Biggest Pharmaceutical Companies are Turning us All into Patients (co-written with Ray Moynihan), The ABCs of Disease Mongering: An Epidemic in 26 Letters, and Seeking Sickness: Medical Screening and the Misguided Hunt for Disease.