Death by Doctors

The word "iatrogenic" means "relating to illness caused by medical examination or treatment". Some medical "professionals" might argue that such a word describes an impossible scenario because medical interventions can never cause harm. However, let's look at the following piece of history:

Ignaz Semmelweis was a Hungarian physician who lived in the 19th century and is now known for his work on the importance of handwashing in preventing the spread of infectious diseases.

In the mid-1800s, Semmelweis was working at a hospital in Vienna where he noticed that women were dying from childbed fever at a much higher rate in the maternity ward where doctors and medical students worked, compared to the ward where midwives worked. He proposed that this was due to doctors and medical students performing autopsies and then going to deliver babies without washing their hands, which was transferring infectious material to the women.

However, his ideas were met with ridicule and opposition from the medical community at the time, and he was eventually committed to an insane asylum, where he died at the age of 47. It was not until many years later, after the work of Louis Pasteur and the development of germ theory, that Semmelweis's ideas were recognized as important contributions to the understanding and prevention of infectious diseases.

Well some might argue that that was then and this is now but I don't think much has changed in the early part of the 21st century. At least not in regards to the "ridicule and opposition" directed at any well-intended criticism of the "profession" from those within it or, heavens forbid, from those not within it. What has changed is the power of BIG PHARMA over medical practice, or should that be malpractice. The arrogance of allopathic medicine has soared since the 19th century as well, subjugating and denigrating all alternative medicine practices before it. The motto nowadays might well be ONE WAY, WITH DRUGS.

Side-effects from the drugs people take are no problem because drugs have been developed to treat those side-effects. There's little point saying more. As I've said before my motivation to post to this blog remains low. Once you realise what's going on, it's pointless mentioning specific examples that confirm the rolling-out of the agenda. The only bright light in an otherwise dismal firmament has been listening to music by "Five Times August".

Five Times August is the solo act of singer/songwriter Brad Skistimas. Skistimas has appeared on the FOX Business channel as an expert "Do-It-Yourself" indie artist and featured in Billboard Magazine, Performing Songwriter, Guitar Player, PeopleMagazine, and USA Today. He was the first completely unsigned act to have an album distributed in Walmart stores nationwide with 2007's "The Independent." The music has been featured on many popular TV shows, commercials, and films and tour dates have supported some of the nation's top acts.

In early 2021 Five Times August began releasing a series of protest songs taking aim at Covid-era regulations, the Biden administration, Justin Trudeau, as well as Anthony Fauci with the hit song "Sad Little Man," which reached #1 on several Amazon and Apple Music charts.

Several of the music videos for these tracks have been suppressed and censored on social media platforms like YouTube and Facebook. Despite being restricted by big tech, the videos have been viewed millions of times and press includes prominent features on Glenn Beck, Chad Prather, Del Bigtree's The HighWire, The Federalist, The Post Millennial, RebelNews, and much more.

​Skistimas performed his song "Silent War" on the steps of the Lincoln Memorial in Washington DC for 35,000 attendees at the Defeat the Mandates rally on January 23rd 2022, and more recently even had the honor of singing The National Anthem for Dr. Ben Carson and President Donald Trump.

In November 2022 Five Times August released the full length album "Silent War," a compilation featuring all of the recent protest singles. The album reached as high as #5 on Amazon's best selling albums, sitting between mainstream artists Taylor Swift and Bruce Springsteen. The album also reached #1 on Amazon and Apple Music's singer/songwriter and alternative charts.

Read more: fivetimesaugust.com/press.html

ARTIST CONTACT: Brad@fivetimesaugust.com

​MANAGEMENT: Kelly@sevenplacesmusic.net

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.