This year is on course to be the fourth hottest year on record, trailing only the three previous years, as rising levels of greenhouse gases warm the planet, the World Meteorological Organisation said.
Up to October 31, mean temperatures in 2018 were an estimated 0.98 warmer than the average for 1850-1900, according the UN agency's provisional State of the Global Climate report.
“We are not on track to meet climate change targets and rein in temperature increases,” said Petteri Taalas, WMO Secretary-General. “Greenhouse gas concentrations are once again at record levels and if the current trend continues we may see temperature increases 3 to 5 degrees by the end of the century."
The WMO report comes days ahead of a global climate summit in Katowice, Poland, where nations will discuss progress on implementing the goals of the Paris climate accord signed three years ago keep temperatures to 1.5-2 degrees above pre-industrial levels. Australia's delegation will be led by Environment Minister Melissa Price.
So the WMO Secretary-General says "we may see temperature increases 3 to 5 degrees by the end of the century", plucking the figures seemingly out of thin air. The heading of the Brisbane Times article thus includes the upper limit of his prediction with the intended result that anybody perusing the newspaper can hardly fail to miss this unsettling prediction.
For anyone who bothers to read the article, there is the inevitable graph included in a screenshot of a tweet from a so-called "climate scientist" Gavin Schmidt, described (source) as a "climatologist, climate modeller and Director of the NASA Goddard Institute for Space Studies (GISS) in New York, and co-founder of the award-winning climate science blog RealClimate".
Figure 2
The graph is below a photo of firefighters battling a blaze in England with the caption: Firefighters work on a wildfire on Winter Hill near Bolton, England. Extreme temperatures, particularly warm ones, have again been prominent in 2018, on course to be one of the hottest years in history.
Let's break the news article down into its components:
overly sensational heading
dire pronouncement from a prestigious international organisation (here the WMO)
dramatic photograph of firefighters battling a conflagration
suitably supporting graph from a climate scientist
I'm not attempting here to confront any details in the WMO report but just to focus on the highly biased manner in which climate news is presented by the mass media. Despite evidence to the contrary, the message being conveyed is clear: the world is getting warmer. You must believe this or else you are a climate denier who has chosen to ignore the irrefutable climate science and the climate facts as presented by the world's leading climate scientists. You must be a climate skeptic and a deluded fool.
Figure 3
As with vaccinations, there is no middle ground when it comes to man-made global warming. It's all or nothing. It is the prevailing orthodoxy to which you must adhere.
The dental procedure known as root canal has become ubiquitous. Even if a person hasn't been subjected to it, that person is bound to know someone who has.
I never suspected that there were any health dangers associated with the procedure until one days, years ago, I did a simple search on the Internet linking root canal and health problems. Of course, a lot of the results addressed the potential health problems that a root canal could remedy. However, there were others that warned about its risks. Here is a 2015 video in which a person who underwent the procedure talks about the consequences to her health:
Generally, it's difficult to link later health problems directly to root canal because their onset may take years to manifest. You might think that, unlike vaccinations, this dental money-maker is performed only on adult teeth but you'd be wrong. Here is a quote from a pediatric dentistry website:
Root canal treatment is a safe and effective way to stop many kinds of tooth pain, and to keep a tooth from being lost due to decay or injury. But if a root canal is recommended for your young child, you may wonder why: Isn't that baby tooth going to fall out in a few years anyway?
That's true — the primary (baby) teeth typically are shed between the ages of 6 and 12 years. Yet there are some good reasons for trying to save baby teeth for as long as possible with root canal treatment, rather than simply extracting any that are damaged by trauma or infection.
For one, primary teeth have the same functions as adult teeth — and a missing tooth at any age can cause problems with speech and eating. Baby teeth also have another important role: They serve as guides for the proper placement of the permanent teeth.
Without primary teeth to guide them in, permanent teeth tend to emerge in a crooked fashion, often becoming tilted or crowded because of inadequate space. This can result in bite problems that may require extensive orthodontic treatment later.
The 2007 scandal in the United States surrounding Small Smiles, a chain of Medicaid dental clinics for children, is an extreme example of how the lust for profits from baby root canals can get out of hand. To quote from the news article:
Parents weren’t allowed to sit with their children during treatment. Young children were routinely strapped to papoose boards, immobilised with Velcro straps. And she showed me a bonus check for beating production goals while acknowledging that she, like other dental staff, conducted x-rays on children even though they weren’t certified, a clear violation of Maryland law.
The key danger with root canal is the potential for bacteria, especially anaerobic, to proliferate in the tubules of the dentine and to later spread throughout the body. It would be a rare dentist who would ever warn a recipient of this danger. Like vaccinations, there is simply too much money to be made for the practice to be overturned anytime soon. The following story deserves to be quoted in full because it shows that some oral surgeons at least are aware of the dangers posed by root canals:
Root Canals and Heart Disease: My Personal Story
By: Dr. David Friedman
We’ve all known or heard of someone who died suddenly of a heart attack for no apparent reason. That 50 year old neighbour, seemingly healthy with no history of cardiovascular disease, found dead in his back yard after having a massive heart attack. What if this deadly heart attack could have been prevented by a simple visit to a dentist? Sadly, I could have been that man found dead on his lawn, had it not been for a dentist who saved my life.
Those that know me say I make the energiser bunny look lethargic. I wake up each morning with vigour and I always embrace the day with zest. I believe in seizing life to its fullest. About a year ago that all changed. My zig no longer zagged. I started going to bed tired and waking up even more exhausted. I was experiencing headaches and having a hard time concentrating. I went to see my doctor who did a complete physical and he discovered I had developed high blood pressure!! What?! How could that be possible? I’m a nutritionist. I eat clean and I exercise regularly. When the results of my blood test came back, I learned that I had elevated C-reactive protein (CRP). CRP is produced by the liver and rises when there is inflammation throughout the body. CRP is considered one of the major predictors of a future heart attack. My CRP measured a staggering 9.8 mg/L! Anything above 3.0 is considered a very high risk for heart attack and stroke.
The body produces CRP during the general process of inflammation which is why it is called the “marker” for inflammation in the body. Your level of CRP is a good indicator of how at risk you are for developing cardiovascular problems. In fact, research shows CRP predicts cardiovascular risk more accurately than a person’s cholesterol levels. Data from the Physicians Health Study, a clinical trial involving 18,000 apparently healthy doctors, found that elevated levels of CRP were associated with a 300% increase in the risk of heart attack.
In addition to an elevated CRP, my white blood cell levels were also high, meaning my body was clearly fighting some type of infection. This internal inflammation was causing a chronic low grade fever, high blood pressure of 170/110; normally my levels are 120/82, and a resting heart rate of 90; normally I’m at 50. With all these factors, I had “the perfect storm” for a massive heart attack! I immediately went to a cardiologist who performed a stress test, EKG and a nuclear heart scan. The findings showed my heart was normal and I had no blockage whatsoever. This was great news; however, I was anything but normal. As the months progressed, I felt even more miserable! No one could give me any answers. I only knew my body was suffering from systemic inflammation but I had no idea why.
Then one day while at a writer’s convention in California I met a dentist named Dr. P. Piero, from Michigan. He had just authored a book and was sharing it with me. As I thumbed through the pages, I noticed a section on C- reactive protein. I asked him why a dental book would have a section on this inflammatory marker? What he told me next would finally bring answers on why I was having so many health issues. Dr. Piero told me that the number one cause of elevated CRP is a bacterial infection in the gums (i.e. a tooth abscess). This creates inflammation inside the gums, which enters the blood stream and travels throughout the body. I explained to him that I did not have any tooth pain so this couldn’t be the culprit. He then asked me if I have had any root canals? I told him I’ve had three. Dr. Piero shared that in a root-canaled tooth, the nerve is destroyed so I may feel no pain.
When I got back home, I made an appointment with an Endodontist who discovered one of my root-canaled teeth was so badly abscessed it had eaten away part of my jaw bone! I made an appointment with an oral surgeon who had to extract the entire tooth and cut out the infection in my jaw bone using a tiny saw. The excruciating pain I experienced was beyond words! He would later pack cadaver bone inside the hole in my jaw, which will need to sit for approximately 6 months before I can get a dental implant.
The oral surgeon that performed the procedure explained that a root-canaled tooth is essentially “dead” which makes it silent incubators for highly toxic bacteria which can make their way into the bloodstream leading to a number of serious medical conditions—many not appearing until decades later. Within two days of having this failed root canal removed, I felt alive again! My energy, drive, endurance was back to normal! My heart rate and blood pressure were normal. After getting another blood test, I was happy to see my CRP was now at a normal level of 1.4 mg/L!
If you are told by your dentist that you need a root canal, there is a safer alternative. Instead of opting to keep a dead tooth that will rot in your mouth, opt for a dental implant. Trust me, it’s MUCH cheaper in the long run and safer! Had I not met Dr. Piero, I feel certain I would have ended up a healthy nutritionist found dead in my yard from a fatal heart attack.
The next time you go to your doctor ask him to check your CRP level. I believe this should be a routine part of everyone’s annual physical. There are two tests for CRP. One can show a non-specific elevation of CRP that occurs with general inflammatory changes in the body; the other test is called hs-CRP – highly sensitive CRP – which is a measure of inflammation in blood vessels. This is the test needed to help establish heart disease risk. Thankfully, more and more doctors are realising the importance of measuring hs-CRP levels along with cholesterol to determine the risk of heart disease and to evaluate disease progression and prognosis in those who already have cardiovascular disease. Be sure and ask your doctor for this test to determine if you are at risk.
I was about to quote from an article that appeared on a website belonging to the Toxic Elements Research Foundation (TERF), a non-profit research foundation dedicated to stimulating interest in the research community as well as informing the public to become aware of potential problems associated with dental materials and procedures. However, closer inspection revealed that TERF was simply a very basic website, last updated in 2009, and the work of a single person by the name of Jamie Tolle. There were good quotes to be had from the site and reference was made to a ground-breaking "study" that was soon to be released to a waiting world. However, it was clear that there was no research foundation. Sources always need to be checked.
The cruel reality is that, just as with vaccinations, there is no research being carried about the long-term effects of root canals. Where would the funding for this come from? There are too many vested interests involved to get anything meaningful research off the ground. It's medical orthodoxy that vaccinations are safe. Doctors who question that do so at their professional peril and it's dental orthodoxy that root canals are safe. Dentists who question that do so at their professional peril. Of course, not many will question the procedure, because it's never raised as an issue in their training.
Here is the header from an article that appeared in today's Jakarta Post:
Pneumonia to kill nearly 11 million children by 2030, study warns
The article was taken from NEWS DESK, AGENCE FRANCE-PRESSE Paris, France on Tuesday, November 13th, 2018 at 03:04 am. The article goes on to say that:
Pneumonia will kill nearly 11 million children under five by 2030, experts warned Monday on a global day aimed at raising awareness of the biggest infectious killer of infants worldwide.
While in the developed world the severe lung infection mainly affects the elderly, in developing nations it is children who bear the brunt, with hundreds of thousands dying each year from the easily preventable disease.
It continues:
A new analysis conducted by Johns Hopkins University and the aid group Save the Children using forecasts based on current trends showed more than 10,800,000 under-fives would succumb to the disease by the end of the next decade.
Furthermore, a handful of countries are set to carry the highest burdens, with 1.7 million children set to die in Nigeria and India, 700,000 in Pakistan and 635,000 in the Democratic Republic of Congo. Yet there is some good news.
The study, published on World Pneumonia Day, found that scaling up existing vaccination coverage, coupled with cheap antibiotics and ensuring good nutrition for children could save a total of 4.1 million lives.
Of course, the article is intended to grab attention. Save the Children CEO Kevin Watkins, whose group operates health programs in some of the countries worst hit by the disease, called for prices of major existing pneumonia vaccines to be lowered "dramatically". It's unlikely that pharmaceutical companies will be lowering their prices. Instead the hope is that governments in developing countries will subsidise the cost from their health care budgets. Much needed funds are thus diverted from where they could be truly useful such as improving sanitation and nutrition.
In the nineteenth century, measles epidemics killed a great many children in England and other developed countries because families lived in vermin-infested, overcrowded and unventilated dwellings with primitive sanitation. Additionally, children ate poorly and sometimes not at all. When housing conditions and diet were improved, measles ceased to be a significant factor in childhood mortality.
It is the same of course with pneumonia which as the article admits "mainly affects the elderly in developed countries". In these countries, pneumonia does not take a significant toll of children because they are generally well-fed and adequately housed. It's a transparent ploy on the part of NGOs like Save the Children to attract funds but what organisations lie behind these NGOs. Well, the usual villains of course. One of this NGO's global partners is GlaxoSmithKline (GSK), laughingly described on the NGO's website as "a science-led global healthcare company on a mission to help people do more, feel better and live longer".
Ah no, GSK is, according to Wikipedia:
a British pharmaceutical company headquartered in Brentford, London. Established in 2000 by a merger of Glaxo Wellcome and SmithKline Beecham, GSK was the world's sixth largest pharmaceutical company as of 2015, after Pfizer, Novartis, Merck, Hoffmann-La Roche and Sanofi.
Of course, nobody is going to donate money to a pharmaceutical company and so GSK and other Big Pharma companies hide behind NGOs like Save the Children and push a very straight forward agenda: marketing their products. Save the Children and its current CEO have been mired in controversy lately. In July, as reported in this article in The Guardian: "(British) MPs question Kevin Watkins on failing to investigate claims of sexual misconduct by senior charity staff". Specifically:
Pauline Latham MP questioned Watkin’s decision to use £114,000 in charity funds on lawyers “to try and stop reports [of inappropriate behaviour] coming out”, adding that such money was likely to have been taken from funds raised by volunteers in the UK.
Clearly, when donating money to NGOs like Save the Children, one needs to seriously consider how the money is being spent. However, if one were casually reading the article under discussion in the Jakarta Post or elsewhere, the simple takeaway would be that the pneumonia vaccine can save the lives of millions of children. If only it were that simple.
Vaccines damage the immune systems of children throughout the world but in developing countries, children's immunity is further compromised by overcrowded living conditions, poor sanitation and inadequate diet. These children do not need vaccines and yet limited health care funds are being diverted to this end.
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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
