Showing posts with label pharmaceutical industry. Show all posts
Showing posts with label pharmaceutical industry. Show all posts
Saturday, May 9, 2020
Masks Don't Work: A review of science relevant to COVID-19 social policy
My article has more than 110 K reads on Research Gate.
It is being used by several organizations, to inform their members.
It can be downloaded for free here:
https://www.researchgate.net/publication/340570735_Masks_Don%27t_Work_A_review_of_science_relevant_to_COVID-19_social_policy
Alternate link:
http://ocla.ca/wp-content/uploads/2020/04/Rancourt-Masks-dont-work-review-science-re-COVID19-policy.pdf
A good media interview about the article is this one:
https://ahtribune.com/world/covid-19/4138-masks-respirators.html
My video presentation about the article is here:
https://youtu.be/m9la-J0yfcQ
Alternate link to the video is here:
https://www.bitchute.com/video/gUh1blirfKWx/
Do watch the videos I made about COVID-19 - reviews of the science and more
https://www.youtube.com/playlist?list=PLtlB5X7s54oW0D9bJF5E-JPdLkFZ-YZBw
Watch them all!
The videos, among other topics, explain my these articles:
https://www.researchgate.net/publication/340738912_OCLA_Report_2020-1_Criticism_of_Government_Response_to_COVID-19_in_Canada
https://www.researchgate.net/publication/340570735_Masks_Don't_Work_A_review_of_science_relevant_to_COVID-19_social_policy
Must read my incisive interview about masks and the Pharma protection racket
Do Masks and Respirators Prevent Viral Respiratory Illnesses?
https://ahtribune.com/world/covid-19/4138-masks-respirators.html
https://dissidentvoice.org/2020/05/do-masks-and-respirators-prevent-viral-respiratory-illnesses/
Wednesday, April 11, 2018
Canadian Societal Depravity is Anchored in Medical Care
Where good will provides cover for predatory population enslavement
This article was first published on Dissident Voice (LINK).
A society of socially engineered individuals who cannot identify their own anthropological dissonance is a depraved society.
Its depravity is further established by its managers who do not experience profound discomfort in the face of the state’s domestic and foreign perpetual mass crimes.
Here, I explore the role of so-called health care in maintaining Canadian societal depravity. Canada is a satellite state of the USA, which defines itself as a jurisdiction with public medical services.
The truth is Canadian “health care” has become a system in-effect designed to keep Canadians stupid and sick. This design serves the global-elite bosses, the political class, the medical profession and the Big Pharma predators, in what is a symbiotic mesh of enslavement. So Canada defines itself by one of its main systems of social control.
I’m driven to write this by a few recent events that point to a downward spiral.
First, in 2017 the Ontario government announced its new publicly funded “pharmacare” program for people 24 years old or younger, which includes virtually every patented “behavioural enhancement” drug. This was done in a total absence of scientific impact studies and in a total absence of independent studies of hierarchical needs and drug efficacy.
Then, last month, in a further cynical move to buy votes in time for the June 2018 election, the Ontario government expanded its “pharmacare” program to seniors, the most over-mediated segment of our drugged society.1
On top of it all, I had the displeasure of reading the leading Left health-care guru’s 2017 book Better Now – Six Big Ideas To Improve Health Care for All Canadians by Dr. Danielle Martin.2
Martin’s book is superbly researched, authoritative and beautifully written. It is an essential current resource for medical care activists and managers. But it plays right into the hands of the said mesh of enslavement by recruiting Left organizers and people of good will to believe that fixing is possible — if guided by research, brave implementations and a moral desire for a fair society.
Such fixing by gradual change from within is not possible with the hydra that we are contemplating. Yet, Martin states:
Martin’s “six big ideas” are too many: (1) return of the patient-physician relationship, (2) too much prescribing of drugs too expensive, (3) get physicians to voluntarilly “do less”, to stop harming patients and to reduce costs, (4) do more with less, (5) eliminate poverty to improve health and reduce overall government expenditures, and (6) be smart about actuating change.
A realistic campaign would have just one idea: The medical-establishment-led so-called health care system does far more harm than good and is a system of exploitation and enslavement that must be dismantled. With one application note: The reform will have to be grassroots and culturally anchored or it will easily be hijacked.
Contrary to Martin’s thesis, death by medicine is not some manageable feature that can be remedied by better procedures and more responsible practice. Rather, it is systemic and would require accountability and publicly documented enforced penalties, which exist on paper but are in reality foreign to the profession.3
In my 2015 critical review of the scientific literature, I summarized the problem of fatal medical “errors” this way:
In the West, medicine causes more deaths that all wars, violent crimes, car accidents… you name it. It is routinely referred to as an epidemic in the scientific literature, yet it is not on the radar of media-driven public policy concerns. The media is too busy telling us about the supposed dangers of self-administered cannabis.
You are at more risk walking into your doctor’s office or into a community clinic than from virtually every other thing you will ever do.
You have been hoodwinked. To achieve this, it is necessary to continuously engineer and maintain a cultural veil that makes one fundamental biological truth impenetrable: almost always the body heals itself, and does a remarkably good job of it if dominance power does not interfere. The human body has been doing this for more than a million years; and this self-healing capacity has sustained the most successful species of large mammals on the planet, despite the opportunism of witch doctors and fortune tellers.
The only exceptions are the inevitability of old age and accidents that are fatal in the absence of crisis intervention. Medical crisis intervention means: Stop the bleeding and repair vital organs that will not repair themselves in time to prevent death or permanent disability, without causing death by the intervention itself. Modern heart attack interventions and repairs following massive lacerations are examples.
Virtually everything else involves simply securing an environment that optimizes healing by ensuring security, alleviating stress and removing causal factors. Admittedly, these are difficult healing goals in a dominance hierarchy of lobotomized and exploited individuals being milked for service charges and drug dependence by a “health care” system.
The said biological truth has been replaced with a constellation of lies: That industry-recommended “medication” and interventions are required and beneficial; That pain plays no useful role and should be artificially suppressed; That drugs accelerate healing without diminishing the body’s ability to heal itself; That disconnected doctors know best; That technological tests and physical measurements are substitutes for self-knowledge; That it’s better to consult rather than try to be one’s own doctor; and so on.
In 1974, Ivan Illich put it this way and things have only gotten much worst since:
Even at her most progressive, Martin in-effect plays this role admirably well. She points to the large area of health research known as “social determinants of health”. The researchers in this field avoid treating the harmful nature of establishment medicine itself and, instead, focus on the societal factors that statistically correlate with ill-health.
They find that the dominant factor that correlates to ill-health and mortality is poverty, and that this correlation is significantly modulated by a co-factor that is the magnitude of the income gap between rich and poor in the society. Martin concludes, therefore, that governments should eliminate poverty to improve public health and to reduce overall government expenditures.
Martin’s economic structural solution amounts to what doctors do best: Divert resources and attention towards suppressing the symptoms rather that addressing the cause, even though she firmly believes that she is addressing a cause. Eliminating poverty by systemic change is an honourable and just cause in itself and it should not be anchored in any ancillary goal, especially not one that relies on the medical profession for its accomplishment.
Of course, extreme poverty causing fatal nutritional and environmental deficiencies causes death. That is not controversial. However, all such extreme poverty has been structurally eliminated in Canada and the killer now is the subjective stress and self-image devaluation caused by the inherent violence of society’s dominance hierarchy, including the violence from the medical enterprise itself.4,7,8 This is true to different degrees in all social classes, from professional workers to aboriginal reserve residents to urban homeless people.
Martin in no way is contributing to a solution. Rather, she is vying for partisan influence for good-will managers and enlightened professionals. However, the problem is deeper than anything addressed by establishment forces, including the progressive ones.
Both private (USA) and public (Canada) medical systems are networks of oppression and enslavement run by collaborating corporate, government and professional bodies whose members derive disproportionate and immoral benefits. Arguing which is best is akin to arguing about whether to vote Democrat or Republican, prior to the somewhat democratizing anomaly of Trump that was enabled by the technological opportunity of a temporarily free social media.
At its heart, individuals have been infantilized and reduced to following directives under paternalistic umbrellas. On the contrary, knowledge and individual responsibility must be distributed and accompanied by individual influence and power. The structures that have neutralized us in every sphere and the forces that keep us depressed are the factors that make us sick and keep us dependent.
The way forward is to fight for fundamental rights that ensure a measure of influence and power, starting with the most fundamental rights of free expression and free association.
Furthermore, those with institutional power must be accountable, rather than shielded. The professional associations, colleges and councils that shield lawyers, doctors and judges must be defeated and made to answer to their victims.
“Whistleblower protection” cannot mean tenuous protection for the few individuals who expose egregious abuses. It must mean broad effective protections for all employees who wish to disclose and complain about government and corporate employers and procedures. It must mean actual transparency by distributed impetus.
“Freedom of the press” cannot mean shielding government and corporate media from accountability and protecting journalist shills who serve interested publishers. It must mean distributed power to individuals to publish in social media without imposed constraints, with effective protection against establishment hijacking of technological venues.
Actual education is a collective and self-organized societal process, not a method to train and indoctrinate. Optimal freedom gives enlightened and healthy individuals. Excessive domination gives the opposite. This principle is increasingly painfully obvious.9
Everything else is a surreal argument about whether the organized oppression is fair or unfair.
by Denis Rancourt, PhD
This article was first published on Dissident Voice (LINK).
A society of socially engineered individuals who cannot identify their own anthropological dissonance is a depraved society.
Its depravity is further established by its managers who do not experience profound discomfort in the face of the state’s domestic and foreign perpetual mass crimes.
Here, I explore the role of so-called health care in maintaining Canadian societal depravity. Canada is a satellite state of the USA, which defines itself as a jurisdiction with public medical services.
The truth is Canadian “health care” has become a system in-effect designed to keep Canadians stupid and sick. This design serves the global-elite bosses, the political class, the medical profession and the Big Pharma predators, in what is a symbiotic mesh of enslavement. So Canada defines itself by one of its main systems of social control.
I’m driven to write this by a few recent events that point to a downward spiral.
First, in 2017 the Ontario government announced its new publicly funded “pharmacare” program for people 24 years old or younger, which includes virtually every patented “behavioural enhancement” drug. This was done in a total absence of scientific impact studies and in a total absence of independent studies of hierarchical needs and drug efficacy.
Then, last month, in a further cynical move to buy votes in time for the June 2018 election, the Ontario government expanded its “pharmacare” program to seniors, the most over-mediated segment of our drugged society.1
On top of it all, I had the displeasure of reading the leading Left health-care guru’s 2017 book Better Now – Six Big Ideas To Improve Health Care for All Canadians by Dr. Danielle Martin.2
Martin’s book is superbly researched, authoritative and beautifully written. It is an essential current resource for medical care activists and managers. But it plays right into the hands of the said mesh of enslavement by recruiting Left organizers and people of good will to believe that fixing is possible — if guided by research, brave implementations and a moral desire for a fair society.
Such fixing by gradual change from within is not possible with the hydra that we are contemplating. Yet, Martin states:
In the anatomy of a system for change, clinicians are the feet that do the walking. They can also be the feet that drag. […] Making change is always about the art of the possible. Sometimes it would be great to pass a piece of legislation requiring hospitals or doctors to do something, but it just isn’t feasible. At other times it would be better to engage physicians and inspire them to drive change locally, but sometimes they’re frankly unwilling or unable to do so.You get the drift. It’s on and on like that.
Martin’s “six big ideas” are too many: (1) return of the patient-physician relationship, (2) too much prescribing of drugs too expensive, (3) get physicians to voluntarilly “do less”, to stop harming patients and to reduce costs, (4) do more with less, (5) eliminate poverty to improve health and reduce overall government expenditures, and (6) be smart about actuating change.
A realistic campaign would have just one idea: The medical-establishment-led so-called health care system does far more harm than good and is a system of exploitation and enslavement that must be dismantled. With one application note: The reform will have to be grassroots and culturally anchored or it will easily be hijacked.
Contrary to Martin’s thesis, death by medicine is not some manageable feature that can be remedied by better procedures and more responsible practice. Rather, it is systemic and would require accountability and publicly documented enforced penalties, which exist on paper but are in reality foreign to the profession.3
In my 2015 critical review of the scientific literature, I summarized the problem of fatal medical “errors” this way:
In the words of Dr. Barbara Starfield, and many others, it is therefore incontrovertible that establishment medicine is the third leading cause of death in industrialized countries, after deaths from heart disease and cancer, which in turn are causes that medicine can do very little about. The next and fourth leading cause of death is cerebrovascular disease and its rate is far below that from medical-induced (iatrogenic) deaths, such that “medical manslaughter” is not about to give up its rank of third leading cause.In concrete terms, I calculated that this means that between 6% and 8% of advanced Western state citizens die from medicine rather than any other cause, including both medical-error deaths and non-error medical deaths.4
In the West, medicine causes more deaths that all wars, violent crimes, car accidents… you name it. It is routinely referred to as an epidemic in the scientific literature, yet it is not on the radar of media-driven public policy concerns. The media is too busy telling us about the supposed dangers of self-administered cannabis.
You are at more risk walking into your doctor’s office or into a community clinic than from virtually every other thing you will ever do.
You have been hoodwinked. To achieve this, it is necessary to continuously engineer and maintain a cultural veil that makes one fundamental biological truth impenetrable: almost always the body heals itself, and does a remarkably good job of it if dominance power does not interfere. The human body has been doing this for more than a million years; and this self-healing capacity has sustained the most successful species of large mammals on the planet, despite the opportunism of witch doctors and fortune tellers.
The only exceptions are the inevitability of old age and accidents that are fatal in the absence of crisis intervention. Medical crisis intervention means: Stop the bleeding and repair vital organs that will not repair themselves in time to prevent death or permanent disability, without causing death by the intervention itself. Modern heart attack interventions and repairs following massive lacerations are examples.
Virtually everything else involves simply securing an environment that optimizes healing by ensuring security, alleviating stress and removing causal factors. Admittedly, these are difficult healing goals in a dominance hierarchy of lobotomized and exploited individuals being milked for service charges and drug dependence by a “health care” system.
The said biological truth has been replaced with a constellation of lies: That industry-recommended “medication” and interventions are required and beneficial; That pain plays no useful role and should be artificially suppressed; That drugs accelerate healing without diminishing the body’s ability to heal itself; That disconnected doctors know best; That technological tests and physical measurements are substitutes for self-knowledge; That it’s better to consult rather than try to be one’s own doctor; and so on.
In 1974, Ivan Illich put it this way and things have only gotten much worst since:
Within the last decade medical professional practice has become a major threat to health. Depression, infection, disability, dysfunction, and other specific iatrogenic diseases now cause more suffering than all accidents from traffic or industry. Beyond this, medical practice sponsors sickness by the reinforcement of a morbid society which not only industrially preserves its defectives but breeds the therapist’s client in a cybernetic way. Finally, the so-called health-professions have an indirect sickening power – a structurally health-denying effect. I want to focus on this last syndrome, which I designate as medical Nemesis. By transforming pain, illness, and death from a personal challenge into a technical problem, medical practice expropriates the potential of people to deal with their human condition in an autonomous way and becomes the source of a new kind of un-health.5“The medical establishment has become a major threat to health” was true is 1976 and that threat has only dug itself in and widened.6 However, more is scientifically known now about the mechanistic cause of ill-health of the individual animal then was known in the 1970s.4,7,8 Therefore, then and now, in addition to hiding the truth about healing, the fundamental truth about the cause of ill-health must also be hidden from the individual and buried as deeply as possible.
Even at her most progressive, Martin in-effect plays this role admirably well. She points to the large area of health research known as “social determinants of health”. The researchers in this field avoid treating the harmful nature of establishment medicine itself and, instead, focus on the societal factors that statistically correlate with ill-health.
They find that the dominant factor that correlates to ill-health and mortality is poverty, and that this correlation is significantly modulated by a co-factor that is the magnitude of the income gap between rich and poor in the society. Martin concludes, therefore, that governments should eliminate poverty to improve public health and to reduce overall government expenditures.
Martin’s economic structural solution amounts to what doctors do best: Divert resources and attention towards suppressing the symptoms rather that addressing the cause, even though she firmly believes that she is addressing a cause. Eliminating poverty by systemic change is an honourable and just cause in itself and it should not be anchored in any ancillary goal, especially not one that relies on the medical profession for its accomplishment.
Of course, extreme poverty causing fatal nutritional and environmental deficiencies causes death. That is not controversial. However, all such extreme poverty has been structurally eliminated in Canada and the killer now is the subjective stress and self-image devaluation caused by the inherent violence of society’s dominance hierarchy, including the violence from the medical enterprise itself.4,7,8 This is true to different degrees in all social classes, from professional workers to aboriginal reserve residents to urban homeless people.
Martin in no way is contributing to a solution. Rather, she is vying for partisan influence for good-will managers and enlightened professionals. However, the problem is deeper than anything addressed by establishment forces, including the progressive ones.
Both private (USA) and public (Canada) medical systems are networks of oppression and enslavement run by collaborating corporate, government and professional bodies whose members derive disproportionate and immoral benefits. Arguing which is best is akin to arguing about whether to vote Democrat or Republican, prior to the somewhat democratizing anomaly of Trump that was enabled by the technological opportunity of a temporarily free social media.
At its heart, individuals have been infantilized and reduced to following directives under paternalistic umbrellas. On the contrary, knowledge and individual responsibility must be distributed and accompanied by individual influence and power. The structures that have neutralized us in every sphere and the forces that keep us depressed are the factors that make us sick and keep us dependent.
The way forward is to fight for fundamental rights that ensure a measure of influence and power, starting with the most fundamental rights of free expression and free association.
Furthermore, those with institutional power must be accountable, rather than shielded. The professional associations, colleges and councils that shield lawyers, doctors and judges must be defeated and made to answer to their victims.
“Whistleblower protection” cannot mean tenuous protection for the few individuals who expose egregious abuses. It must mean broad effective protections for all employees who wish to disclose and complain about government and corporate employers and procedures. It must mean actual transparency by distributed impetus.
“Freedom of the press” cannot mean shielding government and corporate media from accountability and protecting journalist shills who serve interested publishers. It must mean distributed power to individuals to publish in social media without imposed constraints, with effective protection against establishment hijacking of technological venues.
Actual education is a collective and self-organized societal process, not a method to train and indoctrinate. Optimal freedom gives enlightened and healthy individuals. Excessive domination gives the opposite. This principle is increasingly painfully obvious.9
Everything else is a surreal argument about whether the organized oppression is fair or unfair.
- News Release: Making Prescription Drugs Free for People 65 and Over – Expanding OHIP+ Will Make Prescription Drugs Free for Nearly One in Two Ontarians, March 20, 2018, Office of the Premier.
- Better Now – Six Big Ideas To Improve Health Care for All Canadians by Dr. Danielle Martin, Penguin Random House, 2017, pp. 298.
- “Psychiatrist Louis Morissette Should Be Barred From Practice” by Denis Rancourt, Dissident Voice, April 5, 2018.
- “Cancer Arises from Stress-induced Breakdown of Tissue Homeostasis – Part 1: Context of Cancer Research” by Denis Rancourt, Dissident Voice, December 4, 2015.
- “Medical Nemesis” by Ivan Illich, The Lancet, vol. 303, no. 7863, May 11, 1974, pp. 918-921, at p. 918.
- Limits to medicine: medical nemesis—the expropriation of health by Ivan Illich, London: Marion Boyars, 1976, pp. 294.
- “The Influence of Social Hierarchy on Primate Health” by Robert M. Sapolsky, Science, vol. 308, no. 5722, April 29, 2005, pp. 648-652, DOI:10.1126/science.1106477.
- “Self-Image-Incongruence Theory of Individual Health” by Denis Rancourt, Dissident Voice, October 26, 2014.
- “Cause of USA Meltdown and Collapse of Civil Rights” by Denis Rancourt, Dissident Voice, September 7, 2017.
Tuesday, December 1, 2015
Cancer arises from stress-induced breakdown of tissue homeostasis
Note: The full article, with 80 footnotes, is HERE-PDF.
(and ALTERNATIVE-LINK)
(and on ResearchGate doi: 10.13140/RG.2.1.1304.7129)
(and ALTERNATIVE-LINK)
(and on ResearchGate doi: 10.13140/RG.2.1.1304.7129)
Is it time to abandon mutation-centric metastasis as the dominant paradigm? Does ‘seed and soil’ do more harm than good?
By Denis G. Rancourt , PhD
Abstract
Part-I: I critically review the context of cancer research, where it has been advanced that most published research findings are false, that medicine itself is the third leading cause of death in the Western world, and that experienced stress arising from an individual’s position in society’s dominance hierarchy is the primary determinant of individual health.
Part-II: I critically review the randomized trials for treatments and screening, especially for breast cancer. It has been advanced that screening does more harm than good, and that treatment protocols have little effect on net population mortality from cancer. There is no robust demonstration that the treatment protocols for the common cancers do more good than harm to individual patients.
Part-III: I critically review the mutation-centric metastasis dominant paradigm of cancer, and various efforts to somewhat or definitively challenge the dominant paradigm, with an eye to answering the question “What is cancer?”
Final section: I propose a conceptual model of cancer, which incorporates the leading criticisms of the dominant paradigm, and which is testable. In my model, cancer is an age-dependent and tissue-specific stress-induced breakdown of tissue-shape homeostasis. My model is aided by a graphical picture depicting age-specific and tissue-specific curves of steady-state nodule size (DT) versus experienced stress level (S). A given curve has a critical stress (SC) beyond which there is runaway tumour growth due to tissue-response feedback. Here, “metastasis” is the simple consequence of the individual’s tissue susceptibility to loss of shape homeostasis having gone supercritical for a cluster of tissue-specific DT v. S curves. The model provides treatment strategies on three branches: Psychological, tissue-surface-shape homeostasis, and tumour growth feedback attenuation.
Introduction
This paper was presented in the uOttawa Cinema Academica series at the University of Ottawa on November 21, 2015. A video of the presentation is on YouTube (PART-ONE, PART-TWO). It will be “peer reviewed” if peers and others review it.
I am not a medical doctor. I am an interdisciplinary scientist with a PhD in physics. I have published over 100 articles in scientific journals, in a broad array of disciplines.
My starting outlook in researching cancer is best represented by these three non-journal-article publications:
• “A Theory of Chronic Pain: A social and evolutionary theory of human disease and chronic pain” (2011)
• “Self-Image-Incongruence Theory of Individual Health” (2014), and references therein
• Chapter: “Human Biology id Such that People Make and Inhabit Dominance Hierarchies”, in my 2013 book
The paper is organized in three main parts, followed by my proposal for a unifying model of cancer.
PART-I: Context of Cancer Research
Approximately 30% of us who are fortunate enough to live in the Western countries will be diagnosed to have died of cancer. Breast cancer is the main life-threatening disease affecting women, when tumours are present on several organs.
Prior to starting this review to find out what establishment science actually knows about cancer, it is important to admit the possibility that medicine is largely a pack of lies, the usual kinds of lies that provide the mental environment substrate that is created and maintained by any professional group that claims high status in society. In that sense, medicine should be viewed as no different than law, or even basic science itself.
Some prominent critics have made this observation from within the medical establishment, in different ways. For example, the “Gold Effect” was described by Professor T. Gold in 1979 and is the phenomenon in which a scientific (often medical) idea is developed to the status of an accepted position within a professional body or association by the social process itself of scientific conferences, committees, and consensus building, despite not being supported by conclusive evidence.
The Gold Effect was reviewed by Drs. Petr Skrabanek and James McCormick in their book Follies and Fallacies in Medicine, and it is used to analyze errors in public health policy and practice, such as the widespread use of cholesterol screening in the prevention of cardiovascular disease.
Most published research findings are false
From a different perspective, renowned medical researcher John P.A. Ioannidis applied Bayesian statistical modelling to prove that it is likely that “most published research findings are false”. I know something about Bayesian inference theory. I found Dr. Ioannidis’ argument to be entirely rigorous. Other Bayesian practitioners were critical of the work, but Ioannidis ably put them in their place.
Ioannidis showed that published medical claims of net benefits of a treatment (such as a regiment of one or more drugs) or of policy implementation (such as cancer screening or vaccination), based on statistical evaluation of large randomized trials, are most often false. In his words:
“Simulations show that for most study designs and settings, it is more likely for a research claim to be false than true. Moreover, for many current scientific fields, claimed research findings may often be simply accurate measures of the prevailing bias.”
He also points out what is essentially an alternative statement of the Gold Effect:
“… when more teams are involved in a scientific field in chase of statistical significance … The hotter a scientific field (with more scientific teams involved), the less likely the research findings are to be true.”
And he clearly describes main sources of researcher bias:
“Prejudice may not necessarily have financial roots. Scientists in a given field may be prejudiced purely because of their belief in a scientific theory or commitment to their own findings. Many otherwise seemingly independent, university-based studies may be conducted for no other reason than to give physicians and researchers qualifications for promotion or tenure. Such nonfinancial conflicts may also lead to distorted reported results and interpretations. Prestigious investigators may suppress via the peer review process the appearance and dissemination of findings that refute their findings, thus condemning their field to perpetuate false dogma. Empirical evidence on expert opinion shows that it is extremely unreliable.”
In his most recent critical overview, Ioannidis is merciless in his assessment of the medical research enterprise, even questioning whether fundamental lab-bench science is of any use in advancing medicine for patient benefit. In his words:
“… a novel model is needed in funding research to avoid the creation of narrow, isolated specialties that only self-perpetuate … For example, human genetics research has received tremendous funding. This money has not been wasted because other activities and high-tech industry have emerged to support the needs of the genetics community. However, few lives have been saved because of accumulated human genetics knowledge to date, and future prospects (eg, extensions to personalized and precision medicine) also are not promising. Similarly, intellectual fascination in neuroscience for many decades has led to few new practical applications …”
Monday, September 9, 2013
Do medical doctors improve health?
By Denis G. Rancourt
It is a serious question. If any other profession caused a fraction of the death rate due to medical interventions, then that profession would be prohibited from practicing until a full coroner's inquiry was ordered and completed. But not the medical profession. It kills with impunity, without any real oversight.
The numbers are staggering. In 1999, the Institute of Medicine (IOM, of the National Academy of Sciences of the US) published a first authoritative institutional report of medical errors, which disclosed that between 44,000 to 98,000 US citizens were being killed each year by medical errors.[1]
These numbers do not count the equally large death rate from "non-error" adverse effects of medicine.
In her brilliant article of 2000, the late Dr. Barbara Starfield reviewed the medical literature, in the light of the IOM report, and reported that the best estimate of total deaths from medicine in the US was between 230,000 and 284,000 deaths per year.[2]
That was in 2000, and the US population has increased by approximately 11% since then. It is reasonable to assume that the death rates from medicine have remained constant since 2000, which is not contradicted by any study or report. In fact, a detailed study published in 2010 showed no measurable improvement since the IOM report of 1999.[3] This means that presently in the US medicine kills between 250,000 and 310,000 US citizens per year, every year.
These deaths are entirely avoidable, since they are caused by the practice of establishment medicine. This means that halting the practice of medicine would save the lives of over one quarter of a million US citizens every year. Approximately 1000 lives would be saved each day that medicine is not practiced in the US. This is equivalent to the death rate from a large skyscraper collapsing every day.
The corresponding death rate is between 80 and 100 deaths per 100,000 per year. This death rate from medicine is the third leading cause of death in the US, after diseases of the heart and cancer. The other leading causes of death (bronchitis, stroke, non-medical accidents, Alzheimer's, diabetes, influenza/pneumonia, kidney failures, suicide, infections, liver failures) all have individual death rates that are far smaller than the death rate from medicine.[4]
As a percentage, the practice of medicine causes approximately 10-12% of all deaths in the US, compared to diseases of the heart (24%) and cancer (23%). Medicine is a major killer. Yet there is virtually no research funding to find a "cure" for the adverse affects of medicine. By comparison, mega research dollars are spent fighting diseases that medicine has proven itself ineffective at fighting.
The reality of the lethal side of medicine is such that medicine should have the onus to prove that it does more good than harm. If medicine were put to the test, proving its worth would be a difficult task: So-called meta-researchers who critically examine the published claims of benefits from medical drugs and procedures find that most medical research is wrong.[5]-[9]
An institutional analysis reveals an air-tight system in which the medical profession preys on the most vulnerable and kills patients at an alarming rate, without being able to demonstrate a net benefit, from the majority of its lucrative interventions, on the most desperate individuals in society (those with terminal illnesses).
Medicine is good at trauma interventions (car accidents, heart attacks) but may do more harm than good against the leading causes of death, and it is itself a leading cause of death.
All this leads me to suggest that the medical profession is unable to regulate itself, or objectively judge itself. It is in urgent need of external regulation and/or boycott or something. It should be stopped in most of its functions until we figure out how to disarm it.
One collapsing skyscraper per day! If Bush were around, he could start a war against medicine. And that would be more sane than any Obamacare. No public health policy makes any sense unless it deals with the third leading cause of death head on.
Endnotes
[Related article::: "Is establishment medicine an injurious scam?"]
[1] Kohn L. et al (eds.). To Err Is Human: Building a Safer Health System. Washington, DC: National Academy Press, 1999. http://www.nap.edu/books/0309068371/html/
[2] Starfield B. Is US Health Really the Best in the World? Journal of the American Medical Association (JAMA), 284, 2000, 483-485.
[3] Landrigan C.P. et al. Temporal Trends in Rates of Patient Harm Resulting from Medical Care. New England Journal of Medicine, 363, 2010, 2124-2134. http://www.nejm.org/doi/full/10.1056/NEJMsa1004404
[4] For death rates which do not correctly account for deaths from medicine, see the annual National Vital Statistics Reports, such as the report entitled "Deaths: Final Data for 2010". http://www.cdc.gov/nchs/nvss.htm
[5] Ioannidis, John PA, Why Most Published Research Findings Are False, 2005, PLoS Med 2(8): e124. doi:10.1371/journal.pmed.0020124
[6] "Lies, Damned Lies, and Medical Science" by David H. Freedman, The Atlantic, 2010. http://www.theatlantic.com/magazine/archive/2010/11/lies-damned-lies-and-medical-science/308269/
[7] Ioannidis, John PA et al., Replication validity of genetic association studies, Nature genetics, 2001, 29(3), 306-309.
[8] Ioannidis, John PA, Contradicted and initially stronger effects in highly cited clinical research, JAMA: the Journal of the American Medical Association, 2005, 294 (2), 218-228.
[9] “On the sociology of medical meta-science: Exposing the Truth supports the Lie” by Denis G. Rancourt, 2011. http://activistteacher.blogspot.ca/2011/11/on-sociology-of-medical-meta-science.html
Tuesday, September 3, 2013
Global Economic Model of War::: Understanding Syria and more
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| War museum, Ottawa, Canada |
By Denis G. Rancourt
Following a quick survey of macro-economic indicators which are readily available on the web, from such public sites as the CIA, WTO, and so on, one can readily posit a clear and predictive model of war. (All numbers in this article are expressed in trillions of US dollars, such as 1.0T for one trillion US dollars, as an amount, or as a rate per year, as per the context.)
On observing the planet from space (using a macro-economic telescope), the first and most glaring observation arises from a look at net exports, which clearly show a single and dominant global empire, the USA. It has, for many decades, had a negative annual net export, of -0.63T, or so -- far greater than that of its closest "rival", and former dominant empire, the UK, with -0.14T.
This means that US military projection (over 1000 military bases world wide) and power is such that the US can maintain steady and long-term extraction of wealth from the rest of the world towards itself, no questions asked.
Only a country which is a participating satellite of the empire can share in the spoils of the global extortion project and consistently report a large negative rate of net exports. Notably, the UK (-0.14T), and France (-0.07T). (In this regard, it is no accident that the governments of the UK and France are the most willing partners in the US's present call to destroy Syria; more on this below.)
There are also momentary localized cases of large negative rates of net exports in post-war financial invasions, otherwise known as re-constructions financed by the empire (in the broad sense, including the financiers). But that is part of the accompanying phenomenon of how the empire profits from war itself.
For the system of extortion to function, the empire must maintain two parallel instruments: its military apparatus, and its financial apparatus based on the US dollar as world currency for the purchase of the main strategic commodity, which is energy. Only the empire can print the money that is needed to access the ability to develop or expand. A threat to the US dollar is a sufficient reason for war. Both Libya and Iraq had taken concrete steps to circumvent the US dollar as the operational currency, prior to their destructions. An attempt to circumvent the US dollar in buying or selling oil is an attempt to escape the empire's control, and this cannot be tolerated.
As long as the US dollar is needed to buy and sell the key strategic commodity, the US controls the relative value of other currencies, and as long as the US prints the money, it controls world finance and uses the global financial instrument to enslave all those without military protection, or without the sense to know better (i.e., jurisdictions with puppet leaderships).
Financial extortion is a tremendous tool. World national debt is 56.3T or so. The US debt is only a fraction of this at 11.6T or so. Interest on the national debt is low for "stable" states protected by the empire, and high for "unstable" states being consumed by the empire. The world revenue from interest on national debts can be estimated to be at least 1T (per year), and possibly as much as 10T or more from all loan sources. This is comparable to or greater than the gargantuan world revenue from oil and gas, presently at 4.5T.
Based on history, it is more than reasonable to posit that the empire's wars are driven by profit, that is, by an insatiable desire to extract as much stolen wealth as possible as quickly as possible, and to control territory to ensure continued extraction. Next, I examine the consequences of this assumption.
If the militarily superior empire is driven, as it has always been in terms of its military campaigns, by instant wealth gratification and conquest, then, in order to predict wars, we search for where wealth can be found and stolen. Wealth comes in many forms, such as slave labour, and natural resources, but one form is, more than any other, a strategic commodity: fossil fuel energy.
In the present technological and economic context, fossil fuel is incomparable as a strategic resource. It is the most accessible source of development and growth. Without it, a civilization slows and loses its ability to compete. Control energy supply and you control development. By cutting supply, you can bring an economy to its knees.
It is well known, for example, that the Afghan war is in large part about pipeline geopolitics, in view of controlling China's access to energy. To an empire, territory is important for two reasons: the resources that it contains, and the transportation routes that it sustains.
In the case of Afghanistan, there is also the formidably profitable drug trade, now controlled (and, to some degree, exploited) by the empire. The world illegal drug economy is estimated to be between 1.5T to 5T (per year), comparable to oil and gas. Whereas these drugs are not a major strategic commodity, the empire must control the illegal drug economy in order to prevent any competitors or resisters from accessing the corresponding easily-earned mega-revenues. This explains the so-called US "war on drugs". It of course has nothing to do with US public health.
In a nutshell, in the empire's mind, non-compliant and counter-allied states, such as Iran and Syria, cannot be allowed to benefit from and to control significant oil resources, in an area where China could secure protected land access to these resources. The war in Syria is nothing if it is not a predictable march forward by the dominant global empire. The sectarianism on the ground is as significant a motive, from a macro-economic perspective, as the war propaganda spewed out by the empire's sock puppet politicians and disinformation media is truthful. Sectarianism without financial and military support on either side has a way of turning into negotiated accommodation.
In addition to its geopolitical objectives, war also has its immediate dividends for many in the empire. The destroyed territory (infrastructure, population, etc.) must be "reconstructed", as a compliant serf state, using the empire's financing, and re-building enterprises, all leveraged via the continued world pillaging elsewhere. The sick and dying or diseased population needs expensive prescription drugs, and so on. World spending on prescription drugs is approximately 0.95T (per year), and this is a major high-profit sector in the empire's operations. The interest rates on reconstruction loans will keep the invaded population subservient and exploited for decades.
The main high-profit services and commodities include: prescription drugs, illegal drugs, fossil fuels, ultra-cheap labour, debt financing, and so on, all related to non-essentials to which entire First-World populations are addicted. These economic areas, consequently, are represented by the corporate players that have the greatest influence within the empire, and that most generously contribute to political campaign funds, and to post-political lucrative prize-positions for former politicians and their family members.
Medium-profit economic sectors such as domestic manufacturing and services can hardly compete for influence, and have a much reduced voice compared to the industrial era. Behold the era of the US war economy empire.
Basically, the empire's behaviour is entirely predicted by a mafia economic model of geopolitics. To be fair, however, mafias have ethical rules regarding killing an opponent's family and such, whereas the drone-wielding USA empire has no such rules.
By comparison, from a macro-economic perspective, military spending in China (0.17T) and Russia (0.09T) is defensive against the military spending of the US and its client/satellite states -- US (0.68T), UK (0.06T), Japan (0.06T), France (0.06T), Saudi Arabia (0.06), ..., Australia (0.03T), Canada (0.02T) -- since their net exports are positive: China (+0.20T), Russia (+0.14T). The net exports of the US's main war partners are of course negative: UK (-0.14T), and France (-0.07T).
There can be no surprise that the US's most willing war partners will always be the UK and France. Such are their macro-economic structures. They have satellite war economies, a status Canada is working hard to fully achieve.
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