It started during yoga class. She felt a strange pull on her neck, a sensation completely foreign to her. Her friend suggested she rush to the emergency room. It turned out that she was having a heart attack.
She didn’t fit the stereotype of someone likely to have a heart attack. She exercised, did not smoke, watched her plate. But on reviewing her medical history, I found that her cholesterol level was sky high. She had been prescribed a cholesterol-lowering statin medication, but she never picked up the prescription because of the scary things she had read about statins on the internet. She was the victim of a malady fast gearing up to be a modern pandemic – fake medical news.
While misinformation has been the object of great attention in politics, medical misinformation might have an even greater body count. As is true with fake news in general, medical lies tend to spread further than truths on the internet – and they have very real repercussions.
We already see the consequences of this with abusive parents not vaccinating their children based on clearly disproven lies and nonsense, but it also extends to other medical issues. What’s especially interesting is that this affects people with higher educations a lot more than people with lower educations – might overconfidence be a slow and insidious killer (have a cookie if you catch that reference without Googling/DDG’ing)?
In any event, while people not vaccinating their children should obviously be tried for child abuse, I can’t say I can really care about what people do to their own bodies. If a grown adult wants to trust some baseless Facebook nonsense or whatever over qualified medical personnel, then she or he should be free to do so – and suffer the consequences.
The McGill Office for Science and Society published a video targeting miracle cancer cures ( https://youtu.be/3_a181Xkla4 ).
Even after being covered by an article in Wired ( https://www.wired.com/story/cancer-cure-video-bad-science-parody-vir… ), it still has not yet gone viral.
https://www.abc.net.au/news/2015-06-15/patients-cut-back-on-statins-…
Sometimes it’s not just Facebook.
Google (or the Internets) aren’t any more liars than – say – some half-drunk know-it-all from the Pub. Thing is, we wouldn’t give the latter the slightest credit – and certainly wouldn’t value their opinion over a medical one.
And that’s the point, after years being lead to believe “what is said on TV is true”, people transposed that behaviour to the Internet. And while it was already quite concerning when it comes to TV, it’s devastating when absolutely everyone with a computer can write absolutely everything.
One last note regarding personal choices : I’d say it depends highly on the healthcare system you benefit from in your country. When stupid personal choices weigh on society as a whole, maybe it’s time to consider making it less stupid.
First, sorry about my english.
The real thing in this news is that we (Sometimes i also…) Give credit to what we read without reading the references of the article. Is like omeopathy, or a study that says that if you use executive shocks, your chances to suffer stress increase in a 78%, and your chances of a hearth attack in a 56%. I don´t remember who made this study, but i remember reading the procedure, and yhe stadistic base was taken in wall street executives. After it i become so skeptic about what i read in the web even if there are for well known sites, until i read the sources, and after that, you must still think who wins money with this article, because could be paid by a company that want to shell a new product.
An example of this is a pharmaceuticall that whant to shell a new insulin tipe, and anounces an increaser absortion rate of 10% in the first 10 min. Well the other pharmaceuticalls, index the absortion rate in 30 min, so when u read the real absortion rate by the body in 30 min, it´s the same as others, but the sale price of this, is X5 the old one.
Yes, like some have said, to believe on something we read or watch on television or Internet is a problem.
To have a health system that makes it expensive to go to have an appointment with a real a doctor is also a problem.
Unluckily, the problem does not stops here. Fraud in medical publications is of pandemic proportions with a fairly big percentage presenting misleading, not reproducible results, and this kind of studies feeds many doctors with bad data. The economic incentive is just too compelling.
That is why we see special calcium and collagen products selling for unreasonable prices despite the fact the both have to pass our digestion system (as also commented).
But, hey, we must be free to publish our ignorant, if not deceitful, “beliefs” with as little consequences as possible.
Wow, who saw that coming ? Everyone else but bastards with less brain power than a toaster. If you use goolag as source of medical advice, then average headache means your head will fall off, cows around will stop giving milk and you will likely get anal probe from flat planet spaghetti aliens.
“I can’t say I can really care about what people do to their own bodies.” – I do. Because people that don’t get proper treatment are likely to cause a greater burden to society. Not to mention what would happen if a foreign power would spread disinformation about health like they do about elections etc.? A whole nation could be sick because they can’t seperate fact from fiction.
Sadly, there have been cases of almost that exact same thing happening – just on a smaller scale. E.g. western peddlers of quack medicine going to countries with laxer laws/enforcement to carry out trials that would be illegal in their own countries (https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=nfjwkTXoSFo). And the people who targeted immigrant communities with anti-vax advocacy, leading an outbreak of measles (https://arstechnica.com/science/2017/05/measles-outbreak-rages-after…).
Edited 2018-12-18 21:35 UTC
There are “good” sources of information on the internet, and “bad” sources of information.
Bad is anything on social media, forums, or behind a “Try this weird trick” ad banner.
Good includes sources like WebMD, NIH and other major health organizations.
I frequently look up any prescription and known interactions, because frequently, doctors don’t.
Statins have a pretty brutal list of officially known side-effects, but the question you have to ask is, are the side-effects worse than a heart attack?
Another important part is knowing the basics of how to properly do research, especially online – namely: don’t blindly the accept the first source you find, look at and compare multiple sources, and take the credibility of the source into account. It seems like common sense, but it’s apparently not that common if the prevalence of stuff like homeopathy, colloidal silver, “Miracle Mineral Supplement,” black salve, “Jilly Juice,” etc.
I asked my doctor what I thought was a routine question, he left for a while, I wondered out of the room to ask a follow up question…. found him googling my question…
That was the last time I went to him.
Should note, its completely reasonable for doctors to have resources they can call upon. I was irked that he didn’t have access to those verified sources. I understand that his training gives him a better lens to view the information he finds anywhere.
But it was a sign I had exceeded his available expertise and I should go somewhere else. Real experts in a field have journal papers that the have and are reviewing and writing. Rather than google searching to find webmd…
Was there indication that he was using that as his sole source of information, or was looking at poor-quality information? If not, would you have had the same reaction if instead he’d been looking up your question in a physical medical text?
I don’t think a doctor googling a medical question is necessarily equivalent to layperson doing the same thing – presumably, a doctor would have much greater ability to weed out BS from useful/accurate info, and would likely know of sources of info that most of us wouldn’t (or wouldn’t have the necessary training to interpret properly).
Here in ‘Murica, the issue runs much deeper. The medical industry is being run – OK, OK, maybe influenced – by pharmacy companies. Pharmacy companies pay for ongoing medical training for doctors. Do you see the conflict of interest there?
If you are diabetic, most doctors in ‘Murica will tell you to eat low fat, and increase your consumption of grains. Grains ==> high sugar levels, which makes you dependent on high levels of medications to pull them back down. You then become dependent on high levels of medications for life. The drug industry is training doctors this is the best method of treatment.
Diabetes is not the only example here either. All the drug commercials that are on the TV are all aimed at making us dependent. ‘Murica contains 5% of the world population, and yet we consume 75% of drugs manufactured in the world; and we are not healthier because of it.
Dr. Google can be misleading – you really need to get off of page 1 and find the studies (plural!), then find who paid for the studies, before you can draw conclusions. The problem is, you are being lied to from all sides, so the truth is hard to find.
I think you’re just making something up you think is true. My mom has diabetes, and has seen several doctors about it over the years, and every single one has told her to cut down on carbs, in all forms. Zero have encouraged her to eat more grains.
Same with my ex-wife, less carbo and sugar, more exercise.
Not letting one’s children be vaccinated being punishable with child abuse is Big Brother’s dream and my nightmare.
People today have no clue how health works. Health does not involve letting strangers fill you with unknown substances through vaccinations and pills. True health is our natural state and comes from nature. No wonder that everyone is fat and sick.
But the path to good health cannot be found by having blind trust in big pharma. If everyone would be healthy then big pharma would have a financial crisis. They are in it for the money, and they are not going to let their sick cashcows go.
You are free to subscribe to your own beliefs about what is healthy and what not. But I sincerely hope that people like you never get to say what we ought to do to our children. Any form of mandatory government healthcare is my nightmare, because government serves the people with money (like big pharma), not the people who just want to be healthy.
And just for the record, I am very healthy and not overweight. I cured myself of a whole slew of illnesses using a natural whole-food diet. This is how simple health is. Even wild animals know how to do it.
In your fantasy world, True Nature is pink and lovely. In reality, large amounts of people died because of infections. E.g. the black death killed 1 in 3 in Europe.
You have absolutely no clue. You are a free rider. You have less chance to become infected because people around you are vaccinated. That is how herd immunity works.
Even vaccinated people can get sick thanks to such freeriding, uninformed behaviour.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Herd_immunity
And be aware that vaccination is no guarantee to immunity because of mutation. The media overplays anti-vaccine people. The world is a dangerous place, get used to it.
This is partially true, depends a lot of how fast the pathogen goes through mutations, but then, again, look at statistics about poliomyelitis, measles, rubella and many other diseases that or killed or disrupted the health conditions of so many individuals for life.
It is easy pick an argument that says “but it is not perfect!” (actually, “perfection” is a creation of human mind, an “ideal”, it is not something real) but if you check the statistics you just can not brush aside the benefits vaccination brings (same for many things people raise equivalent lines).
I hope that you are laying a nice tasty bait otherwise I have some bad news: you are an idiot.
This starting sentence is really all it takes to come to that conclusion, but of course you don’t stop there.
Medical science is evidence based unlike the anecdote based that most people like to take as truth.
Yes there are problems however those are mostly in the fringe or new areas.
It may surprise you that the rest of the world doesn’t work like in the US, that in many parts of the world bribes to promote a product is completely illegal. And still those parts of the world prescribe pretty much the same kinds of medication, with some local differences. If something would suddenly be shown to have serious side-effects the product will be stopped, this is extremely uncommon unlike conspiracy idiots believe.
This story is about statins. Statins are known as a safe medication which significantly lowers risks of developing problems due to high cholesterol levels and there are increasing indications it can help for some problems not (now/yet?) linked with cholesterol. That doesn’t stop people from claiming it’s extremely dangerous of course. Most medications have side-effects and many common natural foods have it too. The thing is foods have little positive effects so they generally have little negative effects too.
(Other posters/readers: sorry for ranting)
One of the issues I had was urticaria. And now I got rid of it. Big pharma would have prescribed medication in order to suppress the itching. Not to cure it of course, because if it got cured they would lose a customer and curing it is not done using expensive medication but rather through relatively cheap food and thus much less profitable.
Am I to go back to a standard western diet, get urticaria again, and then take expensive medication for the rest of my life just because my cure is not based on any industry sponsored research?
When I was sick I just wanted a cure, not industry sponsored research and a lifetime of pills. And I got my cure. And if I ever have a child with urticaria (which is impossible since I would not allow a child of mine to eat junkfood) I would cure them like I cured myself.
The government already has way too much control as is and they definitely care more about rich lobbyists than they do about us. It surprises me that so many people insist that we ought give all our freedom away to the government, even to the point of surrendering our own body to them. People like that will never have a free country. They will just fight each other about how their government ought to use the governments absolute power over them.
Changing your diet caused you to stop getting a food allergy?
That isn’t exactly groundbreaking. Nor unconventional. That is exactly in line with what Western doctors would recommend
What food allergy makes someone overweight? Allergy to junkfood? Most of my health problems started when I got overweight.
I do not think that Western doctors are a scam. Western doctors do give quick short term relief of pain and that is what most people want, so Western medicine does have it’s place. But for longterm health doctors will never be the right place to go because granting people longterm health is not as profitable as shortterm pain relief.
Longterm health can only be achieved by people not afraid to experiment on their own body and think for themselves because industry profits more from shortterm pain relief and thus all the research funding goes to shortterm pain relief. Why would they research an alternative that would reduce their own profits? You think that industry would spend money to research methods that would reduce their own profits? Industry does not care about our health, they are a business and care about money only. If you seek that which is profitable to provide then industry is your friend but if you seek something that is less profitable to provide like longterm health than you are on your own.
30% of the medical doctors in the U.S. are foreigners. We do not sustain enough training to grow the pool of medical doctors. This has created an easy to control segment of the population for big pharma and investment groups. Private practice is practically impossible with pressures on the medical doctors from multiple directions to conform to a status quo.
That’s precisely what they are doing with for example vaccines… (which started this conversation) Perhaps your problem is that you see their motives via the prism of your ethics, projecting what you would in their position / thinking whole world is akin to you; not so…
Also, many rare ilnesses don’t have enough cases to be profitable, but they research cures anyway.
Anyways, so are you really suggesting that the way to deal with infectious diseases (that’s what vaccines are for; Thoms words you jumped at in your first post were about them) is diet? (hm, I seem to recall some sharlatans in Africa proposing diet as a way to deal with HIV epidemic…)
Also, why won’t you go back to hunter-gatherer lifestyle, that’s really Close to Nature(tm).
Countries where govs are involved the most in healthcare generally have the highest life expectancies …but of course you “overlook” such inconvenient facts.
And itching is something that can well be for example psychosomatic…
Humans are frugivores and not made to eat meat. For the sake of my health and in order to not contribute to animal suffering I have gone vegan. Even though that may seem very out of character considering my supposed “ethics”.
But it is obvious that you will not agree with me, and that is fine. Unlike some people here I do not intent to force my methods of health on anyone.
A lie repeated a sufficient large number of times does not transition to truth, does not matter how you dice it.
Humans, like chimps, our closest cousins, are omnivorous and the proof is in our guts and on its microbiology. It is possible to have a good vegan diet, yes, it is, but you need to ingest a lot of diverse veggie kind of foods that were not present for our primitive ancestors in one place.
We, even with the help of our microbiologic flora and fauna can’t produce all amino acids we need so, you better consume some products made from milk, eggs, fish or else pay a lot of attention to the other components of your diet.
Many people that opt to be vegan only incur on difficulties because of it, I hope you are not one of them. Also, I urge you to rethink what you, looks like, think about vaccines if you have or plan to have kids.
According to what I read here https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Common_chimpanzee#Diet (and in a source cited there) chimpanzee’s hardly eat meat. Only 2% of their diet is meat. The difference between my diet and that of a chimpanzee seems to be much smaller than the difference between most western people’s diets and the diet of a chimpanzee.
Besides our body seem to be optimized for fruit eating. Our senses, our hands, our teeth, our taste buds, they are all optimized to find, pick, peel, bite, chew, or taste fruit. Fructose is even added to things to add flavour because humans are very sensitive to it.
Anyway if veganism is harmful then I will see so soon enough. Since I have learned to distrust authority, I need to see things for myself before I believe it. I have experimented with multiple diets and lifestyles and veganism/fruitarianism is just another experiment, except it is my longest one yet and the only one that has been a success for my health so far.
As for vaccinations, what I am most opposed to is the idea that vaccinations ought to be mandatory. This is about freedom in general. Reading that people want to surrender their freedom of being able to take care of their children’s health to the government really makes me wonder what kind of freedom people care about nowadays. Maybe the freedom to decide what to watch on Netflix?
And purposely abusive parents are a different case. Obviously people ought to not be allowed to harm their children on purpose. However when it comes to well-meaning parents the line is very vague. Ought parents with overweight children to be locked up as well for feeding their children junk food? Personally I find it quite bad when people feed their children junkfood but I do not wish that government would take away that freedom. I know that I cannot have my cake and eat it too. We cannot have freedom yet have all our personal ideologies enforced on other people.
Edited 2018-12-22 16:34 UTC
Don’t be fooled by raw numbers when talking about diet, the important aspect is how much of certain nutrients we need.
Besides, my point is that we really are omnivorous. Lots of primates are.
There is a difference between ideology and science. Vaccination is backed by lots of data, it is not a matter of what we believe or not. The same can be said for “traditional” medicine, only that we must be more critical about treatments/drugs, specially the new “revolutionary” ones.
Also, be parents does not mean that we should be the most authoritative person for their needs, if it was the case, everyone should be free to educate their children by themselves and I do not believe on it, as don’t agree also with parents that refuse to give the health treatments their offspring may, by bad luck, need. Same for diet, if you ask me.
Of course, you must be free to try things you think is important but your freedom means your freedom to do things you want for yourself, not that it is automatically extended to someone that may need your care, i.e., when someone else is affected, your choices may stop right there.
Primates are mostly adapted to fruit and although they can live on meat they can only thrive on fruit. I was talking about being healthy and thriving, not about miserably chugging along through life.
Just compare primates with omnivores like dogs. Dogs have a much shorter digestive tract so that meat exists their body before it starts rotting and dogs have very different teeth. Just because primates are omnivorous does not mean they need a balanced diet with equal quantities of each different kind of food. Primates are made to live on fruit and when given a choice that is precisely what they do, even though they do eat a snack of meat in between. People in the west do the reverse: They life on meat and eat a snack of fruit in between. Hence they get sick because although they can live on meat they cannot thrive on it.
So yes I do go farther by cutting out the 2% of the diet that consist of meat and insects. However most western people cut out the fruit which is a far larger part of the diet. Hence my diet is far more natural than the standard western diet is.
Really, you need to check your facts, dogs are essentially carnivores but, with what is common on highly developed animals, they can have use for other foods also, if not in excess.
And, please, stop with the false argument that meat putrefy in our guts, it is a proof you really don’t know what happens in our body, it just takes longer to break the complex molecules that compose proteins and fat when compared to sugars which can be absorbed easier and faster.
obviously you have never truly looked at the objective data behind vaccines.
If you can explain the steep decline of every disease that we vaccinate for, prior to the widespread invention or adoption of said vaccine, I am all ears.
Thank a sanitation worker
humans are carnivores, our colon does not ferment fiber properly, in fact fiber causes a lot of stripping of the colon which is why vegans so often suffer from irritable bowel syndrome.
Well, surely I am on the conspiracy, too… Meanwhile, many diseases were outright practically eradicated in the wild …not for profit (though “not profitable” doesn’t mean useless – at the very least it results in more knowledge how our bodies work, in the end benefiting other areas of research). BTW, you didn’t seem to know vaccines use natural defenses of our organisms to do their work…
You must realise you are advocating, with your stance on vaccines and Back To Nature(tm), for death of quite a few people …also me; if things were left to Nature(tm), I would be dead at birth (even with emergency c-section at uni clinic, after rushing through ~70km of Martial Law checkpoints, I barely made it, with only 1 Apgar point …for colour, not yet totally pale; 0 for heartbeat, breath, movement; and with likely due to it complications later in life).
And also you partly support your lifestyle with nonsense (PS. and you post more of it down the thread…but acobar already mostly dealt with that) – we evolved basically as apex predators (one of the best this planet have seen, we’re responsible for large part of megafauna going extinct… ~luckily, with emergence of farming, being tasty to humans became an evolutionary advantage – as far as evolution goes, farmed animals are among the most succesful organisms), that was the driving force behind our evolution and what our bodies (and their extensions, tools – this was our great evolutionary breakthrough; or even large part of our ~culture/~pack; cave paintings don’t show fruits and veggies, but us killing tasty animals) are optimised for. Our last common ancestor with chimps was quite a few millions years ago.
You also misrepresent what you call “Western diet” …maybe you think “US diet”, I don’t know; but diverse diets of many western countries are unlike that one. Anyways, for what’s worth, I don’t eat particularly great (lots of sweets for example – gingerbreads in chocolate with fruit filling, marshmallows in chocolate, chocolate alone …I seem to like chocolate
; OTOH on eating day also largely fruits, mostly bananas (close to chimps after all 
) and apples, and fruit juices, joghurt, white cheese; from meat only fish from preserve / paprikash with few slices of bread and whatever trace amounts there are in instant noodles soups 
…though today was mushroom one 
), but I don’t suffer the ailments you accused “western” diet of.
Then there are those, like Eugenia here from OSNews, who swear by paleo diet… (her, and you, is likely all largely ~placebo) But NVM that extreme, we can thrive on somewhat more than 2% of meat; it isn’t the meat that makes people fat and miserable, it’s eating too much. I must take medication after which one supposedly “gains weight” (there was even a court case about it in the US and IIRC some record settlement), which really means one craves food more …so I simply compensate in the other direction, purposefully eating somewhat less than I otherwise would like, and my figure is almost perfect; it’s quite easy.
BTW, your diet still (though considerably less, sure; but if you can sleep at night with that amount…) contributes to animal suffering: http://www.animalvisuals.org/projects/data/1mc/
Which illnesses?
Chronic Lyme? Morgellons? Rope worm? Wilson’s Syndrome? Chronic fatigue? Gluten sensitivity?
Edit: replying to the wrong message, meant for the grand parent.
I don’t think anyone sane would argue that eating a well balanced. less processed diet isn’t an important factor in staying healthy.
Vaccines have saved millions and millions of lives. Evidence and peer reviewed science has. There are flaws and abuses in an imperfect system. But its designed to self correct with falsifiable hypothesizes and tests. You would be best advised to take its outcomes more seriously than approaches that do not have as much evidence for them.
Edited 2018-12-18 19:22 UTC
I agree 100%.
See Atkins diet ordeal/history. Government should have never gotten involved in diets. And now we have the results. In UK, they have record numbers of amputations resulting of obesity/diabetes.
People still discount the truth that food either kills us or saves us.
Cool story bro. And by any chance, did you also diagnose yourself with those illnesses, and diagnose yourself as cured afterward? As for wild animals, are you not aware that almost all wild/feral mammals have fleas/lice, worms, or some other form of parasites (if not more than one) by the time the reach adulthood?
Does that even matter? I was in pain and now I feel great. Would you not care about being in pain every day if a doctor said you are healthy? I think that being overweight is pretty obvious even to the layperson. I could not tie my shoes without holding in my breath because I was too fat. Tell me, how long do I need to study to know that is not healthy? Exercising for even 3 minutes made my body itch so badly I had to stop and scratched my back open until it bled. How many doctors did I need to ask in order to know that is unhealthy according to you?
Don’t entertain the guy mocking you. I’ve played enough sports to see the condition you describe. The guy is mocking you and you keep responding. The guy enjoys being a dick and watching you get defensive.
You must have a pretty thin skin if you think that’s me being “a dick.” If I wanted to do that, then I’d probably respond to your post with something like “Awww, did I hurt your pwecious widdle feewings by criticizing the quack pseudo-science you believe in? Someone get the poor widdle baby his bottle!”
Aww, did I hurt your mean spirited richard cranium self? Poor little man.
Observing symptoms is not the same as correctly diagnosing the cause of them. And yes, there are things that you don’t need medical training to know are healthy/unhealthy, in the “you don’t need a weatherman to know which way the wind blows” sense, but not all (if not most) medical issues are that cut and dry. Good luck, say, diagnosing and treating a genetic condition on your own, or figuring out exactly what condition you have when there are several with similar or the same symptoms. I’m a reasonably healthy & fit person, but I’ve had at least 3 fairly serious medical that I wouldn’t have been able to diagnose & treat on my own (a blood clot in my late teens, RSI-related tendonitis in both thumbs which I initially mistook for carpal tunnel syndrome, and diverticulitis – which I initially mistook for food poisoning).
That’s great that you were able to improve your fitness and that the issues you mentioned went away. But you don’t know for certain that the steps you took were actually what cleared the issues up – or if they simply cleared up on their own & you could be mistaking correlation for causation. Without proper medical testing & diagnoses, most alternative medicine is – at best – the equivalent of Lisa Simpson’s anti-tiger rock.
…and one nun was, after prayer to John Paul 2, miraculously treated from Parkinson…
I little slower to the conclusion on this case, if you ask any expert, he/she will ascribe it much more to the improvements on sanitary conditions (water, sewer and food handling) than on pharmacology breakthroughs.
Yeah, I’m sure that’s a large part of it – but I suspect that advances in medical science had a lot to do with it as well. I’m mainly thinking of outdated practices like consuming mercury as a cure-all, or homeopathy, etc.
We’ve actually had a big pharma-induced dip in life expectancy. Pills are no substitute for a health lifestyle. The most disturbing trend in medicine is the classification of potentially useful drugs as controlled substances under schedules that keep them away from the public.
One particularly elderly gentleman I’ve met over the years was full of vigor in his seventies. His appearance was more like a man around fifty. The guy was sexually active and acted like a teenager around women. The guy was sickly two decades before that before he began exploring microbiology. He wouldn’t say what exactly his secret was to all of his energy, but it made the guy a workout freak. He did pass away close to 80. Whatever he discovered they need to get out to other elderly people.
70-smth “acting like a teenager around women” probably freaked most of them out…
It is offensive that this guy’s post got downvoted when it doesn’t fit the reasons to downvote. Whoever did that needs to grow up.
To be real, my doctor had prescribed one to me because ‘You’re over 40’ they just do it if you’re over 40, not because you have bad cholesterol. It caused me some serious scares because of heart palpitations. So I stopped taking it, and even after telling him that, he said I should take it still.. same thing happened again. Changed doctors, new doctor asked me to try a different med at a much lower dose, and that one is fine.
So yeah, don’t always listen to what your doctor says, listen to your body.
In any event, while people not vaccinating their children should obviously be tried for child abuse
Yes Thom, obviously. 😉
I find it a bit strange that this – and “fake news” in general – keep being described as some sort of new phenomenon. The only new part is that it’s become more mainstream, when in the past it used to be mainly limited to spam – E.g. the endless “Is this the end of Obama?” spam I used to get, and spam about HARP, etc.
From a quick skim over the haul that my spam filters caught just so far today, most it’s hawking some sort of magic bullet solution to health issues, some of the subject lines:
You will no longer experience any nerve pain again
End your nerve pain in 3 days
Drop once on a mole and watch it dissolve in seconds
Mark Cuban stunned by this mole removal
CNN: New nerve pain cure released solves it in a day
This made my nephropathy pain go away
Amazing new oil dissolves any skin tag or mole in minutes
The 1 Truth About Buzzing & Ringing Ears (Tinnitus) & How To Fix
4 Signs You Are About To Die of a Heart Attack
[ALERT] Big Pharma wants this website SHUT DOWN
Eliminate psoriasis forever
Etc. And that’s not even getting into all of weight loss & hair regrowth spam, or the ones hawking ED remedies.
Well, if you read the literature, she seems (I don’t know her medical history so might not be applicable to her), statins are pretty useless for persons at low risk of cardiovascular disease: http://www.thennt.com/nnt/statins-persons-low-risk-cardiovascular-d…
So she was right. The stuff does very rarely help, and has more chance to harm.
I was prescribed Atorvastatin (Lipitor) for moderate cholesterol levels. Everyone told me to stay away from them, etc, but I didn’t have any problem with trying it. What are my options, anyway? I want to stay healthy, regardless, so I’m going to do what the doctor recommends, no matter what anyone else says.
It all went fine, and 3 months later I started to develop a bad pain in my right bicep. The pain was like when you’re at the gym and you lift just a little too much and feel a strain; a pinch and burn. The funny thing was, it happened without any physical activity. The pain stuck with me for about 3 or 4 weeks, and I couldn’t figure out what it was. I went to neurologists and physical therapists, and it got to the point to where I couldn’t even lift my forearm.
A bit later, random muscles throughout my body started to become weak. I was easily strained, just turned 40 and couldn’t figure out what was going on. My quads would freeze up while riding bikes, and it got to the point that I couldn’t even do any physical activity.
I finally got to the point that I quit taking all medications… lipitor was all that I was on at that time. Within a week, my arm was back to normal, and I was able to sleep well again (I couldn’t sleep well with pain). When that happened, I looked up the side effects of the medication, and found this is one of the worst. I contacted my doctor to get an appointment and tell him about it. He agreed I should stay off of it, and replace it with physical activity before it gets out of hand.
Unfortunately, my muscles haven’t recovered. I had a reaction almost like atrophy. If I try to go to the gym, I cramp up and strain instantly. I’m gradually building up, but it seems like irreversible damage.
With that said, I would never recommend NOT trying it because of stories from people who had bad experiences. It works for the majority and probably saves lives in the long run. My father takes it and doesn’t have issues. At least try it, but make sure you keep in the back of your mind that it may be the meds if things begin to get weird. Don’t be stupid and believe some holisticmedsforyou.com or even someone like me. Just pay attention and coordinate everything with your doc.
“It is simply no longer possible to believe much of the clinical research that is published, or to rely on the judgment of trusted physicians or authoritative medical guidelines. I take no pleasure in this conclusion, which I reached slowly and reluctantly over my two decades as an editor of The New England Journal of Medicine.”
Dr Marcia Angell former editor in Chief of the New England Journal of Medicine.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Marcia_Angell
Nice link, thank you.
I think many here are aware of the problems around medical research and results, specially on USA where things really got weird. It is really unbelievable how the richest country would allow its more in need citizens to go through painful years without a sound coverage.
One of the strangest aspects of human body is how the mind affects the healing process, a la placebo effect, and it is why many swear by homeopathy and other forms of alternative medicine.
Human body is a self-healing machine and, on many cases, giving time to it and/or changing habits, things will be sorted, no need for medicine. The problem is, what to do when this is not the case? For me the answer is, don’t fall for despair, keep informed, and ask as many good doctors as you can before you opt for a treatment.
Unluckily, my father failed to check these important steps and some doctors did not give him appropriate advises and treatments in his urge to cure himself. He, most probably, would have had longer and better final years if the aggressive steps he went through were avoided. I miss him dearly.
I’m thinking only http://demotivator.tumblr.com/post/836211160/overconfidence-this-is…
…so I guess no cookie for me 
(after Googling, were you about https://www.reddit.com/r/darkestdungeon/comments/38zxhv/remind_yours… Thom?)
medicine is a bad joke, vaccines haven’t saved any useful fraction of human lives, and potentially immunocompromise every child they are injected into with chronie autoimmune issues like systemic inflimation and other problems of that nature. If you want to thank a group of people for stopping the spread of chronic viral and bacterial infections that were largely only lethal to people with high numbers of comorbiditys, thank a sanitation worker and someone who invented and used DDT to kill insects.
statins are downright lethal, and anyone who has spent time doing the biochemical research into how statins work, what cholesterol is and what it does in the human body knows that the Ancel Keys hypothesis is just such a flatly wrong lie it is not to be believed.
The real cuase of 80% of CVD is high blood sugars, and Dr Kraft figured this out over 40 yrs ago.
Eh, many serious diseases were practically eradicated in the wild thanks to vacciness… also/largely in places where sanitation is still quite poor & where DDT wasn’t used.
And your post goes downhill from there…