Two surprising articles on Medscape
- Created on Saturday, 13 June 2020 13:32
Medscape is a weekly online journal for medical doctors that I have been reading for years, and the June 9 edition contains two articles that surprised me.
The first concerns the latest guidance from the American Cancer Society about lifestyle measures to prevent cancer. For the first time, besides setting limits on alcohol consumption for men and women, they admit that it’s best not to consume alcohol at all- to avoid it completely.
Thus, the change here is that the previous guideline only recommended limiting alcohol consumption, whereas the update suggests that, optimally, it should be avoided completely.
But, I have to wonder what took them so long because it’s not as though it was ever suggested that a little alcohol is good for you, that it helps to prevent cancer. Ethyl alcohol is a carcinogen, a mutagen, and a teratogen, and that’s been known for a long time.
Of course, there was the longstanding fallacy that a little alcohol helps to prevent heart disease, but that was based entirely on the “sick quitter” effect. In the U.S. and many other countries, most non-drinkers are former drinkers who used to drink a lot and often for decades. They are still suffering from the effects of alcohol even though they don’t currently drink. When researchers compared lifelong abstainers to so-called moderate drinkers, they found no protective effect from alcohol at all. The best thing you can do for your heart- and every other organ in your body- is not to bathe it in alcohol- at all.
The second article was an admission that many Covid patients who seem to recover, whose symptoms clear up completely, continue to test positive for the Corona virus for a long and indefinite period of time. So, the question is: are they still infective? But, what the question should be is: Is the PCR test valid? The medical world, in its religious faith in the Covid PCR test, still refuses to admit the possibility of false positives- even though it is widely recognized that the non-sick often test positive, and that the fully recovered also commonly continue to test positive. Some medical authorities are saying that it’s pointless to rely on the PCR test to determine if someone is cured, that other tests will need to be developed, and it may be best to forego PCR testing of recovered patients completely.
There is supposition about disease that occurs across the whole spectrum of pathology, where this, that, and the other thing are believed to be true. In other words, Medicine is riddled with “commonly held beliefs” that are unproven. But, the amount of supposition that is going on with Covid is off the chart.
I am not saying that there is nothing real underlying the Covid crisis, but I am saying that there is an element of “extraordinary popular delusion and the madness of crowds” that has taken over and is feeding on itself. And I am saying that it is happening at the professional level and fueled by the institutional dogmatism within Medicine, especially when it comes to this kind of disease. And to a large and growing extent, the masses just don’t seem to care any more, as evidenced by people flocking to beaches- and to anti-lockdown rallies. Medicine, as a profession, started based on superstition. Well into the 19th century, they were bloodletting to release the bad humors and the evil spirits. Modern scientific Medicine supposedly started at Johns Hopkins in the early 20th century. But, to a great extent, dogma and authoritarianism, and I mean of the worst and most dangerous order, still dominate the profession. What the world did, which was to shut down on medical orders, where governments of every stripe submitted to worldwide international Medicine shows you what Medicine has become and the extent to which it controls our lives. And it’s a very scary thing. With so many exotic viral outbreaks having happened, don’t you think it’s extremely likely that there are going to be more? What are we going to do if another one breaks out next winter? Is the world going to shut down again? One thing is absolutely certain: medical dogmatism is here to stay, and the sweep of it is going to be even greater going forward because of what happened.