The Enduring Power of Medical Myths

“Tranquility can’t be grasped except by those who have reached an unwavering and firm power of judgment—the rest constantly fall and rise in their decisions, wavering in a state of alternatively rejecting and accepting things.  What is the cause of this back and forth?  It’s because nothing is clear and they rely on the most uncertain guide—common opinion.”

-Seneca

Medical science is typically no more than opinion, crafted by those who profit most by the proliferation of manipulated truths.  As Seneca reminds us, such myths will rise and fall based on what is trumpeted by “common opinion,” what is declared to be truth by the press and social media, all of which is fed by medical/pharmaceutical companies and associations that seek to choreograph the conversation as best fits their own greed.  As the great stoic thinker Marcus Aurelius reminds us: “I learned to read carefully and not be satisfied with a rough understanding of the whole, and not to agree too quickly with those who have a lot of say about something.”  Sadly, his lesson is not heeded by our medical community, including the vast majority of doctors, who typically digest and spit out whatever “facts” are fed to them by self-interested parties, who lack a skeptical and critically thinking intellect, and who rarely do the hard work of self-investigation.

Studies have shown that only about 10% of doctors understand the risks and benefits of the interventions they insist patients adhere to (many of which are profitable to them), and most simply trumpet whatever their medical associations, the press, or protocols (which are constructed from drug company data) tell them to do.  This is why, according to neutral writers like Gardiner Harris (the NYT journalist who recently wrote No More Tears), we are killing more people through our interventions than we are helping, something he states is not only due to our dysfunctional medical system, but also to the fact that doctors are typically stooges of those who delude them for profit, not for patient care.

Thus we are left with the fact that what doctors and the media and many other players in the medical industrial complex declare to be “science” is far from being anything more than opinion or even deception.  Whether it’s the relevance of certain cancers (prostate, skin, ect), diabetes/prediabetes, blood pressure, kidney disease, various heart diseases, dementia, cholesterol, respiratory illness, and so much more, the science behind our beliefs is either lacking or refutes known science, but doctors seem to rely on another form of “science,” one based on opinions and self-interested beliefs, and one that they use to trump and often desecrate real scientific discovery and insight.  Hence as our health care spending increased from $500 billion 25 years ago to $5 trillion today based mostly on the proliferation of phony science., we are living shorter lives, we have more illness, we are sicker that we were even 25 years ago, and the only beneficiaries of the duplicitous lies that are now sanctioned as science are those who craft the lies in the first place.

Medical science has a long history of being deceptive and often dangerous.  In the early 1900’s, racial science, eugenics, the use of blood letting and leaches, and proprietary medicines were touted as being unassailable scientific truths; the most prestigious universities and doctors declared them to be sanctimonious facts, and any who doubted their words were locked in the prison of misinformation.  We came to rely on a binary way of thinking in healthcare.  Either you agree with the day’s scientific gospel as preached by those on the take, or you are anti-science and subject to ridicule, censor, or even dismissal.  Questioning the liturgy that is presented to the public as proven science, even refuting much of what the “experts” tell us to be true, will land you in purgatory.

A contorted philosophy of thought (or non-thought actually) abounds across our medical landscape, and we will discuss many examples in more depth in upcoming blogs.   For instance, you are either pro vax or anti vax, pro prediabetes or anti diabetes, pro carbs or anti carbs, pro cancer and heart screening or anti screening, pro cholesterol or anti heart.  Nothing truly fits into such neat oppositional binaries, but medical discourse often devolves into this simplistic morass, blocking access to patient-centered and scientifically generated ideas.  As Osler warned us, if you want certainty, medicine is not the field for you.  And as Seneca states, to be on a boat rocked by the vicissitudes of public opinion, by the narratives scripted by those seeking to profit from your compliance, will never enable you to approach any meaningful truth, but rather bounce upon the dangerous waves of orchestrated fact as CNN or Fox or your doctor tells you what you are supposed to believe, what is science, even if genuine science and common sense scream otherwise.

The sad reality of the scientific façade upon which our medical beliefs are constructed is that few medical scientific truths can pass the test of time.  We used to think smoking was healthy, that manufactured fat (trans fat) is far better than animal fat, that certain medicines were sacrosanct that we now know are lethal.  As Nassim Taleb shows in his book Anti-fragile, most drugs and medical interventions that the medical scientific community introduces can take years or decades to reveal their most devastating side effects, but the drug companies (with FDA and physician complicity) generate favorable studies that show only benefit early on, studies they have grafted to achieve the results they desire.  Thus they advertise the drugs, visit doctor offices, pay money to patient-centered organizations (such as the American Diabetes Association, American Cancer Society, Alzheimer’s Association) to promote the drugs, place compliance with the drugs into standardized protocols, and easily achieve their goal of selling tens of billions of dollars of these drugs before any downside effects are revealed.  Doctors readily comply with this formula, declaring such interventions to be medical breakthroughs. Those who dig deeper and find flaw with the new interventions are pushed to the periphery of relevance.

We saw this so many times in our past.  Those who did not prescribe narcotics to alleviate the fourth vital sign of pain could be sanctioned for their failure to adhere to new science, just like today those who dispute the safety of GLP-1 weight loss drugs, or who doubt the significance of high cholesterol or prediabetes, or who don’t believe screening is a universal good, or who think that each patient has his/her own normal blood pressure that cannot be formulized by a one-size-fits-all protocol, or who believe that stents and stress tests and blood thinners are likely more harmful than helpful, are in danger of being marginalized, losing income, and losing patients.  Those of us who dared fight against a CDC-Fauci COVID policy that landed us in the gutter of outcomes across the world, came close to losing our licenses.  Once the medical community declares something to be scientifically valid, then even science itself cannot convince the public and our medical providers from thinking otherwise.  Every study of heart stents shows them to be ineffective and dangerous, but we still put them in, we still pay huge amounts of money to doctors who perform this scientifically invalidated procedure, and if we question a stent we are vehemently attacked by those who have sanctioned stenting as being a holy scientific truth that simply cannot be challenged.  Science be damned! If we even understand what science is these days!

During COVID the definition of science was best articulated by Anthony Fauci, a doctor who never practiced medicine, a scientist who barely conducted any scientific studies, an administrator long in bed with drug companies.  He said: “I am science.”  Hence, science had nothing to do with studies—and he and the CDC originated not a single study during COVID, since they knew the truth without having to study it—but with his expert opinion.  This attitude reflects science across the medical landscape.  Expert opinion, which is the very idea that Seneca and others warned us about, has replaced real science, something that today’s medical community doesn’t understand.

What is real science?  It is best articulated by people like Albert Einstein, Carl Sagan, William Osler, to name a few.  It means that there is no singular truth, no dogma, that can be sanctified in protocols or truisms.  It means we must question everything and have a skeptical and critically thinking mind, never believing so-called experts who often have ulterior motives to shut us up.  We must dig into information independent of what we’re told, and always be aware of tricks that researchers use to create outcomes beneficial to themselves.  We must always encourage free discourse between differing opinions, never censoring those with whom we disagree.  We must never force people to behave in a certain way, because science is nuanced, it is never fixed, it always must be practiced in a way that is individualized and that makes common sense.  What is true today may well be a fiction tomorrow, and visa versa.  We must always do more studying, more questioning, more digging, more disputing.  That is science.

And that definition is not only the polar opposite of the “science” preached by Dr. Fauci during COVID, but also the antithesis of the science that buttresses our $5 trillion medical industrial complex. 

Two medical scientists are worth mentioning here, and both have been derided not only by their universities but also by the medical community as a whole.  In fact, many of their writings and lectures have been expunged from available computer searches since what they say is threatening to the current state of medical science. Thus, while I do provide links to their videos, as of now, those links are empty as they have been removed from google.

John Ioannidis from Stanford has been on the forefront of the battle against phony medical science.  He studies the studies, and has come to the conclusion that the vast majority of medical studies are manipulated so as to generate promising results despite often showing just the opposite.  Most are drug-company sponsored and designed, and when their results are not what the drug company wants, the studies are not published, and a new design is introduced with the hope of “proving” the company’s pre-determined outcome, maybe by changing the patients invited to participate, changing the placebo arm, reducing the study duration, or simply creating statistical trickery to twist outcomes into something fantastical.  He shows that about 85% of positive medical studies are reversed after 10 years, meaning that drugs or tests or interventions that were life savers in the original studies were found to be either ineffective or dangerous once subsequent studies were done, mostly after the patents expired and drug companies had little to lose from this reversal.  Look for his lectures on YouTube, one of which I highlight here.  He was almost tossed out of Stanford during COVID for merely asking questions, and this was not the first time the medical scientific community wanted him erased.  Ioannidis shows the harm done to trusting patients from this duplicity, as well as the profit generated by corporations, doctors, and many other players in the medical industrial complex who leap on the bandwagon of bad science.

Also in California lives one of the most prodigious cancer researchers in the world, Vinay Prasad.  His book Ending Medical Reversals is a gem and I give it to all kids I know entering medical school, because in the simplest way he shows how medical science has been co-opted by selfish profiteers and manipulated to generate results that are largely injurious to everyone other than those who are enriched from their proliferation.  Anyone can understand this book, and he also has a podcast in which he talks about why wonder drugs often are found to be toxic many years later, and why certain medical truths are fabricated to reward everyone except for the patients who are subjected to the trickery.  He uses the example of a free throw shooter.  The drug companies will hire a professional basketball player to shoot free throws using a certain technique.  He will make 8 in a row, and then the study will be stopped with the assumption that he will never miss and thus his technique is effective, so why continue the study.  Then it’s assumed that everyone in the country who shoots free throws exactly using the pro’s technique will also make all their free throws.  Only when such sculpted findings are introduced to the general public, when people start shooting free throws and missing despite clear scientific proof that everyone should make every free throw as long as they do what the guy in the study did, will their perfidy be revealed, but that only occurs after many years when the drug companies and doctors have profited and when innumerable patients have suffered.

Just read Harris’ No More Tears, as discussed earlier, to see how just one drug company plays this game, who they ally with to help scientifically sanctify their self-serving deceit, who the victims are, why the companies rarely pay a big price even when it is discovered that they knowingly advanced “scientific” truths that murdered people, and why this formula of inventing an anti-science version of science has paid off so brilliantly by those who are expert in it.  We discuss this too in our book A Return to Healing, showing how patients who seek salvation in a confusing and nuanced system are easily swindled by well-schooled white-coat wearing “experts” who promise them everything if they just do what they are told.

This is not science; it is the very antithesis of what any responsible scientist would endorse. But it is medical science, and it has been scripted in this way for 150 years, much to the benefit of swindlers who proselytize it, and much to the detriment of those who believe in what is sold to them as science.  How do we distill real science from the haze of medical pseudo-science to which we are incessantly exposed?  Many of us who are critical thinking skeptics, who dig into the depths of studies and protocols, who seek to individualize our care often in opposition to robotic protocols, have written books and articles, we have spoken out, but we are typically silenced or marginalized, labeled as anti-science by those threatened by the truth.  But we will continue to speak and investigate, and we will let common sense and true scientific inquiry be our guide, even if some of the specialist doctors call us “nut jobs,” as one of the cardiologists in my town labeled me.  But hey, given that others have hung up the phone on me when I presented them with facts that dispute their self-serving scientific malarky, I suppose being called names isn’t the worst thing!

In upcoming blogs we will dig into many of the most pernicious scientific myths that still saturate our collective medical landscape.  When real science disputes scientific myth, which one will prevail?  That depends on who is listening.  Many people prefer a simplistic if satisfying dogmatic approach to their health, seeking pills and tests and procedures to make them feel better, what I label the masking of truth.  This is the religion of medicine, which is what most medical science has become.  Others are more skeptical, are willing to listen and learn, and those ultimately have better outcomes, even if they sometimes feel they are out of the mainstream.  But as Seneca tells us, the mainstream is not reliable, and it is not what should guide our actions.  Real science rarely lives in the mainstream, because real science is messy, it never promises salvation, it usually discredits the interventions doctors believe to be necessary and scientific, and it is always changing.  And that’s what we will explore moving forward.