There is a perception that strikes me as common enough to be considered "common wisdom" that antivaccine views are much more common on the "left" of the political spectrum than they are on the "right." I've discussed on multiple occasions how this perceived common wisdom is almost certainly wrong, or at least so incomplete as to be, for all intents and purposes, wrong. Frequently, the accusation that the left is antivaccine, usually coupled with the stereotype of the crunchy, affluent, liberal elite living on the coasts being antivaccine, is often thrown back by conservatives stung by justifiable criticism that today's conservative have a nasty antiscience streak, as evidenced by the prevalence of anthropogenic global climate change denialism, anti-evolution views, and denial of science when it comes to women's health so common among conservatives. In essence, it's a tu quoque response, in which conservatives retort, "You have your antiscience fringe, too," such as antivaccinationists and anti-GMO (genetically modified organisms) nuts.
Unfortunately, as I've described on multiple occasions, there is no compelling evidence that antivaccine views are any more prevalent among liberals than they are among conservatives. Indeed, antivaccine beliefs span the political spectrum from left to right and everything in between. On the left, there are antivaccinationists who fall prey to the naturalistic fallacy, believing vaccines to be an affront to nature, plus a distrust of big pharma, while on the right there are antivaccinationists whose antivaccine views derive from “health freedom” beliefs that are often a combination of the naturalistic fallacy with good, old-fashioned libertarian contrariness that leads to an intense belief that the government shouldn’t be able to tell them what to do. "No forced vaccination" easily teams up with conspiracy theories about the government and suspicions about public health efforts, which is why antivaccine views are quite at home among libertarians.
The reason I briefly recapped how there is no strong predilection among liberals or conservatives, compared to each other, to fall for antivaccine views is because the stereotype that antivaccine views are more prevalent on the left serves as the basis of an unintentionally gut-bustingly funny rant from what appears to be the newest member of that wine loving, vaccine hating, coffee klatch of mommy warriors for whom the terms Dunning-Kruger effect and arrogance of ignorance were coined. I'm referring, of course, to the other wretched hive of scum and quackery, the one fueled by a combination of hubris, quackery, and wine, namely the Thinking Moms' Revolution. In it, an apparently new member of the boozy crew who prefers Belgian ale to wine and going by the 'nym of Karma, disappointed at finding no support for the antivaccine quackery that provides the raison d'être for TMR, demands that her fellow antivaccine moms Stand Up and Refuse To Be Counted. It's even part 1, meaning that there's more hilarity to come. (I can't wait.) It's tempting to go for the really obvious joke that Karma's a bitch, but in reality Karma is really, really hurt that the media, particularly the left wing media, has been so very, very mean to antivaccinationists lately, eventually finding her way to the grandmommy of all liberal publications (or at least one of the most famous), Mother Jones. Karma was not pleased at what she found:
In my quest to find a progressive, non-biased media presence I went to the most notable sources of independent journalism. Mother Jones is a publication with a rich history, referenced on their website ” . . . Award-winning Mother Jones magazine is a project of the non-profit Foundation for National Progress (FNP), founded to educate the American public by investigating and reporting on important social and political issues of our time. The FNP launched Mother Jones magazine in 1976 and MotherJones.com in 1993 to bring uncompromising reporting to a broad national audience.”
Intrigued, I then did a internet search on the terms “Mother Jones vaccines” and was surprised to find a long history of negative posts that, to my dismay, did not provide a balanced, independent discussion on their pages.
Just for yucks, I did the very same search, and indeed what came up consisted mainly of solidly pro-vaccine articles. One of them included the interview with an antivaccine pediatrician in the Bay area called Dr. Stacia Kenet Lansman, which I described in a post just this month. This particular poor excuse for a pediatrician thinks that vaccines are "messing with nature." Actually, I thought that the article, if anything, was a bit too sympathetic towards Dr. Kenet Lansman. Many of the rest of the articles appeared to share one thing in common, namely Chris Mooney's name in the byline, either as the author or co-author (although, long before Mooney joined Mother Jones, one other was written by Arthur Allen). In any case, it is a truly welcome development that over the last couple of years, Mother Jones has been generally rational with respect to vaccines, and the "Thinking Mom" named Karma doesn't like it at all.
Still, she does manage to come up with one rather interesting observation. She heads on over to MJ's media kit, including this document, this document, and this document. Basically, it indicates that MJ readers are in general educated (90% attended college), pretty affluent, and are into a whole lot of woo:
- 78% of readers buy organic and natural products
- 43% of readers prefer using alternative methods of medicine/healing
- 86% of readers consider healthy eating and good nutrition important
- 45% of readers shop at natural foods or health store at least once per week
- 84% use vitamin or mineral supplements
- 43% prefer alternative medicine/healing over prescription medication
- 39% use homeopathic/herbal remedies
Now, if there's one (sort of) not nutty thing that Karma writes about MJ, it's that she not unreasonable infers from the reader profile above that a lot of MJ readers are likely to be antivaccine like her. Given the known association between interest in "natural health" and "alternative methods of healing" and antivaccine views, it's not such a leap to make that deduction:
Notice anything unusual? The very demographic that Mother Jones relies heavily on to attract advertising dollars is the same one they disparage on a regular basis on their website that draws 8 million views per month. According to their own research, 40% of their readers have a household income in excess of $75k, 43% prefer alternative medicine, homeopathic treatments and herbal remedies. More than likely, this coveted market share also exercises their vaccine exemption rights and are educated consumers when it comes to health-related matters.
Of course, it might just be possible—likely, even—that the antivaccine fringe that's fringy enough to read, much less write for, TMR is such a small proportion of MJ's readership that it doesn't concern itself overmuch with winning their business. That would be perfectly reasonable, if true. Moreover, perhaps MJ sees part of its mission to educate its readership, even those that might have antivaccine tendencies. Given the mild tone of the articles (this is Chris Mooney, after all, and I've gently remonstrated with him before for being a bit to—shall we say?—optimistic about the possibility of building bridges to the antivaccine movement). MJ articles tend to be pro-vaccine these days, but they are about gentle about dealing with the antivaccine movement as you can imagine. Yet, Karma is clutching her pearls for dear life, so much so that she extends her complaints about how the mainstream media portray the antivaccine movement to other sources, such as NPR, TIME, Slate.com, Salon.com, Forbes.com, and Newsweek:
In the interest of keeping things fair and balanced, Mother Jones is not the only example of attracting an educated and desirable readership to draw advertisers only to court controversial blogging tactics that seek to control the flow of information as well as distort it. The list is actually quite long. Think NPR is above these tactics? I wagging fingerdid until I read their “Shots” blog. Financial publications including Forbes and The Wall Street Journal have joined the fray. Slate, Forbes and Salon have latched on to the subject of parents and vaccinations, wagging their collective finger at anyone that disagrees, and their elders, Time and Newsweek, are the grandparents who want an in with the cool kids and their money by upping the ante in regards to outright inflammatory hate speech as evidenced in posts during April 2014.
Hate speech? Seriously? This from someone who identifies with Generation Rescue and Age of Autism, both of which regularly lay down rhetoric far more inflammatory and insulting towards their proclaimed enemies (anyone who opposes them and their desire to demonize vaccines as harmful and a cause of autism). I mean, seriously. AoA, for instance, is a source that Photoshopped the heads of Paul Offit, Steve Novella, and other defenders of science into a painting of a Thanksgiving dinner where the main course was a baby. These are people who regularly deride Dr. Offit as Dr. PrOffit." These are people who liken the vaccination program to the Holocaust (or the Titanic or the Oklahoma City bombing). Now, that's hate speech.
So what's Karma's answer? I'm sure we'll hear more about it in part 2, but for now, she thinks that antivaccinationists like herself should cease to patronize media outlets that criticize the antivaccine movement. That is, of course, her right and the right of antivaccinationists everywhere. (America, dammit!) She also advocates not clicking, sharing, or commenting on such articles. Of course, that would make it a lot more difficult for, say, AoA's "media editor" Anne Dachel, to get the message out to her flying monkey patrol to fly in and dive bomb the comments of pro-vaccine articles with the poo they fling.
Come to think of it, it might not be so bad if the "Thinkers" succeeded at this. Think of it. No more waves of antivaccine stupid flowing over the comments of pro-science articles about vaccines in online forums and comment threads! Wouldn't that be awesome. Maybe I shouldn't be so dismissive of Karma's effort. After all, it's incredibly unlikely that there are enough hard core antivaccine activists like Karma and her fellow "Thinkers" that MJ or Salon.com or NPR or Slate.com would miss them, at least from a financial standpoint. There are, however, more than enough to turn the comment threads after widely read pro-science articles into cesspits of pseudoscience and antivaccine quackery. Maybe I should encourage her. I'm sure that Dorit Reiss, lilady, and all the other commenters who have the guts and persistence to wade into those comment threads would be more than happy to apply their skills at combatting the antivaccine movement to other venues, and I wouldn't mind not feeling obligated to blog about antivaccine pseudoscience so often. Win-win!
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Helianthus, Narad, Herr Doktor, myself and one or two others have identified Philip Hills of the Hope Osteopathic Clinic as the likely author of these posts. There is a little matter of an 's' between who we have concluded the author is and who the author says he is not. Which is why I asked the question. Why state you are not someone other than the person everyone else has identified? Unless Mr Hills is so incompetent as to fail to spell his own name, several times in a row. Sadly, this is something I am almost ready to believe.
Thank you all for the FB explanation. I thought as much.
We're all the same person, of course.
Well if Mr Hills' past performance is to go on, we are all named Chris.
That is OK, because Chris is a pretty good name.
However, if everyone changed their names to Lucy, we could be a Lucy nation
the enire American population, en masse, gave up alcohol and changed their diet and lifestyle from the unhealthy European diet and lifestyle to the healthy pre-Columbian Native American diet and lifestyle durng the mid-60s, which is why, like the pre-Columbian Native Americans, we never suffer smallpox and almost never suffer mumps or measles.
You remember that great change, right? It is in all the history books, the same place we learn about alcohol, the European diet, and the European lifestyle, which we obviously do not ourselves indulge in, or we would get measles, mumps, and smallpox.
Meanwhile plague disappeared from Europe, not after a successful vaccine campaign but a great fire and reforms to planning and city infrastructure laws.
Let's hope that Chris and Her docky are not tempted to run a detective agency or they will be burning anyone who disagrees with their quirky logic. I mean fancy believing that injecting people with crap protects!
This playground lurgy idea of catching disease is bonkers.
And because the black rat that carried the plague was outcompeted by the brown rat that didn't.
Then what happened to smallpox?
As has been pointed out in this thread, germ theory has remarkable predictive power.
"Meanwhile plague disappeared from Europe, not after a successful vaccine campaign but a great fire and reforms to planning and city infrastructure laws" that kept the rats and their plague-bearing fleas away from the people. Tes, exactly.
Vaccination isn't the only way to prevent disease. It's just the best way to prevent air-borne, highly contagious diseases like measles.
@Johnny not Hills labile,
Frankly, Johnny, I don't give a d--- what your real name is, because the value or lack thereof in your statements doesn't depend on who you are.
But I find your posts totally unconvincing, because you fail to make a prima facie argument to support anything.
But the plague reference struck a chord in me because I live in New Mexico, sometimes jokingly called "the land of the flea and the home of the plague" for reasons that are obvious if you look at this map:
http://www.cdc.gov/plague/maps/
But, I will ask you a few questions.
1) How do you explain the spreading of the plague in the 14th century? What change was happening that caused the geographical movement of the disease?
2) Why is there now a sudden growth in plague cases in Africa? http://www.who.int/csr/resources/publications/surveillance/en/plague.pdf
3) What do the flea and the plague have to do with each other?
4) Why do antibiotics work well enough against the plague that routine vaccination is not recommended except for people who are likely to be exposed to yersinia pestis?
When there were no longer people coming into frequent contact with rat fleas that carried the disease, the incidence of bubonic plague decreased and it no longer was a massive health threat on the scale that it was during the middle ages. People still catch it, and there is now a vaccine against it. However, it is sufficiently rare in Europe that the vaccine is not recommended on a routine basis. There are still plague outbreaks in many parts of the world when infected fleas on rodents are able to bite people. Bites from uninfected fleas do not, of course, spread plague.
There are several diseases that have been controlled by providing clean water and uncontaminated food in the absence of any lifestyle changes. The reduction in incidence of rabies by immunizing pet dogs and cats (once again, with no lifestyle changes or presumed changes in the number of animal bites) also suggests that the disease is spread from organism to organism.
"Then what happened to smallpox?"
Everyone on Earth simultaneously changed their unhealthy diet and lifestyle modalities, silly.
"We also routinely culture bacteria from sick patients, find out which antibiotic kills those cultured bacteria, give that antibiotic to the patient, and they get better. Sometimes we find they have an antibiotic resistant infection and they don’t get better as easily. If conventional science had it wrong it would rapidly become very obvious." Kreb cycle
Well this is a bit of fancy, we are now facing a situation where even orthodox medical science admits we have run out of antibiotics to kill germs. No one denies the existence of germs or bacteria or viruses, it is what they are doing that is in question. The alternative view of the role these organisms play is that they are not isolated separate entities that 'infect' the host. The are a normal physiological adaptation to environment. If we cut the blood off to the arm we get gangrene, no one caught it, it is the normal evolution of events. In a 'toxic' lung that is unable to clean itself the bacteria that 'appear' like any flora in a living tissue and will break down this waste and then allow the normal channels of cleaning 'snot' to wrap it up and us to cough it out. It may be a funny colour but it, properly managed with rest and diet, be a self concluding event.
It fits in perfectly with your idea of 'antibiotic resistance' that is if you keep killing natures little cleaners then they will evolve in the newer more toxic environment until they eventually overwhelm the host and we then get 'flesh eating killer bug ate my grandma'
So the short period of time where antibiotics seemed to be the miracle has now got us to a point where those who have chosen to medicate every cleaning crisis are fast trackng to degeneration.
Just like the credit boom led to world wide financial collapse and it was created by financial experts too, all that skill and brilliance but all they did was look at one part of the picture and the end of the story was an almighty fuck up.
Well done orthodox germ mythology!
"As has been pointed out in this thread, germ theory has remarkable predictive power." Julius
Too right!
http://www.haaretz.com/news/world/1.588640
http://www.theguardian.com/society/2013/mar/11/superbugs-antibiotics-ba…
And the ignorance safari continues courtesy of Mr. Hills. It's a variant of "argument to consequences" (If X was true, then it would be unhappy for us, therefore X must be false) but since "people seek 'quick fix' solutions and are careless with them" is not a consequence of germ theory, it doesn't even hold together on that level.
I was going to mock it with the reductio ad absurdum of "people on a farm get lazy and eat through the food that was supposed to be put away for winter, then they suffer extreme deprivation when winter actually arrives; their poor decisions mean, of course, that all our theory about 'people need to eat' is wrong." Then I remembered, Hills is a devotee of Shelton; he might well believe that that's right, and that people don't need to eat!
An unchecked bacteria infection could indeed lead to a self-concluding event.
There is certainly nothing more concluding than death.
I'm sure the poor damselhere just needed a change of lifestyle: more sun, a more balanced diet...
@Johnny Labile/Philip Hills:
It may be "in question" to you, but not to most scientists and doctors. Oh, and I want some proof of terrain of the body, please.
Then why is infection listed as a cause of gangrene? Oh wait, you think germ theory is incorrect.
???
How does that disprove the predictive power of germ theory, which concerns how and why diseases will occur and not -- N-O-T, not -- how or whether they'll respond to antibiotics?
Also:
People had been dying for a long, long time before vaccines, antibiotics, and/or any other pharmaceuticals came to be.
Please explain how that process occurred as you understand it.
Thanks.
What a complete idiot. Antibiotic resistant bacteria causing infections that can't be treated with antibiotics supports the germ theory rather than detracting from it.
Does osteopathy affect cognative function do you think or was Mr Hills always like this?
"Antibiotic resistant bacteria causing infections that can’t be treated with antibiotics supports the germ theory rather than detracting from it." Crispy creme
You obviously don't understand the pathway of resistance. It is created by using antibiotics you fool. There isn't a special kind of bacteria that won't obey the rules, they are all becoming resistant because of the short sighted fix of medics dishing them out like sweeties.
It's natural selection unless of course you are a creationist?
God almighty, and I am an atheist, what can't you not understand about that?
"Then why is infection listed as a cause of gangrene? " Julius C
Ok smarty pants where did the 'infection' come from then?
LW: Why don’t we all experience it now and then?
Europe used to. Along with pogroms, multi-country wars, and crusades.
MI Dawn: That's exactly how the latest case of bubonic plague started. A ten-year-old was examining a squirrel carcass, got bit, and was hospitalized.
@Philip Hills/Johnny Labile:
From bacteria getting in through broken skin, consuming human cells, multiplying, and releasing toxic substances, dimwit.
Unfortunately, we are not fluent in gobbledegook.
I'm still trying to follow the illogic (perhaps that's my problem)-- if germs don't cause disease, why do we care that they're evolving to have antibiotic resistance?
Well, I'm stuck on a different bit of illogic - If a bunch of people live a crappy lifestyle, they'll develop a disease, and that will cause the body generate microbes. If they fight the microbes with antibiotics, those microbes will develope antibiotic resistance. Then other people who live the crappy lifestyle will develop disease, and they too will generate microbes, but not the original microbes, they will get the new model resistant microbes. So how does the information to make the new model resistant microbes get passed along from person to person?
Wait....so moron Johnny believes that humans can spontaneously create life (i.e. bacteria & virus)?
And please note - my comment was not directed at Johnny @526
"if germs don’t cause disease, why do we care that they’re evolving to have antibiotic resistance?" madder
Well it is hard trying to explain logic to medical fanatics.
Normally lungs clean themselves by either wrapping crap in mucous and then us coughing it out. At the cellular level metabolites, which are predominantly acidic, are buffered with alkali and rendered nonreactive so that they can pass into the blood and then through the normal channels of elimination ie kidneys and pissed out.
If the waste build up is too fast or not reduced/prepared for safe excretion it it temporarily stored in extracellular spaces where water is absorbed to dilute its effect. Medically this is called edema. Long term compensations, as such, start to stimulate the production of cortisol which thickens the lysomes in the cells to keep the wast under 'lock and key'.
If the waste becomes organised bacteria starts to accumulate that effectively feeds off the waste, breaking it down into manageable portions and we are now in the state of what the medics would call an infection. These tend to happen to groups of people in similar situations like families or work colleagues and gives the impression that the condition was 'caught'. Those that don't 'catch' it are labelled 'noise in the data' for the more fanatical medics among us.
If we chuck and antibiotic at it it totally fucks the process and forces the process to desperately shove the waste back into extracellular spaces where it organizes and consolidates waiting for the next opportunity. Same with anti pyretics which are there to govern the process. This is now a much more toxic situation and a more rigorous flora to feed off this waste, the original antibiotic won't work now so we need a new one.
Thus infection 'resistance' is a direct consequence of antibiotic prescription at stages when rest, simple food and good nursing would have been enough.
Modern research shows us that persistent antibiotics for chest infections increases the likelihood of lung cancer by a massive 50%.
Rather than germs 'causing disease' they are the products of the environment. Luckily those of us who never take antibiotics are least at risk from the coming nemesis.
Well, he did say @453
@507
@513
So, yah, it seems to me that's what he's saying. Can you come up with another interpretation?
No apology needed - in a fit of vanity, I assumed that the question was directed at me *about* the other Johnny.
"So how does the information to make the new model resistant microbes' Johnnny
Fail in logic, people who don't take all the meds ie allow normal cleaning and eat well are not susceptible to resistant strains. That must be true or we would all have it!
"Wait….so moron Johnny believes that humans can spontaneously create life (i.e. bacteria & virus)?"
Ooooh lawrence didn't your mum tell you where babies came from. So let's get this right, you think there are loads of different viruses and bacteria just randomly 'going around' infecting people? So where did they come from lawrence?
Tell me this, if , as a women I go to the doctor for a Rubella antibody test to see if I am 'immune' to Rubella as I want to have a baby and he tells me my antibody levels are high therefore I am protected. Why, if I get an HIV antibody test and it is positive ie I have high levels of HIV antibodies - am I told that I have a disease?
As best I can tell, he's clinging to a sort of warmed-over Béchampism, where stressed cells are transmogrified into microorganisms. Or something. But I fail to see how the existence of antibiotic resistance supports this idea, or alternatively disproves germ theory.
"How does that disprove the predictive power of germ theory, which concerns how and why diseases will occur and not — N-O-T, not — how or whether they’ll respond to antibiotics?"
I've run into this kind of nonsense before - antibiotic resistance is bad, so any theory that predicts (or is consistent with) antibiotic resistance is also bad - and bad theories must be false. You see the same kind of fantasy among the relativity cranks - atomic bombs are a consequence of relativity, so relativity is bad, and wrong.
Again, go test it out. It would certainly be less tedious than desperately trying to change the subject over and over to try to cover your scat inability to answer direct questions.
I'm sure your "snot" normal cleaning products from any number of sexually "transmitted" diseases would be fascinating for all concerned.
I wonder what Mr. Hills thinks of studies like these, which use genome sequencing to directly trace the transmission of an infectious strain through a community, and to reconstruct the emergence of antibiotic resistance in this strain:
http://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pubmed/24753569
Ummmm....the moron doesn't seem to know the difference between the combination of two living cells (the sperm & the egg) to create a baby vs. supposedly life arising from detritus in the body.......given that his whole thought process was disproven a few centuries ago, this guy is completely hopeless.
I am reminded of insano-troll, that lived in a completely different reality, with even substantially different definitions of even basic scientific terms......the color on this guy's planet most certainly isn't blue.
Then why is there such a long historical record of people dying from pneumonia that it had already existed for centuries before the little observation below was made:
See that part about people dying absent intervention?
If that's not what you mean by "self-concluding event," how do you account for it?
Bear in mind that it predates antibiotics, and that the ancients were aware of food and rest.
Why was Shelton bedridden with symptoms that kept getting worse and not better for the last thirteen years of his life?
Philip Hills, proprietor of the Hope Osteopathic Clinic Essex, inquires,
If I were your physician, I'd tell you not to worry about a thing and just carry on.
After chloroforming you and lopping off your dong, of course.
@Labile
Care for providing a source for this info?
@ Any passing bystander
The answer to this apparent discrepancy is the context:
Strictly speaking, detecting antibodies specific to a given pathogen only proves one thing, that your body encountered said pathogen (or a lookalike, like a vaccine) and your immune system developed antibodies against it.
But.
In the case of rubella, or any infection for which there is a vaccine and/or a good chance of clearing it, if you don't show any symptom of the illness, then obviously you encountered it in the past, and if it made you sick, you got better. Thus, conclusion: your body has seen this pathogen before, and it's a reasonable guess to state that you are now immune to it.
Sometimes, it could be a wrong guess: your level of antibodies is not enough to be protecting. Still, as a quick test, checking for the antibodies is useful as it does tell you that at least, you reacted to a previous encounter. One could be more accurate if the antibodies are not simply detected, but quantified.
And, wonders of wonders, it's even possible to tell you if you met the pathogen only one time (mostly IgM antibodies), or repeatedly (seroconversion to IgG).
Now, as for HIV, or any long-lasting infection without many cases of people having been cured:
Well, if you have antibodies against it, then you have encountered it. And since it rarely goes away on its own, then, very likely, you still have the virus in your body, busy making you sick.
Because rubella and HIV differ in crucial respects. Rubella has a vaccine; HIV does not. Human immune systems can sometimes fight off and clear rubella (much more effectively if they've been vaccinated, of course); with the possible exception of a very few rare cases, human immune systems do NOT fight off and clear HIV.
So if you have HIV antibodies in your system, just about the ONLY possible explanation is that HIV got into your system, and is still there, albeit almost certainly mutated or about to mutate into a form that your existing antibodies won't recognize and can't fight.
By contrast, having rubella antibodies shows that you were exposed to either rubella or the rubella vaccine at some point, but it doesn't mean you have it now.
So the question is a bit like asking, "why does the doctor tell me that the left hand which I sprained should be better in a few weeks, but tells me that the right one which got caught in the woodchipper won't be better even a year from now?" because ... that's the facts. Sprains, absent extraordinary circumstances, heal up with time; amputations do not.
Now that I've dealt with your question, Mr. Hills, let's see if you can answer this one.
Suppose we take one of the viruses which you insist is not infectious, but instead generated by a body in respnse to poor living. Let's pick measles, since those who believe measles is infectious regard it as very infectious indeed.
If we take that virus to a laboratory and introduce it to an appropriate cell culture, very soon we will find that the cells are now churning out multiple copies of the virus. There is no reasonable way to deny this, since this is what we've been doing for decades on decades when we WANT to produce a large volume of virus. Of course, if you DO deny it, please let us know that this is where you choose to part ways with reality.
All right, then. Now, then:
1) Isn't it impossible for the virus to have arisen as an attempt by the larger organism to remediate a negative condition ... since there is no larger organism?
2) Doesn't the cell's response - producing copies of a virus only after being exposed to that virus - match up with what germ theory has been saying all along, about the cells being infected?
3) Even if, for sake of argument, something other than infection was going on between the virus and the cell - we are seeing the results. Cell exposed to virus; cell starts producing virus. Why would this not lead to viruses that, in fact, reproduce themselves in the wild, by doing whatever it is they do to cells, to insufficiently protected cells of living organisms? And continue to reproduce indefinitely in this fashion? How would these viruses NOT be the infectious diseases that you claim it's "bonkers" to believe in?
Today's highlights:
The osteopathic troll claiming that I "don't understand the pathway of resistance" I lolled so hard I think I have broken something. What is most funny about this is that the osteopathic troll knows my real name (as do quite a few other posters here) and could quickly look me up.
The osteopathic troll presents some snot and bull story about how antibiotics cause resistance to do with waste organising itself after being pushed back into extracellular spaces and waiting to leap on the next bacterium that comes wandering by.
I kind of liked that part of it. It speaks to my political tendencies.
(How we gonna make the germ nation rise?
Agitate! Medicate! Organize!
H/T Brother D and Collective Effort, Antonio Gramsci, and Susan B. Anthony.)
Johnny Labile: Dude, do you understand how anything in the world works? I bet you think the Earth is 6,000 years old and flat. And I thought the US was bad at science- what are they teaching British kids these days?
We're now around volume 6 proper of The Hygienic System, BTW.
Anyway, Philip Hills, for the peace of mind of current and prospective clients of the Hope Osteopathic Clinic Essex, not to mention simplifying the lives of the relevant regulatory authorities, please answer the following:
Is your whimsical denial of the existence of infection – seeing as it quite obviously is as close to the core of your "medical" "philosophy" as an errant corn kernel bobbing in a stopped-up toilet – properly implemented by yourself and the other two Hillses on the quackupucture side of the racket?
I suppose if I was a medical doctor and current facts surrounding antibiotic failure and 1 in 16 people pick up an infection in a hospital whilst being there for 'treatment' I'd freak out and deny any causality.
http://www.bbc.co.uk/news/health-27046990
I don't know how many times on has to say 'I am not a germ denialist' for you to get that? Also I am not Mr Hill so I also have no idea why that consoles you with your fascist opinions.
Many acknowledge that the medical experiment of antibiotics is on the cusp of collapsing, it is well known in medical circles that this is the case and the cause - is antibiotics, nothing more nothing less.
"Antibiotics don't 'cause' resistance; rather, they create an environment which favours the growth of resistant variants which already exist in nature or arise by chance." HPA weasel words - its not the sharp landing that killed those on the plane it is the sudden stop at the end.
http://www.hpa.org.uk/Topics/InfectiousDiseases/InfectionsAZ/Antimicrob…
You can't blame those who choose to avoid them either.
So how do you 'catch' ganrene when there is no penetrating wound?
"Because rubella and HIV differ in crucial respects. Rubella has a vaccine; HIV does not. Human immune systems can sometimes fight off and clear rubella (much more effectively if they’ve been vaccinated, of course); with the possible exception of a very few rare cases, human immune systems do NOT fight off and clear HIV." Anus feldspar
Do you make this up or did you read it in a medical peer reviewed comic? I'd love to know
Hey Orac, if you are going to cherry pick replies and then allow your worms to smear shit on everything it kind of validates my perspective. I a still not Mr Hill so that's a blind alley but at least we all know know how your web of pus is linked and who feeds it.
I have lost count of the referenced quotes that you have refused to publish, the ones that show your other posters are basically wrong about physiology on many levels.
Trust me, I am not a doctor would seem to be a fitting sign off, ohh and I am not Mr Hill either!
I have really enjoyed watching the poor level of critique here and look forward to more of your straw fallacies and appeals to emotion going the way of woo.
"not a doctor" is perhaps the only true statement you've made Johnny moron.....
Mr. Labile, if that's your real name, you have one simple question you need to answer if you want to be taken seriously. If germ theory is incorrect, why does all the evidence suggest otherwise?
@ the deletere troll
You should have paid attention in school. This is immunology/microbiology 101.
Well, if you believe the above is false, then surely it will be a snap for you to tell us which part is the false part. Do you believe that a vaccine for rubella does not exist? Or that a vaccine for HIV does? If you CANNOT explain what part of the passage you jeer at is something you're confident in calling untrue, the logical conclusion is that you only know you WANT to believe that it's untrue, and have no actual argument that would lead to that conclusion.
Meanwhile, to remind you of another question you're ducking: if viruses infect cells in culture (as we can readily observe in the laboratory), why are you so adamant that viruses can NEVER infect cells in living organisms?
I'm confused - if "This playground lurgy idea of catching disease is bonkers", then clearly the idea of "picking up an infection in a hospital" would also be bonkers. Thus it can't be part of your argument.
Only in the sense that you don't deny that they exist. Where germs come from, how they spread, and what they do in a host is where your understanding is, shall we say, lacking. It would be more accurate to say you are a 'germ theory of disease denialist'. Or 'idiot'. I could go either way.
I see that Philip Hills has now been reduced to the Gerg level of desperation.
Except for having tried to pass yourself off as a pediatrician.
So if one in fifteen people entering hospital leave with an infection that they didn't have when they went in is this germ theory in action or failure.
If someone promoting diet and health as a defense against disease was creating an infection stat like this you would be calling for the gallows?
I suppose all it takes is a little belief and head in the sand too.
I suppose now we have the internet and are in the modern world that old fake 'trust me I am a doctor' is wearing a bit thin. Must be hard keeping up vaccine belief when so many people can see through the red mist and spot snake oil.
Johnny, a hospital is a nearly sterile environment. If your ideas were correct, there would be no infection whatsoever in them.
WOW the stupid is strong with this one
To explain my comment further: There are, indeed, a large number of sick people in hospitals. If sterility was not carefully maintained, far more than one in fifteen would be infected when they leave. On the other hand, since Johnny claims the illness is a result of environment, then a hospital, with its carefully cleaned rooms and balanced nutrition, should actually be the healthiest place of all.
Of course, understanding cause and effect would destroy the idea of Natural Hygiene.
In action, naturally. After all, the term "infection" means "the invasion of a host organism's bodily tissues by disease-causing organisms, their multiplication, and the reaction of host tissues to these organisms and the toxins they produce." Thus if someone has a new infection, they have been exposed to an infected by some organism which made them in some way sick. They didn't get sick and then their bodies get colonized by (or generate) said organisms.
Question: why is rabies only spread by exposure to an animal with rabies, not from exposure from healthy animals?
Question: why is plague only spread by exposure to infected rodent fleas?
Question: why did people catch anthrax after being exposed to powdered anthrax spores through the mail, when it's not common in people in the same environment who were not exposed to said spores?
I thought that using sock puppets = ban. Two instances in this thread alone...
Maybe if they're entertaining they're allowed to stick around for a bit? And Mr. Hills has proven hilarious.
Voldemort aka Johnny labile, who denies he is Philip Hills despite commenting very much like him:
You cited whale.to in an earlier quote. Oh, and two or more links typically sends a comment into moderation. I don't buy your claims of censorship.
Except for having tried to pass yourself off as a pediatrician.
'Pediatrician' / 'Mythbuster' / 'Cardinal Ernst' / 'The Pope' / 'mythbusterorpopeshagger'.
Not to forget passing himself off as 'Consultant' (that thread holds some sort of record for sockpuppetry, with Troll-boy switching his nym between Ernsty, Ernstymate, Singhkorswim, Humpty, JosephineJugs and Lol).
Comment #550 (under the new nym of 'voldemort'):
Whining about censorship is a recurring theme from Mr Hope Osteopathy. Way back at #76 when he was calling himself "the craic", he complained
(that's the same comment where he invented a best friend with cancer in "lung, prostate, spleen, adrenals" who cured himself with diet... let us just say that his problems do not include a pedantic concern for the truth).
In other blog-threads where he indulged in similar nym-fests, the same complaint emerges, that his comments are being deleted. Incompetence? Drinking early? Dementia?
@voldemort,
That seems needlessly bitter, but could you summarize what you tried to post to validate your perspective? It's been my experience that Orac doesn't censor, though there are spam filters on the site and he may (as he has a real job) take some time to release items.
I have lost count of the referenced quotes that you have refused to publish, the ones that show your other posters are basically wrong about physiology on many levels. Please feel free to summarize.
I personally don't care if you're Mr. Hill or Mr. Underhill and, frankly, I considered it poor form of people to try to see through your 'nym given recent discussions on net anonymity.
I'm sorry you're unable to appreciate the actually rather elevated level of critique you've seen here. In other forums, it would have quickly devolved into stock insults.
Oops, left out a blockquote there in paragraph 3. Needless to say, everything before "please" is a quote.
No, all "diseases" are caused by violation of one or another Law of Nature. As inferred by Natural Hygiene and its forebears.
"We might as well try to extinguish a fire by silencing the fire-bells," per Felix Oswald.
Lest Mr. voldemort or Johnny Labile or whatever he/she chooses to call himself thinks himself/herself special, I have a perfectly civil comment in moderation.
Philip Hills, chickenshіt douchebag:
Once again: "Your turn, Johnnycakes: let’s have the evidence for 'classical osteopathy.' Please also highlight some of the most significant discoveries and revisions to practice guidelines over the past 20 or so years."
Right. Because understanding how infectious pathogens work causes them to spring into being. Naturally, they cluster wherever this understanding belief is strongest.
Philip Hills, chickensh1t douchebag:
Are you suggesting he's a coward? You just don't recognise his special form of anonymous bravery.
Here, for instance, he bravely threatens to use anonymous tip-offs to land JosephineJones in a defamation suit:
And here he is, with a different nym, bravely calling for an "organic jihad" against Orac.
Are these actually normal constructions in UKish flavors of English?
"Consultant": "Being a woman I am surprised you haven’t looked into the cervical cancer jab scam JJ...."
"Johnny Labile": "Tell me this, if , as a women I go to the doctor for a Rubella antibody test...."
Narad: I don't live in the UK, but I doubt it. The troll has about the same grasp of grammar as Thingy and Grog had- not much. And as already remarked, he appears to have a brain the same size as a stegosaur's brain. Although I'm being unfair to the stegosaur.
You tried that fallacious argument before, Mr. Hills. "If people who believe in a scientific principle get bad results kinda-somehow related to that science it means that the principle is WRONG!!" Well, no, it doesn't, does it? If people correctly understand a science, AND they make good decisions about how to apply that knowledge, AND luck is with them, they may get good results. If they get bad results, it could be from bad decisions, or just plain bad luck.
It seems like perhaps it's time for Mr. Hills to face an ultimatum question...
I doubt it.
It's superfluous information in both cases, too.
Unless one has a kneejerk reaction to sensing whiffs of a counterfactual. Which might happen for the sort of person sporting some semblance of a Van Dyke who tries to masquerade as both "Johnny" and "Sarah."
"Please also highlight some of the most significant discoveries and revisions to practice guidelines over the past 20 or so years.” Noonood
How about the NICE guidelines after studies on kids with fevers at great Ormond Street finally realising that suppressing fevers in kids was not only counterproductive it produced more sequalae. It showed that kids with meningitis recovered much quicker than using magical medical potions to thwart nature.
" If they get bad results, it could be from bad decisions, or just plain bad luck." Anus feldspar on weasel words about why 1 in 15 people who go to hospital leave with an infection they didn't have when they went in.
Hey Anus, I thought that medical science was about science, not bad luck. Was it talisman failure or belief system failure?
@ MoB
I agree and should act accordingly. To address the wrongness of this poster's arguments is more important than who he really is.
Although I would also say it's good to know this poster comes under many 'nyms.
@ Bystanders and other lurkers
The Wikipedia entry on gangrene is very educational.
Caution: It also has some vivid pictures of gangrened limbs. Not for the faint of heart.
In short, gangrene starts with tissue necrosis (to simplify, the death and decay of a big piece of flesh).
Many things could trigger necrosis; by example, a restriction of the tissue's blood supply. That happens to the inside of solid tumors once they outrun their blood supply (about the only case where necrosis is a good thing); that happens to limbs around which a tourniquet has been used; that happens to unfortunate people with blood circulation issues, by example as a complication of diabetes.
Note that in all these cases, you don't need a penetrating wound.
And yes, necrosis, and then gangrene, could happen because some nasty bacteria are busy eating you alive. And again, in some cases, you don't need a wound: the bacteria are making their own way in, notably with wet gangrene and food poisoning.
Clostridium perfringens, a deadly-toxin-producing bacterium often involved with gangrene, has some interesting cousins: Clostridium botulinum (of Botox fame), and Clostridium tetani. See a pattern, here?
Members of the Clostridium family are also commonly found in dirt, or as part of the normal skin or even gut flora. A frequent cause of food poisoning by botulism is because Clostridium botulinum is a common guest of pigs' guts, and if bacteria are kiiled by cooking contaminated meat or blood, the toxin isn't destroyed.
Regardless of the initial trigger, necrotic tissue is prime feeding ground for
a bunch of opportunistic bacteria: the immune system is not working here, the dying tissues are releasing a bevy of nutrients, and the absence of oxygen is actually a blessing for many of these bacteria, like the Clostridium above, as they would be killed, or at least seriously impeded, by normal levels of oxygen (the scientific word for these bacteria is "anaerobic").
Now, to quote our recent visitor:
It's indeed a funny colour. Also, according to a hospital doctor who taught me microbiology, gas gangrene has tell-tale smell (hydrogen sulfur) and touch - bubbles of gas generated by the bacterium Clostridium perfringens are trapped inside the decaying tissue.
And if historical chronicles are to be believed, treating gangrene with rest and diet usually resulted in a very painful and very terminal self-concluding event.
You need to do a bit more. Like removing the dead, rotting tissue, increasing the oxygen content around it (yeah hyperbaric tanks), and use some antibiotics.
In case of toxin-producing bacteria, a bacteriostatic antibiotic is sometimes preferred (a drug which will slow bacteria proliferation but not kill them), because the toxin is usually accumulated inside bacteria and killing them would release a massive spike of deadly toxin.
Meh, another wall of text. An illustration of the bullsh!! ratio which favors quacks, I guess. Shouting nonsense is easy and fast, trying to explain things is long and difficult.
They are the kind of grammatical errors I have encountered from poorly educated people who are trying to sound clever.
He was 'nancy' for a while at Zenosblog. The original topic of that thread was osteopathy, which made our friend particularly excitable and sockpuppety, and in quick succession he switched his nym to "professor", "skepticunt", "shitebuster", and "fannyblaster". And a few dozen more, increasingly misogynistic. Vacuum denial is mentioned.
Apologies to Orac to my previous comment, which triggered the obscenity detectors and went into moderation (by listing some of the misogynistic nyms Mr Labile has used at a UK skeptic site).
I'm still amazed that anyone can maintain a belief system that is contradicted by almost everything we have learned about health and disease over the past 200 years. I have a number of questions for Mr. Labile.
If bacteria, viruses and parasites are not separate organisms, but are generated by our bodies in response to disease, why don't they have the same DNA as us? Why is the DNA in bacteria found in chicken with salmonella the same as that found in humans with salmonella?
How is it we can culture bacteria from a sick animal, inject those bacteria into another healthy animal, and it gets sick with the exact same symptoms as the first?
How is it we can construct polio viruses from their genome, inject them into mice and the mice become paralyzed?
Why did almost every child get measles before vaccination was introduced? What 'accumulation of waste' did almost every child suffer from then, but hardly any do now, except in developing countries that don't yet vaccinate?
If bacteria are friendly waste disposal units, that only attack diseased tissue, why do so many of them produce toxins that affect normal healthy cells? What is the function of the toxins produced by cholera, typhoid, botulism, pertussis and tetanus, for example?
Why did so many people die from bacterial infections before the introduction of antibiotics? Doctors (and vets) in the 1940s embraced antibiotics because they finally had an effective treatment for a range of diseases that they were previously unable to treat. You should read some accounts from that era - I read a biography of James Herriot a while ago which described what being a rural vet was like before and after the introduction of antibiotics. It's amazing how many animals died of "a normal physiological adaptation" before the antibiotic era and how few after. Were all those vets and doctors mistaken?
Another thought, why does hand-washing in hospitals reduce illness? Why do we bother having a sterile environment to perform surgery? If the body generates pathogens as "a normal physiological adaptation", why did aseptic and antiseptic surgery improve results so dramatically, if not by reducing post-op infection?
I'm puzzled by this idea that our bodies are unable to deal with "waste" (another term for eevil toxinz), and have to store them up. Robert O. Young makes the same claim, but he says the acid toxins are is stored as fat, not edema. Our kidneys and livers have a demonstrable ability to excrete far more waste, including acidic waste, than we throw at them, so why would we store any up? Since athletes produce far more acidic waste, and use up far more of their alkaline buffering capacity than the rest of us, wouldn't we expect them to be unhealthier than anyone else?
Those are just a few of the facts that are completely inconsistent with natural hygiene ideas that occur to me. There are many, many more.
@ Krebiozen
And sometimes a different species of animal to boot, like every times scientists are studying a human illness using an animal model.
Especially puzzling in light of claims that today's children are subjected to more "toxins" than in the past.
You put your finger on that distinguishes a real scientific theory from unsupported beliefs randomly collapsed together.
A good scientific theory is able to explain the working of the universe (or of a specific part thereof) without running into inconsistencies at every turn.
So I guess the germ theory of disease is not "just a theory".
I agree in some respects with you ... but must disagree in others.
Some propositions are most effectively argued against by showing that the arguer does not actually believe in them, not sufficiently to apply them consistently.
In the current example, the person currently calling himself "Johnny Labile" (JL, from here on) asserts that certain efficacy studies showing the effectiveness of vaccines have been "fiddled" and those studies constitute such a large part of the evidence base for vaccines that we should abandon vaccines as being a "hoax".
It is of course possible to counter those arguments on other grounds - challenging JL to substantiate his claim that studies were "fiddled" in the first place; challenging JL to show that such allegedly "fiddled" studies constitute anything more than a tiny fraction of the large, large evidence base demonstrating the effectiveness of vaccines. However, the problem with this approach is that it depends on making a silence ring loud: rather than admit that he cannot substantiate his allegations about efficacy studies being "fiddled", JL can simply change the subject to OTHER loud allegations.
If, however, it turns out that JL not only believes in but makes his living from a "science" that does not have any evidence base, it means that he does not really believe that vaccines should be disbelieved because of a thin evidence base; he just wants to push the conclusion "vaccines are bad!" and he doesn't give a crap if actual facts lead to that conclusion, or don't.
And I think it should be obvious that if JL is "lovelyday", the one who posted this slanderous comment, then he has sacrificed all right to have his personal life kept out of the discussion. It doesn't matter that he didn't name a particular skeptic who allegedly molested underage illegal immigrant boys; if he is going to allege that such a thing was done and that it somehow reflects on the scientific beliefs held by that skeptic (and by all other skeptics, in an act of "guilt by association with almost certainly non-existent wrongdoers") then there is no reason that his own personal life should not be brought to light. I understand very well that two wrongs do not make a right, but here, it is a question of which wrong we should commit: fighting on a battleground that an honorable arguer would never have opened up, or letting the dishonorable arguer who did chose to open battle there fight launch his offensives, secure in the belief that no one can subject him to similar treatment.
"I have lost count of the referenced quotes that you have refused to publish, the ones that show your other posters are basically wrong about physiology on many levels."
Having difficulty counting to zero? How sad.\
Antaeus
“If people who believe in a scientific principle get bad results kinda-somehow related to that science it means that the principle is WRONG!!”
You've identified the key "logic" in Hill's "thought" process. Looks like I was right in comment #534.
For all your rambling rants on gangrene let's see what a specialist in infection says about the battle of Waterloo and what he thinks of high tech modern 'treatment'
http://news.bbc.co.uk/1/hi/health/4035849.stm
"Yet with all our technical advances in medicine, mortality rates from conditions such as sepsis (bacterial infection of the bloodstream) haven't improved dramatically over the past century. Proff Merv Singer
It is very tiring reading so many rambling rants from people with absolutely no scientific inquiry - all you do is believe Pubmed and crash on.
Just because you are told at med school about "vaccines save lives" "before antibiotics we were stuffed" but hey no now we have antibiotics we are mega stuffed?
Professor Singer's work in no way relates to anything Johnny Labile has discussed, particularly his assertion that vaccines don't work and that the "contagion theory of flu" is "pure supposition".
"Professor Singer’s work in no way relates to anything Johnny Labile has discussed, particularly his assertion that vaccines don’t work and that the “contagion theory of flu” is “pure supposition”." Memphis O'Brain
What a fantastic cherry pick, well done!
If they had better survival rates at Waterloo than they did in the Falklands I'd say modern infection control, along with 1 in 15 leaving hospital with an infection they didn't have on the way in, is pure bullshit!
How can you miss the tyrannosaurus in the room O'Brain?
It is very tiring to read so many rambling rants from Johnny Labile that include no actual substance or rational argument.
Off topic- hospital acquired infections-
s--t happens-
www.reuters.com/article/2014/03/26/us-usa-hospital-infections-idUSBREA2…
Again the 'septic moderator' suspends the posting of comments so that the rambling Memphis can steer his rational away from suppositious bunk towards great piles of septic belief. Long may his ramble blurb a smokescreen.
anon, Dr. Crislip does have much to say about that. You can find him at http://edgydoc.com/ .
@Johnny Labile:
I decided to read the article. What the Professor was saying was that the body shutting down was a method of conserving energy and "going into hibernation". It neither invalidates what we said about gangrene, nor validates your claims.
I take it you are legitimately so impaired that you don't understand that this simply demonstrates my point. Now try again, only with "classical osteopathy."
You know, as in the original question.
I have no idea why you keep directing me to therapies I know nothing about and ask me to validate them? Perhaps by exchange I should ask you to tell me how voodoo works because you seem to know a lot about vaccination or maybe how to make fairy cakes?
Is it your usual method of communication to start insisting that someone is someone they are not and then offload piles of medical magik, claiming to be a scientist and expect a logical reply? You need more help than I will ever forget.
Now how do you respond to new (2009) NICE guidelines telling doctors not to dish out antipyretics to kids with fevers because it is doing what many alt meds speakers have known since Hipporcrates- suppressing temperatures in acute illness directly leads to chronic illness.
Philip Hills does not have "arguments," he has "making things up and changing the subject." His dishonesty, including sockpuppetry, is a free choice. Once one willfully embraces the role of bad-faith actor who wishes to deny responsibility so as to carry on (and on and on), the standards of propriety that underlie pseudonymous posting have been eviscerated by the actor, in my book.
"Antaeus
“If people who believe in a scientific principle get bad results kinda-somehow related to that science it means that the principle is WRONG!!” " Vogon speaks
Well like smearing steroids on kids with eczema or handing out steroid inhailers and doing nothing else about asthma. Ask anyone who is chronically atopic what they think of 'proper doctor' treatment.
“Please also highlight some of the most significant discoveries and revisions to practice guidelines over the past 20 or so years.”
Combining 'classical osteopathy' with completely incompatible modalities like acupuncture, herbalism and TCM -- all the while claiming that the 'osteopathic lesion' is central to the paradigm -- possibly counts as a "revision to practice guidelines". Although there is nothing new about "scamming with whatever grift you have".
Prof. Mervyn Singer is funded by the Wellcome Trust, and the expert at anon's link is from the CDC.
I notice.
Funny how being on the medic-septic payroll isn't always a disqualifier.
But I suppose it's no more of a contradiction than arguing that vaccine manufacturers are lying about their products, except on the package inserts, where they blurt out the truth.
I was SHOCKED to check the actual NICE guidelines and discover that Johnny Labile is lying through his teeth. Again. It is as if he can't help it.
It is entertaining when JL, of all people (if his insults are any guide, he believes that 'puerile' is a location in the Outer Hebrides) waxes indignant because people are addressing him by a name that is not whatever nym has currently caught his fancy.
There does seem to be some issue with mixing sources into a mental slurry smoothie.
Although I'll be jiggered if I can find the real payload, the paper seems to be attached to the Great Ormond findings. Wherever they be.
I'm disappointed, because I was curious whether this source was going to do me the favor of summarizing why slowing the early growth of N. meningitidis was a net clinical good.
Forget it, Jake, it's Chinatown the Daily Mail.
It appears that fever is indeed of some utility, but not exactly in the sense intended.
"When contacts of patients with meningococcal disease receive parenteral antibiotics at the time they develop fever, no disease develops (22, 161, 225; R. A. Wall, M. Hasson-King, H. Thomas, and B. M. Greenwood, Letter, Lancet ii:624, 1986). When antibiotic therapy is started later in the course of the disease, i.e., when ischemic lesions have progressed, more bacteria can escape the effect of antibiotics, since meningococci remain viable in the nonperfused center of these lesions for up to 13 h after the start of antibiotic therapy (499)."
@sockpuppeting antivaccinationist:
My sister had both eczema and asthma as a child. I can tell you for a fact that you are talking horse apples about how physicians treat these conditions.
Labile,
Ah, the good old days of Waterloo. Why did we abandon that wonderful era of medicine? Clearly the preferred method of preventing infection in the early 1800s was very effective. I wonder what that might have been? Here's an excerpt from 'The Bloody Fields of Waterloo', written by British surgeon M. K. H. Crumplin:
That doesn't sound so great, does it? Especially when your only hope of avoiding it was for a field surgeon to amputate the injured limb before infection set in: "amputations carried out speedily after a wounding were twice as likely to be successful than ones delayed by a day or more". No effective anesthetic either. I hope Professor Mervyn Singer isn't suggesting a return to that!
In contrast, here's an account from the Falklands War, the Battle for Goose Green specifically:
I'll stick with modern medicine, including the antibiotics, thanks.
Also, you seem to have conflated sepsis both with infection generally and with all causes of death. Sepsis is what used to be called septicemia; it's a generalized systemic inflammatory condition, caused by severe infection. It mostly affects very sick people whose bodies are unable to fight off infection effectively; people with cancer, serious injuries, the malnourished, the very young and the very old. The most factor in surviving sepsis is how quickly intravenous antibiotics are started. There is no effective alternative or traditional treatment for sepsis. Conventional treatment may not be great, but it's a lot better than what was available in 1815.
The article refers to 52 privates in the 13th Light Dragoons wounded at Waterloo. There were 4700 killed on the side of the UK, Prussians, and their allies; another 14,600 were wounded. In the Falklands, there were 255 killed and 775 wounded on the UK side. There were remarkably few sabre injuries at the Falklands. How you can draw any kind of conclusion from that is beyond me.
I would agree that improvements could be made in infection control in hospitals. On the other hand, the fact that they can get new infections contradicts all you try to say about infections not being transmissible.
That was my thought too, when I read the BBC item... to wonder how long the UCL press department had spent scouring through the Waterloo annals, looking for some narrow combination of regiment and rank where the survival rate among the wounded was high enough to make the point they wanted for their churnalism press-release ("Give us more money for our dramatic research on organ failure").
This doesn't speak well to the level of expertise offered by the Hope Osteopathic Clinic Essex, Philip Hills.
Remember this?
"The big issue is this. Someone decided that an antibody response equated with an immune response and this has been extrapolated to ‘protection’ or ‘immunisation’.
"This is a fantasy, even Immunity Journal has pointed out that equating antibody levels with protection is not really a correlate."
What a coincidence:*
"So this medical theory that 'antibodies protect' how does that fit in with traditional osteopathic practice? Well it doesn't!
"It doesn't fit with medical research either.
"'Antibodies are not required for immunity against some viruses' Immunity journal March 1 2012'"
This ship has sailed, Sockdrawer.
Where have I claimed to be a scientist, Philip?
From you? Heh.
To wit.
I've already responded, bonehead.
"If the fever be acute, and if there be pains on either side, or in both, and if expiration be if cough be present, and the sputa expectorated be of a blond or livid color, or likewise thin, frothy, and florid, or having any other character different from the common, in such a case, the physician should proceed thus: if the pain pass upward to the clavicle, or the breast, or the arm, the inner vein in the arm should be opened on the side affected, and blood abstracted according to the habit, age, and color of the patient, and the season of the year, and that largely and boldly, if the pain be acute, so as to bring on deliquium animi, and afterwards a clyster is to be given...."
suppressing temperatures in acute illness directly leads to chronic illness.
Gee, I misssed that part in the actual guidelines. Oh, wait, you haven't provided any. Get moving.
* Also characteristically screws up the number of people that Krahling & Wlochowski comprise.
In a crowded field of 'em. Here:
There:
Here:
There:
Etc.
Maybe someone's plagiarizing poor Mr. Labile in order to discredit his revolutionary ideas.
ann @616 or therabouts.
The identical misspelling of Cochrane is a bit of a tell.
Except for the sockpuppets, which he's effectively copped to already. So, yes, it's but one hapless osteopath who has not only lovingly seized upon the scattered aphorisms of "Johnny Labile" et al. but also stitched them together into long-form homage.
"That was my thought too, when I read the BBC item… to wonder how long the UCL press department had spent scouring through the Waterloo annals, looking for some narrow combination of regiment and rank where the survival rate among the wounded was high enough to make the point they wanted for their churnalism press-release (“Give us more money for our dramatic research on organ failure”)." Boomler doomler
It is interesting though that when one has a belief system so dependent on dissing anything that is not 'in the book' that Her Docky almost vomits on paper to dismiss blasphemy. Does it scare you that simple events like leaving the temperature alone and not using sexy high tech med equipment may be better than intervention?
We don't want the public thinking that they might not need a doctor.
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=vTXSTGGRvKY
I suppose you would shit your stethoscope watching this short film, let's see how you diss this.
Tell us how dangerous vitamin C is - I can't wait to piss myself laughing.
http://www.bolenreport.com/skeptics/Skeptics2/fun%20down%20under.htm
Here is the bit about the AVN you left out.
So no pro vaxxer had the guts to stand up and defend woo
Ohhh, a Bolen link! Mr. Hill, do you agree with Mr. Bolen when he states:
Bwahaha! I thought Hills couldn't go downwards from using whale.to as a source, but Scudamore the pig farmer is the soul of reliability compared to Patimmy Bolen!
I have no idea why you keep directing me to therapies I know nothing about and ask me to validate them?
It seems a little late in the conversation for Johnny to suddenly feign ignorance of osteopathy.
Where is the NICE Guideline, Philip Hills? You know, the one that supports this assertion:
It is already clear that you think that there is no such thing as a dangerous fever:
It is remarkable that you return with babbling about being "scared" and "shіtting your stethoscope" when you're merely running away again to try to change the subject to vitamin C.
Smearing stuff on children is another of Johnny's obsessions (one hesitates to wonder why). Here he was as "Shurma Wallace" at Skeptical Barista:
(in the same thread, "Shurma" also mentions the 'Cochraine fellowship" and an "Ashfar ruling" known only in osteopathy circles).
Credit for introducing this "Ashfar ruling on informed consent" (a misspelling of Afshar') into the osteopathy hivemind goes to one Howard Broadmore, in a 2007 article for the British Institute of Osteopathy. Thereafter it turns up in a Hope Osteopathy FB post, and from sockpuppets who can't spell 'Cochrane'. The Broadmore article is also Johnny Labile's source for the "survival rates at Waterloo" story (Broadmore reprints a clipping from the Guardian but was evidently unable to read it properly).
How drunk were you when you posted that? I only ask because nobody's mentioned the AV(S)N. Were you trying to make an ass of yourself in two places at once and get confused?
The existence of a no-antipyrexic NICE guideline seems to be a tenet of faith among UK osteopaths -- including the idea that meningitis is best left untreated. For instance, here:
The anti-vaccine article from the British Institute of Osteopathy is unsigned, because cowardice. Having misspelled 'Afshar" as "Asfar" while providing legal advice, the author claims to be neutral ("My personal understanding of this subject is irrelevant to someone else making a choice and I would never advise anyone what decision to make") while linking to Mercola, NVIC, an alt-health magazoid, and a UK-specific antivax site. Because dishonest sh1tweasel as well as cowardice.
Oh, but, hey, Philip, since you're whoring around over there,* could you get Patty Bolen to issue an update about when Mark Geier is going to finish making Maryland "face the music"?** Or David Geier's overturning that little practicing-medicine-without-a-license thing?*** Or his suit against the, er, "NVIC attorneys"? Patty never did follow through on the "I'll be telling you this story shortly" line from a year ago that I can tell.
* Number 18 for the year.
** No. 368510V.
*** No. 374822V.
Oh, I know where one relevant guideline is,* but I'm waiting for Philip Hills' one: "new (2009) NICE guidelines telling doctors not to dish out antipyretics to kids with fevers because ... suppressing temperatures in acute illness directly leads to chronic illness."
All the 2009 guidelines are here.
* Punatr "1...7/4...9/fnzr.cqs" nobir gb "14171/63908/zhgngvf-zhgnaqvf.cqs".
Regrettably, this item seems nowhere to be found:
"Interestingly some years ago I wrote an article for the BOA magazine entitled 'the context of adverse reactions.' It was a response to an IJOM article where I believe the Australian osteopathic org had tried to draw up a list of adverse reactions to osteopathic treatment. It included fever, diarrhoea and vomiting and my article was a critique of this ridiculous position.
"This could be taken to imply that provoking an immune reaction, or healing crisis in your patient, as a result of your treatment might lead to you being effectively struck off for mal practice!"
Compare-and-contrast time with the unsigned piece.
Unsigned: "In 2009 Jayne [Donegal] was asked to be an expert witness in a high court case where two parents had split up, one wanted vaccination for the child but the other didn't.... After losing round one on a technicality the GMC finally lost and was forced to concede that the High Court ruling on this issue was based on the sound up to date evidence that Jayne had provided in her court report.
"The High Court ruling was that vaccination was not in the best interests of the child. This ruling was on the GMC website for a number of weeks before it was taken off."
One might note that this story, as told, is entirely incoherent. Why would the GMC be involved in a parental dispute? Oh, wait, somebody got it into their head that she was bringing the profession into disrepute. And the GMC found there was nothing to the charge (n.b. the correction). Yet, contrary to the anonymous author's claim, the mother(s) lost.
The trick appears to be surviving the "healing crisis". I assume that if the patient does not pull this off it is their own damn fault. At any rate there have been no complaints from those who did not survive the healing crisis.
one Howard Broadmore, in a 2007 article for the British Institute of Osteopathy
Broadmore's omnium-gatherum of loosely connected thoughts contains an earlier recension of the "mumps prevents ovarian cancer" story. He promised more details in a forthcoming article on osteopathy and cancer, which to date remains unpublished.
Side note: Since Philip Hills has seen fit to try to drain Perryani Boilen here, I've brought the RECAP docket for Doctor's Data v. Barrett current.
Howard Beardmore is the British Institute of Osteopathy.
I note the evasive change of subject, but I've seen this before, with no adverse effects on my digestive system.
Firstly, I think it's ironic that the patient in this video was initially ill with influenza, which could have been prevented by a vaccine. Or was it just a 'normal physiological adaptation to environment' that nearly killed him? It's odd that he was also diagnosed with leukemia; perhaps this has something to do with his unusual presentation, and subsequent unexpected recovery.
Was his 'miraculous' recovery anything to do with vitamin C? We don't know. He had been turned into the prone position, in the hope this would help him to clear gunk from his lungs, just before the vitamin C was administered, which may have had something to do with it. How would IV vitamin C immediately start to clear someone's lungs? There is evidence for vitamin C deficiency in chronically ill patients, and in these cases administration of vitamin C may be beneficial, but since ITU patients are routinely given relatively large amounts of vitamin C anyway, it seems unlikely in this case.
IV vitamin C is hugely popular in CAM circles, so why don't we see more of these miracle cure tales? If there were dozens of them I would start to get more curious.
It does seem the hospital were premature in wanting to pull the plug in this case, but sadly this does happen. If you have a limited number of life support machines, you have to pick and choose which patients are most likely to benefit. A patient who appears to have complete lung failure, and leukemia, who hasn't improved in weeks and is very unlikely to improve in the future probably doesn't fit the criteria for life support.
In other words, we must be able to p!ss on patients and convince them it's raining.
Burzynski's career in a nutshell.
"I suppose you would shit your stethoscope watching this short film"
There's your problem - you have been seriously misled about where a stethoscope is supposed to go. Once you take it out, your life may have one fewer pleasure, but you'll probably be able to concentrate better, and learn some real science.
By the way, "Memphis O'Brain" is a surprisingly good alternate screen name. I may keep it. Thanks.
I had been meaning to use this at some point, but it appears that Philip's last tantrum was grade A projection.
Hi Krebiozen, I'm fairly sure the patient in that vid became ill during the first wave of H1N1 in the southern hemisphere, before a vaccine was available. Some of the bloggers at Sciblogs were critical about the unscientific approach and lack of balance on the show. Alas, it remains a rally point for many Kiwi alt medders (meddlers?) See! those ebil doctors were going to let him die!
Hi biblia,
You're quite right. According to my reading he contracted H1N1 influenza in June 2009, which was before a vaccine was available anywhere. However, he might have been afforded some protection from H1N1 if he had influenza vaccines (or had survived influenza) in previous years.
The likes of Labile claim, when it suits them, that infectious diseases such as influenza, are 'normal physiological adaptation to environment' that simply require rest and a good diet for a full recovery, and that vaccines are unnecessary. When someone is actually seriously ill with such a disease, they criticize doctors for doing exactly what they say will allow the body to heal - I don't know how else you can describe an induced coma with all nutritional requirements (and more*) provided - and demand that doctors administer massive doses of IV vitamin C, which is about as unnatural as you can get.
Personally I would like to see more research on higher than usual doses of vitamin C, especially in very sick patients who often have very blood concentrations. I think the evidence does support its use in specific circumstances (for example here) but only in doses high enough to restore normal plasma levels.
The evidence for the benefits of doses of hundreds of grams of ascorbate per day, to increase plasma levels above normal is limited, at best. The risks are minimal, but do exist; excreting large amounts of anything can cause problems in patients with renal impairment. As I wrote above, where is the evidence from alternative practitioners who are using IV ascorbate? Whether negative or positive, it would be useful to see this.
Looking at this case reminded me how the CAM brigade routinely describe the H1N1 pandemic as a debacle or a scam, and claim that hardly anyone was killed by the disease. Recent estimates suggest that globally more than half a million people died of H1N1.
* A few years ago an ITU nurse in the UK told me that patients are routinely given gram quantities of vitamin C in their feeds, though I have been unable to confirm this.
Which brings to mind another highlight of "Johnny Labile"'s trolling career. Sometimes, as noted, he likes to style himself as "sarah007", or as "nancy". So it was inevitable that he would complain that:
(this came as an addendum to his speculation that UK skeptic blogger Josephine Jones was really "a lady boy").
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=vTXSTGGRvKY
Still find it remarkable that the Kreb cycle managed to watch this and forgot that the family had to take the 'proper doctors' to court to get an injunction to force them to give the patient vitamin C intravenously. And then the 'proper doctors', against the wishes of the patient's family withdrew the vitamin C and the patient went down.
It was only removing the patient from the big critical care unit to a smaller provincial hospice that enabled the family to get him back on the large doses.
Your septic myopia would be funny if it wasn't so dangerous. It's laughable that the tube fed patient was 'probably' getting vit C so by default the 'proper doctors' sussed it really.
Science isn't about taking sides, it is about looking at what is happening, you cannot divide the world into pro or alt med, that kind of dualism died out with Descartes.
Have you found the “new (2009) NICE guidelines telling doctors not to dish out antipyretics to kids with fevers because … suppressing temperatures in acute illness directly leads to chronic illness" yet?
Well yes but you still haven't obviously. Try adjusting the septomiter filter.
I take it you missed the part where I provided the relevant guideline. Now, I'm waiting for yours.
Labile,
Since the 'proper doctors' could be sued for negligence if they gave a treatment that was not part of standard care and something went badly wrong, I can understand their reluctance.
Perhaps, we only have the family's word for this, and even if it's true, it doesn't mean the vitamin C had anything at all to do with it.
As far as I can ascertain that's not true, the next hospital also objected to giving him an unproven and potentially dangerous treatment, but eventually agreed to smaller doses which the family supplemented with liposomal ascorbate by mouth.
All ITU patients are given at least 100 milligrams of ascorbate in their feeds daily, and often much more. There is evidence that patients deficient in vitamin C do better with supplementation, but in those who aren't deficient it makes no difference. A patient who has been on ITU for three weeks is unlikely to be vitamin C deficient. I see nothing laughable about that.
Science is about not getting fooled by cognitive biases; the post hoc ergo propter hoc fallacy in this case. This patient was turned into the prone position shortly before he showed signs of improvement. How do you know that this wasn't the cause of his improvement? Which is more likely to be the cause of this man's recovery, IV vitamin C which has apparently only ever had this miraculous effect on this one occasion, or turning the patient which has been shown to be beneficial in clinical trials (I linked to one earlier, you might have noticed)?
I agree that there is only one kind of medicine, medicine that has been proven to work. The rest is quackery.
"Citric acid is OK so send for more oranges", by the way, is a mnemonic I use to recall Krebs Cycle, which someone might find useful:
Citric = citric acid
acid = aconitate
is = isocitric acid
OK = alpha-ketoglutarate
You still have to memorize the enzymes and side reactions, but it's a helpful start.
so = succinyl-CoA
send = succinic acid
for = fumaric acid
more = malic acid
oranges = oxaloacetate
For anyone interested in reality, Waikato Hospital is not a "smaller provincial hospice".
For completists, add 'buckthetrendi'.
Miscellaneous entry:
And... "optimus prime," "nobbly," "bucker," "buckthewowser," and "bouquet."
I present you with: "swingvalse." And the YouTube channel he rode in on.
^ Although I could swear the guitar angle came up before.
Impressively, it looks as though "Dwarky is a system bot" was deployed twice, but "weebeehealthy.com" is toast.