The FBI arrested 5 members of a New York crime family for their part in a 1978 airplane heist.<\/p>\n
Down near the end of the story it mentioned the theft of $1.2 million in gold salts from a FedEx driver. I had no idea what gold salts are – so…<\/p>\n
http:\/\/en.wikipedia.org\/wiki\/Gold_salts<\/p>\n
Gold salts (and they’re not technically salts) were once all the rage for treating rheumatoid arthritis but sound pretty close to medical quackery. The salts cause skin discoloration and kidney damage and all sorts of bad things.<\/p>\n
Here is a double blind study done in the 1970s involving 27 (!) patients over two (!) years that seems to show the disease slowed in several (!) of the treated patients.<\/p>\n
http:\/\/annals.org\/article.aspx?articleid=688227<\/p>\n
An important part of the double blind study is the persons involved in the test don’t know which individuals are in the control group and which are getting the medication. If I want to justify the expense of the study and seek more funding for a longer term study, the incentives are on the side to shade the data. It’s pretty simple to say a person has a strength of 4 instead of a 3 if that’s what you want the outcome to be.<\/p>\n
One of the reasons I distrust Medical Science is the lack of transparency in medical research. Peer reviewed science is not written for nor intended to be read by the masses. This article is behind a subscription firewall. Part of that is revenue related, but a lot of the motivation is to keep away skeptics.<\/p>\n
While it is out of date, the book “Confessions of a Medical Heretic” by Robert Mendelsohn MD forms a lot of my opinions about how medicine has gone off track. Coming from a medical family, this can be a problem.<\/p>\n
The basic theme is that doctors have set themselves up as a religion with themselves as the priests – the keepers of the secret knowledge too dangerous to let the masses understand – analogous to the days when Catholic priests read the Bible for you and kept services in Latin.<\/p>\n
This dynamic creates the expectation that doctors are infallible, when in many cases, they have no idea – give the patient a placebo (or worse) and hope the body cures itself or the patient loses interest and goes away or dies quietly from unknown causes. The reality is genetics is what plays a large role in most diseases.<\/p>\n
The medical system has two main solutions to any problem – medications or surgery. People have the expectations that doctors will “do something” and if they don’t the medical system failed you. Add in government paying the bills and the system consumes 18% of the county’s GDP.<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"
The FBI arrested 5 members of a New York crime family for their part in a 1978 airplane heist. Down near the end of the story it mentioned the theft of $1.2 million in gold salts from a FedEx driver. … Continue reading