When is a Person “Dead”?

Posted on September 15, 2025 by marcia

NOTE: This is a long article, but the topics covered warrant consideration in depth:

The Hidden Crisis in Organ Transplantation — Brain Death Diagnosis and Ethical Failures

STORY AT-A-GLANCE

The concept of “brain death,” introduced in 1968 to enable organ harvesting, has never been proven equivalent to actual death — it merely defines an irreversible coma
Documented cases exist of “brain dead” patients who were conscious, including some who mouthed “help me” as their organs were nearly harvested
Global organ shortages have fueled a black market, with an estimated 5% to 20% of transplants involving illegal procurement and added pressure to lower diagnostic standards for “brain death”
Recent federal investigations found serious failures in the U.S. organ donation system: 29.3% of reviewed cases showed troubling signs, and 20.8% of patients had neurologic activity incompatible with procurement — yet transplant coordinators still pushed to proceed
Safer, ethical alternatives exist — such as natural therapies like DMSO that have revived “brain dead” patients and restored organ function, removing the need for transplant

When I first got my driver’s license years ago, they asked if I wanted to be an organ donor. Having learned to be skeptical of institutions and having heard some concerning stories, I said no. But I felt conflicted about it — I believe in treating others as you’d want to be treated, and if I needed a transplant someday, I’d desperately want someone willing to help save my life.

Since then, I’ve discovered much more disturbing information about organ transplantation that completely shifted my perspective. Recently, RFK Jr. did something I never expected — he formally announced that there were widespread failures in our organ donation system’s ethical safeguards.¹ This opened the floodgates for others to start discussing the grim reality that organs were being taken from people who were still alive.²

Video Link

The Value of Organs

Over time, medicine transformed our cultural relationship with death — from an accepted, intimate companion to a feared, medicalized enemy to be defeated (e.g., one author traces this shift through six historical stages, arguing that medicalization stripped individuals of autonomy and commodified death itself).³

Medicine fueled this transformation by performing modern “miracles,” such as reviving the dead through cardiac resuscitation and transplanting organs — crossing what was once an absolute boundary between life and death. In doing so, it gained immense public trust and the ability to justify exorbitant costs.

This cultivated the myth that medicine can conquer death. Over time, it became seen not just as a means of survival, but as something to be continuously consumed in the name of “health” — transforming it into a highly profitable industry that now accounts for over 17.6% of all U.S. spending.

Because viable donor organs (a central crux of medicine’s dominion over death) are so limited, transplants quickly became incredibly valuable — costs range from $446,800 to $1,918,700 depending on the organ.⁴ Given how desperate people are for organs and how much money is involved, it hence seemed reasonable to assume some illegal harvesting would occur.

Over the years, as demand for organs continues to increase, I’ve continually found disturbing evidence that this was happening.⁵ This includes:

•Individuals being tricked into selling a kidney (e.g., in 2011, a viral story discussed a Chinese teenager who did so for an iPhone 4 — approximately 0.0125% of the black market rate for a kidney, after which he became septic and his other kidney failed leaving him permanently bedridden,⁶ and in 2023, a wealthy Nigerian politician being convicted for trying to trick someone into donating a kidney for a transplant at an English hospital).⁷

•A 2009⁸ and 2014⁹ Newsweek investigation and a 2025 paper highlighted the extensive illegal organ trade,¹⁰ estimating that 5% of global organ transplants involve black market purchases (totaling $600 million to $1.7 billion annually), with kidneys comprising 75% of these due to high demand for kidney failure treatments and the possibility of surviving with one kidney (though this greatly reduces your vitality).

Approximately 10% to 20% of kidney transplants from living donors are illegal, with British buyers paying $50,000 to $60,000, while desperate impoverished donors (e.g., from refugee camps or countries like Pakistan, India, China, and Africa) receive minimal payment and are abandoned when medical complications arise, despite promises of care. To quote the 2009 article:¹¹

“Diflo became an outspoken advocate for reform several years ago, when he discovered that, rather than risk dying on the U.S. wait list, many of his wealthier dialysis patients had their transplants done in China. There, they could purchase the kidneys of executed prisoners.

In India, Lawrence Cohen, another UC Berkeley anthropologist, found that women were being forced by their husbands to sell organs to foreign buyers to contribute to the family’s income, or to provide for the dowry of a daughter. But while the WHO estimates that organ-trafficking networks are widespread and growing, it says that reliable data are almost impossible to come by.”

Note: These reports also highlighted that these surgeries operate on the periphery of the medical system and involve complicit medical professionals who typically claim ignorance of its illegality (e.g., a good case was made that a few U.S. hospitals, like Cedars Sinai were complicit in the trade).

•A 2004 court case where a South African hospital pleaded guilty to illegally transplanting kidneys from poorer recipients (who received $6,000 to $20,000) to wealthy recipients (who paid up to $120,000).^12,13

•Many reports of organ harvesting by the Chinese government against specific political prisoners.^{14,15,16,17,18} This evidence is quite compelling, particularly since until 2006,¹⁹ China admitted organs were sourced from death row prisoners (with data suggesting the practice has not stopped).²⁰

Note: Harvesting organs from death row prisoners represents one of the most reliable ways to get healthy organs immediately at the time of death (which is one of the greatest challenges in transplant medicine).

•I’ve read reports of organ harvesting occurring in Middle East conflict zones,²¹ by ISIS and in the Kosovo conflict,²² and with drug cartels.²³

Note: Many other disturbing cases of illicit organ harvesting are discussed in more detail here. Likewise, many other valuable tissues (e.g., tendons and corneas) can be harvested from dead bodies. Significant controversy also exists with the ethics of how these are collected (e.g., the respect given to the bodies or how profit focused that industry is).

When Consciousness Gets Trapped

Different parts of the brain control various aspects of our being, so people who are still conscious can sometimes completely lose control of their bodies or their ability to communicate — known as Locked-in syndrome.²⁴

The most famous case involves Martin, a 12-year-old who fell ill with meningitis and entered a vegetative state.²⁵ He was sent home to die, but stayed alive. At 16, he began regaining consciousness, became fully aware by 19, and at 26, a caregiver finally realized he was conscious and got him a communication computer. He eventually married.

Note: Two things from his memoir stuck with me: years of being haunted by his mother once saying, “I hope you die” in frustration, and him sharing, “I cannot even express to you how much I hated Barney” because the care center had him watch Barney reruns every day, assuming he was vegetative.²⁶

When someone is dying, certain functions are lost before others. It’s frequently observed in palliative care that touch and hearing are the last senses to disappear²⁷ (e.g., studies show hearing persists at the end of life).²⁸ This is why I sometimes tell grieving families their “brain-dead” loved one might still hear their voice or feel their touch.

Note: Many people who’ve been resuscitated report “near-death experiences” where they were aware of their surroundings when their brain was supposedly “dead,” suggesting other senses may persist during brain death.²⁹

The Problem with Brain Death

Since organs rapidly lose viability once someone dies, the only way to ethically obtain them is from someone who has “died” but whose body is still keeping organs alive — someone who is brain dead.

Brain death was defined by a 1968 Harvard Medical School Committee³⁰ report called “A Definition of Irreversible Coma.”³¹ They stated their purpose was to “define irreversible coma as a new criterion for death” for two reasons: the burden of caring for brain-damaged patients and avoiding controversy in obtaining organs for transplantation.

However, the committee was confident about diagnosing “irreversible coma” but tentative about calling this “death.”³² A Harvard ethicist noted: “That link, between being irreversibly unconscious and being dead, has never really been made in a convincing way.”

The criteria included no response to stimuli, no breathing, no reflexes, no brainwaves, and replication after 24 hours. Though rapidly adopted, it was immediately contested by doctors who felt harvesting organs from someone with a heartbeat was unethical, worried about diagnostic errors, and suspected the primary motivation was avoiding long-term care costs and obtaining organs.³³

Note: Recent studies show fMRIs demonstrate intentional brain activity in 20% of vegetative patients,³⁴ and 25% of patients with no physical ability to respond can still activate brain regions when spoken to.³⁵

The New York Times recently published an essay advocating for broadening the definition of death, arguing: “We need to broaden the definition of death … So long as the patient had given informed consent for organ donation, removal would proceed without delay … We would have more organs available for transplantation.”³⁶

When ‘Brain Dead’ Patients Are Actually Conscious

Compelling cases demonstrate these concerns are valid. Zack Dunlap, a 21-year-old pronounced brain dead after an ATV accident, was about to have his organs harvested when a nurse relative tested his reflexes and got responses.³⁷ The transplant was cancelled, and Zack fully recovered. Crucially, Zack was fully conscious throughout:

“The next thing I remember was laying in the hospital bed, not being able to move, breathe, couldn’t do anything, on a ventilator, and I heard someone say, I’m sorry he’s brain-dead … I tried to scream, tried to move, just got extremely angry.”

Jahi McMath, a thirteen-year-old declared brain dead after tonsillectomy complications, was kept on life support by her family despite court orders.³⁸ Nine months later, she had regained brainwaves and blood flow to the brain, and moved in response to verbal commands.

More cases include Lewis Roberts (began breathing hours before organ harvesting),³⁹ Ryan Marlow (diagnosis reversed after wife’s insistence),⁴⁰ Colleen Burns (awoke on the operating table and was later found by HHS to have been repeatedly misdiagnosed),⁴¹ and Trenton McKinley (13-year-old who recovered before scheduled donation).⁴²

There were also cases like Steven Thorpe (declared brain dead by four doctors, parents refused organ donation, and he awoke two weeks later),⁴³ and Gloria Cruz (husband refused to allow withdrawal of care, and she recovered).⁴⁴

Note: A recent study found that over 30% of brain-injured patients deemed unrecoverable would have partially or fully recovered had life support not been withdrawn.⁴⁵

Harvesting from Conscious Patients

Most alarming are cases where harvesting was attempted on conscious patients. Anthony Thomas “TJ” Hoover II, who’d repeatedly shown signs of life but was sedated, was brought to the operating room with eyes open.⁴⁶ Tears streamed down his face as he mouthed “help me” and thrashed to avoid surgery. The surgeon refused to proceed, but the coordinator attempted to find an alternative surgeon.

Note: In a similar case, a woman diagnosed as brain dead was in fact “locked-in” and able to hear everything around her, including a doctor telling medical students her husband was “unreasonable” for being unwilling to sign away her organs to people who could benefit from them, and that it was fine to speak this way around her as she was brain dead.⁴⁷

There have also been cases like James Howard-Jones, who woke up just before life support was to be withdrawn for organ harvesting.⁴⁸ Additionally, several patients including a three-month-old boy,⁴⁹ a ten-month-old boy, a 15-year-old girl,⁵⁰ and a 65-year-old woman,⁵¹ who were all declared “brain dead” had their life support turned off to facilitate peaceful transitions, but instead unexpectedly survived and recovered.

Note: I suspect these stories are more common than we are led to believe (e.g., after I published this story on Substack, readers came forward to share instances of “brain-dead” children or patients who subsequently fully recovered).

Federal Investigations Expose Systematic Failures

Regional organ procurement organizations facilitate transplants under the Organ Procurement and Transplant Network (OPTN). Due to chronic organ shortages (roughly 5,600 die yearly awaiting organs),⁵² OPTN faced scathing Congressional hearings⁵³ and DOJ investigation.⁵⁴ They found OPTN had become corrupt and dysfunctional:

•20% to 25% of kidneys lost during transport

•Never collecting 80% of eligible organs

•Poor training leaving staff unable to determine brain death

•Retaliating against whistleblowers

•Misinforming families and seeking consent from impaired relatives

•Medicare fraud and altering causes of death

As such, Congress passed a 2023 law breaking up OPTN’s monopoly.⁵⁵

The HRSA Investigation Bombshell

The Health Resources and Services Administration conducted an extensive investigation after OPTN refused to release critical records. While OPTN’s review found “no major concerns,” HRSA’s investigation revealed disturbing patterns.

RFK Jr. made the unprecedented decision to publicly release these horrifying findings^56,57 despite knowing it would undermine trust in organ donations. The partially redacted report found:⁵⁸

“HRSA found a concerning pattern of risk to neurologically injured patients … Multiple patients were documented as evincing pain or discomfort during peri-procurement events after OPO staff had either failed to adequately assess neurologic function or had documented findings inconsistent with successful organ recovery without change to the plan.”

The scale was shocking: Of the authorized but not recovered cases (meaning something went awry at the last minute), HRSA found 103 (29.3%) had concerning features, including 73 patients (20.8%) showing neurologic status incompatible with organ procurement. At least 28 (8.0%) patients had no cardiac time of death noted, suggesting potential survival.

Note: ANR stands for “authorized but not recovered” — something went wrong at the last minute (like the donor reviving) that stopped the harvesting.

The report revealed systematic misreporting of drug intoxication cases, where depressed mental status from drugs was being mistaken for permanent brain injury.

Mainstream Media Confirms the Horror

A July 2025 New York Times investigation corroborated these findings:⁵⁹

“Fifty-five medical workers in 19 states told The Times they had witnessed at least one disturbing case … coordinators persuading hospital clinicians to administer morphine, propofol and other drugs to hasten the death of potential donors.”

One surgical technician described a crying, alert woman being sedated anyway: “I felt like if she had been given more time on the ventilator, she could have pulled through … I felt like I was part of killing someone.” Dr. Wade Smith, a UCSF neurologist, concluded: “I think these types of problems are happening much more than we know.”

Living with Transplants

Transplants aren’t the miracle they’re portrayed as. Failure rates are significant:

•Lung — 10.4% (within a year),⁶⁰ 72% (within 10 years)⁶¹

•Heart — 7.8% (within a year),⁶² 46% (within 10 years)⁶³

•Kidney — 5% (within a year),⁶⁴ 46.4% (within 10 years)⁶⁵

•Liver — 7.6% (within a year),⁶⁶ 32.5% (within 10 years)⁶⁷

Patients must follow lifelong regimens of immune-suppressing medications costing $10,000 to $30,000 annually, with many serious side effects. Comprehensive vaccination is also typically required, which became controversial during COVID-19 when people were denied transplants for refusing COVID vaccines (and in some cases then died from those required vaccines).

What’s most abhorrent is that the COVID vaccine could actually increase transplant rejection risk. I received numerous reports from my network of this and found a paper documenting 44 cases of corneal graft rejections following COVID vaccines,⁶⁸ plus similar results with kidney transplants (36 cases)⁶⁹ and liver rejections (12 cases).⁷⁰

Note: DMSO has been shown to prevent rejection of certain tissue grafts, to potentiate many pharmaceutical drugs (e.g., organ rejection medications) thereby allowing lower and safer doses to be used, to greatly reduce autoimmune responses (hence treating many rheumatologic diseases), and to restore failing organs — all of which suggests it could greatly improve outcomes for transplant recipients.

The Emotional Costs of Transplants

Transplant recipients often face intense psychological stress — from the uncertainty of waiting for a donor, to the ever-present risk of organ rejection, and the lifelong burden of managing complex medical needs.

One of the most overlooked yet profound sources of stress is the phenomenon of personality, preference, and memory transference from donor to recipient. Numerous documented cases describe recipients acquiring new traits — such as food preferences, talents, or even shifts in sexual orientation — that align closely with those of their donor, despite having no prior knowledge of them.

In some extraordinary instances, recipients have reported memories of events they never experienced, including details of a donor’s death that later contributed to solving crimes.

The psychological impact of integrating these unexpected traits — essentially, elements of another person’s identity — can be deeply unsettling. Moreover, research and clinical observation suggest that recipients who resist or struggle to accept these changes may experience more complications post-transplant. Likewise, we frequently observe an immense amount of transference with organs, and it is often necessary to release the trapped emotions from the organ to improve transplant outcomes.

These observations raise complex questions about the nature of consciousness, memory, and identity. They also bring ethical concerns to the forefront — particularly if tangible spiritual consequences exist for receiving organs that are harvested without the donor’s informed consent.

What Needs to Change

Many of the long-standing issues within the U.S. organ transplantation system stem from the lack of accountability and competition within the Organ Procurement and Transplantation Network (OPTN).

For decades, OPTN has operated with minimal oversight, resulting in little incentive to improve donor identification protocols (e.g., recognizing the “brain dead” patients who are still alive), invest in better diagnostic tools, or modernize organ collection practices so that fewer vital organs are lost. To address these systemic problems, meaningful reforms are urgently needed:

•Improved diagnostic standards — Incorporate advanced methods for assessing consciousness — such as functional MRI (fMRI) and other neuroimaging techniques — that can detect subtle signs of awareness often missed by traditional evaluations.

•Independent oversight — Establish clear separation between organ procurement organizations and clinical care teams. All potential donor cases should be reviewed by independent ethics and medical committees.

•Legal safeguards — Enact stronger legal protections, including mandatory waiting periods, second medical opinions from independent professionals, and family rights that cannot be overridden under pressure.

•Transparency and accountability — Implement rigorous oversight mechanisms, robust whistleblower protections, and enforceable penalties for organizations that violate ethical standards.

More importantly, viable alternatives to conventional organ transplantation must be prioritized — because as long as demand far outpaces supply, unethical practices will inevitably emerge. Fortunately, several promising solutions are already within reach:

•Natural and regenerative therapies — Throughout my career, I have seen many marginalized “alternative” therapies restore failing organs. Likewise, physician readers have reported DMSO saved livers and lungs, allowing their patients to be taken off the transplant list.

•Bioengineered organs — Cutting-edge research is advancing the development of synthetic and lab-grown organs, which may be commercially available within the next decade.

•Living donor solutions — In many cases, a healthy living donor — often a family member — can safely donate nonessential organs such as a kidney, significantly reducing the need for deceased donor transplants.

•Reversal of “Brain Death” — Intravenous DMSO has shown remarkable success in reviving patients diagnosed as brain dead or in severe neurological states (and requiring a lifetime of costly medical care). Despite decades of clinical evidence supporting its potential, mainstream medicine has largely ignored this low-cost therapy.

Note: Many documented cases of organ harvesting from paralyzed but conscious individuals closely mirror scenarios in which DMSO has led to full neurological recovery.

In short, recent federal investigations have exposed cracks in a system that can no longer be ignored. We now have a critical opportunity not only to reform a deeply flawed process, but also to champion ethical, innovative alternatives that honor the dignity of every human life.

It is up to each of us — patients, providers, policymakers, and citizens — to ensure that medical decisions are made in the true best interest of the individual, not driven by the pressures of organ demand. Organ donation touches upon one of the most sacred aspects of being human, and now is the time to make sure it is honored.

Author’s Note: This is an abridged version of a longer article which goes into greater detail on the points mentioned here (e.g., the therapies which can restore failing organs, the extensive body of data consciousness resides in the organs, and methods for releasing trapped emotional trauma). That article, along with additional links and references can be read here.

A Note from Dr. Mercola About the Author

A Midwestern Doctor (AMD) is a board-certified physician from the Midwest and a longtime reader of Mercola.com. I appreciate AMD’s exceptional insight on a wide range of topics and am grateful to share it. I also respect AMD’s desire to remain anonymous since AMD is still on the front lines treating patients. To find more of AMD’s work, be sure to check out The Forgotten Side of Medicine on Substack.

from: https://articles.mercola.com/sites/articles/archive/2025/09/12/organ-transplant-brain-death-diagnosis-ethical-failures.aspx?ui=f460707c057231d228aac22d51b97f2a8dcffa7b857ec065e5a5bfbcfab498ac&sd=20211017&cid_source=dnl&cid_medium=email&cid_content=art1HL&cid=20250912&foDate=true&mid=DM1805808&rid=386526050

Autoimmunity and Treatment

Posted on August 22, 2025 by marcia

What They Don’t Tell You About Autoimmune Disorders

and the dangers of conventional rheumatologic approaches to disease

A MIDWESTERN DOCTOR

AUG 07, 2025

•Treating illnesses by suppressing symptoms frequently precipitates far more severe diseases which have rippled out throughout our society.

•The primary management for most autoimmune conditions is through symptom suppressing drugs, which frequently have significant toxicity.

•In most cases, autoimmune disorders and inflammatory joint conditions have an underlying cause, such as a chronic undiagnosed stealth infection or food allergy, which when addressed significantly improve the condition.

•Many factors in life that we can control and do not require prescriptions to address (e.g., diet, stress or sleep) directly contribute to autoimmunity and, when addressed, improve it.

•This article will review some of the key steps which can be taken to improve autoimmune disorders and reduce one’s reliance upon toxic medications.

Autoimmune conditions have become one of the most common and stubborn health challenges of our time. While conventional medicine often treats them as mysterious immune system malfunctions—managed primarily with harmful steroids and other immunosuppressants —there’s increasing evidence that many of these diseases are not random. Rather, they’re signals of deeper dysfunctions in the body—many of which are tied to the modern lifestyle we’ve come to accept as normal.

Lifestyle Contributions to Autoimmunity

Many things in our lives that we have control over significantly affect our predisposition to autoimmunity:

Sleep—I have previously written about the profound importance of sleep and how many different illnesses are linked to poor sleep. In practice, we frequently find that patients with autoimmune conditions also have disrupted sleep cycles, and these improve once that is addressed (e.g., by improving sleep hygiene and avoiding blue light).
Note: the treatments for sleeping issues like insomnia are discussed further here.

Sunlight—Since the sun has no commercial lobby to advocate for it, the medical field demonizes sunlight as a cause of cancer despite a deficiency of the sun and sunlight being tied to a wide range of medical conditions (including cancers) and making individuals 60% more likely to die. A loss of sunlight exposure is also tied to many autoimmune conditions (e.g., multiple sclerosis). As such, we frequently find autoimmune patients improve from resuming healthy sunlight exposures (likewise, I suspect this partly explains why ultraviolet blood irradiation benefits so many different autoimmune conditions).
Note: appropriate sunlight exposure (e.g., going outside early in the morning and having the sunlight touch your face without being obstructed by glass) is also very helpful for reestablishing the circadian rhythm and restoring healthy sleep.

Exercise—Many of the benefits of exercise arise from the fluid circulation it creates in the body (as fluid stagnation underlies many illnesses—many of which we suffer from due to our sedentary lifestyle. This perspective in turn, is corroborated by the Chinese Medical viewpoint that blood stasis causes autoimmunity and that either treating blood stasis or zeta potential (which underlies both microclotting and lymphatic stagnation) frequently improves autoimmune conditions.Note: exercise and eliminating fluid stagnation frequently improve insomnia. Likewise, sunlight exposure is a critical driver of fluid circulation throughout the body, all of which illustrates how intertwined many of the key lifestyle factors we routinely ignore are to our health.

Diet—Food allergens such as wheat, dairy, and nightshades frequently contribute to autoimmune conditions (particularly arthritis), and many have found food elimination diets that identify the reactive allergen to improve their condition significantly. Additionally, in many cases, allergies arise from deficient stomach acid, as without sufficient stomach acid, proteins are often not fully broken down (allowing intact allergens to enter circulation) and triggers acid reflux (due to top of the stomach only closing when sufficient stomach acid is present), which then irritates the lungs.
Note: many of the issues with gluten (e.g., autoimmunity or weight gain) are not experienced in countries like Italy that use more natural forms of wheat.

Stress—is well known to predispose one to autoimmune disorders and flares (e.g., 80% of autoimmune patients report an unusually stressful situation prior to their disease onset, while stress disorders increased the risk of autoimmune disorders by 46%-129%).
Note: some patients will not respond to a rheumatologic drug, until they eliminate the stress in their lives.

The Global Loss of Vitality

If you review the early history of medicine, it is striking:

•How profoundly damaging many of the early western medical remedies were (e.g., the smallpox vaccine or mercury).

•How much healthier people were and how much more effective many natural therapies were in the past than they are now.

This second point prompted me to ask older doctors (from various medical schools) if they had observed a general decline in human vitality in the patients they saw at the start of their careers compared to the end, and all of them shared that they had. Additionally:

•They noted that beyond patients becoming much sicker and having conditions they’d never seen before, it was also much harder to treat them as each therapy they used had shifted from making a dramatic improvement to a more minuscule one, which required numerous successive treatments to bring about an improvement.

•They typically attributed this shift to a loss in human vitality. They cited a variety of correlates (e.g., the average human body temperature dropping, people becoming less able to mount fevers, infants being less able to produce a brisk cry, or increasing degrees of fluid stagnation in their patients).

Note: typically this decline in vitality proceeds in a linear fashion and then spikes at certain times (e.g., after the introduction of the smallpox vaccine, the 1986 law which granted immunity to vaccine manufacturers and led to a rapid proliferation in the vaccine schedule, and after the COVID vaccines). In each case, this increase in disease gets normalized and forgotten by the next generation of doctors (who entered practice after the last wave of sickness had become the “new normal”).

Likewise, many datasets corroborate this steady decreasing vitality in humanity over the decades (e.g., we’ve witnessed a continual increase in autoimmune disorders). Having extensively explored this topic, we believe much of it is due to modern technology (e.g., vaccines, chronic chemical exposures or heavy metal toxicity, dentistry and surgical scars, EMFs, and widespread circadian rhythm disruption). Many of these, in turn, share a common thread—creating fluid stagnation throughout the body.

Note: After thousands of years, around 1830, blood stasis suddenly came to be viewed as a primary cause of disease in Chinese Medicine, which occurred shortly after the smallpox vaccine (which caused many severe injuries resembling blood stasis), which was introduced in China in 1805.

Systemic Suppression

One of the central criticisms of Allopathic (Western) medicine by natural schools of medicine has been that anytime an external agent is used to forcefully change a process which is unfolding within the body (rather than aiding the body’s ability to resolve it) you run the risk of a minor temporary issue being exchanged for a severe chronic one—especially when this is repeatedly done throughout the course of someone’s life. In some cases, this risk is very justified (e.g., in a life-threatening emergency or with a relatively safe drug that has limited long-term complications). At the same time however, a general unwillingness to acknowledge this issue pervades Allopathic medicine.

I’ve thus never forgotten a conference in the 1970s at which one of the world’s leading homeopaths convened a panel to discuss the likely consequences of modern medicine routinely suppressing symptoms (e.g., aggressively using fever suppressing medications or preventing childhood febrile illnesses with vaccination).
Note: studies have repeatedly linked preventing measles, mumps, and chickenpox to severe cancers later in life.

At that conference, building upon the recent mass introduction of suppressive steroids, they correctly predicted that if this suppression continued to increased, in the decades to follow:

•We would see a global shift from less severe illnesses to more severe ones.

•That this suppression would cause physical illnesses to be pushed deeper into the body and be replaced with psychiatric illnesses, and in time spiritual ones (particularly when the psychiatric illnesses were also suppressed with medications)—all of which would dovetail with people being willing to do crazier and crazier things.

Now, everyone has gradually become habituated to patients “just being” sicker and sicker, and that not much can be done about it.

Suppressive Antibiotics

While steroids are one of the medications most associated with “suppressing” illness, many others are too. For example, for years, many natural medicine practitioners (e.g., homeopaths) also told me they’d frequently seen antibiotics “treat” an acute infection but turn it into a chronic one. I wasn’t sure what to make of this (as microbiome disruption could partially but not fully explain it), then I discovered something similar existed in Chinese Medicine:

The concept of Latent Heat is very old in Chinese medicine, having been mentioned for the first time in the ‘Yellow Emperor’s Classic of Internal Medicine’. Latent Heat occurs when an external pathogenic factor penetrates the body without causing apparent symptoms at the time; the pathogenic factor penetrates into the Interior, and ‘incubates’ there, turning into interior Heat. This Heat later emerges with acute symptoms of Heat: when it emerges, it is called Latent Heat.

Note: in modern Chinese Medicine, antibiotics and vaccines are now proposed as sources of latent heat.

Much later, when I read Cell Wall Deficient Forms: Stealth Pathogens all of this finally made sense. This book argued that when bacteria are exposed to lethal stressors, particularly cell wall destroying antibiotics, while most will die, some will instead enter a primitive survival mode and transform into misshapen cell wall deficient (CWD) “mycoplasma like” bacteria which can radically change their size or morphology (and hence look very different). While these bacteria are hard to detect (and when seen, due to no one knowing they “exist,” are often mistaken for cellular debris and ignored), with the correct techniques they can be detected. In turn, the book provides a wealth of evidence that CWD bacteria:

•Are found within many “aseptic” tissues undergoing an autoimmune attack, with specific CWD bacteria associated with many different autoimmune disorders which have no known cause.

•Once the environment is “safe” can transform back into their normal form and cause a sudden recurrence of an infection—suggesting chronic infections are due to antibiotics creating a dormant CWD population rather than continual reinfection.

Note: many popular alternative schools of medicine (e.g., those of Rife, Naessens, and Enderlein) came from microscopes which could directly observe these pleomorphic bacteria continually shifting into new morphologies, and that diseases states (e.g., cancer) correlated to specific morphologies, while other morphologies resulted in a symbiotic state of health. Since the morphologies adopted correlated with the internal state of the body, this gave rise to the belief that treatments should aim to create “healthy terrains” within the body, which would give rise to non-pathogenic forms of the bacteria rather than antibiotics that provoked pathogen transformation.

Addressing Autoimmune Diseases

When autoimmune disorders are treated in conventional practice, we feel five errors repeatedly occur:

1. Frequently, autoimmune disorders have a cause (e.g., a chronic infection) that goes unrecognized, resulting in powerful immune-suppressing drugs being used instead, while the underlying issue progresses.

2. In many cases, lifestyle factors significantly exacerbate autoimmune conditions. If these factors were focused on, the symptoms of the autoimmune condition would significantly reduce, and the amount of medication required to manage the condition in tandem would as well.

3. Those lifestyle factors (e.g., diet) can also prevent conventional treatments from working. Because of that, in many cases where a medication that “should work” but does not, focusing on the unaddressed lifestyle factors for a patient is often what’s needed for a remission. Unfortunately, in those instances, rather than the doctor taking a step back and asking, “What am I missing here,” the reflex often is to simply give more immune-suppressing medications. In short, if a patient has been on multiple potent rheumatologic drugs, something important was most likely missed.

4. As many of the safer autoimmune drugs with the best risk to benefit ratio are relatively new, most doctors in practice are not aware they exist (e.g., that side-effect free alternatives to methotrexate exist) or that they can be used to treat many challenging issues in rheumatology (e.g., corticosteroid pills suppressing endogenous steroid production or large rheumatoid nodules). As such, drugs that should not be used for extended periods (e.g., steroids and NSAIDs) are instead frequently the mainstay of treatment.
Note: in some cases (e.g., for a dangerous and rapidly progressing autoimmune disease or in instances where it is not feasible for a patient to implement a natural treatment plan), immune-suppressing medications, even with their side effects, are necessary.

5. Many highly effective non-standard treatments for autoimmune conditions remain fairly unknown despite extensive scientific evidence demonstrating their efficacy (e.g., ultraviolet blood irradiation or DMSO). Likewise, since there are so many natural therapies for autoimmune conditions, it’s often so difficult to sort out which work that they all get cast under the same umbrella and ignored.
Note: many of those therapies are both anti-inflammatory and highly effective at treating mycoplasma bacteria.

Because of these issues, the management of autoimmune conditions remains less than satisfactory for many patients—which is particularly unfortunate given that these conditions are becoming increasingly common (e.g., extensive evidence ties increasing vaccination to autoimmunity).

Conclusion

Since our medical system focuses on treating isolated symptoms with patentable pharmaceuticals rather than attempting to identify the root cause of a permanent illness, patients suffer, particularly those with chronic disorders. In this regard, autoimmune diseases are particularly unfortunate as they force patients to choose between having a debilitating and sometimes fatal illness or a lifetime of fairly toxic immune-suppressing drugs (e.g., steroids have a wide range of severe side effects, particularly when used systemically for a prolonged period).

But here’s the hopeful part: when we start looking at the body as a whole system and work to restore its natural balance—whether through better sleep, movement, diet, or managing stress—people often feel dramatically better. Healing isn’t always fast or easy, but it’s absolutely possible when we stop chasing symptoms and start supporting the body’s own wisdom. Likewise, while very little focus is given in mainstream medicine for producing safe treatments for autoimmunity or arthritis, many natural treatments have been developed (such as DMSO) which no longer force patients to accept a lifetime of toxic therapies to survive and be free of pain.

Author’s note: This is an abridged version of a longer article which goes into more detail on the safest natural and conventional treatments for autoimmune disorders and musculoskeletal disorders like arthritis, the dangers of steroids and the ways to safely utilize or withdraw from steroids. That article can be read here.

from: https://www.midwesterndoctor.com/p/what-they-dont-tell-you-about-autoimmune?publication_id=748806&post_id=170415402&isFreemail=true&r=19iztd&triedRedirect=true&utm_source=substack&utm_medium=email

Save the CHildren!!!

Posted on July 14, 2025 by marcia

Raising Healthy Children

July’s Open Thread

A MIDWESTERN DOCTOR

JUL 13, 2025

This newsletter was created with the goal of helping others, and over time, I’ve received many messages from people with important questions I’d love to answer. However, writing each article takes a considerable amount of time—just as an example, I’ve spent the past month working on the final installment of the DMSO series, and it’s still not quite finished. Because of this, I’m not always able to respond individually to every inquiry I get.

While I truly wish I could, the most practical solution I’ve found is to host monthly open threads. These provide readers with a space to ask any outstanding questions—especially those left over from previous content—and I make it a priority to respond. Having all the questions in one place also makes it easier for others to benefit from those answers as well.

For each of these open threads, I like to tie in a topic I’ve been meaning to discuss—usually something I’ve been thinking about but haven’t felt warrants a full-length article. This time, I want to focus on a topic near and dear to my heart, healthy children.

The Chronic Disease Epidemic

One of RFK’s rallying cries has been that our children are being stricken by an onslaught of chronic diseases and that this is undermining the strength that is our future, and his organization, the Children’s Health Defense frequently references this chart:

Note: that data comes from this study and this study.

Since trends in motion tend to persist unless significant measures are taken to shift them, as a recently published study confirmed, this problem has continued to worsen.

Nearly half of all children receiving care in the PEDSnet multicenter network had a chronic health condition, while one-third of children in the general population experience from 1 to 15 parent-reported chronic conditions. Furthermore, obesity now affects 20% of children, and early puberty is increasingly common among girls, with 1 in 7 beginning menstruation before age 12 years. Temporal trends also showed deterioration in sleep health and increasing limitations in activity, alongside worsening of an extensive range of physical and emotional symptoms.

In turn, the study’s data shows that the rates of these conditions have roughly doubled over the last 12 years.

Likewise, many other things have rapidly gone awry

Note: this study also highlighted a myriad of other issues, such as our children being more likely to die than other developed nations, in large part due to sudden infant death syndrome (a condition strongly linked to vaccination).

The Other Half of The Picture

While I agree with the gravity of these findings and the urgency to re-evaluate our vaccination program, I feel they only tell half of the story. That is because:
•There are many other factors besides vaccines that also adversely affect children’s health.
•All illnesses (particularly those which result from being poisoned) tend to distribute on a bell curve, so that the severe, easy to spot reactions are only a minority, whereas less severe (and harder to spot) reactions are much more common.

To some extent this is recognized, as autoimmune disorders (a frequent complication of vaccination) are much more common than vaccine sudden deaths—but in most cases it’s missed.

On the one hand, this is due to the “measurement” problem in science, where scientific studies can generally only be conducted if they have a clear metric by which to measure things, thereby creating clear, reproducible data. This becomes an issue when an agent has so many different symptoms that it can make (many of which are quite subtle), they typically will be written off as anecdotal unless they are deliberately traced, and as a result, many common side effects of vaccines are never formally associated with them.
Note: the most recent glaring example of this happened with the COVID vaccines where trial participants were only given a small list of (relatively benign) symptoms they could check off (e.g., fevers or fatigue) so as a result, those were the side-effects that appeared in the published trial reports. Likewise, V-Safe, the CDC program designed to monitor vaccine side effects, did the same; however fortunately, it also included a free text field where participants could enter other symptoms—most of which were never publicly analyzed (and which the government fought in court to avoid disclosing). Because of all of this, the majority of the medical field assumed most of the side effects patients reported from the vaccines (despite many others experiencing the same symptoms) were anecdotal and had nothing to do with the vaccines).

On the other hand, it’s because many of these pathological changes are more subtle and more complex to spot, so since people aren’t trained to notice them, and have gradually become habituated to all of it “being normal” they don’t realize how much things have changed.
Note: doctors are virtually never trained to recognize the subtle neurological injuries which follow vaccination (which indicate damage has also occurred within the brain).

The Hidden Chronic Disease Epidemic

For as long as I can remember, many natural healers have told me that they can normally spot the unvaccinated children as they are much healthier and vibrant than their peers. For example, after I explained some of the ways this can be identified, two readers shared:

Thanks to this substack, I am now the unofficial medical godfather of 4 unvaccinated babies across several families. All are incredibly healthy with none of the typical problems associated with the microstrokes. All have been described by strangers and family as, “wow, your baby is really aware and paying attention. It’s like they’re sentient, I don’t know how else to say it”. And I am sad when I see those other people’s babies because I know they were supposed to be more, undergo less suffering when I hear their random high pitched shrieks.

Last year I attended a fundraiser auction to raise money for local Mennonite schools. Many families, many children. I was struck by the fact that there was a light, a brightness, in these children’s eyes that I had not seen for decades in other children. The Mennonites here do not vaccinate. Now I understand. It hurts my heart.

Likewise, I received this email a few weeks ago from a mother who followed all of my suggestions for a healthy child:

Other than a minor rash, my daughter has never had any health issues. She’s been ahead on all her developmental milestones, and from the very beginning, she’s been incredibly alert and engaged with her surroundings. She’s always exploring, and only cries when there’s a clear reason—if she’s hungry, tired, hurt, or not getting the attention she wants.

When we’re out in public, she smiles at everyone and tries to make friends. People constantly stop us to comment on how beautiful and full of life she is—some even ask if they can hold her. It wasn’t until I had her that I realized how unusual that kind of energy is in a baby. So many infants I see seem withdrawn, like they’re in a kind of daze, avoiding eye contact, and often looking genuinely sickly.

I’m incredibly grateful we were spared that, but at the same time, I’ve started to feel increasingly unsettled by what I see around me. I think a lot about what other parents must be going through—especially single mothers trying to raise kids on limited incomes—and I honestly don’t know how they manage.

One of the most challenging things when you “step out of the matrix” is becoming able to see (fairly disturbing) things all around you, and one of the key reasons why I appreciate stories like these three is because they illustrate that’s what’s been hidden right in front of us is at last becoming more and more visible.

Screens and Children

As cell phones and tablets became widely available, I would see more and more parents (who had their children with them) at medical visits using devices to keep their children content. In many cases, if a device was withdrawn, the children would have a fit (at which point the device was returned to them).

This greatly concerned me, as I could see that the way the screens pulled them in was not having a healthy effect on the child’s developing nervous system (which is why I advise parents to use audio-only media, such as small devices that play children’s songs).

Note: quite a few social media executives have said they have tremendous regret about what their products (intentionally designed to be addictive) have neurologically done to our children. Likewise, many articles have been written about how Silicon Valley tech executives send their kids to an alternative school where phones and screens are banned.¹^,²^,³^,⁴^,⁵

In this publication, I’ve written numerous articles on the mass neurological damage being caused by vaccination.

In one, I showed that neurologic damage from vaccination has been a well-known problem for over a century (that previously was widely reported in the medical literature) and that conditions like autism used to be widely referred to as “mentally retarded,” a change I strongly suspect was done to obfuscate the issue (as autism exists on a wide spectrum, so hearing that someone “became autistic” is much easier to push into the back of one’s mind than if a child rapidly “becomes retarded” after a vaccine).

In the other, I highlighted that the original pertussis (DPwT) vaccine was particularly problematic as it would often cause encephalitis (which was often accompanied by piercing screams) and then leave the child with lasting brain damage. One author who studied this extensively made the fascinating observation that after the DPwT vaccine entered the market in the 1940s, a variety of societal changes followed which matched when the initial cohort who received the DPwT vaccine reached each age bracket.

For example, in the 1950s, a condition termed “minimal brain damage” [MBD] was coined (with the defining characteristic of it being hyperactivity), which before long became “perhaps the most common, and certainly one of the most time-consuming problems in current pediatric practice”. The symptoms of MBD (as defined by America’s Public Health Service and the American Psychiatric Association) had a significant overlap with what was seen after encephalitis, DPT injuries, and what was associated with autism.

In the 1960s, Ritalin came into use for treating attention deficit disorder and hyperactivity, and minimal brain damage was gradually phased out and replaced with ADHD (a condition independent studies show a 3-20 fold increase from vaccination).

I mention all of this because I have had a nagging suspicion that something similar is happening with screens, as they both draw in and pacify neurologically injured children. Furthermore, patterns set in childhood are very difficult to shake for life, and as we are now starting to see a variety of signs the first generation raised on technology has a variety of mental health issues linked to their technology exposure, which further argues for avoiding screens at an early age.

Note: the mother I mentioned above said one of their major challenges with her daughter has been keeping her away from screens (as she is drawn to them whenever they are left open), and as a result they are using screens less now.

Raising a Healthy Child

\As I’ve shown throughout this publication, there is significant evidence that vaccines are damaging to a child’s neurological development, particularly as more and more are given closely together. However, while I believe vaccines are the primary issue, there are a lot of things I think merit serious consideration (e.g., avoiding screens) for parents wishing to have healthy children—most of which essentially equate to “do what people did 100 years ago,” and in the mothers I’ve counseled through the child birth process, I found the best results came from doing all of them. As such, over the last year, I’ve worked on compiling a series about all the most critical aspects I believe deserve attention before, during, and after pregnancy.

In the final part of this article (which exists as an open forum for you to ask any questions you may have), I will cover the key points from each of those that you can directly incorporate into raising a healthy child.

Continue reading this post for free, courtesy of A Midwestern Doctor.

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Bird Flu, Pandemics, and Hyping The Population

Posted on February 24, 2025 by marcia

The Grotesque Bird Flu Scam and How to Actually Treat Colds and Flus

How the cruelty and mismanagement we are seeing with avian influenza is directly reflected within the practice of medicine

FEB 23, 2025

Story at a Glance:

•A massive industry exists to protect us from pandemics. Unfortunately, this industry is largely a grift which receives billions for failed cures, routinely suppresses competing therapies that could end pandemics and frequently causes the pandemics it is supposed to prevent.

•This industry routinely engages in cruel and completely unnecessary animal experimentation (which often then shapes the mentality of modern medical practices). Because of this, one group has recently been able to shift this longstanding cruelty by connecting it to the immensely wasteful spending which often accompanies that research.

•The current “war against bird flu” embodies many of the major problems in the pandemic prevention industry, as over the last few years, we’ve spent billions of dollars killing over a hundred million birds, but all this has accomplished is significantly raising the price of eggs.

•While viruses are typically treated as being “incurable” by modern medicine, many highly effective, frequently over the counter, and unpatentable treatments exist for viral illnesses that have been used for over a century (including for some of the most severe and “incurable” ones). This article will review those therapies and how they can both be used for severe illnesses and to rapidly eliminate common viral conditions (e.g., flus and colds).

In late 2019, I predicted that COVID-19 would turn into a disaster. I told many of my colleagues, who all thought I was crazy and simultaneously were confused by these remarks as I was typically the dissenting voice against getting worked up over the annual “pandemic.” While many things at work by late 2019 suggested this could happen, the primary reason I was willing to put my reputation on the line to claim this was due to the media coverage surrounding the pandemic.

Specifically, it’s a longstanding tradition for both the media and federal health apparatus to massively hype up each potential “pandemic,” but in the case of COVID (called Sars-Cov-2 at the time), the exact opposite happened. There was a consistent push to downplay it (e.g., “it’s just a flu bro” flooded the internet at that time) to the point many of my colleagues who typically got the most up in arms about (minor) infectious diseases laughed me off when I suggested COVID was something to be concerned about.

All of this was a red flag to me as I initially could not believe the pandemic industrial complex would be silent when the pandemic they had been waiting decades for finally arrived. Then, once it became very clear (from reports circulating on the internet in Dec 2019) that COVID was very different and actually had a high likelihood of causing a true pandemic, I inferred that only two things could explain why it was being suppressed—either it was known that it would turn into a huge problem and health authorities wanted time to prepare for it before the public panicked, or they wanted it to spread under the radar as much as possible so it could turn into an actual global disaster.

In my eyes, there are four central reasons why pandemics are always hyped up:

•They give federal agencies (e.g., the CDC) a way to justify their necessity and get Congressional funding (which is most likely the primary motivation).

•The ideal content for the media are things that emotionally agitate and hook viewers but do not challenge any vested interests that do not want to be exposed (e.g., major media advertisers like the pharmaceutical industry). Fear-mongering about the next pandemic hence is an excellent way to sustain those companies.

•A multibillion-dollar industry has been created around pandemic preparedness (e.g., lots of virology research and making vaccines) that succeeds because it has no accountability for abjectly failing to prevent pandemics. In turn, hyping up pandemics is vital for this industry.

•Tackling many of the real health issues facing our country requires confronting the vested interests responsible for those issues existing (e.g., pharmaceutical companies) and addressing the underlying causes of chronic illnesses in the country—all of which is a lot of work and gets a lot of pushback. In contrast, having an aggressive and drastic top-down response to an infectious disease takes relatively little effort to do and allows the government to present the facade of safeguarding our health.

As such, we will constantly see “pandemics” that are hyped up by the media and typically are accompanied by mass slaughtering of livestock along with a variety of aggressive sales pitches for that year’s vaccine and in certain years, Tamiflu as well. Inevitably however, in one way or another, the whole thing ends up being a scam (e.g., the pandemic never materializes or the therapies for it don’t really work).

Note: as I show here, Tamiflu is a scam, as despite governments having spent billions stockpiling it, there is no evidence it works (but significant evidence it frequently has side effects).

The Biodefense Industry

To read the rest of the article, go to: https://www.midwesterndoctor.com/p/the-grotesque-bird-flu-scam-and-how?publication_id=748806&post_id=157417609&isFreemail=true&r=19iztd&triedRedirect=true&utm_source=substack&utm_medium=email

Virus Shedding and The effects

Posted on January 20, 2025 by marcia

What We’ve Learned from a Year of Vaccine Shedding Data

Numerous data sources now corroborate that the COVID vaccines shed in a consistent and replicable manner

A MIDWESTERN DOCTOR

JAN 19, 2025

Story at a Glance:

•After the COVID-19 vaccines hit the market, stories began emerging of unvaccinated individuals becoming ill after being in proximity to recently vaccinated individuals. This confused many, as the mRNA technology in theory should not be able to “shed.”

•After seeing countless patient cases which can only be explained by COVID vaccine shedding, a year ago, I initiated multiple widely seen calls for individuals to share suspected shedding experiences.

•From those 1,500 reports, clear and replicable patterns have emerged which collectively prove “shedding” is a real and predictable phenomenon that can be explained by known mechanisms unique to the mRNA technology.

•Likewise, after being blocked from publication for over a year, recently, a scientific study corroborating the shedding phenomenon was finally published.

•This article will map out everything that is known about shedding (e.g., what are the common symptoms, how does it happen, who does it affect, does it occur through sexual contact, can it cause severe issues like cancer) along with strategies for preventing it.

When doctors in this movement speak at events about vaccines, by far the most common question they receive is, “Is vaccine shedding real?”

This is understandable as COVID-19 vaccine shedding (becoming ill from vaccinated individuals) represents the one way the unvaccinated are also at risk from the vaccines and hence still need to be directly concerned about them.

Simultaneously, it’s a challenging topic as:

•We believe it is critical to not publicly espouse divisive ideas (e.g., “PureBloods” vs. those who were vaccinated) that prevent the public from coming together and helping everyone. The vaccines were marketed on the basis of division (e.g., by encouraging immense discrimination against the unvaccinated), and many unvaccinated individuals thus understandably hold a lot of resentment for how the vaccinated treated them. We do not want to perpetuate anything similar (e.g., discrimination in the other direction).

•We don’t want to create any more unnecessary fear—which is an inevitable consequence of opening up a conversation about shedding.

•In theory, shedding with the mRNA vaccines should be “impossible,” so claiming otherwise puts one on very shaky ground.

Conversely, if shedding is real, we believe it is critical to expose as:

•Those being affected by it are in a horrible situation, particularly if everyone is gaslighting them about it and insisting it’s all in their head.

•It provides one of the strongest arguments to pull the mRNA vaccines from the market and prohibit the widespread deployment of mRNA technologies in the future.

For those reasons, Pierre Kory and I have spent the last year and a half trying to collect as much evidence as possible to map out this phenomenon with the following data sets:

•Dozens of extremely compelling patient histories¹^,²^,³ from Kory and Marsland’s medical practice, including many responding to spike protein treatment.
•My own experience with patients and friends affected by shedding.
• I read large numbers of reports of shedding in (now deleted) online support groups.
•Roughly 1,500 reports from individuals affected by shedding we were able to collect.
•Extensive menstrual data compiled by MyCycleStory.

From that and the hundreds of hours of work that went into it (particularly reviewing and sorting the 1,500 reports), we can state the following with relative certainty:

1. Shedding is very real (e.g., each of those datasets is congruent with the others), and many of the stories of those affected by it are very sad.
2. People’s sensitivity to it dramatically varies.
3. Most of the people who are sensitive to shedding have already figured it out.
4. Mechanistically, shedding is very difficult to explain. However, now that new evidence has emerged, a much stronger case can be made for the mechanisms I initially proposed a year ago.

Note: if you have a shedding experience you would like to share (or wish to read through them), please do so here, where they are compiled.

Shedding Overview:

By far, the most common symptom of shedding is unusual and disrupted menstrual bleeding (which is also the most common COVID vaccine injury). This in turn, was the first thing that alerted me to the inconceivable possibility the vaccines could shed, as I quickly received many similar reports of highly unusual menstrual bleeding, which appeared to be due to exposure to someone who was vaccinated.

After this, the most common symptoms were headaches, flu-like illnesses, nosebleeds, fatigue, rashes, tinnitus, sinus or nasal issues, and shingles. Other less frequent symptoms are also repeatedly seen (e.g., palpitations, herpes outbreaks, and hair loss).

Additionally, many noticed they could immediately tell when they were in the vicinity of a shedder, typically either due to noticing a unique odor or symptoms immediately onsetting.

Generally speaking, the character of shedding symptoms were quite similar to long COVID and vaccine injuries, but typically were more superficial in nature, suggesting the body was reacting to a harmful external pathogenic factor rather than one already deep inside the body. More severe issues (e.g., cancers or heart attacks) also occurred, but these were much rarer than what you saw in the vaccine injured population, again suggesting shedding was primarily an external reaction. Interestingly, most of the (fairly varied) shedding symptoms overlap with the conditions DMSO treats (e.g., strokes), suggesting that DMSO’s key mechanisms of action (e.g., increasing blood flow, eliminating large and small blood clots, being highly anti-inflammatory, and rescuing cells from the cell danger response) are the exact opposite of what shedding does to the body.

Note: in the following sections, each superscript citation links to individual reports I’ve received about the phenomenon. I provided these citations to show how frequent many of these effects were, so that those who’d experienced them could see many others had too, and so that anyone who wants to research this has access to the primary data. The only shedding symptom I avoided comprehensively citing was abnormal menstruation, as so many reports were received, it was not feasible to compile all of them.

Shedding Patterns

In the same manner that there is a fairly high replicability in the symptoms individuals who are affected by shedding experience, there is also a fairly high congruency in the patterns of how they are affected. Specifically:

1. Some individuals are hypersensitive to shedders and can immediately detect when they are in the presence of a shedder or are on their way to developing harmful symptoms.

2. Others are less sensitive, but quickly notice specific characteristic symptoms consistently occur following shedding exposures (e.g., always feeling ill when a vaccinated husband returns from a long trip away, when going to church each week, when singing with their choir, or when taking a crowded route to work).

In some cases, they are able to identify a “super shedder” (amongst a group) who consistently made them ill, and in many cases they can identify the exact shedding incident that made them ill. Likewise, through tracking serial spike protein antibody levels (e.g., for patients undergoing treatment for long Covid or a vaccine injury) we’ve objectively corroborated that shedding exposures repeatedly worsen these patients (providing an explanation for why their symptoms “inexplicably” ebb and flow), that this can be seen objectively in their lab work and that spike protein treatments after shedding exposures clinically improve these patients.

Note: Pierre Kory’s practice has been able to determine that those they suspect are a shedder (e.g., a husband) test positive (through an antibody test) for a high spike protein levels and that eliminating the shedder from the patient’s life or treating the (asymptomatic) shedder with a vaccine injury protocol frequently significantly improves their patient’s recovery. Likewise, readers here have reported significant improvements from avoiding shedders—which sadly in some cases has required the more sensitive individuals to isolate themselves from society.

3. In the majority of cases, the effects of shedding are temporary and go away, but in a subset of people, they can last for months if not years.

4. Recognition of the shedding phenomenon has forced many to significantly change their lives. This included regretfully terminating a long-term romantic relationship, leaving their line of work (e.g., some massage therapists can no longer handle working on vaccinated clients), or only seeing unvaccinated healthcare providers (e.g., numerous people reported getting ill from vaccinated chiropractors or massage therapists, and we now periodically will have patients state they can only see us if we are unvaccinated).

5. The “stronger” the shedding exposure, the more likely shedding is to cause issues, but conversely, for more sensitive patients, “weaker” exposures also will. More substantial exposures include being around someone who was recently vaccinated or boosted (as shedding is strongest initially), being around more shedders, being in a confined space (e.g., a car) with a shedder for a prolonged period, or having close physical contact with a shedder.
Note: given all of this, I thought flying on airlines would be a significant issue, but I have only received two reports from readers where this was the case.

6. There appear to be some unexplained symptoms otherwise healthy patients now experience that are tied to shedding. However, it’s still often very challenging to tease out when shedding is the culprit due to how many variables are involved and the ambiguity of the subject (which is part of why so much detail has gone into this post so each of you can figure out if you are being affected by shedding).

Susceptibility to Shedding

In general, there are three categories of people who are susceptible to shedding (and in many cases these categories overlap).

The first are the sensitive patients (e.g., those who frequently react to chemicals or get injured by pharmaceuticals). For example, near the start of the vaccine rollout (before I was aware that shedding was an issue), I saw this video and genuinely wondered if it was real as many of its claims were quite extraordinary but at the same time, were somewhat in line with what a highly sensitive patient (of whom I know many) would describe.

To read the rest of the article, go to:

https://www.midwesterndoctor.com/p/what-weve-learned-from-a-year-of?publication_id=748806&post_id=154372114&isFreemail=true&r=19iztd&triedRedirect=true&utm_source=substack&utm_medium=email

School Shootings & Psychiatric Medication

Posted on September 6, 2024 by marcia

(TO read the full article, please go to the link. AN excerpt is included here:)

The Decades of Evidence SSRI Antidepressants Cause Mass Shootings

How Dangerous Must a Drug Be Before it is Pulled from the Market?

A MIDWESTERN DOCTOR

SEP 04, 2024

Story at a Glance:

•SSRI antidepressants have a variety of horrendous side effects. These include sometimes causing the individual to become agitated, feeling they can’t be in their skin, turning psychotic, and occasionally becoming violently psychotic.

•During these psychoses, individuals can have out of body experiences where they commit lethal violence either to themselves or others.

•As lawsuits later showed, this violent behavior (and the frequent suicides that followed it) were observed throughout the SSRI clinical trials, but were covered up by the SSRI manufacturers and then the drug regulators (e.g., the FDA).

•Once the SSRIs entered the market, there has been a wave of SSRI suicides and unspeakable acts of violence—which continue to this day.

•Sadly, the idea that SSRIs could cause any of this has always been viewed as a “conspiracy theory” or “mistaking correlation with causation” because very few are aware of the extensive evidence linking SSRIs to violent and psychotic behavior—despite it now being on the warning label of those drugs.

Most holistic doctors consider Selective Serotonin Reuptake Inhibitors (SSRI) anti-depressants to be one of most harmful mass-prescribed drugs on the market (it typically makes their top 5—which typically also includes the NSAIDs, Statins, and Acid Reflux PPIs). However unlike the other drugs, which are just unsafe and ineffective, SSRIs also have a fairly unique problem—they can kill people who are not even taking the drugs.

Note: the only other examples I know of where a drug hurts non-users are birth control pills (which are designed to not break down) being recycled in certain municipal water supplies and shedding of the COVID-19 vaccines—something which theoretically should not be possible but nonetheless is happening and harming the more sensitive members of society.

What follows is a revised and updated article summarizing the extreme dangers of those drugs I was requested by a few readers to write in light of recent tragic events and what was recently uncovered from the 2023 shooting at a Christian elementary school.

Before we go any further, I want you to consider something. Mass school shootings have become so common, many Americans (outside those in the community directly affected by a shooting) barely take notice of them now. However, despite the fact the media has now habituated us to viewing this as an normal facet of life, in the not too distant past, teenagers did never shot up their schools (rather the idea was so inconceivable, they’d frequently bring a rifle to school to use for sports). What then was it, and why has it never been publicly discussed?

Since SSRIs first entered the market, many have noticed the unusual correlation between their consumption and completely out of character violently psychotic behavior, such as extremely disturbing homicides or suicides being committed by the individual. As the years have gone by, more and more evidence has accumulated (e.g., through lawsuits against the drug companies) that SSRIs cause psychotic violence, and in parallel, as the usage of these drugs has spiked, more and more grisly killings have occurred.

Note: a minority of people who take SSRIs greatly benefit from them (particularly those who have deficient methylation), while others (particularly those who have excessive methylation or deficient liver metabolism of SSRIs) tend to have the worst reactions (e.g., violent psychosis). While this is relatively easy to screen for, because there is a general unwillingness to acknowledge that SSRIs could be dangerous, almost no one in the medical field assess for this prior to starting the drugs or changing their dosages. That subject is discussed further here.

As you might imagine, there are many taboo areas in medicine (e.g., suggesting that vaccines can cause neurological damage to children). However, out of all of them, I’ve found by far the most hostility is directed towards anyone who insinuates mass shootings may be linked to SSRIs (e.g., I got in quite a bit of professional trouble for doing this in the past).

One of the first articles I wrote on Substack (on 5-27-22) was an attempt to provide the mountain of evidence showing there was a direct link between SSRIs and psychotic violence. It went viral and since then I’ve noticed there has gradually been more and more people who have been willing to speak out on it. I attribute this to the current political climate (the Trump presidency and the vaccine mandates has made conservatives much more willing to question both big media and big Pharma) being one where this message wanted to be heard and other conservative commentators seeing a large audience for it existed.

Two months later (on 7-25-22), Tucker Carlson aired what I believe to be the first segment I’ve seen in the mainstream media discussing this taboo topic:

Note: I edited out the political commentary from this segment. The full version of it can be viewed here.

Since that time, other prominent conservatives have spoken out on this issue (e.g., Rep. Marjorie Taylor Greene). Conversely, the horror of the “far-right hysteria against SSRIs” has become a talking point of the left (e.g., see this Huffington Post piece and this Slate piece)—something I suspect is due to the high rates of psychiatric medication usage in the modern left and big Pharma buying out the Democratic party during Obama’s presidency.

Fortunately, those attacks did not work, and the violent risks of SSRI’s have gradually become more acceptable to talk about (e.g., RFK Jr. has mentioned this article during his presidential campaign and since then has successfully created the “Make America Healthy Again” movement):

*Note: The above image has been updated for this article.*

One of the immensely depressing things for someone who is awake to this issue is watching the same script be repeated (we need to ban all guns and have more mental health care [i.e. psyche meds] for everyone) each time one of these shooting happens. Fortunately, this script is losing its appeal and SSRIs are more and more frequently being brought to the public’s attention.

Recently Matt Walsh also did a segment on this topic, which like Tucker’s segment was seen by millions of people

Note: the full version of this episode can be viewed here.

Having watched this dynamic play out for decades, it’s hard for me to put into words how monumental of a change this newfound awareness of the dangers of SSRIs is. The only comparable example I can think of are many people now being open to considering the dangers of childhood vaccination—something which has taken a century to bring into the public awareness (e.g., my friends who gave everything they had to speak out in the 1980s and 1990s on vaccine safety were almost completely alone and cannot believe just how much the public’s receptivity to this message has changed in the last few years).

Correlation or Causation?

One of the most common arguments used to dismiss the link between SSRIs and psychotic violence is that people who are mentally ill are more likely to be on psyche meds, so the “correlation” between psyche meds and psychotic violence is simply a product of pre-existing mental illness and would have happened independently of the psyche med.

However, while claiming “correlation is not causation” makes it possible to refute this link while sounding intelligent in the process, there are a few major problems with this argument.

First, there is a lot of evidence tying SSRI usage to these events, including clinical trial data that was hidden from the public (until it was obtained through discovery). Since that evidence was not covered in Tucker or Walsh’s presentation, it will be the focus of this article.

Second, there is a black-box warning on the SSRIs for them increasing the risk of suicide, something which can only be possible if some degree of causation does in fact exist.

Third, these psychotic events are completely out of character for the individuals who commit them, and in many cases they report a very similar (and disconcerting) narrative of what they experienced prior to and during the shooting.

Note: Big Pharma,working hand in hand with the FDA fought tooth and nail for decades to prevent a warning from ever being added to the SSRIs. I believe this is in part due to how much money is made off of these drugs (presently SSRIs make over 17 billion dollars per year).

The SSRI era

Selective serotonin reuptake inhibitors (SSRIs) have a similar primary mechanism of action to cocaine. SSRIs block the reuptake of Serotonin, SNRIs, also commonly prescribed block the reuptake of Serotonin and Norepinephrine (henceforth “SSRI refers to both SSRI and SNRI), and Cocaine blocks the reuptake of Serotonin, Norepinephrine, and Dopamine. SSRIs (and SNRIs) were originally used as anti-depressants, then gradually had their use marketed into other areas and along the way have amassed a massive body count.

Once the first SSRI entered the market in 1988, Prozac quickly distinguished itself as a particularly dangerous medication and after nine years, the FDA had received 39,000 adverse event reports for Prozac, a number far greater than for any other drug. This included hundreds of suicides, atrocious violent crimes, hostility and aggression, psychosis, confusion, distorted thinking, convulsions, amnesia, brain-zaps, a feeling that your brain no longer works right, and sexual dysfunction (long-term or permanent sexual dysfunction is one of the most commonly reported side effects from anti-depressants, which is ironic given that the medication is supposed to make you less, not more depressed).

A large body of data also exists that corroborates this. For example, numerous large studies show half of those prescribed SSRIs (typically to “feel better”) quit using them because they cannot tolerate their side effects, 20-40% of users develop bipolar disorder, over half of users develop sexual dysfunction, half of SSRI users experience significant withdrawals when they stop the drugs. Additionally a variety of other side effects also exist (e.g., users frequently report becoming emotionally anesthetized to life and taking an SSRI during pregnancy significantly increases the risk of a fetal birth defect).

Note: I and many colleagues also believe the widespread adoption of psychotropic drugs has significantly distorted the cognition of the demographics of the country that frequently utilize them (which to some extent stratifies by political orientation), which in turn has created a wide range of detrimental shifts in our society.

SSRI homicides are common, and a website exists that has compiled thousands upon thousands of documented occurrences. As far as I know (there are most likely a few exceptions), in all cases where a mass school shooting has happened, and it was possible to know the medical history of the shooter, the shooter was taking a psychiatric medication that was known for causing these behavioral changes. After each mass shooting, memes illustrating this topic typically circulate online (often citing many of the same individuals in the picture in the previous section).

Note: while the media initially reported this link, as the media became more corrupt (due to Bill Clinton legalizing direct to consumer drug advertising in 1997—allowing the pharmaceutical industry to become the largest media advertiser and thus buy its silence), the SSRI status of shooters stopped being reported. Because of this, we now rarely hear any of the shooter’s medical history (with the only exception I know of being the recent 2023 shooting).

However, as mentioned above, the idea that “SSRIs cause mass shootings” is treated with widespread ridicule and animosity in a manner not that different from how anyone who claimed the “COVID vaccines were NOT safe and effective” was treated in 2020. For instance, the argument to debunk both was always “correlation is not causation” (e.g., the young healthy lady who had a fatal heart attack immediately after a vaccine might have had that happen anyways), and when data to support this contention is presented, it is always ignored by the other side.

Since there are many serious issues with psychiatric medications, to avoid being too long, this article will exclusively focus on their tendency to cause horrific violent crimes, something which was known long before they entered the market by both the drug companies and the FDA.

Lastly, for anyone who reads this article is presently taking an SSRI or SNRI, it is critically important to NOT suddenly stop taking them. Because their manufactures dose them at excessively high levels, these drugs are very addictive and produce very strong (and longlasting) withdrawal symptoms that many (including numerous readers here) have shared. More importantly, there are also many cases of catastrophic events (e.g., a suicide or mass murder) that followed the abrupt discontinuation of an SSRI or a change in its dose. If this is something you choose to do, you need to gradually taper down the dosage (sometimes to the point you use sandpaper to slowly shrink a pill) with a professional who has experience in this area.

However, since doctors who help can you safely withdraw from an SSRI are difficult to find, we put together a guide on the (incredibly unfair) withdrawal process which can be viewed in the second half of this article.

Note: Many of the stories I will share in this article are similar to those I have received from numerous readers (e.g., see the comments on the first article, second article, third article, and fourth article along with numerous comments on Twitter)—which I believe highlights how common SSRI injuries are. Many of these stories are very difficult to read through, but I nonetheless believe need to be heard.

Akathisia

One of my relatives grew up in a big city during a particularly bad crime wave. One of his most notable memories from the time was looking up and seeing a man who was screaming “the ants are trying to get me” frantically tying bedsheets together (so he could flee down the fire escape) as armed men were rushing to his location yelling “get that mother******.” My relative ran out of the area to avoid getting shot, but from the brief look he had at the fleeing man, was almost certain that man was high on cocaine, and experiencing coke (or crack) bugs, one form of Akathisia and a well-documented effect of those drugs.

Akathisia, an extreme form of restlessness is defined as a psycho-motor disorder where it is extremely difficult to stay still. What this definition omits to mention is that akathisia is incredibly unpleasant to the degree that many individuals who experience it frequently commit suicide or homicide (or both). One of the earliest reports from patients with drug-induced akathisia was:

They reported increased feelings of strangeness, verbalized by statements such as ‘I don’t feel myself or ‘I’m afraid of some of the unusual impulses I have.’

Akathisia is much more common than most people realize. To share a personal anecdote—I occasionally discuss this topic with medical students and a few have confided they previously experienced akathisia after using a psychiatric medication and it was so excruciating that one told me they seriously contemplated suicide at the time.

Akathisia (and psychosis) are known side effects of cocaine, methamphetamine, SSRIs, antipsychotics, and ADHD stimulant medications. However, while the common triggers have been identified, the actual mechanism for akathisia is still poorly understood and theorized to result from alterations in the center of the brain involved in movement. These behavioral changes are so unusual and disturbing there are often simply described as the individual appearing to be possessed.
Note: numerous patients I’ve talked to (with or without akathisia) who had bad reactions to SSRIs have shared that they felt as though some type of dark force was trying to take over their body.

from: https://www.midwesterndoctor.com/p/the-evidence-ssri-antidepressants?publication_id=748806&post_id=148503978&isFreemail=true&r=19iztd&triedRedirect=true&utm_source=substack&utm_medium=email

Considering Alternative Therapies for Cancer

Posted on September 4, 2024 by marcia

Integrative Approaches For Cancer

An Interview With Pierre Kory

A MIDWESTERN DOCTOR

AND

PIERRE KORY, MD, MPA

AUG 29, 2024

One of the most common requests I receive from readers is to discuss treatments for cancer. This in turn speaks to a broader issue—despite there being an immense interest in holistic cancer treatments, very few resources exist for patients looking for these options. That’s because it’s been well known for decades within the integrative medical field that the fastest way to lose your medical license is to practice unapproved cancer therapies and over the decades, countless examples have been made of doctors who did so (which sadly go far beyond even what we saw throughout COVID-19).

Note: I’ve also come across numerous cases where a distant relative learned of an alternative or complementary cancer treatment provided to their relative by a doctor, was triggered by it (due to their pre-existing political viewpoints) and then was able to get sanctions directed against the doctor. Most integrative doctors are aware of this and hence often decline to treat patients they are very close to that they know would wholeheartedly support what the doctor is doing because the doctor cannot take the risk of a hostile relative.

In turn, most of the doctors I know who utilize integrative cancer therapies (and have success in treating cancer) only offer this service to longtime patients they have a very close relationship with and explicitly request for me to not send patients to them. This is a shame, because beyond integrative cancer care being almost completely inaccessible to patients, this underground atmosphere both prevents most physicians from being able to have large enough patient volumes to clearly understand which alternative therapies actually work.

Conversely, countless alternative cancer treatments exist outside of America (e.g., in Mexico) which many American patients flock to since they have no alternative, and since these facilities have zero regulatory oversight or accountability, I frequently hear of very reckless approaches being implemented at these sites that none of my more experienced colleagues would ever consider doing (and likewise we often come across numerous critical oversights in those cases).

Note: most of the doctors I know who took up treating cancer with integrative medicine didn’t want to do it because of the risks involved and primarily started because they really cared about some of their patients and felt if they did nothing the patient would likely die. As a result, most of them are “self-taught” and frequently adopt very different approaches to treating cancer.

Since I’ve been quite young (long before I went to medical school) I’ve been fascinated by the alternative cancer therapies (especially those that were buried) and I’ve helped numerous people I knew through the process. From doing so, I gained a deep appreciation for the following:

Many of the conventional cancer therapies have terrible outcomes that make them very hard to justify using—especially given how costly they are. Sadly, the actual risks and benefits of the conventional cancer treatments are rarely clearly presented to patients.
Conversely, some of the conventional cancer treatments are helpful, and in certain cases, necessary. I’ve had patients who died because they understandably refused chemo, and likewise I’ve had certain cases where I had to do everything I could to convince a naturally-minded patient or friend to do chemo, and it ultimately saved their life (as they had aggressive cancers which were chemo-sensitive).
Much in the same way much of the population was fanatically committed to the COVID vaccines and the boosters despite all evidence showing each vaccination only made things worse, there is also a sizable contingent of people who will do whatever their oncologist tells them to do regardless of how clear it is that the therapy is harming them, bankrupting them and not prolonging their lifespan. Initially it was very depressing for me when I was called in to speak to someone’s friend about reconsidering their disastrous chemotherapy plan, but eventually I realized that all throughout human history people have been willing to die for their beliefs so I didn’t need to take their decision to stick to a treatment plan that ultimately gave them an agonizing death personally.
It is possible to dramatically reduce the adverse effects of conventional cancer therapies (e.g., with ultraviolet blood irradiation) but despite many of these approaches existing, there is no interest within the conventional field towards using them.
Some of the suppressed treatments for cancer are phenomenal, while others provide, at best, a marginal benefit.
While there are certain therapeutic principles that are relatively universal with cancer, in most cases, what each patient will respond to greatly differs. Because of this, if you use a safe but unapproved therapy that has a 50% success rate, you can easily find yourself in the position where the patient who received it still dies—at which point whoever provided the therapy can be found liable by a medical board (which does happen). Conversely, if you use an approved therapy that has a 10% success rate and a high rate of harm, there is no liability for the oncologist who prescribed it.
The most clinically successful integrative oncologists I know all hold the opinion that cancer is a very complex disease and anyone who claims to have a single magic bullet is either hopelessly naive or a charlatan.
There is often a significant emotional component to cancers. When this is managed correctly, it dramatically improves outcomes, but it is often a very difficult situation to navigate, especially because people emotionally destabilize when confronted with the fear of a slow but inevitable death.
In most cases, a cancer is the result of an underlying imbalance within the body (i.e., “an unhealthy terrain”). In turn, success in treating a cancer requires recognizing what is creating the unhealthy terrain and utilizing a treatment approach that also treats that. Unfortunately, quite a few different things can create an unhealthy terrain, so you again run into a situation where a one-sized fits all model for cancer simply doesn’t exist.
The COVID-19 turbo cancers are often quite challenging to treat.

Repurposed Drugs and Cancer

The aggressive suppression of unorthodox therapies during COVID-19, while initially successful at protecting the market for the pharmaceutical industry, eventually created a climate where enough pressure built for American doctors to find ways to provide non-standard COVID-19 therapies and organizations were established to support doctors wishing to go down this path (which were ultimately successful thanks to the incredible support of the internet).

One of the prominent COVID physician dissidents is my colleague Pierre Kory who gradually transitioned to building a telemedicine practice (Leading Edge Clinic) that focuses on treating individuals with long-COVID and COVID-19 vaccine injuries (two of the largest unmet medical needs in the country). Much of his treatment approach relies upon utilizing off-patent drugs that were previously approved for another use (e.g., ivermectin), which allows him to take advantage of the drugs being easily accessible, affordable and already generally regarded as safe.

Note: Pierre Kory considers repurposed drugs to be the achilles heel of the pharmaceutical industry since the entire business depends upon selling incredibly expensive proprietary medicines under the justification it is immensely expensive to prove they are safe and effective—whereas in contrast no money can be made off the repurposed drugs (since their patents expired) which nonetheless must stay legal since they were previously proven to be safe and approved by the FDA.

As they worked with studying and treating spike protein injuries, Drs. Paul Marik and Pierre Kory gradually realized that there was also a significant need to provide non-standard approaches for treating cancer and over the last year they’ve put together a model which has been quite beneficial for many patients and are now offering that treatment to a larger group of patients through this research study. Since it is quite rare to find a US based group publicly offering integrative cancer options to their patients, I reached out to Dr. Kory and asked him if I could interview him about his approach.

Before we go further, I want to emphasize that the approach he utilizes is different than my own, something which again speaks to both how many different paths exist to treating cancer.

Note: what follows is a slightly edited version of the conversation I (AMD) and Dr. Kory (PK) had.

AMD: Thank you for agreeing to do this, I know many of my readers will appreciate you taking time out of your busy schedule for this discussion.

PK: Thanks. Since I left the system, my eyes have been opened to how many of the things we do in medicine need to be seriously examined. Medicine has provided us with an incredible set of tools for addressing many problems which have plagued humanity, but the politics and corruption in medicine have caused us to use those tools in a way that benefits Wall Street rather than our patients and this has to change. When I started this journey, my focus was on COVID-19 and the vaccine injuries, but as time has moved forward, I’ve come to see that I have an obligation to make a safer, more affordable and hopefully more effective form of cancer care available to the public.

AMD: Before we go further, I want to show you a chart I just pulled up.

PK: Wow. I had an idea of this, but I didn’t realize it was that extreme.

AMD: Since cancer (oncology) drugs are one of the primary profit centers for the medical industry, I’ve always thought that explains why so much money is spent in protecting this monopoly.

PK: Just like COVID-19…

AMD: Anyhow, could you share with everyone what brought you to be interested in treating cancer with repurposed drugs?

PK: Well as you know, becoming a COVID dissident made me much more open to questioning medical orthodoxies, and becoming very committed to using repurposed drugs. The full story is a bit longer though.

AMD: Let’s hear it!

PK: I first started learning about cancer a little over a year ago when my friend, colleague, and mentor, Professor Paul Marik, started to talk to me about a book he had just read. For those who know me and Paul, this should be a familiar story – Paul developing a scientific insight and then I become really passionate about it in his wake.

AMD: For those who don’t know, Paul Marik MD is an incredible researcher who pioneered many approaches with transformed the practice of critical care medicine and was highly respected in his field, being one of the most published and cited critical care researchers in the world. Nonetheless, that did not protect him from being excommunicated by the medical orthodoxy once he chose to utilize alternatives to the COVID-19 treatment guidelines (which actually saved his patient’s lives). Anyways, please continue Pierre.

PK: A lot of what we’re doing now revolves around the Metabolic Theory of Cancer (MTOC), which argues that cancer is a result of disrupted metabolism within the body, and hence that much of the focus in treating cancer should be on first starving the cancer cell of glucose through a ketogenic diet and then using medicines with mechanisms of actions which interfere or block numerous processes which allow the cell to become “cancerous,” i.e. normalizing cellular metabolism throughout the body rather than trying to just kill the cancerous cells.

Although Paul did not construct the MTOC, his recognition and appreciation of both the validity and the importance of the theory may eventually have more impact than all of his prior contributions. There are several reasons for this:

•The first is that cancer rates have been increasing for a while and more recently have exploded (particularly among young people) in the wake of the mRNA campaign.

•The second is that the available therapies used to treat cancer are often toxic, largely (but not completely) ineffective at improving survival (especially in solid tumors), and immensely costly.

•The third is that cancer mortality has barely budged in decades (in fact it has increased).

AMD: It’s always incredible that medical outcomes have no effect on medical spending.

PK: True that. Anyway, Paul was immensely excited about what he was learning about cancer and it became a frequent topic of conversation. That book inspired him to begin working on a project where he reviewed almost 2,000 studies on the metabolic mechanisms of hundreds of repurposed medicines and nutraceuticals as well as other metabolic interventions to treat cancer (i.e. diet).

AMD: 2000 studies? Paul is something else.

PK: You have to have that type of dedication and information retention capability to become the top researcher in your field.

AMD: What did you think of the concept when Paul first shared it with you?

PK: At the time I already knew a little about the topic of repurposed drugs in cancer because early in Covid I had become friendly with the amazing physician and journalist Justus R. Hope (a pen name) based on his writings on ivermectin for the Desert Review and his book called “Ivermectin For The World.” More importantly, I had also read his book called Surviving Cancer, Covid-19, & Disease: The Repurposed Drug Revolution. It was Justus (check out his Substack) who first “schooled me” on the threat that repurposed (i.e. off patent) drugs present to Pharma, and how Pharma has systematically suppressed and attacked both off-patent drugs and inexpensive, unprofitable interventions whenever they show efficacy in treating “profitable” diseases.

AMD: Oh, I always thought you came up with that. It’s great that you’re open to admitting where you got it from rather than claiming it as your own. People often don’t do that…

PK: I cite what you’ve taught me all the time as well! Anyhow, Justus’s book on cancer was inspired by the case of a close friend of his who developed glioblastoma multiforme (a nasty brain cancer). This terrible diagnosis motivated him to search and study for therapeutic interventions and/or repurposed drugs which might help his friend. He found solid evidence for a four-drug protocol which he recommended to him. His friend then proceeded to far outlive his predicted prognosis, and although he died eventually, it was from the radiation injury to his brain that he had received initially and not from the effects of his cancer.

AMD: Three quick points I wanted to share on your anecdote.

First, there’s quite a bit of evidence linking the chickenpox vaccine to a significantly increased risk of that brain cancer (which further undermines the extremely tenuous justification for that vaccine). Additionally, a few other dangerous cancers have also been linked to specific viral vaccinations.

Second, every now and then I hear a story of someone who was injured by radiation therapy that was accidentally dosed at too high of a setting.

Third, if DMSO is administered prior to radiation therapy, it dramatically reduces its complications (while simultaneously having anticancer properties and zero toxicity). In my eyes it’s unconscionable this has not entered the standard of care for oncology and I’ve spent the last month working on a series about that substance.

PK: Wow. I’ll need to look into these—a lot of the other cancer treatment ideas you’ve given have been really helpful. Also, you sadly remind me of an older dear friend and roommate that I lived with in my 20’s who developed metastatic cervical cancer who, even then, I knew had been badly injured from radiation – essentially her bowels were fried and she lived out her days on intravenous nutrition and opiates. Sad stuff.

AMD: Until they experience it, patients really don’t appreciate the side effects of radiation therapy. One of the most common problems is that it changes the tissue in the area (e.g., creating adhesions) and those can create a lot of chronic issues for people (which are often too subtle for the doctor to recognize or believe was linked to the radiation).

PK: If we circle back to Justus’s story, after I heard about it (this was still very early in Covid), I took a close relative of mine who had recently been diagnosed with melanoma for an additional consultation with an integrative oncologist I knew. Although my friend’s melanoma was completely resected and she showed no evidence of disease (NED) on imaging, the pathologists who looked at the tumor tissue (including my friend Ryan Cole, a dermatopathologist) found it suggested a high risk of recurrence and/or metastasis.

Her “system” (standard) oncologist thus proposed she use a cancer drug (an immune checkpoint inhibitor) to prevent recurrence. This was a novel use of the drug, given that she was cancer free at the time so she wasn’t sure she wanted to use it. The reason for her hesitation was that her oncologist had rightly explained that the drug had risks of adverse effects which worried her. It also didn’t help that I was a pulmonologist who had been sent numerous patients over the years with pulmonary toxicity from this same drug (i.e. I’d seen cases of organizing pneumonia).

My relative was thus greatly concerned about the potential side effects and chose to forego her system oncologist’s recommendation. The more integrative oncologist instead started her on 11 different repurposed medicines and nutraceuticals (which I was a little shocked by at the time). Although the integrative oncologist explained the conceptual scientific framework behind the regimen quite well, I wasn’t personally familiar with the evidence base or scientific rationale for the treatment protocol my relative was placed on. That would come much later. I should note that my relative is doing well and cancer free three years later, and unlike many traditional cancer patients, has had no problems tolerating her medication regimen.

AMD: One of the things I’ve always found noteworthy in medicine is that while doctors will typically recommend patients follow their oncologists recommendations, once they or someone close to them gets cancer, physicians immediately start desperately researching the subject and reaching out to anyone they know personally who intensely studies the cancer literature.

PK: I agree. My knowledge about what could have happened to my relative definitely motivated me to go outside the box for her.

PK: Anyway, Paul started becoming obsessed with studying cancer as a metabolic disease in the winter/spring of 2023 but it was not until 6 months later that that I finally read the book that inspired Paul so much, a book titled “Tripping over the Truth: How The Metabolic Theory of Cancer Is Overturning One of Medicines Most Entrenched Paradigms” by Travis Christofferson. That book would prove to be as scientifically transformative to me as “Turtles All The Way Down” was in regards to my understanding of the (non) importance and (non) safety of childhood vaccines.

I was inspired to read the book, and after meeting with Travis and Paul to design an observational trial of using repurposed medicines and dietary interventions in cancer. We designed the study together and successfully obtained IRB approval from a rigorous IRB (we have over 200 patients enrolled already). For any interested, info on the study and enrolling into it can be found here.

AMD: It’s incredible you pulled that off. Options like that are almost never available to cancer patients.

PK: A lot of this came about because I was deeply intrigued by Travis’s knowledge base and the results of one protocol of repurposed medicines that had been studied in patients with one of the nastiest cancers, glioblastoma (which is also the one that killed Senator McCain a year after diagnosis). To put it bluntly, glioblastoma, when treated with current “standard of care” (SOC) consisting of surgery, radiation, and oral temozolomide, has a horrific but well defined and reproducible median overall survival of about 15 months and a 2 year survival between 26-28%. Furthermore, those are all very aggressive therapies which can be incredibly traumatic and harmful to the patient.

In the study that blew my mind, named METRICS, a four drug repurposed medicine protocol was used (mebendazole, metformin, doxycycline, and atorvastatin) alongside the standard of care (SOC) for that cancer. They found that the treated patients lived an average of 27 months from diagnosis and had a 2 year survival of 64% compared to the well established 28% observed with SOC (despite the patients not starting the repurposed drug protocol until a median of 6 months after diagnosis). Such a sudden improvement in one cancer’s survival rate is truly remarkable if not somewhat unprecedented.

AMD: In a recent article, I made it very clear I do not support the general use of statins as there is not evidence they meaningfully decrease one’s chance of dying and conversely they have a high rate of side effects (affecting roughly 20% of users), with many of them being severe and incapacitating. At the same time however, I try to be open minded about everything, and one of the things I’ve always been surprised is that a case can be made for using them in certain cancers.

PK: Fully agree on the statin thing.

PK: Ultimately, what I learned from Seyfried and Christofferson’s papers and books (as well as lectures and interviews by Seyfried) essentially upended the conventional understanding, I like many doctors had been trained to believe causes a cell to become cancerous.

AMD: An unhealthy terrain of the body?

PK: In a way I suppose. Seyfried is the one who ultimately and nearly singlehandedly compiled all the scientific underpinnings into a coherent MTOC (metabolic theory of cancer). He found that cancer has a “metabolic” origin (i.e. problem with energy production) and not a “genetic” one (i.e. arising from mutations in genes). This might sound boring and geeky, but I cannot overemphasize the importance and applicability of Seyfried’s work (which is the culmination of the work of a smallish group of other incredible scientists and researchers over the last 100 years).

AMD: I just want to jump in and mention that one of the diseases a dysfunctional Cell Danger Response (a metabolic state mitochondria enter where the energy production of a cell is shunted to protecting it and hence its normal functions cease—which underlies many inexplicable chronic illnesses) has been linked to, is cancer.

PK: That’s really interesting. What you introduced me to the Cell Danger Response it completely changed how we looked at vaccine injured patients because we realized the mitochondrial shut down we were observing was a normal physiologic response we had to slowly coax back to normal. I only realized recently mitochondrial dysfunction was also linked to cancer.

PK: Jumping back to Seyfried’s book, more importantly, it rightly concludes from a vast body of evidence that nearly the entire scientific and oncologic community has misunderstood the true origin of cancer (they believe it is due to cells mutating by chance and then rapidly dividing and taking over the body). The implications of the erroneous somatic mutation theory (SMT) has been devastating in that it has led to the development of a range of therapies that are indiscriminately cytotoxic (kills both cancer cells and normal, healthy cells) and minimally effective if not outright harmful in terms of quality of live vs. extension of life (the stats on chemo for most cancers are deplorable, I have an upcoming article on this in my Substack series about cancer).

AMD: Another great example of this process was the Alzheimer’s field getting hijacked by the dogma amyloid production in the brain causes the disease and that treatment of Alzheimer’s thus requires destroying that amyloid. This theory has received billions in research dollars, but failed to produce a single viable therapy (even with the FDA doing everything they could to push the newest ones onto the market), and was largely a result of a study that was proven to have fabricated its data but everyone keeps on citing. In contrast, when Alzheimer’s disease is treated as a metabolic disorder, it can be treated (and data exists clearly demonstrating this) but despite the billions we spend each year searching for a cure for the disease, that proven treatment is not acknowledged by the medical field and few doctors even know it exists.

PK: It’s literally the same exact story!

PK: On the cancer front, Seyfried’s book on the MTOC was transformative to me professionally because it now dwarfs the impact of the several other practice innovations that I have been instrumental in propagating in my career (i.e., induced hypothermia in cardiac arrest patients, point-of care ultrasound at the bedside of crashing patients in the ICU, the use of IV vitamin C in septic shock, and the utility and safety of ivermectin or other repurposed drugs in Covid).

AMD: I really wish IV vitamin C for sepsis had caught on. In my experience when it’s utilized correctly, sepsis deaths rarely occur, and the hospitals I know of that use it as a standard protocol have an extraordinary low sepsis death rate. Nonetheless, most ICU doctors, despite acknowledging it’s safe will refuse to use it (regardless of what you do) even though sespsis remains the number one cause of hospital deaths (with roughly 270,000 patients dying each year).

PK: The way vitamin C for sepsis has been treated by my profession is a punch in the gut for me and it still makes me and Paul sad whenever we think about it. To your point and experience, in the first year that Paul started employing his IV vitamin C protocol for sepsis at his hospital, independent Medicare data showed the mortality rate there dropped from a stable and consistent 22% over the years down to 6% and that was in the setting of only his ICU doing it (the hospital had other ICU’s which did not). On the subject of Paul, I’d like to quote a few things from the cancer monograph (basically a book) he created after reviewing those 1800+ studies.

TO READ THE REST OF THE ARTICLE, PLEASE GO TO; https://www.midwesterndoctor.com/p/integrative-approaches-for-cancer?publication_id=748806&post_id=148277456&isFreemail=true&r=19iztd&triedRedirect=true&utm_source=substack&utm_medium=email

Cholesterol, Statins, & Heart Disease

Posted on July 1, 2024 by marcia

This is a highly abbreviated version of the total article. Go to the Link (https://www.midwesterndoctor.com/p/the-great-cholesterol-scam-and-the?publication_id=748806&post_id=146062962&isFreemail=true&r=19iztd&triedRedirect=true&utm_source=substack&utm_medium=email) to read the rest:

The Great Cholesterol Scam and The Dangers of Statins

Exploring the Actual Causes and Treatments of Heart Disease

A MIDWESTERN DOCTOR

JUN 30, 2024

Story at a Glance:

•There is a widespread belief that elevated cholesterol is the “cause” of cardiovascular disease. However, a large body of evidence shows that there is no association between the two and that lower cholesterol significantly increases one’s risk of death.

•An alternative model (which the medical industry buried) proposes that the blood clots the body uses to heal arterial damage, once healed, create the characteristic atherosclerotic lesions associated with heart disease. The evidence for this model, in turn, is much stronger than the cholesterol hypothesis and provides many important insights for treating heart disease.

•The primary approach to treating heart disease is to prescribe cholesterol lowering statin drugs (to the point, over a trillion dollars have now been spent on them). Unfortunately, the benefits of these highly toxic drugs are minuscule (e.g., at best taking them for years extends your life by a few days) and the harms are vast (statins are one of the most common pharmaceuticals that severely injure patients).

•In this article we will explore the specific injuries caused by statin drugs, the forgotten causes of cardiovascular disease, and our preferred treatments for heart and vascular diseases.

The more I study science, the more I come to see how often fundamental facts end up being changed so that a profitable industry can be created. In the case of heart disease, I very much believe that is the case and in this publication, I’ve tried to expose the erroneous information that predominates our understanding of this subject (e.g., previously I’ve discussed why our model of how the heart pumps blood in the body is incorrect and in an article that will be released in a few weeks, I will detail the major misconceptions about blood pressure management).

Within cardiology, I believe one of the most damaging falsehoods is that cholesterol causes heart disease and that taking statins (or their newer equivalents), which lower cholesterol, are the key to preventing heart disease. This is because, in addition to those “facts” being incorrect, statins are also some of the most dangerous and widely used pharmaceutical drugs on the market.

Cholesterol and Heart Disease

Frequently, when an industry harms many people, it will create a scapegoat to get out of trouble. Once this happens, a variety of other sectors that also benefit from that scapegoat existing will jump on the bandwagon. Before long, a false belief that harms society becomes an unquestionable dogma that becomes very difficult to overturn because many corrupt parties have a vested interest in maintaining the lie.

For example, various easily addressable factors (which often exist in the first place because they benefit an industry) are responsible for the chronic diseases we face in society and our vulnerability to infectious diseases (e.g., the obese and diabetics were much more likely to catch COVID-19). However, by saying all diseases result from insufficient vaccination, it gets all those destructive industries off the hook and creates a huge market for selling vaccines and treatments for these illnesses. Thus, since there are so many vested interests behind the vaccine paradigm, it is very difficult to overturn—despite the fact the existing evidence shows vaccinations are responsible for the massive epidemic of chronic disease that is sweeping our country.

In the 1960s and 1970s, a debate emerged over what caused heart disease. On one side, John Yudkin effectively argued that the sugar being added to our food by the processed food industry was the chief culprit. On the other side, Ancel Keys (who attacked Yudkin’s work) argued that it was due to saturated fat and cholesterol.

Note: a case can also be made that the mass adoption of vegetable oils lead to this increase in heart disease. Likewise, some believe the advent of water chlorination was responsible for this increase.

Ancel Keys won, Yudkin’s work was largely dismissed, and Keys became nutritional dogma. A large part of Key’s victory was based on his study of seven countries (Italy, Greece, Former Yugoslavia, Netherlands, Finland, America, and Japan), which showed that as saturated fat consumption increased, heart disease increased in a linear fashion.

However, what many don’t know (as this study is still frequently cited) is that this result was simply a product of the countries Keys chose (e.g., one author illustrated that if Finland, Israel, Netherlands, Germany, Switzerland, France, and Sweden had been chosen, the opposite would have been found).

Fortunately, it gradually became recognized that Ancel Keys did not accurately report the data he used to substantiate his arguments. For example, recently an unpublished 56 month randomized study of 9,423 adults living in state mental hospitals or a nursing home (which made it possible to rigidly control their diets) that Keys was the lead investigator of was unearthed. This study (inconveniently) found that replacing half of the animal (saturated) fats they ate with vegetable oil (e.g., corn oil) lowered their cholesterol, and that for every 30 points it dropped, their risk of death increased by 22 percent (which roughly translates to each 1% drop in cholesterol raising the risk of death by 1%)—so as you can imagine, it was never published.

Note: the author who unearthed that study also discovered another (unpublished) study from the 1970s of 458 Australians, which found that replacing some of their saturated fat with vegetable oils increased their risk of dying by 17.6%

Likewise, recently, one of the most prestigious medical journals in the world published internal sugar industry documents. They showed the sugar industry had used bribes to make scientists place the blame for heart disease on fat so Yudkin’s work would not threaten the sugar industry. In turn, it is now generally accepted that Yudkin was right, but nonetheless, our medical guidelines are still largely based on Key’s work.

However, despite a significant amount of data that now shows lowering cholesterol is not associated with a reduction in heart disease (e.g., this study, this study, this study, this review, this review, and this review) the need to lower cholesterol is still a dogma within cardiology. For example, how many of you have heard of this 1986 study which was published in the Lancet which concluded:

During 10 years of follow-up from Dec 1, 1986, to Oct 1, 1996, a total of 642 participants died. Each 1 mmol/L increase in total cholesterol corresponded to a 15% decrease in mortality (risk ratio 0–85 [95% Cl 0·79–0·91]).

Note: when people are diabetic (which leads to the liver having to process too much sugar) the liver will convert to fat and then create more cholesterol to transport some of that fat. In these instances, I would argue the actual issue is an excess of sugar rather than elevated cholesterol levels it causes.

Statins Marketing

One of the consistent patterns I’ve observed within medicine is that once a drug is identified that can “beneficially” change a number, medical practice guidelines will gradually shift to prioritizing treating that number and before long, rationals will be created that require more and more of the population to be subject to that regimen. In the case of statins, prior to their discovery, it was difficult to reliably lower cholesterol, but once they hit the market, research rapidly emerged stating that cholesterol was more and more dangerous and, hence that more and more people needed to be on statins. …

Here is the link for the continuation of the article : https://www.midwesterndoctor.com/p/the-great-cholesterol-scam-and-the?publication_id=748806&post_id=146062962&isFreemail=true&r=19iztd&triedRedirect=true&utm_source=substack&utm_medium=email

Prejudicial Treatment for the “Unvaccinated”

Posted on June 7, 2024 by marcia

A Comment by A Midwestern Doctor at the end of his article:

“While what we all saw happen during COVID-19 was a tragedy many of us are still struggling to come to terms with, I instead feel it is miraculous we have come as far we have because we were facing a vast and almost insurmountable apparatus I never thought we could succeed against. Much of that is because of how many of you also stood up to oppose it, and I am hence incredibly grateful to each of you who have given your support and allowed me to have a platform like this and actually be able do something to stop it. Unfortunately, these people are relentless (e.g., consider the conduct of the leaders at Dr. Miller’s hospital), and unless we use the window we have now to hold them accountable, it is almost inevitable what we witnessed over the last few years will happen again.”

Here is a link to the body of the article, and it is long, but even skimming will give you a sense of what has been and probably is going on:

https://www.midwesterndoctor.com/p/the-price-of-truth-vs-deception-in?publication_id=748806&post_id=145239196&isFreemail=true&r=19iztd&triedRedirect=true&utm_source=substack&utm_medium=email

Who Will You Listen To? Truth vs Spin

Posted on May 9, 2024 by marcia

The Vast Pharmaceutical Conspiracy to Silence Online Dissent

Millions of dollars were spent to weaponize the public against all of us

by: A Midwestern Doctor

Story at a Glance:
•There has been a coordinated campaign to attack and defame anyone who has spoken out against the COVID-19 response. This has primarily been restricted to social media (e.g., getting people deplatformed) but it has also been weaponized in real life (e.g., getting medical licenses revoked).

•This coordinated campaign was the result of a “non-profit” known as The Public Good Project (PGP), which was actually directly linked to the pharmaceutical industry. The PGP used the industry funding it received to defend industry interests.

•Vaccine safety advocates were able to get into the group where these campaigns were coordinated. There, they discovered numerous public figures working hand in hand with healthcare workers to descend like a hive of bees on anyone “promoting misinformation.” Likewise, we learned that the most belligerent doctors we keep encountering on Twitter belonged to these groups.

•Some of the influencers advancing PGP’s message through “Shots Heard” (and its sister United Nations initiative “Team Halo”) were hucksters who faked their own credentials. My overall impression from looking at everything was that this group operated in a very similar manner to many of the sleazy internet marketing operations I’ve seen in the past. Fortunately, the public appears to be seeing through what they did.

Almost any viewpoint can be “proven” using the “correct” evidence and logic. Purely as a challenge, I’ve successfully done this in the past with beliefs I consider to be abhorrent and completely disagree with. Once you become familiar with the process, you begin to gain an appreciation for how ephemeral the truth is and how problematic it is that most people have filters they see through reality through that lead to them doing this even if it’s not deliberate (although if you watch carefully for it, you’ll often see non-verbal signs that show they are somewhat aware they are lying to themselves).

For some reason, this realization directly conflicted with my deepest values (which to this day I don’t know the source of as they just existed long before I had learned about the world), so my own way of seeing the world reoriented around trying to discern what was actually true rather than proving I was right (e.g., to hold onto the illusion I know what was going on) in the hopes the truth could become something tangible rather than this ephemeral fiction our hands and minds constantly passed through. In turn, a major reason why I approach most topics I present here by fairly presenting both sides is because I found it was one of the things necessary for me to pass through that ephemeral layer of truth that clouds almost everything.
Note: after going through this process for years, I started being able to tell if what I was exposed to had a “solidity” to it or an “emptiness” and a large part of how I filter reality now is by focusing my attention to the things that appear to have solidity (rather than them conforming to what I want to be true). In the past, I’ve mentioned how I will constantly debate and scrutinize each idea I am considering before deciding which one to adopt (which is important to do), but I view this discernment of solidity and emptiness to be much more important for arriving at what rings true.

Despite this publication being about medicine, I’ve repeatedly focused on highlighting the work of public relations (PR), a massive invisible industry (e.g., 20 billion was spent on it in America last year) that continually shapes our perceptions of reality for its corporate and government clients. Briefly, PR is the incredibly refined science of manipulating the public, and essentially is what lies between propaganda and marketiing.

(Check out the link for the video:https://www.midwesterndoctor.com/p/the-vast-pharmaceutical-conspiracy?utm_source=substack&utm_medium=email#media-73ee14d3-ed71-47ce-9e3a-23343c1c36480

Note: this is not that different from how many people who have an ulterior financial motive will inevitably arrive at the conclusion which supports their financial interests regardless of how hard you try to convince them not to. For example, listen to this talk below the co-founder of Shots Heard gave about why no one online could possibly have a valid reason to question vaccine safety, that no doctor who promotes vaccines is being paid off to do so, and why it was necessary to censor all of those opinions—while conveniently neglecting to mention he’s received over $200,000.00 from vaccine companies.

The “miracle” of PR is how effective it is, and I’ve now lost count of how many times an abhorrent policy that few Americans wanted was pushed through by a well financed PR campaign. In turn, I would argue PR has effectively altered policymaking from being a process of crafting an idea which is acceptable to the public (this is essentially how Democracy is supposed to operate). To simply making sure what is being done isn’t so far out of line it will be prohibitively expensive for a PR firm to sell it to the public.

For reference, some of the common PR tactics include:

1. Organizing a massive amount of coverage of an event which supports someone’s narrative and was crafted to go viral. For example:
•The founder of PR was infamous for convincing women across America to take up smoking by staging a women’s suffrage (right to vote) protest and having them all smoke their “liberation torches” as part of the protest).
•The Gulf War was sold to America by a fake testimony from a Kuwaiti girl (who was the daughter of the ambassador) who was coaxed to say the rampaging Iraqi army was invading hospitals and “taking babies out of incubators and leaving them to die on the cold floor,” a line which was then repeated again and again by politicians (e.g., Bush) around the world.
•In 2022, one actor made a joke about Will Smith’s wife having hair loss due to alopecia (a known side effect of the mRNA vaccines) which quickly went viral on every network.

This was very usual. However, it just so happened that Pfizer was sponsoring the Oscars, and had just announced a positive result in their pivotal phase 2b/3 trial clinical trial for their new alopecia drug, and had recently begun the marketing push in anticipation of its FDA approval (which happened exactly a year later, with an annual course of the drug being priced at $49,000.00). While it’s impossible to know what actually happened behind the scenes, individuals did come forward alleging the whole thing was scripted.

2. Hiring focus groups to determine what language is the most effective in persuading people to support your position and then blasting it on every public announcement and news station (e.g., the local ones) simultaneously. This often goes hand in hand with producing news programs for the stations (which are effectively PR productions for their sponsors). To illustrate one example of this approach being used:

3. Creating an endless number of “non-profit” organizations with nice names that actually advance the interests of the sponsoring industry. For example, the “non-profit” Foundation for Clean Air Progress is an industry front group that has aggressively lobbied both the public and the government to reduce the existing air quality standards mandated by the Clean Air Act. Likewise, the National Multiple Sclerosis Society took in 172 million dollars last year and is notorious for blocking many proven treatments for MS from seeing the light of day, while continuously supporting lucrative new drugs to “manage” the disease.

4. Paying off an endless number of experts to promote your message and having them be hosted on networks that are already in your pocket.

I cannot state how effective PR is and how depressing it has been to watch each candidate I supported get torpedoed by the media industrial complex.

However, while the effect of PR is remarkable, many of the people who work in the industry aren’t that talented, and as a result, they will just copy existing (and proven) PR tactics for the current campaign. Because of this, once you’ve seen enough PR campaigns, it becomes very easy to recognize one being enacted.
Note: two things allowed me to accurately predict most of what happened during COVID-19. One was being familiar with the same script having been followed during the HIV epidemic, and the other was seeing the PR campaigns for it be enacted in real time and recognizing the implications of each stage I observed (as the campaigns are typically structured in a sequential series of steps which eventually arrive at their sponsor’s desired outcome).

Censoring the Internet

The primary thing which has allowed the existing PR model to work has been the fact there is an (ever increasing) monopoly over the mass media. Because of this, a chosen PR campaign can be rapidly disseminated across the country while simultaneously, no dissenting narratives are allowed to air that challenge it.

Recognizing that the internet was the fatal weakness of the existing system, I suspect (but can’t prove) that a decision was made to have large internet companies become gatekeepers of information online, and in turn, as these large platforms attracted a large enough audience to become the “trusted sources” of information, they slowly transitioned to censoring things.

In turn, we saw a tug of war occur between the increasing pushes for censorship and the increasing ability of the internet community to bypass the attempts that were made to censor them. This eventually hit a tipping point, when in October 2016, Obama gave a speech at Carnegie Mellon where he declared:

“We’re going to have to rebuild, within this Wild, Wild West of information flow, some sort of curating function that people agree to,” “[T]here has to be, I think, some sort of way in which we can sort through information that passes some basic truthiness tests and those that we have to discard because they just don’t have any basis in anything that’s actually happening in the world.”

Parallel to this declaration, various campaigns were launched. This began with “Fake News” being blared everywhere until Trump attached the label to CNN, at which point the media pivoted. We saw an endless number of media messages about the dangers of “misinformation” ( followed by anything challenging the existing narrative, in turn receiving that label).

Note: public officials (like the instance of Obama mentioned above or Biden throughout the COVID vaccine push) are frequently involved in PR campaigns. For example (as discussed within a recent article on Dermatology’s disastrous war against the sun), in the 1980s, the struggling profession of dermatology spent 2 million dollars hiring a public relations firm to inflate their status and were suggested to rebrand themselves as cancer doctors. This in turn was accomplished by:

1. Offering campaigns beginning in 1985 to provide skin examinations to bring awareness to “skin cancer” and having widespread strategic media coverage of those campaigns.

2. Convincing Ronald Reagan to sign proclamations for “National Skin Cancer Prevention and Detection Week,” and “Older Americans Melanoma/Skin Cancer Detection and Prevention Week.

3. Creating a mortal fear of the sun (which persists to a truly absurd degree these days) despite the fact people that who avoid the sun are 60-130% more likely to die than those who get moderate or high amounts of it (e.g., smokers who get regular sunlight have the same risk of dying as nonsmokers who avoid the sun).

4. Equivocate melanomas (which are rare, dangerous, and caused by a lack of sun exposure) to basal cell carcinomas (which are common, never fatal, and caused by sunlight) since both are “skin cancers” so people can be corralled into regular skin examinations where those skin cancers are identified and quickly surgically removed.

5. Dermatology became one of the highest paying specialties in medicine, and the number of diagnosed skin cancers greatly increased, but there have been minimal changes in the actual death rates of skin cancers. Simultaneously, since those surgeries pay a lot, the profession lost all motivation to determine the actual causes of skin cancer, safe and effective non-surgical treatments for skin cancer, or how to make the sun heal rather than damage the skin.

What I find particularly interesting about Obama’s announcement was that it happened at the same time a coordinated campaign (spearheaded in California) was being conducted to push vaccine mandates across the nation, which were part of a coordinated push by Bill Gates, the WHO, and the WEF (amongst others) to launch a “decade of vaccines” as much of what we saw later throughout COVID-19 was laid out in their documents. Since they knew the public, through the internet would likely oppose this, a lot of investments were made to preempt that. For example:

Note: in this 2020 talk (and many others) PGP’s CEO explains how they monitor all anti-vaccine messages online 24/7 and their plans to pay off local influencers around the country to promote vaccines and to use counter-terrorism tactics to turn everyone on the internet against the anti-vaxxers (who are “not nice people”)—discussed further in this article. Finally, in a later 2023 webinar about inoculating the public against misinformation, the CEO also mentions they regularly use PR techniques. What I personally find amazing about his numerous talks is that he characterizes things being said online (e.g., that monkeypox was a non-issue) as “dangerous misinformation” which has since been proven true. Likewise, I suspect this project was inspired by past pharmaceutical initiatives like this infamous one.

Twitter () and PR

One branch of the misinformation campaign was Peter Hotez going on a national media tour in 2019 about the dangers the country was facing from online vaccine misinformation, which in turn laid the foundation for rapidly censoring any voices online that dissented against the COVID narrative. Because of this, we saw an escalating level of censorship from all the major internet platforms after Obama’s 2016 speech which then kicked into overdrive during COVID-19 to protect us from dangerous misinformation.

At the time this began in 2016, it became very clear to me that major online censorship was occurring, some of which was happening behind the scenes (e.g., shadow banning) and some of which was happening overtly towards easy to target groups (e.g., the alt-right) which I took as a sign more and more aggressive censorship was going to happen, much of which we would not see.

Simultaneously, since the censorship was very selective in who it targeted, based on who it targeted, while I couldn’t “prove it,” I assumed it had to be some type of collaboration between the government and the pharmaceutical sector. This was eventually confirmed by two things:

•Discovering numerous major investments being made by Big Tech into the pharmaceutical industry.

•Elon Musk buying Twitter () and making the choice to publicly release Twitter’s correspondences with the Federal Government, which in turn showed a consistent pattern of Twitter complying with (illegal) requests from the Federal government to censor anything that threatened its narratives. Those documents in turn led to a landmark case that placed an injunction against the Federal Government (which Biden is currently trying to appeal at the Supreme Court).

From my perspective, Elon buying Twitter and making free speech on it was monumental as in addition to it being a large venue for free speech, it’s structure was such that it allowed ideas with merit to spread very quickly, and again and again, I saw well packaged bits of truth reach millions of people (and sometimes make national headlines)—something I’d never witnessed before on any media platform.

When I reflected on why this is, I realized that this frequently cited internet quote described it.

It’s not [that] the left can’t meme per say, it’s that their viewpoints rely on a carefully constructed denial of reality, to a far greater extent than any of the cults or religions they seek to supplant. This doesn’t lend itself to simple, easily conveyed messages, because if you rely on your viewers to see things as they are, without providing several layers of carefully selected context, they’ll interpret it the wrong way. The left can’t meme because memes are the antithesis of how they communicate.

Note: I describe myself as “liberal” but the current definition of “the left” is very different from what many of us signed up for when we became Democrats.

Private Social Media Groups

to get the rest of the article, go to the link: https://www.midwesterndoctor.com/p/the-vast-pharmaceutical-conspiracy?utm_source=substack&utm_medium=email#media-73ee14d3-ed71-47ce-9e3a-23343c1c3648