Is Evidence-Based Medicine Evidence Based?

Overdosed America: The Broken Promise of American Medicine
by John Abramson
(New York: HarperCollins, 2004), 352 pp., $24.95

According to the U.S. Centers for Disease Control and Prevention, of the 2.4 million U.S. deaths in 2000, 400,000 were associated with unhealthy diet and lack of physical activity. These are deaths related to the particular way in which civilization has “progressed” upon this planet: high-fat, high-carbohydrate fast foods devoid of fruits and vegetables; a vast multitude of automobiles that make self-propulsion (walking) obsolete as a standard life routine; and couch-potato-creating television sets that not only replace the neighborhood kickball game and hide-and-seek activities that amused me when I was a kid, but also badger us to purchase those same automobiles and eat those same fast foods.

How has the trillion-dollar-plus enterprise we call the health care system responded to this pervasive undermining of our health? By offering more inventions, which—like those cars, fast-food chains, and TV sets—are capable of making money for a small stratum of society. Instead of approaching the health effects of modern civilization through community-wide and public health interventions—banning cars and creating greenbelts within cities, spending more dollars on health education than the food industry spends on advertising, and creating more neighborhood physical activity programs than the auto industry creates cars—we have chosen to address those 400,000 deaths with a few rushed minutes in a sterile exam room populated by a highly trained physician, a passive patient, and a prescription pad.

John Abramson is a physician who spent more than twenty years in those exam rooms, filling out thousands of those prescription pads. But something happened to him that, sadly, happens to few physicians. He began to study epidemiology and research methodology, expanding his viewpoint from a close-up focus on the individual patient to a panorama of the entire population. Carefully reviewing the research literature, he found that spin doctors had been doctoring the evidence. The conclusions he reached from his careful literature review differed from the conclusions published by the authors of the universally accepted clinical practice guidelines—the “evidence-based medicine”—that are the yardsticks against which physicians’ quality of care is measured…

Overdosed America presents a strong indictment of the evidence that dictates medical practice, a challenge that is credible only because Abramson backs up his statements with detailed analyses of the prevailing evidence. It is beyond the purview of this review to judge whether each of Abramson’s conclusions are scientifically and statistically valid. What can be said, however, is that the seriousness with which he explores clinical issues merits a major debate on those issues within the world’s leading medical journals—untainted by the almost ubiquitous monetary distortions…

Why this lengthy exposition of a clinical issue in a health policy book review? Because readers who might be inclined to view Overdosed America as simply another in the growing number of diatribes against drug companies should be aware that this book makes its arguments in a detailed, well-referenced manner. Moreover, responsibility for the overdosing of America goes far beyond the drug industry, resting equally with the nation’s physicians. I beg all of my physician colleagues to read this book and to think deeply about how we are practicing our chosen profession.

Thomas Bodenheimer

Editor’s Notes

Thomas Bodenheimer ([email protected]) was a private primary care physician for twenty-two years and is now on the faculty of the University of California, San Francisco.

High pollen today. The most prominent pollens are maple tree with frequency 476666 (scalar octave 1181.5) and oak at 442444 (scalar octave 1096.7) . Pollens are living organisms. If your immune system kills them quickly, you do not have allergy symptoms. If your immune system is weak, you need a frequency assist to kill them. Most people with allergies have chronic fungus and parasite infections that lower immune response and aggravate symptomology. For best results, these chronic infections must be eliminated as well. In any event, you can run the following program on an F165 and remain symptom free. If you have an ABPA, you can broadcast the frequencies so you do not have to hold on to the electrodes.

#F165 pollen program
label loop
program c
vbackfreq b 0.002478752 0 66.6
vbackfreq a 0.049787068 0 66.6
duty 66.6
dwell 13
converge .0066% 1
442444 #oak
converge .16% 1
476666 #maple
pause 47
goto loop

If you need more or less power you can increase or decrease the “dwell 13” command. This is the number of seconds the frequency is transmitted.

Advanced practitioners should pump up their Chi level. Start with Chi Lel. Lately I have been using high gauss magnetic plates under my feet and magnetic balls in my hands from Peter Ragnar. Using strategies outlined in the “Magus from Java” you can raise your Chi level 20-25 times higher than normal, enhancing your immune system.

When I was out running this morning, I noticed some shortness of breath. I had not checked pollens before I started. Using muscle testing, I identified the maple frequency 476666. I have found that pumping Chi into the affected area while mentally holding the intent of a specific frequency will disable the organism. In this case, it cleared by lungs and sinuses and enhanced my immune system so that I could continuously kill the maple pollen and I was no longer bothered by it.

Ultimately, it is possible to use the information gained by frequency analysis to transcend the need for machines. Once you can do this for yourself you can do it to help others.

The Life Extension Collector’s Edition 2006 is well worth reading. One of the interesting articles in the collection is Dave Tuttle’s, “Controlling Blood Sugar with Cinnamon and Coffee Berry.” Here are some of Tuttle’s comments about cinnamon.

… Because the incidence of cardiovascular disease is increased up to fourfold in type II diabetics, researchers have sought out nutrients that can simultaneously improve glucose metabolism and lipid levels. In a recent study published in Diabetes Care, cinnamon proved to be such a dual-action agent. Sixty adults (30 men, 30 women) with type II diabetes were divided into six groups. The first three groups consumed one, three, or six grams of cinnamon daily, while the other three groups consumed equivalent numbers of placebo capsules.

The spice or placebo was consumed for 40 days, followed by a 20-day washout period. After the initial 40-day period, all three levels of cinnamon reduced mean fasting serum glucose levels by 18-29%. The one-gram dose also reduced triglyceride levels by 18%, low-density lipoprotein (LDL) by 7%, and total cholesterol by 12%. Higher doses of produced even greater reductions in triglycerides, LDL, and total cholesterol.

Tuttle references Diabetes Care which has free access to the full text of the study below:

Cinnamon Improves Glucose and Lipids of People With Type 2 Diabetes
Alam Khan, MS, PHD1,2,3, Mahpara Safdar, MS1,2, Mohammad Muzaffar Ali Khan, MS, PHD1,2, Khan Nawaz Khattak, MS1,2 and Richard A. Anderson, PHD3
Diabetes Care 26:3215-3218, 2003

OBJECTIVE—The objective of this study was to determine whether cinnamon improves blood glucose, triglyceride, total cholesterol, HDL cholesterol, and LDL cholesterol levels in people with type 2 diabetes.

RESEARCH DESIGN AND METHODS—A total of 60 people with type 2 diabetes, 30 men and 30 women aged 52.2 ± 6.32 years, were divided randomly into six groups. Groups 1, 2, and 3 consumed 1, 3, or 6 g of cinnamon daily, respectively, and groups 4, 5, and 6 were given placebo capsules corresponding to the number of capsules consumed for the three levels of cinnamon. The cinnamon was consumed for 40 days followed by a 20-day washout period.

RESULTS—After 40 days, all three levels of cinnamon reduced the mean fasting serum glucose (18–29%), triglyceride (23–30%), LDL cholesterol (7–27%), and total cholesterol (12–26%) levels; no significant changes were noted in the placebo groups. Changes in HDL cholesterol were not significant.

CONCLUSIONS—The results of this study demonstrate that intake of 1, 3, or 6 g of cinnamon per day reduces serum glucose, triglyceride, LDL cholesterol, and total cholesterol in people with type 2 diabetes and suggest that the inclusion of cinnamon in the diet of people with type 2 diabetes will reduce risk factors associated with diabetes and cardiovascular diseases.

Political Science
The Bush Administration’s war on the laboratory
Michael Specter, The New Yorker, 13 Mar 2006

On December 1st, Merck & Company applied to the Food and Drug Administration for a license to sell a vaccine that it has developed to protect woemn against the human papillomavirus. HPV is the most common sexually transmitted disease in the United States; more than half of all Americans become infected at some point in their lives. The virus is also the primary cause of cervical cancer, which kills nearly five thousand American women every year and hundreds of thousands more in the developing world. There are at least a hundred strains of HPV, but just two are responsible for cancer. Tw others cause genital warts, which afflict millions of people. Merck’s vaccine, designed to protect against those four strains, has been tested in thirteen countries, including the United States. More than twelve thousand women between the ages of sixteen and twenty-six were monitored for an average of two years. The results were conclusive: twenty-one of the women who received a placebo during the trial developed the cellular abnormalities that are associated with cancer and other illnesses. Not one of those in the vaccinated group did…

Even in the age of molecular medicine, such unqualified successes are rare, “This is a cancer vaccine, and an immensely effective one,” the Nobel laureate David Baltimore, who has served for the past eight years as president of the California Institute of Technology, told me. “We should be proud and excited. It has the potential to save hundreds of thousands of lives every year.”

…The Bush Administration, its allies on Capitol Hill, and the religious base of the Republican Party are opposed to mandatory HPV vaccinations. They prefer to rely on education programs that promote abstinence from sexual activity, and see the HPV vaccine as a threat to that policy… The Bush administration has been relentless in its opposition to any drug, vaccine, or inititative that could be interpreted as lessening the risks associated with premarital sex…

“I never thought that now, in the twenty-first century, we could have a debate about what to do with a vaccine that prevents cancer,” David Baltimore said… “this is religious zealotry masked as politics, and it runs against everthing that I as a scientist believe in, that I have devoted my life to. We are talking about basic public health now. What moral precepts allow us to think that the risk of death is a price worth paying to encourage abstinence as the only approach to sex?”

The new F165 and new FSCANs with USB connections often have difficulty communicating with your computer. I have seven F165s and they all have given me considerable trouble by dropping offline unpredictably.

Using a driver analysis program called Driver Detective, I discovered that the Microsoft USB drivers were out of data on all five of my computers. These drivers are included in the lastest mouse software from Microsoft which you can download at the Microsoft Mouse and Keyboard Hardware site.

You don’t need Driver Detective which has a fee, but you do need the latest Microsoft drivers which are free. If you are running Windows XP using the English language, the name of the latest file is IP55_32Eng.exe.

These drivers appear to have resolved all USB problems on all of my computers.

Please note that these drivers are independent of the USB drivers that come with the F165 and FSCAN which must still be installed properly. The Microsoft drivers provide the infrastructure that interacts with the F165 and FSCAN drivers that come with these frequency generators.

Doctors told to watch for flesh-eating bacteria
Louisville surgeon seeing it more often

Laura Ungar, The Courier-Journal, 2 Apr 2006

Tim Bledsaw thought the dime-size spot on his inner thigh was just a boil — no cause for worry.

But within days, the spot grew so painful it became hard to walk, forcing him to seek help in the emergency room.

Doctors later would discover that the 40-year-old Louisville man had necrotizing fasciitis, commonly known as flesh-eating bacteria disease. Soon they would be struggling to save his leg, and his life.

Although flesh-eating disease is relatively rare, some doctors say the number of cases may be higher than the widely used estimate of up to 1,500 a year nationally. In fact, Dr. Alberto René Maldonado, one of Bledsaw’s physicians, is writing an article for the Kentucky Medical Association’s journal reminding doctors to be vigilant about the potentially deadly condition.

“It’s a very devastating infectious disease,” said Maldonado, a plastic and reconstructive surgeon in Louisville. “I’m seeing it more often.”

One of the germs to blame for Bledsaw’s illness is a resistant staph bacteria — a growing threat fueled by the overuse of antibiotics. Researchers writing in “The New England Journal of Medicine” last year said flesh-eating disease caused by this germ is “an emerging clinical entity” and they had seen “an alarming number” of cases — 14 in a 15-month period at a Los Angeles medical center.

Also on the rise are serious problems linked to Group A strep, the bacteria that causes many other cases of flesh-eating disease. Kentucky reported 62 cases of invasive disease caused by this germ in 2004, up from 39 in 2001. This number includes other invasive strep infections, such as pneumonia. Physicians aren’t required to report flesh-eating disease cases separately to the state.

Dr. Martin Raff, an infectious disease specialist at the University of Louisville, said he sees about one case of necrotizing fasciitis each month.

“A lot of physicians fail to recognize its presence and severity,” Raff said. “The real key is speed of diagnosis and appropriate surgery. People can wind up badly damaged or dead.”

The Bisphenol A web site contains dozens of papers on carcinogenicity of this plastic showing equivocal results. Therefore, the plastics industry declares it safe because they cannot prove it is harmful.

Those with intelligence will demand that chemicals which get into the body be proved to be safe and equivocal proof of no harm is not proof of safety.

This chemical is widely distributed in the body as it is in everything from dental amalgams to food wrap. The body can be stimulated to excrete it using its resonant frequency, preferably with an ABPA for 15 minutes or less a day. I would not use a pad device like the FSCAN for this purpose. I use the following F165 program to drive the ABPA:

dwell 900
duty 66.6
program c
vbackfreq a 0.002478752 0 66.6
vbackfreq b 0.049787068 0 66.6
converge 0 0
67553.6

Food Wrap Linked to Prostate Cancer
Jonathan Leake, Science Editor, The Sunday Times, 1 May 2005

A CHEMICAL used to make food wrapping and line tin cans could be the cause of surging prostate cancer rates in men, says a study.

Bisphenol A is widely used in the food industry to make polycarbonate drinks bottles and the resins used to line tin cans, even though it is known to leach into food and has long been suspected of disrupting human sex hormones.

The new research suggests the small but constant level of bisphenol A entering people’s diet has a particular impact on pregnant women, disastrously altering the development of unborn baby sons.

The chemical causes microscopic changes in the developing prostate gland but these are not apparent at birth. Instead, they show up years later when they lead to a range of prostate diseases, such as enlargement and cancer. The changes can also cause malformation of the urethra, the channel for urine.

In Britain, rates of the cancer have surged to about 27,000 new diagnoses and 10,000 deaths a year. It is now almost as big a killer as breast cancer in women.

Frederick vom Saal, professor of biological sciences at the University of Missouri, who led the study, warns: “During foetal life small amounts of such oestrogenic chemicals could permanently disrupt cellular control systems and predispose the prostate to disease.”

In the study vom Saal and his colleagues fed tiny amounts of bisphenol A to pregnant mice.Another group of pregnant mice was fed similar amounts of ethinylestradiol, which is used in the contraceptive pill. The researchers wanted to examine whether similar damage to the prostate occurred when women taking the pill accidentally become pregnant.

The results showed that even tiny amounts of both hormones — far lower relative to body size than what humans are exposed to — could disrupt development of the prostate gland.

About 2.8m tons of bisphenol is produced every year worldwide and it has been used in babies’ drinks bottles and teats in addition to food packaging.

Roger Kirby, consultant urologist at St George’s hospital, London, said the new research could help explain at least some of the reasons for the surge in prostate cancer rates.

“We are seeing more prostate cancer, and are also seeing it in younger people. So clearly there could be some environmental factor,” he said.

The Health Report: 18 April 2005 – Chemotherapy
http://www.abc.net.au/rn/talks/8.30/helthrpt/stories/s1348333.htm

Norman Swan: Good morning Fran and welcome to the program. This morning on the Health Report globalisation writ small. Why go down the road for your surgery when you can avoid the waiting lists, get it cut price in another country and have a holiday with the money you’ve saved? A personal story involving new knees coming up.

And, has cancer chemotherapy, the use of drugs to treat malignancies been oversold? That’s the clear implication of a paper published by some Australian cancer specialists, two of whom, perhaps non-coincidentally are radiation oncologists/radiotherapists.

Anyway in this summary of evidence, the assertion is that chemo has only added about 2% to cancer survival. The lead author is Association Professor Graeme Morgan who’s at Royal North Shore Hospital in Sydney. Is this, I wondered, an in house battle, the revenge of the radiotherapists?

Graeme Morgan: Well one could cynically say that but the reason I did it was that we were sick and tired of hearing about these new drugs and it wasn’t really cementing into anything. And the reason for my doing the paper was to really show that there hasn’t been any improvement in survival, or the improvement has been very, very modest despite all these new drugs and new combinations and bone marrow transplants.

Norman Swan: So what did you do in this study?

Graeme Morgan: Well what I did was that I took the major cancers and got their incidence from the Australian data sets and also got the breakdown of those cancers into their stages and also then compared that with the data from America.

Norman Swan: So you knew how many people were coming down with cancer per 100,000 of the population or whatever?

Graeme Morgan: Yes, we knew the exact number who were diagnosed in I think the years were 1998 and we then broke it down into the various stages and we looked at those stages what impact chemotherapy would have on a particular stage and a particular cancer.

Chasing the cancer answer
Broadcast: March 5, 2006

In the next generation, the Canadian Cancer Society says almost one in two Canadians will be diagnosed with cancer. One in two.
WHAT CAUSES CANCER?

Cancer occurs when cells are triggered to grow abnormally. Triggers include genetics, radiation, and carcinogens.

It might be your husband, your daughter, your brother, your neighbour.

It might be you.

After Marketplace host Wendy Mesley was diagnosed, she began a long and personal journey. Along the way, she came across disturbing clues about why more Canadians than ever are getting sick.

When prevention isn’t enough

Mesley says she thought she was doing everything right. The Canadian Cancer Society touts its seven steps to health:

ON THE RISE

1 in 2.3 men and 1 in 2.6 women will have cancer in their lifetime.
Don’t smoke
* Eat your veggies
* Exercise
* Stay out of the sun
* Get screened regularly
* Visit your doctor and dentist regularly
* Avoid cancer-causing substances

Those are all great tips for healthy living – but like so many other Canadians with cancer, Mesley did all of them and still got the disease. Clearly, there must be something else going on.

The real cancer story is the fact that nearly one in two of us are going to get this disease.

Lyme disease: A Look Beyond Antibiotics
Dietrich K.Klinghardt, MD, PhD

In the last decade the majority of outcome-oriented physicians observed a major shift: we realized that it was neither the lack of vitamins or growth hormone that made our patients ill. We discovered that toxicity and chronic infections were most often at the core of the client’s suffering. We watched the discussion, which infection may be the primary one: mycoplasma, stealth viruses, HHV-6, trichomonas, Chlamydia pneumoniae, leptospirosis, mutated strep, or what else?

The new kid on the block is Borrelia burgdorferi (Bb) and some of us have looked at it for a long time as possibly being the bug that opens the door for all the other infections to enter the system. Lyme disease has become a buzzword in the alternative medical field. Since none of the recommended treatments are specific to either one of the microbes, we can never assume
that we really know what we treated once a patient has recovered.

Microbiologist Gitte Jensen, PhD had shown, that the older we get, the more foreign DNA is attached to our own DNA. Somewhere along the line pathogenic microbes invade the host’s DNA and become a permanent part of it. Since we use only 2% of our DNA, it may not be a problem. In fact, it may make us who we finally become. It may also cause a number of symptoms and chronic illness. Genius Guenther Enderlein’s discoveries take us off the hook: if one microbe can change into another given the right environment, why bother to find out, who we are infected with? The book “Lab 257” suggests that Bb is an escaped man-made US military bio-warfare organism (just like myoplasma incognitus and HHV 6).