Here is a sampling of the answers my patients gave to the rhetorical questions in my last post “A complex encryption only you can decode.”
What fascinating, brilliant people you are! This sampling is to show the breadth of answers; it is only a pale relection of the breadth of your ideas. From the poetic, nearly prophetic to the historical/analytical to the technical/pedagogical. I may post more if you are interested but here are 3:
- “Hi Mike…..my attempt to describe the problem….We see
And we are blindUnconscious fear secretly eats our perception
We piece together what is leftAnd call it knowledgeI think what is going on is a distortion of survival instinct (fear)…desire for control,”easy” answers and comfortable social/tribal….ahhhh thatht’s it! I am shifting to straight stream……..I bet we were much wiser in our group think back when (10,000 years or so)! We could trust the process(of tribal thinking) because we were more intimate with our life and living……..I like this train….. Hmmm…I am respecting our ancestors and life and most of all our love and awe with existence. We have let go of the love and awe and pretend that what is left is understanding…….ok I am getting off on one of my sidetracks ,or not ….God Speed Indeed…”
- “Dr. Mike, I believe the answer starts with the Russian flu of 1889, which is thought to have given immunity to those later exposed to the Spanish flu of 1918. Between WWI and the Spanish flu outbreak a huge percentage of the best and brightest of breeding age in Europe died, most between the ages of 18 and 35. The town of Cambridge lost 15,000 in one day at Ypres in the first chlorine gas attack. A large number were University students. The US lost comparatively few, the survivors were the parents of those dying today. So – demographically, our tough guys bred, Europe killed their tough guys off. Next – the people dying today lived through the depression and WWII – again, as a % of population we lost less of the strongest. Finally, the people dying today grew up before antibiotics. The data you site was selected to only look at the survivors of all that – tough old birds! I doubt the good old US of A’s good stats will extend to the boomers – who grew up on vaccines, antibiotics, industrial farming, junk food, and the notion that better living can be found through chemistry…”
- “To me, the answer to your conundrum is perfectly clear. In fact your citations provide the answer.The drug company pushes the drug through its costly several year clinical trial. The cohort is usually not that large and end point is usually comparison to another drug (standard care). Then the drug is approved and barring obvious consequences like people having heart attacks, the drug company is done with it.So nothing further happens unless some government or not-for-profit group decides to do an epidemiological study. Of couse to do that, they need an epidemiology which takes many years to develop.The missing piece is that there is no rigorous follow up once a drug is launched. It may get involved in a epidemiological study or it may not.At this point, the drug companies are likely to have a real conflict, and it would surprise me if they treated objectively epidemiological data that rained on their blockbuster drug.
So then, who is going to wake up the FDA to ban or re-label the drug. Just the people that did the study. I don’t know if there is an avenue for this. I never heard of it is there is.
Anyway, that’s my 2¢’s…”
Very cool. Each note with an undeniable element of truth; part of the picture. If any of you have more to add to the dialogue please feel free to forward your thoughts to me. If you are up to it post them on facebook. Thank you and God Speed,
Dr. Mike
