I swear by Apollo the physician, and Asclepius, and Hygieia and Panacea and all the gods and goddesses as my witnesses, that, according to my ability and judgement, I will keep this Oath and this contract:
To hold him who taught me this art equally dear to me as my parents, to be a partner in life with him, and to fulfill his needs when required; to look upon his offspring as equals to my own siblings, and to teach them this art, if they shall wish to learn it, without fee or contract; and that by the set rules, lectures, and every other mode of instruction, I will impart a knowledge of the art to my own sons, and those of my teachers, and to students bound by this contract and having sworn this Oath to the law of medicine, but to no others.
I will use those dietary regimens which will benefit my patients according to my greatest ability and judgement, and I will do no harm or injustice to them.
I will not give a lethal drug to anyone if I am asked, nor will I advise such a plan; and similarly I will not give a woman a pessary to cause an abortion.
In purity and according to divine law will I carry out my life and my art.
I will not use the knife, even upon those suffering from stones, but I will leave this to those who are trained in this craft.
Into whatever homes I go, I will enter them for the benefit of the sick, avoiding any voluntary act of impropriety or corruption, including the seduction of women or men, whether they are free men or slaves.
Whatever I see or hear in the lives of my patients, whether in connection with my professional practice or not, which ought not to be spoken of outside, I will keep secret, as considering all such things to be private.
So long as I maintain this Oath faithfully and without corruption, may it be granted to me to partake of life fully and the practice of my art, gaining the respect of all men for all time. However, should I transgress this Oath and violate it, may the opposite be my fate.
I bet you didn’t know that abortion was in there. By coincidence, I was telling my wife last night that the only thing I remember about my medical school graduation was putting on the vestments, that my parents were there, and it was in Oklahoma City. I doubt I took the Hippocratic Oath. I was in my agnostic phase then. And as a Christian now, I would never swear an oath to Apollo, Asclepius, Hygieia, and Panacea. I’m not a good Christian, but I try.
A confluence of crises—lockdowns and business closures, mandates and worker shortages, supply chain disruptions and inflation, sanctions and war—have compounded to trigger food shortages; and we have been warned that they may last longer than the food stored in our pantries. What to do?
Jim Gale, founder of Food Forest Abundance, pointed out in a recent interview with Del Bigtree that in the United States there are 40 million acres of lawn. Lawns are the most destructive monoculture on the planet, absorbing more resources and pesticides than any other crop, without providing any yield. If we were to turn 30% of that lawn into permaculture-based food gardens, says Gale, we could be food self-sufficient without relying on imports or chemicals.
Permaculture is a gardening technique that “uses the inherent qualities of plants and animals combined with the natural characteristics of landscapes and structures to produce a life-supporting system for city and country, using the smallest practical area.”
Author Ellen Brown discusses the apparent success of small gardens on dachas in Russia.
I don’t know much about permaculture, but I’m skeptical about it working in my environment in southern Arizona where we only get 7 inches of rain/year and summer temperatures are often well above 100 degrees F.
I have a small raised-bed garden. This is my second summer of experimentation. I’ve had a modicum of success with green beans, tomatoes, cantaloupe, carrots, rosemary, parsley, basil, and Armenia cucumbers. I’ve battled pests and predators who want my crops: mealy bugs, white flies, powdery mildew, woodpeckers, and rabbits. I find vegetable production difficult here, but I’m enjoying it anyway thus far.
Dr Cole avers that the COVID-19 mRNA vaccines (e.g., Moderna and Pfizer) are making people sick and killing some. How so? Impairing immunity, leading to cancers and recrudescence of prior cancers and dormant infections such as varicella and Eptein-Barr virus. Also via clot formation induced by the spike proteins induced by the vaccination, leading to sudden death. Dr Cole believes that the damage caused by the vaccines will eventually exceed that of COVID-19 itself.
I work as a hospitalist at a 120-bed hospital in southern Arizona, HonorHealth Thompson Peak hospital in Scottsdale. This is in an area called “The Valley of the Sun,” which is best known for Phoenix but includes may adjacent cities like Scottsdale, Mesa, Gilbert, Sun City, Peoria, and others. Arizona has ~7.5 million residents; ~3 million are in the Valley. What you may not know is that the Valley population fluctuates significantly every year because we have winter visitors from other states that come to here avoid the snow and cold. The “snowbirds” arrive in December and most depart by mid-May because it’s too damn hot here. A majority of winter visitors are elderly and retired. Because of their age, they are high healthcare utilizers. Hospitalized patient numbers swell in winter and recede in Spring.
I mention all this to say we’re seeing unusually high hospitalization rates even now, in June, and it’s not clear why. Possibilities include:
Available hospital beds counts aren’t keeping up with population growth
The residents are aging, so need, more hospital care
The pandemic temporarily reduced or restricted the delivery of medical care, so we are playing “catch up” now
The high vaccination rate over the last 1.5 years is making people sick
My little 120-bed hospital is an excellent facility but would not usually be considered a major regional referral center for all of Arizona. We’re not a trauma center and we don’t do cancer chemotherapy, obstetrics, pediatrics, or neurosurgery. But we’re getting referrals for admission from all over the state, such as Sierra Vista and Show Low. The reason we’re getting admissions from all over the state is because the larger referral centers (300-500 beds) are full. Why full? See the bullet list above. Another factor may be lack of support staff such as nurses. E.g., an ICU bed is worthless unless you have a nurse to take care of the patient. Is there a shortage because of the vax mandates? I don’t know.
I wish I had a high enough birds-eye view and data to figure this out.
Steve Parker, M.D
PS: I hear no chatter yet about HonorHealth mandating the vax booster for medical staff. I doubt I will take it.
You’re not familiar with John Wilder but you should be. Take the following with a grain of salt; Wilder is a jokester:
Medical care. In general, the very best medical advice I’ve seen says to stay away from doctors as much as you can. Eat healthy food. Get exercise. Stay hydrated. Wash your hands. Try not to get crushed under heavy things. Avoid Chicago.
The problem is that none of this is very profitable for the medical industry. Healthy people are lousy customers. Goldman Sachs® asked it themselves, “Is curing patients a sustainable business model?” Yes, this is a real quote.
Well, no, curing patients doesn’t work for big financial companies – they hate that idea. No one makes money off of diet foods if you maintain a healthy weight. No one makes money off of insulin if you can avoid diabetes. And they actually want you to get cancer. This is again a comment from the same Goldman Sachs® report: “Where an incident pool remains stable (e.g., in cancer) the potential for a cure poses less risk to the sustainability of a franchise.”
From WebMD: “Comorbidity is a medical term that you may have heard your doctor use. It describes the existence of more than one disease or condition within your body at the same time. Comorbidities are usually long-term, or chronic. They may or may not interact with each other.”
Although we are all dealing with COmorVIDities, anyone who has COmorVIDities from the vaccine can place them purely at the feet of the medical community. You might say, “But JC, the government and companies required it of Employees.”. Although this appears true on it’s face, if the medical community had stood up and acted on the, “First do no harm.” oath they took as medical providers, the government and businesses wouldn’t have had anywhere to go but “STOP”.
One of the COmorVIDities I now have, is a fear that anything I am told by any medical provider, whether for my kids or myself, is BS and aimed at padding their pocket. The majority of them have proven they will take kickbacks from the GOV or Big Pharma, over providing quality medical care.
I actually questioned my Child’s Pediatrician, when she was getting a normal childhood vaccine, because it didn’t sound like the ones my other three kids had received over the last 24 years. Why? Because I no longer trust them to do the right thing for their Patients.
Although I know some good Doctors and Nurses, I believe most of them were forced out of what is considered, “The Medical Community”, because they weren’t foolish enough to get the vaccine, or wanted to be able to prescribe “Non-Approved by Big Pharma” treatments. Most of those left are getting their “30 Pieces of Silver” from Big Pharma and the GOV, and couldn’t be happier.
I am a hospitalist. Most of the physicians I know are frontline in-the-trenches doctors taking care of patients and in no position of authority over hospital administrators, business administrators, and public health authorities.
I remember only two things from the first day of medical school, spoken by an Asian professor:
“If you’re sitting here today, you probably have an IQ of at least 120.” (So don’t worry, you can handle the workload.)
Most of medical school, which typically lasts four years, involves memorization of massive amounts of information, which you regurgitate and on a test and have forgotten a month later. It is not fun, to say the least. Medical students have actually done more analytic thinking while acquiring their undergraduate degrees and in high school. After med school, physicians spend at least three to five years in a residency that also requires incredible memorization, but you tend to retain more since it is clinically relevant. Much of the actual thinking of a practicing physician revolves around establishing a diagnosis and formulating a rational treatment plan. Even then, much of the diagnosis is made by high-tech imaging and blood tests, so the doctor has to do less thinking than our predecessors of 40 years ago. Similarly, we have “clinical practice guidelines” that are composed by “authoritative” committees, telling us how to treat specific conditions. If we follow those guidelines, we may be more likely to retain our jobs, earn a salary bonus, and prevail in malpractice lawsuits. Physicians who think and question the guidelines are too often seen as trouble-makers. Unlike 40 years ago, a majority of physicians are not independent, but are employed by large organizations that tend to control them via a paycheck.
My point is: Many practicing physicians don’t have to do much thinking, so they don’t. Sad, but true.
So JC Dodqe is right to question his child’s pediatrician.
Steve Parker, M.D.
PS: One of the reasons for specialization is that there is so much to learn in any given field, there’s just no time or mental capacity to keep up with less pertinent aspects of medicine. An orthopedic surgeon doesn’t need to know much at all about heart failure, diabetes, and anemia. That’s my job.
One of the nation’s leading public health experts has slammed the CDC’s top advisory panel over its approval of Covid booster shots for children as young as five years old – just as leading jab manufacturer Pfizer reveals plans to submit an application to give the shots to babies as young as six-months this week.
Dr Marty Makary, a public health expert from Johns Hopkins University, told DailyMaill.com that the Advisory Committee on Immunization Practices (ACIP) is a ‘kangaroo court’ full of nothing but like-minded individuals pushing what he describes as ‘low value care’.
He also said that they never have seen a vaccine they would not approve, and that others who had previously gone against the pro-jab dogma had been forced off of the panel.
Tennessee Governor Bill Lee (R) has signed a bill that makes ivermectin, an antiviral drug that has been found to be an effective early treatment for COVID-19, available in the state without a prescription.
Lee signed SB 2188, approved by the State Senate, 66-20, and the State House, 22-6, which authorizes a pharmacist to provide ivermectin to patients 18 years of age or older, “pursuant to a valid collaborative pharmacy practice agreement containing a non-patient-specific prescriptive order and standardized procedures developed and executed by one or more authorized prescribers.”
Liberty Counsel, a Christian ministry and litigation firm, noted about the legislation:
“That means that adults can explain their symptoms to the pharmacist, fill out a sheet listing any preexisting conditions and other medications they are taking, and the pharmacist can determine the right dosage.”
Joe Biden’s plans for a Ministry of Truth are tabled for now. This video may have contributed to its (hopefully permanent) demise. Or his lawyers finally convinced him the Ministry of Truth was unconstitutional. Ever heard of the 1st Amendment, Joe?
The agency is now only authorizing the pharmaceutical giant’s Janssen COVID vaccine to people 18 or older for whom other authorized or approved vaccines are not accessible or clinically appropriate, and to those 18 years or older who otherwise would not get a COVID vaccine.
The decision comes following an investigation into reports of thrombosis and thrombocytopenia syndrome (TTS) – a rare and potentially life-threatening disease that creates blood clots and creates low levels of blood platelets – from those who have received the vaccine.
There have been 60 confirmed cases, including nine fatalities, through March 18, 2022 from the nearly 19 million doses administered nationwide. The FDA determined that the reporting rate of TTS is 3.23 per million doses of the vaccine administered, and the reporting rate of TTS deaths is 0.48 per million doss of vaccines administered.
Symptoms began in the confirmed cases about one to two weeks after the individual received the vaccine.
We haven’t seen much of the J&J vax in south central Arizona. Mostly Pfizer and Moderna.
Is it too soon for a COVID 45 retrospective? Perhaps. [I don’t know why he calls it COVID 45] I suspect COVID is going nowhere in my lifetime, as the current, likely undercounted, surge indicates. But there are two endpoints that could mark the end of the COVID pandemic. One is that the infection goes away. Never gonna happen. The other is when as a society we transition back to normal and at some level decide to live with COVID. I marked that point when the US resumed mass killings. Sadly, back to business as usual.
….It is impressive how the R0, the number of people that a single infected person can be expected to infect, goes up with each variant. I suspect the increasing infectivity, but not virulence, is a result of our half-assed approach to COVID infection control. With semi-masking, semi-social distancing, and semi-vaccination, we have probably been selecting for more infectious strains of COVID.
….The other reason COVID is going nowhere is the relative lack of immunity after vaccination and disease. The vaccine is still great for preventing severe illness and death, both good endpoints, but with emerging variants partially evading prior immunity and large, in both numbers and BMI, populations of unvaccinated people, this virus will continue to circulate forever. Omicron seems particularly good at causing reinfection.
….COVID looks to be a perfect storm for perpetual disease: genetic variation, marginal immunity, half-assed infection control, and a susceptible population. Like what we have seen for the at least 500 years with influenza.
….Like all ID docs, I prefer prevention over treatment, and preventing, or at least decreasing, the spread of COVID is simple. Mask and vaccine.
….The six-foot rule? I never bought into that one. In the hospital, where the infected patient is spewing infected droplets while lying in bed not moving in a room with hospital air handling, six feet of distance to prevent droplet spread is reasonable. The patient isn’t going anywhere and the air is being turned over rapidly.
….The slow course of the disease [in its early progression to death] is also why interventions directed at the virus seem to do so little. As a clinician, I can’t tell that remdesiver, or any treatment, is doing all that much.
….But steroids and other immunomodulators are effective in treating the late inflammatory phase of COVID and that surprised me. Immumomodulation has a dismal treatment record for most infectious disease, it was nice to see it work.
Study participants were enrolled from Nov 2020 to Feb 2021. So probably before the delta and omicron variants. Outpatients were assigned either to a “standard program” of home monitoring or the standard program + pulse oximetry. There was no difference between groups in terms of “number of days alive and out of the hospital.” For the 30-day trial, that number was 29.4-29.5. In other words, very few of the ~1000 enrolees got very sick.
Pulse oximeters are readily available in the U.S. for ~$40.
The standard program was “COVID Watch, a 2-week program involving twice-daily automated text messages inquiring about dyspnea and offering rapid callbacks from nurses when appropriate. This program has been associated with improved survival as compared with no remote monitoring.5“
I spent about 10 mins trying to find the age of these patients. No luck. I don’t even now if they were adult. Thanks, NEJM. I’m not totally convinced that outpatient oximetry has no role in home treatment of COVID-19. But clearly not every patient needs it. Perhaps just those at high risk of hospitalization and death.
Americans are now entering uncharted, revolutionary territory. They may witness things over the next five months that once would have seemed unimaginable.
Until the Ukrainian conflict, we had never witnessed a major land war inside Europe directly involving a nuclear power.
In desperation, Russia’s impaired and unhinged leader Vladimir Putin now talks trash about the likelihood of nuclear war.
A 79-year-old Joe Biden bellows back that his war-losing nuclear adversary is a murderer, a war criminal, and a butcher who should be removed from power.
After a year of politicizing the U.S. military and its self-induced catastrophe in Afghanistan, America has lost deterrence abroad. China, Iran, North Korea, and Russia are conniving how best to exploit this rare window of global military opportunity.
The traditional bedrocks of the American system—a stable economy, energy independence, vast surpluses of food, hallowed universities, a professional judiciary, law enforcement, and a credible criminal justice system—are dissolving.
Gas and diesel prices are hitting historic levels. Inflation is at a 40-year high. New cars and homes are unaffordable. The necessary remedy of high interest and tight money will be almost as bad as the disease of hyperinflation.
There is no southern border.
Expect over 1 million foreign nationals to swarm this summer into the United States without audit, COVID testing, or vaccination. None will have any worry of consequences for breaking U.S. immigration law.
Police are underfunded and increasingly defunded. District attorneys deliberately release violent criminals without charges. (Literally 10,000 people witnessed a deranged man with a knife attack comedian Dave Chappelle on stage at the Hollywood Bowl last week, and the Los Angeles County D.A. refused to press felony charges.) Murder and assault are spiraling. Carjacking and smash-and-grab thefts are now normal big-city events.
Crime is now mostly a political matter. Ideology, race, and politics determine whether the law is even applied.
Supermarket shelves are thinning, and meats are now beyond the budgets of millions of Americans. An American president—in a first—casually warns of food shortages. Baby formula has disappeared from many shelves.
Politics resembles the violent last days of the Roman Republic. An illegal leak of a possible impending Supreme Court reversal of Roe v. Wade that would allow state voters to set their own abortion laws has created a national hysteria.
Never has a White House tacitly approved mobs of protesters showing up at Supreme Court justices’ homes to rant and bully them into altering their votes.
There is no free speech anymore on campuses.
Life may well get very tough, very soon. VDH didn’t dwell on the risk of upcoming famine. Are you ready? You need to be lean and physically tough. Let me help.
If image owner (who?) objects to me posting the image, let me know and I’ll delete it.
This looks and sounds intriguing but I haven’t tried it yet. I’ve never combined avocado and salmon in an entree. I never imagined I’d like avocado in chicken soup, but it’s become a Parker Compound favorite.
Advanced Mediterranean Diet 