Growing up American, I always had the mindset that scientists had come up with chemical compounds to relieve almost any symptom. They were well advertised. Tums for the tummy. Speedy Alka-Seltzer. Ben-Gay for aches and pains.
Aspirin was all there was for aches and pains when I was a kid. Then came Tylenol Ibuprofin Naxproxin Motrin and a host of others. Nobody read the slips of paper in the packages, and nobody worried about side effects.
Only now, late in the game, are we starting to hear that some of those NSAID's – nonsteroidal anti-inflammatory drugs – may lead to cancer and other problems. Prescription drugs for acid reflux – proton pump inhibitors – are bad. The nonprescription alternatives also don’t work for very well.
Prescription drugs for cholesterol appear now to be counterproductive. Cholesterol is not the evil that they made it out to be! They made it up. It turns out that they wanted to sell you hydrogenated, trans-fat Crisco instead of plain old lard.
Depression is something of a manufactured disease as well. Everybody feels out of sorts every now and again. It is more prevalent these days when we have fewer close associations with other people and more influence from media telling us how we ought to be. I thought I had depression and got a prescription for Prozac. It did nothing. In retrospect, the best possible result. The problem was elsewhere.
The drug companies can vilify as well as promote drugs. Follow the money. They have vilified vitamin C and vitamin D. No profit in them! A great many doctors, most recently Michael Nehls, the review of whose book got me kicked off of Amazon, carry on at length about how essential vitamin D is and how evil the pharmaceutical industry was in suppressing it so people would get genuinely sick and buy more profitable products.
They certainly vilified hydroxychloroquine and ivermectin, which I took throughout the Covid episode two no ill effect. And… never got Covid.
Oksana and I are applying this recent experience. A week ago I banged my foot hard against a drawer that had not been pushed in properly. It is still swollen. I suspect that I broke a small bone in my second toe or its metatarsal. Whatever the case, it hurts.
The pharmaceutical industry has vilified aspirin for a long time. My suspicion had been that they did it because there was more profit in those NSAIDs. However, for me, aspirin is the only thing that works for pain. It made my foot feel better.
On the other hand, I noticed that my urine turned a muddy reddish color. I looked up side effects of aspirin, and there it is. I don't know if it does any permanent damage, but rather than find out I'm going to put up with pain for a while.
In a related note, Oksana repeatedly hustled me to go to the doctor about the foot. The question she never could answer was “What would they do?” Broken fingers and toes need to be set if the break is obvious. Immobilize them and let them heal. In this case there is no obvious break.
Therefore, all it needs is time. Showing it to a doctor, besides wasting time, could temp the doctor to try to do something where the best course of action is doing nothing. I was glad that the Mayo Clinic online supports my line of thinking. No doctor.
I was recently wrong about the second installment of a two week cold. Said second one-week installment has been going on for more than three weeks. I have a productive, but not heavy cough. Oksana has been taking a Ukrainian medicine called Ah-Tse-Tse, for the letters АЦЦ, and strongly encouraged me to do the same.
It didn't do anything the few times I took it. Today I looked up the active ingredient Acetylcysteine on drugs.com. As is the case with a surprising number of drugs, different regulatory agencies were bribable in Europe than in the United States. In the US it is available only by prescription to break up heavy mucus. In any case it doesn't look like anything I need.
More than that, it also has a long list of side effects. I asked "Why would I do that?" and said, “No more.” Oksana is getting better at taking my rejection of her medical advice, and pays attention to my reading and discoveries about the dangers of medications.
We are going back to what our ancestors did, simply wait things out. And, when applicable, use traditional medicines. They have centuries of experience behind them, are not making big companies any money. Because of this the side effects are usually pretty well documented.
There is nothing to do for my sore foot except soak it and give it time. As for the cough, I simply need to give it time to go away. It may not be easy – one kid always seems to be coughing as well. At the moment it is Marianna. I'm lucky to have Oksana's support as I do nothing. Sometimes the hardest thing to get away with.
The latest that I hear from the US is that the medical authorities want to ban homeopathic medicines. The basic principle of homeopathy is that it works by stimulating the body to respond to allergens and pathogens. There is actually nothing measurable in homeopathic compounds, because they have been diluted substantially, so our bodies are stimulated by almost the memory of what was in the compound, much like traditional vaccinations, which inject tiny amounts of the dead pathogen into the body to make the immune system respond. Homeopathy was invented in Germany and has been used for more than 200 years, but it competes with the giant Big Pharma bros, so it has to go.
They make shit and want to force us to take it. The great thing about homeopathy is that there is no toxicity since the amounts of toxins in it are immeasurable. As I understand it, the Swiss homeopathic company, Similisan, which makes the top quality eye drops in the world have been recalled in the US because of contamination. It's utter nonsense. The FDA and the CDC are adjuncts of Big Pharma which wants to make us sick, keep us sick, and prevent us from having the freedom to take care of ourselves. All in the name of profit. In the US, law prevents the FDA from banning products, but they can have them recalled for phony reasons. They found one contaminated bottle in an FDA lab.
This is much like the blood found at the scene of the OJ Simpson murders. The chief detective was carrying around the vial of blood drawn from OJ Simpson at the crime scene and oops the amount submitted was 40% less than the amount drawn. And why was the detective carrying around the vial of blood at the crime scene when it was drawn at the LA Police building and should have gone up five floors but instead was carried around in a shirt pocket for half the day? And why did the blood contain EDTA, the preservative that the police use to prevent the degradation of the blood? Why did all of the blood samples found at the scene of the crime have EDTA in them? Duh!!!
For those of you who read about the OJ Simpson trial in the newspaper, I can tell you that I watched much of the trail in the evening because it was on Court TV and it made great entertainment. When I read about the trial in the newspapers, it was like a report on something entirely different, not the trial that I watched. You all know how spin works. We watch a debate on TV and then immediately the talking heads come on the screen and tell you what you saw. You didn't see this or that, no, you saw something entirely different. And the talking heads will tell you what you saw.
And speaking of the LAPD. Why is it that there were thirteen bullets found at the scene of Bobby Kennedy's assassination when Sirhan Sirhan's gun only had 7 bullets in it? But he was convicted as a lone assassin? And the LAPD destroyed the evidence right after the trial because the wall panels with expired bullets in them were no longer relevant? Hmmm! I wonder why?
Just in case anybody thinks that misinformation from the government is a new thing.
The authorities treat us like fools. How long we will remain fools is the question.
Modern medicine and pharmaceutical science are based on estimation by super extrapolation using random controlled trial statistics.This RCT is a method that requires extreme caution in estimating anything other than a sample to assess policy effects, but I suspect that the officials at the Pharmaceutical Licensing Agency do not understand statistics.
For individuals, the degree of deviation is inevitably large.
Therefore, it is essential for doctors to get feedback from their own experience, and for individuals to get feedback from their own experiences and those of others.
Even if I hit my shin somewhere, it akes, so I hope Graham's leg recovers soon.