RUTHFULLY YOURS

https://www.wsj.com/articles/the-exaggeration-of-long-covid-overmedicalization-research-mortality-children-bivalent-restrictions-11670857268?mod=opinion_lead_pos5

Long Covid is real. I have reliable patients who describe lingering symptoms after Covid infection. But public-health officials have massively exaggerated long Covid to scare low-risk Americans as our government gives more than $1 billion to a long Covid medical-industrial complex.

The Centers for Disease Control and Prevention claims that 20% of Covid infections can result in long Covid. But a U.K. study found that only 3% of Covid patients had residual symptoms lasting 12 weeks. What explains the disparity? It’s often normal to experience mild fatigue or weakness for weeks after being sick and inactive and not eating well. Calling these cases long Covid is the medicalization of ordinary life.

Two studies published this month put long Covid in perspective. The first, in the Journal of the American Medical Association, looked at a spectrum of wellness indicators in 1,000 people who recovered from symptomatic Covid or another respiratory infection. It found that 40% of patients who had tested positive for Covid “reported persistently poor physical, mental, or social well-being at 3-month follow-up.” For Covid-negative patients who had other upper-respiratory infections, the figure was 54%. Covid patients did better than non-Covid patients. While there are certainly unique hallmark conditions of Covid, such as loss of smell, any respiratory infection—flu, RSV, other cold viruses—can knock you down for a while.

The second study, in Lancet Regional Health, looked for long Covid in 5,086 children 11 to 17 and found that symptoms present during infection rapidly declined over time. The researchers found that among children who tested positive and negative for Covid “prevalence patterns of poor well-being, fatigue and Long COVID”—defined by its symptoms without the need for a past diagnosis of the disease—“were broadly similar.” (The study also found that loneliness in children increased steadily in the year after Covid illness.)

The National Institutes for Health has been intensely focused on studying long Covid, spending nearly $1.2 billion on the condition. To date, the return on investment has been zero for the people suffering with it. But it’s been terrific for MRI centers, lab testing companies and hospitals that set up long Covid clinics. I’ve talked to the staff at some of these clinics and it’s unclear what they are actually offering to people beyond a myriad of tests.

https://www.wsj.com/articles/the-twitter-blacklisting-of-jay-bhattacharya-medical-expert-covid-lockdown-stanford-doctor-shadow-banned-censorship-11670621083?mod=opinion_lead_pos6

Jay Bhattacharya, a professor of medicine at Stanford University, was a latecomer to Twitter, joining in the summer of 2021. In his first tweet, he linked to a recent article he had written that discussed age-based mortality risks and natural immunity, among other topics. His main message was powerful and contrary to Covid policies enacted across the country. “Mass testing is an insidious form of lockdown by stealth,” he wrote. Many Americans, especially parents of school-age children, would agree. But it’s possible that many on Twitter didn’t see his message.

This week Twitter released a set of internal emails and documents from before Elon Musk’s takeover of the company in October. One of the revelations was that Dr. Bhattacharya, among many others, had been censored and shadow-banned (tweets hidden in various ways) by Twitter.

Screenshots from an internal Twitter content-moderation system showed that his account was tagged with a label of “Trends Blacklist,” which ensured that his tweets would never make it to the algorithmic trending topics on Twitter’s front page.

How many people endured weekslong quarantine because Dr. Bhattacharya’s message was suppressed? How many students would have been spared the education death knell of remote learning had schools heeded his advice, or even known about it?

https://www.thefp.com/p/the-hijacking-of-pediatric-medicine?utm_source=substack&utm_medium=email

Today, we’re teaming up with reporter Aaron Sibarium and our friends at the Free Beacon to take a hard look at the American Academy of Pediatrics. The AAP is the nation’s leading organization of pediatricians. Millions of families follow its pronouncements on children’s health without skepticism or second-guessing.

Thousands of pediatricians convened in Anaheim, Calif., in early October for the American Academy of Pediatrics’s (AAP) annual conference. The group, which boasts 67,000 members in the U.S. and around the world describes itself as “dedicated to the health of all children.”

So some audience members were shocked when Dr. Morissa Ladinsky, an associate professor of pediatrics at the University of Alabama at Birmingham, lauded a transgender teenager for committing suicide.

In an address about “standing up for gender-affirming care,” Ladinsky eulogized Leelah Alcorn, an Ohio 17-year-old who, in Ladinsky’s words, “stepped boldly in front of a tractor trailer, ending her life,” in 2014, after leaving a suicide note that “went viral, literally around the world.” 

Ladinsky’s remarks were captured on video by a horrified onlooker, Oregon pediatrician Dr. Julia Mason, who expressed outrage on Twitter that Ladinsky was “glorifying suicide,” an act she described as “unprofessional and dangerous.”  

That isn’t just Mason’s opinion. Technically speaking, it is also the official stance of the AAP, whose website for parents, healthychildren.org, explicitly warns that “glorifying suicide” can have a “‘contagious’ effect” and inspire others to take their own lives. 

Reached for comment, Ladinsky expressed “regret” about her choice of words and said it was “never my intent” to glorify self-harm.

https://www.frontpagemag.com/the-medical-communitys-reprehensible-march-toward-segregated-medicine/

The need for someone who “looks like me” has become part of the American psyche. There are tens of thousands of articles about how people of color need someone who “looks like them” if they are to be inspired – or even able to achieve. A lack of “people who look like me” is also used to explain why people of color may receive inferior medical treatment.

This perspective is now found throughout the medical establishment. St. George’s University sums up the belief of many medical schools today. The Medical School states: “When a patient cannot find providers that resemble them, their beliefs, their culture, or other facets of their life, they run the risk of not being understood or being able to receive the appropriate treatment.”

Or as the University of Michigan Health Lab claimed: “Minority Patients Benefit From Having Minority Doctors.”

The National Library of Medicine lists dozens of articles claiming that healthcare outcomes are significantly impacted by discordant patients and medical providers. All of these claims are made in an effort to justify the need for more “people of color” in the medical field.

Yet, few ask how such a medical system would work. Would such a system mean that white patients would not be treated by Indian or Asian doctors? Should Blacks only be treated by Black doctors?

Currently, Asians comprise 17% of America’s doctors while only being 7% of the population – should they be limited to only treating 7% of all Americans?

https://pjmedia.com/columns/david-solway-2/2022/12/04/a-conversation-with-a-doctor-n1650850

A recent conversation with my (now former) GP did not go well. After insisting on the virulent consequences of COVID-19 and extolling the efficacy of the jabs, he did not respond kindly to my demurrals. He simply dismissed as the illiteracy of a layman my recital of the results provided by our best, independent virologists on the 99% recovery rate from the virus (the profusion of contrary fact-checks by the usual suspects is obviously meant to uphold the ritual narrative), the adverse and often lethal nature of the genomic injections, and the grand collusion and bulldozing approach of the major operators promoting the greatest scam of the modern age, perhaps the greatest scam in human history — referred to as a “plandemic.”

He obviously did not know the clinical findings of Robert F. Kennedy Jr. or of mRNA inventor Robert Malone, whose exposure of what we may call the “Corona conspiracy” was definitive. The work of such sober and world-class researchers in the field as Peter Breggin, Sucharit Bhakdi, Jeffrey Tucker, Joseph Mercola, Colleen Huber, Alex Berenson, Julius Ruechel, Christopher Shaw, Aaron Kheriaty and Aseem Malhotra — indispensable reading for anyone, not only medical people, interested in real learning — was a closed book. He clearly had never consulted the Great Barrington Declaration or the Canadian Covid Care Alliance. Brave Canadian doctors who risked career and reputation to speak truth to medical power, like Roger Hodkinson, Charles Hoffe, Francis Christian, Byram Bridle, Mark Trozzi, and others, were either virtual strangers or objects of contempt to him.

I must admit I was taken aback. Could he still believe that the vaccines were safe, effective, and harmless in the face of mountains of non-aligned specialist documentation and evidence that they are decidedly not?

https://www.wsj.com/articles/hardly-anyone-is-buying-bidens-bivalent-boosters-vaccines-public-health-trust-dr-fauci-covid-shot-elderly-seniors-11670175190?mod=opinion_lead_pos6

Marketing 101: Don’t puff up your product. When it doesn’t live up to the hype, the public won’t trust what you’re selling the next time around. That’s the problem the Biden administration faces as it tries to peddle “bivalent” booster shots for Covid-19.

Vaccines have served a useful purpose by reducing severe illness among the vulnerable and seniors. But many Americans who rolled up their sleeves for the original two-doses and even third ones were led to believe the vaccines would prevent them from getting sick. Many nevertheless fell ill. Some were knocked out for days with flulike symptoms—exactly what they were trying to avoid by getting vaccinated and boosted. Can you blame them for not buying the administration’s pitch that the new and supposedly improved bivalent boosters will “protect” them and their families?

The Health and Human Services Department has been running ads during the World Cup: “As we know, immunity doesn’t last forever. Updated vaccines offer additional protection against Omicron. Don’t miss the game.” Such a misleading statement might get a vaccine maker sued for deceptive advertising.

Omicron has been supplanted by numerous distant relatives. The bivalent vaccines target the original Wuhan strain as well as BA.4 and BA.5 variants—grandchildren of Omicron. Those variants predominated when the Food and Drug Administration directed vaccine makers to produce the bivalent boosters this summer, but they now make up less than 15% of viruses sequenced.

https://americanmind.org/salvo/dei-in-the-er/

Rising wokeness in medical schools is a problem for patients everywhere.  

Contrary to popular belief, the United States is no longer home to the best education system in the world. According to the World Top 20 Project, an international organization that gathers educational data from more than 200 countries, the U.S. lags well behind countries like Finland, Denmark, and South Korea. From elementary schools to colleges and universities, the U.S. education system is in crisis. Academic standards have drastically slipped, with a woke madness gripping classrooms across the country. And no school is immune—not even the most prestigious medical schools in America. 

In September, Stanley Goldfarb, a UPenn medical school professor, warned Americans that “anti-racism” policies have lowered admission and teaching standards, corrupting the world of medicine. Instead of focusing on recruiting the “best and brightest,” Goldfarb argued that an increasing number of medical schools are more interested in picking students based on their skin color. The blame for these recent shifts should be laid at the feet of Diversity, Equity, and Inclusion (DEI) initiatives.  

For the uninitiated, DEI focuses on building diverse workplaces and classrooms, on creating environments that are equitable and inclusive. To many, this sounds like progress. But on closer inspection, DEI is dangerous and unmeritocratic. Accidents of birth like race, sex, and ethnicity are the only things that matter in a world where DEI reigns supreme. As Goldfarb shows, these initiatives punish white and Asian applicants. Contrary to the ideology that underlies DEI, individual academic achievement and the ability to finance are the only things that should matter when applying for medical school. 

https://amgreatness.com/2022/12/02/the-science-deniers-at-the-new-england-journal-of-medicine/

The New England Journal of Medicine has published an article called “Protecting Transgender Health and Challenging Science Denialism in Policy.” It is the latest example of using denialism to denigrate any opinion contrary to that of the latest set of experts to claim sovereignty over a controversial subject. The technique is to stifle debate and force discussion from the subject to defense of an unrelated issue. This is what the NEJM paper does to perfection.

The authors place the management of transgender and transgender expansive (TGE) people as an issue between concerned scientists on the one hand and ignorant science deniers on the other. In their view everything on the subject is settled; they have the prescription for the management of TGE, and there is no room for discussion or debate. The laws passed in several states to protect children are, in their view, malicious examples of science denial which should be reversed without any further discussion.

Of course, the paper itself is an example of science denial as there is little, if any, science in it. There is no discussion of which people are included in the TGE category. The authors include no diagnostic criteria for this disease. They likely would deny that it is a disease, despite its treatment with potent drugs and surgery. They offer no discussion as to why TGE, which until recently was an extremely rare problem, has ballooned into ubiquity. 

They also use past attitudes about homosexuality to justify what they think is appropriate management of TGE. In their view, falsehoods that “contain inflammatory statements that gender dysphoria should be treated with psychotherapy alone thereby evoking the same dangerous stereotyping that once pathologized homosexuality” apply to gender dysphoria. Nobody today wants to treat homosexuality with psychotherapy, drugs, or surgery. If the authors think that gender dysphoria should be treated with these three modalities, it is they who are pathologizing TGE. These treatments are being dispensed by physicians at medical centers. Have the doctors and hospitals gone into the management of non-diseases? Non-diseases that will require lifetime follow-up. Who are the science deniers?

https://www.foxnews.com/media/critical-race-theory-related-ideas-found-mandatory-programs-58-top-100-us-medical-schools-report

CriticalRace.org, which monitors critical race theory (CRT) curricula and training in higher education, has expanded its Medical School Database and found that 58 of the nation’s top 100 medical schools have some form of mandatory student training or coursework related to the polarizing idea that racism is systemic in America’s institutions. 

“Medical School education is in crisis, with ‘social justice’ and race-focused activism being imposed on students, faculty, and staff,” William Jacobson told Fox News Digital. 

Jacobson, Clinical Professor of Law at Cornell Law School and founder of the Legal Insurrection website, founded CriticalRace.org’s sprawling database that has also examined elite K-12 private schools, 500 of America’s top undergraduate programs and military service academies.

Earlier this year, the group uncovered that 23 of the 25 most prestigious medical colleges and universities have some form of mandatory CRT-related student training or coursework. CriticalRace.org expanded the study and found that 46 of the top 100 medical schools have offered materials by authors Robin DiAngelo or Ibram Kendi, whose books explicitly call for discrimination, according to Jacobson. 

“Approaching the doctor-patient relationship through a Critical Race lens is being implemented under the umbrella of ‘Diversity, Equity, and Inclusion’ and other euphemisms, such as Ibram Kendi’s ‘anti-racism’ approach. ‘White privilege’ and similar concepts, pushed by Robin DeAngelo and others, are being infused into the medical school culture,” he said. 

The schools examined were based on the rankings by U.S. News’ rankings of America’s top medical schools. The study also found that 38 of the top 100 medical schools have some sort of mandatory CRT-related training for faculty and staff. 

For students, 14 schools were found to have department-specific mandatory training, 31 were found to have school-wide mandatory training and 41 have school-wide mandatory curricula. When it comes to faculty and staff, 18 schools have department-specific mandatory training, 30 have school-wide mandatory training and five have hiring committee-specific training. 

CriticalRace.org details the exact curricula and trainings at each school, along with contact information and an overview of every university. 

“A patient-centric ethos is being drowned out by politics and activism,” Jacobson said, adding that CRT being pushed on medical students is particularly alarming even compared to other areas of higher learning. 

“Because there are only just over 150 accredited medical schools in the U.S., and they are so hard to get into, students really have no options. Unlike universities and colleges, where students may be able to avoid a race-obsessed campus climate, with medical schools students have to submit to race-focused medical education or give up their career hopes,” Jacobson said. 

“We have analyzed CRT-related training in colleges and universities and elite private K-12. As bad as those institutions have become, things are much worse in medical schools because the stakes are so high. Patient care and people’s lives are at risk when doctors and medical providers view patients as proxies for racial or ethnic groups in sociological and political battles,” he continued. “Every person has the right to be treated equally as an individual, based on his or her medical condition, without societal racial politics influencing treatment. Yet increasingly we see the medical establishment, including the American Medical Association, demanding that medical students and physicians become race-focused activists.”

The subjects of mandatory training and coursework are worded and phrased differently at individual schools, but use terms including “anti-racism,” “cultural competency,” “equity,” “implicit bias,” “DEI – diversity, equity and inclusion” and critical race theory, according to CriticalRace.org.

For example, the study found that Lewis Katz School of Medicine at Temple University’s Department of Surgery will “assess and improve upon the current state of surgical trainee evaluation to eliminate the impact of implicit and explicit bias.”