Can We Avoid Being Eaten

Carney at Davos

Like or loathe his politics, unless I am missing something, Mark Carney, Canada’s premier and Liberal party leader, seems a decent man.  As the Canadian standing up to Donald Trump, whether you are pro- or anti-Trump, you are likely interested to see how this contact sport plays out. (Even Curling is close to being a contact sport these days).

On January 20, at a meeting of the rich and famous at Davos, Carney’s Speech, telling countries they need to get to the Table if they want to avoid being a Dish served up to the Great Powers, stood out.

Liberalism

Being at the Table was the key driver behind the nineteenth century birth of Liberal and Socialist politics.  It wasn’t safe to leave decision making to the nobles, the wealthy – the conservatives who didn’t want change.

Liberals and Socialists couldn’t easily argue against creating new factories, new jobs and wealth, especially in a world where if we don’t create them someone else will and will gobble us up.  The only effective response lay in the dead bodies or injuries happening in those factories. If they are too risky to work in, you won’t be able to compete against a motivated workforce.

Health was the Trump card.

Factories were like nations. At a time when the British didn’t give a fig about killing off millions of Irish, forcing them to emigrate or viewing them as vermin when they arrived in Britain, the French and Germans had realized that the nation with the most able-bodied mobilizable men was likely to win the Wars (contact sports) between them.

These considerations led to an alliance between Conservatives and Socialists in Germany in 1871 that, ironically excluding Liberals, set up a first ever national health insurance scheme.

Rudolf Virchow’s Liberals, meanwhile, installing sewage works in Berlin made it habitable and sustainable. Its population grew, and markets thrived demonstrating that public works could be good for business.

The history of these nineteenth century interactions between health and politics is outlined in Shipwreck of the Singular.

Born in the USA

Few Americans understand that, while communists wanted to destroy the Table, socialists in contrast wanted a seat at it.

After World War I, socialists and liberals in Germany soothed political tensions by expanding healthcare coverage for War related mental and physical injuries.  They also combined to put down a communist revolution, executing its leaders – See The Great Silence.

In America, Table dynamics played out most clearly during the 1980s AIDs crisis, when ACT-UP (AIDs-Coalition-To-Unleash-Power) took to the streets.

ACT-UP’s success hinged on getting people with AIDs to come out.  Some fabulously brave individuals, not afraid to stand up for their homosexuality, led the way.

Post-SSRI Sexual Dysfunction (PSSD), Post-Finasteride Syndrome (PFS) and Post-Retinoid Syndrome (PRS) are another pharmaceutical and sex saga that began in the 1980s. These are conditions that can permanently obliterate our ability to make love that cause profound shame. Sufferers, however, weren’t facing an immediate death sentence with nothing to lose and have been slower to achieve what ACT-UP achie.ved. But this slower burning fuse has links to recent events in Tumbler Ridge.

An essentially political decision meant that AIDs was all over the media in the 1980s creating a platform for ACT-UP. Today’s political decisions, aimed at avoiding deterring people from seeking treatment, mean the public don’t hear about drug induced injuries like PSSD or the resulting deaths. Heaping Insult on Injury, the public get told the prior mental state of those damaged has been to blame.

Events like those in Tumbler Ridge recently offer a crack through which some light might get in.  It’s one thing not to deter people from seeking the benefits of a treatment that clearly saves lives but SSRIs, Finasteride and Isotretinoin lead to more loss of life than would otherwise be the case.  Is loss of life or loss of profits at stake?

Faced with almost no progress by the mid-1990s ACT-UP began to fracture. The ‘communists’ within wanted to take sledgehammers to the healthcare Table and start anew. The liberals and socialists clung onto a place at the Table from which they could shape what was happening.

Triple Therapy

Triple Therapy emerged just as the fracture was taking shape. Companies had made several ineffective antivirals. The epidemic would have killed a lot more people if companies had been left to market minimally effective meds and charge crazy prices for them. The initiative to combine several weak antivirals came from folk with AIDs. Clinical trials weren’t needed. People on Triple Therapy got up off death beds and walked.

Triple Therapy stands as one of the few pharmaceutical treatments from the 1980 onwards that saves lives. It’s price is reasonable, because as Goldman Sachs noted – saving lives is a bad business model generating as it does immense pressure to lower the cost of treatment.

For more on this history of AIDs and politics – see Shipwreck.

Carney at Tumbler Ridge

Having had such an impact at Davos, Carney’s choice to pull out of an important Global Defense meeting in Munich a few weeks later surprised many.

Just before he was about to fly, at Tumbler Ridge, a small town near the British Columbia (BC) Alberta border, an 18-year old shot his mother and brother, 6 students in the local school, and himself.

Carney opted to attend a vigil at Tumbler Ridge rather than go to Munich. It looked like Canadians coming together in the face of a natural disaster. But it wasn’t a natural disaster.

Tumbler Ridge was even more of a man-made disaster than a fire at Crans Montana 3 weeks before Davos, when an accident with lighted candles set a club on fire killing 41.

Iron Cages

In 1919, Max Weber, many people’s favorite Liberal, said Liberals and Socialists had problems to sort out before they could collaborate at the same Table. While both had similar goals, the socialist impulse to systematize risked creating an Iron Cage of process.

Weber was referring to socialist success at the replacement of an aristocracy that figured they knew what was best for people with a set of impersonal procedures, a bureaucracy, that relentlessly codified what at one point might seem rational risked disaster.  Without a good way to later undo what at one point might have appeared best for people, rather than helpful this would lead to politically correct but stifling tokenism.

For Weber this was not a specifically German problem. Iron Cage logic almost necessarily was totalitarian.

Denn heute gehört uns Deutschland und morgen die ganze Welt

Recognizing countries need bureaucracy, Weber stressed the need for political leadership.  He explained what he meant by saying Leaders would be like Doctors, professionals who when needed could ensure a people took what might be a necessary but not very pleasant medicine. Like doctors, leaders would make judgement calls and take responsibility for their calls rather than hide behind process.

He explicitly recognized that our developing medical capabilities would enable us to engineer births and death – putting medical assistance in dying (MAiD) on our Tables. Reading this now, many likely assume Weber figured doctors as leaders would not get locked into the Iron Cage of procedure.

Rather than seeing the Holocaust as a painting of our past, others have seen a window onto our present – onto Modernity.

Around 1940 German medicine, in particular psychiatry, led the world. Set a political goal to engineer the healthiest nation on earth, German health authorities cautioned against tobacco use before anywhere else.

Without any coercion, German psychiatrists and other physicians sterilized roughly 360,000 men and women, terminated the lives of over 170,000, and ran dangerous medical experiments on over 15,000.  Close to all German doctors participated. None were coerced. None who refused to collaborate were sanctioned.

Canada now leads the world in mental health related MAiD – thanks in part to an erstwhile Liberal Senator, who also had a part in what led to Tumbler Ridge.

None of the Christian Churches that Marco Rubio, the US Secretary of State, presented in Munich as our saviors from civilizational erasure, raised a peep in the 1940s.

We Wanted You to Hear

About 6 hours before Rubio’s Valentine’s day speech, in Tumbler Ridge Mark Carney said:

We wanted you to hear that Canadians are with you. That we will always be with you. That whatever portion of your sadness that Canadians can bear to help ease your heavy load we will gladly do so   When some of you go back to quiet houses, to empty rooms, please know that you are not alone.

I have a colleague who knows a great deal about the harms psychotropic medicines have the capacity to cause.  Her daughter living in BC was recently killed by a man with a BC treatment history. Even though a proper assessment of the effects of his medication might mitigate his sentence or provide grounds for a not-guilty plea, she would like him assessed by someone capable of doing so. Not knowing what happened makes sitting alone in a quiet house more difficult.

Neither my colleague nor I know any physician in Canada with the forensic skills to make an assessment of the effects of this man’s drugs. It would mean going outside Canada.

Her request for an assessment to the prosecutor she is dealing with, for whom she has great respect, comes up against current procedures which make no accommodation for something as obviously sensible as this.

On the other side, even if this man could afford the best lawyers money can buy, and they were handed a report with good grounds to bring the medication he was taking into play, they almost certainly would not attempt to plead not guilty. They would pressure their client instead to accept a plea deal – his own lawyers in other words would make him a felon.

The doctor who prescribe the medicines will be told by his medical insurers than on no account can the medication be blamed for what happened.  S/he must blame the terrible illness and if s/he doesn’t feel capable of this, s/he needs to let the insurer’s lawyer make that case – See When Will Medical Insurers Stop Killing People.

The system in other words systematically conceals what is happening in cases like the one that drew Carney to Tumbler Ridge.

Another colleague lived with his two sons just over the BC border in Alberta. Unbeknownst to his father, one of his boys was put on an SSRI by a BC family physician, with the dose elevated to double the toxic levels. The first the father knew about any meds was when his son shot himself. This lack of knowing could not legally have happened if a BC child was prescribed treatment by an Alberta family physician.

For several years now, my colleague has come home to an empty house shorn of its shining light sensing that Canadians want nothing to do with his pain.

In France 16 year old Romain Schmitt was put on paroxetine by his doctor. When it was raised beyond toxic levels, Romain stepped in front of a high speed train.  His family have similarly had the light go out on their lives. Their case that paroxetine killed their son is compelling but just as in Canada it seems to be close to impossible to get a medical expert, even from among those who claim to be critical of the pharmaceutical industry, to agree to undertake a report.

French Experts claim not to have the expertise to write such a report, which begs the question as to whether they are fit to practice medicine – See Clinical Details Confuse Expert Doctors.

Homicides

Woody Witczak lived just over the Alberta border in Minneapolis with his wife Kim. He had no health problems of any sort. He and Kim had good jobs. They were planning a family and had booked trips away.

Woody went to a decent doctor in need of something for a few nights good sleep. He was given Zoloft, an SSRI. He became agitated and told Kim she wouldn’t believe the thoughts going through his head. In line with process based practice, his doctor told Woody to persist with treatment. Trusting his doctor, he did. Soon after, he hung himself.

After his death Kim learnt that killing her was among the thoughts in his head – Health, Care and Science in Real Life..

We have known for 70 years that for healthy people taking drugs acting on serotonin systems:

“the first few doses frequently made them anxious and apprehensive… they reported increased feelings of strangeness, verbalized by statements such as ‘I don’t feel like myself’… or ‘I’m afraid of some of the unusual impulses that I have”.

These reports come from people with no mental history being treated for raised blood pressure.

Companies making SSRIs have known for over 40 years that these drugs can cause healthy volunteers to become suicidal and commit suicide, as well as aggressive and homicidal and can obliterate sexual function permanently even after stopping in some cases.  Investigators on company trials, like me, were told not to ask about sex.

Everyone agrees the unusual impulses above included suicide. Cases like Woody’s make clear that while the drugs cause suicidality sometimes the suicides may be completed in order to avoid worse happening.

My colleague in Alberta and friends in France mourn the loss of a child without being aware that this loss may have been occasioned in part because of their children’s horror at what they might do to their parents. We cannot know if this was the case for these two boys, but it certainly can be the case, as might have been the case in Tumbler Ridge.

Asexual

Besides the direct drug induced suicidality, the two boys above were not told they would have a loss of sexual function while on treatment, with an impossible to ignore profound genital numbing. This is not the kind of thing a teenager can discuss with his parents. Did either wonder about homosexual or transgender issues? Did either find out from the web that this loss can be permanent?  Romain inexplicably smashed his phone before stepping in front of a high speed train.

The Eating Process

At present in Canada, SSRIs are de facto sterilizing more Canadians than German doctors did in the 1940s[1].  These drugs have almost certainly medically assisted more Canadian deaths than German doctors ever assisted.

The difference between the 1940s and today is that people are not dying in intentional medical experiments now. Their deaths are process driven, but the suffering inflicted on fellow citizens is no less excruciating.

Coercion and sanctions are more likely to brought into play today against physicians who refuse to adhere to our health service processes than was the case in Nazi Germany – See Gaslighting, Milgram, Madness.  While there may have been criminals among doctors in Germany, and there may be among doctors today, the root problem is political.

We have a process in which doctors and other healthcare staff, most of whom are decent and we have no reason to think weren’t decent in Germany in the 1940s, are trapped. Running fraudulent studies and portraying hearsay as evidence has been central to creating this process.

Stan Kutcher, a former Liberal Senator, has played a significant part in this process. He is listed on the authorship line of a ghostwritten article about Study 329, a GlaxoSmithKline (GSK) trial of paroxetine in adolescent depression, that returned a statistically significant excess of suicidal and related behavioral events on paroxetine. Documents indicating the article was fraudulent led New York State to take a fraud action against GSK and factored into a Department of Justice action against GSK that resulted in a USD 3 Billion settlement.

Paroxetine is almost certainly a pharmaceutical sibling of one of the drugs the Tumbler Ridge shooter was on, all of which have the capacity to cause homicide.

No one should assume that the medical literature on our medicines is anything but ghost-written and de facto fraudulent or shaped by the fact that medical journals are too scared to run anything other than material supporting treatment benefits. Even a former CEO of Britain’s NICE Guideline process recognized that the ‘evidence’ treatment guidelines involving psychotropic drugs is based on is deeply flawed but asked what alternative did guideline makers have?  See The NICE before Xmas.

I make these points as a physician convinced our use of SSRI and related medicines could not just be much safer, but their sensitive use also could reveal important aspects of our subjectivity, currently hidden, if, like Triple Therapy, their use is not bent solely to making a profit – See I Come to Praise SSRIs.

Healthcare needs Leadership. In a reversal to Weber’s metaphor, given pharmaceutical companies believe that few doctors have a thought in their minds not put there by them, Leadership seems unlikely to come from medicine.

Socialists sitting at the healthcare table are predisposed to gorging themselves on the edibles – refusing to let anyone deny them any of the 12 psychotropic drugs a day ‘their industry’ provides them with. As a result Western Life Expectancy and Healthy Life Expectancy is falling. This is not sustainable.

This is a probably then unforeseeable end-game to the dilemma Weber brought into view. Other than offer tasty soundbites, can a Liberal like Mark Carney do anything to stop us being served up as a Dish on the Great Corporate Table?

 

Footnote

[1] SSRIs sterilize by depleting sperm counts and implantation hormones, through miscarriages and by causing neurodevelopmental delay in offspring – in addition to killing libido which may not recover to normal in up to 50% of us.