God Does Not Play Dice. Should Doctors?

May, 18, 2023 | 20 Comments

Comments

  1. Playing the Dice…

    “On-Off”

    “cut and thrust moment.” …

    https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Jby3xtEVm0g

    DC’s Improbable Science

    Truth, falsehood and evidence: investigations of dubious and dishonest science

    https://web.archive.org/web/20130302072440/http://www.dcscience.net/

    This is very sad, because I have great reason to like the drug industry.  I’ve benefitted from several of their products myself.  But the industry is in trouble.  Many of its products provide only marginal benefits.  Furthermore, some of the things that seemed to be useful, like SSRI antidepressants, have turned out to be next to useless once hidden trials were revealed (4). 

    The MHRA’s learning module on SSRIs doesn’t seem to have caught up with this yet.
    Sadly, the reaction of industry has been to resort to dishonesty, to hide unfavourable data and to increase yet more what it spends on marketing.  Between 2009 and 2012, fines of at least 10 billion dollars (5) have been imposed on some of the most eminent companies.  They include Lilly, Pfizer, AstraZeneca, Merck, Abbott and GlaxoSmithKline (GSK). The biggest fine of all ($3 bn, in July 2012) went to a British company, GSK.  This succession of large fines seems to be regarded by the companies as mere marketing expenses. 

    All these fines were levied in the USA.  Where, one might ask, are the regulators in the UK? 

    Why have there been no fines here? Why, indeed, are some of the senior managers of these companies not in jail?  Why has the BPS remained silent about the prostitution of its subject? 

    And why have the MHRA done so little to stop it?

    https://web.archive.org/web/20130302072439/http://www.dcscience.net/?p=5821

    “Stop-Go”

    Slide 20

    Even with these maneuvers, there was an excess of suicidal events on SSRIs but the 95% confidence interval was no longer to the right of 1.0.  Why do this? Because regulators and companies need a Stop-Go mechanism and statistical significance provides this.  But doctors don’t need an external Stop-Go mechanism to replace their clinical judgement, so why do we go along with this?

    Slide 21

    FDA and companies liaised closely over the suicide crisis in 1990. Criminally?  Perhaps. I prefer the idea of strategic ignorance.

    Doctors should be the people creating medical knowledge but they went missing in action around 1990, leaving companies able to create the appearances of knowledge.

    Slide 34

    the key scientific partner is the patient – who brings clues…

  2. Shaping the Future?

    David has introduced a new perhaps hopeful topic to me . Thank you
    ‘Mathematics is more about shapes than numbers and earlier this year a New Shape was discovered, the first aperiodic or truly individual shape – that means it cannot be incorporated into other shapes or averages. This may offer us a template for a new robustly individual mathematics – and perhaps a better template for clinical practice than rolling dice has been – or should I say the rigged gambling we have had up to this.’

    I find this possibility intriguing (maybe Escher the artist – mathematical genius who was fascinated by shapes would have been too) But will progress be corrupted by the same disgusting scumbags which float around the contaminated pond of ‘scientific research’ , sacrificing millions, without conscience without pity? We can hope – maybe. .
    Seems the possibility is somewhere on the horizon in another lifetime that good will come out of the new science. But whether the research being carried out will outlaw the stuff being pumped into bodies often without consent almost always without proper knowledge will alter the type of drugs produced or enable them and their harms to be avoided is another thing. ,

    Let’s hope they get the maths right this time. Take the time to avoid others jumping on another theoretical bandwagon when charismatic, usually men so far, like the funny little creature sitting cross legged on a rock smoking a pipe, (hilarious) gather their followers and sycophants.

    In Smithsonian Magazine
    Introducing the Scutoid, Geometry’s Newest Shape
    The scutoid allows skin cells to remain packed tightly together even over curved surfaces (Touch and the skin are often topics on Rxisk Blogs)

    Jason Daley
    July 30, 2018
    Scutoid
    This shape, dubbed the scutoid, had no name until researchers found it while modeling how skin cells pack together. University of Seville and Lehigh University
    Most of us only need to master the classic shapes like circles, squares, triangles, and a handful of polygons to get along in this world. But that’s not all that’s out there—there are dozens of funky shapes that scientists, engineers and biologists have classified, including things like the hemihelix, discovered in 2014, which resembles a kinked Slinky. Now, biologists have found another new shape, dubbed the scutoid. It’s likely found in your armpits, up on your nose and all over your face, as it’s a shape your skin cells take as they bend.

    Bruce Y. Lee at Forbes reports that the new shape, described in a paper in the journal Nature Communications, helps solve a long-standing conundrum about human skin. Millions upon millions of epithelial cells are packed together to create human skin, which is pretty good at being air- and watertight. On a totally flat surface, columns, prism, or cube-shaped cells could be squeezed close enough together to create such a strong barrier. But the human body has few, if any totally flat surfaces (apologies to Channing Tatum’s abs), meaning cubes and columns don’t work. And epithelial cells need to do some pretty extreme bending and curving during embryonic development too.

    To solve the mystery, researchers in the U.S. and Europe collaborated on a computer model using a process called Voronoi diagramming to figure out just how epithelial cells are packed together. According to a press release, the best solution was a totally new shape the team dubbed a scutoid, since it resembles a top-down view of a beetle’s scutellum, part of its shell. The shape looks like a long five-sided prism with a diagonal face sliced off one end, giving that end six sides. That makes it possible to pack scutoids together with alternating five-sided and six-sided ends making up the surface, allowing the shapes to make curved surfaces without pulling apart. Don’t worry if it’s hard to envision—the team had trouble making sense of it too, until one of the scientists and his daughter modeled it using clay.

    “During the [computer] modeling process, the results we saw were weird,” co-author Javier Buceta of Lehigh University says in the release. “Our model predicted that as the curvature of the tissue increases, columns and bottle-shapes were not the only shapes that cells […] developed. To our surprise, the additional shape didn’t even have a name in math! One does not normally have the opportunity to name a new shape.”

    Jessica Boddy at Gizmodo reports that the team then found scutoid-like shapes in the epithelium of zebra fish and the salivary glands of fruit flies. While Sesame Street will probably not be singing a ditty about the scutoid anytime soon, the shape could have important uses in medicine. “For example, if you are looking to grow artificial organs, this discovery could help you build a scaffold to encourage this kind of cell packing, accurately mimicking nature’s way to efficiently develop tissues,” Buceta says in the release.

    “We believe that this is a major breakthrough in many ways,” co-author Luis Escudero of the University of Seville tells Boddy. “We are convinced that there are more implications that we are trying to understand as we speak.”
    and
    Shame about the animal experiments
    Maybe one day this could this benefit those who are being vaccinated and harmed
    1
    Math model predicts several useful new drug combinations that may help treat heart attacks

    Reviewed by Emily Henderson, B.Sc.Jun 17 2022
    The new model predicts several useful new drug combinations that may one day help treat heart attacks, according to researchers at The Ohio State University.

    Treatment to restore blood flow to these blocked passages of the heart often includes surgery and drugs, or what’s known as reperfusion therapy. Nicolae Moise, lead author of the study and a postdoctoral researcher in biomedical engineering at Ohio State, said the study uses mathematical algorithms to assess the efficacy of the drugs used to combat the potentially lethal inflammation many patients experience in the aftermath of an attack.

    “Biology and medicine are starting to become more mathematical,” Moise said. “There’s so much data that you need to start integrating it into some kind of framework.”

    But this study chose to model how certain immune cells like myocytes, neutrophils and macrophages -; cells imperative to fighting infection and combating necrosis (toxic injury to the heart) -; react to four different immunomodulatory drugs over a period of one month. These drugs are designed to suppress the immune system so that it doesn’t cause as much damaging inflammation in parts of the heart that were damaged.

    Bruce Hartpence et al., Intelligent and Converged Networks, 2021
    A simple and easily implemented risk model to predict 1-year ischemic stroke and systemic embolism in Chinese patients with atrial fibrillation
    Chao Jiang et al., Chinese Medical Journal, 2021

    Mayo Clinic Healthcare, 2023

    Their findings showed that certain combinations of these drug inhibitors were more efficient at reducing inflammation than others. “In medicine, math and equations can be used to describe these systems,” Moise said. “You just need to observe, and you’ll find rules and a coherent story between them.

    “With the therapies that we’re investigating in our model, we can make the patient outcome better, even with the best available medical care,” he said.

    Depending on their health beforehand, it can take a person anywhere from six to eight months to heal from a heart attack. The quality of care patients receive in those first few weeks could set the tone for how long their road to recovery will be.

    Because Moise’s simulation is purely theoretical, it won’t lead to improved therapies anytime soon. More precise mouse data is needed before their work can become an asset to other scientists, but Moise said he does envision the model as a potential tool in the fight against the ravages of heart disease.

    Heartsink – ‘Its going to be some years before we can actually integrate this kind of approach into actual clinical work. But what we’re doing is the first step towards that.”

  3. Thank you for another powerful and compelling lecture, and for the skilful, detailed responses to questions. These lectures keep our hopes of improved prescription drug ADR awareness (amongst prescribers and patients) alive.

  4. Kristina understands it. Kristina gets it. Kristina says it.

    https://share.transistor.fm/s/81400fb3

    Of ‘strategic significance’ to Dan

    Dan Johnson
    @DanJohnsonAB

    #worldfamilydoctorday

    Failure of duty to warn.
    Killed by pseudoscience.
    Primum non nocere means nothing now.

    4:41 AM · May 20, 2023 from Lethbridge, Alberta
    ·

    The ‘Power’ of Prozac…

      • See Comment One

        Do we have problems with, skipping ‘o’er the water’ … Robert Burns

        O’ver the Water Tae Charlie – A fine poem

  5. A FDA Bureaucrat speaks!

    Here’s a little clip from the recent FDA pantomime examination of the safety/dangers of Pfizer’s RSV vaccine about to be unleashed onto unsuspecting American pregnant people.

    https://youtu.be/NXVMILYvocM?t=22411

    Dr Hana El Sahly has the measure of these guys (and Pfizer) and voted against the proposal that this vaccine is safe.

  6. “first-ever”

    Albert Bourla
    @AlbertBourla

    Thrilled that #VRBPAC has voted independently to recommend our maternal RSV vaccine candidate to
    @US_FDA
    . In the United States, ~500,000 to 600,000 cases of medically attended lower respiratory tract disease due to RSV occur annually in infants <12mo. This is an important step toward what could be the first-ever maternal immunization vaccine to help protect infants from birth through 6 months from this contagious respiratory illness. https://on.pfizer.com/3WiVgXV

    https://www.pfizer.com/news/press-release/press-release-detail/fda-advisory-committee-votes-support-approval-pfizers

    “The role of the VRBPAC is to provide recommendations to the FDA; however, these recommendations are not binding.”

    “first-ever”…

  7. God Does Not Play Dice.

    Louis appleby
    @ProfLAppleby
    ·

    Brilliant novelist. #Money – its subtitle “A Suicide Note” – the novel that captured the greed & selfishness of the 80s. Uncompromising, opinionated – wonderful to see live. And for a time Prof of Creative Writing at @OfficialUoM (I like to think of him as a colleague).

    louis appleby
    @ProfLAppleby
    ·

    Beautiful day at South Stack on #Anglesey. A wildlife haven – puffins, porpoises, kittiwakes & guillemots. And hundreds of Manx shearwaters. Like a small albatross gliding just above sea. Incredible sight.

    louis appleby
    @ProfLAppleby
    ·

    Because severe anxiety is debilitating, with long-term consequences. Social anxiety can have serious impact on school/work & relationships. In young patients who die by suicide, anxiety is behind only depression & autism as diagnosis. Let’s not dismiss it & stigmatise it more.

    Slide 29

    “The idea the disease is responsible for suicide attempts and suicides in healthy volunteers is hard to believe but companies can wheel out experts to say just that.”

    https://www.theguardian.com/society/2023/may/21/labour-vows-to-reverse-rise-in-suicides-in-england-and-wales-within-five-years-keir-starmer

    ‘Its a long way to Tipperary’ …

  8. God Does Not Play Dice.

    “Imagine if as much time and effort that went into reducing smoking went into suicide prevention.” – The Samaritans

    louis appleby
    @ProfLAppleby
    ·

    Full-throttle call of a Cetti’s warbler at Llyn Llywenan tonight & a more distant repeat. One of 7 types of warbler singing at the lake just now.
    Francesco Cetti was an 18thC Sardinian mathematician.

    louis appleby
    @ProfLAppleby

    Why do so many think suicide is rising? Not just political speech-writers but people I happen to meet. In last 20yrs we have had lowest rates since records began in 1861.

    1. stigma – easier for families to talk about.
    2. More media coverage.
    3. (Misplaced) fears about Covid?

    louis appleby
    @ProfLAppleby
    ·

    Misleading from @samaritans , wrongly implying no progress over 2 decades.

    Suicide rates reached all-time low in 2007, almost as low in 2017.

    Rates since 2018 have been inflated by lower standard of proof required at inquest – comparison with 20yrs ago is not like with like.

    Samaritans
    @samaritans

    This

    Suicide rates are as high now as they were 20 years ago, so any pledge to save lives is welcome. Smoking rates are at their lowest levels since records began. Imagine if as much time and effort that went into reducing smoking went into suicide prevention.

    https://twitter.com/samaritans/status/1660607997524033537

    “Like with Like”

    The Birds and The Bees…

    • I read a paper by this person a while ago. Didn’t need to read much more after the first conclusion sentence.

      “Suicide rates among patients subject to Community Treatment Orders in England, 2009-2018”

      Conclusions
      CTOs may be effective in reducing suicide risk. The relative benefits of CTOs and intensive aftercare may be time-dependent, with the benefit of a CTO being less before 12 months after discharge but greater thereafter. CTO utilisation requires a careful balancing of patient safety versus autonomy.

      Last year I conversed with a person on a CTO paliperidone depo in the Netherlands – they feared for their life as many do. I had a daily blow by blow account of what this drug did to them and no quick way out after it’s been injected.

  9. When did it start to be the case that doctors stopped listening to the patients re adverse events – and if people do not think it the case – it 100% happened to myself, and was it the drug companies who inured health workers in to this with the anecdotal training or are they just trying to save themselves or maybe both ?

  10. So many facets to this question.

    In the case of Stewart Dolin, his doctor, who was a family friend, was distraught. At the trial against GSK, his doctor said something along the lines of if only he had known the dangers of Paroxetine.
    This would point to this doctor not feeling that GSK had given adequate warnings.

    In the case of Stephen O’Neill, fully documented, his doctors seemed to make drug decisions without any evidence that they were following any sort of common prescribing sense and did not make any efforts to discuss their, as it turned out, disastrous reasoning’s.

    These are two diametrically opposite points of view which throws out the questions as to how well pharmaceutical companies hid the dangers with fraudulent clinical trials and ghostwriters and how well this may have worked by keeping doctors in the dark.

    What also has kept doctors in the dark, are organizations such as RCP and RCGP who really should know better by now, but are still nonchalant and apathetic.

    It surely is the worst thing in the world to be put in a life-threatening situation by doctors who didn’t believe their patient. For the patient to then die, should be a matter for an inquiry.

    It seems ludicrous to us that doctors are still in a state of denial. I think some of their reasoning comes from the fact that antidepressants are given for anxiety and depression, and a host of other problems, which points to, in their minds, an ‘unstable personality’, for want of a better expression, hence their justification for mucking about with changing dosages, adding more drugs and all in all making a complete mess of it. It’s a bit of a high faluting attitude, with nothing to back it up but is clearly disastrous for the patient. They can be reckless and naïve playing god with peoples lives.

    Children of the Cure by David Healy; Prescription for Sorrow by Patrick D. Hahn, are good places to start.

    Good question, Chris, I am sure others will have a go at it.

    I certainly don’t think the world was prepared for the mass over-prescribing that has taken place, somewhat like the ‘Covid Vaccines’ taken the world by storm.

    • Thank you for that.

      My situation was almost the same as Stephen O’Neil.

      I’d love to see psych patients in A&E with anxiety/panic attacks if they were not on any drugs inducing the problem I’d just give them B6 p5p it would just be a matter of how much and the problem would stop within 2 to 3 hours for most. Mine went on for 10 years, near death many times and many other human rights abuses.

  11. Roos of the Who

    Rob Roos MEP Retweeted

    Rob Roos MEP 
    @Rob_Roos
    ·

    MUST WATCH: The #WHO is pushing for a Global Pandemic Treaty. In minutes, I present you reasons why this would endanger our freedom and our democracy. Please share this video. And please e-mail it to your elected officials. We cannot allow this to happen:

    https://twitter.com/Rob_Roos/status/1661400401885667329

    https://twitter.com/Rob_Roos

    “That’s a concern that’s been documented,” says Linsey McGoey, a professor of sociology at Essex University in the UK who wrote a book (“No Such Thing as a Free Gift: The Gates Foundation and the Price of Philanthropy”) on Gates and global public health. She thinks Gates has an ideological interest in seeing measurable results on a quick timescale, to show that “billionaire philanthropy” is working. “I think it’s because he has a personal interest in seeing results quick, because it helps to bolster his own reputation,” says McGoey.

    Does Bill Gates have too much influence in the WHO?

    https://www.swissinfo.ch/eng/politics/does-bill-gates-have-too-much-influence-in-the-who-/46570526

    Some public health officials have disagreed with Gates’s priorities, but there is reluctance to criticise him for fear of losing support.

    The Ruse of the Whose…

    •  ‘The plans represent a significant shift for the organisation, from a member-led advisory body to a health authority with powers of compulsion.’

      Britain could be thrown into another lockdown in the future… by the World Health Organization! Fears over new pandemic powers being considered for all member states

      The WHO could order governments to impose rules in future disease outbreaks

      Tory MPs have called for a block on powers that would dictate UK health policy

      By EMILY CRAIG SENIOR HEALTH REPORTER FOR MAILONLINE
      UPDATED: 12:01, 26 May 2023

      https://www.dailymail.co.uk/health/article-12127267/Britain-thrown-lockdown-future-World-Health-Organization.html

      Britons may be plunged into lockdowns at the whim of the World Health Organization in future, MPs fear.

      Sweeping powers being considered by the UN agency would force all member states — including Britain, the US and Australia — to comply with any rules enacted during pandemics.

      Such measures could include ones that were deployed to thwart the spread of Covid, such as vaccine passports and border closures.  

      Member states would also have to use 5 per cent of health budgets on preparing for another pandemic if controversial proposals are given the go ahead.

      World Health Organization (WHO) bosses are whittling down the suggested amendments, before a vote next spring decides whether they will come into force. 

      Six Tory MPs have now written to the Foreign Office, demanding it block any new powers that could see the WHO dictate policy and budgets in the UK.

      Ex-Cabinet minister Esther McVey warned the powers would see the organisation, described as China’s puppet by critics, move from a ‘member-led advisory body to a health authority with powers of compulsion’.

      The powers are being considered as part of an update to the WHO International Health Regulations (IHR) 2005, which sets out obligations for its 194 member states to prepare for and respond to outbreaks and other public health risks. 

      More than 300 amendments to the IHR have been proposed by member states after the Covid pandemic showed it ‘needs to be improved’, the WHO said.

      In parallel, the agency is also working on a pandemic preparedness treaty. 

      WHO chiefs say both instruments will make the world safer from health threats, with another crisis feared to be lurking around the corner.

      But among the 308 suggested changes are proposals to create a ‘legally binding’ response to public health emergencies.

      This amendment, suggested by African nations, states that the current wording of the IHR — that countries ‘should’ respond to health risks — is ‘weak’.

      If given the green light, the move could see the WHO decide on how nations respond to outbreaks, such as imposing vaccine passports, quarantine rules and restrictions on movement.

      At a four-day meeting last month, the WHO discussed a third of the proposed amendments while being ‘mindful’ of each nation’s ‘equity, sovereignty and solidarity’.

      The IHR working group is set to meet again in July, October and December and will agree on an amendments package to present to the World Health Assembly (WHA) in May next year, where a majority vote among member states decides whether they should be adopted.

      The updated IHR would then come into force within a year for all member states, unless a country files a rejection.

      And a meeting about the ‘complimentary’ pandemic treaty will take place in July, which sets out that all nations are expected to devote no less than 5 per cent of their budget to improve their pandemic preparedness. 

      However, a letter from Tory MPs, led by Ms McVey, calls for a vote in the Commons on the draft before it is signed.

      The letter, seen by The Telegraph, states that there is ‘growing concern’ about both the IHR and the treaty.

      Ms McVey said: ‘The plans represent a significant shift for the organisation, from a member-led advisory body to a health authority with powers of compulsion.

      ‘This is particularly worrying when you consider the WHO’s poor track record on providing consistent, clear and scientifically sound advice for managing international disease outbreaks.’

      The WHO repeatedly came under fire during the pandemic for its stalwart defence of China.

      This included parroting Beijing’s dismissal that the virus could have leaked from the Wuhan Institute of Virology.

      In the earliest days of the outbreak, WHO director Dr Tedros Adhanom Ghebreyesus even went as far as to praise Beijing’s ‘commitment to transparency’ which he called ‘beyond words’.

      At around the same time, China’s Communist Party began censoring public information about the spread of the virus and its potential origins, at one point suggesting that US troops could have been the initial carriers.

      Ms McVey’s letter was co-signed by Tory MPs Sir John Redwood, David Davis, Philip Davies, Sir Christopher Chope and Danny Kruger, The Telegraph reported.

      Andrew Mitchell, a Foreign Office minister and MP for Sutton Coldfield, told the newspaper that he would support a WHO treaty that speeds up sharing data on pathogens that could trigger an outbreak so that nations can ‘respond quickly’. 

      ‘We’re clear that we would never agree to anything that crosses our points of principle on sovereignty or prevents the UK from taking decisive action against future pandemics,’ he added.

      A WHO spokesperson said: ‘Just as with negotiation on pandemic accord this is a process led by sovereign states and the WHO secretariat is facilitating the negotiations.

      ‘As with all international instruments, any amendments to IHR, if and when agreed by member states, would be determined by governments themselves, who would take any action while considering their own national laws and regulations.’

  12. Prof Norman Fenton
    @profnfenton
    ·

    Vaxx injured @Nohj_85 provides an important dissection of the new BBC @mariannaspring initiative which looks like it will be about ‘proving’ that the vaxx injured are ‘conspiracy theorists’ and ‘spreaders of dangerous misinformation’.

    Wow – WATCH ‘TIL THE END

    From a Vaccine Injurred person’s perspective The @BBCNews ‘Disinformation & Social Correspondent’ @mariannaspring seems somewhat confused

    So I thought I’d help her out by telling some of OUR experiences, debunking some of HER myths & say who she SHOULD actually be ‘investigating’ (can you guess)

    Let’s see if I get a response or a straight block, shall we!

    BRING THE NOISE!

    https://twitter.com/Nohj_85/status/1662101120121028609

    Safe and Effective – A Second Opinion


    The documentary was removed from YouTube on 26th October 2022 under the pretext of alleged “medical misinformation”. At that time it had accumulated over 990,000 views and 7,000 comments.

    Watch the film in 4K here and decide for yourself.

    https://www.oraclefilms.com/safeandeffective

    Robert F. Kennedy Jr Calls Out Pfizer’s Clinical Trial Data on National Television

    https://twitter.com/TheChiefNerd/status/1662051461352632324

    BBC Verify – A Second Opinion…

  13. Robert F. Kennedy Jr
    @RobertKennedyJr

    No one is safe! Be afraid! Are we ready to outgrow this kind of messaging?

    Matt Orfalea
    @0rf

    “NOBODY IS SAFE!” #COVID19

    https://twitter.com/RobertKennedyJr/status/1662078835976798213

    Thread

    Robert F. Kennedy Jr
    @RobertKennedyJr

    Yeah, it’s not safe all right. It’s not safe for you to see the data. It’s not safe for you to have your own thoughts. It’s not safe for you to question authority. It’s not safe to criticize the oligarchs who are crushing your freedoms and taking your money. Not safe for them, anyway.

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