Pain, Pain, Go Away!

One of the greatest things about science is that it helps you get rid of wrong ideas. You might not like it when you see your hypothesis is wrong, but having the desire to think rationally, not emotionally, and to go wherever the facts lead, makes it easier to accept being wrong and trying to correct course. Thinking emotionally, on the other hand, is following a road that can leaf off a cliff.  Photo from Pexels . You don't have to look very hard to see cars heading for a cliff--or falling through the air. Australia is a penal colony again, New York state is about to fire over 80,000 unvaccinated health care workers in the midst of a pandemic and labor shortage even though whatever vaccinated replacements they can find can spread COVID, and everywhere there's a forceful push to vaccinate everyone even though it hasn't slowed down spread anywhere it's been tried.  It's not just policy makers: an online acquaintance thinks unvaccinated people are committing involunta...

Jodi O'Malley, a registered nurse at the Phoenix Indian Medical Center (part of the Department of Health and Human Services), teamed up with Project Veritas to expose severe COVID vaccine reactions occurring but not being reported to VAERS, the vaccine adverse event reporting system, even though medical professionals are legally required to report such injuries. During the filming, a man in his thirties with congestive heart failure was being treated; the doctor believed the cause was his COVID vaccination. O'Malley says she's seen dozens of adverse reactions. "The vaccine is full of shit" and the government wants to "sweep it under the mat," the doctor says on hidden camera. We finally know what's in the vaccine. Screen grab from Project Veritas video . The video also shows a pharmacist stating that off-label medications such as ivermectin were forbidden to be prescribed on pain of termination.  Project Veritas is a nonprofit organization that does ...

The FDA Advisory Panel just gave the thumbs-down to boosters for the general public. They’ve only recommended it for elderly and high-risk people. If you’re not approved for a booster, the COVID vaccine buys you some six months’ worth of reduced risk of moderate to severe COVID; most of the shots already given are due to turn into a pumpkin in time for winter. This is exactly why some of us  noped out of the vaccine experiment : public health experiments in our lifetime haven't had much success.  Assuming the FDA follows the Advisory Panel’s recommendation, hospitals and other employers who’ve issued vaccine mandates will have run off the help for nothing. Several thousand people have died or suffered severe vaccine injuries for nothing. Our Unifier-in-Chief tried to get 80 million Americans fired for nothing.  On the bright side, maybe the vaccine evangelists will quarantine themselves for the duration and the rest of can quit thinking of us versus them . Hat tip to A...

I'm interrupting this delta variant/Afghanistan nightmare/vaccine passport/Australian lockdown/throw-the-unvaccinated-under-the-bus mess to bring you some late summer joy. A butterfly enjoys the asters in my back yard. A monarch butterfly caterpillar munches on milkweed by the driveway. A praying mantis sits on the garage, mugging the camera.  Summer harvest from my garden: ox heart slicing tomatoes, roma cooking tomatoes, Anaheim chiles, jalapeños, and a Right Stuff bell pepper. Biggs caught and killed the rat that was eating the tomatoes--good dog! Pickled peppers. Don't you love it when the lids go "tonk"? Only three grams of carb per quarter cup--should you want to eat that much! Three-herb marinara, made with tomatoes and herbs from the garden. No pesticides or funky ingredients, and just 13 grams of carb per half-cup serving.  The canning recipes are from the Better Homes and Gardens Complete Canning Guide, 2015. The three-herb marinara is a favorite of mine, b...

Yesterday, our Unifier-in-Chief told us we should be angry with our unvaccinated neighbors for putting vaccinated people at risk, even though (he said) the vaccines make you very safe. All the same, he's trying to get employers to fire their unvaccinated employees because they're a threat to the vaccinated employees. Good luck with the testing option when there's a shortage of health care workers.  If the vaccines reduce symptoms enough to keep people out of hospitals--by all accounts, they do--then the unvaccinated aren't a threat. "But the vaccines don't provide perfect protection!" the vaccine evangelists cry. Of course, everything else they do, like driving , eating and riding a bike , is completely free of any hazard--right? I'll bite, though: let's take a look at the odds of having a breakthrough hospitalization or death. I have data for Indiana, but you can play along with data from your area. Odds of Breakthrough Hospitalization According ...

A number of stories on ivermectin, both for and against, have turned out to be false or at least unverifiable.  An Oklahoma hospital wasn't flooded with any patients with complications from ivermectin, Mississippi's poison control center was not inundated with calls from people who'd overdosed on ivermectin, and the "spike" in calls to Kentucky's poison control center consisted of 13 calls . Yes, the first retraction begins, "One Oklahoma hospital denies..." but it can't be that hard for professional journalists to identify which rural hospital had multiple shooting victims AND an ER full of ivermectin overdoses. Even in Indianapolis, multiple shooting victims make the news. It's tempting to blame the gullibility on people who've never set foot in flyover country (except for Chicago), but Kentucky's governor is going on about the " horse dewormer craze " and the Oklahoma TV station that ran the horse-meds-at-the-OK-Corra...

Ivermectin has been in the news lately with headlines like "Man ODs on Horse Dewormer" and "Hospitals Full of Ivermectin Patients." If this is the only perspective you've heard, let me tell you why people DIY their own health.  DIY Health Years ago, a commenter at Dr. Davis's Track your Plaque blog recalled when he was diagnosed with diabetes. He researched the illness, found that doctors and veterinarians had completely different views, and he wondered how humans and animals could be so different. He concluded that the veterinarians had it right. For a while, he thought about seeing a veterinarian for his diabetes, but finally decided to take care of it himself. He's not the only one taking care of his own illness. I'm part of online communities whose members have had to either fix their own health problems or watch them get worse. Dietary guidelines for all Americans include "healthy whole grains," even though too many Americans are overw...