Pain, Pain, Go Away!

Professor of Medicine Vinay Prasad has had enough of "useless fucking cowards." Normally measured and thoughtful in his YouTube videos, he lays out his contempt for cowards and careerists who didn't try to protect kids (and everyone else) from disastrous policies during the pandemic. Dr. Prasad carried out his duties in person at the county hospital throughout the pandemic. He carefully examined the evidence for masking children, injecting children with COVID "vaccines," closing schools, boosters for all, and Paxlovid in the vaccinated, and came out mostly or entirely against them. He says it hasn't helped his career or made him many friends--but it was his duty as a doctor and professor. Dr. Prasad says duty has fallen out of favor; I say it's courage that's lacking. You don't need to be charged with a duty to take the initiative to do some good. Without courage, you can't carry out your initiatives or duties when they're unpopular. He h...

I was right all along/You come tagging along. -The Hives Remember a few months ago when those of us with concerns about the safety and efficacy of COVID shots were called anti-vaxxers? Now that COVID has spread through the vaccinated, CNN quotes Fauci saying,  “We have very good vaccines, but we’ve got to get better platforms and immunogens, maybe with adjuvants that allow us to have a greater durability of protection,” Fauci said. Adjuvants are extra ingredients in vaccines that help them work better. Just "very good"? CNN says they're "astonishingly good": In clinical trials, the new mRNA vaccines have proven to be astonishingly good at protecting people against illness, hospitalizations and deaths, at least in the short term. Fauci said mRNA vaccines have other advantages, too. It’s relatively fast and easy to redesign them to better protect against new variants, for example. Sure, if by "astonishingly good" you mean a 1% absolute risk reduction of ...

The Office of the US Surgeon General called for information on the prevalence of misinformation about COVID--and Indiana's attorney general told them to look in the mirror. AG Todd Rokita, along with Drs. Jay Bhattacharya of Stanford University and Kulldorff (formerly of Harvard), spelled out the misinformation that the CDC and other government organizations spread that "has led to great harm in the lives and livelihoods of Americans" and "shattered the public’s trust in science and public health and will take decades to repair." The memo notes--with citations--the government's failure to accurately count, their natural immunity denial, their false claims that the shots prevented spread, their worse-than-useless mask mandates, school closures, tracing and lockdowns, and their zero-COVID fantasy.  Have you noticed that you never hear "follow the science" anymore? It's because science doesn't support the aggressive busybodies who shouted ...

This week, I uncovered layers of nonsense interspersed with some good information.  The Crappy Childhood Fairy on YouTube mentioned a book where she'd learned about tapping pressure points. I've used acupressure in the past and found some relief for a few different problems, so I looked up the book: The Body Keeps the Score by Bessel van der Kolk. It was a New York Times #1 best seller and has over 46,000 reviews on Amazon.  Yet as I read it, various things leapt out as improbable: a child who didn't recognize himself in the mirror; psychological trauma in childhood resulting in a lack of neurological development in the brain; and finally the story of a man who suddenly "remembered" being molested by a priest. Can that be right? Photo from Pexels . In humans' 2 million year history, children must have gone through much more trauma than kids of the late 20th century, let alone the current crop. How could they have functioned as adults lacking neurological dev...

L. Gasseri BNR17 Lactobacillus gasseri BNR17 is one of the bacteria we use over at Dr. Davis's Inner Circle. It's part of the SIBO yogurt because it creates seven bacteriocins (bacteria killers); it's also been shown to reduce waist size. So instead of making more yogurt with it, I fermented it with apples, carrots and spices (recipe here ). It's delicious, and it got rid of a lot of gas and bloating. My belly feels a little smaller too--always a good thing. I fermented it in my redneck yogurt maker with the heating pad set on high for three days. The bacteria digest the carbohydrate (greatly reducing the carb count) and it gives the apples and carrots a tart taste.  You can get L. gasseri BNR17 from Dr. Mercola's web site--it's in a product called BioThin . Once you ferment something with it, you can use the fermented food as a starter for the next batch; you don't have to keep buying supplements.  * * * * * Supplies Food choices are getting worse. I had t...

It was a perfect weekend for gardening. I pulled weeds, pruned the roses and cut down five-foot clumps of ornamental grass. The dead grass made such a tall pile that I wondered what to do with it. The trash bin was full. You can't compost it since it doesn't break down-- That's exactly what the paths between the raised beds needed. I put a thick layer of the grass and some dead perennial stems on the paths where they'll last a long time and help block weeds. I'll still put down cardboard and mulch to make it look better, but this helped solve two problems at once. Mail-order plants are already arriving, leafy and green. It's much too early to plant them here at the northern edge of Zone 6, where it's a month away from the last average frost. Maybe the nursery doesn't have enough employees to take care of the plants, so they're sending them out. In any case, the seedlings and geraniums growing in the basement have a couple of hydrangeas to keep them c...

I love novelty. Despite getting in trouble for trying new foods (I ended up in an ambulance once), I enjoy new foods enough to keep trying them.  With the flu going around the office, I thought I'd try fermenting L. casei shirota in pawpaw fruit puree. Pawpaw is a mango-like fruit native to eastern North America. It's very sweet, but fermentation reduces sugar. I cooked the raw puree before fermenting it, then had a few bites with some pork. A few hours later, I was vomiting. It's been days and I'm still not feeling right.  Despite the web full of articles on the amazing properties of pawpaw fruit, it contains neurotoxins . Even members of the Lewis and Clark expedition might have gotten sick on it .  Fortunately, I have fermented pear juice. I put a few capsules of Floristat in the bottle and left it on the counter for a few days. It tastes good and makes my stomach feel a little better.  Finally, Mark Sisson has come out with a healthy queso dip in his Primal Kitch...