Your entire argument, which you make VERY CLEAR, is that us doctors are sell-outs to big pharma and we just do their bidding to up their profit margins.
So
@bkp_duke displays the tragic behavior of tribalism -- a tendency we humans all have (for evolutionary reasons), which is strengthened by the training that conventional doctors endure.
@bkp_duke passionately defends his tribe, despite claiming to have left it, and takes any challenge to his tribal beliefs as a personal attack on him. (My jabs in response to his insults also didn’t help.)
I never said doctors are sellouts, or evil, or gullible. I believe the opposite: most doctors sincerely want to help their patients, and do the best they know how to do. But like their patients, they are victims of a powerful corrupt system (the "medical-industrial complex"). I suggested this before, but not clearly enough:
...conventional doctors are condemned to watch their patients slowly worsen on drugs prescribed for the rest of their lives, instead of getting off the drugs and fixing disease causes instead of symptoms.
Conventional medical training (during and after med school) focuses mostly on drugs and surgery, and very little on nutrition or other alternatives less profitable to Big Pharma and Big Surgery. This really isn't debatable (although some here disputed it). Early in his career, Michael Greger MD tried to change the system from inside by lecturing on nutrition at medical schools, but he encountered so much resistance that he gave up and decided to bypass doctors, and educate the public directly about the new science of nutritional medicine.
NutritionFacts.org | The Latest in Nutrition Related Research
Now another conventionally trained doctor who taught himself nutrition, Michael Klaper MD, is again trying to change the system from inside by lecturing at medical schools. But he said in a recent webinar that he generally is invited by the medical
students, not the school administrators. Only the students are interested.
https://www.doctorklaper.com/moving-medicine-forward
Why would that be? Because Dr. Klaper is a quack? Is Dr. Greger a quack with no solid science behind him? Only the ignorant and/or brainwashed would claim that.
I believe resistance to changing mainstream medicine is due partly to obvious economic incentives, and partly to ordinary tribalism, and partly to the extraordinary thought-control methods employed during medical training. These methods include many described in the classic text by Robert Jay Lifton, such as sleep deprivation, isolation from outside influences, sacred jargon that confounds outsiders, the appeal of elitism, and intense social pressure to conform.
Thought Reform and the Psychology of Totalism - Wikipedia
The result is doctors like
@bkp_duke (and the clickers of Disagree below), who deny the established science of vitamin C, even after I quoted journal-referenced statements by specialists in the science, and by scientist-doctors applying the science to patients every day.
ONCE A DIAGNOSIS IS MADE, "standard of care" dictates how I treat that condition. Anything deviating from standard of care, without EXCELLENT documentation and reasoning, is sub-par, inadequate, puts the patient at risk, and opens oneself up for a malpractice lawsuit.
Very true. Deviation from the standard of care also opens you up to censure by your medical board, revocation of your medical license, destruction of your career and life, even being driven from your State as happened to my former dentist who dared to deviate from the standard of care of implanting mercury in his patients' teeth.
Standard of care is not something made up or dictated by pharma companies, the AMA, or even the medical schools at which we train. Standard of care is based up on the FULL evidence for treatment of a condition (not cherry-picked crap that the news is tossing out daily right now).
Tragically false.
Coronary heart disease has been known for decades to be reversible by diet and lifestyle, after Dean Ornish's Lifestyle Heart Trial was published in
The Lancet in 1990. That peer-reviewed, randomized, controlled trial has been confirmed many times, including by published studies by Caldwell Esselstyn MD, former President of the Staff of the Cleveland Clinic. Dr. Ornish's Lifestyle Medicine Program is now covered by Medicare. Yet the standard of care for heart disease remains highly profitable drugs and surgery.
Ornish Lifestyle Medicine | Ornish Lifestyle Medicine
Dr. Esselstyn's Prevent & Reverse Heart Disease Program | Make yourself heart attack proof
Type 2 diabetes has been known for decades to be reversible by diet and lifestyle, after peer-reviewed studies by many researchers, including Neal Barnard MD, President of the Physicians Committee for Responsible Medicine. Yet the standard of care for diabetes remains highly profitable drugs and high-tech medical devices such as glucose monitors and insulin pumps.
Physicians Committee for Responsible Medicine
I could go on for all the common chronic diseases (obesity, hypertension, stroke, common cancers, depression, autoimmune disorders, etc.), because all are now known to be preventable and/or reversible by diet and lifestyle. This is not surprising, since unnatural diet and lifestyle damages the body in various ways. Yet the population of most countries grows sicker every year, and nearly 70% of Americans aged 40-79 now take one or more drugs prescribed by their doctors, generally for the rest of their lives.
Products - Data Briefs - Number 347 - August 2019
What does all this have to do with coronavirus?
If you trust the medical-industrial complex to treat COVID-19 "based upon the FULL evidence," you are trusting a system proven to be untrustworthy. Your doctor means well, but he is likely ignorant about non-drug treatments, and brainwashed against them. And tragically, he might watch you die rather than question his training and prejudices.
Vitamin C Saves Dying Man - Jeffrey Dach MD
You should also know that Big Pharma is quite aware of the threats to their profits. They are not dumb, and like other industries (tobacco, oil, autos), they have a history of defending themselves with all their considerable power, including regulatory capture, media censorship, and disinformation. They are sophisticated and extremely well-funded, so I advise skepticism of both sides of treatment debates.
Far less well-funded is Dr. Greger (whose website is free and book-profits donated to charity), but he claims that his staff reads every peer-reviewed nutrition paper in the world every year "so you don't have to." His free webinar,
How to Survive a Pandemic, is scheduled for May 27. I don't know what he'll say about vitamin C, but he likely has some helpful info.
COVID-19 Resources | NutritionFacts.org
