Tom Brokaw's documentary on the "Greatest Generation" talked about the accomplishments that people my father's age made. These include fighting back destructive political movements like facism, winning the Second World War, developing medicines, providing public education, and many others. It may be a cliche that the achievements of the parents are squandered by the children, and that may be truest in the area of medicine.
When I was growing up in the 1960's and 1970's, the people in charge - doctors, researchers, government officials - teamed up to stop the spread of infectious diseases, and cure the patients who had them already. My childhood was one of TB screenings, vaccinations and public service commercials encouraging parents to vaccinate their kids. While this was going on, an army of researchers was working at the NIH to identify, catalog, and characterize new infectious diseases, and ones that were emerging.
Back then, medical care was cheap, and most people in my community were not sick. Here's a copy of my medical statement from my doctor. That's right, $10 to see the doctor, and about five visits in my first 10 years of life.
That's a big change from what we found in Corvallis when we moved here from Idaho. About half of the families here with children have at least one member with chronic gastrointestinal illness. Discussions of visits to "pediatric gastroenterologists", extensive exclusion diets, multiple food allergies, and the like are common. We didn't understand why, until 2003, when I contracted the disease that 10-20% of the State of Oregon carries - Blastocystis.
New Age Drivel
New diseases have been emerging in the US since we started recording history. Native Americans were decimated by smallpox. Immigrants from Europe and China brought other diseases, so much that Ellis Island was more of a medical facility than an immigration center. Before the 1990's, the federal government considered addressing these diseases - documenting them, and working to find treatments - to be one of its functions. Science was viewed as something that was here to help us.
That changed in the 1990's, as the children of the 1960's took control of the instruments of government. The "New NIH" is based on New Age medicine, and a narcissistic view of science as something that should be personally pleasing to the researcher. And that's wrecking this country, one family at a time.
The first thing that went out the window at the NIH was the ability to investigate new infectious diseases. New Age philosophy advocates living in harmony with nature, and infectious diseases are natural, so they can not be bad. According to New Age adherents, disease comes from "stress and toxins." I'm not making this up. In 2007, I wrote a paper for the newsletter of the United Kingdom's leading charity to address "irritable bowel syndrome" - a disease where many people get diarrhea that doesn't stop. The story described the research that was showing that people with IBS didn't have a disorder- they just had an infectious disease that wasn't getting diagnosed and treated properly. Dr. Nick Read (MD), the leading consultant to the UK charity, and a prominent researcher world-wide corrected me. Disease was not caused by microbes, since many people had microbes but did not have disease. Disease was caused by "stress and toxins." That included not just chronic diarrhea, but also diseases like tuberculosis, since many people test positive for TB, but do not have symptoms. This is coming from a medical doctor, and distinguished researcher. As proof, Dr. Read cited English historical novels.
Incidentally, many people have infectious diseases but do not have symptoms. They are carriers. Typhoid Mary is a carrier. There is no reputable body of scientists that believes the carrier state is related to stress and toxins. In the last 10 years, scientists (real scientists - the kind that follow the rules) have found a series of genetic mutations present in humans and animals that influence symptoms seen in infectious diseases. Scientists can now breed mice to either get sick temporarily, to get sick permanently, or to not get sick when exposed to certain infectious diseases.
But back to the real world. The stress-and-toxins package is what the flower children are foisting on us now. Science used to be about laboratory experiments, repeatability, and developing an understanding that was consistent in a larger body of knowledge. That's gone out the window in the new NIH. You can see it in their own publications. Their job is not curing diseases - it is "supporting scientists." The NIH doesn't drive medical practice. They "enable people." Their usefulness is judged by the percentage of applications that are approved.
In a post-60's world where everyone is supposed to be a "winner", this may be a positive improvement, but it is disastrous for medicine. One example is a grant, close to $1 million, to study "liver energy" as a cause of illness in humans. The grant borrows from ancient Chinese texts. Is this science? Is there any reference to "liver energy" in any text of chemistry, physics, or biology? If people submit a thousand proposals to study "liver energy" as a cause of illness, the best thing would be to reject every one of them. But the NIH is enthusiastically funding this.
They are NOT funding any investigations into infectious diseases, especially those which are have spread epidemically in the US like Blastocystis. Again, these run into the problem that New Agers want to believe Nature is warm, friendly, and fuzzy. People who get sick are party-poopers. According to one popular New Age philosophy, called "The Secret", people who get sick deserve what they get, because they are sending out negative vibrations.
PHOTO: New Age drivel on the rise. Dr. Oz, a board-certified physician, agreed with a guest on a June 8, 2008 Oprah that our current state of health may be influenced by past life experiences.
Conforming to the Doctrine
We've a little over 15 years of this - most of the exploratory infectious disease work was shut down in the 1990's, as AIDS was emerging the feeling was that performing any work into anything other than HIV would be foolhardy. Today, we spend 60% of our infectious disease research budget on AIDS, a disease which has infected less than 0.5% of the population. Diseases like Blastocystis, which cause chronic diarrhea, abdominal pain, and other symptoms in 10-20% of the population are "embargoed."
This is not a question of money, however. The NIH is dumping tens of millions of dollars into studying patients who have Blastocystis infection. They just call it something different - "irritable bowel syndrome." These people are being studied because they are sick, and as such we can learn some kind of New Age truth from them, about how stress and toxins cause disease. The researchers in the US who study them get multi-million dollar grants to study "mindfulness" as a treatment. They talk about "two-way signaling of the brain-gut axis." Others discuss how neurolinguistic programming (NLP), a treatment that grew out of the transformative movement that brought us dianetcs and EST, can be used to cure patients.
They are NOT funding any investigations into infectious diseases, especially those which are have spread epidemically in the US like Blastocystis. Again, these run into the problem that New Agers want to believe Nature is warm, friendly, and fuzzy. People who get sick are party-poopers. According to one popular New Age philosophy, called "The Secret", people who get sick deserve what they get, because they are sending out negative vibrations.
This is not a question of money, however. The NIH is dumping tens of millions of dollars into studying patients who have Blastocystis infection. They just call it something different - "irritable bowel syndrome." These people are being studied because they are sick, and as such we can learn some kind of New Age truth from them, about how stress and toxins cause disease. The researchers in the US who study them get multi-million dollar grants to study "mindfullness" as a treatment. They talk about "two-way signaling of the brain-gut axis." Others discuss how neurolinguistic programming (NLP), a treatment that grew out of the transformative movement that brought us dianetcis and EST, can be used to cure patients.
Breaking the Rules
Science has rules. The rules were created because before science, people wasted an enormous amount of time making things up that proved not to be true. These rules say things like, "A scientific fact is a hypothesis provable by experiment." Or that new scientific ideas generally need to fit within our existing understanding of the Universe. Or that science should be repeatable.
By breaking rules of science, the NIH is wasting a lot of time and money. The new idea at the NIH is about parochialism. Namely, science in the United States is not the same as science somewhere else. We can ignore Blastocystis research around the world, because we have a special understanding here. That understanding does not have to be based on experimental evidence.
Overall, this idea takes us back 200 years in medicine, to the time when interventions by doctors probably killed more patients than they helped. We're seeing the return of "patent medicine" - herbal concotions brewed up by physicians and sold to patients without any kind of testing or verification of efficacy. With the elimination of investigatory work into infectious diseases, we're seeing the rise of personalized world-views, with groups of physicians developing ways of understanding human disease which have no basis in experimental practice.
Wrecking America One Family at a Time
As I said, the rules were put in place to defend patients, and as the NIH breaks them, patients suffer. When an infectious disease like Blastocystis gets into a community today, doctors have no reliable diagnostics or treatments. Public officials get no guidance, or the wrong guidance from Washington. In Oregon, the CDC provided guidance to the State of Oregon which resulted in the defeat of a bill that would have helped track Blastocystis infection, while NIH officials still advise patients that Blastocystis can't cause any kind of disease under any circumstances. These statements aren't based on any kind of reliable scientific study - they are based on a faith in New Age medicine, and maybe the desire of public officials to to evade their professional responsibility.
The state of denial takes a huge toll on families, as they run from doctor to doctor trying to find out what is making them so sick? It is extraordinarily expensive, and possibly cruel, to infect people with a disease, to have all the tools to identify and potentially treat the disease, but then to insist that some elusive factor must be responsible for the illness. Even those who aren't sick pay for this. In areas of the US where Blastocystis now infects 10-20% of the population, the disease may play a major role in the high cost of medical insurance, which now runs $13,000 per family.
The process causes families to run down their personal savings - I've heard from more than one family that has lost their retirement savings to the medical profession trying to get this disease diagnosed and treated. More significantly, many people who contract the disease won't be able to work due to severe fatigue and cognitive impairment. Others will only be able to find employment in low-wage jobs.
If our parents were the "Greatest Generation", what should we call the generation that is in control of Washington? The Least Generation?
References:
1. NY Times http://www.nytimes.com/2010/07/18/business/18choice.html?pagewanted=2&hpw
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