Medical misinformation
The public relations industry and medicine generally
Dear Church Leaders (and everyone else)
In this recent post…
…I discussed the public relations industry and the covid era. The article was based on a post by A Midwestern Doctor (AMD), who writes one of the best of the many Substacks that I have encountered.
I thought it worth following up that post with some extracts from a recent interview with AMD, where he (or she) discusses the public relations industry and medicine generally.
A long history
In the context of a question relating to areas of illusory or false consensus in medical science, AMD comments on the power of PR in medicine generally, noting (under point 5 around 40-50% down the page) that:
One of the things I’ve come to appreciate about modern propaganda (public relations) is just how effective it is and how many different things that are widely believed within our society are the result of a public relations (PR) firm being commissioned to instill that belief on behalf of their client.
He cites the example of Edward Bernays, author of the above 1928 book, who is often referred to as “the father of public relations”:
[Bernays] initially earned his reputation by overturning the social taboo against women smoking by seeding a protest for the right to vote with paid actresses who lit up cigarettes as a symbol of women’s liberation, and then blasted that through the media which overnight got women across the country to start smoking and hence doubled his client’s business.
And says that:
Within medicine, you continually see a similar pattern — a drug or procedure is developed, and then a marketing firm gets to work figuring out how to change society’s beliefs so that everyone will buy the medical product into perpetuity (emphasis added).
Some examples
AMD goes on to cite multiple examples in a list that he says is far from exhaustive, but that features areas covered in recent Substack posts:
Skin cancer treatments
Cholesterol-lowering drugs (e.g. statins)
Heartburn medication
Surgery for neck and back pain
Bone density building drugs for osteoporosis
Anti-depressants
Vaccination in general
Covid vaccines in particular
His brief comments and links for each are below [with occasional comments]:
Skin cancer treatments
Using the belief that cancer is a scourge upon humanity to argue that cancer caused by the sun should be viewed in the same light and that we should hence do everything we can to avoid the sun and aggressively screen for and remove all skin cancers and all skin pre-cancers. This in turn leads to people avoiding the sun (which doubles their risk of dying), and doing a variety of unhealthy behaviors (e.g. avoiding the sun or using toxic sunscreens) which cause a variety of diseases including the deadliest skin cancer (as melanoma is linked to a lack of sunlight). Likewise, it’s led to the simple and safe treatments for skin cancer being largely buried as they compete with the incredibly lucrative skin cancer surgeries.
Cholesterol-lowering drugs (e.g. statins)
Since people can easily visualize fat clogging a pipe, I believe the PR industry chose to cement the idea cholesterol clogging the arteries was the cause of heart disease and that the cure for heart disease was to aggressively prescribe cholesterol lowering medications (e.g. statins). In reality, cholesterol is not the cause of heart disease, and since it is an essential nutrient, a variety of problems arise from it being lowered within the body (leading to statins becoming one of the most common drugs that cause severe injuries throughout the population)… there [is also] widespread reluctance in medicine to consider the actual causes of heart disease and the non-standard (but proven) treatments for [it].
Heartburn medication
Stomach acid is vital for the health of the body, and many of the complications of aging are due to stomach acid secretion declining with age. One of the many complications of low stomach acid is acid reflux (because the acid-sensitive upper esophageal sphincter won’t close) so the pharmaceutical industry cleverly reframed stomach acid as something which only exists to give you heartburn, and hence must be fully suppressed within the body to prevent heartburn that does not exist (rather than giving supplemental stomach acid, which then amongst other things keeps the top of the stomach closed).
Surgery for neck and back pain
That back and neck pain is primarily due to disc herniations that must be treated with spinal fusions. Beyond this often not being the case, these incredibly profitable surgeries frequently lead to a variety of severe complications for the patients.
[Another surgical example that springs to mind is “gender-affirming surgery”, which is also a lucrative business]
Bone density building drugs for osteoporosis
That osteoporosis and one’s risk of a fracture can be treated by giving drugs that aggressively increase bone density. Since the primary determinant of a fracture is how flexible a bone is, the bone density building drugs (which create very brittle bones) fail to prevent the fractures they are supposed to eliminate and instead have a wide range of significant side effects. Like many of the other things in this list (e.g. the spinal pain industry) these highly lucrative therapies have kept safe and effective treatments for the disease (e.g. effective ways to promote bone health) off the market.
Anti-depressants
That depression is due to a chemical imbalance in the brain and that spiking serotonin levels creates “mental health.” This, like many beliefs, was concocted by a marketing team, and leads to much of the population being on addictive psychotropic drugs that don’t help most types of depression and create a wide range of significant psychiatric issues (which then require even more drugs to be treated). More remarkably, once these drugs were developed, a lot of money was spent both convincing much of the population the normal emotions of life were medical conditions that required these drugs, and to avoid the safe and effective things that prevent depression (e.g. sunlight).
[I am reminded of e.g. this website for people in the UK experiencing sexual dysfunction — a common side-effect after taking antidepressants such as Prozac :]
Vaccination in general
The choice to continually repeat the declaration that “vaccines are safe and effective” has led to the immense harm they create to the immunological and neurological systems of their recipients being ignored again and again and each disaster caused by a vaccination campaign quickly fading into memory and becoming forgotten. Note: I compiled some of the previous (acknowledged) vaccine disasters here, and much of the evidence which demonstrates how damaging vaccines have been to society here. [And more recently: “Determining the risks and benefits of each recommended vaccine”]
[To illustrate the extent of the US vaccine schedule, here is a diagram from US civil rights lawyer Aaron Siri:]
[Not least in terms of being acquainted with both sides of the argument, I recommend e.g. safertowait.com, whose homepage is curiously difficult to find on mainstream search engines…]
[And particularly the book Turtles All The Way Down…]
[…the foreword, introduction and first chapter of which can be found here:]
[This post describes some of my own journey in relation to vaccination:]
[In the context of this article, it seems not unreasonable to wonder whether terms like “anti-vax” and “anti-vaxxer” — used particularly in the pharma-funded US media to discredit anyone raising reasonable concerns about vaccination — were invented by PR companies:]
Covid vaccines in particular
In order to sell an experimental gene therapy to the world (which people would understandably object to), it was necessary to first create as much fear of covid as possible, [to] use that fear to justify a variety of pointless rituals (e.g. social distancing or wearing masks) [so as] to cause those who performed them become invested in the narrative… [and then to] use both of those to get people to agree to disastrous lockdowns which in turn made them desperate for any type of salvation from the disaster.
Hence, many of them had an almost religious zeal for the vaccines once they became available and rather than listen, were willing to attack anyone who raised fairly straightforward issues about these products (to the point much of the vaccine crowd supported imprisoning or taking away the children of people who didn’t want to vaccinate) and bought into a variety of ridiculous lies (e.g. that a vaccine which could not prevent transmission would be able to end the spread of a rapidly mutating virus and bring us back to normal).
He adds that:
Because of my past familiarity with PR campaigns, I recognized this [forthcoming covid vaccination campaign] was in the works at the start of 2020 [having seen that] e.g. the suppression of all effective treatments for [covid] was remarkably coordinated…
So while it is the events of the covid era that have played a major part in waking up many people (including me) to the extent of the corruption in medicine, it transpires that much of what we have seen recently has in many respects been an extension of previous malpractice.
Some related comments
In the remainder of the same section of the interview AMD makes several further points, namely that:
One of the general lessons I believe PR has taught the corporate industries is that it is typically much easier to create the perception one is doing a good job than it is to actually do a good job. Because of this, medicine constantly uses a variety of scripted images to create the perception it can offer the most remarkable care possible, even when the actual expected outcome of a procedure being sold is quite poor…
Many approaches to medicine exist. One of them is using an external force (e.g. surgery or drugs) to force the body to assume a healthy state. Much of modern science revolves around using force to dominate nature, and while this sometimes works, it typically creates a lot of problems (e.g. collateral damage and the approach gradually becoming unsustainable in the long term). I believe one of the central issues with modern medicine is that since much of it fundamentally revolves around dominating the body, it can’t create health [because] health never emerges from an artificial state being propped up by an external force, certainly not in the long term. [While] dominating the body is often life-saving for acute illnesses… that is typically not where medicine struggles (as we have remarkable acute care medicine [but high levels of levels of chronic disease]).
Many of the diagnostic frameworks doctors are taught to use are very binary (e.g. you have something or you don’t). Because of this, we frequently fail to recognize subtle issues that are not overtly there (e.g. partial cranial nerve dysfunction [caused by vaccines]). Similarly, we tend to assume that if a concrete symptom we have a label for is not present, then no issue exists… but, in my own experience, the more subtle symptoms I continually observe in my patients are often what needs to be focused on to tangibly improve their quality of life. Likewise, most of the symptoms of pharmaceutical drug injuries aren’t overt, hence tend to get written off as unrelated or unimportant, when in reality they provide vital signs as to how a patient is reacting to a drug (e.g., I’ve lost count of how many times someone had a progressively severe reaction to a pharmaceutical but the doctor never stopped it because they believed it must have been something besides the drug—eventually leading to the person becoming permanently disabled by the pharmaceutical after further use of it).
Since medicine is very visually focused, doctors often will believe something doesn’t exist (or is psychosomatic) if it can’t be seen on imaging or in labs. This is unfortunate because many chronic conditions (e.g., covid vaccine injuries) can’t be detected with those tools (e.g… micro-clots are too small to see with an MRI [scan] and [lab tests] simply don’t exist for many of the pathologic changes they create within the body).
I also found the rest of the interview — which discusses potential ways forward, some harmful medical myths (including in relation to psychiatry and psychotherapy), and the effects of EMF radiation — to be a thought-provoking read.
The medical misinformation discussed in this post brings to mind Revelation 18:23:
Your merchants were the world’s important people. By your magic spell all the nations were led astray.
The Greek word translated “magic spell” here is “pharmakeia”, from which we get the modern English word “pharmacy”. And the word “pharmaceutical” — as in Big Pharma — has the same root.
As to the extent to which any of the above is relevant to churches and their leaders, that will be the subject of a separate post.
PS If, in the context of the public relations industry, you are thinking along the lines of “now do global warming and climate issues,” then yes, you have a point. Among other things, the Church of England’s £10.1 trillion partnership with the Transition Pathway Initiative (mentioned in this post) springs to mind. As do the many parallels between climate and covid.
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