If you watched the 60 Minutes item Living Proof on Wednesday night, you’ll no doubt agree that King Country farmer Alan Smith is lucky to be alive.
Acutely affected by the H1N1 virus, Smith lay in intensive care close to death, an ECMO machine battling to keep his fluid-filled lungs functioning. As Mike McRoberts says in the introduction to the 60 Minutes piece by veteran reporter Melanie Reid, Smith came back from the dead.
But what saved his life?
Well, if the 60 Minutes piece is to be believed, large doses of vitamin C administered to Smith intravenously at the behest of his desperate family pulled him back from the brink of death. The family had to battle doctors to allow the treatment to proceed and even had to enlist top-flight constitutional lawyer Mai Chen to apply the legal blowtorch to the hospital treating Smith to allow the treatment to continue.
Smith’s lungs began to clear as the vitamin C was administered though his family admits this may have had something to do with the fact that at the same time, Smith was put in the prone position – that is, he was rolled onto his stomach in the hope that this would help clear his lungs.
Where did the family come across the idea of administering vitamin C intravenously? What does the peer-reviewed literature say about this sort of treatment for pneumonia-like symptoms? Could Smith’s family have actually risked harming him by giving him large doses of vitamin C? None of that is clear from the piece, because 60 Minutes didn’t interview anyone with a medical or scientific background equipped to answer these questions. No one from the two hospitals that treated Smith would comment on how he was treated but it is clear from the case notes flashed across the screen that the doctors treating his thought intravenous shots of vitamin C was a wacky idea and would do him no good.
The upshot is that we have an apparent “miracle” on our hands – that’s definitely how 60 Minutes promoted the piece:
So was it a one-off miracle? Or has the family stumbled on a miracle cure?
Or how about option three – no one knows what led to Smith’s recovery and there’s certainly no evidence it was vitamin C. Not that you’d get that sort of equivocation from 60 Minutes, who obviously didn’t want to let pesky experts get in the way of a powerful story about a good kiwi family standing up to a cold medical bureaucracy. At the Science Media Centre, we asked experts to watch the piece and provide feedback on it.
Professor John Fraser, Head of School of Medical Sciences, University of Auckland told the SMC:
It is disappointing that the journalist did not attempt to seek expert advice on the reasons why the consultants were unwilling to administer high dose vitamin C. There is certainly no evidence from the medical literature that this treatment works particularly in severe cases of pneumonia. The consultants were quite right to resist the use of an unproven treatment, and to their credit they did acquiesce to accommodate the family’s wishes because they felt it would do no harm. In this remarkable case the patient did survive but there is no evidence that this was due to the vitamin C. This is a wonderful story of personal survival and it is sad that it has been used to discredit those professionals who were just trying to provide their best for a very sick patient. If the vitamin C had killed him, then the story would have been different. That is the risk of using an unproven treatment.
None of this point of view was reflected in the 60 Minutes piece, though any number of independent experts like Professor Fraser would have happily provided it if asked.
The evidence on intravenous vitamin C
At the very least, 60 Minutes could have added a bit of background about intravenous vitamin C treatments and the lack of empirical research suggesting such treatment is effective. I haven’t been able to find a single study looking at intravenous use of vitamin C to treat people in Smith’s condition. There are instead assorted case studies of patients treated in this way – but almost always for types of cancer and there have been some studies looking at vitamin C administered to mice and rats. This paper published in the Journal of Orthomolecular Medicine ten years ago suggests: “Some cancer patients have had complete remissions after highdose intravenous vitamin C infusions”.
A study by the US National Institutes of Health (NIH) published in the Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences in 2008 showed “high-dose injections of vitamin C reduced tumour weight and growth rate by about 50 percent in mouse models of brain, ovarian, and pancreatic cancers”. The paper caused some heated debate among scientists as this letter from molecular biologist Professor Piet Borst to PNAS illustrates:
It is possible that ’the promise of ascorbic acid in the treatment of advanced cancer may lie in combination with cytotoxic agents’. As long as this has not been tested, we should try to avoid a new hype of vitamin C as cancer treatment by pointing out, especially in PNAS, the limitations of the available data.
There simply isn’t enough peer-reviewed literature to see this treatment endorsed by the medical profession other than those offering alternative therapies yet isolated cases of cancer sufferers going into remission following treatment with intravenous vitamin C keep the media spotlight on this supposed miracle cure. Check out another such story that screened in the US on ABC:
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=MCBRMFBVzi0
The reality is that Smith’s being placed in the prone position is just as likely to have been responsible for his recovery than the administering of large doses of vitamin C or anything else for that matter. We simply don’t know and the 60 Minutes piece suggests you should be willing to defy the advice of medical experts and demand alternative therapies for yourself or loved-ones who are seriously ill. How irresponsible is that?
PETER GRIFFIN 
correct me if I’m not wrong but wasn’t he diagnosed with cancer too!! also completely gone?? I’m sure that wasn’t cured from lying on his stomach! why is that not mentioned in this article? I know why because this article doesn’t want anyone to believe that it could have been the vitamin c. well its obvious no matter how u spin it. nothing they had tried worked at all and he was dying, they gave it to him and he improved enough in two/three days to be removed from life support. Then it was stopped and he got worse, and after the family demanding/ begging it was started again and he got better again? common sense people we need More Common Sense!!! and does anyone wonder why when there are stories like this around the world there are still no studies on vitamin c and doctors say it does nothing? strange very strange
Ahem. Speaking of “sins of omission”… Did you forget to note that, had the family not legally badgered the doctors concerned, Mr Smith would have had his ECMO turned off and he would almost certainly have died? Or perhaps to ask why he was not proned before they were talking about turning off the machine and letting him die?
Actually, that would be an interesting aspect to look at in more detail: the doctors were opposing the Vit C treatment as it had inadequate evidentiary basis, what were their documented views on the proning, I wonder? Because if it was the case that the proning (an “acceptable” treatment, I assume?) was the fix, wouldn’t the doc’s have told the family that the Vit C wasn’t required, they had another solution lined up? Or did they just get lucky?
If they the proning wasn’t the intentional solution, and they were all out of bullets otherwise, then what is the moral justification for stopping further treatment, whether it was Vit C or something else unproven?
Results count. Surely science is all about “now why did that happen?”, which kinda implies you have to do, or at least see, some wacky things from time to time. (And what better time than when you are out of saner options?) I sometimes wonder whether that has been forgotten on a few of the blogs around here. We don’t (nearly) have all the answers yet.
I think it is entirely “acceptable to take treatment into your own hands when you or a member of your family has “nothing left to lose†defying experts and evidence in favour of treatments that haven’t been proven effective”. Why is saying this a sin? Are you really asserting that trying the Vit C was dangerous, therefore they should have left him untreated and unsupported – which is surely a far greater danger?
*Note to those prone to misunderstanding: this is not an anti-science beat-up. Au contraire, without the science-y bit up front (all those tubes and things, for one thing) he would almost certainly be dead.
Lots of questions there rainman which could have been answered in the 60 Minutes piece and follow-up story on Campbell Live had the producers bothered to include a medical expert. That’s the whole point.
I have no problem with the premise of the story, but the lasting impression from the pieces is that a miracle vitamin C treatment was responsible for Alan Smith’s recovery. That may or may not be the case. If scientists want to explore that further, they should set up a proper trial with proper ethics approval and test it scientifically, as others have done with intravenous vitamin C doses for cancer patients.
The blog post is titled Sins of Omission because none of this was explored in either piece on TV3, it would seem because it was inconvenient to the angle of the story.
I’d have to agree with rainman in questioning what is wrong with the “message that it is acceptable to take treatment into your own hands when you or a member of your family has “nothing left to lose†defying experts and evidence in favour of treatments that haven’t been proven effective.”
This may even be a case of credit to the doctors for agreeing to try something when nothing in their own toolkit was working. If only it was clear that was the case.
I take it your main point is that a medical expert would have helped provide balance to the story and avoided the mistaken impression about vitamin C’s properties that has been given.
the main point Richard is that none of this is put in context in either the 60 Minutes piece or the Campbell Live follow-up, where a lawyer was asked to back up the veracity of claims for the efficacy of intravenous vitamin C. Why is it appropriate to have the family and lawyers talking about medical treatments? Sure, the doctors involved couldn’t talk probably for legal reasons, but how about some analysis from an independent expert. A 30 second clip to that effect could have given the piece what it needed to be credible but for some reason they decided not to bother.
.
One swallow doesn’t make a summer, and one anecdote doesn’t make proof of efficacy.
Sciblogs readers might be interested in this paper on vitamin C written by local GPs and alternative medicine practitioners who administer intravenous vitamin C doses at a clinic in Auckland.
Click to access Ge_October_08.pdf
I understand this was the group the family of Alan Smith consulted ahead of pushing for him to receive the treatment, though none of that was mentioned in the 60 Minutes piece.
Rosalind,
True.
I have something in a draft form, but if it appears at all it will have to wait until the weekend: just popping up here to offer my support for the general points made. I’m curious as to how much effort was made to source independent medical advice to ensure an understanding of the medical consultants’ actions and that the basic science presented was sound. As Prof. Fraser said, it wouldn’t have gone amiss.
Two questions:
1) If after the intravenous vitamin C Mr Smith had died, would we have heard about it?
2) How many people have had such treatments and they haven’t worked?
When homeopaths, alternative therapy proponents come across a rare case where their therapy appears to work it is news. When they don’t work, it is ignored.
Contrast this with medicine, where the regular successes are ignored, while the rare side effect or poor outcome is the only thing that tends to feature in the media
Hardly what I would call balanced reporting.
“Its so difficult to get doctors to administer treatments that they don’t consider to be conventional or not research-based.”
Surprise!
“Certainly I would recommend using a parachute when jumping out at 20,000 ft. What? You want to jump without one? I don’t recommend it. But, you say that the two who have survived in the last (mumble) years show it works? Hmmm…thinks….No, I still won’t let you get into the plane. What? Lawyer? If the Judge says so, then he can let you on the plane.”
Among the many gaping holes in 60 minutes’ sophomoric coverage was the lack of any consideration as to why the clinicians involved only tried use of prone position as a last resort, as rainman alludes to in his comment. I wasn’t there at the time, but I can give you a pretty good idea. The lack of understanding comes from a failure to appreciate just how complex a process Extracorporeal Membrane Oxygenation (ECMO) is.
Take a patient who is in multi-organ failure. Total respiratory failure, probably liver and kidneys shutting down, gut not working, heart failing. It’s a cascade of problems all too familiar to ICU doctors and nurses. One of the last-ditch attempts to save such a patient is to put them on ECMO.
Why last-ditch? Well, ECMO is a big deal. Any time you pump blood out of someone’s body, manipulate oxygen and carbon dioxide levels in it, treat it with heparin to stop it clotting, and pump it back inside so the oxygen can reach the patient’s brain and vital organs, you’ve got to figure these are fairly drastic measures. The risks are high, and they climb the longer patients are left on the ECMO ‘circuit’. It’s taken so seriously that a separate staff member (usually a specially trained and experienced registered nurse) is assigned just to look after the circuit and nothing else.
The link to Wikipedia above gives some idea of the technology, but I’m afraid the article is of fairly low quality. It doesn’t mention, for example, that moving a patient on ECMO is not done lightly. The nurses in charge of these patients will reposition them with the utmost care, and only after considering the consequences if their stability is at issue. If the patient is extremely unwell, the natural tendency is to leave them as still as possible.
So you can probably imagine that completely inverting the patient is something that’s only undertaken after discussion with the whole team. It can be very dangerous, and I’m pretty sure that would have been explained to the family at the time. The risks include the cannulae dislodging, fatal haemorrhage, obstructed blood flows, circuit disconnection, clots embolising to the brain or lungs. Accepting these kinds of risks early in the course of treatment is generally unreasonable, although ICUs around the world are making progress in making ECMO and other invasive treatments as safe as possible.
It’s easy to demonise people when all you’ve got is an emotive twenty minutes of television (complete with soundtrack lilting softly in the background) to go on. Yet these professionals have dedicated their lives to bringing patients back when there seemed to be no hope, and when they do manage it, they’re told that ascorbic acid was responsible despite overwhelming evidence to the contrary.
And you know what? Even while they’re being criticised, those same doctors, nurses, perfusionists and surgeons are glad for the patient and for the family. However, I doubt they share the same warm feelings for TV3 producers right about now.
And what about his leukaemia? Has that miraculously disappeared too? I can already see the snake-oil salespeople gearing up to fleece gullible people. After all, who needs science-based evidence when you have a sensationalist TV show to cite as proof of Vit C’s ‘miracle’ powers!
Oh yes! Talk about sins of omission, I didn’t even get to the leukaemia which disappeared. Was it misdiagnosed? Who knows, 60 Minutes doesn’t go there.
Paedsrn, thanks for the background on ECMO and proning.
If it wasn’t for the extraordinary efforts of the medical staff this gentleman would have died within days. The decision making about the cessation of ECMO were not taken lightly, the piece made it obvious that the medical staff concerned had consulted with overseas specialists for their opinion as well, it’s a shame that no expert opinion was consulted for the piece that would illuminate what the process was. As everyone points out it’s post hoc reasoning – there is no evidence that the Vit C worked and it could be any other of a number of things that lead to his recovery. This happens quite a bit then we hear of patients unexpectedly making a recovery when doctors were very pessimistic.
What scares me about this, is it leaves the door wide open for patients and their families to force doctors to give unproven and even potentially dangerous “alternative” treatments despite the medical staff having valid clinical concerns about it. All they have to do now is threaten to get a lawyer in and the hospital and doctors will probably have to cave in against and give what they found on the internet.
Someone has just made this interesting observation on another forum:
“Just a couple of points which may have been mentioned already. I also note patient was diagnosed as having Hairy cell leukaemia, which disappeared after recovery. I suspect this was also an incorrect diagnosis no doubt from a blood film that was actually ‘viral’ but resembled something more sinister. (Vit C would not have cured that so he likely did not have it in the first place.)”
Sadly apart from that your story is providing huge amusement to the followers of pseudo-science. Yes, this is strange but true. The last paragraph which I’ve just read again and makes perfect sense to me – is described as being so hilarious it apparently brought one poster and her husband ‘to hysterics’
It was a completely woeful peice of reporting.
When Mei Chen spurted her bit about “well researched treatment” I nearly choked. For pneumonia?
It was not considered anywhere in either of these pieces that maybe modern medicine, antibiotics, ventilation a nd the best of nursing care had something to do with this man’s recovery?
Naah must have been the woo. If all of that had stopped he would have got better with just the Vit C. Why didn’t Mei Chen argue for just Vitamin C?
Because it wouldnt have worked of course…
Interesting letter in the Sunday Star Times on the vitamin C issue I’ve posted and blogged about here https://sciblogs.co.nz/griffins-gadgets/2010/08/22/clash-of-the-anecdotes-on-vitamin-c/ (Clash of the anecdotes on vitamin C)
The point is surely that the “experts” were going to turn of this man’s life support and that he would now be dead if it hadn’t been for the suggestions of health professionals not directly involved in the case, the intervention of his family and their lawyer. Medical ignoarnce and arrogance never ceases to amaze me.
@diaz, and the others who think the family are in the wrong here, a straightforward question (requiring something close to a straightforward answer):
If you were a doctor responsible for choosing the course of treatment to be applied to this patient, and the family asked for the Vit C, would you have declined?
Neat reply by Hilary Butler http://whale.to/a/wakeup_call.html
Read Dr Levy’s book to find 1,200 medical citations showing Vitamin use in infections and poisons http://whale.to/a/levy4.html for 60 years
And Dr Kalokerinos 30 year clinical use http://whale.to/vaccines/kalokerinos.html
Also Clemetson http://whale.to/a/clemetson_h.html
Klenner http://whale.to/m/klenner.html
enjoy
I invoke Scopie’s Law. (http://rationalwiki.org/wiki/Scopie's_Law)
@ Grant – yup, I’d second that 🙂 A (dubious) first for this site 🙂
“If you were a doctor responsible for choosing the course of treatment to be applied to this patient, and the family asked for the Vit C, would you have declined?”
Thinking like a doctor, what I would want is to do give treatment to the patient that I know will help them and not cause further harm or distress because what I would be doing is by necessity, invasive. While the documentary is poor, it’s quite clear that the doctors considered this and didn’t discard out of hand but felt it wasn’t a viable option because of lack of evidence, lack of plausibility and the potential for harm given this patient was critically ill. I would most likely make the decision to decline, after considering the hard facts.
Good medical care shouldn’t be about throwing anything and everything at the patient and then performing the Texas sharp shooter fallacy to declare a hit. The family could have equally pushed for acupuncture, prayer or wing of bat and eye of newt in this case, there are thousands of “options” out there. In effect they forced the medical staff into experimenting on the patient with their stab in the dark with an untested treatment. It’s only after the fact that it’s been touted as the “cure” and no one knows that, they certainly didn’t cease conventional care and only gave Vit C to really test it out. Good medical care should be giving treatments that have a reasonable evidence base for actually helping. That things were desperate doesn’t change that, in fact it makes it even more critical that decisions are made carefully because if things go wrong, it wouldn’t be the family that was accountable but the doctors for their decisions.
Diaz, it’s really touching how the doctors worried so strongly about harming a patient by giving him vitamin C AFTER they’ve already told the family their husband/father was dying and there was nothing they, the doctors, could do about it (which is why they strongly ‘advised’ to let them, the doctors, turn off life support and let the patient die). How (dangerously) arrogant can you get?!
exactly Diaz, it could be anything wing of bat, eye of newt, a beer transfusion even – that’s certainly what my brother would be pushing to give me – Epic Pale AIe hopefully!
diaz,
I agree; good comment.
A earlier draft of my own post on this (finally out last night) had words to similar effect. I dropped this and other stuff as I thought it was getting too long; perhaps I should have left all the extra stuff in?!!
Encouraging people to demand that specialists to do something the specialists consider unprofessional is asking for trouble, as you say (which I did write about!) You’d think this applies to any profession, really.
I truly believe that if seriously ill people want the vitamin C whose miraculous capabilities have been so cleverly concealed for so long – they should have it – and have as much as they want. But they’d need to sign an informed consent form. And guess what? Some would still die and some would still survive and I doubt very much there’d be any discernable difference in the numbers!
Leave your comment here…
mythbuster said:
“I truly believe that if seriously ill people want the vitamin C whose miraculous capabilities have been so cleverly concealed for so long – they should have it – and have as much as they want. But they’d need to sign an informed consent form.”
Thanks for this very sensible comment!
If a patient (or his or her next of kin) sign a consent form for whatever treatment they have decided on, after consultation with the medical staff, the outcome is then THEIR responsibility and not that of strangers who have little or no emotional investment in the outcome.
It would also prevent abuse of their position of power by those in authority, who due to their ignorance and arrogance may be tempted to play God, as appears to have been the case with the New Zealand farmer whose life was obviously saved by his determined relatives and their lawyer, Vitamin C and the health professionals in the background who recommended its use. .
Erwin, it wasn’t obvious at all what saved him, that’s the point which you seem unable to grasp.
Anyway, the reason you popped on over to Sciblogs was because I mentioned your anti-vaccine network on Facebook where parents proudly proclaim their children are and will remain unvaccinated. There are some 8000 people on the network which likely equates to hundreds of unvaccinated children.
Have you reconciled yourself to the fact that some of those kids may contract a disease and pass on a disease to other children that results in permanent damage? Does promoting this type of thing ever give you pause for thought? In other words I guess, how do you live with yourself?
And how do you live with yourself, pushing any medical intervention onto anyone – all the worse without informed consent, meaning without pointing out all the toxic stuff that’s in these vaccines, the almost 4 billion dollars payed out to families who got injured/killed by these ‘safe’ vaccines, etc. The majority of people never bother to question the vaccination practice (one reason being they feel they can’t afford to stay home to take care of their kids when they get the measles, chicken pox, etc., thereby denying them the chance to develop strong, natural immune systems in stead of the artificial, weakened/damaged ones caused by the toxins in the vaccines that trick the immune system into attacking EVERYTHING in them – not just the weakened antigens, which in and by themselves would hardly trigger any immune respons! Hence the scary raise in auto-immune and neurological disorders, allergies, skin disease, astma, etc, we’re witnessing especially in the youth of the countries with the heaviest vaccination schedules (just look at the American youth and you’ll know what I mean). Most uneducated people, under which many doctors, still believe vaccines just contain ‘some kind of weakened virus/bacteria’ floating around in some kind of saline solution… Wouldn’t informed consent at least mean giving/showing the ‘patients’ (or the parents, because the patients are mostly babies or little kids) the vaccine inserts? Instead we see concerned parents getting bullied and frightened by doctors and (other) ignorant members of their community. The link between vaccination and ‘mega doses vitamin C for ‘swine flu’ and other viral infectious diseases is obvious: vitamin C (and vitamin A, etc.) prevents complications of all kinds of diseases. Just do your own research, don’t wait for money based medicine to do it for you (there’s no money in mega-dose vitamin therapy, especially not compared with the profits the pharmaceutical industry makes from their chemical drugs and allowing people to naturally build strong immune systems/health would be disastrous for the medical/pharmaceutical establishment). Time to wake up people…
Erwin – it was a sarcastic comment. Why do you rely only on anecdote and require no proof of efficacy and safety as long a product or treatment is promoted by conspiracy theory websites, snake oil salesmen and psuedo-science?
As regards the last comment in your post above this Peter, I’ve just been reading the McCaffrey family’s reply to the truly vile and evil treatment they endured from Meryl Dorey and I think they’ve shown great dignity and restraint. In baby Dana’s case the permanent damage was death.
http://www.facebook.com/topic.php?uid=76305414878&topic=21150
mythbuster – vaccination is a multi-billion industry built on myth and hearsay, without any proof of safety or efficacy (apart from pseudo-scientific drivel) – yet you berate ME for relying on anecdotes??!!
Mind you, iI DO believe in the “anecdotal evidence” in the form of vaccine-related injuries and deaths rather than the Mickey Mouse science used to prop up the fraudulent vaccine industry.
I don’t particularly want to get involved in an argument about the Meryl Dorey/AVN and Dana McCaffrey brawl, except that tempers got inflamed on both sides, on the anti-vaxer side because they were (IMO) wrongly referred to as baby-killers and targeted with abuse by pro-vax fanatics. Things may have got a bit out of hand after that. Dana’s death was obviously a tragedy, but the belief that vaccination would have prevented.it is IMO quite ludicrous.
vaccination is a multi-billion industry built on myth and hearsay, without any proof of safety or efficacy (apart from pseudo-scientific drivel)
As I said on another thread: smallpox.
Things got more than ‘out of hand’ Erwin. The way Meryl behaved was unforgivable but I guess it’s just the way you people do things! Now, back to the Vitamin C everybody!
I forgot to say that while your comment may have been meant to be sarcastic, it nevertheless addresses a vitally important point: whose life is it, and who’s in charge?
The crucial part is the concept of the patient’s right to informed consent, or in the case of someone who is incapacitated, the right of informed consent by his or her next of kin.
I agree that this opens up a can of worms:
– should children whose parents decide against conventional cancer treatment be forced to have it?
– should children whose parents are Jehovah’s Witnesses be forced to have a potentially life-saving blood transfusion?
– should children whose parents refuse an organ transplant be forced to have one?
etc.
I remember a case where British parents residing in New Zealand, whose young child had a liver transplant, were forced by court order to return to Britain to have their child undergo a second transplant when the first one was rejected and the parents decided against a second transplant.
The parents took the case to the Supreme Court, which decided that as their child’s natural custodians, the parents were entitled to make informed decisions on behalf of their child and annulled the application to enforce the operation.
I came across a case in Fiji where a 15-year-old Fijian girl developed a tumour on her leg which kept increasing in size. The hospital staff said that the surgical removal of the tumour, which was by now about 6 inches in diameter, was too risky and that the only way to save the girl’s life was to amputate her leg,
Believing that their daughter’s life was in God’s hands, the parents refused surgery. They took the girl home where she died about a month later. Very sad really, but I suspect that they also figured that one-legged, their daughter’s prospects of marriage would be minimal and her quality of life affected accordingly, because as an amputee and being single, she might not even be able to support herself. This kind of reality may be difficult to accept for us, but in such places, this is the way things are.
The point is that informed choices can have happy or unhappy outcomes. In the case of the New Zealand farmer, there is no doubt in my mind that if it wasn’t for the fact that in New Zealand, doctors have to respect patients or their family’s wishes, the Waikato farmer might well be dead now, instead of enjoying life.
Oh, OK 🙂
There does appear to be some slight evidence that vitamin C (in high doses) might have some efficacy against cancer: http://scienceblogs.com/insolence/2009/02/vitamin_c_and_cancer_has_linus_pauling_b.php. Note Orac’s comment that in the high doses used in this study the ascorbate is acting as a drug, not a nutritional supplement: “a prodrug that generates peroxide and ascorbate radicals.”
erwin alber, in case you missed Alison’s point – smallpox, smallpox, SMALLPOX!
You talk about the “multi-billion” dollar vaccine industry, but what about the fact that many of those pushing the anti-vaccine agenda are making money by peddling useless alternative theories such as homeopathy – i.e. making people pay large amounts for magic water? At least pharmaceuticals contain active ingredients and work beyond the placebo effect.
Dr Mike, one could also note that the same ‘big pharma’ companies that make various drugs & vaccines are often also the companies that make the various vitamin pills & other ‘dietary supplements’ beloved by some CAM practitioners. Cognitive dissonance, anyone?
(I know, mythbuster, I know – but I did use the word ‘vitamin’!!)
While Erwin is busy slating the evidence, let me put a few things right for the sake of other readers who might think his comments credible. (I can’t imagine there are many here, this being more of a science site; I imagine this is preaching to the choir.)
Much of that evidence for vaccines being effective does not come from within the pharmaceutical industry, but from universities and the like. The people running those studies are not paid by the industry and don’t earn that much, as any academic will tell you. They don’t have the money motivation Erwin refers to. Their main motivation is trying to help provide better health care.
I ought to know. I’ve only spend 20+ years working with people like that.
(In the case of smallpox, once the virus was eradicated there is no need for the vaccine, so there are no further sales.)
Regards Alber, let me share with you a thread on his Facebook site that convinced me to stop conversing with him on an earlier vaccine thread on sciblogs. I would express my personal opinions, but I feel as if I’d be damned for it even though it’s a sincerely held concern. Instead I’ll present this as neutrally as I can and let you form your own ideas. (You can see the full thread referred to in the link I’ve supplied.)
In this thread, a commenter posted onto Alber’s Facebook site a rambling “fear of god†sermon the commenter found elsewhere on the ‘net, which runs along the lines of:
“Here, God spoke to me saying ‘my son, every person will be asked to compulsorily take immunization against the swine flu in the next few days. This is a disguise. They will in the process be infected with demons from the abyss […]â€
http://www.facebook.com/topic.php?uid=69667273997&topic=14754
This “pastor” (assuming he exists and is real – this is the internet) links biblical references to “swine” with swine flu, and recounts (paraphrasing) ‘receiving a vision’ that makes out those giving vaccines as “the enemy”, and works it’s way to end-times religious ideas.
Alber replies, broadly agreeing, and writes “It seesm fairly clear what the vision is referring toâ€, pointing his readers an internet bullet-list flyer, which he has placed on his Facebook pages, drawing his readers attention to an — in Alber’s words — “key pointâ€:
“Liquid crystals and nano-sized microchips may have been included into the vaccines to facilitate mind control at a distance.â€
then adds himself “I understand that that the chips can also be used to induce illness or death.â€
Curse. We don’t have comment previews here, nor the ability to edit comments to correct them as some other sites do. Peter, if you have time, could you edit my comment to fix the incorrect close italic tag after ‘referring to’?! Luckily I’ve used quotations marks so it still makes some sense.
Peter, the point YOU seem to be unable to grasp is that vaccines DO NOT prevent diseases.
1. Here is the evidence (click on each ‘Read more..’ to view graphs):
http://www.healthsentinel.com/joomla/index.php?option=com_content&view=section&layout=blog&id=8&Itemid=55
Alison, the story that Jenner’s filthy cowpox vaccine prevented smallpox is a myth put out by the medical-pharmaceutical mafia that also portrays Louis Pasteur as a hero, when in fact smallpox vaccination was a complete failure and Pasteur guilty of scientific fraud. You have to realise that there is an official version of everything for the brainless masses to believe in, and then there’s what really happened; they are very different things.
The official version of JFK’s murder is e.g. that a lone gunman killed him, but this was quite obviously part of a cover-up. Likewise, the official version that Arab terrorists crashed hijacked airliners into the WTC towers which caused their collapse, is clearly a wild conspiracy theory promoted by the authorities via the mainstream media to hide the fact that it was an inside job.
If you REALLY want to know the truth about smallpox vaccination, google ‘smallpox vaccination whale’. I however suspect that you prefer to live in your fake reality in which vaccines prevent diseases, the world’s biggest terrorist organisation is Al Quaeda, not the US government, in which Louis Pasteur saved Joseph Meister from rabies and Edward Jenner’s filthy potion humanity from smallpox.
drmike, the amount alternative health practitioners make is minuscule compared to the multi-billion dollar rip-offs by vaccine manufacturers, as recently via the sale of useless and dangerous vaccines to fight a staged “pandemicâ€. The World Hell Organisation’s head witch Margaret Chan even had to change the definition of the word to get this whole swindle under way. Luckily people figured out that the whole thing was a dangerous scam, which is why in the USA alone, 40 million doses were recently incinerated because most people wisely refused to take the shot. This is of course a terrible waste of public money – money which is now in vaccine manufacturers’ bank accounts – but I figure it’s still better incinerated than injected!
Rather hilariously, Grant says: “Much of that evidence for vaccines being effective does not come from within the pharmaceutical industry, but from universities and the like. The people running those studies are not paid by the industry and don’t earn that much, as any academic will tell you. They don’t have the money motivation Erwin refers to. Their main motivation is trying to help provide better health care.â€
Well, Grant, I have news for you – I suggest you get ready for a serious reality adjustment! I knew things were bad, but this article virtually made my hair stand on end!
Harvard Medical School in Ethics Quandary
By DUFF WILSON
Published: March 2, 2009
Regarding micro-chips: I suggest you don’t concern your pretty little head about it, Grant. It would be a waste of time, as it appears that like Alison and some others, you are already remote-controlled. ïŠ
We’re dealing with such an extremist here in Erwin, that any debate is essentially pointless. He will believe anything and everything – no matter who says it, and regardless of whether there’s proof – as long as it fits his opinion that vaccines are harmful. And thank you Grant, it’s the link you provided above that puts this into sharp relief. When I think of the wasted potential in Liam Williams Holloway plus the other little boy in Ponsonby who died about the same time, and whose case sounds similar to the girl in Fiji, I can only feel sadness that someone like Erwin might think letting them die is OK. The majority of people on this forum will find that position hard to imagine and frankly, I think we need to stop giving him the oxygen of publicity and let him go back to running his ghastly scaremongering website.
Re my last comment to erwinalber
Apologies for “shouting” at you erwin by using capitals. I think Alison’s point about smallpox is a good one, and it is one that you have not responded to but that is no reason for me to “shout” at you.
Regarding the high dosage vitamin C, I would be interested in seeing what would happen if it was employed as a treatment in hospitals under controlled conditions so it’s efficacy could be determined. However, as medicine should first do no harm, consideration would have to be given to any potential detrimental effects, for example how much strain would it put on the kidneys.
It is interesting that many advocates of such treatments will claim it is effective based on one off occurrences such as the article that this post was about but will reject conventional treatments that have shown efficacy in thousands of subjects and for which the side effects have been carefully noted.
I also stand by my observation that many of the people who use fear to discourage people from medicine seem to benefit financially or in some other way from alternative therapies.
They also seem quite happy to ignore medicines, for which the modes of action are often well understood, for therapies for which the only proof is either anecdotal and the mechanism is unknown. Take for example the admission by New Zealand homeopaths that they have no idea how it “works”, You would have thought after 200 years they might have some clue, and more than just anecdotal evidence and poorly written papers demonstrating nothing more than a placebo effect.
This perhaps is the biggest gap between those who support medicine and those who support “alternative” therapies. We want evidence that is consistent and verifiable. Those who tout alternative therapies belief that belief and selective anecdotes are enough.
I will note here that a minority of conventional treatments have been determined to have no more than a placebo effect but will point out that this was 1) discovered by scientists and 2) a significant number of medications have efficacies of 70 to 100% which far outperforms the the placebo effect which often hovers below the 5% mark
There really is no arguing with someone who is shouting ‘la la la la I can’t hear you’ with fingers stuffed firmly in ears (& who recommends whale.to, for goodness sake!).
For those still open to reason: your body recognises ‘foreign’ materials – including pathogenic bacteria & viruses – by virtue of the ‘antigens’ on their surfaces. (An antigen may be a protein, a polysaccharide, a glycoprotein….) Immune-system cells called B cells produce antibodies (another class of protein) which circulate in the blood. If an antibody has the right configuration to bind to an antigen it will do so, effectively making the antigen (& the pathogen it’s attached to) more visible to the rest of your immune system. Other immune cells (T-helper cells) that detect this antibody-antibody complex trigger a series of responses that including inducing the B cell that produced the original anitbody to rapidly divide, so that there’s a clonal population of B cells all pumping out the original antibody. More & more of the antigen-bearing cells are flagged by antibody & cleaned up by other immune cells. Some of the B cells become ‘memory’ cells, so that the next time your body encounters that particular antigen, the immune response will be much faster as it doesn’t have to be primed.
That’s the basis of an immune response. It takes a while & while your antibody titres are being built up in the face of a novel infection, you may become extremely ill. Or die. For many pathogens these are relatively rare events, but they do happen & with diseases like the 1918 ‘spanish’ flu, smallpox, polio (& yes, ‘even’ measles) morbidity & mortality can be quite high.
Which is where vaccines come in. They elicit the same immune response as exposure to the pathogen – but because your body is dealing with an isolated antigen & not the whole, live, regular-strength pathogen, your antibodies & memory cells build up without causing more than passing discomfort for most people. (Yes, there are risks associated with vaccination, & science has documented them; they are orders of magnitude lower than the risks of infection with the disease itself.) This means that if/when you are subsequently exposed to the disease-causing organism, your immune response is faster, targeted, & generally able to destroy the pathogen before it takes hold.
erwinalber
I’m simultaneously surprised and intrigued by your last post which contains quite a mix of conspiracy theories. I’m curious as to where you draw the line between what you consider to be real conspiracies and ones that you consider to be fanciful.
For example, do you believe that man has gone to the moon and/or that extraterrestrials have visited Earth?
On both counts, I don’t know, but it’s IMO possible. 🙂
mythbuster said:
“He (Erwin) will believe anything and everything.”
You’ve shot yourself in one foot and put your other foot in your mouth right there and then, mythbuster. Comfortable?
The fact that I don’t believe in nonsense like vaccination clearly shows your statement to be false.
Also, I’m still waiting for a response to the infectious disease mortality graphs which clearly show that vaccines have never prevented any diseases (click on each ‘Read more..’ to view graphs):
http://www.healthsentinel.com/joomla/index.php?option=com_content&view=section&layout=blog&id=8&Itemid=55
Any takers?
drmike, you say “Regarding the high dosage vitamin C, I would be interested in seeing what would happen if it was employed as a treatment in hospitals under controlled conditions so it’s efficacy could be determined. However, as medicine should first do no harm, consideration would have to be given to any potential detrimental effects, for example how much strain would it put on the kidneys.”
Good grief! The New Zealand farmer was given high doses for some time, then lowered doses, after which this previously dying man walked out of hospital!
You are worried about kidney damage from high doses of Vit C, yet you and others here appear unconcerned about injecting babies and children with neurotoxic, allergenic and carcinogenic vaccines which sicken cripple and kill countless children. Talk about double standards, if not outright insane.
I suggest you check out these two links:
http://www.facebook.com/album.php?aid=263807&id=69667273997
http://www.facebook.com/album.php?aid=94644&id=69667273997