The sword of "misinformation" cuts both ways.
While one motivator may be fear, bad (as in not in the best interests of patients) decisions have been made solely on the basis of profit, and while difficult to prove in a peer reviewed environment (because those controlling the funding for the studies that will be peer reviewed have a dog in this fight), there are those intrepid or desperate souls who have little or no alternative but to try off-label and unapproved (again for lack of peer reviewed research showing benefit) courses of treatment, and sometimes with success.
When pharmacological research began, the search was for a cure, for the fame, acclaim, and prestige (not to mention the benefit to patients) that cure or prevention would bring. Names like Lister, Pasteur, Salk, Sabin, ring in the annals of medical history for those accomplishments--accomplishments not controlled or motivated strictly by the quarterly statements at the board of directors' meeting.
I'm not saying results never got tweaked, but that it was less likely because the fallout if exposed, would ruin a career and standing in the field.
So what becomes the single most important thing in all this?
Honesty.
Integrity.
The idea that the patient's benefit comes foremost in selecting treatment options, not whether the treatment can be hit with a fresh patent and billions can be made before it goes generic. The question of whether items currently on the shelf can be used off label with genuinely beneficial effects.
It isn't the idea that medicine is good or bad, it becomes (and should be) a question of what works.
If that won't put billions on the bottom line, so be it, but at least the patients will be around to get some other malady that just might enhance the corporate coffers.
Are we doing science or bid'ness?
In the name of making money, science takes the rumble seat, and it's raining.
We're all (to some degree or another) afraid of dying, especially a protracted, painful, debilitating exit from this mortal veil, and that is the fear being exploited.
Better we return to seeing what works, gathering that data, even helping those experimenting on themselves to document the methods and results, so we can get the information to make informed decisions about what to use, how much, and how often to achieve desired outcomes--or whether to not use it at all. How many used Ivermectin, doxycycline (or some other antibiotic) and zinc during COVID, who tested positive, and what were their outcomes? What else, if anything did they use?
[I did. The 'horse paste' in weight appropriate dose (.2 mg/kg of Ivermectin), once per day, 200 mg of Doxycycline per day, one zinc supplement tablet (50 mg) per day, 1000 mg vitamin C per day, and recovered in a week, despite being overweight, having scarring in my lungs, a type 2 diabetic, and over 60--four comorbidities that should have contributed to my death.]
Two others I knew used what I call 'AMA medicine', and trusted "The ScienceTM" and died, in hospital.
I had seen Zelenko's YouTube video (before it got pulled) describing Hydroxychloroquine, Azithromycin, and Zinc usage as a treatment protocol for COVID, explaining what each component did and how that fit into the strategy to defeat the disease.
He sold a supplement package later (a 'sin' used against him, enabling people claim he was just hawking pills and not a 'real' doctor) which had most of what was needed in a single package.
But the video, before it was pulled, made sense. I dug into the effects of Zinc on SARS, and it killed the virus by halting replication in vitro and in vivo during research done in 2005 (linked somewhere in the NIH library). The HCQ got the zinc through the cell membrane into the cytoplasm, the Zithromax warded off bacterial infection and gave the virus time to die out. It made good, scientific sense that this would work against SARS-Cov-2.
Having heard how Hydroxychloroquine was a killer on CNN, as if one tablet would lay you out, and my mother taking it off-label for Rheumatoid arthritis for 7 years, I knew CNN was lying. Mom's in her 90s, now.
What I did not understand was why they would lie about something like that.
HCQ was, primarily (on label), an anti-parasitic, used off label for RA and Lupus. (Which is why I paid attention to whispers of Ivermectin being useful, too, to help get the Zinc ions into the cell, through the membrane, where they could shut down the replication of the virus and let the body clean up the wreckage, incidentally, developing natural immunity, something the body does with most pathogens it survives.)
I had read the 2015 Nature article that I still believe heralded the invention of COVID, and it noted that known anti-virals were ineffective, but no one had tried an anti-parasitic. Was this class of drugs key to defeating the virus?
Needless to say, the amount of damage prevented by and the effectiveness of those HCQ and IVM protocols was greatest earliest in the progression of the disease, and the protocols were an early onset treatment, although there were claims that they could help as the disease was more advanced. Zelenko had claimed to have treated some 800+ patients with the HCQ protocol and only one had been hospitalized, all not waiting for confirmation of COVID (which early on could have taken 2 weeks to confirm, allowing the disease to progress to a critical stage), but as soon as they showed symptoms. The likelihood of harm from the protocol was very low, despite CNN's rantings.
Railing against that possibility as a selling point for little tested and unproven shots was also scientifically weak. Studies were produced showing HCQ (only) as ineffective against COVID in hospitalized (more advanced) patients, but in only part of one study was Azithromycin administered, too, and NEVER (as in not one study) was Zinc supplementation also administered. An ionophore without ions is like sending empty landing craft to the beach on D-Day.
In the meantime, drugs were being administered which had known lethal or damaging side-effects, in hospital, experimentally (even though results of experimentation in Africa had shown renal failure to be common in patients taking that particular drug), and respirators were used to push congestion into the deepest recesses of struggling lungs in an effort to push air into them too. Of course antibiotics are ineffective against viruses, so they were not administered. It has been postulated that a lot of people who officially died of COVID actually died of an opportunistic bacterial pneumonia, taking advantage of stagnant mucous in the lungs.
It is unknown how many actually used one of those protocols and survived just fine, or had negative results (I'm sure those would have been proclaimed loud and widely had there been some, just to bolster the narrative, but that did not happen). Only a study conducted in Brazil where toxic doses of Chloroquine (a different drug from HCQ) were administered was spoken of, and in that study the dosages were lethal and the study was stopped--the point that CNN made--that the study was stopped because the subjects died, but not why they died, and somehow conflating the effects of the two different drugs.
Billions were made selling shots with questionable efficacy, and even safety, depending on who is doing the talking, all under the Emergency Use Authorization maintained by decrying the HCQ and IVM protocols as not being viable treatments.
There was a definite money motive to not do good science and preserve the narrative.
Now, I'm using COVID as an example, without having gone across the Oncological red line and pointing to 'managing' cancer, but both have great potential to make lots of money now, as do other chronic and often lethal diseases.
If you came up with a simple pill or protocol that would cure, not inhibit, but cure cancer--even just one or two forms--the financial devastation that would wreak on the medical industry is incalculable.
Entire clinics and careers have been built around cutting this out and radiating that and administering cocktails of medicines that come just short of killing the patient in hopes the cancer dies first. Even buying a few months more comes at a premium. Would a single (or a couple of) inexpensive off-the-shelf compounds that suppressed cancer, limited tumor growth, or even caused remission be suppressed if they could not be freshly compounded, patented, and administered under a new name for tremendous profit?
Stay tuned.
A friend with a PSA of 800 (Stage 4 prostate cancer) opted out of chemo after it nearly killed him, and has been taking Ivermectin. His last PSA was well under 100, a year down the road, and he has recovered his energy and even put 30 lbs back on. No new tumor growth.
Others have indicated similar results. That's "anecdotal evidence" and not considered to be scientifically valid because the 'right people' weren't taking notes, but he is not alone, and those taking note in the land of unofficial medicine have tried the same on other cancers as well. That jury is out, despite some promising results.
What has shifted in the medical field over the last 100 years:
The trend to treat symptoms, not causes.
Pharmacological research is steered by potential profit, not by any altruistic motive of doing good. It's funded by a corporate board, seeking profit for the stockholders, so limited diseases which have too few sufferers or cures which have no profit potential (already generic or non-patentable) get little or no focus.
This is fertile ground for any from those seeking cures desperately for their loved ones or selves to encounter charlatans and hucksters promising hope but delivering little, and unfortunately, those who genuinely are seeking a cure, 'old school' to relieve suffering and maybe get some recognition (which will bring profit later, theoretically), who are investigating repurposing known drugs or using natural and unpatentable substances to try to find cures will be lumped in with the charlatans and demonized by the news outlets that have at least one prescription drug ad per commercial cycle.
It isn't that medicine can't do good, it becomes a question of whether the shift to immediate pecuniary reward over ending pain and suffering is preventing it from doing well.
