BM Hegde is a full blown anti vaxxer Why is any credence at all being
paid to his claims?
--srs
On Fri, Feb 1, 2019 at 9:35 AM +0530, "Srini RamaKrishnan" <che...@gmail.com>
wrote:
The respected medical journal Lancet is named after the knife used to lance
boils - and this was the specific metaphor the journal founder intended to
convey, to bring a modicum of scientific rigor to the work of medicine
which he felt was a messy boil on the face of humanity, full of half truths
and lies. This was 1823.
Cut to the present, and we see that for the last ten or twenty years well
respected Doctors, Professors and even editors of journals like Lancet have
repeatedly sounded the warning bell and warned that more than half the
studies they publish in their peer reviewed journals can't be trusted.
Then we see Pharma companies like Pfizer and GSK alone have paid more than
8 billion dollars each in the last two decades as malpractice settlements
in the US alone, but I don't see anyone calling them quacks. They literally
budget 1-2% of their revenue for future legal settlements annually. When
expecting to get caught pulling a con, and setting aside money for fines is
part of the business model, we have come a long way from science. It's just
business. Not service. Not science. They even continue to sell drugs that
have been banned or declared harmful in gullible parts of the world where
the law is yet to wake up. That is the very definition of a con artist, who
moves to new markets where the marks are still stupid.
The modern drug industry is clutching at straws - after billions of dollars
in research they have been forced to admit that the placebo effect is the
most effective drug in their arsenal, and they don't know how it works.
There is a point at which some people wake up to the fact that the practice
of institutional medicine is one of the biggest cons. For instance, Dr. B M
Hegde, is a world renowned cardiologist and a Padma Bhushan awardee who has
spoken out repeatedly against the modern medical business that pushes
invasive bypass surgeries, angioplasties and stents, which he says shorten
lives and reduce quality of life - he advocates instead calming the mind
using meditation and relaxation to accept death, and to allow the heart to
naturally route around blockages.
There's a tendency among Nobel laureates to think out of the box because
they finally have nothing to lose. Incidentally Dr. Rustum Roy is said to
have been nominated several times. Science cannot be science when it is
wedded to money and power - it doesn't matter how brilliant you are, if you
don't please the people with the purse you may as well rot. To speak truth
to power requires courage, which is impossible when you are a slave.
When you ignore this reality you find out the hard way what it costs - as
with Dr. C. V. Raman, the 1930 winner of the Nobel prize in Chemistry who
antagonized the ruling elite, especially Nehru and was expelled from IISC
for not being political enough. He reportedly smashed his Bharat Ratna
repeatedly with a hammer and gave up Chemistry, instead he taught his
neighbor's children Carnatic music in his last decades, and hung a board
outside his house - "No politicians allowed" - which mainly fingered the
politicians that filled the boards of research institutes, but also the
actual politicians who were their puppet masters.
Most scientists today spend more than half or 3/4ths of their time on
non-research activities, such as grant applications, networking,
administrative affairs, and teaching. What little time is left is spent on
the cargo cult ritual of publishing papers only on topics that were funded
for being normative, and that stand the best chance of not being rejected
for being too brave.
Medicine is about the whole human - not just the body, but also the mind
and the spirit. I think too many are still addicted to the opiate of
accepted wisdom.
