Surely it’s time to stop medical
misinformation?

When is someone going to do something about the routine misinformation being peddled by orthodox medicine? 

While social media “fact”-checkers and mainstream media blast stalwarts like Dr Joseph Mercola and Dr Robert Malone, orthodox medicine’s academic journals seem to have free rein to publish whatever they like, without criticism or comeback.

We’re indebted to the Vitamin D Society – https://www.vitamindsociety.org – and GrassrootsHealth – https://www.grassrootshealth.net – for their critique (page 27) of a New England Journal of Medicine paper that had the world’s media declaring that vitamin D “doesn’t work”. The fact that most of the coverage had a gleeful tone shows just how deeply the pharmaceutical industry (who now control the academic journals) is also influencing the mainstream media with millions of pounds in advertising and pressure on journalists to spin the news the way it wants. If you don’t, your contacts for quotes and story leads among clinicians and researchers rapidly dry up. 

Now the NEJM claims to be “the world’s leading medical journal” (and website). Lead author of the paper is Dr Meryl LeBoff, MD, who is Professor of Medicine at Harvard Medical School, which is ranked the USA’s best for research. So this is the best they can do?

What is exposed here is not just the shoddy science routinely accepted for publication in the leading medical journals, but also a stunning ignorance about biochemical individuality, nutrient interactions and, well, nutrition science in general.

 Perhaps the most startling weakness of a study claiming that vitamin D “did not result in a significantly lower risk of fractures than placebo” is that thousands of participants were all given the same dose (2,000iu) and yet were not tested to see if they had achieved an effective serum level of D. 

In 2014, Dr Robert Heaney published his “Guidelines for optimising design and analysis of clinical studies of nutrient effects” in Nutrition Reviews, a peer-reviewed Oxford University Press journal. 

The Heaney criteria provide a sound basis for evaluating the worth of any study involving nutrients – and is especially useful for checking research that inappropriately applies the pharmaceutical industry-orientated RCT to test single nutritional molecules. The high-ups at institutions such as Harvard and the NEJM probably haven’t even read it.

Mask on, mask off

See page 46 this issue to “enjoy” another example of “how junk science got spread like wildfire”, as Dr Alasdair Munro put it. In this case a fraudulent paper written to support the mythical power of face masks vs COVID that was seized on and promoted by science writers, a health minister and a bunch of other gullible “influencers”. None of them had their accounts closed.

Vaccinated? No, I’m in the control group…

With the CDC apparently deciding it has been following the “wrong” science all along (a reversal of policy, but no apology – see page 46), and the UK seemingly headed for an epidemic of deaths from “unknown causes” (also page 46), we must be forgiven some scepticism about the latest from the vaccine moguls. The UK media has proudly and uncritically (of course) regurgitated the Government’s propaganda about the UK being the first in the world to approve Moderna’s new “dual strain” COVID jab aimed at both the original SARS virus and the more recent Omicron variant.

Why is this something to be proud of? The speed at which Moderna has rolled out this new vaccine OBVIOUSLY precludes any long-term safety tests…but that doesn’t seem to worry anybody. The mass experiment continues – me, I’m staying in the control group.

An end to Alzheimer’s? It starts with prevention

All those little things we ignore – forgetting where the car keys are, why we went upstairs, is that person somebody we know, what on earth is the name of that supplement – I know it begins with B, why can’t I work out this client’s fee, why is packing a suitcase just impossible…?

This isn’t “just getting old”, any of these may be the early signs of Alzheimer’s. And don’t be taken in by “mild” cognitive impairment. Equate this lovely, reassuring diagnosis with pre-diabetes. If you are “pre-diabetic”, you have diabetes. If you have MCI, assume you have Alzheimer’s.

Finally we’re doing something about this. IHCAN and a horde of other natural health organisations and companies are getting behind the new Alzheimer’s is Preventable campaign, run by FoodfortheBrain.org and Patrick Holford. Read all about the campaign and the science behind it, starting page 8 this issue. 

Simon Martin
Editor

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