It’s a rundown of some of the more interesting incidents of mass hysteria, where numerous people began to manifest symptoms based entirely on their belief that something existed when it didn’t. It’s actually more common than one might think. History is littered with examples of whole populations erupting in uncontrollable laughter, people believing they could not breathe and thus passing out, men panicking that their penises were retracting into their bodies or the female equivalent, where women believe their reproductive tracts are closing up. In some cases, individuals have injured themselves in an attempt to stop the fictional condition from progressing.

Never put 100% trust in anyone, not even yourself!

The story might have ended there and been the sad tale of a young lady who lost an arm to cancer.   However, due to her poor choices, the story is much much sadder.   Ms. Ainscough decided to decline further treatment.  She instead opted for an organic diet, coffee enemas and various detoxification rituals.   She believes she is “healing” her cancer and that this is an example of her taking responsibility and doing the right thing.

Ms. Ainscough looks pretty good and, according to her, she feels pretty good.   That’s actually not too surprising.  The cancer has invaded her soft tissues and is growing and spreading, but, at least from the sound of it, it has not become debilitating just yet.   The sad thing is Ms. Ainscough seems to be very confident she is getting better because she lacks the most basic understanding of what the condition is and how it needs to be treated.   It’s certainly true that surgery, chemotherapy and radiation are damaging, but that’s because they have to be.  Cancer cannot be “healed.”  It must be killed.  Cancerous cells are damaged cells of ones own body, which grow out of control, due to a breakdown in the function of the mechanisms that control cellular growth.   Cancer is a problem inherent to animal cell biology, it can happen in anyone, for any number of reasons, but usually with no single attributable cause, and when it does, the only way it can be cured is by destroying the cancerous cells.

Ms. Ainscough’s complete lack of even the most basic understanding of how cancer is treated is apparent in some of her statements, such as this one:

Drugs do not cure cancer. They just don’t. Every now and then, chemotherapy and radiation treatments may put a patient into “remission”, but this is not truly healing. This is certainly not a cure. Why? Because cancer is so much more than the tumour it shows up as. The tumours are merely the symptoms. And when you just target the symptom without dealing with the root cause, the disease is going to keep showing up. You can chase the disease around your body with surgery and radiation, and you can douse it with toxic chemicals, but this is not an effective long-term solution. This is why you here so often of people whose “cancer came back”. They didn’t do the work to truly reverse their disease. Cancer is nothing more than your body telling you that something has got to give. It is the result of a breakdown in your body’s defenses after it has endured years of abuse in the form of a toxic diet, toxic mind and toxic environment.

No. That’s not it at all. The tumors are the problem. The tumors are composed of the cancerous cells that are the root of the problem and the reason it often comes back is that it’s so damn hard to get every one of those cells, especially when they start spreading to different areas of the body.   While cancer can be the result of carcinogenic chemicals, it can also be caused by heredity or by the random degradation of genetic material that happens as a result of cellular respiration.

Let me be blunt about the sad truth here.  Jess Ainscough is going to die.   I don’t mean in fifty years either.   The cancer she has now is going to kill her.   It’s too late for her to have a good prognosis, and if she continues without treatment, then the already poor odds are going to get worse.   She may feel okay for the time being, but she will die.  Her only hope is spontaneous remission, which in this kind of cancer is all but unheard of.

I should note that I am not a doctor and I do not have access to Ms. Ainscough’s complete medical information.  However, what I do know is that she claims to have been diagnosed with epithelioid sarcoma.   If this is indeed true (and if it’s a lie then she’s downright evil), and if she is not receiving treatment by surgery, radiation and chemotherapy, then the cancer can be expected to be fatal.   This has been confirmed by experts I have consulted before writing this.  As one put it “Not treating epithelioid sarcoma is suicidal.”

The thing that really bothers me, however, is that she is working very hard to put out the message that her non-treatment is working and is the best course of action.  She’s been embraced by the media and this idiocy could easily kill others who buy into it.

Via Dolly:

“I’m healing myself from cancer naturally”

In 2008, when I was 22 years old, I was diagnosed with a rare type of cancer called epithelioid sarcoma in my left hand and arm.

I was living in Sydney at the time and working as the online editor for DOLLY magazine. I was living an ideal life for someone in their early twenties – burning the candle at both ends, paying no attention to how my actions could affect my health, but having a whole lot of fun while I was at it.

Everything was going exactly according to my life plan. Or so I thought.

On the 24th of April, 2008 I went to see my hand surgeon to have a cast removed, following an operation I had to biopsy some lumps that had been popping up all over my left hand and arm.

After taking the cast off, my doctor told me the news that would change my life in too many ways to predict. He said that I had cancer, and that the type of cancer I have is so rare that not many doctors know how to treat it.

Epithelioid sarcoma doesn’t respond to chemotherapy or radiation, and my only chance of prolonging my survival would be to have my arm amputated at the shoulder. But essentially, my condition was incurable.

None of this made any sense to me. I felt so healthy, and I looked healthy. I could not understand how my life had come down to a decision about whether to have my whole, fully functioning arm chopped off.

After so much anguish and being given no other options, I signed the papers and arranged to have the amputation. However, Baby Jesus, Buddha, Elvis – or whoever is up there – must have been looking out for me, because two days before I was due to have the operation, my medical team came to me with an alternative option.

They wanted to tie a tourniquet around my armpit so that an extremely high dose of chemotherapy drugs could be pumped through my arm. I spent eight days in hospital having the treatment, then a week at home recovering.

Following scans showed I was clear of cancer, but in 2009 – not even a year after going into remission – the cancer was back.

This time I was told that my only real chance of prolonging my survival would be to have my arm amputated at the shoulder, but that this would just be biding me time. My case was regarded as terminal.

Deciding this was not good enough, I took matters into my own hands. I refused their offers and began searching for natural, alternative cancer treatments.

The way I saw it I had two choices. I could let them chase the disease around my body until there was nothing left of me to cut, zap or poison; or I could take responsibility for my illness and bring my body to optimum health so that it can heal itself. For me it was an easy decision.

I began looking at the different ways I may have contributed to the manifestation of my disease and then stopped doing them.

I swapped a lifestyle of late nights, cocktails and Lean Cuisines for carrot juice, coffee enemas and meditation and became an active participant in my treatment.

This research led me to Gerson Therapy which ensures you have a perfectly balanced diet for optimum health, assisting your body to flush out nasties whilst feeding it with all the goodness it needs to flourish.

Epithelioid sarcoma is a relatively rare type of cancer of the soft tissues. It usually occurs in the extremities and is most common in young adults. The tumors are slow growing, but have an extremely high rate of recurrence. Whenever possible they are best treated by surgical removal. As with most cancers, the earlier the tumor is removed, the better and the lesser the chances of recurrence, but even when the entire tumor can be removed, it frequently recurs. Up to 77% of patients will have the cancer reoccur after it has been removed.

Amputation would seem to be an extreme step to take, but in the case of Epitheloid Sarcoma, it is often the recommended treatment that offers the greatest probability of long term survival. The cancer is prone to metastasis early in its development, which is what makes it so difficult to treat and necessitates radical surgery as the best means of avoiding recurrence.   The cancer is most prone to “local metastasis” which is why operations to remove only the tumor are frequently unsuccessful.   Operations to remove larger areas of tissue or amputate the entire limb have a much higher success rate.   It’s hard to gauge the exact success rate because it depends very heavily on how early the cancer is caught and to what degree it has spread.  If the entire region of the cancer is removed, metastasis is only 30%.  Therefore, while amputation of a cancerous limb does not guarantee that the cancer is cured, but it offers the best chance for doing so.   Even despite the disfigurement and lack of function, it is generally advised that such radical surgery be the primary means of treatment.

The condition becomes extremely difficult to successfully treat once it has begun to spread to more distant areas of the body.  It does not respond well to chemotherapy some chemotherapy drugs do appear to have effect on large tumors, but the data is inconclusive due to lack of peer reviewed studies evaluating long term survival.  Radiation, though helpful for local occurrences, is of limited value once the cancer begins to spread to multiple areas of the body.   In some cases, aggressive radiation therapy does stack up favorably to amputation and therefore may allow for retention of a limb while still providing a similar success rates.   Surgical removal of the tumor combined with radiation therapy in the area of the tumor is another option which offers relatively good success with the ability to retain the limb.

The fact that this type of cancer is not common makes it difficult to get good statistical data on the success rates of different treatment regimes.   With aggressive treatment by surgery, radiation and chemotherapy, the overall success rate is, sadly, only lackluster.   About 42-55% of patients treated will survive ten years or more, which is generally considered the benchmark for being “cured.” Ms. Ainscough, however, would have had better than average odds of survival, given her demographic.  Women tend to have better survival rates than men, and younger patients tend to have better survival rates than older ones.  In more favorable cases, the rate of successful treatment can be as high 80%.

It’s hard to tell what Ms. Ainscough’s prognosis would be, but it appears it would have been pretty good, based on her age, gender and general health.  With aggressive treatment, she had a very good shot at beating the cancer, even if it may have cost her an arm.   Regardless of her ultimate outcome, treatment could certainly offer Ms. Ainscough a longer life, even if it were not ultimately successful.   In all likelihood, the aggressive chemotherapy she had early on has given her at least a year or more extra to live.

Unfortunately, it’s now probably too late.   I asked a doctor about what would be recommended now, and he said it might be amputation, if the cancer is completely or at least mostly in one arm, but if it’s spread further, amputating the arm would not provide much benefit.  If the cancer has moved beyond her arm, which it probably has, then there’s very little hope of a successful outcome.  Once the cancer has reached widespread distribution, the likelihood of long term survival is small, although it is not impossible. Even if treatment could still result in a favorable outcome, it appears that Ms. Ainscough is not open to the possibility of reconsidering mainstream medicine.

The progress of this type of cancer is usually slow.  Since it primarily affects soft tissues, it may be grow and spread for quite some time before presenting serious symptoms or life threatening complications.  Soft tumors develop around the body, mainly in the deep subcutaneous tissues.  They are slow growing and may or may not result in noticeable tenderness or discomfort.  It can, in some cases, result in surface ulcers.  The slow but aggressive cancer will eventually begin to impair normal functions as it invades lymph nodes and structures like the abdominal wall.

It can take some time for this form of cancer to become debilitating and even longer for it to kill.  The most common way that this cancer kills is by infesting the lungs.  It may take some time, but eventually the cancer will begin to impair lung function.   Palative care may include supplimental oxygen, which can allow patients to live a bit longer, even as their lung function declines.  Ultimately, this is the manner in which epithelioid sarcoma kills.

I really do not take any delight in saying this, but based on all the research I have done and the opinion of doctors in the field, if Jess Ainscough really does have epithelioid sarcoma and is not having it treated then she will almost certainly die in the near future.   She may continue in relative comfort and appear healthy for the time being, but the cancer is only going to get worse.  She will begin to suffer progressively worse symptoms and will die, although it may take anywhere from a few months to a few years for it to happen.   She has missed the opportunity to have a reasonably good prognosis.   If she were to start treatment now, her likelihood of living a full life would be low, but if she continues to forgo treatment, it will be even worse.

I really find it extremely sad.   Ms. Ainscough is a twenty six year old lady who may be naive and has been very quick to embrace alternative medicine as a cure for a disease she seems to have no understanding of, but being naive hardly is grounds for a death sentence.   Sadly it does not look like she is going to make it to thirty.

Now this is really going to sound terribly cold, but considering she is going to die and there’s not much to be done about that, part of me hopes it happens soon, because has long as she is alive (which isn’t going to be a whole lot longer, no matter how you look at it), she’s spreading this deadly misinformation.   Maybe once she dies, her tragic case will make others wake up and realize they need to get their condition treated.

The ones who really should have to answer for this disgrace is not so much Ms. Ainscough, who is as much a victim as anything else.   This poor woman is dying and does not even know it, because charlatans exploited her ignorance and lack of blind trust.  Media outlets have given her a platform to spread it even further.   In the end, she’ll be the dead one and they’ll be laughing all the way to the bank.

Unless she’s lying about having this condition, in which case she’s just plain evil.

Finally, in a highly unusual step, I wrote to Ms. Ainscough:

Dear Miss Aincough,

I am writing you because I have read your posts and articles about your battle with cancer and the actions you have taken to try to treat your condition. I am sure that you firmly believe that you are getting better and that you are doing the right thing to improve your health. You may even feel better and perfectly healthy at the moment. However, you have been had. You are taking advice from people who have no idea what they are talking about. If you continue to do so, it will likely kill you.

I am not a doctor, but I know when a doctor should be consulted and being diagnosed with cancer is most certainly a time when you need a doctor. Having read your accounts, I can understand why you feel they are not giving you the answers or advice you are looking for. The modern healthcare system often bounces patients between white coat-clad professionals who do extremely cold and clinical assessments and seem to take little interest in personal wellness. This is a symptom of doctors needing to treat many people and being forced to work within constraints. It’s a heavily regulated and impersonal system. That does not, however, mean they don’t know what they are talking about.

The doctors who treat cancer understand it very well. They have spent years studying it on a biochemical level, a microscopic level and on a whole-body level. They know how it works, how it progresses and how different chemicals interact with the cancer cells. Becoming a doctor is not easy and you’ll generally find doctors to be very smart people.

Despite what you might have heard, doctors are not in it just for money. Sure, a career in medicine pays pretty well, but it’s not as simple as that. Medical school is long, hard and expensive. Doctors have to spend years in low paying residency before they ever get the chance to make good money, and even then the salaries doctors get are good, but they’re not usually enough to become extremely rich – usually just upper middle class. They have to worry about things like malpractice and may be forced to be on call at odd hours. If a person only wants money, they’ll go into finance or become a lawyer. Doctors, on the other hand, may make good pay, but they are also motivated by the desire to help and the challenge of things.

I don’t think anyone is going to deny that cancer is a tough thing to treat. It’s not as simple as nutrition, and if it was, we would not be spending billions a year working on improving treatment. Cancer is a problem inherent to animal cells. Sometimes they break down and start to divide out of control. When this happens, there’s usually no attributable cause. It’s not your body reacting to something, but just a random error that causes the body to attack itself. This is why it’s so hard to treat and why the treatment can be so difficult.

I realize that losing an arm is something that anyone would want to avoid. Being young and healthy and suddenly hearing you’ve got to have your arm amputated to avoid dying from cancer must be a huge shock. However, I assure you that no competition medical professional would ever recommend such a thing unless they thought it was absolutely necessary and even then, they don’t take it lightly.

The reason you have heard things that you do not want to hear from doctors is that they are required by the ethics of their profession to be truthful. When they said you had to have an arm removed and that it would not guarantee that it would successfully stop the cancer, they were telling you the cold hard truth. When they say the disease could kill you and they can’t be sure they’ll be able to stop you, they are telling you the truth. It’s not the reality you want or they want, but it’s just the way things are. Those who tell you to drink juice and have coffee enemas can tell you much more positive and desirable things. They can tell you that you are being cured and will live a long healthy life with both arms and no cancer. They can tell you this because they lie.

One thing that is universal with cancer treatment is that it always is always more effective when started early. You have already waited some time and therefore, your odds of success are now lower than they had been. They are not zero and if you start treatment now, you have a fighting chance of beating the disease. If you want until tomorrow, they will be worse. The longer you wait, the worse the odds get.

I really do not expect you to listen to this, because I’m sure you have heard this all before, but I still felt ethically obligated to at least try.

Please consider seeking real medical treatment or you will almost certainly die.   If you get treatment now, you might have a chance.

Regards,
Steve Packard

Helsinki/Finland, January 11, 2012-Epidemiological studies are given the most weight in evaluation of human health effects. Therefore, when researchers started their effort to find out whether cell phone radiation causes brain cancer, epidemiology was given the most of attention – and the most funding.

Well… yes, since Epidemology is the study of health events, disease patterns, health statistics and disease rates and their relation to factors like environment, lifestyle and other causes, it would seem to be the field of study that would apply to such a question.

It’s as straight forward as determining that geology is the appropriate field of science to look to when trying to determine the characteristics of a rock.

However, and please let me play “devils advocate”,

Only if I can play with science advocate.

is the epidemiology overrated?

No.

There, are we done?

Will epidemiology ever give us reliable answers concerning cell phone radiation and brain cancer?

Yes, and they have. Or is it simply that you don’t like the answer and want it to be something else, therefore you consider it flawed?

In 2010 and in 2011, two of the largest epidemiological studies on brain cancer were published. It appears that the time and money were used generously,

There’s a lot of interest in the topic, so a lot went into it. I’m not certain which studies you mean, but there have been some enormous ones recently.

but the studies failed to provide reliable answers concerning cell phones radiation and brain cancer. Flaws in the design of both studies prevented delivering conclusive answers.

Really? Well, if you say so. But thankfully, we don’t have to rely on any two studies. Two studies don’t mean much in the world of epidemiology anyway. To actually get a conclusive answer, you need to have confirming data coming from many studies. In this case we’re lucky enough to have literally thousands. So, you could actually discard two of them if you so choose and it won’t change the balance of the evidence much, because there’s such a huge amount from other sources.

It was 1999 when the largest case-control epidemiological study, INTERPHONE, was planned. At that time, optimists hoped that by the end of this project in 2004 we would know whether cell phone radiation causes brain cancer.

Actually, I think we had a pretty good idea even back in 1999, so it doesn’t seem very optimistic to think we would by 2004. That would be like me predicting that in the year 2017 we’ll know that the earth revolves around the sun. Unless there’s some kind of complete collapse of civilization that leaves behind only a handful of completely uneducated people, I am pretty sure we will know that in 2017, since we do already know it now.

I think I see where this is going though. The Interphone study was supposed to be one of the largest studies of this type and would dispel the doubt forever. It pretty much did.

After several delays, INTERPHONE published the results of the glioma brain cancer study in 2010.

The results were confusing, to say the least. Use of the cell phone for less than 10 years seemed to have a “protective” effect, whereas the use of the cell phone for more than 10 years showed a small increase in glioma occurrence.

Well I agree on one thing: The study abstract didn’t do a very good job of putting this all in context. It might simply be that research scientists are very apprehensive about using absolutes and tend to talk in degree of confidence. The tiny increase in giloma, but only in certain subsets was almost certainly statistical noise. It was miniscule. The “protective” effect can be attributed to a combination of statistical noise and possibly some slight confounding factors.

The balance of the data provides pretty good confirmation of no overall risk increase. Again, this should have been made more clear. The problem largely stems from having non scientifically literate persons get involved in the reporting. Reports and public officials have a tendency to focus on very narrow portions of a study like this and take them out of context. They will generally then demand to know whether the researchers can be 100% confident that this is not in fact a risk effect. The answer to that question is always no, statistical analysis never regards anything as being 100% certain. Then the study gets reported as if it raised doubts, when it actually does not.

Several problems with the design of INTERPHONE were debated. By design, the INTERPHONE study was unable to detect brain cancer induced by cell phone radiation because of its long (over 10 years) latency period.

Okay, that might be the case, but plenty of other studies did look at longer latency periods. A few went so far as to track down some of the early adopters of cell phones who started using them frequently in the early 1980’s and they also found no increase in brain cancer.

That said, even if the AVERAGE latency period were something like twenty or thirty years, it’s hard for me to imagine that there could be a bell curve so narrow as to have zero detectable risk increase after a much shorter period of time.

At the time of execution of INTERPHONE (2000-2004), cell phones were in common use for only a few years. There would be not enough time for the development and diagnosis of brain cancer if it was caused by cell phone radiation.

It does not matter how common they were by the early 2000’s. The fact of the matter is that they have existed since the late 1970’s and they have been used by many people since then. Sure, the actual proportion of the population that began using cell phones a lot in the early 1980’s is small, but it’s still more than large enough to produce good study results.

It’s not even really a cell phone issue. Wireless phones are just UHF/Microwave transmitters and those have been around for ages. There are studies that have been done on others exposed much longer. Police officers started using radar guns in the late 1950’s to measure the speed of motorists and some cops spent thirty years working highway patrol with a radar gun in their car. Others spent their careers as microwave technicians for AT&T or television networks. Military personnel worked on the deck of ships with radar antennas energized nearby.

Studies have been done on these individuals. Many of them, in fact. The results are consistent and compelling: The only health effects ever detected are acute thermal injuries and no chronic effect of exposure to RF fields has ever been documented.

However, there was an even more important design flaw. The information about the extent of exposures to cell phone radiation was based on individual recollection of the subjects in the study. The study subjects were asked about their history of using cell phone, including how long and how many phone calls they made in the past.

Perhaps in this study, but not in all. While it may introduce a potential source of error, I’m hard pressed to see how this could possibly skew the studies that badly. Even if you rely on spotty recollection, the fact that people who reported being heavy phone users show no greater cancer risks than those who never owned a cell phone at all would seem to be pretty hard to mess up.

By the way: Studies on cigarette smoking and cancer have largely been based on the subject’s recollection of how many packs they usually smoked a day. Despite this, they had no problem picking up on the fact that tobacco causes lung cancer.

It is a very unreliable method. Who of us remembers how many and how long calls made a few days ago? The study subjects were asked to recall cell phone use up to ten years before the study.

Okay, lets see if I can do this…

Got my first cell phone in the summer of 2001. Before that I had used cell phones a bit, but only occasionally when on that belonged to someone else. I worked for a company that sold cell phones so I had a good plan with a discount. Consequently, I used it a good few minutes a day or more. I would say my use has generally been on the increase since then, although not always. I’ve generally made or received three or four calls per day, usually each one only being a few minutes. Occasionally I have longer calls. In 2004 and 2005 I had a job that had me on the road a lot and my usage went up to about a dozen calls a day, but mostly short. As it stands now I use about 180 minutes of talk time in a month, but occasionally one or two long calls can push that way up. That’s how it’s been for the past few years.

Good enough?

Therefore, by design, INTERPHONE compared reliable information concerning diagnosed cancers with entirely unreliable information about exposures. Such kind of comparison can not produce reliable result, as was seen in the confusing results of the study published by INTERPHONE in 2010.

Again, you’re presuming that this error is so great that it would make someone who has never owned a cell phone indistinguishable in risk from someone who says they’ve been a heavy cell phone user for the past ten years. That just does not make sense. Even if recollection skewed the data, it shouldn’t so enough to cause that kind of discrepancy.

In 2011, the Danish Cohort published another largest study, evaluated in this column in December 2011.

Similarly to INTERPHONE, the Danish Cohort compared reliable information on diagnosed brain cancers with the absolutely unreliable information about exposures based not on the use of cell phone but on the length of subscription with the network operator.

No. That’s actually perfectly reasonable. It stands to reason that a person who has a cell phone contract and owns a cell phone will be more prone to using a cell phone than one who does not. This is even more true in the early years. In 1983, a handheld cell phone cost about four thousand US dollars. Anyone who pays that much for something obviously has reason to do so. For example, real estate agents were some of the first to embrace the technology, because even given the high cost, they needed to make appointments while traveling between properties.

It might be imperfect in that some cell phone owners will use it more than others, but a cell phone owner will always use it more than one who does not own a cell phone.

The study also contaminated the control group with the cell phone users.

The study looked at the habits of long term user as compared to the general population and to groups of similar demographic profiles. Some of those included those who had used a cell phone as well, but didn’t you just assert that it would not matter since the latency period is very long? In any case, it’s all but impossible to find a large group these days which has never owned a cell phone. So the study compared long term cell phone users to those who either had recently acquired a cell phone, never owned a cell phone or had been very light user. The study actually looked at the groups using more than one method. It examined it based on the length of the phone ownership, the average usage of the phone, the reported habits etc.

In all cases, no coloration to increases in brain cancer was ever detected.

Again, as with the INTERPHONE, the Danish Cohort made comparison of reliable data on cancer with the unreliable information about exposures cannot produce reliable final result.

And what the hell would you consider to be reliable data?

Brain cancer is a rare disease, somewhat in the range of around 10 cases per 100,000 people. It means that in order to reliably detect the change, which seems to be less than 50% according to flawed INTERPHONE, tens of thousands of the study subjects should be analyzed. This is very expensive but not necessarily productive.

It’s actually not quite that rare. In fact, it’s about twice as common as cited.

But regardless, the fact is that if the probability of brain cancer were increased by using a cell phone, it would be easy to detect if that probability increase were large. In other words, if it increased the risk from, 22 per 100,000 people to 23 per 100,000 people, that would be very hard to find and a massive sample would be needed. On the other hand, if it increased it from 22 per 100,000 people to 100 per 100,000 people, that would be easy to detect and would stand out from the statistical noise in even a modest study.

Therefore, what we can say from these studies, without doubt, is that while it is impossible to rule out the possibility that there is an increased risk, it must be vanishingly small, if it does exist, because otherwise it would have been easily detected.

As shown by the experiences with INTERPHONE and Danish Cohort, large amounts of money (tens of millions of Euros) and ample amounts of time (over 10 years) were used and no reliable answers received.

No, we have reliable answers. They’re just not the ones you want.

In the current situation, with the above presented experience, should the epidemiology be the first kind of studies to use our scarce research resources? Epidemiology is very expensive and takes a very long time to get results. Any flaw in the study design sets us back by ten or more years.

Well I agree in so much as there’s no point in throwing more money at this. We have plenty of data. The jury is not out. The questions have been answered. It’s time to consider spending money on things we don’t know.

Would we be we better off using the available funding for the human studies examining acute effects of cell phone radiation on physiology? This would, of course, include studies of the known molecular events leading to initiation and development of cancer. We still do not know if cell phone radiation triggers any such events in living humans.

We’ve actually done that too.

And as far as molecular events that lead to initiation and development of cancer, those are not observed with microwaves. No mechanism by which that could happen has ever been discovered, despite more than a century of study of RF fields and electromagnetic radiation.

Performing physiological studies on volunteer will provide information whether any known carcinogenic events are triggered by cell phone radiation. Depending on the result, we could act immediately by imposing preventive measures based on scientific evidence.

Yes, we have done that. We’ve done it on humans. We’ve done it on animals. We’ve done it on live tissue cultures. We’ve done it on chemical systems that mimic what goes on in cells.

To provide such information, epidemiology will still need tens of years before it is able to perform effective studies, assuming that studies will be designed without any major flaws. Volunteer studies examining physiology and pro-carcinogenetic events would provide information much faster.

It’s been done. At some point it becomes time to give up on the existence of something which has been studied for so long and has not been determined to exist.

In this time of scarce resources, we need to make choices how to obtain, most reliably and expeditiously, information about the possible effect of cell phone radiation on brain cancer.

Based on the experience of the last 10-15 years, epidemiology does not seem to be the method of choice.

Well, compared to an assclown with an ax to grind and a desire to be in the newspaper, it actually does pretty well.

Hopefully by posting this garbage I can get some sound-minded people to vote it down a bit and make some rational comments to educated those who might believe this dangerous message.

Here it is. The Greater Good: Supposedly a fair look at vaccines, but actually one of the worst pieces of lying propaganda I have ever seen.

This is beyond shameful. It’s a very skilfully made, compelling set of bold faced lies that tug on heartstrings and can easily cost lives. Defeating this kind of propaganda is going to be very difficult. It’s a potent weapon against the war on infectious disease that humanity has fought for its entire history. We’re really going to have to work hard to fight this filth. It may require writing letters to the film festivals and venues that show it.

For a complete and well researched refutation of the film, please visit Science Based Medicine.

Oh, and by the way, there’s no evidence that the health problems of the young lady shown in the beginning are at all related to vaccines. She began to experience health problems which were diagnosed as central nervous system vasculitis and central nervous system lupus “within weeks” of her third dose of the HPV vaccine, but there’s absolutely no evidence the two are related and in all likelihood, the condition had been developing for some time before that. Of course, it’s very sad that she has this condition, but it was not caused by the vaccine. You can read more about it on the Science Based Medicine page.

It is going to be very very hard to counter this kind of media. We’re facing an uphill battle. The major pro-vaccine groups have nowhere near the money necessary to produce a film of this kind of quality and if they did, it would just be portrayed as proof of all the dirty money that big pharma is spending. The only way of combating this is to redouble grass roots efforts, but with this well funded and cunning opposition, it won’t be easy.

In the war on infectious disease, it now seems we have two enemies working in close alliance. One is the pathogenic microbes who seek to invade our bodies and the other is the humans who have defected to their side. I’m not sure anymore which is the tougher one to defeat.

Today has not been a good day for me. I woke up this morning with an itchy, watering, irritated eye. I wiped it, I splashed water in it and that did not seem to help. By the time I was driving to work my other eye was bothering me. In fact, my eyes were so irritated I could hardly keep them open for long and they were watering enough to make it a bit hard to see, especially with the glare of the early morning sun, low on the horizon. I had to keep stopping the car and wiping the tears from my watering eyes, closing them to regain my vision and returning to the road until they started bothering me enough to stop again.

By the time I was at work, it had become obvious that I was suffering from conjunctivitis, commonly known as pinkeye. The outer layer of my eye, the conjunctiva, had become inflamed and was bloodshot, itchy and irritated. It’s a fairly common condition which can be caused by a bacterial or viral infection. In my case, I’d later find out I probably have a minor viral infection, based on the symptoms. It’s generally not terribly serious and tends to clear up on its own within a couple of days, but it’s annoying and uncomfortable. It’s also fairly contagious, so it’s important to wash one’s hands, avoid touching common surfaces when possible and clean those that are touched.

My condition, however, was bad enough that I figured I should probably see a doctor. I made a call to my doctor’s office and was told that unless it was an emergency they wouldn’t be able to have anyone to see me until later in the afternoon. Of course, it’s not an emergency, so I was agreeable to waiting a few hours to have my eyes looked at.

Given that I had to wait a few hours, I went to my local drug store to see if there were any products that might be able to offer some kind of relief in the meantime. I wasn’t looking for a cure, but as my eyes were pretty sore, I thought that there might be some kind of anti-itch, anti-irritation eye drops that would, if nothing else, at least be soothing to my sore eyeballs.

And this is where I almost got swindled, because as I scanned across the shelf of eyedrop products, something caught my watery, itchy, squinting eyes:

I saw the pink eye and the words “Pinkeye relief,” and immediately thought to myself “Well that’s exactly what I’m looking for!”  I then read the indications, stating that it provided relief from redness, irritation and watery discharge.   Again, I thought it was perfect.

You may notice that there word “homeopathic” is written in thin white font against the red background of a tiny band that runs around the box just bellow the picture of the eye.   I literally couldn’t see this at all in my state.    I was really and truly about to buy this product.  Luckily, I have a habit of looking at the back fine print whenever I buy a health product, and this was no exception.  Despite my irritation, I wiped my eyes and forced them all the way open to examine the directions and active ingredients of the product.  Only then did I actually see the words “homeopathic.”

I’m also lucky in that I know what “homeopathy” means, which many people do not.   The fact that it’s homeopathic means that everything else on the front of the box can be discounted as a lie.  It says “relieves the redness, watery discharge & burning associated with conjunctivitis.”  Well, it doesn’t.  That’s just a bold faced lie.   You might think that it would do so, because it says it does right on the box and most products you find on the shelves of your local pharmacy are required by law to only make truthful statements about what symptoms they can provide relief to, but this is homeopathic, so they can lie.

The active ingredients are belladonna, euphrasia and hepar sulphuris, not because these ingredients actually have been shown to help the symptoms of pinkeye, but because if you put them in a healthy eye, they’ll make it get red, irritated and watery.   However, they’re diluted to the point where there are only a few molecules or less actually present in the final product, so there’s really no effect.   The only thing this product might do to help pinkeye is just provide a little bit of lubrication and moisturizing, which any eyedrop could do.

I was lucky to catch this.  In the end I bought some general purpose anti-itch eyedrops that cost half as much as the homeopathic version and actually have some active ingredients that help provide some itch relief.   They didn’t help all that much, but they seem to reduce the itch a bit.   (Note, this is not a placebo controlled study thus my opinion that they seem to help should not be considered to be an objective fact.)

But still, I was very nearly swindled by an extremely dishonest product making a false claim and sitting next to perfectly legitimate products in similar packaging on the same shelf.

And yes, I’m pissed!

I wonder if they actually picked the font and colors to make it intentionally difficult for a person with watery, irritated eyes to see it.  It wouldn’t surprise me if that was the case.

I wrote about this kind of thing a while ago, but this is the first time I was almost swindled, because I’m usually very careful about these sort of things.

Chickenpox is a pretty nasty disease to have.  Like most adults, I went through it when I was a child because there was no vaccine at the time.  It was pretty misserable, but I was lucky, because despite missing more than a week of school and being covered with an  itchy, painful rash, I didn’t have any lasting effects.   Some are not so lucky.  It’s fairly common to be left with disfiguring scars, especially on the face, from chickenpox (I know a few people with such marks on their cheeks or forehead).   It’s less common, though not unheard of to have more severe and lingering effects and occasionally even death.

The virus tends to be less severe in children than adults, there was once a custom of intentionally infecting children with the disease.   So-called “pox parties” were held where children intentionally came into contact with others with chickenpox to get the disease when young.  Whether exposing children to the disease intentionally was ever a justifiable idea is debatable (most medical experts think it was always a bad idea), but it certainly is not any more.   These days, there is a vaccine for chickenpox that is highly effective and avoids the discomfort, suffering, dangers and possible disfigurement of the disease.   The vaccine is now part of the normal vaccine schedule and most children receive it.  Chickenpox is therefore far less common than it once was.

But what to do if you’re a vaccine fearing idiot?  Since the antivax crowd seems to think that getting infections is a good thing and boosts the immune system, a pox party seems like it would be right up their ally.  The only problem is that the vaccine has reduced the number of cases of chickenpox enough to make it difficult to find a good pathogen host to infect your kid with.   So what to do?   Why not use social networking to find other like-minded morons around the world and swap spit by mail with them.

The most popular and widely reported on Facebook group for doing this appears to have been recently shut down, but that’s unlikely to actually stop anyone in the long run.

I’m not even kidding…

Via the Los Angeles Times:

‘Pox parties’: Coming to a mailbox near you?
This week, press reports emerged that some parents, hoping to avoid giving their kids the chickenpox vaccine, were arranging through Facebook to pay strangers to send them “[licked] lollipops, spit or other items” from kids with the illness.

The idea is to expose the kids to the virus to build immunity without having to get a shot.

It’s a lousy strategy, doctors say.

Dr. Wilbert Mason, a professor of clinical pediatrics at USC’s Keck School of Medicine and an infectious disease expert at Children’s Hospital Los Angeles, said he was “dumbfounded” by the news. “I’m speechless, which will make for a very bad interview,” he told Booster Shots. “How could people be so stupid?”

For starters, he said, sending chicken poxthrough the mail probably won’t work, because the varicella virus needs cells to live in, and there probably would be very few cells in spit or on a used lollipop. “It’s unlikely the virus would survive long enough,” he said.

But more resilient types of infections — dangerous ones — could make it, including hepatitis B, group A strep, and staph germs.

Getting chickenpox “naturally” provides immunity that may be more long-lasting than immunity from the vaccinebut can cause complications. It’s rare, but children with varicella can die if they develop pneumonia or encephalitis, Mason said.

Also, chickenpox blisters often get infected, and if they get infected with invasive group A strep, “it can kill [a child] in hours,” he added.

“The most important risk factor for a child getting that infection is varicella,” he said. “Since we’ve had the varicella vaccine, we’ve seen a decrease in children with invasive group A strep. For me, that’s the most compelling reason to get it.”

Thirty years ago, it was common for parents to bring their kids over to a sick friend’s house to get exposed to chickenpox — maybe that’s why today’s “pox parties” seem like a good option to parents put off by vaccines. Mason likened the practice to playing roulette. “It was not a good idea then, and it’s still not a good idea,” he said.

A few are actually flaunting how stupid they are by telling fellow anti-vaxers about their activities.

Via WNEM, CBS 5:

The Facebook group is called “Find a Pox Party in Your Area.” According to the group’s page, it is geared toward “parents who want their children to obtain natural immunity for the chicken pox.”

On the page, parents post where they live and ask if anyone with a child who has the chicken pox would be willing to send saliva, infected lollipops or clothing through the mail.

Parents also use the page to set up play dates with children who currently have chicken pox.

Medical experts say the most troubling part of this is parents are taking pathogens from complete strangers and deliberately infecting their children.

One concern is that they are sending the virus through the mail.

A Facebook post reads, “I got a Pox Package in mail just moments ago. I have two lollipops and a wet rag and spit.” Another woman warns, “This is a federal offense to intentionally mail a contagion.”

Another woman answers, “Tuck it inside a zip lock baggy and then put the baggy in the envelope Don’t put anything identifying it as pox.”

The video on the CBS-5 Website is definitely also worth watching.  It includes an interview with one of the parents who is shipping out the spit.

The chickenpox virus may or may not survive being mailed. In most cases, it probably won’t. Still, for those who might not realize this: it is generally considered to be a bad idea to intentionally ingest the bodily fluids of random people you don’t know and meet on the internet. (Granted some people do this for fun, but at least that involves some other benefits.) It’s certainly not a good idea to do it with someone who is infected with a disease and may be carrying other infections. And if they do have any bacteria infections, putting the biological material on a sugary item and placing it in a warm envelope is not going to do anything to prevent that bacteria from multiplying.

In other words: what the hell are these people thinking???

Thankfully, the law seems to be on the side of reason on this issue. It is generally illegal to intentionally send infectious diseases by mail, except under special circumstances, such as properly isolated and prepared laboratory samples, shipped with appropriate bio-hazardous safeguards. Federal prosecutors have made it clear that they are willing to charge those who violate the law.

Via Third Age:

Chickenpox Lollipops By Mail? Illegal, Prosecutor Warns

Parents receiving chickenpox-infected lollipops through the mail are breaking the law, a federal prosecutor tells the Associated Press.

Spurred by reports aired in the past week about parents turning to Facebook to procure items said to be infected with chickenpox, U.S. Attorney Jerry Martin hopes to make it clear that trafficking in infectious diseases is illegal — as well as unsafe.

“If you are engaged in this type of behavior, you’re not only potentially exposing innocent people to dangerous viruses and illnesses and diseases, you’re also exposing yourself potentially to federal criminal prosecution,” Martin told The Associated Press.

According to Martin, it is a federal crime to send diseases or viruses across state lines, whether through the U.S. Postal Service or private services like FedEx or UPS. The same laws that prohibit, say, the mailing the of anthrax also apply to infectious diseases: Offenders, if convicted, could face up to 20 years in prison.

The hubbub comes in the wake of the growing popularity of so-called chickenpox parties, organized by parents in order to expose their children to chickenpox and thereby strengthen their immune systems. As WSMV-TV in Nashville reported Thursday, parents without entree to such events are increasingly turning to internet dealers purporting to sell lollipops, among other items, infected with the chickenpox virus.

I fully expect to hear a lot of whining about how this is more proof that the government and judicial system are firmly in the pocket of the big evil corporations and how they are stopping parents from exercising their rights to do things the “natural” way. The antivaccine groups always seem to have had a persecution complex. Still, I hope that this warning will be enough to stop most from engaging in this illegal, dangerous and disgusting practice, though I’m sure it won’t stop them all.

I suppose the next thing will be swapping contaminated feces to infect children with polio in order to get a “natural” immunity.

First, some background on the lobotomy:

The lobotomy may well be the most notorious and misunderstood medical procedure ever to have been developed.   It’s the butt of many jokes and is portrayed widely in the media as a savage operation preformed on those who were unruly as a means of turning them into dribbling vegetables, incapable of resisting and placid in all respects.  This is partially true, but is an overly simplistic portrayal of what the lobotomy really was and how it was used.

To understand the use of the lobotomy one must first realize the environment it was developed in.  Prior to the mid 20th century, there was very little that could be done for the severely mentally ill. Psychotherapy existed and was useful in helping those with problems like anxiety, phobias and depression better manage their symptoms, but this could do little for the truly insane. For those who suffered from severe delusions, violent episodes, severe depression with suicidal tendencies, extreme bipolarism, there was no effective therapy.

Such individuals were placed in mental institutions, where they were often forced to live the entirety of their lives.   Often miserable places, institutions provided little more than warehousing for many individuals.   Mental institutions were enormous, becoming huge communities onto themselves.  Attempts were made to make life more pleasant by providing  classes and recreation, but the enormous expense of caring for the populations made that difficult to do on a large scale.   The worst cases were often left restrained or locked in padded cells.  With so many completely crippled by mental disease, conditions could easily degrade to the point where wards became filthy and filled with the screams of insane patients.

The origins of psycosurgury can be traced back to the 1880’s, when Gottlieb Burckhardt, a Swiss neurosurgeon began to experiment with operations on the brains of the most severely insane. Small sections of brain were removed in the hope that it might calm the continual mania of the patients operated on. The results were not encouraging, but research continued into the 20th century. It was known that traumatic brain injury, brain tumors or their removal could alter a person’s personality, but only the most basic understanding of the regions of the brain associated with various aspects of thought and emotion existed.

The lobotomy was developed in 1935 by Portuguese doctor António Egas Moniz, who intitially called the procedure the leukotomy. Moniz had become aware of experiments carried out on apes in which portions of the brain were intentionally removed or disconnected. Operations that removed the frontal lobes had a major effect on the learning capacity of the animals, but also made them more placid and less prone to expressions of frustration and emotional outbursts. He believed that doing so on humans might allow those with the most violent psychiatric episodes to lead more normal lives, or at least be more manageable. Early experiments involved injecting alcohol into the nerves that connected the frontal lobes to the rest of the brain. This was later replaced by simply cutting the connections.

The belief at the time was that mental illness was caused by areas of the brain becoming too active or the brain being overstimulated and going haywire with out of control signals. It was thought that there was simply too much emotional activity that that cutting away the overly active portions of the brain would relieve this. While this belief is not always entirely false, it’s overly simplistic and does not apply to most cases of mental illness.  While there are portions of the brain that are associated with certain functions or aspects of personality, it is far too complex for a single region to be defined as the source of something like delusions, violent episodes or depression.

Still, the procedure did appear to have some validity. Many of those who received the operation did indeed become calmer and more easy to manage. Contrary to popular belief, it did not necessarily render the individual incapable of speech or basic function, although this did sometimes happen. It seems that overall, the results were highly variable. This is likely attributable to the simplicity and crudeness of the surgery. It involved drilling holes in the head of patients and cutting the pathways by inserting instruments. Exactly what kind of effects this had on the brain could vary quite a bit, especially since the individuals it was preformed on had all manner of conditions to begin with.

Early observations considered the outcome of the procedure to be result in a 33% to 33% to 33% success rate. In other words, roughly one third of patients could be considered to have improved from the operation. One third could be considered to be worse than before the operation and one third were roughly the same. This is hardly a stellar success rate, but given the lack of options for the worst cases of mental disease, it may have seemed worth the risk. There certainly were a few cases of individuals who seemed to gain extensive relief with few complications, but these were relatively rare.

A few individuals died during the procedure.  Others were left completely incapacitated and severely disabled.  Many, however, did retain their basic abilities to communicate and do simple tasks.   Some lost the ability to walk or talk but subsequently relearned it.   A number of reports indicated that the patients became very child-like and lost the ability to comprehend complex concepts.  Lack of emotional responses or social capacity was also reported.   Another effect was the loss of inhibitions.  Many seemed to have no fear or anxiety, even in circumstances where it would be appropriate.  Apathy and social disconnection were common.  Many patients began to overeat and put on large amounts of weight.  Some developed complications ranging from incontinence to lack of balance to sleep disorders.

The psychiatric community accepted the procedure with varying levels of enthusiasm. It gained rapid acceptance across the world, but many remained uneasy about the implications and ethical considerations. It was used primarily on the worst of the worst cases, at least initially. Directors of mental hospitals welcomed anything that could make it easier to manage their overcrowded wards, resulting in an expansion of use that raised questions about whether it was really being used as a last resort. Overall, the procedure was never without controversy, but given the lack of alternatives, it often was considered about the only thing that could be done to at least try to relieve severe mental illness.

Walter Freeman, the great lobotomist

Nobody did more to advance the expansion of lobotomy than Dr. Walter Freeman. Freeman was an American neurologist who, in the early 1930’s, became interested psycosurgury as a means of relieving the epidemic of mental illness he witnessed in state-run asylums. In 1935, he heard of the leucotomy procedure and became immediately interested in its potential. Freeman learned about the technique from Moniz, who became something of a mentor to Freeman. Yet his enthusiasm would far surpass that of even Moniz.

In 1936, Freeman brought the procedure to the United States, when he preformed his first lobotomy on Alice Hood Hammatt of Kansas. Freeman believed the leucotomy was the answer to nearly all mental illness. He claimed the procedure showed marked improvement in at least sixty percent of cases, although this finding is very much in doubt given the reports of others. In the next few years he preformed hundreds of the operations, assisted by his assistant James Watt. With the help of Watts, Freeman modified the procedure to remove even more of the white matter connecting the frontal lobes to the rest of the brain. He renamed the procedure the lobotomy and began his long career in promoting lobotomy across the United States and world.

While Freeman was fairly successful in selling his procedure to mental hospital administrators and in getting patients to undergo the surgery, he recognized that the complexity and expense of brain surgery was a major barrier. Drilling into the head of a patient and cutting portions of the brain required a skilled surgeon, a sterile operating room and properly administered anesthesia. To make the procedure truly commonplace, Freeman would need to make it much simpler and faster. Ideally, he wanted to find a way to make the lobotomy possible as an outpatient procedure preformed in a doctor’s office.

So was born the “transorbital lobotomy,” an especially crude procedure that Freeman would champion for the remainder of his medical career. Freeman preformed the first of these operations in 1946. The transorbital lobotomy was preformed through the eyesockets and left the patient with no outward signs of the surgery except for severely black eyes. The instrument used was likened to an icepick, which was inserted along the top of the eyeball and then broken through the thin bone on the top of the eyesocket with a hammer. It was then moved back and forth to sever the connection with the frontal lobes. The whole procedure could be done in minutes. Freeman took an additional shortcut by omitting standard anesthesia in favor of electroshock. A few shocks of electricity to the head of the patient would send them into spasms and then into a brief period of unconsciousness. This was more than enough time to preform the lobotomy.

Freeman toured the United States promoting the lobotomy, and especially the transorbital lobotomy at hospitals and medical meetings. He preformed a total of 3,400 lobotomies and suggested the procedure for everything from depression to migraine headaches. He toured in a car he dubbed the lobotomobile. Freeman took photographs of nearly all his procedures, he produced instructional films on the benefits and techniques of lobotomy. He held workshops to teach doctors how to preform his procedure. Yet his showmanship and the rapid fashion in which he preformed the operation made many of his colleges very uneasy.

Many of his procedures were preformed on individuals who did not seem to suffer from any major mental disease. His most notorious was that of Rosemary Kennedy, sister of President John F. Kennedy. Rosemary was reported to have been difficult and unruly. She may have been mildly retarded or at least learning disabled. Whatever the reason, he father, Joseph Kennedy had no tolerance for a daughter who did not fit the image of perfection he sought to cultivate. In 1941 he sent her to Freeman for a lobotomy, which left her severely incapacitated. She was forced to live out the rest of her life in institutions, unable to care for herself and badly handicapped. She died in 2005, having never recovered from the operation.

Freeman’s techniques and willingness to preform lobotomies so readily on those who did not appear to have any major mental illness lead to increasing criticism throughout the 1940’s and 1950’s. Concerned over the cruelty and crudeness of Freeman’s practices, even his loyal college James Watts left Freeman’s practice in 1950. Freeman’s fall from grace was accelerated in the mid 1950’s, when the drug Thorazine became widely available. The first modern anti-psychotic, it revolutionized mental health care. Thorazine could help control psychotic episodes and calm violent behavior. Unlike the lobotomy, it had minimal dangers of complications. It could also be adjusted to the appropriate level for the patient and its effects were temporary. Discontinuing Thorazine would result in the full reversal of the effects.

It would be followed by other psychoactive drugs, which were embraced by the mental healthcare sector. Finally, an effective treatment other than lobotomy existed and thus began the revolution that would lead to widespread deinstitutionalization. By the late 1950’s most in the medical field considered the lobotomy to be obsolete, crude and unnecessary. Yet Freeman remained a champion of it and continued to promote the lobotomy as a better treatment than drugs. Freeman dismissed Thorazine and similar drugs. He believed they did not treat the underlying problem and considered them temporary, noting that his operation could “cure” patients for life, but drugs needed to be administered continually.

As his promotion of lobotomy became more fanatical he became more marginalized. Yet Freeman continued to preform the procedures until 1967. That year he preformed the operation on Helen Mortensen. It was the third time he had preformed the operation on Mortensen. It’s not clear why he would do so more than once; he may have believed he had not completely severed the connections in the past operations. Whatever the reason, the operation proved disastrous. Mortensen suffered a severe cerebral hemorrhage and died. She was not the first patient to die during the operation. In fact, a large number had lost their lives due to similar complications, but this time, it would not go unnoticed. Freeman lost his medical license and finally stopped preforming lobotomies.

From 1967 until his death in 1972, Freeman toured the country visiting his former patients to collect their stories in support of his claims of the success of the procedure. Despite his enthusiasm for the procedure, Freeman, of course, never had it himself. Yet it seems he may have been more qualified for it than many of his patients. Freeman appears to have had a number of his own daemons. He often took large doses of sleeping pills and suffered a number of personal tragedies that he never overcame. His marriage was unhappy and his wife an alcoholic. Freeman also lost a son when he fell into a river and was swept over a waterfall while our hiking with Freeman. Though he showed signs of depression, he never received any treatment and instead threw himself into his work.

By the 1970’s, the era of the lobotomy was over. Few were preformed anywhere in the world. Today few psycosurguries are preformed and when they are, it is only in the most extreme cases. A modified form of lobotomy is preformed on very rare occasions. It is almost never used for psychiatric conditions but occasionally may be used as a last resort for epilepsy.

There remain an unknown number of individuals who received the procedure decades ago.   As is typical of the lobotomy, their condition varies widely.  Some were robbed of most of the faculties and left profoundly handicapped while others remain mostly coherent.  A few appear to be relatively normal.   However, today those who have had the operation are now seen as having suffered a major setback, being left with a brain injury that only complicates their treatment and worsens their prognosis.

“My Lobotomy” – An Absolute Must Read on the Subject

Anyone who has interest in the lobotomy, the evolution of mental healthcare of simply wants to read a fascinating, if heartbreaking tail should consider the book “My Lobotomy.”  It’s really one of the most unique and memorable books I’ve ever read.  The book was written by Howard Dully, who, in 1960 was one of the youngest of Freeman’s patients to receive a lobotomy at only twelve years old.

Freeman had diagnosed Dully with schizophrenia, though this is highly suspect given that he only actually interviewed Howard a few times. In fact, Howard seems to have suffered from little or no mental disease at all. He was an energetic kid, prone to playing practical jokes on others and not always one to sit quietly in class. He was punished often at home for relatively small infractions, such as stealing cookies from the cookie jar in the kitchen.

Howard’s mother died of cancer in 1954, and his father remarried a woman who seems to have hated young Howard. It may have been because she favored her biological children or because Howard was larger than most and thus could seem threatening, but whatever the reason, the didn’t like Howard. She punished him severely and frequently. She attempted to get rid of him by passing him off to the state social services system with inflated claims that he threatened her other children. She insisted he was disturbed and had him sent to a school for special needs children and to a mental hospital. Howard’s father worked multiple jobs and was of little help in defending his son, usually caving to his wife’s hatred of Howard.

Howard’s step-mother went to numerous psychiatrists, but most told her there was no problem with Howard and some suggested she needed help. Then she found Walter Feeman. Freeman mentioned the lobotomy as a possibility, but even he was apprehensive about it. It took her a few months to convince Freeman that Howard was out of control and in desperate need of a lobotomy. At twelve years old and with little understanding of what was being done, Howard had the procedure preformed.

The photograph to the right shows the actual procedure with Freeman holding the instrument in Howard Dully’s brain.

Unfortunately, even after the procedure Howard’s step-mother seems to have continued to hate him and consider him unruly. He was thrown out of the house, forced into institutions and ended up an alcoholic, living on the street and dabbling in petty crime like check fraud to get by. With no family support and having never learned how to live a normal life, Howard Dully spent many years in this condition. He eventually managed to pull his life together. He sobered up, got a degree in information technology and then became a certified bus driving instructor. Though it took years, Dully managed to establish a stable, productive life.

In many ways, Howard Dully was lucky. That might sound like a very strange thing to say given what was done to him, but the results could have been much worse.   Howard Dully is not profoundly disabled.   He can drive, take care of himself and lead a generally normal life.  He’s not spaced out all the time and does not lack emotions.  He’s articulate and even and has a sharp, if dry sense of humor.   He has no problem bonding to others, understanding the feelings of his peers or experiencing normal social interactions.  He can do math, remember things and seems to have otherwise normal cognition, being of better than average intelligence.

In that sense, the results of the procedure could have been far worse and were for many.  It’s unclear why Dully managed to recover so well from the procedure.  It’s possible that his young age aided him.   In younger individuals, neural plasticity allows the brain to better compensate for injuries than in older individuals.  It’s quite likely that Howard Dully managed to regain most of what he lost by reconfiguring the connections in his brain to compensate for the injury.

In 2005, Dully was featured on the NPR program All Things Considered. The program centered around Dully and documented the effects of the lobotomy on him and others. As part of the program, Dully was given unprecedented access to the records of Walter Freeman, which had been stored at George Washington University. He was finally able to see his case file and read what Freeman had been told that lead to the decision to preform the lobotomy. He also interviewed others who had been lobotomized as well as the son of Dr. Walter Freeman.  The program was one of the highest rated NPR radio documentaries of all time.  The program is available online here.

In 2007, Dully co-authored his memoir with Charles Fleming. (as is commonly done by those with little prior writing experience).

The book is shocking and revealing. It provides unique insight into how the lobotomy was used and also into the world of Walter Freeman. There are a few things that really surprised me. Based on his notes and accounts, Freeman does not come off as an unsympathetic doctor. However misguided he may have been, he took genuine interest in the lives of his patients and was concerned for their welfare.  Freeman was, in fact, a very complex character.  Those who knew him almost universally described him as a genius, yet he seemed oblivious to the harm he caused.

There are also accounts of some of the more odd encounters with Freeman, such as one in which Howard and two other young people were presented on stage by Freeman as examples of the success of his procedure. The audience was shocked by their young ages and booed Freeman, who lost his temper and began to defend his procedure by citing the Christmas cards he got from his patients.

From NPR (And Very Much Worth Listening to):
‘My Lobotomy’: Howard Dully’s Journey
Howard Dully Talks about ‘My Lobotomy’

You can buy the book here. It’s well worth the read.

Other Links:
Psycosurgery.org
Rosemary Kennedy: the importance of a historical footnote
Walter Freeman – Father of the Lobotomy
Walter Freeman’s Lobotomies: Oral Histories (recollections of physicians assistant and others)
The Lobotomist(PBS Documentary On Freeman)
Walter Freeman’s Photographs (A look at the photographs Freeman took, including before and after)
Guide to the Walter Freeman and James Watts Papers (George Washington University)

Freeman’s own film on the transorbital lobotomy (part 1) – warning, graphic
Freeman’s own film on the transorbital lobotomy (part 2) – warning, graphic

Such would appear to be the case with Steve Jobs.   I do not mean to make light of his death.   While I do think his legacy has become extremely inflated, especially in light of his death, he was, by all accounts a nice guy and certainly a good manager.   He was a great motivator, he had a pretty good sense of industrial design and he helped provide direction for Apple in the mid to late 1990’s when the company was faltering.

Without diminishing the grief his family and friends are surely feeling, we can still look at this death as an example of why alternative medicine is dangerous.   Hopefully it can even save lives.

In 2003, Steve Jobs was diagnosed with pancreatic cancer.   Pancreatic cancer happens to be one of the most deadly forms of cancer, because it tends to be asymptomatic until it reaches very late stages of development.  By the time most pancreatic cancers are discovered, the prognosis is very very poor.   Once the cancer has metastasize, it becomes very difficult to treat.   Pancreatic cancer is often aggressive and will quickly invade the liver and other organs.  Once this happens, simply removing the tumor does little to stop the spread of the cancer and even the most aggressive treatment with chemotherapy and radiation only results in a long term survival rate of a few percent.

Steve Jobs, however, was lucky.   His form of cancer was slower in progression and less aggressive than most forms of pancreatic cancer.  Even more importantly, it was caught relatively early on in the progression of the disease.  The cancer was discovered entirely by chance.   Steve Jobs had a history of gastric problems and therefore had been receiving periodic abdominal scans. In October 2003, doctors noticed a growth that was confirmed to be pancreatic cancer.

It’s impossible to know with absolute certainty whether the cancer had begun to spread when it was detected, but based on the early stage it was in and the type of cancer, it probably had not. With any form of cancer, delaying treatment can be deadly, but with a form of cancer like pancreatic cancer, it’s all the more vital. As long as the cancer is confined to the pancreas, it can be operated on and the survival rates are very good. Yet the longer the cancer remains, the greater the odds that it has begun to spread to other organs. In 2003, the time bomb had probably not yet gone off, but it was definitely ticking.

Steve Jobs’ doctors recommended an immediate Pancreaticoduodenectomy, also known as a “Whipple Procedure”. The procedure would have removed a large portion of the pancreas, including the entire tumor along with some of the other structures around the pancreas, such as the duodenum and possibly part of the stomach. Overall, for a person in Steve Job’s stage of the disease in 2003, the prognosis for completely overcoming cancer is excellent for the procedure.

The procedure is fairly drastic, and while most who undergo it successfully are able to lead relatively normal lives, it can include complications like digestive issues and an elevated risk for diabetes.   The fact of the matter is that the cancer was not going anywhere and was only going to get worse unless it was operated on.   Doctors urged Jobs to have the procedure immediately, but he was understandably apprehensive.   Jobs instead perused a course of so-called “alternative” treatments. While these treatments may have been a lot less invasive than major surgery, there’s absolutely no evidence that they actually work.

By some reports, Jobs was “skeptical of mainstream medicine.” His preferred course of treatment was a special diet and various supplements prescribed by a naturopathic practitioner. There was concern by some of Jobs friends as well as board members at Apple, but Jobs stuck with the special diet and herbal remedies for more than nine months.

Unfortunately, scans showed that the tumor was growing at an alarming rate, with the herbal and dietary measures having no apparent effect on the progression of the disease. Finally at the end of July 2004, Jobs had the procedure to remove the cancerous tissue from his pancreas.

It’s not entirely clear from published reports exactly how far the cancer may have progressed, but what is known is that the procedure that was preformed on Jobs did not simply remove the part of the pancreas. Instead, doctors had to remove much the pancreas, gal bladder, bile duct and parts of the stomach and intestines. It therefore appears that by the time the procedure was preformed the cancer had begun to spread at least to the organs closest to the original tumor. None the less, Jobs and his doctors were hopeful that they had gotten every trace of the cancer, although this is impossible to be certain of.

After recuperating from his operation, Jobs began to resume his role at Apple and appeared to be in reasonably good health. However, over the following months and years, he would show additional signs of troubled health. In 2006, Jobs provided the keynote speech at a major apple event. Many observers were surprised by his appearance, which was described as thin, listless and unhealthy. By 2008, his health had apparently deteriorated further, resulting in Jobs taking medical leave for several months.

It was later revealed that Jobs had received a liver transplant. The exact reason for the transplant has not been made public, but it is overwhelmingly likely that it is because the cancer had returned and spread to the liver.   In most cases, the standard course of treatment for such liver tumors would be to surgically remove only the parts of the liver where the tumors are located. However, it seems that the cancer was too far progressed for anything less than complete liver transplantation.   Such surgery can cure the type of cancer Jobs had, provided it has not spread beyond the liver, but cancer does often return, often within about two years. A liver transplant tends to be the last resort for such situations.  Not only is it very major surgery, but it also involves the use of powerful immunosuppressive drugs, which introduce their own risks and reduce the ability of the body to fight both infections and cancer.

In the end, it seems the cancer returned again. Jobs began to show signs of illness again this year, resulting in his taking medical leave in January and finally stepping down last month. His death, though sooner than most had expected, is not shocking given his deteriorating health.

We’ll never be able to know for sure whether it was those nine months of inaction that killed him, but the time lost took him from having an excellent prognosis to having only a mediocre one. If you are lucky enough to catch cancer early, do not squander your opportunity to treat it early. Do what your doctor tells you gives you the best chance of survival, not what some naturepath or yogi tells you will work.

Kevorkian was most prolific in his activities between 1991 and 1998.  During that time he traveled around the United States aiding individuals in taking their own lives.   Kevorkian designed the equipment used, which included an IV drug machine and a carbon monoxide respirator.   He attached patients to the machines but did not take the final step of pushing the plunger or opening the valve.  That was done by the patients, and to some extent, insulated him from being easily prosecuted.   Still, he was in and out of court many times during the 1990’s.   He lost his license to practice medicine and was repeatedly ordered to stop his activities.

Kevorkian loved the attention that the controversy generated.   His court dates became media circuses and he never passed up an interview.  Kevorkian would always say that he was fighting for the right of a person to control their own destiny, die with dignity and relieve their own suffering.   However, many of his antics were not exactly dignified.

In 1998, Kevorkian appeared on the news program 60 Minutes and showed a videotape of the assisted suicide of Thomas Youk, a 52 year old ALS sufferer.   Youk expressed his desire to die and gave his full consent to the procedure to end his life.   In this video Kevorkian did something he had never publicly admitted to before, he pushed the plunger that delivered the lethal drugs himself.   Kevorkian also directly dared authorities to convict him of murder for his actions.   This time he bluffed a bit too hard.  They did and he was sentenced to ten to twenty five years in prison.  Kevorkian was finally paroled in 2007.   Since then he spent a bit less time in the media spotlight.   As a condition of his parole he agreed to no longer preform any kind of suicide service or provide any advice on the matter.

With the recent death of Kevorkian, there has been a lot of talk about his life and accomplishments.   A large number of individuals who identify with atheism, humanism, libertarianism and other related movements have been quick to praise Kevorkian.  Those who believe that a person should have the right to die often cast him as a hero, fighting for a basic human liberty and for the merciful release from pain and suffering.   This is not new.  During his life, Kevorkian was portrayed as a hero by a number of groups and activists.  In 2010, Al Pacino portrayed Kevorkian in the television movie “You Don’t Know Jack,” which showed Kevorkian as a compassionate activist fighting to legalize dying by choice.   Kurt Vonnegut’s collection of short stories published under the title “God Bless You Dr. Kevorkian,” was more of a spoof than a tribute, but Kevorkian seems to have enjoyed the attention anyway.

Sorry, but I can’t agree. I find the man despicable.

Before I explain why I find Kevorkian so despicable, let me make it clear that it’s not because I don’t support the right of the informed to choose to end their life and it’s not because I think that any doctor who would engage in assisting them in doing so is doing something wrong.   As a general follower of libertarianism, I can’t see much justification for making it illegal for someone to end their own life in such circumstances as terminal illness.  Of course, doing so does raise the very concerning possibility that a person might somehow be coerced or pressured into doing so, and as such euthanasia protocol must have multiple checks and procedures to assure that anyone who ultimately chooses to end their life has made the decision in a sound state of mind, without coercion and has had time to consider the implications and alternatives.

Kevorkian, by most accounts, didn’t seem to think much of such safety measures.   However, ultimately, that’s not what I find the most unsettling about Kevorkian.   Rather, it’s the very attitude that the man demonstrated and the way he portrayed his work and himself.

The intentional taking of one’s life in these circumstances is never anything less than a tragic event.   While it may mean an end to suffering, it is ultimately the culmination of the most agonizing decision anyone will have to make.  When an individual has reached this stage it means that there is no longer any hope of continuing life in any meaningful capacity.   They have found their self in such excruciating pain or physical degeneration that none of the joys of life can make existence worthwhile.   All that they are and were is coming to and end because it is the only escape from their condition.   For the loved ones of the person dying, the death represents the climax of their struggle with seeing someone they care about suffer and finally die.   Loved ones are likely to have complex and conflicting emotions, which will not end with the life of the patient.  For those closest, it only begins the second phase of their grieving and coming to terms with the loss.

A physician may well consider it their duty to offer assistance in making the process as quick and painless as possible.   They may even feel they are doing a good service to those involved.   Yet any reasonable doctor (or reasonable person) will approach this with an appropriately somber and respectful tone and will view the taking of their patients life as the most serious and tragic of the duties they are called to preform.    There’s nothing joyous about watching a terminally ill person fade into death.

But Kevorkian didn’t seem to view his work as somber at all.  In fact, his attitude toward his role in ending life seemed to be a combination of flamboyant self-promotion and some kind of morbid power lust.   Kevorkian didn’t just help sick people die, he delighted in it.   The prospect of another patient willing to die made Kevorkian beam like a kid being handed a great big lollipop.   His compulsion to take part in the taking of human life was worse than just morbid.

Kevorkian complete disregard for the most basic ethical responsibilities.

There are certain things which are nearly universally agreed upon by those who advocate legalized euthanasia.  In jurisdictions where euthanasia is legal (such as in the Netherlands), these are, in one way or another, accounted for in the legal requirements before a physician can in any way assist a person in dying.

A few of the basic requirements include the following:

• The patient must be of sound mind and should receive counseling and evaluation to assure that they are.
• The request must be the decision of the patient.  It cannot be the result of any kind of pressure or coercion from others.  Any doctor involved is obligated to make sure that the patient is fully aware that they do not need to go through with it and that should taken steps necessary to make sure they have every opportunity to alert their care givers if they are being pressured.
• The patient must be legitimately terminally ill and experiencing suffering that will not subside.   It is important that this is confirmed by second opinions.   The possibility that they have been misdiagnosed and in fact have a treatable or short term condition must be eliminated and this needs to be verified.
• The patient must be made aware of their other options.  Various forms of pain management and assisted living should be brought to their attention and evaluated.
• The patient must have ample time to consider their decision.   It should never be made in a state of shock or as a sudden, rash decision.   Obviously, it is something which one can’t change their mind about after the fact.
• The process must be well documented, reviewed and witnessed.   For the protection of the patient, there must be absolute verification that everything was done properly, that they did indeed want to die and made the decision on their own, with proper councilmen and complete awareness of the alternatives.

These requirements may well result in a cumbersome process that can take weeks before the death actually occurs, but they are an unavoidable consequence of the extreme gravity of the decision and the deep ethical obligation of a doctor to always consider the best interests of those being treated. Kevorkian himself publicly endorsed stringent standards for those who requested euthanasia. He stated that such individuals should always have their mental health evaluated.

However, in practice, Jack Kevorkian largely ignored those rules. In 1997, an extensive investigation of patients Kevorkian helped die by the Detroit Free Press uncovered some disturbing evidence of just how lax Kevorkian’s standards had become.

An article on the investigation concluded:

In fact, at least 60 percent of Kevorkian’s suicide patients were not terminal. At least 17 could have lived indefinitely and, in 13 cases, the people had no complaints of pain.

Many friends and relatives of the people who committed suicide with Kevorkian weren’t even aware he had a written set of standards. But they believe he is willing to suspend almost any rule to accommodate people who really want to die.

…

Examining the Kevorkian suicides, the Free Press found that in clear violation of his own written standards:

KEVORKIAN HAS FAILED to consult psychiatrists, even when dealing with depressed people.

In a 1992 article setting out his rules for physician- assisted suicides, Kevorkian wrote it is always mandatory to bring in a psychiatrist because a person’s “mental state is . . . of paramount importance.” But the Free Press found at least 19 cases in which Kevorkian did not contact psychiatrists.

In at least five of those cases, the people who died had histories of depression.

KEVORKIAN HAS FAILED to observe minimum waiting periods before helping people to die.

He has stated that after signing a formal request, a person must always wait at least 24 hours before getting help to commit suicide. But the Free Press found at least 17 instances in which Kevorkian’s first meeting with the person was also his last. In at least five of these, less than three hours passed from the signing of the request to the moment of death. In one case, the waiting period was one hour.

KEVORKIAN HAS FAILED to consult with pain specialists and other medical experts, even when the need was clearly indicated.

Kevorkian has endorsed a written rule requiring that a pain expert be consulted in any case where “pain is a major factor” in a suicidal patient’s complaints. But out of 33 cases in which people came to Kevorkian complaining of chronic pain, he failed to consult a pain specialist in at least 17.

KEVORKIAN HAS FAILED to discover financial or family problems that may have contributed to a patient’s wish to die.

He has written that skilled help is “necessary to detect personal or family disputes, to clarify financial problems” and help people with their wills and funeral arrangements. But his questioning in these areas is cursory at best. In one recent case, he failed to uncover multiple allegations of spousal abuse and debts of more than $320,000.

Kevorkian outlined these and other rules in a 1992 article he wrote for the American Journal of Forensic Psychiatry. Fieger has described the article as a codification of the guidelines Kevorkian lives by.

It’s very difficult to know exactly what standards were followed in all cases. Kevorkian did not keep much in the way of documentation, leaving disturbing questions in a number of cases as to whether the patient actually wanted to die and came to the decision without outside manipulation. Kevorkian and his supporters always claimed the lack of documentation and the fact that he rarely consulted other doctors or mental health care providers was because he was forced to operate in an oppressive and persecutory climate, where such measures would have resulted in his work being ended. However, even in circumstances where Kevorkian did not need to fear criminal liability. (such as in Oregon, where assisted suicide was legalized in 1994.)

In at least some cases, Kevorkian did make audio or video of his “counseling” sessions with patients. However, a review of these recordings found his methods to have a very disturbing level of persuasion toward commission of suicide. Kevorkian rarely, if ever, mentioned alternatives of asked his patients to consider the positive aspects of their life.

As the Free Press Reports:

Kaplan, who is studying Kevorkian’s methods, has reviewed 14 videotapes made by Kevorkian of conversations with 12 people wishing to die.

“There are aspects of counseling in some of them,” Kaplan said. “But in many of these tapes, it’s difficult to see.”

Kevorkian did ask Hugh Gale, a 70-year-old Roseville man suffering with emphysema, to make a list of things he enjoyed so he would have reasons for living. And there are numerous cases where Kevorkian has told people they are not ready to die and has put them off for days, weeks or even months.

But in many cases Kevorkian’s conversations with his patients focused on negatives — the things they couldn’t do, rather than potential reasons to live.

Kaplan, head of the Suicide Research Center at Chicago’s Columbia-Michael Reese Hospital and a psychology teacher at Wayne State University, cited a taped session with Janet Adkins, the 54-year-old Portland, Ore., woman who was Kevorkian’s first suicide. Three days earlier, the Alzheimer’s disease patient had beaten her son at tennis.

Rather than her tennis ability, the conversation focused on memory lapses that made it hard for Adkins to keep score on the court.

The 1997 Free Press Report Also found strong evidence that many of those Kevorkian helped die may have been suffering from little more than depression, a treatable condition which often does result in suicidal thoughts and an illogically negative outlook on life.

From terminal illness to no physical illness: He has assisted in the deaths of elderly, terminally ill and desperately suffering men and women, such as Merian Frederick, who died Oct. 22, 1993, at age 72, unable to speak, eat or swallow because of the fatal, paralyzing nerve disease ALS, also called Lou Gehrig’s disease.

But Kevorkian also helped end the life of at least one woman, 39-year-old Rebecca Badger, who was a mentally troubled drug abuser and had no physical disease. An autopsy showed she was mistakenly diagnosed with multiple sclerosis.

From years of counseling to minutes: Kevorkian has had at least three cases in which more than a year went by between his first contact with the suicide candidate and the moment of death.

By his own admission, Kevorkian had, in at least a few cases, been contacted by a patient, agreed to consider their request, met them and attended to their death all in a matter of two days.  That is hardly enough time to actually get to know the situation of a person and their state of mind.   Kevorkian’s supporters have always insisted that he declined to assist in the death of anyone he evaluated as mentally unstable or merely depressed, but there are very few accounts of anyone actually being declined by Kevorkian for these reasons.

Kevorkian’s first (admitted) assisted suicide, Janet Adkins, was in some ways one of the most disturbing.   Adkins was diagnosed with Alzheimer’s Disease, but was only showing the earliest stages of the disease.   Alzheimer gets progressively worse, but the rate of decline varies considerably.   Mental facilities diminish over time as does memory and general awareness.   For someone in such a condition, it’s critical that great care is taken to assure that they are still in a state where they understand their condition and are giving informed consent.   Kevorkian didn’t seem to make any effort toward this.   In fact the opposite seems true. According to a number of reports, Adkins psychiatrist, Dr. Murray Raskind, had warned Kevorkian that her condition made it impossible for her to make such a decision. That did not stop Kevorkian, however. He carried out the assisted suicide the very day that Adkins received the final diagnosis of Alzhimer’s, hardly enough time to get past the initial shock and begin to digest the implications.

Kevorkian never responded to the scathing report of the Detroit Free Press.  That report, though perhaps the most disturbing was not alone.

According to the Economist:

Over 130 people died painlessly with the help of these machines and the doctor who invented them. The first was Janet Adkins, a former college instructor on disability, who resolved to kill herself the day she was diagnosed with Alzheimer’s, and did so, with Dr Kevorkian in attendance, in his rusty van in a Michigan campsite. Those who followed her seemed unremarkable: a bus driver, a doctor, a supervisor at a pillow factory and so on, all terminally ill, or so they believed. Studies of those who sought out Dr Kevorkian, however, suggest that though many had a worsening illness, cancer perhaps or a neurological disease, it was not usually terminal. Autopsies showed five people had no disease at all. Those who came to him were more likely to be women than men, often unmarried and typically ill-at-ease when talking to doctors. Little over a third were in pain. Some presumably suffered from no more than hypochondria or depression.

The families of those who Kevorkian helped die have also not been universally supportive of his actions. While it is true that some of the families were grateful for Kevorkian’s services and saw them as merciful and necessary, others saw Kevorkian as little more than a murderer who preyed on those in a weak enough state of mind to be persuaded to take their own life with Kevorkian’s machines and assistance. One confronted him during his unsuccessful campaign for congress in 2009. In most cases, Kevorkian had limited or no contact at all with the friends and family of the individual who he helped die.   He spoke of the need to consult family members to verify the state of mind and wishes of the patient, but did not consistently follow through with this.

A History of Kevorkian’s two great loves: Death and himself

One thing that Kevorkian can never be accused of is being overly modest. The greater the controversy and the media coverage the more his ego seemed to grow. He beamed in interviews as he showed off his death machines and talked about how he battled for the most fundamental of human rights. He compared himself to Gandhi and Martin Luther King. He said those who opposed him were no better than Nazis. He call doctors who opposed his methods or believed he was taking his mission too far “hypocritic oafs”. He basked in the light of the cameras and seemed to enjoy his nickname “Doctor Death.”

Despite talking a great deal about the duties and responsibilities of a physician, Kevorkian never actually worked directly with patients prior to his assisted suicide campaign. After graduating from the University of Michigan medical school in 1956, Kevorkian worked in a number of hospitals as a pathologist.   The only patients Kevorkian ever actually came in contact with were already dead, as Kevorkian was tasked with preforming autopsies.

Yet for Kevorkian, death was far more than just a part of his career. In fact, he seems to have had an unhealthy obsession with death that went far beyond accepting it as a part of life that the medical professions must face.

Kevorkian earned his nickname “Doctor Death” long before his euthanasia campaign.   His strange and morbid experiments with death date to the earliest days of his residency.   In 1955, Kevorkian embarked on what would be the first in a series of unusual experiments and projects when he began photographing the eyes of patients at the University of Michigan medical center at the time of death and shortly thereafter.

It’s not entirely clear what the medical and scientific value of these experiments was.  Kevorkian claimed that observing the pattern of blood in the cornia could be used to determine time of death and to determine which individuals may have experienced cardiac arrest recently enough to be candidates for resuscitation versus those who were no longer viable.   Both his techniques and his apparent enthusiasm for the subject made his colleges uneasy.   Kevorkian would later admit “my number one reason was because it was interesting, And my second reason was because it was a taboo subject.”

Kevorkian made his “death rounds” (as jokingly called them) for several months, photographing the eyes of patients shortly before and after death, but it was not until 1956 that he got his wish. Kevorkian caught a sick woman in the final throws of death, he taped her eyelids open and stuck his camera in her eye. As she convulsed, Kevorkian got the condition of her cornea before, during and after death. A paper was published, but no apparent useful science came of it.

This was only the first in a string of notorious publications and experiments conducted by Kevorkian.  One topic that most doctors won’t touch is execution and capital punishment. It’s seen as going against the basic purpose of the medical profession. Regardless of their personal opinions on capital punishment, most doctors simply won’t involve themselves in the matter or discuss it publicly, as it is a professional taboo. Yet Kevorkian was fascinated by executions. In 1960 he made the proposed that condemned prisoners could be used for medical experiments, a suggestion that shocked his peers in the medical field. Although Kevorkian suggested that prisoners consent to the procedures, the ethical issues it presented. The incident resulted in Kevorkian losing his job at the University of Michigan medical center.

In 1961, Kevorkian once again generated controversy when he began conducting experiments at Pontiac General Hospital in the use of blood harvested from cadavers for transfusion to the living. The concept may well have had value as a means of increasing supplies for blood banks, but Kevorkian’s methods and attitude toward the experiments turned stomachs.  Many doctors that worked alongside Kevorkian questioned the motives and value of Kevorkian’s experiments. One stated “Most of us just sort of changed the subject when he got on it. We thought it was inappropriate. We had plenty of blood. We didn’t need to deal with cadavers.”

As time went on, Kevorkian became bolder with his experiments. When he first began the transfusion experiments in 1961, a strict procedure was used to assure the blood was screened for pathogens and that the body of the donor was free of infectious disease. By 1964, his experiments had evolved to become far more gruesome and less restrained.   As Kevorkian stated “We actually transfused blood from immediately dead people—from their heart through a special syringe—into the recipient.” Indeed, Kevorkian had begun experiments in which he transfused the blood directly from the corpse of an 18 year old accident victim into a living person. The death had just occurred and no toxicology tests or disease screenings had taken place when Kevorkian stuck a needle into the dead girl’s heart and began to siphon her blood into a living subject.

Kevorkian’s early experiments in which blood was drawn from corpses for transfusion to live subjects had at least not been a completely unknown procedure.   During the Second World War, Soviet doctors had used cadaver blood for transfusions.  However, direct corpse to human transfusion with no incubation, additives or testing was beyond what even the Soviets were willing to try.

Kevorkian claimed that the reason for these bizarre and goulish experiments was that such techniques could be used on the battlefield, allowing medics to transfuse blood from recently dead soldiers into their injured comrades to save their lives.   It’s questionable whether or not such a procedure would actually be reasonable, even for a war zone.  Moreover, the safety of the procedure was not entirely established.   Kevorkian insisted in research papers that the results were positive and that the need for anticoagulant additives typically needed for transfusion.  If all transfusions went well, it’s only by luck, because Kevorkian openly admits that he began the transfusion experiments on human patients without first attempting them on laboratory animals – something which is virtually unheard of in modern medicine.

Not only were his experiments morbid, dangerous and downright unethical, but his methods of promoting his ideas were tailored to increase their shock value. When Kevorkian attempted to pitch his idea in Military Medicine, he didn’t just describe the procedure, but also included photos of a staged battlefield transfusion between a dead and a wounded soldier. The Pentagon declined Kevorkian’s idea.

After being asked to leave Pontiac General Hospital in 1966, Kevorkian would work briefly at a number of hospitals, preforming freelance pathological work before eventually becoming chief of pathology at Saratoga General Hospital in Detroit in 1970. By most accounts, Kevorkian was not a very good fit for the position. He made his colleges uncomfortable. Kevorkian was a loaner with eclectic interests. He dabbled in painting and music composition and even wrote a diet book.

In 1976 he took a hiatus from the medical world, moved to California and began to set his sights on making movies. Somehow he managed to get the funding to produce a single low-budget feature film. The film was never exhibited and Kevorkian refused to discuss the shelved film project thereafter. Before long he had run out of money and started to work odd jobs in medicine and pathology again.

This was not Kevorkian’s only creative work, however. He was also a fairly accomplished painter and dabbled in music composition. His paintings, like so much else in his life, were intended to shock and showed a disturbing fascination with violence and death. Several of his paintings are shown to the right. Some might say that his paintings were intended to be humanistic by forcing viewers to consider the great pain and suffering caused by war, disease and genocide. However, given the rest of Kevorkian’s life, it seems likely that their significance was far darker.

By 1979 he had returned to his early fascination with photographing the eyes of the dying, but no scientific studies came of it.  From there, Kevorkian bounced between several hospitals and other jobs into the 1980’s.   He frequently wrote of death, assisted suicide and unorthodox ideas for the use of corpses or executions.  He wrote histories of medical experiments on the condemned and other topics that most in the medical world found disturbing.   In 1987 he traveled to Amsterdam in an attempt to become part of the accepted Dutch practice of Euthanasia.   Yet dutch doctors rejected him, considering many of his ideas offensive and believing he ultimately hurt the cause.

After returning to the United States, Kevorkian began his career as a suicide provider.   He placed an ad in the paper which read:

DEATH COUNSELING

IS SOMEONE IN YOUR FAMILY TERMINALLY ILL?

Does he or she wish to die – and with dignity?

CALL PHYSICIAN CONSULTANT

It was not until 1990 that Kevorkian went from being a consultant to a provider of suicide supplies. Unless, of course, he had done it earlier than he admits, which is a distinct possibility.

Many predicted that when Kevorkian’s life ended it would be by his own hand, using one of his death machines and perhaps being turned into some kind of media event. It was not. Early in 2011, Kevorkian was diagnosed with liver cancer. This would seem to make him a perfect candidate for his own brand of “mercy” but he never attempted to end his life. On May 18 was admitted to William Beaumont Hospital in Royal Oak, Michigan on May 18 2011 due to Kidney problems.    He hung on for more than two weeks in intensive care, but his condition worsened and on June 3, he died of thrombosis, a complication of his condition.  He was 83.   As far as we know, there were no cameras shoved in his eye at the moment of death to capture images of the dying Kevorkian’s cornea.

And good riddance to him. Despite being the public face of the debate over legalized euthanasia as a means of decreasing suffering and giving people the freedom to choose their own fate and die with dignity, the man appears to have been little more than a sociopath who got his jollies over watching other people die.

You may notice that there’s something a bit off here.   Claims that vaccines are a dangerous conspiracy purported by horrible pharmaceutical companies are usually associated more with the Loony Left of the political spectrum, while Bachman is decidedly on the Loony Right side of the isle.  It’s interesting to note that different ridiculous beliefs tend to come from different sides of the isle.   Vaccine conspiracy theories tend to center on mistrust of corporations and capitalism in general and are often part and parcel of theories of how the military and big corporations are killing us with fluoride, chemtrails and depleted uranium, which means we all need to embrace the “natural way” and move back to mud huts where we can practice free love and drop acid.

You’ll notice, however, that Backmann is not opposed to vaccinations in general, but is singling out one vaccine which apparently has a nearly magical power to steal the innocence of sweet lovely little twelve year old and make them retarded.   The reason that conservatives are so opposed to the HPV vaccine is that it’s seen as somehow encouraging sex or that requiring it is somehow offering a government endorsement of premarital sex.   It’s an extremely warped view when one considers that they’re effectively saying that they are so opposed to what they consider to be offensive forms of sex that it’s worth avoiding a vaccine that could wipe out most cervical cancer.

Her sentiment seems to have been touched off in part by the state of Texas adding the HPV vaccine to the required immunizations for school admission for girls.   This was done by another Republican presidential candidate, Rick Perry.   Some have accused Perry of taking pharmaceutical money for this policy, it really does not change the fact that it’s a good idea to have girls vaccinated.   If he did do so because he was paid off, then all he can be accused of is doing the right thing for the wrong reason.

About HPV:

HPV or the Human papillomavirus is a human-specific virus that can infect the mouth, respiratory system or skin. However, it is most problematic when it effects the genitals. Genital infection of HPV also tends to be quite contagious. Different strains of HPV tend to be more prone to infecting one area of the body than another, so while it is remotely possible that a strain of HPV associated with genital and oral infections could also result in an infection elsewhere, it’s unlikely that this would happen, except perhaps in an immune-compromised individual or in circumstances where there was an unusual level of exposure.

Most HPV infections are asymptomatic. The most common acute symptom of HPV infection is warts. HPV causes all varieties of warts, ranging from genital warts to plantar warts and common skin warts. There’s no cure for HPV, but the local infection is typically treated by removing the warts. Warts can be removed any number of means including cutting or freezing the warts off. Removing warts does not assure that they will not return, as the virus still exists in the region of the body. However, since the wart itself contains the highest concentration of the virus, removal of warts can help the body in clearing the infection. Ultimately, most HPV infections do clear the body due to the action of the immune system, but it can take months or more.

While warts are an unsightly, embarrassing and uncomfortable problem, the real danger from HPV is cancer. HPV is most strongly associated with cervical cancer. Indeed, more than 70% of cases of cervical cancer can be directly attributed on HPV. The strains of the virus that have the strongest association with cancer are not prone to causing warts. The greatest danger occurs in individuals who have the virus in their system for a long period of time. While most HPV infections clear the body in less than a year, 5-10% may last years. These long-lasting infections pose the greatest risk of cervical cancer. HPV is the reason it is recommended that women receive regular pap smears. Since the cancer-causing infection is usually asymptomatic, it is the only way of assuring early detection.

While HPV has the strongest association with cervical cancer, it is certainly not the only cancer that is caused by HPV. The same strains responsible for most cervical cancers are also responsible for at least 25% of anal cancers, a large percentage of oral cancers, cancers of the upper respiratory system, penil cancer and other types of cancer. More than 5% of new cancers detected are attributed to HPV, a whopping half a million cases per year, resulting in innumerable deaths. HPV may soon exceed tobacco usage as the single largest cause of oral cancers.

Overall, the risks of HPV are considerably greater for women than men, but it should not be considered an exclusively female problem. Men rarely get genital warts from the infection and male genital cancers from HPV are far more rare than in females, but they certainly can and do happen.

Transmission and Prevention:

HPV is extremely common. By some estimates, more than 75% of sexually active individuals will contract at least one strain of HPV at some point in their life. The prevalence of the virus varies by age, with sexually active women in their early 20’s having the highest rate of HPV infection – upwards of 40%, although most of these infections are considered “low risk” and will probably clear the body without ever causing any complications. Most infections are asymptomatic, so the majority of individuals are never aware of their exposure to HPV.

Sexual contact is the most common way in which HPV is spread and is the cause of nearly all genital tract infections with HPV. While it’s remotely possible that the infection could be spread by contact with some intermittent surface or object, such cases are rare to the point of being nearly unheard of.   There are no documented cases of HPV being spread by a toilet seat, and evidence indicates the risk of this happening is approximate zero.

The risk of spreading HPV from one partner to another can be reduced by the use of a condom, but condom use is far from completely effective. Fluid transfer is not necessary to spread HPV, only skin contact is needed. Therefore, condoms offer, at best, very limited protection. Intercourse is not required either. Simply engaging in activities that involve touching of the genitals can spread the infection.

There are really only two methods of effectively reducing transmission of genital HPV. The most obvious would be complete abstinence from all sexual contact. Obviously, one who never comes in contact with the genital region of anyone else is not likely to acquire the infection. Needless to say, this is not something that is likely to have very broad appeal as a method of reducing transmission.

The second, generally more effective and realistic method is the use of the HPV vaccine, which is highly effective at preventing infection by the most high risk strains of the virus.

The vaccine:

There are currently two vaccines for HPV. Both vaccines are relatively new. Gardasil, developed by Merck was approved by the US government in 2006 and within the next year gained approval in the European Union, Australia and elsewhere. A similar vaccine, Cervarix, was developed by by GlaxoSmithKline. Cervarix was first approved in Australia in 2007 and later that year by the European Union. It won final approval in the US in 2009. The vaccines have now been approved in nearly all industrial countries.

While hundreds of strains of HPV are known to exist, the vaccine targets four strains that are known to cause the overwhelming majority of both cancers and genital warts. The vaccine has been shown to reduce the probability of cervical cancer by 70%, the risk of genital warts by over 90% and significantly reduce the risk of HP V-related cancers in other areas of the body. Of course, the vaccine does not only protect the individual who receives it, but also stops the infection from being transmitted to others.

To be most effective, the vaccine should be used prior to an individual becoming sexually active. When used as such, it avoids that individual ever acquiring the highest risk HPV strains. The effectiveness of the vaccine in individuals who have already been infected by one or more strains of HPV is not established. Most sexually active adults don’t know whether they’ve ever had an HPV infection and certainly would not know what strain. Therefore, it is considered optimal for the vaccine to be given at a relatively young age. It is not specifically approved for those older than their mid-20’s, although older individuals can be vaccinated, it’s not entirely clear what level of protection they will receive, if they already have been exposed to HPV.

The HPV vaccine has primarily been marketed for use in females, but it can be used in either gender and has increasingly been suggested for males. Use of the vaccine in both males and females can deny the HPV virus a host. Ultimately, wide deployment of the vaccine can wipe out the most dangerous strains of the virus and avoid at least 70% of cervical cancers. If everyone was vaccinated against HPV, hundreds of thousands of cancers would be avoided each year.

On a personal note:

I have had the HPV vaccine. This despite the fact that I’m a male and that I was technically above the cutoff age. I don’t know if I’ve ever had an HPV infection. There’s a very good chance that I have and a very good chance that I haven’t. If I have had an HPV infection, it was asymptomatic and there’s a very good chance that it was not one of the strains that is of concern and that the vaccine protects against.

Since I don’t know, I thought it was worth the cost of the vaccine to at least reduce the probability that I’d host the HPV virus. If I have not had any of the strains the vaccine protects against, I should be completely protected. If I have had one, I should be protected against at least the other three, but the effectiveness against the one I’ve already had is unknown. It may help or it may not. It’s also possible that I already have a naturally acquired immunity to that infection.

More importantly, I got the vaccine because I thought it was the responsible thing to do. I believe everyone should get it, even if there’s a good chance they’ve had exposure to one or more HPV strains before. The recommendation is more based on economics than safety, recommending the vaccine for those who most benefit. I want to protect humanity and when I say that the vaccine is safe I want to be able to back that up by saying that I was willing to put it into my own body. That was worth the couple hundred dollars I had to pay for it.

And no… it’s not because I’m some kind of playa’ or man-whore.

The Controversy:

There is really no debate over the safety or effectiveness of the HPV vaccine, but you might not know that based on what a lot of socially conservative and Christian groups have to say. In fact, they are not opposed to the vaccine because of any legitimate concerns over the possible side effects or medical validity of the vaccine, but simply because, in their minds, it somehow interferes with the message that all sex is wrong unless it is within the confines of a religiously-sanctioned marriage between and man and a woman.

One could go so far as to say that, if everyone practiced sex as most fundamentalist Christians demand, it would mean that genital infections with HPV would not be a problem.   If every person maintained absolute sexual abstinence, never engaging in sexual intercourse or any other sexual contact with anyone until the day they were married and thereafter had sex with only their partner, then HPV would have a very hard time spreading very far within the population.   Therefore, in the minds of some, HPV is associated with sinning and the vaccine is only helping the dirty, sinful people who would do such a thing.

For most, it might not be so direct as saying those who have sex deserve to get cancer, but some of the arguments include the following:

• Giving a young girl the HPV vaccine effectively conveys the message that you expect she’ll have sex at some point in her life with someone other than her virginal husband and that it’s okay for her to do so.
• Protecting young girls from a sexually transmitted disease will make them go out and have sex.
• If the vaccine is paid for in any way by the government or insurance then we’re all subsidizing protection of the segment of the population that engages in sinful behavior.
• The vaccine would be unnecessary if everyone practiced the christian ideal of sex.  We should focus efforts on just getting people to stop having sex.

If you do not believe me, here are some quotes on the subject:
Bridget Maher, Family Research Council:

Abstinence is the best way to prevent HPV… Giving the HPV vaccine to young women could be potentially harmful, because they may see it as a license to engage in premarital sex.

Tony Perkins, Family Research Council President:

Because HPV infection is caused by sexual activity, it is not transmitted by casual contact and therefore is not in the same class as other diseases like polio for which mandatory, school-based vaccination is a public-health imperative

David Bereit, American Life League

Gov. Perry has turned his back on the pro-life and pro-family people who elected him and is now playing into the agenda of Planned Parenthood, a group which regularly opposes parents’ rights and which praised his action as ‘a great day for women and for future generations of Texas women and families
…
Gardasil is a vaccination against a sexually transmitted virus, and parents should be the ones to decide whether their young daughters should receive these shots – not Planned Parenthood, and not the governor of any state. American Life League strongly opposes such a mandatory vaccine because it completely removes parents from these important medical decisions and makes children the innocent victims
…
Planned Parenthood’s own internal documents show that the organization makes most of its income from sexually active, young, single women . Not only does Planned Parenthood stand to profit by selling these expensive HPV vaccines, but it also will profit enormously from the aftermath of the sexual promiscuity that will surely follow when young girls are led to believe they can be sexually carefree without consequence once they receive these shots.

Steven W. Mosher, Population Research Institute

I (Steve) think that they see Gardasil as what one might call a “wedge” drug. For them, the success of this public vaccination campaign has less to do with stopping cervical cancer, than it does with opening the door to other vaccination campaigns for other sexually transmitted diseases, and perhaps even including pregnancy itself. For if they can overcome the objections of parents and religious organizations to vaccinating pre-pubescent—and not sexually active—girls against one form of STD, then it will make it easier for them to embark on similar programs in the future.

After all, the proponents of sexual liberation are determined not to let mere disease—or even death—stand in the way of their pleasures. They believe that there must be technological solutions to the diseases that have arisen from their relentless promotion of promiscuity. After all, the alternative is too horrible to contemplate: They might have to learn to control their appetites. And they might have to teach abstinence.

Human Life International (A Christian Pro-Life Group):

Excluding children from school for refusal to be vaccinated for a disease spread only by penetrating vaginal intercourse is a serious, precedent-setting action that trespasses on the right of parents to make medical decisions for their children as well as on the rights of the children to attend school. In addition, this vaccine prevents a disease which is exclusively sexually transmitted; mandating it as early as 9 years of age places the medical provider in an ethical dilemma.

The Pro-Family Law Center:

The Pro-Family Law Center opposes this proposed legislation on the grounds that it infringes on parental rights, unequally protects female students over male students from HPV, and disturbs a natural incentive for teenage students to abstain from sexual intercourse to avoid the contraction of certain sexually transmitted infections.

Jacob Puliyel, St Stephens Hospital in Delhi:

The underlying assumption here is that adolescent girls in India may all become promiscuous

Leslie Unruh, the National Abstinence Clearinghouse

I personally object to vaccinating children against a disease that is 100 percent preventable with proper sexual behavior

Gene Rudd, Christian Medical and Dental Associations:

I’ve talked to some who have said, This is going to sabotage our abstinence message

Conclusion (yes it should be mandated):

Requiring vaccination as a condition of entry into school is nothing new.  It’s a well established health policy that has resulted in numerous diseases being wiped out.  Since the vaccine is an unavoidable requirement, health insurers have to cover it.  For those who do not have insurance, required vaccines are usually available through state programs.  Wide distribution of such vaccines can reduce the individual cost.  Of course, the vaccines will eventually reduce healthcare costs dramatically due to less need for cancer treatment, although in this case, the majority of those savings will take some time to be realized – although reduction in genital wart treatment will occur much sooner.

The fact of the matter is that the vast majority of girls will eventually have sexual contact with more than one person.   Most will not wait until they are married to do so and even for the few who do, they usually will not be marrying a man who has likewise been completely sexually sequestered.    Providing the maximum protection requires that they receive the vaccine early in life, before they have had any chance to be exposed to the virus.   For those who might not be exposed, such as those who plan on going into the convent and becoming nuns, getting the vaccine still does them no harm.

The idea that parents should decide whether their girl “needs it” is ridiculous.  It’s totally unreasonable to expect that a girl is going to go to her parents and reveal that she is thinking she might engage in some sexual activity and therefore, it’s about time she gets that vaccine.   It’s also completely absurd to expect that parents are somehow completely aware of their kid’s sexual experimentation.   It’s one thing to be open with your children, but lets be reasonable here!   If nothing else, the mandate allows for girls to receive the vaccine without having to go through the uncomfortable process of requesting it.  It gives them an “out” to simply say “I need it for school” and not “I might someday have sex.”  (Even though they generally will.)

It won’t turn innocent little girls into whores or even encourage sex.   It’s not as though risks like sexually transmitted diseases have ever been that much of a deterrent anyway, and eliminating one of the less high risk ones is not going to make anyone suddenly feel liberated to go screw the entire town.   The whole ideas is as absurd as thinking that getting a tetanus shot encourages anyone to go play with dirty, rusty nails.

There is one thing, however, that is missing from most of the requirements:  it only applies to half of the population.   We already know that the HPV vaccine protects boys from genital warts and a variety of cancers.   Overall, the chances that HPV will cause harm to a male are far less than those for females, but that’s not the entire issue.  If the vaccine were given to both boys and girls, it would deny the virus hosts and eventually the most harmful strains would be driven to extinction.