The Shocking Truth About Medical Research

My Research Flawed? How Dare You!

“Oh look dear, Jonny’s going out with his friends and it looks like a flask in his back pocket. I hope he remembers our talks about designated drivers.”

Wise parents understand what their kids go through in maturing to adults, as they remember the struggles they experienced themselves. They use their prior “medical research” to make life better for their kids by sharing honestly and coaching skillfully. So, while alcohol consumption to the point of drunkenness could be a research project a teen undertakes, the understanding of the parent can make that behavior less risky when the communication channels are open.

Understanding is less clear when we haven’t “been there, done that,” however. New understandings could be hard to come by, for example,

• realizing that dogs are wolves inside, not small furry children who need to eat three meals a day or perish. Who don’t need to have their teeth brushed.
• realizing there’s money behind health recommendations given to you, like repeated vaccinations for your animal when there’s neither benefit nor safety in this practice.
• learning that it’s really pesticides that are in those little tubes sold to make fleas go away.
• seeing tiny, less than physical doses of homeopathic medicine cure serious disease.

Common Sense vs The Age of Science

We live in a time when loud voices can clamor openly in a public forum for what ever they feel is significant to them. Haters can hate openly and vociferously, trolls can provoke us in comments and forums, and the so-called skeptics can question everything that flies in the face of their paradigm.

Common sense is often lost in the ensuing search for truth.

The “science” drum is beaten loudly when skeptics enter a conversation. Instead of being open minded and inquiring, these minds have snapped shut like a steel trap, rebuking anyone who doesn’t toe the line they’ve drawn on what’s real.

“Where’s the research, the double blind studies?!” “There’s no scientific proof that homeopathy is anything more than water. Anyone who gets well from it is making it all up! It’s a placebo response!!” “Vaccinations do not cause autism.” Etc. etc.

Meanwhile, mothers are seeing their perfectly normal, well adjusted toddlers lose all vestiges of normal life shortly after getting vaccinated. The rising autism incidence parallels closely the rise in vaccine requirements for children over the last 20-30 years. Any careful medical research could uncover this.

Sometimes those loud voices in the name of “science!” come from people in places of power and influence, who can wreak havoc on others. Witness Dr. Andrew Wakefield and Dr. John Walker Smith, considered the father of pediatric gastroenterology, who brought to light a link between the MMR vaccine and autism, based on parents’ observations and careful studies of the affected kids. Both lost their licenses to practice in Britain for publishing their findings in The Lancet, a prestigious medical journal. The case against Walker Smith was thrown out of court, but seven years after the doctors involved were maligned publicly.

Who lodged the charges? A journalist, with no medical training, but with an obvious agenda to discredit the link made by the authors between vaccination, gut disease, and autism.

Prescriptions Based on Medical Research. Really?

It’s not widely known, but rigorous scientific study has found that a high percentage of the research that MDs depend upon to make their prescriptions and recommendations to patients is false. This work is done by Greek physician John P. A. Ioannidis, known and widely respected for his rigorous meta-research. His paper on this is the most downloaded scientific paper in recent time, entitled “Why Most Published Research Findings Are False.”

A prominent article about his work appeared in The Atlantic in 2010, and its author states,

He charges that as much as 90 percent of the published medical information that doctors rely on is flawed. His work has been widely accepted by the medical community; it has been published in the field’s top journals, where it is heavily cited; …Ioannidis may be one of the most influential scientists alive. Yet for all his influence, he worries that the field of medical research is so pervasively flawed, and so riddled with conflicts of interest, that it might be chronically resistant to change—or even to publicly admitting that there’s a problem.”

How about “evidence based medicine?” EBM sounds like a gold standard, doesn’t it? What could go wrong with medicine based on evidence from the real world?

According to the founder of Evidence Based Medicine, experts are hindering the healthy advancement of science.

Writing in this week’s British Medical Journal (BMJ), Canadian-based researcher, David Sackett, said that he would “never again lecture, write, or referee anything to do with evidence based clinical practice”. Sackett is not doing this because he has ceased to believe in evidence based clinical practice but, as the BMJ comments, because he is worried about the power of experts in stifling new ideas and wants the retirement of experts to be made compulsory.”

Understanding comes of experience

When Samuel Hahnemann, the German physician discovered the principal of “like cures like” in the late 1700’s, it was from direct experience in his own body. Homeopathy was born from this experience. Hundreds of physicians and patients since him have corroborated his experience, and homeopathic veterinarians see it in daily practice.

When you hear skeptics trying to quash something that gets animals and infant children well, you have to question their agenda. Homeopathy cures both, patients who have no possible placebo effect.

Just as you’ll never convince mothers of autistic children that vaccinations are harmless, you’ll never convince veterinary homeopaths that animals are getting well by delusion. We’ve got volumes of patients that speak otherwise. Animals don’t live in delusion.

We don’t have time for the skeptic’s blathering. We’ve got work to do. Medical research marches on, pet by pet, horse by horse, tot by tot: real patients, real results.

Homeopathy: Evidence based medicine at its finest.

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