The Problem with “Trusting The Experts”
You want to go to college to study physics. The dominant paradigm is that there is a strange substance called ether that holds all the objects of the cosmos in place. That’s what Aristotle believed. If you don’t believe it, then you don’t get into college. Plain and simple.
All the physicists laugh at anyone who proposes Newton’s theory of gravity because everyone knows that apples fall from trees because everything tends towards a state of rest.
Any students who may have been open to the truth have long since been vetted before they get anywhere near studying a PhD., but whenever anyone goes online to say there is this alternative theory called The Theory of Gravity, mainstream people scoff at them and say, “They’re not real physicists! None of them even have PhD.’s! They don’ have the right letters after their names!”
College professors who discussed this alternative theory in class at any depth, suggesting they might have some merit, would not get tenure. If they had tenure already, they wouldn’t get published in any of the leading journals. Any journals who did present scientific papers that favored these ideas would be considered fringe and lose any credibility. People would dismiss them out of hand without any investigation.
In social situations, whenever anyone questioned the ether hypothesis they would be ridiculed and people would say, “All the qualified experts agree that ether holds the stars and planets in place! You must be anti-science to believe these kooks who are questioning it on the internet, and none of them are even real physicists!”
So, when people say that “the experts agree” on something, you have to be a bit careful about that, because in most fields you will never become an expert unless you first accept the existing precepts of the system. We have all head that “science progresses one funeral at a time.” That’s sad, but the fact is once you have spent years being educated into a certain way of seeing the world, everything is interpreted through that lens. That’s why we need dissenting opinion between experts. The experts might not be able to see their own blind spots, but those listening on can sometimes see where each is going wrong.
Our problem now is that only one view is being represented. There is no public discourse between experts. People think the reason why mainstream medicine is the only big show in town, and that everything else is woo woo, because allopathic medicine is scientific. But that’s not the reason at all. It’s just because it has all the funds behind it, all the media behind it, all the government grants, all the journals, it’s all the insurance companies will pay for. It’s because that’s all that insurance companies and the government will shell out on. The doctors have gone through years of education and residency and only been educated in this world. They aren’t schooled on proper nutrition, organ detoxification, fasting, physical exercise, supplementation or the use of herbal medicine and naturopathy. Even if an alternative remedy is thoroughly backed by science, it won’t be found in their database, and even if it was – they wouldn’t be legally allowed to prescribe it. What’s more, the manufacturer is not going to have millions to spend sending them to hotels for Continuing Medical Education conferences. They don’t even have the millions to fund bigger more elaborate studies to showcase its efficacy, and if they did, the media would be unlikely to cover a study of that kind because most of their advertising revenue comes from pharma.
You can’t trust medical journals to print studies debunking drugs that have been approved or saying the side-effects are more severe than originally thought, because the pharmaceutical companies who manufacture those drugs advertise in the journals.
In 2011, researchers at the Mayo Clinic, a non-profit academic medical centre based in Rochester, Minnesota, found that almost half of the established medical practices they reviewed were no better than alternatives that were less expensive, simpler or easier. In 2013, the same group produced a second report finding that 146 articles published in the prestigious New England Journal of Medicine reversed older studies, casting doubt on the effectiveness of 128 medical practices.
Dave Eddy, a heart surgeon turned health care economist and a leader in the evidence-based medicine movement, estimated that as little as 15 per cent of what doctors do is backed up by valid evidence.
In 1992 the Institute of Medicine, which has funded some of the best clinical trials around, estimated that less than half of the treatments and tests are backed up by strong scientific evidence, with the rest being based on very weak evidence, or even none at all.
The editors of both the New England Journal of Medicine and The Lancet both resigned in disgust, claiming that at least 70% of the articles in their journal were trash and biased towards the corporate health care industry bodies that funded the research.
When a prominent medical journal ran research past other experts in the field, it found that most of the reviewers failed to spot mistakes it had deliberately inserted into papers, even after being told they were being tested. The Economist reported in 2013 Amgen, found they could reproduce just six of 53 “landmark” studies in cancer research. Earlier, a group at Bayer, a drug company, managed to repeat just a quarter of 67 similarly important papers. In 2000-10 roughly 80,000 patients took part in clinical trials based on research that was later retracted because of mistakes or improprieties and that flawed research does not put people’s lives at risk. They are still able to perform 40% of their surgeries for free or at discounted patients to those who cannot afford the full rate.
People like to throw around generalizations like, “most doctors agree…” that this or that. “If that was true, more people would be speaking out about it!” Well, we have seen some of the consequences of speaking out. But the rot runs deeper. You cannot become a medical doctor unless you accept the underlying precepts of the system in the first place. You won’t pass their exams. There is a survivorship bias. It takes a certain kind of character to survive med-school. It’s a narrow funnel. Not necessarily the only kind of person who would make a good physician or healer, but the kind of character that lends itself to a certain way of seeing the world and interacting with it.
That’s where we are with medicine. People who are open minded are excluded from the system. If they go through the system and then become enlightened afterwards, they are threatened with loss of hospital privileges, lawsuits, malpractice, loss of their medical license, or having to leave the country, and if they never go through the system but become independent researchers and share what they have learned, everyone says they are not even doctors. Until they start curing people. Then they are charged with practicing medicine without a license.
To get all the inside details, grab my book Big Pharma – Guess It Quacks Like A Duck
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