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GeoffPainPhD's avatar

Yes, when I attempted to teach Chemistry to medical students I found they were good at rote learning but in general had disappointing IQ and deductive reasoning skills. I saved the life of one young aspiring medico when she approached a flask of ether with a Bunsen Burner.

Notre Dame University started admitting first year students into my Chemistry and Physics classes with zero high school qualifications so they could charge huge fees to students hoping to take a fast route to Medicine. Too many Epidemiologists and not enough Single Cell Scientists these days.

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Bob Feldtman's avatar

and we let them operate on us. Heaven help us.. Oh I am a surgeon but took me about 13 tears to get their.

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David AuBuchon's avatar

They both matter. Mechanisms can be misleading too. Example:

https://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pmc/articles/PMC9282120/

Masks could catch aerosols, evaporate the water, and make viruses effecitvely smaller and easier to breath deep into the lungs. And while masks may reduce inhalation of aerosols, they may also reduce exhalation of aerosols. So mechanisms are not a clear face mask argument to me. Humidification is another potential beneficial mechanism. The main potential benefit of masks is not reduction in infection, but reduction in severity, but reducing initial viral dose. This was never tested, and not even suggested by mask promoters, which is pathetic and just shows how disconnected discussion is. They missed their best argument.

In other words, there is always the possibility to realize something about mechanisms we did not think about before. And it's not like gravity. It's interactions with biological systems and there will always be things we don't expect.

Another physics speculation: The better your filter material, the harder it is to breathe through, the more air is thus redirected along poorly fitted edges. A paradoxical effect.

Vinay is far better than most, but he does need to get woke about a lot still.

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Joseph T. Shen's avatar

The RCTs are farcical. They are designed to bribe the investigators and keep the competitors out by the big pharmas. The "investigators' are paid to cherry pick the data to fit the preordained narratives of the paymaster of the medical industrial complex, nothing more. When one asks for the data to examine independently, they are NOT available. The solution is to make all the data transparent and allow replication and validation independently and allow decenting voice in the scientific debates. We need a decentralized trusted data-network to "keep-everyone-honest" and to incentivize honest and innovative work to benefit everyone.

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Bob Feldtman's avatar

this is generally correct. there are some honest clinicians who don't lie. But the majority of them are influenced by those who fund their research (pad their pockets)

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Joseph T. Shen's avatar

Refusing to make a living based on mainly lies, I walked away from my beloved day to day clinical duties and embarked on a journey to create something important and vital to usher in a better world.

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GeoffPainPhD's avatar

I studied the Physics and Surface Chemistry of how Masks capture exhaled Virus

https://geoffpain.substack.com/p/asymptomatic-people-spread-the-covid19

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SheThinksLiberty's avatar

Did you study the tradeoffs?

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GeoffPainPhD's avatar

When I last had surgery, all of the medical team wore masks to avoid giving me potentially fatal infection. They wore faceshields, gloves and masks when exposing themselves to my blood as expected. There were no casualties.

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SheThinksLiberty's avatar

I'm glad you got through surgery, but I asked you a different question.

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GeoffPainPhD's avatar

Tradeoffs?

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SheThinksLiberty's avatar

Yes, the tradeoffs. You state that you studied the physics and surface chemistry of how masks captured exhaled virus. I took from your link your support for the use of these things, but I missed any mention of the downside of their use. Did you study the downsides, the tradeoffs of mask wearing?

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Vijay Gupta's avatar

Simply having the evidence or studies (supporting the benefits of a treatment or intervention) makes little or no difference to ordinary people unless there is a compnay or institution with an incentive to advertise and promote those benefits regularly (daily or weekly).

Here is an example. This article below claims that there are 12,000 peer reviewed studies on the health benefits of turmeric. (I have seen some of them.) For example, one 2008 study found that a turmeric based preparation is comparable to statins (like Lipitor) in efficacy, and much safer. But how many people in the US will ever hear about that study?

tinyurl.com/2p987uer

The fundamental problem with modern medicine is not lack of RCT studies. The fundamental problem is that all the incentives in the system are geared towards keeping people perennially sick, and permanently dependent on drugs and doctors. All the incentives are for medical intervention, and none for natural prevention (some lip service to prevention notwithstanding).

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Vinu Arumugham #MAHA's avatar

We pay the NIH to promote the benefits of things like turmeric. They have become corrupted and indistinguishable from pHarma. Nazi Institutes of Holocaust (NIH) seems more appropriate now.

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Vijay Gupta's avatar

The root cause of all corruption in the government (among politicians as well as bureaucrats) is that politicians depend on money from corporations (including pharma) to win elections. So the ultimate source of all political power is corporate (i.e., corrupt) money.

Moreover, the US Supreme Court has legalized this form of corruption through their Citizens United vs. FEC decision.

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Vinu Arumugham #MAHA's avatar

Yep, corruption is protected as free speech by misinterpreting the constitution.

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Bob Feldtman's avatar

they can lie all they want. But when it goes bad it goes very bad. Look at the Talcum powder suit, it is bringing down the entire 3-M monopoly, splitting into six companies so the can declare bankruptcy move offshore and not have to pay the billions. Why didn't that happen to Pfizer?

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Bob Feldtman's avatar

just watch TV at night and see who is supporting the fake media. Used to be beer and liquor and trucks.. still some but in the evenings the Pharma ads are incessant. Money talks and BS walks. Thus fake media will call me a misinformation guy cause I have questions about some of the drugs they make.

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Baldmichael's avatar

Nazi Institutes of Holocaust very appropriate, they have been Nazi for decades.

https://alphaandomegacloud.wordpress.com/covid-19-summary/

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Johnny Dollar's avatar

Don't forget migraines which afflict tens of millions of North Americans. My daughter has a persistent cough and two doctors and an allergist are 'baffled' as they try to figure out the right pharmaceutical to prescribe. As you note, no attempt is made at understanding human diseases.

I've learned medical professionals (I'm not pointing to Prasad here but making a general statement) are astonishingly bad at reason and logic. At least Prasad is highly critical of what's becoming of allopathic medicine. Something many people have observed a long time ago. I myself was indifferent until 2020. Not anymore.

Haven't there been multiple RCT studies that show IVM and HCQ can be quite effective within 1-5 days of observing symptoms? Yet, Prasad doesn't seem convinced about those treatments. No one is saying they're a cure but they do seem to help in some cases.

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Bob Feldtman's avatar

Allow me a simple suggestion for your daughter... Shower every night before bed, including washing her hair. Will reduce the accumulated pollen load on the pillow and thus inhaled.. and whatever allergy meds her docs suggest.

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Johnny Dollar's avatar

Thanks. Doctors ruled out allergies. We're wondering if it's linked to anxiety.

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Baldmichael's avatar

I wonder if anybody asks if the migraine sufferers are dehydrated let alone poisoned by big pharma.

Not that the water in the USA is much good I understand. I am from the UK.

Tom Lehrer - Pollution - with intro

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=nz_-KNNl-no

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Bob Feldtman's avatar

hydration is the key.

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John Coleman's avatar

By the same “leaving the back door open” analogy one can also see why masks don’t work, bc exhaled air full of virus simply leaks thru any gaps between the face and mask, people touch their faces and so forth. It’s known that PPE is at the bottom of the hierarchy of effective protection from contamination.

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Masaki Fujii's avatar

In the first place, there is no research on how many Viruses need to be inhaled to be infected, so it remains vague. It will also depend on the type of virus. DNA can identify 8 billion people, so individual sensitivities will be different.

It would be impossible to research it because it would be a human experiment.

Even if human experimentation is set, if an individual does not give a million dollars, no one will apply, right?

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Vijay Gupta's avatar

See the quora post below (The nature of empirical evidence in medicine):

https://www.quora.com/profile/Vijay-Gupta/posts

Note that what matters most in the real world is not the evidence itself, but the marketing of that evidence.

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Laura Noncomplier's avatar

Love your take, simple and clear. I’m tired of being manipulated, so tired

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John Stone's avatar

What a perspective! Thanks Vinu.

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Roman S Shapoval's avatar

We also need to remember that the longer people wear masks, the longer their brains are out of oxygen, so we have to forgive them for lack of reasoning.

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Bob Feldtman's avatar

AMEN. difficult to trick physics.. If the stall speed on my Cessna 182 is 60 mph, then it is that. no RCT needed. I can only change it by changing the physics, like putting on micro vortex generators to smooth out the air flow (airfoil). that drops to 55 mph now. So zip pop.. didn't require a RCT. It is what it is. What makes thing complex in medicine is that patients are humans and the DNA profiles are different, the protein synthesis and reactions are not always exact. There is a range of responses. Simple.. I can eat a peanut butter sandwich and love it. My grandkid eats it and he has a violent allergic reaction. While our genetic codes are similar, they are not exact. Thus RCTs might show it but would be awful to perform- because of potential terrible side effects. Ditto the COVID shots.. but who is gonna stand up and say oops sorry for all the morbidity and mortality?

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Vinu Arumugham #MAHA's avatar

As an engineer, I was minding my own business in my lane. My son was diagnosed with multiple life-threatening food allergies and asthma. Our doctors had no answers. So I learned immunology and published my shocking findings.

Evidence that Food Proteins in Vaccines Cause the Development of Food Allergies and Its Implications for Vaccine Policy

https://papers.ssrn.com/sol3/papers.cfm?abstract_id=3571073

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TMartini67's avatar

What makes me mad is that there were health experts that KNEW ivermectin works for asthma and hypoxia. It would definitely be safe and worth trying in treating covid. Instead they smeared it repeatedly and caused thousands of unnecessary deaths. For asthma:

"We used a mouse asthma model, in which allergic airway inflammation and airway remodelling were induced by ovalbumin (OVA) sensitisation and challenge. Ivermectin or PBS treatment was administered 1 h before OVA challenge. Ivermectin at 2 mg/kg significantly diminished recruitment of immune cells, production of cytokines in the bronchoalveolar lavage fluids and secretion of OVA-specific IgE and IgG1 in the serum. Histological studies indicated that ivermectin suppressed mucus hypersecretion by goblet cells in the airway.

Hypoxia: "Hypoxia-inducible transcription factors (HIFs) regulate hundreds of genes involved in cellular adaptation to reduced oxygen availability. HIFs consist of an O2-labile α-subunit (primarily HIF-1α and HIF-2α) and a constitutive HIF-1β subunit. In normoxia the HIF-α subunit is hydroxylated by members of a family of prolyl-4-hydroxylase domain (PHD) proteins, PHD1-3, resulting in recognition by von Hippel-Lindau protein, ubiquitination and proteasomal degradation. In contrast, reduced oxygen availability inhibits PHD activity resulting in HIF-1α stabilisation and nuclear accumulation. Nuclear import of HIF-1α mainly depends on classical nuclear localisation signals (NLS) and involves importin α/β heterodimers. Recently, a specific inhibitor of nuclear import has been identified that inhibits importin α/β-dependent import with no effects on a range of other nuclear transport pathways involving members of the importin protein family. In this study we evaluated the physiological activity of this importin α/β-inhibitor (Ivermectin) in the hypoxia response pathway. Treatment with Ivermectin decreases binding activity of HIF-1α to the importin α/β-heterodimer. Moreover, HIF-1α nuclear localisation, nuclear HIF-1α protein levels, HIF-target gene expression, as well as HIF-transcriptional activity are reduced upon Ivermectin treatment."

https://link.springer.com/article/10.1007/s00011-011-0307-8

https://pubmed.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/26351913/?dopt=Abstract

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Vinu Arumugham #MAHA's avatar

Dr. Feldtman, In case you were not aware, peanut allergy has nothing to do with genes. Peanut protein contaminated vaccines cause peanut allergy.

https://vinuarumugham.substack.com/p/skepticalraptor-is-wrong-about-peanut

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Bob Feldtman's avatar

thanks. I need to read that.

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DR's avatar

Physicist my not be fooled by physics, but biology is another story all together.

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Bob Feldtman's avatar

I so agree.. If my Cessna stalls at 60 mph, it will always stall at that. Unless I change something like improve laminar flow by installing micro VGs on the leading edge of wings and it drops stall to 55 mph... yep I did and the physics didn't change, I did it. Biology on the other hand might say a vaccine is 99% safe.. Well what if you are in the 1% and develop a life threatening or deadly event group. For you it is 100%. We doctors have to be able to tell that to patients when getting informed consent.

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Vinu Arumugham #MAHA's avatar

The way I look at it, we have not understood the complex physics (biology if you want to call it that) of vaccines. So we cannot claim it is safe AT ALL. The only truth on vaccine safety we can provide for informed consent is: WE DON'T KNOW.

In fact, we know that for injected vaccines, it is IMPOSSIBLE to make them safe.

https://twitter.com/SynthIge/status/1666912159769710592?s=20

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DR's avatar

Where's the evidence for ADE?

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Masaki Fujii's avatar

Thank you, Mr.Vinu Arumugham. I especially enjoyed Dr. Charles Richet's lecture notes on Anaphilaxis from 110 years ago. “Each of us is different from every other human being. ” said Richet. In particular, it is only an experiment with 20,000 people vaccinated with Pfizer's BNT162b trial / 340 million US population = 0.006%. Since people are not mass-produced goods in factories, this would not be sufficient to estimate the reaction of the entire remaining population. There is no proof that the remaining 99.994% can be estimated using only 0.006%.

Other vaccines are probably similar, so I think there is basically a problem with medicines called vaccines.

The safety valve that says to shut down immediately when a danger signal appears has been ignored, and who caused it to be ignored?

I think everyone is living with this understanding.

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Masaki Fujii's avatar

Ethically, experiments cannot be performed on humans. Therefore, experiments on cats have been conducted since around 1990.

Cat CoronaVirus (it's called FIPV)

Medical scientists seem to have thought that it probably occurs in humans as well.

https://journals.asm.org/doi/10.1128/jvi.64.3.1407-1409.1990

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DR's avatar

Tell them what? That 1% is not 100%?

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Ziggity's avatar

EBM’s reliance on the “gold standard” RCTs is wonderful for big capital/philanthropy because they are prohibitively expensive and easy to control with $$$$.

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DR's avatar

So what do you want to use to evaluate therapies?

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Vinu Arumugham #MAHA's avatar

Mechanistic evidence. Not speaking for Ziggity of course.

https://twitter.com/SynthIge/status/1645560307291688960

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DR's avatar

So where's the evidence that proves that this is actually the mechanism?

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Vinu Arumugham #MAHA's avatar

Be specific. I covered many topics and provided relevant evidence.

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DR's avatar

If you want to evaluate a therapy using only mechanistic evidence, then you need evidence that your claimed mechanism, and only that mechanism, is the actual mechanism.

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Vinu Arumugham #MAHA's avatar

There are not a thousand mechanisms that produce the same effect.

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Michael Kowalik's avatar

Regarding the explanation of CO2 concentration in the masked space by Del Bigtree, the additional and I think critical factor in this kind of analysis is to account for the respective volumes of mask space vs inhaled air. In short, the measured concentration of CO2 under the mask (a very small volume) must be corrected for the effect of dilution in the act of breathing (a large volume of external air inhaled together with the CO2 retained under the mask). For example, if the ratio of these volumes are 1:100, the measured concentration under the mask will be 100 times lower in the lungs. There will be some CO2 accumulation effect, but it is not equivalent to the CO2 measurement under the mask. Nevertheless, even if the CO2 effect is benign, mask mandates are unethical for many other reasons.

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Vinu Arumugham #MAHA's avatar

It seems to me the dilution is occurring (due to breathing) as the measurement is being made and is therefore already accounted. In other words, the meter does not have access to undiluted exhaled air. Is that not true?

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Michael Kowalik's avatar

I understood the experiment as measuring co2 concentration in the pause between breaths. If the measurement were made during inhalation it would simply measure the ambient co2 concentration, since the dead volume under the mask would be inhaled first in a fraction of a second. I can think of two ways of measuring the increase of co2 inhalation due to mask wearing: 1) by measuring the time average concentration of co2 directly in the lungs (difficult to do), 2) measuring the mass of all exhaled co2 over a period of time with a mask on Vs no mask (this would give the actual increase/ratio of co2 amplification). Since the mask does not filter gases in one direction, I would expect co2 amplification to be negligible (it only increases the dead volume of the lungs/mouth so in effect makes for shallower breathing.

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Vinu Arumugham #MAHA's avatar

My understanding is the meter is sampling/updating every second. So seems like it is showing the actual CO2 level being breathed in, accounting for dilution effects.

The manufacturer warns that when attempting to measure ambient CO2, one should not place it close to your face to avoid exhalation interference. So perhaps the measurement should be performed at the same location near face, with/without mask to see the difference.

https://www.manualslib.com/manual/1339918/Spectrum-3445.html

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Michael Kowalik's avatar

Yes, that could work, provided that the measurements are integrated over a time period. Nevertheless, just on the basis of physics one would not expect any effect apart from change in the respiratory system dead volume. A mask is not a one way valve that allows co2 to enter but stops it leaving, and conservation of mass precludes the mass of co2 absorbed exceeding the mass inhaled from ambient air). The only physical mechanism that could somewhat affect co2 absorption is the change in the enclosed volume, which is equivalent to shallow breathing (not fully emptying lungs, which we do most of the time).

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CBD's avatar

Careful with your physics explanation of masks. Droplets will be 'aerosolized' by the weave of the masks. These aerosols will go deeper into the lungs. This is a very complex issue so please don't over simplify it in your article promoting better use of physics! The only masks that physics supports as effective are true respirators (and they protect the wearer only) with as you say eye protection.

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Bob Feldtman's avatar

correct, but the other factoid not concsidered is the physics of air flow in the airways from the vocal cords down..... and the impact of the mucus lining of the airways that traps virus and bacteria particles...Think about what you cough up in the morning.. especially if you are a smoker, or have allergy issues during the seasons. I personally use CPAP mask and all that air for the eight hours at night goes through a filter system in the machine - before going in my lungs. You should see the dust and pollen that build up over two or three months. But bottom line are masks of any sort, except for the negative pressure space suits the otheopods use to do artificial joint replacement. Infections there are dramatic and disastrous.

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Masaki Fujii's avatar

Conclusion [[ Things that enter the body, especially the blood, are considered poisonous until their safety is confirmed. ]]

In the first place, medicine is intermediate between the natural sciences (physics, quantum chemistry,chemistry) and the humanities and literature.

In the case of natural science, hypotheses are proved by experiments with eight-nine probabilities and become theories.

Experiments can be repeated infinitely.

On the other hand, medical experiments cannot be repeated using the same human body.

There are individual differences even in animal experiments, and infinite repetition is fundamentally impossible.

People who are the target of medicine have such large individual differences that even 100 billion people can be sufficiently identified due to genetic differences.

It just makes up for it with stats.

Can medicine and pharmacy give answers to human responses using calculation formulas?

It won't be possible until 1000 years from now.

Therefore, it is not a natural science at present.

Evidence is that medical treatment cannot be calculated.

At most, AI will be able to find out which medical treatment seems to be good from a large number of experiences. (AI is based on statistics)

Therefore, medicine is not yet a science, but an intermediate between science, humanities, and literature.

It's not a natural science, so in medicine, the one with the loudest voice often wins. (Like CDC, FDA, Fauci)

So for me personally, this is the first conclusion.

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Vijay Gupta's avatar

Lies, damned lies, and medical science (or rather medical statistics):

https://www.theatlantic.com/magazine/archive/2010/11/lies-damned-lies-and-medical-science/308269/

"Much of what medical researchers conclude in their studies is misleading, exaggerated, or flat-out wrong."

AI will not, and cannot, save the day.

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Bob Feldtman's avatar

if it says NEJM, or JAMA, or BJM (or even now Most surgical journals, ) I throw them in the trash. they are garbage. Been there, done that, and saw how the academes twist things to their liking.. Boy do I have stories to tell.

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Bob Feldtman's avatar

Human mind beats AI hands down. AI won't work unless hooked to the internet. AI is limited to a binary 0-1 system, living things, like the human DNA is GCTA.. Four options.. and the strands are long. Each cell has 12 meters of DNA strands in the nucleus. But there are 50 trillion cells in a human body so the DNA data stream would stretch across the solar system three times. I am gonna do a substack on that soon. AI is a nice search engine tool. but when I put in a question about protein folding of hemoglobin and electrostatic connection points and the difference between the points in sickle cell vs normal hemoglobin.. - the CHAT got or whatever, gave an answer that was gibberish and told me nothing. - try it

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Bob Feldtman's avatar

actually, here is a factoid. Studies done when I was in medical school 1968-72 showed that dogs routinely have positive blood cultures for bacteria, thus we didn't experiment with cloth arterial grafts on dogs for concern the grafts would get infect. Oh and a study of volunteer medical students showed that a large percentage of them, had positive blood cultures for a bacteria of some sort after chewing ice. Go figure. Shows we have an amazing immune system actually.

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