Epoch Health
@epochhealth • 110,211 subscribers
👉Independent journalism. 👉Top Daily articles on #health 👉 subscribed by 1 million plus readers 👉Side effects of following us may include: critical thinking
Videos
John Miller was so sick with chronic Lyme disease he was passing out and could barely take part in life. He flew to a clinic in Germany and after three weeks, he came home cured. "We heat the body to 106.8 Fahrenheit," says Dr. Julian Douwes of St. George Hospital. "It has been shown that the spirochetes, the bacteria behind Lyme disease, actually dies off at that temperature." Antibiotics can't reach chronic Lyme. "It's in the brain. It's intracellular. They have a lot of immune evading mechanisms." The idea won a Nobel Prize in 1927. Syphilis comes from the same family of bacteria as Lyme, and back then there were no antibiotics. So Julius Wagner-Jauregg injected his syphilis patients with the blood of malaria patients. The fever spikes cured them. He had 18 patients. 16 came out of a wheelchair. Meanwhile, chronic Lyme patients today are being "ignored and tossed away." "They actually have a positive lab test and people still tell them your symptoms are not valid, your symptoms do not exist, chronic Lyme doesn't exist." The treatment isn't available in the United States.
Epoch Health118,530 Aufrufe • vor 4 Tagen
"Most published research findings are false." Say that out loud in a hospital and you'd get laughed out of the room. That's the actual title of a paper by John Ioannidis at Stanford, whom Dr. Aseem Malhotra calls the most cited medical researcher alive. The greater the financial interest in a field, the less likely its research is to be true. Doctors treat the New England Journal of Medicine, JAMA, and The Lancet like biblical truth. They don't realize how much of it is corrupted by vested interests. Dr. Malhotra spent years treating those journals as gospel. Then he realized what he was actually reading: studies bought and shaped by the people who profit from them. He isn't saying doctors are bad. He's saying they're being manipulated and don't know it.
Epoch Health174,296 Aufrufe • vor 17 Tagen
“A healthy patient is a lost client.” That’s one of the most unsettling lines in the film. “Healthcare Decoded” explores the incentives, pressures, and hidden structures shaping modern medicine—and what they mean for your care, your costs, and your choices. Watch Now👇
Epoch Health1,154,210 Aufrufe • vor 4 Monaten
The state showed up at Joel Salatin's farm and told him selling chickens to his own neighbors was illegal. He was stunned. "I'm a voluntary farmer. They're a voluntary buyer. We're neighbors. What do you mean? We can't butcher a chicken here and sell it to them?" Their reasoning? The air was unsanitary. "If one fly enters your processing area, then it's an adulterated chicken and inedible." They said his windows had to be covered with fly-impregnable mesh. One problem. He processed outdoors, with no walls. "It doesn't say I have to have a wall," Salatin told them. That sentence became the crux of the showdown. "They were going to eliminate our farm." He pulled in his senator, his delegate, and an attorney. Three months later, he won. In the living-room meeting, a legislative aide looked at the regulators and asked: "Gentlemen, is it possible that somebody in Richmond created these rules who could not have conceived of a place like Polyface?" They had to say yes. And here's the thing. A microbiology lab had just swab-tested his birds against store-bought chicken. The store-bought birds had been through 40 chlorine baths. His had no antimicrobials at all. The store-bought chicken averaged 3,600 colony forming units of bacteria. His averaged 133. That's 27 times more bacteria in the government-approved bird. "So if it's clean, who cares if it's outside, inside, in the kitchen? If it's clean, it's clean," Salatin said. The regulator's answer? "Well, that's not all we're concerned about." The standard was never cleanliness. It was compliance.
Epoch Health216,840 Aufrufe • vor 1 Monat
Her body was cooled to 60 degrees. Her heart was stopped. The blood was drained out of her brain. Every monitor in the room said she was dead. Then she woke up and described her own surgery. Pam Reynolds had an aneurysm at the base of her brain that couldn't be operated on by ordinary means. So Dr. Robert Spetzler stopped her heart, drained her brain, and gave himself 30 minutes to rebuild the artery. When she recovered, she told him she had watched the whole thing. He told her she couldn't have. She was under surgical drapes. She was brain dead. So she described his custom-made instruments. The conversations between the doctors, word for word. The problems that came up mid-surgery. "She described the music they were playing in the operating room while she was brain dead." Spetzler's own response: "I can't explain it."
Epoch Health244,447 Aufrufe • vor 2 Monaten
Twenty years ago, a blood pressure of 150 over 90 got you told to exercise more and cut the salt. Then the line dropped to 140. Then 130. Now it sits around 120. Nothing changed about the human body. Only the number changed. "You would not believe how often they move the goalposts." That's Alan Cassels, a health policy researcher who has spent decades tracking how disease definitions get written and who writes them. "When you lower the level at which you start treating someone, or telling someone that they're ill or potentially ill from high blood pressure, you expand the massive pool of people that become patients." And the line only ever moves one way. They never redraw a definition in a way that shrinks the pool. Cholesterol is the cleanest example. "Just by lowering the level at which we would consider high cholesterol to be a condition, overnight, they would expand the number of Americans who would be treated for cholesterol lowering drugs by 25 million people." Cassels says the Canadian diabetes guidelines carry conflict-of-interest disclosures that run 15 or 20 pages. "The pharmaceutical companies are very good at putting their own people on guideline committees." You are not diagnosing more disease. You are manufacturing more patients.
Epoch Health100,329 Aufrufe • vor 1 Monat
Patients with low vitamin D were ending up on ventilators and dying. The ones with normal levels were mostly fine. The fix looked obvious: give everyone vitamin D. Dr. Roger Seheult did exactly that. It didn't work. "We just didn't see the real benefits that we thought we would see." But what if vitamin D was never doing the heavy lifting? What if the blood test was pointing at something else, something we have quietly engineered out of our lives? Something like... the sun. Vitamin D wasn't the cause. It was a marker for sunlight, and almost no one gets enough anymore.
Epoch Health42,077 Aufrufe • vor 16 Tagen
A 16-year-old girl raised vegan told her parents she wanted to eat meat to get stronger for track and field. Her parents refused to support it. But she found her way to the carnivore diet anyway. What happened next was completely unexpected: “Her Tourette’s went into full remission.” DR. SHAWN BAKER: “She ended up becoming a carnivore. She got a little stronger, but her Tourette’s went into full remission.” “I was just like, that is really weird. There’s not really any kind of talks about curing Tourette’s syndrome.”
Epoch Health162,091 Aufrufe • vor 2 Monaten
In 2023, the FDA quietly changed one of the most basic protections in medical research. Sharyl Attkisson revealed that researchers can now withhold certain risks from study participants if they decide those risks are minimal. “If they determine on their own that the risks are minimal, they don’t have to disclose those to people in a study.” Read that again. The same researchers conducting the experiment may now decide which possible risks you do not need to hear about. Attkisson’s question cuts through the justification: “If risks really are minimal, why can’t they tell you? Why is that something they would want to withhold?” For decades, informed consent meant being told what could happen before agreeing to participate. That protection now has an exception, and the people running the study help decide when it applies…
Epoch Health71,266 Aufrufe • vor 1 Monat
Twenty years ago, a blood pressure of 150 over 90 got you told to exercise more and cut the salt. Then the line dropped to 140. Then 130. Now it sits around 120. Nothing changed about the human body. Only the number changed. "You would not believe how often they move the goalposts." That's Alan Cassels, a health policy researcher who has spent decades tracking how disease definitions get written and who writes them. "When you lower the level at which you start treating someone, or telling someone that they're ill or potentially ill from high blood pressure, you expand the massive pool of people that become patients." And the line only ever moves one way. They never redraw a definition in a way that shrinks the pool. Cholesterol is the cleanest example. "Just by lowering the level at which we would consider high cholesterol to be a condition, overnight, they would expand the number of Americans who would be treated for cholesterol lowering drugs by 25 million people." Cassels says the Canadian diabetes guidelines carry conflict-of-interest disclosures that run 15 or 20 pages. "The pharmaceutical companies are very good at putting their own people on guideline committees."
Epoch Health17,135 Aufrufe • vor 7 Tagen
James was 4 years old, sitting on his dad’s lap, when he said something no child should be able to say. His father had just hugged him. “You are such a good son.” And the boy looked up and answered: “That’s why I picked you. I knew you would be good parents.” Cute thing for a kid to say. So his dad played along and asked where he found them. “A big pink hotel in Hawaii.” “What were we doing when you picked us?” “You were having dinner on the beach at night.” His father went pale. Five years earlier, before James was even conceived, he and his wife had celebrated their wedding anniversary at the Royal Hawaiian, a coral pink hotel in Honolulu. They had dinner on the beach. At night. They had never once spoken about that trip in front of James. And that was just the beginning. Because at 2 years old, James had started waking up screaming the same words: “Airplane crash, on fire. Little man can’t get out.” He told his parents he had been an American pilot, that his plane was shot down by the Japanese. Then the details got specific. He named the carrier he flew from: the USS Natoma Bay. He named a fellow pilot on the ship: Jack Larson. He named the man who died: James McCready Huston Jr. His father, a skeptic by nature, started digging to prove it wasn’t real. Every name checked out. James M. Huston Jr. was a real World War II pilot who really flew from the Natoma Bay, was really shot down by the Japanese, and really died. Then James repeated a private nickname Huston had used only for his sister. Huston’s surviving family confirmed it. These weren’t a toddler’s bad dreams...
Epoch Health96,349 Aufrufe • vor 2 Monaten
Almost every biscuit and pancake in the American diet is made with aluminum. It's in the baking powder. "They now make an aluminum free baking powder. But they don't use them," says Dr. Russell Blaylock, who practiced neurosurgery for 25 years. Can you spot it on the label? "I don't know of any manufacturer that uses aluminum free baking powder." Then there's the foil. "People wrapping their food in aluminum foil and cooking in aluminum foil, that aluminum is leached into the food." He says you absorb about 30% of what you eat. "If you're absorbing 30% aluminum for a lifetime, you're accumulating a lot of aluminum in the brain and the other organs. And it's neurotoxic, it damages brain cells." Dr. Blaylock ranks food as the second most common source of aluminum. He says vaccines are first.
Epoch Health35,817 Aufrufe • vor 22 Tagen
By 2010, Laura Delano had spent more than a decade as a psychiatric patient. Diagnosed bipolar as a teenager, she'd handed her life over to doctors and done everything she was told. Then, at age 27, one afternoon flipped how she saw all of it. She was in a day program, at the hospital nine to five. A psychiatrist sensed she was becoming suicidal, and suggested she check herself into the short-term unit. "So I said, yeah, that's a great idea. I'm just going to go home and get my belongings. I'll come back later this afternoon. And he wouldn't let me leave to do that." "Things escalated. I began raising my voice. He called security." That was the moment reality inverted for her. "And that was the moment that I realized that this system I had been turning to for help through all of these years, through the most formative years of my life, that I had been assuming existed to take care of me, to help me feel okay in my skin was actually a system of control, and I just hadn't seen it for what it was because I had never said no to it before." "In an instant, it all just kind of blew up. And I suddenly was like, what have I been participating in? How did I not see this?"
Epoch Health72,574 Aufrufe • vor 1 Monat
1 in 2 Americans have a bacterial infestation in the small intestine, and most have no idea it's there. That's the conservative estimate from Dr. William Davis, cardiologist and author of Super Gut. He calls it SIBO, small intestinal bacterial overgrowth, where fecal microbes climb out of the colon and colonize the 24 feet of small intestine that was never built to hold them. Why does it matter? "I call it the uber risk factor for cancers because that process, SIBO and endotoxemia, has now been associated with numerous forms of cancer. Breast, prostate, uterus, you name it." When those fecal microbes die, they dump toxins straight into the bloodstream. Dr. Davis calls it endotoxemia, and he ties it to accelerated aging, dementia, heart disease, and cancer.
Epoch Health61,200 Aufrufe • vor 1 Monat
Everyone knows SSRIs can dull your sex life while you're on them. Almost no one is told what can happen after you stop. Sexual health clinics were the first to hear it. Patients coming in years after their last dose, still not right, telling doctors the same thing: "I came off the Prozac, you know, 2 or 3 years ago, and I've still got the symptoms." No drive. No sensation. Long after the pills were gone. The clincher, psychiatrist Dr. Joanna Moncrieff says, was in the animals: "There are animal studies showing that animals that were treated as adolescents with SSRIs show reduced sexual activity as adults." It has a name now: PSSD. And Moncrieff says most doctors don't know it exists, which means they can't warn you.
Epoch Health21,233 Aufrufe • vor 15 Tagen