Many of the problems we currently see in medicine are not new, but rather iterations of things that have been forgotten and occurred countless times in the past. For example, the COVID mRNA vaccines are not the first time the medical field has experienced irrational exuberance for a dubious remedy, even as some of their colleagues spoke out against it (at great risk to their professional standing). Here, we’ll look at what happened with corticosteroids, both because it provides a critical window into much of what’s gone awry with medicine and because steroids are some of the most problematic but widely used medications on the market.
Allopathy
Because of the work that has been done to enshrine our system of medicine as the gold standard everything else must measure up to, many are not aware it is just one of many approaches to healing that has been developed throughout history, or even that in previous eras, it had its own label rather than just being “medicine.”
Note: one of the major challenges I run into when writing is that there is no widely accepted term for our system of medicine, as they either simply assert it is “the standard” (e.g., conventional medicine or modern medicine) or frame it in a cultural context (e.g., “Western Medicine”). Of the accepted options, “biomedicine” is probably the most accurate (but largely unknown to the general public), whereas “standard medicine” (a term I made up) has become my favorite as it encapsulates it being the orthodox approach, the need of medicine to treat patients through standardized algorithms that ignore their individuality, and highlights J.D. Rockefeller’s monopolization of medicine in the early 1900s (as he named his oil monopoly “Standard Oil”).
Almost two thousand years ago, Galen, a Greek physician in Rome, collated, systematized, and refined existing approaches to medicine, particularly those originating in Greece, and then disseminated them worldwide. Central to Galen’s approach were the importance of anatomy (gained through continuous dissections) and the humoral theory of disease, which dominated Western medicine until around the 1850s.
For context, Hippocrates’ humoral theory of disease posited that health depended on the balance of four bodily fluids, known as humors: blood, phlegm, yellow bile, and black bile. Each humor was associated with specific qualities (hot, cold, wet, dry), elements (air, water, fire, earth), and temperaments (sanguine, phlegmatic, choleric, melancholic). Within this framework, disease resulted from an imbalance of these humors, caused by factors such as diet, environment, or lifestyle. Treatments, including bloodletting, purging, and dietary changes, aimed to restore humoral balance.
While this framework somewhat resembled what other cultures had come up with (e.g., the “fire” of the five elements in Chinese Medicine and “Pitta” of Ayurveda largely matched “yellow bile”), like surgery, it was more unique in its tendency to use forceful measures to correct a perceived humoral imbalance in the body. This in turn, gave way to a system of medicine where drugs that created dramatic physiologic changes (e.g., mercury, lead, arsenic, and opium) became the therapeutic mainstays of Western medicine, particularly since it was much easier to tell a drug “worked” if it created a dramatic effect.
Unfortunately, in many cases, those dramatic effects (e.g., it rapidly inducing vomiting) were due to the drug being highly toxic so many were injured by these early drugs, which in turn required the medical profession to aggressively double-down on the importance of their approach (particularly since so many people were being severely poisoned by mercury based drugs).
Note: during my training, another doctor proudly showed me the bag his father had brought to many visits, and sure enough, it had mercury in it (which remarkably the doctor did not even realize was mercury).
Because of the poor outcomes this form of medicine often produced, a variety of alternative approaches came into existence (e.g., Homeopathy in 1796, Eclectic Medicine in 1827, Osteopathy in 1874, Chiropractic in 1895 and Naturopathy in 1901), all of which were based on supporting the body’s ability to heal itself rather than trying to force the body into its desired state. To cement this distinction, the founder of Homeopathy used the term “Allopathy,” (“allo” means ‘other’ or ‘different’) as it highlighted allopathic medicine’s tendency to use external interventions (e.g., drugs or surgery) that created effects opposite to the existing disease in order to bring the body towards its desire state.
Note: initially, Allopathy was a derisive term, but in time some MDs adopted it to distinguish themselves from their competition, however once Allopathy used a variety of monopolistic tactics around 1910 to take over the medical marketplace (which was necessary to save the dying profession), Allopathy faded into obscurity and Allopaths simply referred to themselves as “doctors” while Allopathic medicine became “medicine” (and all the other approaches to healing largely faded into obscurity despite many offering immense benefit to patients).
As Allopathic medicine evolved (e.g., new drugs were discovered) it gravitated towards drugs which suppressed the unpleasant symptoms in the body (e.g., fevers or skin eruptions), in part because this matched its pre-existing mentality of forcefully overriding illness and in part because this was the easiest way to create a dramatic change in a patient (hence inspiring confidence in both the doctor and patient).
At the same time however, the competing schools of medicine became more and more aware of the damage Allopathic remedies created and gradually concluded that while suppressing symptoms could lead to short term improvements, it often also lead to the subsequent creation of severe illnesses (which coincides with Allopathic medicine being excellent at treating acute emergencies but poorly equipped to treat chronic diseases).
A key insight during this debate (Hering’s Law of Cure) came from a Homeopath who concluded that healing occurs in a specific order (e.g., from the inside out, from the head down, and in the reverse order of symptom appearance) and that disease occurs in the opposite direction (e.g., initially at a superficial level and then eventually at a deep one). Thus, by allopathically suppressing symptoms (which were often the body’s attempt to expel a pathogenic factor), rather than curing the illness, the pathogenic factor was instead pushed deeper into the body, creating a more severe illness in the future.
Note: Chinese medicine holds a similar perspective and argues that the defensive energy of the body which reacts to illness (the “Wei Qi)” functions to prevent external pathogenic factors from penetrating into the body. Chinese medicine in turn maps a progression of increasing severity of disease as the pathogenic factor travels from the superficial to the deep energy channels of the body (something I believe correlates with increasing blood stasis and loss of zeta potential obstructing larger and larger vessels). As such, Chinese Medicine’s treatments are often aimed at expelling a pathogenic factor rather than counteracting the symptomatic reaction to it. Conversely, some schools of Chinese medicine advocated for suppressing the initial reaction to the more dangerous plagues (as this was lifesaving at the time), but acknowledged this resulted in a chronic infection in the future.
Throughout my career, I have seen numerous extremely compelling cases of Hering’s Law of Cure (e.g., children with significant reactions to vaccines being given Tylenol for their fevers and then experiencing a much more severe illness, such as autistic regression, or COVID-19 patients crashing after their unpleasant fever is suppressed). Unfortunately, this principle remains largely unrecognized, and as a result, many standard medical practices are simply aggressive suppression of symptoms.
Note: Hering’s Law of Cure subsequently expanded to recognize that the “deeper” layer of physical symptoms were emotional and mental in nature, and then even deeper ones were spiritual symptoms
The Global Loss of Vitality
Early on, when I began reading about the largely forgotten history of medicine, I was struck by two things:
• How profoundly damaging many of the early Allopathic remedies were (e.g., I’ve previously written about the smallpox vaccines, and this book does an excellent job at shedding light on the damage mercury did over the centuries).
• How much healthier people (who weren’t poisoned by a mercury prescribing doctor) were and how much more effective many natural therapies were in the past than they are now.
This second point prompted me to begin asking older doctors (from various medical schools) if they had observed a general decline in human vitality in the patients they saw at the start of their careers compared to the end, and all of them shared that they had. Additionally:
• They noted that beyond patients becoming much sicker and having conditions they’d never seen before, it was also much harder to treat them as each therapy they used had shifted from making a dramatic improvement to a more minuscule one, which required numerous successive treatments to bring about an improvement.
• They typically attributed this shift to a loss in human vitality. They cited a variety of correlates (e.g., the average human body temperature dropping, people becoming less able to mount fevers, infants being less able to produce a brisk cry, or increasing degrees of fluid stagnation in their patients).
• They stated some of the treatments that had been developed by their profession were specifically made to address this loss of vitality, as their original treatments no longer worked. Conversely, some shared that when patients were placed in environments that restored aspects of their vitality (e.g., by being somewhere with exceptionally clean air), much less needed to be done to improve their condition.
•One doctor I spoke to had asked this same question of their mentor, while another had asked a mentor who’d also asked their mentor—all of whom corroborated that this decline in vitality had been continually in motion since at least the late 1800s.
Note: typically this decline in vitality proceeds in a linear fashion and then spikes at certain times (e.g., after the introduction of the smallpox vaccine, the 1986 law which granted immunity to vaccine manufacturers and led to a rapid proliferation in the vaccine schedule, and after the COVID vaccines). In each case, this increase in disease gets normalized and forgotten by the next generation of doctors (who entered practice after the last wave of sickness had become the “new normal”) and by the time its noticed, it’s often too late for them to share it (e.g., I was just speaking to a colleague who entered practice in the early 1970s and remarked that he used to have many patients in their 90s and 100s who were very mentally clear, that the dementia we frequently see in the elderly now was quite rare then, and that time it was rare to see cancers except in fairly old patients).
In turn, while I thought this model of decreasing vitality was valid (particularly since countless datasets have shown an explosion in the rates of chronic illness over the decades), it was much harder to say what was responsible as a good case could be made for so many different factors in our environment that the answer one arrived at was nearly guaranteed to be the product of one’s biases and specific focus rather than an objective assessment. Nonetheless, when I asked a variety of skilled practitioners who’d successfully treated the “unsolvable” chronic illnesses over the decades, they shared that they typically found the root issue in those diseases was one of the following:
• Heavy metal toxicity
• Dental issues (particularly root canals).
• Pharmaceutical drugs
• Vaccines
• Chemical toxicity
• Dysfunctional dynamics perpetuating in their family constellation
• Electrosmog (e.g., EMF sensitivity)
• Toxic scars (e.g., from surgeries)
Note: while not a direct cause, many also believed the demineralization of our soil (which leads to nutritionally deficient foods) and modern technology making us be disconnected from all the natural rhythms that regulate the body were also major contributing factors.
When I looked at all of this, I realized a common thread over half shared was them creating fluid stagnation (or exacerbating the consequences of fluid stagnation such as insufficient nutrients being present in the remaining blood that reaches tissues—something, which for example, often underlies macular degeneration).
Next, since Chinese Medicine holds one of the longest medical records of humanity, I was curious to see if it had observed any significant changes in humanity’s health and found out that around 1830, the concept of “blood stasis” became established as a primary cause of disease (and since that time has come to be seen as having a greater and greater importance). Since many of the highly unusual and severe injuries caused by the smallpox vaccine, introduced in 1796, matched those attributed to blood stasis in Chinese medicine, I looked up when it was first introduced to China—1805, which corroborates this theory.
Note: all of this could easily be expanded into multiple books. For those wishing to learn more, I covered the smallpox and blood stasis aspect of it in more detail here, the general loss of vitality here, how vaccines cause fluid stagnation here and the data demonstrating the profound damage vaccination has done to our society here.
Because of this, I am inclined to believe that the introduction of the smallpox vaccine (and the vaccines that followed) radically shifted humanity’s health, and that much of this was a direct consequence of the fluid stagnation (e.g., due to a loss of physiologiczeta potential) that humanity experienced. However, while there is a good case for my argument, it could also be a product of my own biases, as my approach to medicine places a heavy emphasis on fluid stagnation, and I constantly see how it links to a myriad of diseases).
Systemic Suppression
Since it is often possible to make so many different credible and persuasive arguments for a topic at hand (e.g., what’s causing this global loss of vitality), one of my approaches for filtering through them is seeing which ones then accurately predicted the future (as most don’t ultimately pan out or are retroactively crafted to explain the past).
In turn, I’ve never forgotten a conference which happened in the 1970s (I believe it was in 1974) where one of the world’s leading homeopaths convened a panel to discuss what the likely consequences would be in the upcoming decades of Allopathic medicine routinely suppressing symptoms (e.g., it aggressively treating all fevers with medications and preventing the childhood febrile illnesses with vaccination—something studies have repeatedly linked to cancer later in life).
Note: throughout the literature on the 1918 influenza, doctors from every school of medicine found influenza patients who had been treated with the fever suppressing medication aspirin (which was excessively distributed by MDs of the era) tended to be much more likely to die, while conversely, they discovered that the most effective treatments for the illness were those which then caused the fever to break on its own. Similarly, after I learned of the arguments against suppressing fevers, when I came down with a flu and did not feel well, I decided to try heating my body to see if it would accelerate the clearance of the infection and discovered not only that it did, but also that I immediately felt much better once I heated myself. This led me to conclude the discomfort the body experiences during a fever (assuming it is not an extreme fever) is not due to the heat, but rather the effort being expended to heat the body up and since then I’ve had many cases where heating the bodies (but not heads) of febrile patients greatly benefitted them.
At that conference, building upon Hering’s Law of Cure (along with the recent mass introduction of suppressive steroids), they predicted that if Allopathic medicine continued to proliferate in its mass suppression of symptoms, in the decades to follow, we would see:
•We would see a global shift from less severe illnesses to more severe ones (e.g., cancers).
•That this suppression would cause physical illnesses to be pushed deeper into the body and be replaced with psychiatric illnesses, and in time spiritual ones (particularly when the psychiatric illnesses were also suppressed with medications).
Note: the predicted psychiatric illnesses included common ones (e.g., anxiety along with depression, which at the time was rarely an issue), psychopathy, mass shootings, self-harm and self-mutilation, and the public becoming willing to do crazier and crazier things. The spiritual ailments, included people wanting to be robotic rather than spiritually connected to life, and people knowing they were spiritually adrift because they’d lost their connection to life (which otherwise would have prevented much of this dysfunctional behavior).
It was hence quite noteworthy to me that many of these shifts indeed happened, and likewise to compare just how different patients in the 1970s (especially older ones) were. However, I also feel a very strong (albeit retrospective) case can be made that the increasing proliferation of vaccinations explains this shift.
All of the previous thus touches upon one of the central criticisms of Allopathic medicine: anytime an external agent is used to forcefully change a process which is unfolding within the body (rather than aiding the body’s ability to resolve it) you run the risk of a minor temporary issue being exchanged for a severe chronic one—especially when this is repeatedly done throughout the course of someone’s life. In some cases, this risk is very justified (e.g., in a life-threatening emergency or with a relatively safe drug that has limited long-term complications). At the same time however, a general unwillingness to acknowledge this issue pervades Allopathic medicine. Now everyone’s gradually become habituated to patients “just being” sicker and sicker, and not much being possible to do about it.
Note: I believe this blindness arises in part because medical training requires doctors to be knowledgeable in a wide range of topics leading to many complex subjects being reduced to simple axiomatic truths that are memorized and then never questioned and because so much of the Allopathic therapeutic toolbox carries long term risks that it would be very difficult for doctors to practice medicine if they were fully conscious of those issues (discussed further here)
Suppressive Antibiotics
While steroids are one of the medications most associated with “suppressing” illness, many others are too. For example, for years, many natural medicine practitioners (e.g., homeopaths) also told me they’d frequently seen antibiotics “treat” an acute infection but turn it into a chronic one. I wasn’t sure what to make of this (as microbiome disruption could partially but not fully explain it) then discovered something similar existed in Chinese Medicine::
The concept of Latent Heat is very old in Chinese medicine, having been mentioned for the first time in the ‘Yellow Emperor’s Classic of Internal Medicine’. Latent Heat occurs when an external pathogenic factor penetrates the body without causing apparent symptoms at the time; the pathogenic factor penetrates into the Interior, and ‘incubates’ there, turning into interior Heat. This Heat later emerges with acute symptoms of Heat: when it emerges, it is called Latent Heat.
Note: in modern Chinese Medicine, antibiotics and vaccines are now proposed as sources of latent heat.
Much later, when I read Cell Wall Deficient Forms: Stealth Pathogens all of this finally made sense. This book argued that when bacteria are exposed to lethal stressors, particularly cell wall destroying antibiotics, while most will die, some will instead enter a primitive survival mode and transform into misshapen cell wall deficient (CWD) “mycoplasma like” bacteria which can radically change their size or morphology (and hence look very different). While these bacteria are hard to detect (and when seen, due to no one knowing they “exist,” often mistaken for cellular debris and ignored), with the correct techniques they can be detected. In turn, the book provides a wealth of evidence that CWD bacteria:
• Are found within many “aseptic” tissues undergoing an autoimmune attack, with specific CWD bacteria associated with many different autoimmune disorders which have no known cause.
• Once the environment is “safe” can transform back into their normal form and cause a sudden recurrence of an infection—suggesting chronic infections are due to antibiotics creating a dormant CWD population rather than continual reinfection.
Note: many popular alternative schools of medicine (e.g., those of Rife, Naessens, and Enderlein) came from microscopes which could directly observe these pleomorphic bacteria continually shifting into new morphologies, and that diseases states (e.g., cancer) correlated to specific morphologies, while other morphologies resulted in a symbiotic state of health (e.g., this a video of the organisms Naessens observed). Since the morphologies adopted correlated with the internal state of the body, this gave rise to the belief that treatments should aim to create “healthy terrains” within the body, which would give rise to non-pathogenic forms of the bacteria rather than antibiotics that provoked pathogen transformation.
All of this has influenced how I (and quite a few colleagues) practice medicine in some unique ways:
• First, around 10% of chronic conditions I come across seem to have a “pleomorphic” component and improve once that is addressed.
• Second, while sometimes helpful and necessary, I try to avoid using cell wall targeting antibiotics (e.g., penicillin) as they are particularly prone to provoking the CWD transformation.
• Third, I have found many therapies which help autoimmune conditions (e.g., ultraviolet blood irradiation) often also happen to be highly lethal to CWD. As such. I have long wondered if certain rheumatologic drugs work in this manner. For example, there was a prolonged period where minocycline (which is potent against mycoplasma) was successfully used to treat rheumatoid arthritis (RA), but eventually abandoned as (like all tetracycles) it had some side effects, it only worked in a subset of RA cases but not others, and there was no mechanism to explain how it could be working.
Note: a case has been made that there are widespread mycoplasmal infections in the population (that possibly were lab engineered). The drug that best treated those infections was doxycycline, and I have long wondered if the reason why integrative practitioners find it helps inflammatory conditions like Lyme disease is because it is actually eliminating pathogenic mycoplasma.
Likewise, one of the most popular drugs in rheumatology, methotrexate, “works” by depleting folate production in the body, but oddly still works when folate is given to counter (some but not all) of its side effects—implying folate elimination is not its actual mechanism. Conversely however, it also has potent antibacterial properties (against specific bacteria), and rather than targeting the cell wall, it reduces bacterial DNA synthesis.
Note: many integrative physicians find that chronic autoimmune illnesses are linked to a wide range of chronic but unrecognized infections (possibly because the organisms contain antigen sequences matching normal tissue and hence provoking an autoimmune attack against it).
