The Arrow #119

Hello everyone.

Greetings from Dallas.

You will no doubt be pleased to learn that my life over the past week has been pretty ordinary and pleasant. With one minor exception, more about which shortly.

The flight to Dallas was uneventful. All the appliances and utilities worked when we got back to our house here. Not even a reboot of the modem was required.

So, I have nothing to complain about this week.

With one small exception. I was briefly caught up in the feud between Elon Musk and Substack.

You may not have known about it. I didn’t until late in the game. If you recall, in the last Arrow I tried unsuccessfully to put up a Twitter link. Typically, all I have to do is copy the link and paste it into the Substack post I’m writing, and Voila! the Tweet is embedded. When I tried last week to put up a tweet showing a video of the tornado in Little Rock, I got this:

I just figured there was some kind of technical glitch going on with Substack. What I didn’t realize is that in a fit of pique Musk had screwed with all the Twitter links going to Substack.

Substack has developed a product called Notes, which they’ve emailed me about countless times inviting me to participate (which I haven’t as of yet, not because I have an issue with it, but because I simply haven’t had the time to fiddle with it). Anyone who is familiar with Twitter taking a quick look at Notes would realize the latter is basically a carbon copy of Twitter.

I’m sure this was not lost on Elon Musk, who has a considerable fortune invested in Twitter and is struggling to keep it afloat while trying to figure out how to make it profitable. And get a return on his substantial investment.

In his conversion of Twitter from a carefully-controlled mouthpiece for the deep state to more of a public square, freedom of speech platform, Musk alienated all the so-called elites ( a term I hate, because IMHO they are dumb as dirt and total herd animals) and drove them to Mastodon and other such platforms where they can all virtue signal and parrot one another. Along the way, woke advertisers left Twitter, so ad revenue fell. And Musk was left with a bunch of bills that weren’t disclosed, so now he (Twitter) is being sued right and left for payment.

Musk isn’t a happy camper. And when a competitor popped up with basically a mirror image of his platform, he was pissed.

So, he fought back. Which I have no problem with, other than the fact he didn’t play straight and true with the facts.

Matt Taibbi wrote that Twitter was blocking Substack links folks had put in their tweets.

Musk put up the tweet below, which I can’t get to embed, so I just took a screenshot.

I can tell you (and show you) that #1 above is false. I don’t know about #2. And #3 is questionable.

At first Substack had difficulty recruiting big name writers to the platform. The way Substack works is that writers can charge whatever they want for their work, and Substack takes 10 percent. Stripe, the credit card processor, takes their chunk of 2-3 percent plus a fixed fee per transaction. The writer gets what’s left over.

Big name journalists didn’t want to leave their steady jobs to take a chance on Substack, so Substack made a handful of them offers of a guaranteed income for a year while they tried it out. In all cases, the writers would have made much more money taking Substack’s regular 10 percent deal than they did with the guaranteed payment. So all of them switched after their first year.

So Taibbi and these other writers get paid by their readers. They are not employees of Substack. Substack provides the platform on which they write and takes a 10 percent fee for doing so. But, it is sort of true that during that first year these writers could have been considered employees of Substack.

When I read all this was happening, I understood why the link to the tweet I tried to post didn’t work, but I didn’t know about the Substack links on Twitter. So I immediately went there to check the Substack link on my own Twitter profile.

I used to have a link to my blog where the Substack link is now. When all this was blowing up, I clicked on the Substack link in my profile and was taken to this:

When I hit the “Ignore this warning and continue” link, I was taken to my Substack. I tried clicking on the link on my Twitter profile multiple times over a couple of days and got the same popup every time. So, Elon was clearly lying about Substack links never being blocked. I intended to put up a page on my blog with the link to Substack and an explanation, then link to that on Twitter instead of linking directly to Substack. But just about the time I was ready to make my move, I checked again, and the Twitter link worked again. So, I left it alone. Now I’m ready should it happen again.

As it turned out, it was all a tempest in a teapot, but it was disconcerting for a while. And it was the only unseemly thing that happened to me over the past week, so life is good.

Elon somewhat redeemed himself in my eyes by labeling both NPR and PBS as being publicly funded, which, as everyone knows, they are. Both rage quit Twitter. I would put up Musk’s tweet on it, but Twitter links still can’t be embedded in Substack with a quick copy and paste. I don’t know who’s at fault for this. Is it Musk or is it Substack fighting back? I don’t have a clue, but it’s a real pain in the ass, because it used to be so easy to stick up a short video or a tweet. Now I have to take a screenshot and add the tweet as an image. Would be so much easier if this spat were over. Screenshot below. Link here.

Strange this is; everyone knows they are government funded. Why is it worth rage quitting over a statement of the obvious?

Fit Versus Healthy

As everyone probably knows by now, popular actor Lance Reddick died recently. The popular star from The Wire, Bosch, and John Wick was found unconscious in the back yard by his wife on March 17. He never regained consciousness and died later in the hospital.

Of course, the first thing those of us who are vaccine-hesitant wondered was if Reddick’s death came as a result of the Covid vaccine(s) he had surely taken. Hard to work in woke Hollywood without them.

That’s certainly what Jeff Childers of Coffee & Covid believes.

Here is part of what Jeff Childers had to say about this untimely death (Reddick was only 60) [bold emphasis mine]:

Let’s take a different look at this untimely death, shall we.

First, does anyone remember Jim Fixx?

He was the guy who brought jogging to the masses back in the 1970s and 1980s. You couldn’t turn on the TV without seeing an interview with Jim Fixx. He wrote a bestselling book on the benefits of running titled The Complete Book of Running (still in print) with his own well-muscled legs on the cover.

Fixx was the epitome of fit, yet he died of a massive coronary while running at age 52. He was found dead in a ditch beside the road he was running on in Vermont. On autopsy, the coroner discovered severe coronary artery disease involving all his major coronary arteries.

Jim Fixx was extremely fit, but he certainly wasn’t healthy.

Now let’s look at another example.

Sir Winston Leonard Spencer Churchill pictured above was certainly not fit. This was a photo of him 20+ years before he died at age 90. He smoked cigars, drank like a fish, but was generally pretty healthy. Not fit, but healthy.

There is a difference between the two.

Unhealthy people can be extremely fit. Fit people are not always healthy, despite appearing so.

Let’s take a look at Lance Reddick.

He has two things going against him right from birth. He’s black and he’s a male.

Black people have about 30 percent more heart disease than do white people. And males have more heart disease than do females.

According to the statement from Reddick’s lawyer Childers quoted above, Reddick followed a “strict diet.” We don’t know what kind of diet he followed. It very well could have been a high-carb, low-fat diet. Which, if that were the case, would have run his triglycerides up and his HDL down. The ratio of triglycerides divided by HDL is a strong marker for cardiovascular disease. If his ratio was high, as it typically is in those following high-carb, low-fat diets, his heart may have paid the price.

Apparently, he worked out daily and insisted a gym be provided for him as a part of his acting contracts. Working out every day is not particularly good for the heart. A hard workout sets all the processes in motion to develop muscle mass and increase fitness, but the changes all take place during the rest days after the hard workout.

Heart disease kills more people in the U.S. than does any other disease. And in one third or more of cases sudden death is the first symptom of heart disease. Think about that a bit. In one third of the people who have heart disease, the first symptom they experience is death. And that’s a helluva symptom. that means that one third of the people who die of heart disease have never had any symptoms of heart disease. No chest pains, no difficulty breathing, no excessive sweating.

Childers writes that Reddick’s attorney “all but accused the coroner of falsifying the death certificate.” Childers, though he knows absolutely nothing about Reddick’s medical condition, believes the same thing.

These are serious accusations. I can’t imagine coroners falsifying autopsy results. I’ve been in on my share of autopsies as an observer. There are just too many people involved for that kind of cover up to take place. In a typical autopsy there is a diener (autopsy assistant) present along with the pathologist and maybe another two or three people. The pathologist removes the organs—including the heart, which he/she dissects looking at all the chambers and the coronary arteries. As the inspections and dissections are taking place, the pathologist is dictating it all as it goes.

If relatives have an issue with the cause of death, another pathologist may be called in to review or even repeat an autopsy. The risk would be too high to fudge something like this, especially with a celebrity involved.

I’m reasonably certain Lance Reddick had severe heart disease just as the coroner reported. I doubt that Pfizer would rush someone in to offer him/her a payoff to keep from saying it was vaccine related.

I’m sure some of these deaths in young adults and even teenagers are as a consequence of the vaccines. But not all. And it seems entirely possibly that the jab could have worsened his underlying cardiovascular state.

MD and I have a friend in New York whose only daughter died in her sleep at age 19. This was 20 years ago, long before the mRNA vaccines. She was home from college, went to a party, came home and went to bed. When her mother—our friend—went to wake her, she was dead. Since her death was unwitnessed, an autopsy was required. And, as I recall, no specific cause was determined. She had allergies and had taken an antihistamine/decongestant before the party. May have been an alcohol-medication reaction. I did not see the autopsy report, but that’s what her mother told us.

So, it can happen for other reasons than the Covid vaccines.

Don’t get me wrong. I think the Covid mRNA jabs have been and will continue to be a disaster. But not every unexpected death is due to the shots.

Sometimes, as Freud was alleged to have said, “A cigar is just a cigar.”

Time for Another Poll

I’ve been thinking about expanding my presence on Substack a bit. When I polled folks earlier, I asked if most would like more commentary than just once per week. As I recall, the slim majority said once a week was enough.

Here’s what I’ve been thinking about and why.

All through the week I collect information I find interesting and assume you the reader would find interesting. I have multiple ways of saving it depending upon the source. Then when it comes time to write The Arrow, I run out of time and space before I run out of material.

So, I was thinking that maybe once per week, I might send out an email with all these extra links along with a brief—one sentence or two—description of them. Based on the number of links I don’t get to, this email would contain somewhere in the neighborhood of 10-20 links with descriptions.

It would look something like this:

I’ve written often about the site howbadismybatch.com. Now comes Dr. Peter McCullough detailing a new study of the Pfizer vaccine showing there are indeed bad batches. Some are okay, some are bad, and some are really bad. The really bad one represents 4.2 percent of the doses given and 71 percent of adverse events.

WSJ reports that after a couple of years of decline, suicide rates increased in 2021 led by men in almost every age group.

The Biden administration is funding its own version of Operation Warp Speed with $5B to discover new vaccines and treatments for Covid-19 and any new coronavirus that might come along. Big Pharma is rubbing its greedy hands in anticipation.

That kind of list of links with brief descriptions.

I was running this by MD, who suggested instead that I do a periodic Zoom call with readers and answer specific questions in a live Q&A. Not specific medical questions since medico-legally I can’t do that. But general questions about diet, nutrition, medical issues, critical thinking, philosophy, etc. All the things I write about.

I follow a couple of nutritional biochemistry folks who do consultations and charge for them. They do give specific advice on nutritional supplements, diet, and exercise. They are PhDs and can get away with it. If they tell someone to take something and it causes harm, they can’t be sued for malpractice, because they aren’t physicians. The legal system, I suppose, figures if people take medical advice from non-physicians they deserve whatever happens to them.

Since I am a physician, licensed in a couple of states, I can’t give specific advice on supplements, diet, and exercise to individuals who I haven’t seen and examined hands-on without getting in trouble with the medical boards or getting sued. So non-physicians can give medical advice, but real physicians can’t. Or can’t without assuming a lot of risk.

Strange.

Anyway, what do you think of the above two ideas? Let me know in the poll below.

The Latest Victim of Climate Change

You may find this difficult to believe, but according to a paper I received a couple of days ago from a medical press service I subscribe to, the latest victim of climate change is the major league pitcher.

Yes, that’s right. Major league baseball pitchers are getting bombed now for more home runs than ever, and it’s all the fault of climate change.

The article goes on in excruciating detail about all the variables the researchers evaluated to come up with the notion that climate change is driving the rate of home runs. Apparently, from a data perspective, every base was covered (pun intended) in their quest to finger exactly what is causing the increase in major league home runs. And according to their model, climate change is the driving factor.

Their analysis reminds me once again of the slide William Briggs showed at a talk I attended last February. I’ve already put it up a time or two, but I can never show it enough. It’s that important.

The model these researchers built is based on absolutely accurate data. And it tells them just what they want it to tell them.

But they missed one important data point that, in my view, cancels out all the precise temperature measurements in baseball stadiums all over the country.

Major league baseball players are just like the rest of us except they can play baseball a lot better. Like the rest of us during our peak earning years, they want to further their careers and make more money.

Home run hitters make more money than singles hitters with high batting averages. Folks want to come to the ball park to see home runs. They don’t come to see bunts and walks.

I’ve played a lot of baseball in my time and have even played with some high level players (which is a story for another time), so I know my way around baseball a bit.

When you swing for the fences, your batting average drops, and your strike out average goes up. If you just “try to meet the ball,” as every baseball coach I’ve ever had has admonished, you’ll get on base a lot more often. If you try to hit it out of the park, you will occasionally. But you’ll also whiff a lot. And hit a lot of fly balls that get caught.

And that’s exactly what has been happening in the major leagues. The trend is more home runs, lower batting averages, and more strike outs. It’s all driven by the players all wanting bigger paychecks and the owners wanting more fans.

The researchers who wrote the paper fingering climate change as the driving force behind the surge in home runs may have measured temperature changes to the nth degree in all the different ball parks, but what they didn’t look at was player motivation.

I’m sure their model is extremely accurate in terms of precision temperature data. And that data seems to accord with the increase in home runs. But is it really the driving force. I certainly don’t think so. The lure of a larger salary probably sends more balls over the outfield fence than an infinitesimal change in temperature.

I like my model better than I do theirs.

The Metabolic Duo

Ivor Cummins and Gabor Erdosi have joined forces as the Metabolic Duo. They are intending to create a subscription site to provide deeply researched metabolic information to their clients. Here is a short video on what they have in mind.

I have the highest respect for both of them. Give their program a look to see if it’s something you might be interested in. I have no financial involvement with their project whatsoever. I don’t have an affiliate agreement with them for any kind of commission. I’m just passing this along because I know whatever they do will be of high quality. And a lot of people who read The Arrow like in-depth discussions of the metabolic basis of disease.

Blue Cross Blue Shield Vaccine Kickbacks

After taking Jeff Childers to task for his take on the Lance Reddick situation, I’ve now come to praise him for providing some info I was not aware of. I knew, of course, that the government was proving all kinds of extra funds to hospitals for taking care of Covid patients, which, of course, encouraged them to do Covid testing on anyone who walked through the door with any kind of illness. If they were having a heart attack and tested positive for Covid, the hospital got the extra Covid funds. If a family member died of anything after testing positive for Covid, the government provided $9,000 for funeral expenses.

What I didn’t know was that the insurance companies were in on the racket. Somehow Jeff got his hands on a leaked Blue Cross Blue Shield vaccine bonus promo that he posted on his site. Here it is:

With this kind of bonus structure, it’s easy to see why docs everywhere would be so eager to vaccinate their patients.

As I’ve written many times in these pages, medical education does not encourage critical thinking. Nor does it particularly attract critical thinkers. Then you’ve got the halo effect around vaccines. And the herd instinct of doctors to follow guidelines. Add that all up and throw a hefty bonus in there, and you can see why so many docs would be all over this.

And to be perfectly honest, I might have done so myself. I hadn’t really thought about the downside of vaccines when I was in primary care practice. Like most everyone, I thought they were a good thing. I started to have second thoughts when I saw so many of them coming out. Kids were getting countless shots for first one thing, then the next. It piqued my interest as I saw the huge number of jabs being pushed on my grandchildren compared to what was recommended when my kids were coming up. It concerned me some, but I didn’t really dig into it until the claims I was hearing about Covid didn’t jibe with what I remembered about immunology from medical school. Once I did dig in, I became much more enlightened. Thank God.

More on the Metabolic Basis of Cancer

It’s been a while, so let’s review where we’ve been so far.

According to Dr. Tom Seyfried, cancer is a disease of unrestrained growth and mutation. Most oncologists agree with that definition, but where the difference arises is in where this all starts. Traditional oncologists believe the cancers arise from a mutation in the cell’s genetic material. Once these cells begin reproducing, multiple genetic abnormalities appear and the cancer begins to grow. As these cells reproduce and grow, the internal energy production apparatus in the cells goes haywire.

Seyfried and others believe that the defect takes place in the mitochondria of cells. That is the first step in the progression. All the weird mutations take place downstream.

Normal cells take in oxygen and use it to generate energy via oxidative phosphorylation (OxPhos), a process we discussed in detail in an earlier Arrow. In cancer, these cells convert the oxygen into free radicals (ROS), which then damage the genetic material in the cells and launch the entire tumorigenic process. These cancer cells then end up using the more primitive process of fermentation to get energy from glucose instead of using the OxPhos system.

These cancer cells gobble glucose, but can’t really use ketones for energy as can normal cells. So, the first step in treating these cancers metabolically is to put patients on a strict ketogenic diet. Or even better yet, a water fast for a few days to get them into ketosis quickly.

When cancers are first discovered, they usually have ill-defined borders as a consequence of the enormous amount of inflammation the growth of atypical cells induces. By getting the patients into ketosis quickly, the tumor cells typically begin to shrink a bit and the inflammation subsides. Then when the borders of the tumor can be clearly delineated, often surgery can be undertaken to debulk the mass.

Then the process of dealing with the tumor becomes one of denying it food for growth and trying to co-exist with it. In that way, cancers that normally kill patients within months can be kept in check for years. Victims that might succumb within a year can lead fairly normal lives for many more years. Some can achieve remission.

But it is done without radiation or chemotherapy, though for some specific cancers radiation is used sparingly once the cancer is weakened by the lack of glucose and in other cases, vastly reduced doses of certain chemotherapeutic agents—doses low enough to not cause hair loss or GI issue—can further damage the cancer.

The entire process of metabolic management is designed to keep constant pressure on the cancer with periodic pulses of increased stress, the press-pulse strategy adopted from anthropology.

Many cancer patients experience the following trajectory: They get diagnosed with cancer. Their oncologist recommends a particular chemotherapeutic and/or radiation strategy. The patient goes through the process of getting large doses of poisonous chemicals and sometimes radiation. After the chemotherapy and radiation treatment is complete, the patient gets a scan that shows the tumor is gone. Everyone celebrates. The patient is ‘cancer free’. Then, in a couple of months, the cancer is back and growing quickly. Nothing really works on it at that point, and the patient succumbs within a few months after being declared cancer free.

Sound familiar?

What happens is that the tumors are generally composed of bizarre cells with countless mutations. The cells don’t all have the same mutation—the entire cancer is a hodgepodge of different mutations. Many of these mutations will be susceptible to the chemotherapeutic agent (or radiation), but not all of them.

In the growing tumor, the various mutations more or less keep one another in check. The cells are all mutating away and going through unrestrained growth, but there is only so much food for them and only so many blood vessels to bring them glucose. So the competition for resources limits growth.

Once the patient is blasted with a mix of various chemotherapeutic agents, the susceptible cells are killed. But their deaths make way for the cells with mutations that make them unsusceptible to the chemotherapy, and now they no longer have any competition for resources, so they grow like crazy. And since these are basically immune or resistant to the chemotherapeutic agents, nothing can really stop them.

Keeping the entire cancer under metabolic stress puts pressure on all the cancer cells irrespective of type of mutation. And if this continued stress can make the tumor smaller and weaker, the patient can live a lot longer. In some cases, maybe for an entire normal lifespan.

And the metabolic therapy is fairly benign as compared to being poisoned or irradiated. Granted, it does require the patient to stay on a ketogenic diet. But, speaking for myself, I would vastly prefer a ketogenic diet to being face down in a box of donuts if the former would give me an extra 6,7,8 or more years of life. To someone given a six month death sentence, an extra six years seems like a lifetime.

There are a couple of important things to think about in terms of metabolic therapy for cancer.

First, almost no one comes to metabolic therapy when they are first diagnosed. They end up going through chemotherapy, radiation, and, often, surgery. When all the traditional oncologic procedures have been followed and the cancer is still there and growing, only then do they turn to metabolic therapy. And then they are weakened and have given up a lot of hope.

Most oncologists have never heard of metabolic therapy and don’t have a clue it works as well as it does. They know only what they’ve been trained to do. So most patients start there first.

Next week I’ll go through why that is.

Another issue we haven’t discussed yet is that along with glucose, cancer cells can ferment the amino acid glutamine. Which is problematic, because glutamine is the most abundant amino acid in the body. So you just can’t eliminate it like you can sugar in the diet.

There are a number of experimental and repurposed drugs used in metabolic therapy that are glutamine antagonists. In other words, they block or interfere with the cancer cells use of glutamine. Since I’m not a metabolic therapy practitioner, I don’t understand how the latest glutamine antagonists specifically work, but I’ll delve into it a bit more to see what I can uncover.

In metabolic therapy, the goal is to keep the glucose-ketone index at or below 1 for maximum therapeutic effect. The GKI is explained in this paper.

I’ll see what I can dig in and find about the specific drugs used to block glutamine. And I’ll discuss why more people don’t use metabolic therapy despite its effectiveness in keeping people alive longer without all the terrible side effects from chemo and radiation.

Video of the Week

Okay, this is going to be a weird one. I’ve been kind of hesitant to put it up, fearing what people might think of me.

A week or so ago, MD and I watched a mystery series set in New Zealand. The background music was kind of haunting, and I loved it. It is apparently what is called country music in New Zealand.

I waited till the end and watched all the credits to find who the artist was. It’s a guy named Delaney Davidson. And his music is different.

The tune I was so taken with on the series was Time is Gone, but it’s kind of long and totally weird. I’m not all that crazy about the instrumental part, but the voice part from about halfway through to the end is wonderful. To me. But I’m strange.

Here is a shorter video that captures his weirdness and the beat of his music.

Enjoy! I hope.

That’s about it.

Keep in good cheer, and I’ll be back next Thursday. Don’t forget the poll.

And don’t forget to take a look at what our sponsors have to offer. Dry Farm Wines, HLTH Code, and Precision Health Reports.