Greetings everyone.

A most hectic week this week. MD and I are traveling. We’re hanging out with friends in Boulder, Colorado right now. I’m trying to keep up as best I can. I’ve read all the comments, but haven’t responded yet. I’ve watched all the videos recommended by everyone on the sugar diet, all of which have made me more skeptical than when I first heard about it. I’ve read all the articles recommended as well, with the same outcome.

I’m also woefully behind in my emails as well. Before we hit the road and got so bombarded, I did get one fun email I’ll pass along. This email is a commentary and story related to last week’s video of the week.

The friend who emailed me is a singer of many, many years’ standing. It just now dawned on me that I’ve never asked him if he’s sung professionally, i.e., for pay, so I don’t know. But he’s been a part of countless barbershop quartets that have performed all over hell and gone and won lots of awards in that capacity. He sings bass in the Santa Barbara Choral Society with MD, which is how we met him. He also sings in other choruses from time to time. The man likes to sing.

Retired now, his paying job was working in Hollywood. He directed Land of the Lost, Mary Hartman, Mary Hartman, The Jeffersons, a few episodes of All In the Family and a host of others.

Here is his commentary on the VOTW with accompanying song.

Medical Education

Last week I wrote about how medical school was memorization and regurgitation without time for critical thinking, or even asking questions in many cases. All of which selects for people who do well on tests. These are not always the people who make good doctors. I, of course, was extrapolating my medical school experience to everyone else in medical schools elsewhere.

I came across a Substack this morning written by another physician, who described his medical school experience about the same way I did mine. He attended medical school at the University of Rochester. Here is what he wrote about his medical education there.

Pretty much the same education MD and I had. I suspect it is universal. And I don’t think it’s the best way to teach physicians. But maybe it will better help you understand your own doctor.

Dear Abby and Early Detection

MD is a regular reader of advice columnists. I never read them unless she sends me something she thinks I would find interesting. A couple of days ago, she sent me one from Dear Abby, who was counseling a woman on early detection of cancer. Here is what the woman wrote:

Early detection is a two-edged sword.

Just about everyone you talk to in the medical profession believes early detection is highly to be desired because the earlier a disease, say, cancer, can be detected, the higher the likely hood of successful treatment. This seems a pretty universal sentiment as evidenced by Abby’s answer.

For the most part, I tend to agree that early detection increases survival. But you’ve got to be careful about what survival really means. In the same way Big Pharma has touted its drugs to seem like they are more efficacious than they really are (by using relative rates of cure versus absolute rates, for example), Big Diagnostics (the companies making all the machines that supposedly provide early detection) also uses slippery data to make the case for liberal use of their highly expensive products.

Let me give you an example.

Let’s take an imaginary patient named Joe. Joe, who is 70, hasn’t been his normal self for a while. He’s been feeling like crap, in fact. Joe goes to his doctor on April 15, 2025, who puts him through a gamut of tests. The findings of these tests suspect something sinister is going on, so one of the big diagnostic machines is wheeled out and Joe is tested. Sure enough, Joe has cancer. And it’s pretty far gone.

There isn’t a lot they can do for Joe but palliative care. Joe passes away from his disease on July 15, 2025 at age 70.

Now let’s look at scenario 2. Joe #2, who is 65, is feeling pretty good, but he’s heard all the talk about early detection, so he want’s to stay ahead of anything bad. He goes to his doctor on April 15, 2020. His doc puts him through a medley of test and tells Joe he saw something that’s probably nothing, but recommends taking a deeper look with a piece of Big Diagnostic equipment. As it turns out, Joe does have what appears to be a small cancer.

Joe undergoes chemotherapy to shrink the cancer, then goes on to have whatever is left of it surgically removed. Invariably, the cancer comes back, so Joe goes through another bout of chemo and another operation.

Then his oncologists follow him with some radiation here and here. And maybe some more chemotherapy. Maybe even another operation is required.

Joe fights valiantly, but he passes away from his cancer at age 70 on July 15, 2025. The same day the first Joe we discussed did.

The first Joe went to the doc on April 15, 2025 and was dead three months later on July 25.

The second Joe went in on April 15, 2020 and died on the same day as Joe #1, July 25, 2025.

Both live to be 70 years old before dying.

Statistically, Joe #1 lived for only three months after his diagnosis. Joe #2, on the other hand, lived a bit over five years after his early diagnosis.

Joe #1 lived his normal life blissfully unaware anything was going on until three months before his death at 70. The three months between diagnosis and death were pretty brutal, but up until his diagnosis, he live a fairly normal life.

Joe #2 spent the years between 65 and 70 in and out of hospitals, going through chemotherapy, radiation, and surgery with the knowledge that he had a cancer diagnosis hanging over his head. At the end, he had the same miserable last three months that Joe #1 had, but another almost five years of medical misery and worry.

Would you rather have the experience Joe #1 had or Joe #2. I suspect most of us would want the Joe #1 deal.

Where this really gets screwed up is in the statistics.

Joe #1 came in, got diagnosed, and died three months later.

Joe #2 came in, got diagnosed, went through extensive treatment and died five years later at the same age as Joe #1.

Statistically, however, Joe #2 lived five years after his diagnosis whereas Joe #1 lived only three months. Yet they both died on the same date at the same age.

So statistically, the early detection and treatment allowed Joe #2 to live five years longer than Joe #1. But it really didn’t.

And I suspect the extra five years Joe #2 spent going in and out of hospitals and constantly worrying about his condition were miserable.

When the statistics are given to patients, they’re told that early detection gives them five more years of life, which isn’t exactly true. It may give them more time since their diagnosis, but is it quality time?

Given the type of cancer the husband of the woman who wrote to Dear Abby had, it would have been unlikely to be cured had it been found two years earlier. Squamous cell cancer of the lung is not a good diagnosis. So she and her husband would have been sucked into the medical system two years earlier, and he would probably have died about the same time he did. But he would have had a miserable, worry-filled, financially costly two years instead of just three months.

Having written the above, I hasten to add there are many cancers that can be caught early and cured. You need to have a serious conversation with your doctor about the situation and not just simply fall into the trap that early detection is always the best strategy.

Vaccines: Mythology, Ideology, and Reality

One of the activities that has been occupying my time of the last couple of days is an excellent book titled Vaccines: Mythology, Ideology, and Reality (VMIR) by John Leake and Peter McCullough. I purchased the book the minute it was available and have not been disappointed.

I’ve been waiting for the book to come out, but was unsure from the title and some of the descriptions I had read of it on the McCullough Substack, whether it would be the book I was hoping for. I have not been disappointed. Quite the opposite, in fact.

Early on the authors write:

This is what I wanted to read, because my own thoughts on vaccines followed the same pathway. When I was in medical school, we were not really taught about vaccines other than that they were lifesaving. Of course, this was before Big Pharma got shed of any liability in 1986. There weren’t so many vaccines then.

Like the authors of the book, I, too, never questioned the sacred cow status of vaccines. To prove it, somewhere in the archives of Newsmax is an interview I gave as the Covid-19 vaccines were rolling out. I have a lawyer friend who was a commentator on Newsmax back then. The producers of some show wanted a physician to comment on the new vaccines, so my friend volunteered me. Fortunately, it was done over Zoom, and for whatever reason, the sound wasn’t working that great. So, I’m hoping the whole thing was discarded (I didn’t record it myself), but it’s probably still out there mouldering in a box somewhere.

Anyway, I could have been compared to Anthony Fauci in my kid-glove treatment of the new mRNA vaccines, which I said were extremely clever (and so they seemed at first) and would be the templates for all new vaccines (or so I thought then). They showed the video of the nurse from Tennessee, who fainted on live TV after having gotten her Covid jab. I said that fainting after getting a shot or having blood drawn was a common occurrence (it is), and totally pooh-poohed the idea that it could have been an issue with the vaccine. I can’t even remember the rest of the ignorant statements I made and answers I gave. But if it were to see the light of day, it would prove my bone fides as a true believer in vaccines in early 2021.

How things have changed.

When I first started reading VMIR I was a little worried that it was going to be almost a rip off of Dissolving Illusions, one of my other favorite books on the vaccine situation. But I needn’t have worried. The two books are complementary. The authors of VMIR recommend Dissolving Illusions, especially for all the contemporaneous news reports of what was going on two centuries ago.

VMIR is more of a medical history of vaccines, and it goes through them chronologically starting with Jenner’s small pox vaccine and all the offshoots of it. There is really no way to tell since randomized, controlled studies were not really done back then, but just understanding the process tells me that probably more people died from the small pox vaccine than were saved from it.

Remember, this all took place before the days of sterilization. Although Jenner’s name is associated with the vaccine, many doctors and so-called doctors vaccinated (for pretty substantial fees) for small pox. There were a host of techniques, but all of them sound total dreadful in terms of what we think of as sterility today.

One common method was to unroof one of the lesions on someone who had small pox, scrape the contents, then puncture the skin of the vaccine recipient and rub the nasty, pus-filled gunk in. Just understanding this would lead one to think the so-called vaccines would cause more harm than good.

Giving the vaccinators some credit, perhaps since they couldn’t really measure the ‘dose’ they were giving, they may have accidentally given some of their patients just enough material to actually stimulate an immune response, which may have protected them against small pox. While in others, they may have overdone it and actually given them small pox. Or in other cases, they just caused infections.

Then, like now, there were those clamoring for vaccine mandates. And others vigorously opposing them. Both groups had members of their families die from small pox, and the descriptions of the deaths, especially of the children, are truly heart breaking.

One of the great revelations to me in the book is what a charlatan Louis Pasteur was. I was completely gobsmacked by that information. Although he did save plenty of lives through his process of pasteurization of milk, he no doubt caused other deaths with his experimental vaccines. He was a publicity hound and wanted desperately to be the Master of the Vaccine Universe — preceding Anthony Fauci by a mile. He would do ‘studies’ and report them to various societies and would write papers touting the efficacy of his vaccines, but he would never provide his data. (Sound familiar?) He kept voluminous notebooks filled with experimental data, but he never made them available.

I was able to grab a copy of the above review for those who would like to read it.

Another myth this book explodes is that of the yellow fever vaccine. When I was a boy growing up, it seemed like I ran into the story of Walter Reed and how he conquered yellow fever every year or two in school. But Walter Reed didn’t develop a vaccine; he figured out the disease was carried by a mosquito and used techniques to prevent mosquito bites, allowing for the Panama Canal to be built.

The French initiated digging the Panama Canal a few decades before Walter Reed was tasked to the project. They gave up after nine years and 20,000 deaths from yellow fever.

Walter Reed did a ton of work—well described in the VMIR—determining what the cause of yellow fever really was. He relied on his own methods and a paper from some years before by another scientist.

When he made public his findings, the Washington Post, as is unfortunately its wont, described his hypothesis thusly:

The Washington Post’s criticism aside, Reed had landed on the cause and set about to fix it. Which he did by way of an historic sanitation campaign in Havana, Cuba, which is where he was sent to solve the yellow fever problem.

So much for nonsensical rigmarole!

Similar campaigns were conducted elsewhere with great success, leading President Roosevelt to take another shot at building the Panama Canal.

There was no vaccine involved until 30 years later, and its efficacy was questionable.

Before I leave this section, I want to provide one of my favorite quotes from the book, which goes into a fair amount of detail on the various flu vaccines, which are not particularly efficacious.

I hope this has given you a taste of this exceptional book. If you are interested at all in the history of vaccines, and learning which ones actually provide benefit, I can’t recommend this book highly enough.

The Sugar Diet

As I mentioned above, I watched all the videos and read all the suggested literature.

Probably the best summary was in Ben Bikman’s video.

I know Ben pretty well, and I could sense his hesitancy in even coming close to recommending this diet.

For those of you who don’t know, the sugar diet has popped up lately on social media and has become somewhat of a rage. Those who follow it consume very little protein (<10%) and take in most of their calories as sugar in one form or another, including fruits, fruit juices, and even candy.

Some advocates consume very little protein, but make up the rest of their calories in fat. Which is really a ketogenic diet, not a sugar diet.

Dr. Bikman pointed out that almost all the people he’s found on social media reporting great results on the Sugar Diet are males, who are intensely active and lean to begin with. There may be something in the metabolism of such people who end up being able to metabolize all the sugar and other carbs without an issue. And even lose weight.

But I would not consider for a moment putting an overweight, not particularly active person, with metabolic issues in such a diet. The ketogenic version certainly, but not the high sugar version.

It doesn’t make sense for so many reasons.

First, let’s look at the macronutrients involved. As we all know, protein is essential to a healthful diet. If you don’t eat, you die from protein malnutrition. A couple of fats are essential, but it takes a long time (sometime years) before a deficiency issue makes itself known if you don’t eat any of the essential fats. Finally, carbs are not essential at all.

It doesn’t make sense to me to load up on all the macros you don’t need and replace them with carbs that are totally nonessential.

There are plenty of studies on low-calorie diets, low-fat diets, and low-carbohydrate diets, but there are not plenty of studies on the Sugar Diet.

I always turn to the Public Health Collaboration, a UK non-profit that, among other things, looks at nutritional studies. Over the years, they have found studies comparing low-carb diets to low-fat diets. As of now, they have come across 71 studies that meet their criteria for length of study and structure. As you can see from the graphic below, the low-carb diet destroys the low-fat diet in terms of weight loss.

If you would like to see the actual studies, you can go to this link.

One of the things the Sugar Diet is supposed to do is to raise fibroblast growth factor 21 (FGF21). One paper that both Ben Bikman and Nick Norwitz mention that cutting protein can raise FGF21 by 361 percent, which is pretty amazing. But it is only one paper, and it isn’t exactly about the Sugar Diet.

I would have to see a few more papers before I launched off on the Sugar Diet. The low-protein, high-fat version, i.e., the ketogenic diet, I have no trouble with. But blasting the average overweight person with a ton of carbohydrate cannot lead to anything good in my opinion.

I’ll keep my eye on the Sugar Diet and report whenever new evidence comes out.

Odds and Ends

• How did doctors operate before anesthesia? As quickly as possible. You wouldn’t want to experience it.

• 97-year-old puts her beloved fudge recipe on her tombstone. And it contains NBS. There is sugar, but nothing else that would qualify as BS.

• Car lovers rejoice! After 50 miserable years, CAFE standards are dead. Sedans will make a comeback.

• Is ‘Ozempic face’ driving a cosmetic surgery boom?

• To boldly go where no one has ever gone before... an interactive site to find out how far we've made it. Trek fans, this is for you!

• It's actually illegal to eat watermelon in this suburb's public parks.

• Test kitchen checks out seven different methods to determine the best way to cook bacon. And the winner is?

• An African lake that petrifies all that touches it. Sort of, anyway.

• The many health benefits of physical touch.

• Medieval Taverns you can still buy a pint in. And MD and I had lunch and a pint (or two and maybe a dram) in one of them. And it was great! Hint: MD had haggis, tatties, and neaps.

• Schoolboy finds 250 year old warship from the American Revolution uncovered in the dunes on a windswept beach. Why does this stuff never happen to me?

• The undervalued power of muscle. Great medical essay. Facts you know, maybe some you don’t. Worth the read.

• Can you decipher Cockney Rhyming Slang? If you’re a lover of Brit dramas or soaps, you’ll likely have heard it, may even be fluent in it. For the rest of us here it is explained.

• Do your really need 10,000 steps a day to be healthy? Give those tired dogs a break. A recent study says maybe not.

• This food was once held more valuable than gold. Some people might still agree.

• People who did this one thing at age 50 were the healthiest at age 80. What is it?

• The genesis of a mysterious sound that rattled an Oregon community may finally have been solved

• Not just man’s best friend, it seems. Pup befriends a lonely cheetah cub in an Aussie zoo.

• It sounds like a tabloid headline, but it’s real. An 80 million year old hot blob is headed for New York!

• The oldest team/ball sport is getting a revival in Mexico and Belize and the remnants of MesoAmerica. Let’s hope they don’t revive the ritual sacrifice of the players!

Newsletter Recommendations

Video of the Week

One of my great regrets in life is that I did not get to see Luciano Pavarotti. Now I’ve found a great replacement, Johnathan Tetelman, who sounds just like Luciano. Except this guy is American and much younger, so he should be around for a while, and maybe if we’re lucky we’ll get to hear him in person. And his voice is spectacular. Give it a listen.

Time for the poll, so you can grade my performance this week.

That’s about it for this week. Keep in good cheer, and I’ll be back next Thursday.

Please help me out by clicking the Like button, assuming, of course, that you like it.

This newsletter is for informational and educational purposes only. It is not, nor is it intended to be, a substitute for professional medical advice, diagnosis, or treatment and should never be relied upon for specific medical advice.

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And don’t forget my newest affiliate sponsor Lumen. Highly recommended to determine whether you’re burning fat or burning carbs.