#254 Life and Death

In 2015 Scott Adams, the cartoonist who created the Dilbert franchise, was flying high. He had a busy schedule of lectures to corporate groups; he was writing a new book every year or so; his Dilbert cartoons were syndicated in newspapers all over the country. With all this going on, he decided to add a daily podcast (though he didn’t call it that at the time) to his schedule. Called Coffee with Scott Adams, he pontificated on all kinds of subjects.

I had just finished my first Scott Adams book about this time, so I watched a few of his podcasts, which were on some other platform that I can’t remember now, but then he ultimately switched to Twitter/X.

One of Adams’s supposed skill sets, one that he wrote about a lot, was persuasion. He was a trained hypnotist, and he brought that training to bear in his talks and writings on persuasion.

At the time, Adams was a typical Bay Area lefty (by his own admission), and he loved to make recommendations on everything up to and including diet. He, himself, ate an almost vegetarian diet, to which he attributed his thinness.

One day, he happened to see a Donald Trump speech as the 2016 election campaign was getting rolling. Adams thought Trump was a great persuader. At that point, he didn’t support him for president, but said that of all the Republicans running in the primary, Trump was the most persuasive, and he (Adams) thought Trump would win.

When Trump became the Republican nominee, Adams thought he was much more persuasive than Hillary Clinton and said so again and again.

It was not long before he got completely canceled.

He lost all his corporate lecture gigs. The book companies that published his books quit selling them. And, finally, many, many papers dropped Dilbert.

This didn’t happen overnight, but it happened a lot more quickly than you would expect.

After the election, I pretty much stopped watching his Coffee with Scott Adams show, because I simply couldn’t afford the time. He would prattle on for an hour, sometimes an hour and a half. And it was every single day, seven days per week.

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I would drop in from time to time just to see what theme Adams was obsessed with at the time. I ended up taking a look in 2021, when the Covid-19 shots were being mandated. I happened to hit a segment in which Adams said he had gotten the shots himself and gave his justification for why. Which was that he, himself, knew nothing about vaccines, so he listened to the experts. That was the smart thing to do, he opined.

Then several months later—-maybe a bit longer—I happened to tune into his show only to find he was in another tiff with his viewers. By this time, he had realized the vaccines were bad news, and he wished he had never taken them. But, he insisted he did the right thing given the info he had. He said sometimes people in cults are correct. Not very often, but sometimes. He said he was smart and followed the experts, but all these people who were in anti-vaxx cults didn’t know squat about anything, but they were right. Not because they were smart like he was, but just because they lucked into it by following their cult belief which happened to turn out to be right.

As you might imagine, this pissed a lot of people off. Way more so than Adams had expected. He ended up spending several episodes apologizing, making amends, saying what he said was taken out of context, etc.

I was there for all that and wrote about it in The Arrow at the time.

But then I quit watching again due to time constraints.

Next time I thought about Scott Adams was back in the spring of this year. And he was in a bad way.

Apparently, he was suffering with stage 4 prostate cancer and had but a few months to live. He said he was in unbearable pain every day all through the day, and that the only thing that allowed him to be productive at all were pain pills. He described how he was not expected to make it through the summer, but for his fans not to worry, because he had his own little elixer that he was going to throw back and end it all when he couldn’t bear it any longer.

Before I go on with this story, I want to switch gears a bit to bring in another character.

William Makis, M.D. is a Canadian oncologist who graduated from McGill University, often dubbed the Harvard of Canada. After graduation, he did a five year residency in radio-oncology. Plus he’s written over 100 papers on various aspects of oncology.

I posted a long video of a conversation between Makis and John Campbell a while back. There almost couldn’t be a more careful, conservative interviewer than John Campbell. Here it is again. It is excellent.

We have discussed many times the standard of care (SOC) required in most hospitals and group practices. The administration routinely audits doctors’ charts to ensure they comply with the SOC. If docs are out practicing on their own, they can pretty much do what they want in terms of treating patients. They don’t really have to follow the SOC. Most docs have malpractice insurance coverage of a few millions dollars. So if a doc practicing on his/her own screws up, that’s all the lawyers can go after.

When you have a hospital system that owns a large group medical practice, the malpractice dynamics are different. If a doc screws up, they don’t just go after the doc, they go after the group practice and the hospital, i.e., the deep, deep pockets. They try to make the case that the hospital/group practice is to blame, because they hired an incompetent doctor. Consequently, there is a layer of bureaucracy that audits charts. If a doc is not following the SOC, he/she is warned. If it continues, they’re given the boot.

Now the SOC is mainly set by the pharmaceutical companies, especially where cancer is concerned. Hospitals get about 60 percent of their revenue from cancer treatment. Many chemotherapeutic drugs cost tens of thousands of dollars for every dose. Both the oncologist who prescribes and administers the drug gets a cut, as does, of course, the hospital.

If you watch the Campbell/Makis video above, you will learn that Dr. Makis has made a study of a handful of drugs he believes work well for cancer. These are repurposed drugs that are all dirt cheap: Ivermectin, Fenbendazole (which isn’t even licensed for humans), and Mebendazole (which is). These drugs cost a tiny fraction of what chemotherapy drugs cost, and, according to Makis, they are effective.

Now here is where William Makis and Scott Adams intersect.

Apparently, Scott Adams reached out to Dr. Makis for help with his prostatic cancer. Dr. Makis put Scott on some protocol using one or more of these repurposed drugs.

Scott followed the protocol (I have no idea how closely) and gave up after a month or so. But he didn’t just give up, he badmouthed Makis. He said he had talked to other people who had followed the Makis protocol, and it hadn’t helped them. Scott said it hadn’t helped him. And he called Makis a fraud in a tweet that he pinned to his Twitter/X feed. He wrote that he had found another oncology group that was going to save his life.

Unfortunately, I can’t find this tweet that was pinned. But I did see it myself back in May of this year.

Dr. Makis responded with a tweet of his own.

Fast forward to now, and it appears Scott Adams is once again in a bad way.

On Nov 2, Scott posted

CWSA = Coffee with Scott Adams.

This tweet was followed later in the day with this one:

And this one.

Scott is working with Kaiser Northern California. There probably couldn’t be a giant group practice that adheres to the Standard of Care more than Kaiser. I’ve never used them myself, but I make that statement based on discussions with people who have used Kaiser.

This announcement reached Dr. Makis, who responded on his own Substack.

Dr.Makis goes on to say:

The entire Substack can be found here.

Then Dr. Makis put up this tweet with a short video. The video is a must watch.

And he followed again with another Substack including the same video along with some more info. You can find that here.

Since Scott Adams apparently wants to play his life out in front of his millions of Twitter/X followers, this should provide us all with some insights into the SOC and the newest chemotherapy drugs available.

I’m rooting for Scott, because I hate to see anyone succumb to cancer. But in my career, I’ve seen way too much of it. Patients who are informed they have beaten cancer and are given a clean bill of health, only to die four or five months later.

We’re never going to solve the cancer problem until we start exploring new ways to treat it. I read a paper years ago from Australia showing that cytotoxic chemotherapy has a five year survival rate of 2.3% in Australia and 2.1% in the United States. Which tells us that 97.7% of the people taking such therapy died within five years in Australia and 97.9% in the US. Those aren’t very good odds.

Next to heart disease, cancer is the second greatest killer of people in the US, and it seems to be going up every year.

The switchover from the idea that cancer is a disease of mutagenesis to one of metabolism should stimulate the development of new drugs that deal with the metabolic issues and starve cancer much as the ketogenic diet does.

Meanwhile, we’ll all have ringside seats to see what happens to poor Scott Adams. Will the modern chemotherapy keep him alive and perhaps kill his cancer? Let’s hope so.

Only time will tell.

Keep in good cheer, and I’ll be back before you know it.

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