Martin Shkreli hikes price of drug 5000%

[moralist]

Jerry writes:

One condition that supports the healing process is rest. Shelton lists 5 kinds of rest.

1. physical rest --- cessation of physical activity

2. mental rest --- cessation of mental activity

3. emotional rest --- cessation of emotional activity

4. sensory rest --- close eyes, be in a quiet place

5. physiological rest --- fasting

Somewhere in that list should be keeping warm.

All kinds of rest together can be called total rest or complete rest. Rest conserves energy. This leaves more energy that can be used for healing.

Sleep. Rest merely conserves energy but sleep generates energy.

Everything you said is absolutely true. Health is not complicated. It's simple.

Greg

[Brant Gaede]

If we can't get confirmation bias, we'll manufacture and display all we need.

--Brant

OL's purpose

[Brant Gaede]

Now I know why there aren't very many females on OL and such like. Males strut and females cluck. Maybe we guys should go where the girls are.

--Brant

https://youtu.be/Yk8jV7r6VMk

https://youtu.be/tGE381tbQa8

[moralist]

[

Brant writes:

Maybe we guys should go where the girls are.

If we do... they'll just go somewhere else.

Anyways, I'm already where the girls are... my Wife and my 94 year old Mom.

Greg

[Brant Gaede]

My Mom almost made 97. If she were alive today she would be almost 101.

--Brant

saved her life 3 or 4 times

[moralist]

When you get old you got two horses, Body and Mind... and one will always outrun the other.

Greg

[Jonathan]

Jonathan writes:

I think I get it now.

You'll never get it, Jonathan.

Greg

Oh, I'm sure that I won't. I've never been good at irrationality and self-delusion.

J

[Brant Gaede]

When you get old you got two horses, Body and Mind... and one will always outrun the other.

Greg

Hate to tell you this, but that kicks in with puberty.

--Brant

[moralist]

[william.scherk]

The market has delivered some competition to Skrell's Daraprim. From the Independent:

only the very first step of the process that may ultimately provide an effective cure for such patients presently facing death.

I will cite myself for this attempt to get Jerry's eyes on the ball -- the ball being a non-poison/non-cutting/non-burning therapy ... hoping he would approach this novel and promising line of work with his prejudices disarmed.

Jerry, take a moment to understand my question. The disorder/disease for which the genetic therapy showed great promise of permanent cure -- acute leukemia.

The Gerson therapy, as you should know, but perhaps do not, offers its products and services in the United States. Moreover, they have a long list of conditions and stages of disease for which they will not provide therapy. Notably among them is, you guessed it, acute leukemia.

Gerson therapy does not even attempt to provide therapy for acute leukemia. No nutritional therapy makes any claims for curing acute leukemia.

Here I had tried to highlight the difference of the new therapy from conventional therapies that do not otherwise meet approval from Jerry ... it may be able to offer an effective cure without being a drug as normally conceived. I had hoped to help him make a conceptual breakthrough, or at least interest him in developing options in terminal cases of blood cancer.

What were once deadly diseases can be successfully treated in novel ways, built on a understanding of complex disease states. One promising treatment is "targeted cellular therapy," part of what is known more generally as 'molecular medicine.' To over-simplify grossly, therapy acts to redress key metabolic processes at work in tumours, for example in acute cancers, where the only other therapy option (aside from hospice care) may be dangerous bone-marrow transplantation. For some folks with some disorders and cancers, gene therapy may serve as an alternative to certain death.

Here, for example is a report -- in simple language -- that announced effective cures for a particularly insidious cancer. From http://singularityhub.com/-- Gene Therapy Turns Several Leukemia Patients Cancer Free. Will It Work for Other Cancers, Too?:

That particular kind of targetted-cell-therapy is as I said at the beginning of the tough process that can result in widespread adoption. It is merely 'promising' at the moment.

Here is some other news of a therapy that has demonstrated success after the tough scientific process was complete:

FDA Approves T-VEC for Advanced Melanoma

-- T-VEC is the nickname for Talimogene Laherparepvec. This is a an oncolytic (cancer-eating) modified Herpes virus. It is designed to instruct the immune system to eat cancer cells, for cancer to eat itself. The final results of the last-stage study were published in the Journal of Clinical Oncology as Talimogene Laherparepvec Improves Durable Response Rate in Patients With Advanced Melanoma. The therapy was especially effective with advanced cancers that were inoperable -- and with cancers that were 'treatment-naive.'

The efficacy of the agent was 'proved' in clinical trials, and is the first cancer-eating immunotherapy to show its efficacy in so-called Stage 3 trials. Thus the FDA approval.

I think this is a notable result of concerted effort to "treat cancer by conscripting the body's natural immune system." If we could bring Mssrs Trall, Gerson, Gonzalez, and Shelton back to life, I bet that they would be thrilled with a new and effective treatment with few side-effects. They would be thrilled with an entirely new angle on 'healing' disease ...

For a less-technical and breezier report on the new treatment, readers may consult the Guardian story: A 'huge milestone': approval of cancer-hunting virus signals new treatment era ... "Imlygic programs viruses to attack only cancer cells and gives patients more humane options – potentially ‘a complete change in the game’ in treatment"

Melanoma treatment with the monoclonal antibody Ipilimumab, another non-'poison' first-line option:

[jts]

William,

I don't know what your problem is. Do you think you or anyone else needs my permission to try genetic therapy? If it works, do it. What's the problem?

It wouldn't really be that hard for you to do some homework and learn what hygiene is. I have to suspect you are not interested. Among Shelton's many books is a whole book titled 'Natural Hygiene'. It is free. You can read it online. You can download it. You can find things in it and similar books using the NHL. So there doesn't seem to be any good reason for you to not inform yourself about what hygiene is if you are really truly interested.

Hygiene can be defined as simply the science of health. Shelton says essentially the same thing in a more wordy way in chapter 10 titled simply 'hygiene'.

Hygiene is properly defined as that branch of biology which designates the conditions upon which health depends and the means by which it may be sustained in all its virtue and purity while we have it, and the means upon which its restoration rests when we have lost it. It is the scientific application of the principles of nature in the preservation and restoration of health. We may also define Hygiene as the science of normal vital development. It comprehends all the laws that determine the changes in living organisms and all the conditions which conduce to or interfere with normal growth and sustenance. It traces these conditions to the unerring laws of nature and thereon establishes its science of life. It demonstrates the great primary principle of human action, that all permanent good, all enduring happiness and all true advancement are found only in obedience to these laws.

The bottom line is hygiene is the science of health. But he also seems to think the application of this science is an art.

He continues:

Hygiene does not neglect the care of the sick. All true care of the sick recognizes and applies these same laws of nature in providing the needs of the sick and the removal of abnormal conditions. Disease results from disobedience to organic laws. Hygiene, as applied to the sick, is not the mere employment of diet, or of fasting; but it enters into all the causes of disease, seeking to remove these, and supplies all the needs of life in assisting the efforts of nature in restoring health. It provides a simple and healthful diet, carefully adapted to the assimilating powers of the body; it demands pure air and warmth; it provides rest or invigorating exercise as demanded, with other physical and normal Hygienic conditions.

Read the rest of the chapter here.

How can anyone get the idea that hygiene (the science of health) does not include a consideration of genetics? Maybe you might get that idea from the fact that the NH writers usually don't write much about genetics. But that would be incorrect reasoning. They do recognize genetics as a limit on health potential but they put the focus on what we can control. Nature deals your hand and your job is to play your hand as well as you can. The NH doctors, while recognizing genetic limits, are not as quick to attribute health problems to genetics as most doctors are.

About quackery.

Start with a definition of quackery. Quackery is any doctoring (attempt to restore health) not based on health science. It follows from this definition that any doctoring not based on hygiene (the science of health) is quackery.

For example you can suppress symptoms by poison and ignore root causes and expect restoration of health. This would be quackery. And it wouldn't make any difference how many letters the quack has after his name. And it wouldn't make any difference whether the quack is approved by government. And it would make any difference what kind of poison it is, allopathic poison (causing different or opposite effect) or homeopathic poison (causing same effect) or naturopathic poison (poisons from nature).

If you don't have the expertise or the time or ability to do the necessary research on a doctor to find out whether he is a quack (as defined above), the quickest and easiest way is the question: do his patients get well? A doctor (with all the conventional credentials) told me with his own mouth that none of his patients get better and he told me helping people get well is not his job. I figure he convicted himself by his own words from his own mouth of being a quack. Opinion doesn't enter into the picture. He as much as said he is a quack. Don't go to this doctor if your purpose is to get well. Maybe he is good for diagnosis if that matters.

For more about quackery, read this chapter.

Or hell, read the whole book.

Hygiene is not Sheltonism. Hygiene is not a cult around Shelton. Shelton had a mission. Early in life he saw a whole body of literature going into oblivion about to be lost forever. His mission was to 'fan the dying embers to fierce flame'. He wrote more books than any other NH writer. And he has been described as a 'powerful' writer. Hence his popularity in the NH community. But hygiene is not Sheltonism.

Shelton wrote his books at night when he should have sleeping, to the serious detriment of his health. Dr. Cinque, who knew Shelton, had no explanation for 'this madness'. He worked 100+ hours per week and never took vacations. Somehow reminds me of Ayn Rand, the personification of rationality, who smoked and got lung cancer.

As evidence that Shelton did not think he knew everything, I offer the following:

We have previously pointed out that a series of individuals, perhaps even of ages, are required for the full development and culmination of a great thought. Each individual and each age provides further light and truth, while man labors through indefinite time for the perfection of a science. Each event is the term of a series; the present is the summation of the past, which is still to be added to in the future. It was inescapable that at its origin (or rather, its revival) in the last century, Hygiene should have had many imperfections. It is certainly true that at its present stage of evolution it shall have imperfections still.

This fact was recognized by the early Hygienists, who not only held to different views and carried on different practices, but strove to improve both their understanding and their practices. Trall stated that the greatest room in the world was (or is) the room for improvement. To his classes he emphasized that the most the pioneers of Hygiene could do was to lay foundations and establish broad outlines, but that future Hygienists would have to fill in the details. Nobody thought that Hygiene had burst forth in full flower with no errors to be corrected and no further developments to be made.

Every basic and positive truth that is discovered adds to the approximation of the perfect system that belongs to the future. It not only adds to our understanding of truth, but enables us to correct past errors and to eliminate practices that are not based on truth. If we adhere to the original proposition of Hygienists, in laboring for the perfection of the science and art of Hygiene--that its true principles are to be drawn from physiology alone--and continue to work and harmonize its various parts, we will not waste time and energy seeking for Hygienic developments in all the fields of human investigation.

What was, perhaps, the basic error of the early Hygienists (all save Jennings and Graham), at least insofar as their application of Hygiene to the care of the sick is concerned, was their assumption that the remedial efforts of the body had to be regulated and directed. In pursuing the effort to regulate and direct these remedial efforts, they resorted to a wide variety of extra-Hygienic means and measures, the most important of these being hydropathy.

Water applications, massage, changes in atmospheric pressure (an elaborate apparatus was used for this purpose), electricity and hypnotism (by some Hygienists) were chief among the means employed with which to control and direct the body's remedial actions. Some of them enthusiastically adopted the Turkish bath, although this was denounced by Trall. Indeed, his opposition to this bath caused a serious breach in the ranks of Hygienists, leading to efforts to repress Trall and to lawsuits. It was but dimly recognized that their efforts to direct and control the remedial efforts of life by adventitious and extraneous means were suppressive.

All truly successful art is established upon scientific principles. The experimental art always presupposes error and disaster. No man can learn independently of general principles, except through frequent failure. The sad and disastrous experiences of life teach man wisdom quite as much as do his successes. Nowhere, perhaps, has this been more true than in the care of the sick. The healing art, as it is called, has been a long series of failures and disasters and, because of the lack of a single valid general principle, has taught only negatively.

The early Hygienists built upon sound principles. In saying this, we do not commit ourselves to all of the opinions, principles and practices which they promoted. Fundamentally, they were right and this was enough of a foundation to build upon.

Napoleon's famous remark--"Get your principles right and the rest is a matter of detail"--expresses an important truth; but he who thinks that when the principles are right the details automatically and instantaneously fall into their proper places, that they arrange themselves in their proper orders, sequences and relationships, with no effort on our part or that no mistakes are made in our work of ordering them, is naive. A true science is only slowly and laborously built up, even after the acquisition of correct principles.

Hygiene is a science in progress.

Shelton's place in history:

Near the end of his life the interviewer asked him how he would like to be remembered. He said he would like to be remembered as the man who rescued the whole body of NH literature from oblivion.

[Brant Gaede]

"Hygiene" sounds like a colonic enema.

--Brant

[jts]

"Hygiene" sounds like a colonic enema.

--Brant

Fry's list:

• Pure air
• Pure water
• Cleanliness—both internal and external
• Sleep
• Temperature maintenance
• Pure wholesome food to which we are biologically adapted
• Exercise and activity
• Sunshine upon our bodies
• Rest and relaxation
• Play and recreation
• Emotional poise
• Security of life and its means
• Pleasant environment
• Creative, useful work
• Self-Mastery
• Belonging
• Motivation
• Expression of the natural instincts
• Indulgence of aesthetic senses

Where in this list do you see 'colonic enema'?

------------------

Dr. Tilden used enemas. So did Dr. Moser. Modern NH doctors tend to be thumbs down on enemas.

http://naturalhygienesociety.org/review/0501/enemas.html

[Brant Gaede]

This call for purity seems to exclude the body's need for stimulation to deal with greater insults.

--Brant

that's purity from the outside in while Rand sought purity primarily from the inside out and demanded the world match up or get out of her heroes' way

the desire for Utopia

[Brant Gaede]

"Hygiene" sounds like a colonic enema.

--Brant

Fry's list:

• Pure air
• Pure water
• Cleanliness—both internal and external
• Sleep
• Temperature maintenance
• Pure wholesome food to which we are biologically adapted
• Exercise and activity
• Sunshine upon our bodies
• Rest and relaxation
• Play and recreation
• Emotional poise
• Security of life and its means
• Pleasant environment
• Creative, useful work
• Self-Mastery
• Belonging
• Motivation
• Expression of the natural instincts
• Indulgence of aesthetic senses

Where in this list do you see 'colonic enema'?

------------------

Dr. Tilden used enemas. So did Dr. Moser. Modern NH doctors tend to be thumbs down on enemas.

http://naturalhygienesociety.org/review/0501/enemas.html

I suppose daily doses of Valium could be substituted.

--Brant

[moralist]

Jerry quotes:

Fry's list:

Pure air

Pure water

Cleanlinessboth internal and external

Sleep

Temperature maintenance

Pure wholesome food to which we are biologically adapted

Exercise and activity

Sunshine upon our bodies

Rest and relaxation

Play and recreation

Emotional poise

Security of life and its means

Pleasant environment

Creative, useful work

Self-Mastery

Belonging

Motivation

Expression of the natural instincts

Indulgence of aesthetic senses

All of the items on that list are qualities of self governance. This is the essence of American liberty. People who govern themselves will never be governed by others.

Greg

[jts]

This call for purity seems to exclude the body's need for stimulation to deal with greater insults.

--Brant

Check out this pdf file about the great stimulant delusion.

[Brant Gaede]

I read several pages and will read more. Still looking for real data and references to data. The real problem seems to be the casting of a net so wide what's important is lost or not addressed. The smallpox vaccine, for instance, is a stimulant.

--Brant

[william.scherk]

I've been trying to keep a line of argument in mind. Here is where I posed a question directly.

Jerry, Greg, what do you think about this kind of therapy -- does it fit within your understanding of all medicine as variants of 'cut-burn-poision' -- or does it open in your mind a new category?

New Category. Is it, ain't it? I am almost thinking Jerry has already conceded the point of a 'new category' of conventional medicine in this quite limited area of deadly cancer. The treatment did not cut any tumours out of the flesh, it did not burn any tissue with radiation, and it did not poison any other cell but those which were cancerous. So, logically, I think Jerry can approach the moment of saying "that is cool. It kinda goes against Natural Hygiene but it is cool. If I get acute leukemia, I will remember this smart and promising 'new' therapeutic line of reasoning . I can see why it might work."

But no.

William,

I don't know what your problem is. Do you think you or anyone else needs my permission to try genetic therapy? If it works, do it. What's the problem?

No, Jerry, I don't believe I was asking your permission. The problem, as I see it, is that you cannot break out of your zone. If the only thing you get out of my last post was that I was demanding your permission for something, then either you or I is an idiot -- in terms of being able to communicate.

I'll just invite you to permit yourself to broaden your concept of modern medicine -- beyond the categories of cut, burn, poison. Targeted cell therapy and the 'cancer-hunting virus' therapies do not seem to fit within your cut, burn, poison scheme. Living human cells are given a boost to their ability to target and kill cancer, are reinfused once enhanced. Nothing dies but the cancer. That is the promise. Added bonus is the 'side-effect' of fever. It's like your guarantee that something healthful is happening, nu?

It wouldn't really be that hard for you to do some homework and learn what hygiene is. I have to suspect you are not interested. Among Shelton's many books is a whole book titled 'Natural Hygiene'. It is free. You can read it online. You can download it. You can find things in it and similar books using the NHL. So there doesn't seem to be any good reason for you to not inform yourself about what hygiene is if you are really truly interested.

I am not peddling Natural Hygiene like a Jehovah's Witness. I have done research on your recommendations, including reading an entire Trall tome. I have already read the text you mention.

Hygiene is a mix of vitalism, nutrition and whoopee, in my opinion, a weird 'natural thinking' cult.

Hygiene can be defined as simply the science of health. Shelton says essentially the same thing in a more wordy way in chapter 10 titled simply 'hygiene'.

Natural Hygiene is the bastard child of a whole lot of quacks in the vitalism tradition. It offers nothing that was not on offer in 1922. It has made zero progress since Shelton in effective advancement. First clue. It is like something frozen in amber, a relict. It is preserved intacta by a community of believers. Second clue.

Hygiene is properly defined as that branch of biology which designates the conditions upon which health depends and the means by which it may be sustained in all its virtue and purity while we have it, and the means upon which its restoration rests when we have lost it. It is the scientific application of the principles of nature in the preservation and restoration of health. We may also define Hygiene as the science of normal vital development. It comprehends all the laws that determine the changes in living organisms and all the conditions which conduce to or interfere with normal growth and sustenance. It traces these conditions to the unerring laws of nature and thereon establishes its science of life. It demonstrates the great primary principle of human action, that all permanent good, all enduring happiness and all true advancement are found only in obedience to these laws.

Germ theory. Viral illness. Genetic errors. Deficiency diseases. Or ... whoopee.

The bottom line is hygiene is the science of health. But he also seems to think the application of this science is an art.

He continues:

Hygiene does not neglect the care of the sick. All true care of the sick recognizes and applies these same laws of nature in providing the needs of the sick and the removal of abnormal conditions. Disease results from disobedience to organic laws. Hygiene, as applied to the sick, is not the mere employment of diet, or of fasting; but it enters into all the causes of disease, seeking to remove these, and supplies all the needs of life in assisting the efforts of nature in restoring health. It provides a simple and healthful diet, carefully adapted to the assimilating powers of the body; it demands pure air and warmth; it provides rest or invigorating exercise as demanded, with other physical and normal Hygienic conditions.

Vitalism redux. The notion that we can be in such a state of purity that no sickness can affect us that wasn't our fault in not being Hygienic. Logically, this is a ham salad with no ham. It cannot offer what it does not possess. It is the deadly fallacy at the heart of Natural Hygiene. It assumes its own conclusions.

Vitalism in a Puritan guise is no friend of reason. Shelton's oddball puritanism posits an Eden,

Hygiene is not the gift or invention of any man nor group of men nor of any succession of men, but the pristine way of life with which man emerged when he first came upon the earth.

Thus Spake Doctor Moses Whoopee.

Read the rest of the chapter here.

How can anyone get the idea that hygiene (the science of health) does not include a consideration of genetics? Maybe you might get that idea from the fact that the NH writers usually don't write much about genetics. But that would be incorrect reasoning. They do recognize genetics as a limit on health potential but they put the focus on what we can control. Nature deals your hand and your job is to play your hand as well as you can. The NH doctors, while recognizing genetic limits, are not as quick to attribute health problems to genetics as most doctors are.

Natural Hygiene writers have nothing to say about particular genetic diseases. Go to your Hygiene library to discover what this 'science' has to say about cystic fibrosis, for one example. You will find fuck all. And on down the line. Natural Hygiene has nothing to offer -- not in terms of depth of knowledge -- and nothing worthwhile to say about genetics. To overgeneralize, Natural Hygiene is separate from what any honest inquirer would call reliable, valid knowledge -- as represented in 'science.'

About quackery.
Start with a definition of quackery. Quackery is any doctoring (attempt to restore health) not based on health science. It follows from this definition that any doctoring not based on hygiene (the science of health) is quackery.

Quackery is when someone pretends to medical knowledge and promotes their ignorance in treatments, protocols, diets, regimens, and other such whoopee. You equivocate on 'health science,' and it results in ham salad with no ham. If the Natural Hygiene collection of whoopee is 'health science,' then I am Marie of Roumania.

-- all dictionaries have a definition of quackery that closely resembles this one:

Quackery is the promotion of fraudulent or ignorant medical practices. A "quack" is a "fraudulent or ignorant pretender to medical skill" or "a person who pretends, professionally or publicly, to have skill, knowledge, or qualifications he or she does not possess; a charlatan"

For example you can suppress symptoms by poison and ignore root causes and expect restoration of health. This would be quackery. And it wouldn't make any difference how many letters the quack has after his name. And it wouldn't make any difference whether the quack is approved by government. And it would make any difference what kind of poison it is, allopathic poison (causing different or opposite effect) or homeopathic poison (causing same effect) or naturopathic poison (poisons from nature)

Let's plug in some real entities (disease processes) into your fluff. "You can suppress the symptoms of Lyme Disease by poisonous antibiotics, and expect restoration of health, and you would be a quack." Or not.

Or, "You can suppress the symptoms of acute lymphocytic leukemia by poisonous infusions of reconfigured patient T cells to target and destroy all cells with the protein CD19 on their surface, and expect that cancer cells would be destroyed and 'health' defined as cancer-free would be restored -- and you would be a quack. Or, let's face it, not.

-- go to it, Jerry, find us one single NH worthy who offers anything but fluff, whoopee, general puritan vitalism and ignorance in relation to genetic disorders and cancers.

If you don't have the expertise or the time or ability to do the necessary research on a doctor to find out whether he is a quack (as defined above), the quickest and easiest way is the question: do his patients get well? A doctor (with all the conventional credentials) told me with his own mouth that none of his patients get better and he told me helping people get well is not his job. I figure he convicted himself by his own words from his own mouth of being a quack. Opinion doesn't enter into the picture. He as much as said he is a quack. Don't go to this doctor if your purpose is to get well. Maybe he is good for diagnosis if that matters.

For more about quackery, read this chapter.

-- what is most excellent about the staged trials of drug or gene-target or immuno-therapy is that they demand clear evidence. The question you ask 'do his patients get well?' is a dodge. Nobody like you or me is able to interrogate a doctor or demand his records. That's one of the problems with Natural Hygiene, its inability to properly test its own claims. It hasn't accrued a scientific literature.

There is no way to check your 'just-so' story about some unnamed MD in some unmentioned specialty. Accepting a wild generalization to all MDs obviously leads to logical reefs.

You are on a rational, Objectivish forum, Jerry, and you are peddling walled-off primitive systems of knowledge. Don't you feel the disconnect sometimes?

Or hell, read the whole book.

Hygiene is not Sheltonism. Hygiene is not a cult around Shelton. Shelton had a mission. Early in life he saw a whole body of literature going into oblivion about to be lost forever. His mission was to 'fan the dying embers to fierce flame'. He wrote more books than any other NH writer. And he has been described as a 'powerful' writer. Hence his popularity in the NH community. But hygiene is not Sheltonism.

Hygiene is indeed a kin to cult practice in that it is incorrigible and closed to reason. It is set aside from even the most glancing encounters with actual knowledge of the workings of human bodies. Only a sliver of modern human beings falls for its full blandishments, adopts its tenets, proselytizes its dogma. It is separate and distinct from conventional and alternative medicine. You cannot find a Natural Hygiene practitioner on the ground in any numbers like its competitor. It is on its way to extinction or at least the merest kook pockets. Modern medicine marches on in thousands of directions. Natural Hygiene is irrelevant to the real world.

Which sadly, almost makes you a cult member, as you too have walled off your mind to modern methods, and have adopted the full demonology of the doctrine. There is no budging you from your fundamental adhesion to Natural Hygiene.

The best thing I got out of my Shelton readings was his rejection of enemas as evil. It kinda put paid to the latter-day cult of Gerson.

Shelton wrote his books at night when he should have sleeping, to the serious detriment of his health. Dr. Cinque, who knew Shelton, had no explanation for 'this madness'. He worked 100+ hours per week and never took vacations. Somehow reminds me of Ayn Rand, the personification of rationality, who smoked and got lung cancer.

It was his own damn fault that he got sick and that he died when he did. If only he had been Perfect. Perfect is what we all try to be and when we fail, It Is Our Own Fault. All of it.

As evidence that Shelton did not think he knew everything, I offer the following:

We have previously pointed out that a series of individuals, perhaps even of ages, are required for the full development and culmination of a great thought. Each individual and each age provides further light and truth, while man labors through indefinite time for the perfection of a science. Each event is the term of a series; the present is the summation of the past, which is still to be added to in the future. It was inescapable that at its origin (or rather, its revival) in the last century, Hygiene should have had many imperfections. It is certainly true that at its present stage of evolution it shall have imperfections still.

Let me count the ways. Germs. Viruses, Genetic Disorders. Deficiency Diseases. Vaccinations. Immunotherapy, Targeted-cell therapy. Monoclonal antibodies. Tumour necrosis factor. Cytokine signaling. Antibiotics.

On one line of inquiry today -- following your suggestion to read more -- I found a health podcaster who had let some of his Natural Hygiene dogma lapse. When bitten by a deer tick and infected by Lyme Disease, he took antibiotics. When he was at risk of dangerous infection at another time, he chose antibiotics. What do you think of his reasoning, Jerry?

This fact was recognized by the early Hygienists, who not only held to different views and carried on different practices, but strove to improve both their understanding and their practices. Trall stated that the greatest room in the world was (or is) the room for improvement. To his classes he emphasized that the most the pioneers of Hygiene could do was to lay foundations and establish broad outlines, but that future Hygienists would have to fill in the details. Nobody thought that Hygiene had burst forth in full flower with no errors to be corrected and no further developments to be made.

Trall, whose 1862 speech in DC was made into a book you recommended I read, which I did -- Trall was of a time when 'cut, poison, burn' was indeed the treatment for a variety of ailments, when the practice of doctoring was primitive by today's standards, and a brutal, senseless endeavour at times. For example, who needs to go back in time to consider how syphilis was 'treated' by various hideous decoctions whether antimony or mercury?

That said, do not read deeply of Trall thinking he had much to say about infectious disease, cancer, physiology and nutrition that has not been shown false, naive, uninformed or not even wrong in the march of reason since he passed. In other words, he was not ahead of his time. He was of his time. Much of what he wrote is by now bizarrely out of sync with what is known about the subjects he touches.

Every basic and positive truth that is discovered adds to the approximation of the perfect system that belongs to the future. It not only adds to our understanding of truth, but enables us to correct past errors and to eliminate practices that are not based on truth. If we adhere to the original proposition of Hygienists, in laboring for the perfection of the science and art of Hygiene--that its true principles are to be drawn from physiology alone--and continue to work and harmonize its various parts, we will not waste time and energy seeking for Hygienic developments in all the fields of human investigation.

You see, this is just glittering generality. There is nothing at all there to grab hold, nothing that you could illustrate, Jerry, as evidence of 'investigation' ... though we can as I said, check back on each of his specifics.

What was, perhaps, the basic error of the early Hygienists (all save Jennings and Graham), at least insofar as their application of Hygiene to the care of the sick is concerned, was their assumption that the remedial efforts of the body had to be regulated and directed. In pursuing the effort to regulate and direct these remedial efforts, they resorted to a wide variety of extra-Hygienic means and measures, the most important of these being hydropathy.

Yes, Dr Kellog had some wack ideas. Hydropathic whoopee among them. Which leads into further refinements of Natural Hygiene whoopee, one zany item at a time.

Water applications, massage, changes in atmospheric pressure (an elaborate apparatus was used for this purpose), electricity and hypnotism (by some Hygienists) were chief among the means employed with which to control and direct the body's remedial actions. Some of them enthusiastically adopted the Turkish bath, although this was denounced by Trall. Indeed, his opposition to this bath caused a serious breach in the ranks of Hygienists, leading to efforts to repress Trall and to lawsuits. It was but dimly recognized that their efforts to direct and control the remedial efforts of life by adventitious and extraneous means were suppressive.

We've got rid of electrowhoopee and hypnosis! We are on a roll!

All truly successful art is established upon scientific principles. The experimental art always presupposes error and disaster. No man can learn independently of general principles, except through frequent failure. The sad and disastrous experiences of life teach man wisdom quite as much as do his successes. Nowhere, perhaps, has this been more true than in the care of the sick. The healing art, as it is called, has been a long series of failures and disasters and, because of the lack of a single valid general principle, has taught only negatively.

Oh, for a single valid general principle. Oh for an Ayn Rand of Natural Whoopee.

Have some mercury for your syphilis, or not.

The early Hygienists built upon sound principles. In saying this, we do not commit ourselves to all of the opinions, principles and practices which they promoted. Fundamentally, they were right and this was enough of a foundation to build upon.

Fundamentally, electro water hypno massagerama aside, we got it all!

Napoleon's famous remark--"Get your principles right and the rest is a matter of detail"--expresses an important truth; but he who thinks that when the principles are right the details automatically and instantaneously fall into their proper places, that they arrange themselves in their proper orders, sequences and relationships, with no effort on our part or that no mistakes are made in our work of ordering them, is naive. A true science is only slowly and laborously built up, even after the acquisition of correct principles.

Thus the treatment for cancer is not a treatment, but the entire Natural Hygiene System which is also applied in every other case no matter what. Do everything just right and you will be close to Perfect. Minister to your body as would a religious ascetic, combine foods in just the right pattern, fast and fast some more. Begone all ailments. If you fail and get sick, it is your fault.

Above all, avoid 'regular' doctors in all cases but bone fracture or heavy bleeding. They are all, to a man or woman, corrupt, devoted to your undoing, rapacious, deluded, bloated with lies and hubris, with nothing whatsoever of value to offer in comparison to the Cult Teachings, er, Natural Hygiene.

Whew.

Hygiene is a science in progress.

Shelton's place in history:
Near the end of his life the interviewer asked him how he would like to be remembered. He said he would like to be remembered as the man who rescued the whole body of NH literature from oblivion.

That is quite an achievement. Your achievement, Jerry, is to bog down an Objectivish forum with incorrigible dogma impervious to reason.

Anyhow, how did I get to this point? I had asked your opinion of novel cancer treatments outside of the paradigm of 'cut, poison, burn' ... that, as far as I can tell, is not what you have given. You say if it works, do it, don't wait for you to weigh in. But, I was looking for a conceptual awakening, a category-broadening in your mind, a eureka moment. I still have a little bit of hope you can be reasonable about the gross and obvious defects of Natural Hygiene. Maybe not this time.

I came to an impasse with Jerry and Greg on the subject of a quite novel genetic therapy for a deadly kind of acute leukemia

What were once deadly diseases can be successfully treated in novel ways, built on a understanding of complex disease states. One promising treatment is "targeted cellular therapy," part of what is known more generally as 'molecular medicine.' To over-simplify grossly, therapy acts to redress key metabolic processes at work in tumours, for example in acute cancers, where the only other therapy option (aside from hospice care) may be dangerous bone-marrow transplantation. For some folks with some disorders and cancers, gene therapy may serve as an alternative to certain death.

I don't know if there is much use continuing on this line of argument. But I did my best.

Edited November 6, 2015 by william.scherk

[Brant Gaede]

Quackery has room to roam for two reasons: if you're in fairly good health you can be comfortable with this intellectualzation and modern medicine doesn't statistically add much to the longevity of the population as a whole. The four big advances that did are surgical anesthesia, vaccinations, public health (clean water and modern sewage) and antibiotics. Modern medicine throws the biggest dollop of its resources into end of life treatments which may or may not be palliative. Remove those treatments and maybe the average American life-span will decrease by six months to a year and only a few months is more likely. What modern medicine does do generally best is to make life much better in the living of it. The availability of medicine is a function of wealth.

--Brant

as there is quite a bit of dogma in (cultural) Objectivism, an Objectivist site can be an inviting landing ground for some dogmatists, but OL is where dogma comes to die (in a wood chipper)

it's hard work, btw

[moralist]

William writes:

The notion that we can be in such a state of purity that no sickness can effect us that wasn't our fault in not being Hygienic.

Hygiene is an impossible ideal...

...but just because it is does not mean it's worthless to aspire towards its horizon.

I haven't taken so much as one aspirin in more than 50 years just by living close to the Good Earth that God made for me to enjoy. And heck, I'm not even that dogmatic about it. I just live simply with lots of time working outside in the Sunshine, fresh air, and soil. Fruits, vegetables, nuts, simple meals cooked from scratch, and most importantly, doing what's morally right. All of the other blessings flow from first doing what's morally right.

And you can't peddle that "good genes" crap to me, because I have absolutely rotten genes. My Dad died of a heart attack at 50, his brother died from a heart attack at 51 and his sister died at 46 from cancer. I just chose to play the horrible cards that were dealt to me in a different way than you did. So the consequences from my own choice are totally different than yours.

Logically, this is a ham salad with no ham.

For once you actually offered some logical nutritional advice, William. You ought to take your own advice.

Eat pig... become one.

Greg

[Brant Gaede]

I'd take a potassium supplement if I had your family health history, an aspirin a week with food, vitamins E and C and maybe sodium selenite.

James Fixx had an even worse family history than yours. He took up running. He wrote some books on running. He dropped dead running in Vermont. He may have extended his life 10 - 15--even 20--years.

If everybody had my "good genes," the profession of cardiology would evaporate. My maternal grandfather had a mild heart attack when he was 85. That was it for any known heart attacks going back generations.

--Brant

[moralist]

It's all up to each of us to make the best of the cards dealt to us... so that's what I do because we'll all die from something.

And I don't think much in terms of individual external additives, but rather just eat the foods I like. I faithfully observe the old saying of "An apple a day keeps the doctor away" and so have at least one every day. I've never needed to take any prescription drugs and prefer apples to pills.

You mentioned potassium, I eat plenty of bananas avocados and spinach as staple foods so adding anything else isn't really necessary. Forget aspirin. Don't need it. Don't want it. My blood pressure averages 120/80 and for 67 years old that's good enough.

My work is mostly physical and keeps me active, as there isn't hardly a job I do that doesn't involve climbing ladders and hauling tools up and down steps. It's really hilly here so everyone has lots of steps! . My wife and I spend a lot of our time outdoors working in the yard. We hike and bicycle as well.

All of these are life choices I made a long time ago... and I still enjoy the consequences of them today.

The healthcare system is misnamed. It's actually the sickcare system. It does not concern itself with heath or nutrition, but instead is focused on treating problems and the symptoms of problems. This is fine if you have a problem you can't solve yourself, or want to cover over a symptom without addressing its cause.

Greg

[william.scherk]

Sort of almost on topic, I came to an impasse with Jerry and Greg on the subject of a quite novel genetic therapy for a deadly kind of acute leukemia ... The therapy was not yet in clinical trials, but showed great killing promise without the dire effects of conventional cancer chemotherapies.

The impasse was in getting them to consider a different kind of 'poison' entirely, where the actual human immune-cells are 'tuned up' outside the body, and then reintroduced -- and to consider utterly novel immune-dependent treatments that don't fit other models. The novel therapy had been applied to patients who had exhausted all treatment options for lymphocytic leukemia. The study of 59 patients is only the very first step of the process that may ultimately provide an effective cure for such patients presently facing death.

Another similar 'promissory note' regarding T-cell therapy for cancers, this time a single case. As in the quoted study above, these are suggestive, preliminary indications of promise, at or near only the first stage of clinical trials, N=1.

Baby's leukemia recedes after novel cell therapy (Science blog)

A London baby with end-stage leukemia has received a remarkable new cancer treatment: off-the shelf T cells with several gene modifications. Doctors say it's too early to know whether she's cured, but the announcement advances a frontier in cancer immunotherapy, in which the body's immune system tackles the disease. For the past several years, researchers have been modifying T cells so they can attack leukemia, but the cells must be painstakingly isolated from the patients themselves and grown in a lab. Drug companies and many doctors dream of using off-the-shelf cells to make the therapy more like a regular drug. Now, by harnessing advances in genome editing to slice and dice genes in donor T cells, researchers have created a new type of cancer immunotherapy.

New gene therapy may cure childhood immune condition (Guardian)

Specialists at Great Ormond Street Hospital (GOSH) in London treated the girl two months ago and stressed that it could be more than a year before they know for sure whether the therapy has cured the disease, or simply delayed its progression. [...]

Despite several rounds of intensive chemotherapy, Layla still had leukaemia cells in her body when the transplant was performed, and seven weeks later the disease returned. Soon after, doctors told the family there were no other treatments that might cure Layla and suggested palliative care. But Layla’s parents, Lisa and Ashleigh, insisted that the doctors keep trying.

“We didn’t want to accept palliative care and give up on our daughter, so we asked the doctors to try anything for our daughter, even if it hadn’t been tried before,” Lisa said.

The hospital had been working on an experimental cell-based treatment for leukaemia. Researchers at UCL showed last year, and again in May, that the modified cells had an anti-cancer effect, but it had only been tested on mice with leukaemia. They had one vial of the cells to give to Layla, but to go ahead they needed approval from an emergency ethics committee and informed consent from her parents. The doctors explained there was no guarantee it would work even if approval was granted.

“It was scary to think that the treatment had never been used in a human before, but even with the risks there was no doubt that we wanted to try the treatment. She was sick and in lots of pain, so we had to do something,” said Ashleigh.

The ethics committee approved the treatment, and Layla received a 1ml infusion of the genetically engineered immune cells under UK special therapy regulations. The infusion took 10 minutes. “We thought that the little bit of liquid in the syringe was nothing and asked ‘what is that going to do when bags and bags of chemo haven’t worked?’,” Ashleigh said.

The cells came from frozen batches of donated T cells, or white blood cells, which play a central role in human immunity. Before they are infused, the cells are given an extra gene to make them target leukaemia cells. They then have other genes disabled to stop them attacking patients who receive them, and to make them invisible to a drug called alemtuzumab, which doctors use to suppress patients’ immune systems.