Tom's Blog on Life

Banning of “Cancer Care” is an extremely dark moment in the history of censorship.

A few days ago I received the word that Amazon had banned Dr. Paul Marik’s book Cancer Care: The Role of Repurposed Drugs and Metabolic Interventions in Treating Cancer. In Amazon’s words:

Hello,

We are terminating your account effective immediately because we found that you have published titles with misleading content that have the potential to mislead or defraud our customers.
You can see the violations reflected in the following title(s):
58840430 / Cancer Care: The Role of Repurposed Drugs and Metabolic Interventions in Treating Cancer, PRI-4BJKMH3ENCP / Cancer Care: The Role of Repurposed Drugs and Metabolic Interventions in Treating Cancer

As part of the termination process:
• We will close your account
• You’re no longer eligible to receive any outstanding royalties
• You’ll no longer have access to your accounts. This includes, editing your titles, viewing your reports and accessing any other information within your account
• All of your published titles will be removed from sale on Amazon

This action strikes me as identical to that of the Holy Office of the Inquisition excommunicating a heretic during the Counter-Reformation.

On the same day I received the news of Dr. Marik’s excommunication, I also received some photos of Dr. McCullough’s trip to Milan, Italy, including one of him standing in front of the Teatro alla Scala opera house.

These two events, happening on the same day, reminded me of Verdi’s 1867 opera, Don Carlos, based on Friedrich Schiller’s 1787 play of the same title. As the distinguished law professor, Martha Nussbaum, wrote about the play and opera in her 2022 essay, Don Carlos: Liberty or the Inquisition?

Republics sometimes die by conquest from without. But they also die by collapse from within. … Can this new … form of government depend on people to do the job? Or will weak-willed human beings give way to fear and yield their freedom to an authoritarian leader — whether religious or secular?

This question was much debated in the 18th century, when Friedrich Schiller made it central to his drama Don Carlos (1787), and it was still debated when Verdi — drawing on Schiller, but also on his own passionate involvement in the Risorgimento (a movement for Italian unity and republican self-government) — wrote his opera Don Carlos (1867).

The villain of Don Carlos is the Grand Inquisitor of Spain during the reign of Philip II. As Nussbaum points out, Verdi was drawn to Schiller’s opera not only as a historical drama, but out of his conviction that its theme of “Liberty or the Inquisition?” was still as relevant as ever in the Italy of his day.

Self-government had powerful enemies, in particular Pope Pius IX (1792-1878), who became pope in 1848, and was 75 when Don Carlos premiered. Initially sympathetic to the Risorgimento, he changed course and adopted an extreme conservative and church authoritarian posture. In 1864 he issued a “Syllabus of Errors,” an attack on all forms of liberalism, religious toleration, personal autonomy, and national self-determination which still makes chilling reading. He reversed the religious toleration laws of the Republic and reinstituted the Jewish ghetto, which he had previously opened.

As Nussbaum concluded her essay:

Here, I think, Verdi sees more deeply than Schiller: The struggle for free speech and freedom is perpetual, and it must be fought in the heart and mind of every person who loves self-government, in every generation—as love of liberty contends with superstition and fear of power. We cannot wait for God, or even history, to deal with our tyrants. Italy’s future was precarious in the 1860’s—with Pius IX lurching from liberalism to dark anti-rationalism—just as ours is today, with threats against democracy from the forces of anti-truth, and with a public culture tainted by fear of other groups and people. The ending of Don Carlos is as dark or “light” as we make it in our lives.

The Grand Inquisitor at a recent production of Don Carlos at the Met.
Today in the United States, the Democratic Party, and mainstream media, and much of the academic establishment believe in ORTHODOXY, and therefore see no reason why men like Dr. Paul Marik—one of the most published and distinguished critical care doctors in history—should be protected from censorship.

The ultimate victims of this censorship will be people dying of cancer who might have benefitted from the information presented in Dr. Marik’s book. Like the hospital administrators who deprived Dr. Marik’s intensive care patients of his repurposed drug protocol for treating advanced COVID-19—thereby consigning them to death instead of allowing them to have a fighting chance under Dr. Marik’s care—whoever compelled Amazon to ban his book apparently doesn’t want cancer patients to try repurposed drugs that could suppress tumor growth, even if conventional cancer treatments have failed to stop the disease’s advance.

Fortunately, the book is still available on the FLCCC.net website — at least for now.

Schiller and Verdi would have understood the grave danger that censorship poses to the American Republic. Sadly, people with true education, discernment, and culture have become increasingly rare in the United States. Their influence in public affairs has been crowded out by the rule of half-educated philistines—people “full of passionate intensity” as Yeats famously put it in “The Second Coming.”

International Man: The Soviet Union used the diagnosis of mental illness as a tool to silence political dissenters. It was a practice known as “psychiatric repression.”

Dissidents who spoke out against the government were often declared insane and forcibly institutionalized in psychiatric hospitals, where the government subjected them to inhumane treatment and abuses.

The diagnoses were often based on political rather than medical criteria and were used as a means of punishment and control.

What is your take on this practice?

Doug Casey: Well, before we get into what happened in the Soviet Union, and what seems to now be happening in the US, we really have to address the validity of psychiatry as a science to start with, and mental illness as being a real illness.

Dr. Thomas Szasz, who died some years ago, made the case that mental illness is not a medical concept and does not have a biological basis. He believed that what people commonly refer to as “mental illness” is actually a label used to describe deviant behavior, emotions, and thoughts that do not conform to social norms. He argued that mental illnesses are not diseases in the traditional sense, as they cannot be objectively measured or diagnosed like physical conditions such as cancer or arteriosclerosis. He wrote numerous books debunking psychiatry; I highly recommend them.

My own view is that people have always had psychological problems, worries, and aberrations. These things were once dealt with by talking to friends, counselors, or religious figures. Since the time of Sigmund Freud, however, “treating” mental conditions has been turned into the business of psychiatry.

Psychiatry has set up a priesthood of doctors who look at what people think, say, and do, and offer opinions as to whether or not it’s healthy. Of course, there’s nothing wrong with studying the way the mind works. The problem arises when a practitioner can impose his opinion on another person. If a surgeon thinks you should have a heart operation, he can’t impose that on you. But if a licensed psychiatrist thinks you should be incarcerated and subjected to various drugs and “therapies,” there may not be much you can do about it.

Coming back to what happened in the Soviet Union, State officials found psychiatry was an excellent way to keep dissidents under control. It’s one thing to be prosecuted because the government thinks you’re politically unreliable and your views are wrong, but another to be punished because a medical practitioner claims you’re insane for holding them. Psychiatry—which I view as a pseudoscience—can easily be used to give a patina of science to political views.

But by saying they were crazy, the Communists were able to attack the actual essence of a person. This is one more thing that made the Communists not just nasty and dangerous, but evil. Evil is a word that’s fallen into disrepute in recent years, perhaps because it’s been used so indiscriminately by poorly educated Bible thumpers. My own view is that many, or most, supposed psychiatric disorders are a consequence of doing evil; if a person can’t confront these things, he may act irrationally, and be viewed as neurotic or psychotic. But putting yourself under the control of a person who’s taken some courses about other doctors’ opinions is rarely a cure.

It’s funny that psychiatrists, as a group, are usually looked down upon by other members of the medical profession. They may have real medical training, but when they go into practice all they basically do is sit behind a couch and listen to people rap about their problems, then experiment with psychoactive drugs, hoping for magic to happen. It’s not a bad gig to sit and listen for several hundred dollars per hour.

In using Freudian talk therapy, psychiatrists are basically no better than a friend or counselor, and often worse. I suspect many are just voyeurs who like to hear about others’ problems, perhaps just looking to compare them with their own. In fact, it can be worse. A lot of people become psychiatrists because they themselves are troubled and they like the idea of listening to other people’s problems and bouncing their arbitrary thoughts back at them.

Worse, the public thinks that psychiatrists actually know how the mind works, and can magically know what they’re thinking. The public thinks shrinks have special powers, like modern witch doctors. That fear, ridiculous as it is, gives them genuine power. That in itself draws the wrong kind of person to psychiatry. There’s a reason why Hannibal Lecter was portrayed as a psychiatrist as opposed to an accountant or an engineer or a salesman.

The process is disguised and legitimized by classifying problems using, among other things, the Diagnostic and Statistical Manual of Mental Disorders (called DSM-5 in its latest edition). Unlike a real medical or surgical manual, the book is mostly guesswork and opinion, a modern version of the medieval Malleus Malificarum, which classified everything known about witchcraft.

Although most Freudian talk therapy is actually bunkum, simply allowing a troubled person a chance to talk, even for just 55 minutes, can sometimes be helpful. But the usual cure prescribed today is some type of drug affecting brain function. Most of these drugs only disguise the problem by clouding the mind. These drugs can actually alter the cells in the brain—what they do, and how you think. There are hundreds of psychiatric drugs now—Ritalin, Zoloft, Xanax, and Prozac are common ones—but there are many more that are seriously dangerous.

As a by-the-way, it turns out that FTX had a psychiatrist on the payroll at their Bahamas hangout. The shrink, one Dr. George Lerner, apparently had about 20 FTX employees as private patients at one time. Sam Bankman-Fried himself has stated that he’s been on the antidepressant Emsam for “half his adult life.” It’s a bad idea to invest in a company that has a staff psychiatrist, where lots of people are on psych drugs. What they needed wasn’t a pill pusher, but a decent human who was interested in ethics, and concepts like right and wrong.

In their belief that there’s “bad think” and that they have a right to alter it, psychiatrists have gotten into things like electroshock therapy, which physically destroys people’s brain calls, and prefrontal lobotomies performed by taking an ice pick, going through the side of the eye, and purposefully destroying part of people’s brains.

One of the most inhuman things about the Soviet Union, which was full of bad things, may have been the way it perverted medicine, endorsing psychiatry, to destroy the human spirit itself. This concept is finding its way into the US and the West. Corrupt psych specialists use pseudoscience to prove that people the government deems to have crazy political ideas are indeed crazy. “Crazy” is being defined as not believing what they believe, and saying things that are politically incorrect.

I would submit psychiatry is a phony and dangerous specialty to start with. And putting psychiatric pseudoscientists in charge of determining what’s “good think” and “bad think” is very dangerous.

Medicine shouldn’t be involved in politics, which is certainly the major takeaway of Dr. Fauci’s role in the recent COVID hysteria. And that goes double for psychiatry. Professional associations—like labor unions—are always looking to increase political power and economic wealth for themselves and their members. Bar associations do it for lawyers, the NEA for teachers, the AMA for doctors, and the American Psychiatric Association for shrinks. They’re all dangers to society. But the APA more than most.

To give you an example, I once met a prominent shrink in Washington, DC. He advocated requiring psychiatric tests for all high government officials, to keep dangerous nutcases out of office. That’s understandable. But what if the tests in question skew against certain political, economic, and philosophical beliefs? At this point, it could only play into the hands of those with power.

Remember, control freaks—people that like to control other people—aren’t interested so much in controlling the physical universe as manipulating and controlling other people. They tend to go into government. And when they go into medicine, they’re often drawn to psychiatry.

If you can disguise your desire to control and manipulate your fellow humans by claiming you have medical necessity on your side, you become much more effective and much more dangerous.

International Man: During the Covid mass psychosis, there were reports of certain medical agencies in Canada that suggested refusing the vaccine was a sign of psychiatric problems.

We’ve also seen proponents of climate change hysteria use language to describe skeptics as mentally ill.

What are the implications of this?

Doug Casey: The politicization of psychiatry—trying to control what people think—is really, really dangerous. It’s a trend that has been building for a long time, and I think it’s getting worse.

Once upon a time, somebody was deemed insane if they were manifestly irrational, walking down the streets yelling and screaming. Someone obviously unable to maintain themselves. They’ve always existed, but as a teeny-weeny portion of society. If they committed an actual tort, it was a matter for the police and the courts. If they didn’t commit an actual crime, then they were just a nuisance—and life is full of nuisances. Historically, crazy people were non-problems. Unless, of course, they got into government…

In the last 100 years, the number of diagnosable psychiatric disorders has grown like topsy. There are hundreds and hundreds of things that are now deemed psychiatric disorders. Enough that almost everybody can now be said to need a psychiatrist. Personal quirks, eccentricities, and non-mainstream beliefs have been made into psychiatric disorders, listed in the DSM, requiring a “qualified” professional to cure. They pretend to do this by bouncing their own personal opinions off of you with talk therapy, or by putting you on dangerous psychiatric drugs.

Soon I expect we’ll see public health used as an excuse to shut down beliefs which don’t suit a certain class of people. It’s very dangerous and it’s very unnecessary.

I’m not saying all psychiatrists are bad. But most are necessarily living in an echo chamber that reinforces bad tendencies. Look at it this way. Not all economists are bad, but they live in a Keynesian echo chamber in today’s world; as a result most economists wind up making bad recommendations. The same is true for psychs, even the ones who join the profession because they really want to help people.

International Man: Where is this trend going? What can the average person do about it?

Doug Casey: We’re facing a multi-front war against Western Civilization in general.

It’s not just a physical war. It’s not just an ideological war. It’s not just a political war. It’s turned into a psychological war.

One of the fronts of attack is to convince the general public—who don’t think about much outside the narrow confines of their own life and watching sports and television—that people who don’t believe a given narrative are, in fact, crazy. The psychiatric profession is very involved in the process.

In my view, this is further proof that many psychiatrists are dupes of evil people. At best.

What can you do about it?

Call out BS wherever you see it. Don’t automatically accept the opinions of people just because they’ve been granted a degree or license. Think critically, and demand logical answers to impolite questions.

Since this is a psychological war more than anything else, speak out whenever you can. Staying quiet makes you complicit in the crime by subtly agreeing with it.

https://internationalman.com/articles/doug-casey-on-the-dangerous-trend-of-psychiatric-repression/

• Vitamin B6 plays a crucial role in blood sugar regulation through “first responder” beta cells in the pancreas. Some cases of diabetes may be linked to vitamin B6 deficiency or dysfunction
• Vitamin D deficiency is associated with increased risk of Type 2 diabetes. Maintaining adequate vitamin D levels may improve glucose metabolism and reduce diabetes risk
• B vitamins, especially B6, B12 and folate, are important for both blood sugar control and mental health. They can help manage diabetes symptoms and reduce anxiety and depression
• Minerals like zinc, magnesium and chromium are essential for glycemic regulation and mental well-being. Deficiencies in these minerals are linked to diabetes progression and mood disorders
• Mitochondrial health is crucial for preventing chronic diseases like diabetes. Reducing exposure to toxins like seed oils, endocrine disruptors and EMFs can improve cellular energy production and overall health

https://articles.mercola.com/sites/articles/archive/2024/09/25/diabetes-vitamin-b6-deficiency.aspx

Food Affecting Blood pH

The big problem with the claims made by alkaline diet proponents is that they’re based on a misunderstanding of pH and how the body regulates blood pH. The relative alkalinity of the foods you eat doesn’t generally affect the alkalinity or acidity of your blood.

Acids are continuously being produced in the body during normal metabolic processes, but they don’t influence overall bodily pH in healthy individuals. Your body works hard to keep that 7.35–7.45 blood pH range, which is slightly on the alkaline side. If there’s too much acid or base in your system, built-in physiological buffers get rid of it through your urine.

Changing your diet might change the pH of your saliva or urine, but it’s practically impossible to affect the pH of your blood by what you eat. The only times that blood pH is affected is in the case of an acid-base disorder such as advanced stages of shock, diabetic ketoacidosis, or kidney failure — all of which are medical emergencies and not the result of not eating enough alkaline foods.

Focusing on the Wrong Benefits

Not only does the alkaline diet theory misunderstand the mechanisms through which your body regulates its pH, but the narrow focus on this one attribute of plant-based foods ignores the many benefits of plant-based eating that are actually backed up by science. A whole food, plant-based diet supplies an abundance of powerful antioxidants, fiber, and a rainbow of health-promoting phytochemicals. The alkaline diet’s health benefits are real, but they likely have little to do with pH.

Confusing and Restrictive

With a focus mostly on pH and choosing the most alkaline foods, there’s a risk of dietary restriction to the point of nutrient deficiency. It’s easy to get confused about what you are and aren’t supposed to eat, as there’s a lack of consistency in the recommendations, which vary widely. Some lists, for example, say that mushrooms are highly acidic, while others tell us that they are alkalizing.

Little to No Scientific Backing

Mst problematic of all, there’s minimal scientific evidence to support the alkaline diet’s biggest claims around diet alkalinity protecting against chronic disease or affecting blood pH.

One 2010 study found that low urine pH predicted neither low bone density nor bone fractures, while another from the same year discovered no correlation between dietary acid load and bone mineral density in older women. A 2011 study found no correlation between dietary acid load and lower bone density, except possibly in older men.

And a 2016 review of over 8,000 published articles relating to dietary pH and cancer found a single clinical trial on the topic. This trial found no relationship between the acid load of the diet and bladder cancer. The researchers concluded, “Despite the promotion of the alkaline diet and alkaline water by the media and salespeople, there is almost no actual research to either support or disprove these ideas.”

The Bottom Line

The alkaline diet, which focuses on pH balance, is a popular diet with many adherents and proponents. It is inherently whole food, plant-based, which can be great, and it’s been shown to be helpful for chronic kidney disease. But beyond that, there’s little to no scientific evidence to support its other health claims. In fact, it’s likely that its benefits have more to do with all of the known advantages that come with a whole food, plant-based diet that steers clear of added sugars, highly processed foods, and animal products.

https://foodrevolution.org/blog/the-alkaline-diet/

https://youtu.be/5a6lN2M9VTQ?si=pi_Pb3yqrtXk7iBC

• I recently spoke at the Ron Paul Institute, sharing how modern medicine is heavily influenced by pharmaceutical companies, leading to an overreliance on prescriptions rather than addressing root causes of disease. This approach has resulted in poor health outcomes despite high health care spending
• I shared an overview of my new book that comes out next month, Your Guide to Cellular Health, which is now available for preorder on Amazon
• Three major threats to cellular energy production include consumption of seed oils, exposure to plastics containing endocrine disruptors and electromagnetic fields (EMFs) from wireless technologies. These factors disrupt mitochondrial function
• Gut health is intricately linked to mitochondrial function. Damaged mitochondria cannot properly remove oxygen from your intestines, allowing harmful bacteria to flourish and produce endotoxins that further compromise health
• Despite current health challenges, future developments, including AI-powered health guidance systems and a growing movement toward understanding and addressing the true causes of disease, offer hope

Carbs Made Simple: A Color-Coded System to Guide Your Gut Health Journey

The method that I discuss in my book ranks carbohydrates based on their impact on your biology, specifically in relation to your gut health. This approach recognizes that the traditional complex vs. simple carb dichotomy likely does not tell the whole story when it comes to individual health outcomes.

Instead, it suggests that the relationship between your gut health and carbohydrate metabolism could be key to unlocking improved overall wellness. It’s not about following a one-size-fits-all diet, but rather about understanding how your unique gut biology interacts with different types of carbohydrates.

Surprisingly, for many people, this approach favors simple carbs over complex ones. This is because they usually have less-than-optimal gut health. If you have a compromised gut system and you consume complex carbs, the fiber and prebiotics in these carbs can feed oxygen-tolerant gut bacteria and worsen your symptoms.

The following chart breaks down several types of carbohydrate sources and how they fit into this plan. We can categorize them into three groups: green, yellow and red.

In the green category are the most easily digestible simple carbs that provide quick energy without overtaxing your compromised digestive system. You will focus on these carbs initially, because simple carbs provide a quick energy boost for your cells and mitochondria. It’s like giving your body’s energy factories an immediate fuel injection, while allowing your gut to rest and heal at the same time.

Next is the yellow category, which includes carbs that offer more nutrients and fiber compared to the green category, yet are still relatively easy on the digestive system. Finally the red category, the most complex carbs, offers many health benefits but can be challenging for a compromised gut to handle.

So how can you begin implementing this approach? If you have severely compromised gut health, start with pure sugar water. This is a temporary measure to jumpstart the healing process. Mix one-half pound, up to a full pound, of pure dextrose (glucose) into a half gallon of water and sip it slowly all day. Don’t drink more than an ounce at a time to avoid spiking your insulin.

Once your gut health has improved, you can switch your primary carb source to whole foods. More than likely, you’ll also need to eat more frequently than you’re used to during this transition to avoid hypoglycemia. Eating every three to four hours, with snacks throughout the day, is crucial when relying on simple carbs for energy.

As your mitochondrial energy production continues to improve and your gut starts to heal, you will begin the transition back to complex carbs. This is a slow and steady process — don’t rush it.

Once you’re able to include more complex carbohydrates in your diet, you’ll start to notice significant benefits. You’ll be able to extend the time between meals to between four and six hours, and many people find they can comfortably switch to a three-meals-a-day approach. This is because complex carbs digest more slowly, providing a steady stream of energy.

https://articles.mercola.com/sites/articles/archive/2024/09/15/the-truth-about-health.aspx