Medical guilds have always served two masters, the health of the patient and the profits of the doctor

It is a Faustian ‘devils’ bargain if ever there was one, made all the worse by the practice of guild dogma

After decades of baseless admonitions by doctors to patients and caregivers to take all of the pills in a course of antibiotics that practice is now shown to be a self-serving dogma not designed to deliver the best health to the patient.

The moral of the story is one must become a learned health conscious person and that means learning from what your body tells you not merely blindly following just any so-called doctors advice.

Every patient has likely been given a stern look and a firm instruction by their doctor and pharmacist when receiving their prescription for an antibiotic to resolve some infectious disease. The regimented admonition is so common and constant it leads one to believe that in medical school devious brainwashing techniques might have been use to drum this incantation into every medical student. But now thanks to a major medical journal, the British Medical Journal, we know that dogma has been unfounded and in effect not advice given for the benefit of the patient.

Here’s the opening words from the BMJ paper, The antibiotic course has had its day

“With little evidence that failing to complete a prescribed antibiotic course contributes to antibiotic resistance, it’s time for policy makers, educators, and doctors to drop this message, argue Martin Llewelyn and colleagues.

Antibiotics are vital to modern medicine and antibiotic resistance is a global, urgent threat to human health. The relation between antibiotic exposure and antibiotic resistance is unambiguous both at the population level1 and in individual patients.2 Reducing unnecessary antibiotic use is therefore essential to mitigate antibiotic resistance.”

One needs to look for the reasoning and source of the reasoning for such a profoundly common piece of medical advice that is now shown to not only be wrong but to indeed to lead to the very harm it has been touted to prevent. If there were to be a criminal conspiracy investigation to be held another age dogmatic admonition would surely come into play, “follow the money.”

Prof. Martin Llewelyn BSc, FRCP, DTMH, PhD, and nine other British colleagues authored the study. Dr. Llewelyn hails from Brighton and Sussex Medical School. In the study, he and fellow authors write, “The idea that stopping antibiotic treatment early encourages antibiotic resistance is not supported by evidence, while taking antibiotics for longer than necessary increases the risk of resistance.”

The roots of the matter

One certain root cause for this sort of long-standing bad advice surely lies in the medical guilds, ‘guild behaviour’ that being that only members of the guild have the knowledge that you need, so listen, nay obey, your doctor. Of course this pernicious behaviour is meant to line the pockets of the guild and its members at the expense of its customers, aka patients. As patients we are all in our most vulnerable and easily preyed upon condition, we need help and doctors hold an absolute lock on the precious medicines that can help us.

Medical practice has always been a rather unique profession whether the practitioner be a tribal medicine man, witch, or board certified western doctor. They always distinguish themselves by wearing distinctive costumes to separate themselves from the common man. That’s the same of every guild, a visible cue that identifies members of the guild so that interlopers can be kept out.

PU$H BACK

The medical guild has been fast to respond sending in their elite propagandists, ahem I mean spokespersons, such as this one Microbiologist Lance Price, director of the Antibiotic Resistance Action Center at The George Washington University, who worries about this overturning of the long-standing dogma. He told Scientific American that, although he agreed that more research is needed, he called removing the current public health message before a more accurate one was ready, “totally irresponsible.” He clearly either did not read or choose to ignore the vital message in the new report that declares that the standard ‘current public health message’ is indeed producing great harm!

Roots

The most important ‘root’ to this story is that one must become ones own best judge of ones medical condition. Sure that takes a lot of work to read and become learned on our own health and well-being and it is so easy to just pay your medical insurance premium trolls and let those trolls become fat and lazy but at least they make all the decisions.

The lazy self health system is better than Catholic Sin that comes with absolution for the asking. Just ‘do what the doctor tells you’ and all the responsibility for the outcomes becomes theirs. Heck it’s like a disease lottery ticket, if the doctor tells you wrong your attorney’s will sue the pants of the affiliated big med/pharma and you may become rich enough to take a vast fortune to the grave. The insurance trolls don’t care, the more costly health car becomes the fatter and happier they become as they live off their slice of your health care cost that they excise as you cross every threshold on the way to guild controlled treatment.

Some regions of the world, generally those where the standard of living and personal income are so low as to provide no fat for the trolls to feast upon. To find those places where more caring medicine might be practiced just ‘follow the money.’

This Blog is all about taking care of your self and your loved ones.

You must become an intelligent active participant in your health care. Don’t just take advice of any old doctor, find a great doctor who has more passion for the profession than they do for their fancy cars, golf club memberships, and mansions. It might be hard to find the good ones but it is miserably easy to identify the bad ones. Keep shopping.

Don’t be poorly informed. There is no excuse these days in the world of the Internet. In seconds the search engines will offer you hours of reading materials. Just learn to become discriminating as once again the old adage ‘follow the money’ just works. If the source of information is festooned with ‘DONATE HERE’ buttons …. run away!  Likewise if the source is part of the established big medicine/pharma industrial complexes, aka the guilds, you best be very wary of their advice as likely it is very intelligently designed to lead you to the most expensive paths.

BAD medical advice that leads to high medical charges with far less certain patient benefits goes far beyond this example of the abuse and misuse of medical science regarding antibiotics. In my personal case and condition which is the point of this blog on IgA Nephropathy I testify to an example that has now, because of my 20 years on the Internet, been shown over and over again.

The standard medical dogma, aka advice as to treatment, for IgA Nephropathy is mostly a do next to nothing wait until it gets really really dire dogma. Since there is an exorbitant ultimate treatment path, kidney dialysis costing $100,000 per year and more, or kidney transplant costing even more why bother with saving a patients kidneys. Just recite the guild dogma that the disease is poorly understood hence dramatic interventions are not warranted.

Sure there are a few procedures that might help, treating to alleviate symptoms of the disease like high blood pressure with a plethora of highly profitable constantly changing pills or helping one eliminate poor kidney function, aka edema, with diuretics.

Antibiotic over-treatment and other sledge-hammers.

There there is the long-standing recommendation of using what even medical practicioners call the sledge-hammer treatment. Sledge-hammer because of the dire side effects that hit every patient. This corticosteroid treatment practiced for decades based on poor science but common mis-practice is now declared by a new very clear study to be unacceptable.

Corticosteroid treatment in IgA nephropathy patients, an autoimmune kidney disease revealed an increased risk for immediate dangerous side effects, according to researchers reporting in the top medical journal JAMA.

The new study –Therapeutic Evaluation of Steroids in IgA Nephropathy Global, aka ‘TESTING’ — was halted after 2 years when an interim analysis revealed serious adverse events had occurred in patients. Adverse effects showed up early, during the first 3 months of treatment, and they were primarily seen as an excess of serious infections, including two fatal infections.

In IgA Nephropathy One Size Does NOT Fit All

The ecology of IgAN is complex and varies greatly from person to person, family to family, and cultural common features. It is up to the individual to become a careful and observant investigator of their own and family members IgAN.

Only through collection of lots of data and allowing that data to speak to you can you learn how to manage your own condition. Doctors may be useful but they are impatient and rather inept ecologists and are prone to following their guilds and medical payer rule books.

They far too commonly show more attentiveness to their standardized treatment billing manuals than they pay to the time-consuming task of getting to know and understand a given patients condition. Hence they simply push the simple decisions for them which are almost inevitably the wait until the disease is truly dire then treat with the expensive and profitable prescribed practices.

Early aggressive treatment with low-cost solutions is clearly the path which will lead to the most positive outcomes for those of us with IgAN. These early aggressive treatments take a lot of effort to determine and you the patient are in the ideal position to contribute the right medical data to best diagnose and prescribe the ideal treatments!