Recently, Elon Musk unveiled Tesla’s humanoid robots (which in full disclosure are not yet ready for public use). As I watched his presentation, a few things suddenly clicked to me about the direction Musk and Trump want to take the country in, and the immense implications they have for everyone. In this article, I will explain them and how all of that relates to the current state of medicine.
Creating Wealth
Throughout history, there have always been two ways to accumulate significant wealth:
1. By producing things of value.
2. By stealing wealth from someone else.
The Great Deformation:...
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In turn, I believe almost all empires follow a similar cycle—initially an empire creates its own wealth (allowing it to rapidly ascend as a superpower), but gradually, transitions to using its newfound power to steal wealth from others until eventually, the foundation which underlies the empire (e.g., its ability to create wealth) becomes unstable, the empire crumbles and its replaced with a new empire in its ascendancy phase.
While the above is a simplified description of wealth accumulation, I believe this paradigm very much describes the current state of our society. For instance, many of our institutions have transitioned from having to earn their value to simply being given it either through government subsidies (e.g., a key reason why education is so bad now is because the government gives unconditional student loans to everyone to attend college which in turn incentivizes colleges to focus on retaining as many students as possible rather than on ensuring they get a worthwhile education) or by them having a market monopoly that prevents competition from forcing them to produce something of value.
One of the best illustrations of this has been the relentless promotion of diversity equity and inclusion (DEI), where rather than selecting applicants or employees on the basis of merit, it’s done on the basis of their race (or sexual orientation) and their commitment to social justice. Because of this, many corporations and institutions are producing lower and lower quality outputs, but thus far they have gotten away with it due to the monopoly they (and by extension the US dollar) have.
Medical Monopolies
Consider that as the years have gone by, medical education has had a greater and greater focus on DEI. Because of this, I have seen numerous unqualified diverse applicants be admitted to medical school over more qualified non-diverse applicants, and numerous poorly performing diverse applicants be retained by their medical schools so that the graduating class has diversity. Despite the fact this lowers the quality of the graduating class, nothing has been done to stop it as the accreditors place immense pressure on the medical schools to maintain DEI in their classes.
Likewise, originally, medicine “earned” its reputation on doctors being the pinnacle of what society could produce. However, as the years went by and a medical monopoly was established based on the prestige afforded to doctors, medicine became more and more about forcing doctors to follow standardized protocols (that could not get to the root of each patient’s issues but could sell a lot of products for the medical industry). As such, having substandard medical graduates isn’t actually an issue for the medical industry because they simply are cogs in a system where there’s now minimal room for doctors to make independent decisions.
If you take a step back, it’s clear our medical system has failed disastrously as the cost for it keeps going up (on average 4.8% per year), but the quality of care gets worse (e.g., despite spending far more than any other country, currently we rank 69th in healthcare outcomes)
I would argue that this trend is a result of the fact there is no incentive in medicine to produce a good outcome (e.g., consider how many diseases like Alzheimer’s we’ve spent billions on research for over decades yet still have no cure for—despite proven ones already existing, and how many diseases we manage with decades of costly therapies which do very little and often create far more problems). Rather, the “incentive” in medicine is to produce expensive products that can get an approval to be sold within America’s medical monopoly, which lobbyists can then get insurance companies to subsidize.
To a large extent, I believe this resulted from a misguided attempt by Congress in 1962 to prevent toxic drugs from entering America where they not only gave the FDA the power to block anything they deemed unsafe, but also gave the FDA the discretion to determine what constituted a pharmaceutical being “effective.” In turn, the FDA decided that extensive and costly (and not necessarily relevant) data needed to be compiled, which resulted in the cost of drugs skyrocketing and the number of new drugs reaching the market grinding to a halt.
Note: as best as I can tell (as I have to infer the number from incomplete data), the 1962 law caused the cost of bringing a drug to market to go up roughly 1000 times and take almost 10 times as long.
This was a huge problem as (due to the immense cost of developing new drugs) it effectively created a “pay-to-play” system that:
•Encouraged pharmaceutical companies to doctor trials and bribe drug regulators to get their drugs approved (as otherwise they could not afford to risk sinking that much money into developing them).
•Encouraged pharmaceutical companies to doctor trials and bribe drug regulators to get their drugs approved (as otherwise, they could not afford to risk sinking that much money into developing them).
•Encouraged pharmaceutical companies to pursue drugs that were likely to get approved (e.g., by being very similar to an existing drug or by having a very minor specific benefit that could be “proven”) rather than maverick ones that could significantly improve the standard of care (particularly since doing so would displace other costly drug franchises and hence motivate their manufacturers to lobby against the novel drug’s approval).
•Changed the pharmaceutical business to revolve around sales rather than drug efficacy, as this was something that could be reliably implemented (regardless of how ineffective or unneeded the drug was) and hence made the business remain sustainable.
•Incentivized the pharmaceutical companies to spend a lot of money eliminating “unapproved” competitors from the marketplace (e.g., by lobbying the government to target those who didn’t pay to play).
Note: I tried to summarize the corruption that pervades the medical regulatory process here (e.g., the NIH invested 162 million into remdesivir, and then the panel that was appointed to chose the COVID-19 treatments was comprised of people who’d taken money from remdesivir—and not surprisingly kept on voting for it to be the treatment for COVID-19 despite it being far more unsafe and ineffective than the off-patent options) .
In turn, if you compare the pre-1962 era to now, there are far fewer drugs or medical therapies entering the medical field that change the practice of medicine or significantly improve healthcare outcomes. At the same time, many (if not far more) dangerous drugs are hitting the market. As a result, many of the therapies we use (e.g., numerous remarkable cancer therapies) actually were developed prior to the 1962 law being passed—which is insane as the scientific capabilities we have now are incomparable to what existed back then and hence should be producing far more impressive medical treatments and tech now.
Likewise, the key point I’ve been trying to illustrate with DMSO is that not only does it produce dramatically better results for illnesses than almost any therapy we’ve developed in the 63 years since it was discovered, but the results it produces are immediate and obvious (which is why it spread like wildfire across the country and such a national uproar occurred when the FDA banned it).
Because of this, I believe that the FDA’s primary responsibility should be to regulate safety, not efficacy (unless the drug is so dangerous it needs to have a clear benefit to justify its risk) and that the market should then select for the most effective therapies because patients will rapidly adopt the things that work and reject the ones that are ineffective. However, rather than do that, a very creative ideology has been erected that tells us we can’t trust our own “biased” observations and instead must let “the science” tell us what is safe and effective.
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Note: the 2018 Right to Try Law was an attempt to fix this issue by allowing patients in certain cases to take medications that had only undergone safety but not efficacy testing (but unfortunately did not go far enough to actually address this issue).
In DMSO’s case, this logic is particularly astounding as the FDA was confronted with thousands of cases of people, who within minutes had their issues (e.g., decades of chronic pain or a recent sprain) improve from DMSO, yet in each case, claimed those improvements were “anecdotal” and likely instead were due to the placebo effect or would have happened anyways.
Note: in 1899, allopathic (conventional) medicine was rapidly falling out of favor due to it being unsafe and ineffective). The American Medical Association (AMA) decided to rescue allopathy by unconditionally promoting industry products (e.g., cigarettes) in return for cash, using the media to aggressively go after every competing school of medicine (e.g., by labeling them as quacks) and blackmailing each new medical product to sell out to them or be branded as quackery. Due to the media’s complicity, this worked. Before long, numerous promising therapies (that owing to their remarkable results were rapidly being adopted across America) were told they could either sell their rights to the AMA or be buried—and then, again and again, were systematically canceled. (e.g., I’ve summarized how the AMA did this to ultraviolet blood irradiation once hospitals across America began using it to rescue numerous hopeless cases and how they likewise they did it to the cancer cure Krezbiozen—but sadly there are many other examples too, the most recent of which was the AMA attacking ivermectin’s use for COVID-19).
