Opinion – October 04 2009

Accepted Wisdom ““ Future folly

The case for keeping an open mind ““ or why not to jump on the next bandwagon that rolls through town….

by Stephanie Fairbairn

Ever wondered where you got your view of the world? What is normal? “Everybody knows that, it’s obvious!”  ”It was on the TV.”  ”We learnt that at school…. ” and so it goes on. After a while we build a picture of acceptance of some information, rejection of others, in order to create a framework of reference to make sense of the world around us. The thing is ““ every so often we would do well to take stock of ‘received wisdom’ and re-evaluate what we think to be true.

The oft quoted classic is ““ the Flat Earthers. How hilarious ““ humans used to believe if you sailed too far in one direction you would fall off the edge of the world!! – ha ha ha. How could they believe that?! ‘It’s obvious!” – ‘everyone knows that!’ Are you crazy? That’s the way it is….. sound familiar? ‘Truth’ goes through three stages. First it is ridiculed, then attacked, then finally accepted as self evident.

That was the ‘olden days’ after all we are all sophisticated now with computers, satellites, multi-national corporations, universities, specialists, nanotechnology. I’m afraid that we do not have to look back centuries to find examples of bizarre beliefs, even  in my lifetime certain accepted wisdoms have been turned on their head and have gone through the circle described above. To name but a few:

Margarine will be the new health food….. It has no cholesterol and it is made from lovely vegetables. Use it in place of nasty saturated fat butter.  The real reason however was commercial not health concerns. There was a drive by the post war economies to try and find a cheap way of selling the public a solid fat in place of butter, as a result of the pressure on the dairy industries and rationing in the post war years. Margarine was born as an industrial process of high heat and addition of hydrogen to keep the oil solid at room temperature. Voilà ““ problem solved. Fast forward 50 years as all areas of chronic and acute cardiovascular health problems have exploded,  trans fats are now accepted as the main contributers to negative health effects in lipid metabolism. So, from the time I studied my nutrition degree in Oxford in 1990, the key message from my (distinctly rotund) lecturer was that butter was out, margarine in….Twenty years later, we are systematically getting the trans fats out of the food chain, as it is now clear that these chemically altered fats are having a disastrous effect on body lipid chemistry.

Babies cannot feel pain…... This is one of the more shocking ‘accepted wisdoms’ As late as 1987 surgeons were performing open heart surgery on babies without anesthetic. Other procedures were also carried out with no pain relief under the impression that baby’s nervous system was too immature to feel pain. Had they never thought to ask the mother? This reasoning perpetuated for so long for a range of reasons, one of which was the inability of the baby to object. By the time someone bothered to look at the markers for trauma and stress in the blood of babies undergoing these procedures, it was clear that their hormonal responses to pain were the same as anyone else’s, and they were literally in shock. Some dying from the after shock of undergoing such a massive release of cortisol, in total awareness of the procedure. As if this was not unbelievable enough, nowadays older baby boys are still undergoing circumcision without adequate pain relief, often with none at all. This is possibly the most acute pain there is.

Operations to ‘lift’ your internal organs ““ like a face lift.….Strange but true. When the x-ray was used in the general population to examine people it was discovered that the stomach, intestines and other organs were in unexpected positions, when compared to where doctors were used to seeing on the mortuary slab, or operating table. This was rather alarming to the medical fraternity. Suddenly a new syndrome was occurring and doctors could do something to fix it. The internal organ lift. Soon people were queuing up to have radical surgery to fix their ‘drooping’ organs. What they didn’t stop to think about however, was that all these perfectly healthy people were demonstrating that as we stand up (as per having an x-ray) our organs may well appear in a different place than when we are horizontal (the way most doctors observe anatomy in a patient / cadaver). Common sense. That’s one word for it.

Thymus disease in children…The fact that the size of the thymus (gland in the centre upper chest cavity) was generalized from autopsy observations led to a tragic misdiagnoses of illness in children in the 1920s to the 1940s. It was known from routine autopsies that children have larger thymuses than adults. However, when children who died suddenly, as in ‘crib death’, were found at post-mortem examination to have particularly large thymus glands, they were thought to have died from a thymus-related disease, a disease given the name ’status thymicolymphaticus.’ Research on the thymus gland in the 1950s, along with further evidence from post-mortem examination, brought this disease into question. Pathologists took note of the fact that autopsies performed from those who died on the battlefield were similar to those men of the same age who died from chronic illness in a hospital. Eventually it was realized that the thymus shrinks rapidly during serious illness or great physical stress. The children’s gland had time to shrink; their large thymuses were actually the normal size. A whole disease had been constructed on the erroneous idea that the thymus gland had swollen and caused death. To think that children’s thymus glands had frequently been irradiated to make them smaller on the assumption that this would reduce the chance of illness! What it did was actually destroy a vital part of their immune system and make them susceptible to infections, cancer, and chronic diseases.

Mass lobotomies…. The following extract is from the 1952  TIME magazine and describes the treatment of the day for psychiatric patients; “The patients suffered from a variety of mental disorders. Some had anxiety neuroses, others fought against irrational fears, morbid thoughts, hallucinations, a few had drifted into suicidal depression. But for all of them the treatment was the same. Strapped to an operating table, they got three quick jolts of electricity””enough to start violent, involuntary convulsions before they lapsed into anesthetic coma. Next a thin, icepick-like leucotome was inserted under each eyelid, hammered home through the eye socket and into the brain. Carefully manipulating the two icepicks, the doctor severed the connection between thalamus and frontal lobes in the patient’s brain. The entire operation took only ten minutes. It was so progressive back then he was given a Nobel prize. By the time he finished his experiments with patients in West Virginia mental hospitals last month, Washington Neurologist Walter Freeman had supervised or performed more than 200 of these transor-bital lobotomies  in two weeks. He already had more than 1 ,000 other lobotomies to his credit.” He had lobotomized over 2,500 patients in 23 states during the 31 year period. However, a total of 70,000 people were ‘cured’ with lobotomies that we know of. Until his death in 1972, he continued to stay in touch with his patients, driving his so-called “lobotomobile” around the country. Marvelous. Don’t be too complacent today however. We still have ECT ““ electro convulsive therapy ““ which is what it’s name suggests, and this still has many proponents in the medical and psychology fraternities.

Enforced sterilization.… this particular process was open policy in the US throughout the 20th century up to the 1980’s. It concerned mainly the criminal, low intelligence and minority groups who were poor, resourceless and even the ‘feeble minded’ (what ever that means) – it was an open attempt at ridding ‘bad gene’ pools from the overall population. One man’s ‘racial hygiene another man’s eugenics policy.  An abhorrent thought to modern sensibilities, it does however beg the question about modern political policies. Are there other, more ’socially acceptable’ ways of achieving the same ends, and are being openly suggested nowadays?

Twilight sleep ““ the new way to give birth…. For anyone who has given birth this is particularly harrowing. Even today one can see some equally unpleasant parallels in birthing practices for mother and baby. The term “twilight sleep” applied to the combination of analgesia  and amnesia that was created by using a mixture of scopolamine and morphine (”scope”) given by a hypodermic injection. The mixing of the two drugs produced a state in which the woman, while reacting somewhat to pain, didn’t recall it after delivering her baby.   However, there were serious problems with twilight sleep. It totally removed the mother from the birth experience, and it severely depressed the baby’s central nervous system. This sometimes made for a drowsy depressed baby who was difficult to resuscitate, and so we get the popular culture image of a doctor with upside down baby, smacking it’s bottom in an attempt to get it breathing normally. Never mind being separated from the mother for days, and sometimes dying from the effects of over anesthetic. In addition, mothers were routinely strapped to the bed with shackles and a head covering to protect them while they were thrashing about. The drugs were often administered at night and the labouring woman left alone until the last stages of labour. As this memory was suppressed, but not erased from the unconscious, subsequent mental health traumas of both mother and child were inevitable from this extremely disempowering experience.

Doctors did not see it necessary to wash their hands.…During the 1800’s, lying on hospital beds started to become the preferred place to have a baby. When this happened, infections after childbirth (known as childbirth fever) became the main cause of women dying in relation to childbirth, although no one could work out why for some time, as until 1880 there was no knowledge of bacteria and sterile techniques. Then a Dr. Semmelweis worked out that if doctors washed their hands after performing autopsies, and before visiting women in childbirth, infection rates decreased dramatically!

Remedy for teething babies.….A delightful mixture of  ”morphine sulphate, chloroform, morphine hydrochloride, codeine, heroin, powdered opium, cannabis indica,” and sometimes several of them in combination. That should do the trick… maybe mum took some too. Just bear in mind though, before one becomes outraged, Ritalin is performing a similar function today (and I know of mothers who borrow some from their children for personal use).

Mercury as a magical cure all?……..That was the thinking for centuries, when (magical) Mercury was used to treat pretty much anything and everything. Scraped your knee? Just rub a little mercury on it. Having some problems with regularity? Forget fiber, time to get some mercury up in there! If you lived more than 100 years ago, you simply weren’t considered healthy if you weren’t leaking silver from at least one orifice. Of course we all know now that mercury is as toxic as hell. Unfortunately someone forgot to tell the vaccine companies and the eco light bulb manufacturers though… a little mercury in every shot and every bulb.

Feeling a bit fat ladies?….. Well wash down a few magic pills and in a few weeks the pounds will have dropped off, thanks to the tapeworms which will have grown a few feet in your intestines. Yes, you have intentionally ingested tape worm eggs in a handy pill and job done. You will start wasting away. Before you start retching over this one, I know a doctor who will cut your stomach out so the process of digestion is decisively reduced ““ oh wait ““ that’s another name for gastric band surgery and 100’s of 1000’s of people queue up for this ““ 5% dying soon after.

What does all this medical miscellany tell us? Well, for one, truth is certainly stranger than fiction, and it pays to reflect on our current state of madness to put ourselves in the shoes of the next generation who may well be thinking ““ they did WHAT?

Good candidates for revising current thinking:

• How we power our houses:  Stop wasting grid electricity and use roof tile solar panels.
• Clean Drinking water: Generating pure water from the atmosphere, all solar powered, and stop pouring toxic fluoride compounds into the water supply – technology is here now.
• A sick, overweight population: Stop poisoning the food with chemicals, preservatives and heavy metals.
• ‘Fighting infectious diseases: Stop shooting newborn babies up with a cocktail of viruses, metals, squalene, antibiotics and mercury directly into their blood stream ““ why not support the immune system and allow it to develop under clean healthy environments.
• The use of coal, nuclear or oil to generate electricity: There is a never ending, 100% non-polluting, source of endless energy that can generate electrical power right under your feet right now, no matter where you are in the world. Just dig a hole deep enough, send down water, it comes back up as steam, powers the generator, and drops again as water. If geo-thermal energy is good enough to power the houses of Queen Elizabeth II and George W Bush, then surely it is good enough for you and I too. All we have to do is work out a “commercial” angle.

It is healthy to question ‘normal’. If you do not, at best your actions will be seen as a joke by your descendants. At worst, you won’t have any descendants.

Stephanie Fairbairn ““ 4th October 2009

Stephanie is an ante-natal teacher, a nutritionist, and a former clinical research scientist