The Notion of Consensus

The Notion of Consensus

“I want to pause here and talk about this notion of consensus, and the rise of what has been called consensus science. I regard consensus science as an extremely pernicious development that ought to be stopped cold in its tracks. Historically, the claim of consensus has been the first refuge of scoundrels; it is a way to avoid debate by claiming that the matter is already settled. Whenever you hear the consensus of scientists agrees on something or other, reach for your wallet, because you’re being had.

“Let’s be clear: the work of science has nothing whatever to do with consensus. Consensus is the business of politics. Science, on the contrary, requires only one investigator who happens to be right, which means that he or she has results that are verifiable by reference to the real world. In science consensus is irrelevant. What is relevant is reproducible results. The greatest scientists in history are great precisely because they broke with the consensus.

There is no such thing as consensus science. If it’s consensus, it isn’t science. If it’s science, it isn’t consensus. Period.”

“… Finally, I would remind you to notice where the claim of consensus is invoked. Consensus is invoked only in situations where the science is not solid enough. Nobody says the consensus of scientists agrees that E = mc². Nobody says the consensus is that the sun is 93 million miles away. It would never occur to anyone to speak that way.””

Of around 2500 treatments so far reviewed by the journal's distinguished team of advisors, peer reviewers, experts, information specialists and statisticians, only 13 percent have been found definitely beneficial. A further 23 percent are rated as likely to be beneficial; 8 percent can be classified as a trade off between benefits and harms; 6 percent as clearly unlikely to be beneficial; 4 percent are likely to be ineffective or harmful, and a whopping 46 percent - almost half of all treatments reviewed - are rated as being of unknown effectiveness. WHERE'S THE EVIDENCE? by Ralph Moss

"Allopathy : Also known as ‘scientific medicine’, ‘orthodox medicine’ and ‘modern medicine’, is barely about 200 years old. It lays emphasis on drugs. It offers antibiotics, synthetic vitamins, steroids, chemotherapy, radiation, and immunization all of which are highly dangerous. Its diagnostics methods are not foolproof and 95% of surgeries in allopathic hospitals are unnecessary. Doctors of modern medicine receive their continuing education from Medical Representatives of (P)harmaceuticals, and prescribe lethal drugs based on cuts and commission. These inadequately tested and prescribed drugs create more diseases. Allopathy is a ‘pseudo science’ which has done more harm to health and wellbeing of humanity than any other 40 odd systems of healing described below."---- A TO Z OF ALTERNATIVE MEDICINE by Dr. Leo Rebello (A chapter from Dr. Leo Rebello's popular book AIDS and Alternative Medicine, 4th Edition)

Scientific medicine is one term accepted by these (allopathic) physicians. This name lays exclusive claim to a "scientific" foundation on a body of knowledge, derived from both research and observation, that is chronicled in peer-reviewed journals. It has a history of controlled, clinical studies; has a strong tradition of basic laboratory science; and is closely affiliated with medical schools and hospital research centers. But alternative practitioners, short on laboratory science but long on case reports, can also point to a historic collection of observations and data. With the NIH now enrolled as a sponsor, they will be soon publishing the results of more rigorous clinical studies, whatever their outcome, and may establish a stronger scientific foundation for their work. The term scientific medicine implies that other healing practices are not grounded in reality. It suggests, in a not so subtle manner, that alternative practices have no scientific or technological underpinnings, no systematization of facts, methods, or principles. Annals of Internal Medicine

"Despite the tendency of doctors to call modern medicine an 'inexact science', it is more accurate to say there is practically no science in modern medicine at all. Almost everything doctors do is based on a conjecture, a guess, a clinical impression, a whim, a hope, a wish, an opinion or a belief. In short, everything they do is based on anything but solid scientific evidence. Thus, medicine is not a science at all, but a belief system. Beliefs are held by every religion, including the Religion of Modern Medicine." Robert Mendelsohn MD Preface by Hans Ruesch to 1000 Doctors (and many more) Against Vivisection

"Most patients probably assume that when a doctor proposes to use an established treatment to conquer a disease he will be using a treatment which has been tested, examined and proven. But this is not the case. The savage truth is that most medical research is organised, paid for, commissioned or subsidised by the drug industry (and the food, tobacco and alcohol industries). This type of research is designed, quite simply, to find evidence showing a new product is of commercial value. The companies which commission such research are not terribly bothered about evidence; what they are looking for are conclusions which will enable them to sell their product. Drug company sponsored research is done more to get good reviews than to find out the truth."----Dr Vernon Coleman

"Today's medical training is based upon pronouncement and opinion rather than on investigation and scientific experience. In medical schools students are bombarded with information but denied the time or the opportunity to question the ex-cathedra statements which are made from an archaic medical culture. Time and again new treatments and new techniques are introduced on a massive scale without there being any scientific support for them and without doctors knowing what the long term consequences are likely to be. Instead of experimenting and then practising tried and trusted techniques, modern medical practitioners use all their patients as guinea pigs and practice their black art as a massive international experiment."----Dr Vernon Coleman

"Doctors go to great lengths to disguise the fact that they are practising a black art rather than a science. The medical profession has created a 'pseudoscience' of mammoth proportions and today's doctors rely on a vast variety of instruments and tests and pieces of equipment with which to explain and dignify their interventions. This, of course, is nothing new. The alchemists of the middle ages and the witch doctors of Africa realised that words and spells reeked of gods and sorcery and so they created a secret and impenetrable structure of herbs, songs, dance, rattling of special bones, chants and ceremonial incantations. Today's clinicians have much more sophisticated mumbo jumbo to offer. They have laser surgery and psychotherapy, CAT scanners and serum manganese assessments to substantiate their claims to be scientists. But however good the impenetrable pseudoscience may sound or seem to be, and however well based on scientific principles the equipments and the techniques is still little more than mumbo jumbo. Doctors may use scientific instruments but that doesn't make them scientists any more than a witch doctor would become a scientist if he wore a stethoscope and danced around a microscope!"----Dr Vernon Coleman

"Now, if doctors were aware that medicine was not a science and that they were pulling what is undoubtedly the largest and most successful confidence trick ever tried the damage would be fairly minimal. But the problem is compounded by the fact that the vast majority of doctors believe the lie that they are taught; they believe that they are scientists, practising an applied science."----Dr Vernon Coleman

"In the last century the practice of medicine has become no more than an adjunct to the pharmaceutical industry and the other aspects of the huge, powerful and immensely profitable health care industry. Medicine is no longer an independent profession. Doctors have become nothing more than a link connecting the pharmaceutical industry to the consumer."----Dr Vernon Coleman

Medical Delusions

Medical Delusions

When crises have been repeated (and cured) until organic changes are established, medical delusions multiply like rats in the corn crib - the most deluded and fatuous draw their air-line decisions, fight their therapeutic battles, and, if they belong to the "regular" school, promise therapeutic perfection - if only the United States Army and Navy will beat down the cultists and quacks, while they demonstrate the glories and wonders of "medical science" on the dear people.

WATERLOO - SYMPTOMS GET WORSE WITH TIME

It is in this field that all of the cures and curing systems meet their Waterloo. The pathology which has been in the making since the development of the first of these "self-limited" crises reveals no tendency to spontaneous disappearance. Rather its tendency it to grow worse and more complicated with the passing of time. Organic change occurs in more and more tissues and organs and these "complications" defy the best efforts of the peddlers of cures. Cause has been present from the beginning (the first cold of infancy represents an established toxemia) and has never been removed.

The physicians are long on diagnosis at this terminal stage of the evolving pathology. They name exactly the pathological status quo and, although they do not hesitate to treat the patient and to accept money for their experiments, they freely confess that their treatments are ineffective. They have all been experts at curing the continuous series of recurring crises - the "self-limited" diseases - but they are all helpless before the end-point of the development of which the first crisis was the initiation. They cannot cure cancer, or diabetes, or Bright's disease, or endocarditis, or arteriosclerosis.

INSULIN "CURES" UNTIL DEATH OF DIABETES

Toxemic subjects who continually poison themselves with excessive carbohydrates and thus stress the pancreas, develop sugar in the urine. These are cured with insulin. Indeed, insulin cures them until they die of diabetes - go out, perhaps, in either an insulin or a sugar coma.

Insulin-cured diabetics, like pepsin-cured dyspeptics, are made to feel fine for a year or two - until the burden of cause so stresses other organs that they develop "complications." They are also so filled with "reflex' discomforts that they demand other forms of "relief." When this stage is reached the curing must become a medley of palliating measures. Surgery, drugs, in fact, all kinds of cures, are now resorted to in keeping with the whims of the patient and the caprices of the physician. Because there are so many who refuse to die after being cured by all known cures, it is necessary to discover new cures all the time.

FATTER AND MORE DEGENERATED

Every day we watch people getting fatter and fatter on "plenty of good nourishing food" that "keeps up their strength" until they die of fatty degeneration, cerebral hemorrhage (apoplexy), or paralysis. Nobody warns them of what is in store for them and they will not heed if they are warned. So disgracefully have we become habituated to associating health and even distinction with a most pampered state of the body, that we think it most natural or normal for a fat man to maintain at the highest pitch, the unholy "love affairs" of his unregulated body. Unfortunately, our standards are empty of all value except for measuring varying degrees of ill health. Even our "normal" or "healthy" individuals, as measured by these standards, represent only a slightly less degree of ill health than that seen in the sick.

A study made by the collaboration of forty-three American life insurance companies, using three numerically equal groups of people over forty-five years of age, showed the incidence of diabetes in these three groups as follows. In the group of very thin people there was one case; in the normal group there were five cases; in the fat group there were two hundred and twenty-seven cases. Similar figures are available for cancer and a few other so-called degenerative diseases of later life. Fat and the overeating that is back of it are serious dangers at all ages of life.

"STRONG" MEN ARE NOT STRONG

Our strong men do not live any longer than the run-of-the-mill specimens of humanity. Many explanations for this have been devised. Actually, there is very little excuse for these mental meanderings. Athletes and strong men are often toxemic to the point of collapse.

They are so vulnerable from the effects of self-poisoning that all they need to bring them down with a "fatal malady" is some slight unusual enervating influence, or some slightly unusual amount of an accustomed influence. As unreasonable as it may appear, the average medical man as well as the average layman, recognizes those - who are on the verge of apoplexy, "heart failure," kidney disease, or other diseases resulting from the degeneration brought on from chronic toxemia, arterial tension and fat pressure - as ideal types of health.

They are commonly referred to as "pictures of health." In the early days of the recent war a young man was called before his local board for examination. The physicians found him fit and told him to go home and await his call for induction. He dropped dead on the way out.