Author Archive

Yet Another Magazine Uses Name Calling To Belittle Lyme Patients

https://www.change.org/p/the-us-senate-calling-for-a-congressional-investigation-of-the-cdc-idsa-and-aldf/u/31708332

Insider article: A woman is trying out a 4-dose Lyme disease vaccine

Carl Tuttle

Hudson, NH, United States

JUN 28, 2023 — 

Please read the following complaint letter sent to the Insider regarding inaccurate information relating to Lyme vaccines.

———- Original Message ———-
From: CARL TUTTLE <runagain@comcast.net>
To: “corrections@insider.com” <corrections@insider.com>
Cc: “hbrueck@businessinsider.com” <hbrueck@businessinsider.com>, “jhood@insider.com” <jhood@insider.com>, “hbeckler@insider.com” <hbeckler@insider.com>, “rzisser@insider.com” <rzisser@insider.com>, “cpreti@insider.com” <cpreti@insider.com>, “pdifiore@insider.com” <pdifiore@insider.com>, “information@axelspringer.de” <information@axelspringer.de>
Date: 06/28/2023 11:53 AM EDT
Subject: A woman is trying out a 4-dose Lyme disease vaccine as we approach the worst summer for ticks yet

Insider

A woman is trying out a 4-dose Lyme disease vaccine as we approach the worst summer for ticks yet
https://www.insider.com/lyme-vaccine-for-people-being-tested-across-us-europe-pfizer-2023-6

By Hilary Brueck  Jun 27, 2023

“Although studies showed it [LYMErix] was about 75% effective at stopping Lyme disease, it received a lukewarm public reception and was the subject of conspiracy-theory lawsuits, driving down sales and leading it to be quickly taken off the market.”

Insider
1 Liberty Plz Fl 8,
New York, New York, 10006

To: the management team at Insider,

I would like to register a complaint regarding the statement highlighted above. The following link will take you to the Vaccines and Related Biological Products Advisory Committee’s January 31, 2001 meeting:
Vaccines and Related Biological Products Advisory Committee Meeting
Excerpt:

“The people who have contacted us were, prior to vaccination with LYMErix, healthy, active and energetic. Indeed, the very reason they sought the LYMErix vaccine was their desire to preserve their healthy, active lifestyle. However, what they experienced was a dramatic degradation of their health and quality of life. As will be described below, these previously healthy individuals are now afflicted with painful, at times debilitating arthritic symptoms, including joint pain and swelling, as well as extremely severe Lyme-disease-like symptoms which have persisted to this day.” 

Question: Does that sound like a conspiracy-theory?

Additional concerns:

There were neurological complications with the previous “OspA-Based” Lyme vaccine (LYMErix) as published in the International Journal of Risk & Safety in Medicine. Reports of cerebral ischemia, transient Ischemic attacks, demyelinating events, optic neuritis, transverse myelitis, and non-specific demyelinating conditions are evaluated in this paper. To my knowledge, there were no studies to determine why LYMErix caused these serious complications.

Neurological complications of vaccination with outer surface protein A (OspA)
https://content.iospress.com/articles/international-journal-of-risk-and-safety-in-medicine/jrs527

And we are to believe Pfizer will bring a “safe and effective” product to market? A company that paid the highest fine for health care fraud:

Justice Department Announces Largest Health Care Fraud Settlement in Its History
 
Pfizer to Pay $2.3 Billion for Fraudulent Marketing (Wednesday, September 2, 2009)
https://www.justice.gov/opa/pr/justice-department-announces-largest-health-care-fraud-settlement-its-history

A chronic relapsing seronegative disease does not fit the vaccine model so deny the chronically infected and your patents for vaccines and diagnostic technology continue to reap patent royalties as evidence of persistent infection (following the one-size-fits-all IDSA mandated treatment protocol) must be concealed/ignored at all costs.

In the interest of time I have shortened the evidence to five points below with most reference links taken from the NH COMMISSION TO STUDY TESTING FOR LYME AND OTHER TICK-BORNE DISEASES of which I was a member appointed by Governor Chris Sununu:

Barbara Johnson of the CDC put Advanced Laboratory Services out of business after the lab was reporting 80% positive culture results. If contamination was an issue as Johnson claimed,[i] why didn’t the CDC work with Advanced Laboratory Services to correct the problem? Culture is the gold standard for definitive diagnosis of bacterial and fungal infections worldwide but when it threatens the existing paradigm suddenly it becomes “not particularly useful.” Johnson by the way filed her own patent  [ii] a year earlier for the detection, diagnosis and/or treatment of Lyme disease.

Dr. Sin Lee had been working with the CDC on a project to develop proficiency testing for his DNA sequencing-based tests for Lyme Borreliosis (Approved by the New York Dept. of Health) When Dr. Lee reported a case of chronic [iii] Lyme through Sanger sequencing suddenly all communication stopped. A positive DNA test is irrefutable evidence of active infection.

The CDC refuses to recognize the mountain of publications identifying persistent infection after extensive antibiotic treatment. A chronic relapsing seronegative disease should have set off a red flag but its misclassification as a simple “nuisance disease” has left hundreds of thousands if not millions worldwide in a debilitated state.

The CDC refuses to recognize the disabling stage of Lyme disease as reported by the Lyme patient population worldwide because it contradicts the CDC 30yr Official Narrative; “Lyme is hard to catch and easily treated with 2-4wks of antibiotics” Social Security disability compensation is denied leaving patients to fend for themselves.

Serology (Western blot) was manipulated to facilitate vaccine development. The two most significant bands, 31 (Outer surface protein A) and band 34 (Outer surface protein B) of the spirochete were removed as those who were vaccinated would test positive. Humans do not produce antibodies to Lyme disease for 4-6 weeks after a tick bite so serology has always been the wrong diagnostic tool but absolutely essential to deceptively prove vaccine efficacy.

Patent royalties and pharmaceutical profits [iv] over lifesaving care.

Unimaginable pain and suffering for the sake of a vaccine while our public health officials ignore the evidence that we are dealing with an antibiotic resistant/tolerant superbug.

Questions: Where is the outrage? Will any of these facts find their way into a revised article at the Insider or is the conspiracy-theory statement final? Who coached Hilary Brueck in the writing of her article?

A response to this complaint is requested.

Carl Tuttle
Hudson, NH

To TBDWG: “The CDC has propagated a false Lyme disease narrative”
https://www.lymedisease.org/tuttle-tbdwg-false-narrative/

Re: Lyme borreliosis: diagnosis and management (Published letter to the editor of the BMJ)
https://www.bmj.com/content/369/bmj.m1041/rr-1

Additional References

[i] Assessment of New Culture Method for Detection of Borrelia Species from Serum of Lyme Disease Patients

Barbara J. B. Johnson, Mark A. Pilgard, and Theresa M. Russell
https://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pmc/articles/PMC3957795/

[ii] COMPOSITIONS AND METHODS RELATING TO LYME DISEASE
https://patents.google.com/patent/WO2013110026A1/en?oq=ininventor:%22Barbara+J.B.+JOHNSON%22

[iii] Lyme disease caused by Borrelia burgdorferi with two homeologous 16S rRNA genes: a case report

Johnson Patent
https://pubmed.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/27186082/

[iv] Valneva Receives FDA Fast Track Designation for its Lyme Disease Vaccine Candidate VLA15
https://valneva.com/wp-content/uploads/2019/06/2017_07_24_VLA_Lyme_FDA_Fast_track_PR_EN.pdf

____________________

**Comment**

It is clear Brueck was coached from one of many in the Lyme Cabal.  Proof the Lyme narrative is being controlled:

  • Cabalist Gary Wormser has developed diagnostics for Pfizer’s Lyme “vaccine” trial.  The man continues to use taxpayer money to propagate the ongoing Lyme narrative.
  • Cabalist Dr. Mark Klempner calls LYMErix’s removal a “tragedy.” Please know the backstory on Klempner, which includes a history with biological weapons as both director and investigator of a bioweapons lab, accusations of research fraud, and his single-handedly convincing mainstream medicine that extended treatment won’t help Lyme/MSIDS patients. The infamous “Klempner” trial has ruled Lyme-land for over 20 years.  Klempner was also the trial administrator of the Connaught OspA Lyme vaccine in the 1990s, and is quite aware of the adverse effects of injecting OspA into people, yet despite all of this, he  was an author of the 2006 IDSA Lyme Treatment “Guidelines” that were the subject of an investigation by Senator Richard Blumenthal which exposed undisclosed financial conflicts in many of the panelists as well as the fact they simply ignored alternative medical opinion (which is happening again with COVID). Those guidelines relied heavily on his 2001 “retreatment” study in which most of the participants had not been treated in the first place.  He claims his new shot isn’t a “vaccine;” however, according to this,  OspA is still in it. Here’s what Dr. Stricker has to say about OspA: 

Another Lyme OspA Vaccine Whitewash

The meta-analysis by Zhao and colleagues comes to the conclusion that “the OspA vaccine against Lyme disease is safe and its immunogenicity and efficacy have been verified.” The authors arrive at this sunny conclusion by excluding 99.6% of published articles that demonstrate potential problems with the OspA vaccine. Furthermore, the authors ignore peer-reviewed studies, FDA regulatory meetings and legal proceedings that point to major problems with OspA vaccine safety (1-3). This whitewash bodes ill for future Lyme vaccine candidates because it fosters disregard for vaccine safety among Lyme vaccine manufacturers and mistrust among potential Lyme vaccinees.

  • Cabalist Sam Telford teaches biosecurity, specializes in the bioweapon Tularemia, and was the director of a bio-level 3 lab in Groton, Massachusetts that works on dangerous, tickborne diseases on the government’s select agent list.  He’s funded by the NIH and the military-industrial complex but dismisses all concerns of biowarfare research and spends his time bad-mouthing doctors who dare to defy the narrative. He laments and blames a rotavirus vaccine for children that was demonstrated to actually do harm added to the growing anti-vaccine sentiment around the same time of Lymerix, making us question if the man has a heart in his body at all or is merely stuffed with straw.
  • Cabalist Linden Hu, recruited by Klempner, is a professor of Microbiology and Basic Science at Tufts Graduate School of Biomedical Sciences and is fixated on the ever lucrative vaccine-infused mouse food which contains a virus what he insists is safe.  Thankfully the U.S. Dept. of Agriculture is leery.  He has also proposed putting an antibiotic into mouse food at bait stations. The science it’s all based on was done more than a decade ago. This project was also stalled due to fears of antibiotic resistance.  Given the appropriate title of the “crazy man” of Lyme disease, he is leading NIH funded studies to investigate feeding live ticks on people as a diagnostic test and releasing genetically altered viruses to prevent disease in the animals in the wild.  His laboratory works with leading pharmaceutical companies in the development of vaccines and other approaches to prevent human Lyme disease.  Hu and Telford just received nearly 4 MILLION from the NIH to study a more narrow-spectrum antibiotic.
I’m having flash-backs of childhood cartoons of mad scientists that want to rule the world.

Category:

Activism, Lyme, vaccines

Tickborne CCHF Spreading in Europe: Lockdowns Feared

https://www.independent.co.uk/news/health/crimean-congo-hemorrhagic-fever-uk-cchf-symptoms  News Video Here

Deadly tickborne virus that’s spreading in Europe ‘likely to reach UK’

Climate change is causing infectious ticks to move north in Europe, expert warns
Andy Gregory

July, 17 2023

A virus with a fatality rate of 30 per cent that is spreading in Europe will almost certainly reach the UK, an expert has warned.

Crimean-Congo haemorrhagic fever (CCHF) is a disease caused by a tickborne virus, categorised as one of the nine “priority diseases” deemed by the World Health Organisation (WHO) to “pose the greatest public health risk due to their epidemic potential”.

The virus causes sudden symptoms of fever, dizziness, pain in the head, neck, back and eyes, and sensitivity to light…. (See link for article)

_______________

SUMMARY:

http://  Approx. 11 Min

Fears of New Lockdowns

Go here if Youtube censors the video

July 17, 2023

  • CCHF is transmitted via ticks but can also be spread from livestock to humans as well as less commonly via human to human transmission by percutaneous and per mucosal exposure to blood and other body fluids containing the virus – typically in the hospital setting.
  • The research article discussed within the video states a higher mortality rate of 40-60% than the article above.
  • Interestingly, death occurs as the result of multi-organ failure, disseminated intravascular coagulation (DIC), circulatory shock, acute respiratory distress syndrome (ARDS), and diffuse alveolar hemorrhage, accompanied by a systemic inflammatory reaction – all of which are being seen due to the COVID injections often due to the fact the shots set people up for COVID due to ADE.
  • Despite any proof, headlines singularly blame “climate change” for CCHF which conveniently promotes the corrupt WHO’s agenda.  A recent report in fact states there is ‘no evidence’ of a climate emergency.
  • Virologist Geert Vanden Bossche states that those who are COVID vaccinated are incubating omicron-derived variants. He believes those who will NOT be at risk for serious disease are the unvaccinated, and those who have received a placebo. He predicts that those who have had two or more COVID shots are at the greatest risk for “vaccine” break-through infection and he highly recommends they have access to antivirals.  He predicts that by late summer – early autumn we will see more and more deaths due to autoimmune disease and cancer which will be followed by a substantial wave of hyper-acute COVID disease in the highly “vaccinated.”

Category:

Activism, Ticks, Transmission, vaccines, Viruses

CDC Altering Death Certificates Again

https://brownstone.org/articles/the-great-covid-laundering-scheme/

The Great Covid Laundering Scheme

BY    JULY 12, 2023 

The CDC seems to have been systematically swapping in Covid as the Underlying Cause of Death on death certificates listing a different condition as the UCoD.

To briefly recap what we’ve covered in previous articles, the CDC applies medical diagnostic codes from the ICD-10 database for all conditions listed as a CoD on death certificates.

The thesis explores how the CDC has been systematically misclassifying covid as the UCoD on death certificates that clearly list a different condition as the Underlying Cause of Death, or where covid was obviously not the UCoD even if it was technically listed in the position of the UCoD by the coroner or ME who filled out the death certificate. The CDC does this by entering the ICD code for covid – U07.1 – as the UCoD even though the death certificate itself lists a different condition as the UCoD.

To be clear, this isn’t meant to capture coroners adding covid as a CoD where covid clearly was clinically irrelevant. Rather, what I am highlighting is a subset of “covid” deaths where the CDC swapped in covid as the UCoD even though it wasn’t documented as the UCoD on the death certificate by the coroner/ME.

In other words, potentially an enterprise of systemic out-and-out fraud by the CDC to falsely portray deaths that at best covid ‘helped’ hasten the demise of the decedent as deaths where the death was primarily instigated by covid.   (See link for article)

https://brownstone.org/articles/cdc-altered-death-certificates/

CDC Altered Minnesota Death Certificates that List a Covid Vaccine as a Cause of Death

BY    JULY 3, 2023 

Someone (who needs to remain anonymous) was able to obtain the death certificates from Minnesota for all deaths that occurred from 2015 to the present, which presented the opportunity to see if the CDC is being entirely honest about the US death data. Unsurprisingly, the CDC is not.

As we shall document, the CDC is concealing references to a covid vaccine on Minnesota death certificates (that are exceedingly rare to begin with because of widespread medical establishment denialism of vaccine adverse side effects). In almost every death certificate that identifies a covid vaccine as a cause of death, the CDC committed data fraud by not assigning the ICD 10 code for vaccine side effects to the causes of death listed on the death certificate.

Background

When someone dies, there is a death certificate that is filled out for official/legal purposes. Death certificates contain a lot of information (some states include more than others), including the causes of death (CoD).

Causes of death refer to the medical conditions that ultimately played some role in the demise of the decedent. To qualify as a CoD, a condition only needs to contribute to the medical decline of the decedent in some way, but doesn’t have to be directly responsible for whatever ultimately killed the person. If someone had high blood pressure, and subsequently suffered a heart attack that led to cardiac arrest which killed them, all three conditions qualify as CoD. On the other hand, this unfortunate fellow’s ingrown toenail is not a cause of death, because it in no way contributed to their demise.

(See link for article)

____________________

**Comment**

  • It’s the CDC’s job to assign ICD (International Classification of Diseases) 10 codes via  a secret algorithm, with only a tiny percentage adjudicated by CDC staff.
  • While there are codes for literally every random bizarre thing you can think of, there are only TWO codes given for COVID shot side effects.
  • The article gives 7 examples of death certificates from Minnesota of those who died within hours to days that identify the COVID shot as a cause of death but the CDC fraudulently omitted the ICD 10 code.
  • It is noteworthy that the average age of the decedents is 80, and 7/9 died before May 2021, a time of maximum prejudice against acknowledging the shots can trigger lethal pathologies.  Young people “dying suddenly” sticks out but the death of the old and frail receives much less attention and is simply blamed on age.

There are many inherent problems with CDC death statistics:

  • hospitals were paid to count deaths as COVID even when there were confounding issues and COVID wasn’t the direct cause of death.
  • infant deaths due to vaccines are never listed on death certificates but are listed as SIDS due to the lack of an ICD code,  Without a code, it simply doesn’t exist and therefore can not be tracked or numbered.
  • has been described as a “circular mortality rate generating system” that regurgitates the same causes of death over and over due to the fact doctors provide the simplest natural cause as they know it will quickly pass the approval of the local registrar’s office. This means any hope of capturing deaths caused by or complicated by a vaccine or drug is lost and enables deaths caused by Big Pharma to remain unnoticed and uncounted.
  • similarly to fraudulent testing which is controlled and patented by the CDC, the agency’s domination of coding also allows them to control the narrative.

Category:

Lyme, vaccines, Viruses

Link Between COVID Shots & Long COVID Finally Gaining Acceptance

It always starts out “rare” until it isn’t…..

https://www.science.org/content/article/rare-link-between-coronavirus-vaccines-and-long-covid-illness-starts-gain-acceptance

Rare link between coronavirus vaccines and Long Covid–like illness starts to gain acceptance

Studies probe unusual cases of neurologic complications, blood pressure swings, and other side effects

3 JUL 2023

BYGRETCHEN VOGEL, JENNIFER COUZIN-FRANKEL

couple on rocks at beach
Emergency medicine doctor Saleena Subaiya (left), who developed severe postvaccine symptoms, with their partner Lawrence Purpura, an infectious disease doctor.SALEENA SUBAIYA
A version of this story appeared in Science, Vol 381, Issue 6653.Download PDF

COVID-19 vaccines have saved millions of lives, and the world is gearing up for a new round of boosters. But like all vaccines, those targeting the coronavirus can cause side effects in some people, including rare cases of abnormal blood clotting and heart inflammation. Another apparent complication, a debilitating suite of symptoms that resembles Long Covid, has been more elusive, its link to vaccination unclear and its diagnostic features ill-defined. But in recent months, what some call Long Vax has gained wider acceptance among doctors and scientists, and some are now working to better understand and treat its symptoms.

“You see one or two patients and you wonder if it’s a coincidence,” says Anne Louise Oaklander, a neurologist and researcher at Harvard Medical School. “But by the time you’ve seen 10, 20,” she continues, trailing off. “Where there’s smoke, there’s fire.”

(See link for article)

___________________

**Comment**

“We’ve been screaming from the top of our lungs about these things happening,” Agnieszka Wilson, founder of #CanWeTalkAboutIt told The Defender. “And finally, slowly, it’s being acknowledged.”

The #CanWeTalkAboutIt campaign is a global effort to break the silence around injuries from the COVID-19 vaccine.

SUMMARY:

  • Persistent headaches, severe fatigue, abnormal heart rate and abnormal blood pressure are being found by doctors hours, days or weeks after the COVID shot and are aligning with medical conditions such as small fiber neuropathy and blood circulation problems as well as POTS.
  • Predictably, these findings are making regulators worried about “sensational headlines” and undermining trust in the clot-shots. All of a sudden they are worried about truth misleading the public when they have done nothing but mislead the public from the very beginning.
  • COVID shots have NOT saved millions of lives. In fact, CDC data has shown that they have had no measurable impact on COVID mortality.
  • Regarding the COVID shots, it’s pretty much bad news all around, including the fact they are contaminated with green monkey DNA, numerous metals, black and white matter, PEG, nanotechnology, impurities from human fetal cell lines, parasites, eggs, and moving “self-aware” organisms, graphene, and many other toxins including the spike protein.
  • These facts have been known for months, and in some cases years, yet regulators continue to downplay, deflect and blame anything but the “vaccine,” (ABV) for the rash of SADS carnage, the highest mortality rate in children for decades, and prolific heart damage, sustained vascular injury, thrombosis and occlusion, long post-COVID “vaccination” syndrome (LPCVS) and it is carnage.
  • Expert, after expert from all walks of life have put their necks and jobs on the line by demanding that the clot-shots be withdrawn, but are simply silenced via ad hominem attacks.
  • Interestingly, work in 2021 on long vax symptoms was abruptly halted without explanation.  The NIH has deflected attempts to determine what they knew early on, but other peer-reviewed research has also reported links between immune system and neurological effects from the clot-shot.
  • Similarly to Lyme/MSIDS, the majority of advocacy getting doctors and researchers to speak up has occurred due to injured patients.

Category:

vaccines, Viruses

Study Says Opioids No Better Than Placebos For Back & Neck Pain

https://www.paintreatmentdirectory.com/posts/opioids-no-better-than-placebos-for-back-and-neck-pain-new-study-says

Opioids No Better Than Placebos For Back and Neck Pain, New Study Says

By: Cindy Perlin, LCSW

7/10/23

A new study just published in The Lancet, a highly respected mainstream journal, reported that patients with low back pain and neck pain who were prescribed opioids did no better than patients given a placebo. The randomized, controlled study of 347 patients found that there was no significant difference in pain scores between the two groups at six weeks. A year later, the placebo group had slightly lower pain scores,1.81 compared to 2.37 for the opioid group. The average age of participants in the study was 44.7 years and they all had lower back pain, neck pain or both for 12 weeks or less.

According to the National Institute for Drug Abuse (NIDA), 10-12% of those prescribed opioids develop an addiction. Despite the fact that over a million Americans have died of opioid overdoses to date, opioids continue to be widely prescribed as noted by the CDC. After peaking in 2012 at 81.3 prescriptions per 100 persons nationwide, the prescription opioid rate was 43.3 per 100 persons in 2020. However, some counties had rates that were nine times higher than that. This study indicates that many pain patients are being unnecessarily exposed to devastating and potentially fatal risks for absolutely no benefit.

I believe that the reason that opioids continue to be so widely prescribed despite the risks is that healthcare providers and patients have heard so often that “opioids are the best treatment we have for pain”. This statement has been repeated so often by pharmaceutical interests and their enablers despite the lack of evidence that most people believe it. Will this study be enough to change these beliefs? I doubt it.

Besides patients’ and healthcare providers’ frequently reinforced beliefs that “opioids are the best treatment we have for pain”, there are several other barriers that get in the way of change. These include:

Healthcare providers are not educated about safer and more effective alternatives.

One survey of medical school curriculum in the U.S. found that physicians were receiving less than two hours of education about pain during their four years of medical school. Post-graduate education is largely sponsored by the drug companies, who fund the medical journals through advertising, sponsor most of the continuing education courses and conferences that physicians attend and send sales reps to physicians’ offices to peddle their wares on an almost daily basis. There are no comparable platforms for educating physicians about alternatives to pharmaceuticals for the treatment of pain.

Insurance companies won’t pay for alternative treatments or severely underfund them.

They do not pay for acupuncture, biofeedback, massage, nutritional counseling or supplements, exercise programs, herbal treatments, light therapy or other proven pain treatments. They have not raised fees for chiropractors, mental health providers or physical therapists in over 40 years.

Government policy often blocks access to alternative treatments.

Marijuana is still federally illegal, making it inaccessible for many. The FDA has gone to great lengths to try to ban kratom, a very effective southeast Asian pain-relieving herb, and failing that, has done their best to demonize it. Several states have banned kratom. 

The FDA has also recently declared homeopathy illegal, classifying all remedies as unapproved drugs, despite significant evidence that homeopathy is safe and effective and a long tradition of its use being legal.

No federal or state laws require insurance coverage for most alternatives or adequate fees for the treatments, like physical therapy, psychotherapy and chiropractic, that are covered.

Sign My Petition to Require Insurance Companies to Pay for Alternative Treatments

The supply of alternative service providers cannot currently meet increased demand.

For instance, while the demand for chiropractic services has been increasing, the U.S. Small Business Administration reports that the five-year survival rate of chiropractic practices is only 48.9%. This is most likely due to low fees and excessive paperwork demands by insurance companies.

The physical therapy profession is currently hemorrhaging providers despite increasing demand, with over 22.000 physical therapists leaving the workforce in the last quarter of 2021 alone. Over 15,000 licensed clinical social workers left the workforce during the same time period in professions where there were already significant shortages.

There are already shortages of massage therapists and demand for acupuncturists is already increasing compared to supply. These shortages will be even more severe if insurance coverage is made available.

Find the Right Provider

The Placebo Effect and Chronic Pain

The placebo effect refers to the improvement in a patient’s condition, despite receiving a treatment with no active pharmacological properties, for example: a sugar pill. Research has consistently shown that when patients genuinely believe they are receiving an effective treatment, their bodies often respond accordingly, producing measurable improvements.

The power of placebos extends beyond a mere psychological response; it can lead to actual physiological changes in the body. Studies have shown that the placebo effect can trigger the release of endorphins (the body’s natural opioids), dopamine (the body’s natural mood elevators) and other neurotransmitters associated with pain relief and improved mood. This indicates that the mind possesses an innate ability to activate the body’s self-healing mechanisms.

Placebo-controlled clinical trials are now standard practice in drug development, enabling researchers to evaluate the true effectiveness of new medications, or in the case of the above-described study, older medications.

While placebos have the potential to produce positive outcomes, some have raised ethical concerns about their use. They claim that deceiving patients by prescribing placebos without their knowledge undermines the principle of informed consent. However, I would counter that by pointing out that prescribing potentially dangerous drugs without warning patients of the full range of risks or the fact that a safer alternative exists is a much higher order ethical violation.

Researchers are exploring ethical ways to use placebos. Some studies have shown that even if you tell patients they are getting a placebo for their condition, it still seems to have the desired effect.

Placebos and the Power of the Mind/Body Connection

Placebos are an indicator of the power of the mind-body connection to influence our well-being. The effectiveness of placebos in pain management has been observed for both acute and chronic pain. Placebos have shown significant analgesic effects in conditions such as migraines, osteoarthritis, and even post-surgical pain. They have been proven to reduce pain intensity, increase pain tolerance, and enhance overall well-being. Placebos have also been shown to reduce anxiety and depression and to improve sleep.

Want to try a placebo for yourself or a loved one? Here is a placebo you can order on Amazon:

Conclusion

Many safer treatments for back pain, neck pain and other types of pain exist and should be offered to patients instead of misinforming patients that “opioids are the best treatment we have for pain”. A “best” treatment doesn’t have the potential to kill people.

Cindy Perlin is a Licensed Clinical Social Worker, certified biofeedback practitioner, chronic pain survivor, the author of The Truth About Chronic Pain Treatments: The Best and Worst Strategies for Becoming Pain Free and the founder and CEO of the Alternative Pain Treatment Directory. She has been helping her clients in the Albany, NY area reach their health and wellness goals for over 30 years. She also provides virtual pain consults. See her provider profile HERE. 

For more:

BTW, in the effort of staying real: The Lancet and other journals have been caught numerous times publishing fraudulent studies and pushing politics rather than science:

Category:

diet and nutrition, Hemp Oil, Herbs, Inflammation, Pain Management, research, Supplements, Treatment