But we don’t tell animals that they have rabies, or FIV, or parvo, etc. and they still die. And it’s not simply a matter of bad vibes from humans, because wild animals get sick also.
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The same thought occurred to me after writing my posts. Having infected animals myself, I can attest to the effectiveness of pathogens in animal models. Cultured cells can also have a very impressive reaction to pathogens without needing to be told they should be scared of what we are adding to their culture media.
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And people were dying of pathogens long before they knew what was killing them. And what about silent killers? You can have high blood pressure and be symptom-free and feeling just fine until it is too late. And colon cancer? You will feel fine and dandy until the cancerous polyps metastasize. Well, now I’m getting scared!
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Get that colon checked! A friend’s daughter just died of colon Ca at the age of 37, tumor had a mutation that was very aggressive. No family history. Scary stuff.
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A bit off topic, but this point can’t be stressed enough. I avoided a rather scary situation with a timely colonoscopy at the age of 42. It is one of the most important medical procedures you should get after the age of 40, no matter what your family history is.
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So sorry! And 37 is a bit early, with no family history.
Good for you!
I just turned 50, and my very nice paired office nurse threw me a “colonoscopy party,” with cards, chocolate iced cupcakes (maybe there was a message there), and a good deal of laughter. Seriously, though, I am the “colonoscopy missionary,” I tell my patients, because I have seen way too much death from that cancer.
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If smoking damaged the lungs then everyone smoking would be sick. The reality is very different.
What Percentage of Smokers Get Lung Cancer? (verywellhealth.com)
The article was written by an oncologist (lung cancer physician) and reviewed by another oncologist.
It states:
"Based on the findings, the researchers estimated that lifetime risk of lung cancer by smoking status in males and females is:2
- Never smokers : 1.8% for males and 1.3% for females
- Former smokers : 7.2% for males and 5.8% for females
- Current smokers : 14.8% for males and 11.2% for females"
So at worst about 15% of smokers get lung cancer. That means 85% don’t.
What about COPD?
Tips From Other Journals - American Family Physician (aafp.org)
“About 10 to 15 percent of smokers develop COPD,”
I smoked 20 cigarettes plus a day for about 20 years. I had developed lung cancer when I was 42yo.
Evidence it was not the smoking.
- It was not diagnosed till I got to Sydney for second opinion on Uterine cancer. I was smoking all the way to Sydney. It took 5 and half weeks to drive to Sydney because we went a long way inland. Anyway by the time I got to Brisbane (4 weeks ) the reddish brown phlegm I was coughing up vanished. In Sydney the oncologist said that this would have been blood in the phlegm. I continued to smoke for a short while then the herbalist I went to wanted me to stop. I had a spontaneous remission of all the cancer (It was stage 4 ovarian cancer with metastases to the uterus, cervix, bowel and both lungs.)
- I realized later that there were a lot of suggestions being made to me in Cairns about “smoking causes cancer” and “smoking is bad for your lungs” and things like that. One guy from work used to ring me up and say the same joke over and over “what did one coffin say to the other? Is that you coffin?” but with the second “coffin” sounding like “coughing”.
All of these suggestions had affected me and I had not realized it at the time. They have been tried since with the idea that ozone coming from an oven they had tampered with in one of the many home invasions when I was out shopping. I rejected the idea and no problem.
The reality is that smoking is an insult to the lungs BUT the body adapts. It replaces the more sensitive cells with more robust cells. It is called cellular adaptation.
Lastly “germs don’t make you sick”. We have, at least I have I don’t know about you, I have an immune system that knocks the germs out for six. ONLY when I have had some stress had I had problems. But I recognized that back in my twenties and I have not had the flu and other infectious diseases since. I don’t take any flu shots either.
A couple of Christmases ago I was bitten by a goanna. It lived. The wound wouldn’t stop bleeding for two hours so some nasty protein was injected from its saliva. BUT the wound healed inside of ten days. for a 70 yo that I was then my immune system is prefect.
Few diseases are “all or nothing”. Most have a gradient of severity, be it COVID or cancer. Smoking is similar in that various factors interact, but there is no doubt smoking is the primary cause of lung cancer today, as your statistics show.
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You are a biomedical scientist, I am only a retired industrial chemist, though I am working on a huge cancer project. Do a clinical trial. Let me give you some tips if you don’t mind.
You can give them all a very benign virus or only tell them they are getting a harmless virus and only give them all some saline solution by injection.
The only difference in the treatment arm is the idea. “Ooops wrong virus this one does some damage” or worse if you want. They got to be convinced of not simply danger but actual damage in the lungs.
I see those that were claiming it was a hoax and died in hospital with the virus as a red flag. Why would they get the virus at all?
The deaths have all come about by excessive inflammation doing damage to lung tissue as well as other organs like the heart and the kidneys. As far as the heart is concerned ideas such as “taken it to heart” for someone who is very distressed indicates the heart and thus they may get further distressed about their heart suffering damage. A good clinical trial will show this up. You don’t need to let it go to the point where they need hospitalization. You only need to see the cytokine storms and some damage in X-rays. Then call it off. “Guys, guys, it’s all okay. It wasn’t the wrong virus after all!” That will make them relax and you should see the body repair the damage asap in old and young alike.
You can sell the idea of damage with them feeling fear. This can be done with a snake in an adjoining room and a remote control opening device/ button on your desk. You never need press the button. Only the intent to do so is enough to give them the fear response. They won’t be able to attribute the fear to anything as they don’t know about the snake. so it gets used to upgrade the idea to a belief.
Alternatively you could have some nurses as stooges, who push the idea of damage and don’t worry we’ll help you and so on. So they really believe in damage in the lungs.
Of course you won’t be funded by Jay and Jay or 'Ere lie…? lily or Murk or any of those. Try the NIH if they are really independent. This experiment can help a lot of people.
I did. I didn’t find anything much. Can you give me some papers?
Try this on someone else. The human immune system doesn’t need to evolve to handle new viruses. We are bombarded by viruses, bacteria and other things like fungi all the time. The immune system sees what it is and build antibodies and stops it in its tracks.
I’ll tell you a story from my younger days.
From about 7 or 8 until my father sold the shop, about 12yo, my two sisters and I used to play a game every time it rained. The shop we lived in was on a reasonably steep hill and when it rained the gutters were full of water. There were often build ups of rubbish in the gutter were the water flowed over it. We saw these as waterfalls. We used to arm ourselves with a medium bottle of Coca-Cola each and we used to pour it into the top of the waterfall and drink it out of the bottom of the waterfall. So we drank heaps of water that was crawling with heaps and heaps of pathogens. None of us got sick from any of this game play.
Once my father came out of the shop and saw us and went ballistic. But it didn’t stop our game. We just took it in turns to stand sentinel near the shop and wave the others off if there was any sign of dad coming out.
Our immune system saw everything imaginable and more. No evolution necessary. Maybe I have a good immune system because I would have a huge library / memory in my body of antibodies for pathogens.
The statistics show that a number of people, SOME people, who smoke also develop cancer. But that is only correlation. It is not causation.
We take a chemical out of the smoke and apply it to cells and get a mutations. Then the two hit hypothesis is invoked and it is pure supposition from there that there are more and more mutations that give rise to cancer. The fact of the matter is you can’t get cancer without cancer stem cells forming in the first place. And cancer tumors have the characteristics of an organ. They are not just a bunch of transformed cells or abnormal cells dividing out of control.
I found that cancer is really stem cell mediated immunity, erroneously ignited in the body owing to ideas about possible danger or possible harm BUT only under certain conditions. Those conditions are usually emotional reactivity owing to some ongoing life issue. If a person has suffered a loss and has sadness then and only then will ideas of possible harm cause the body to react. I won’t give my research here.
My late husband’s father had TB and it did take him a year to get well. But he didn’t start to show improvement from what my late husband had said, until he move away from his farm and went to live nearly several hundred kilometers north on a friend’s farm. This too, for me, sounds like he was being stressed where he was and only when he got to a stress free environment did he improve and recover.
My father got well too suddenly and at the time he went ahead with the sale of his shop. This was when the stress was gone.
We can get sick when we are stressed and we can retain our health if not stressed. I recall my two sisters got the measles and I had to help my mother look after them and I also slept in the same room as them. Yet I never got the measles. On the other hand there was a time when all three of us got the chicken pox and shortly after the mumps. I don’t recall what was happening at that time but we may have had some problems. But here again my parents never got sick from being near us and feeding us and helping us get up and wash and go to the toilet etc.
I’ve seen a time in my twenties when I had a bad infection in my leg. The doctor got frightened when no antibiotics worked. My leg was slowly getting worse. Then I overheard him consult his colleague in the corridor and the colleague had said "if this doesn’t work (he’d given him another antibiotic) we may have to take the leg off. I was shocked.
I couldn’t dispense the script on the way home because it was late night shopping and I couldn’t find parking. I went home and thought one of my flat-mates would get it for me. There was no one home so I went to bed and slept. I slept till the next morning. In the morning my flat-mates and I were very surprised that my leg was like 80% better. How on earth did that happen?
It wasn’t until a year later that I realized why. I was talking to one of the professors in biochemistry school where I was working. We talked about the fear response. Then I realized that at the time of the infection in my leg there were funding cuts going on at the university and I was very frightened I might lose my job. So I had a perception of an external danger and it was super stressful. This declined my immunity.
Then when the doctors talked about cutting my leg off I must have suddenly realized the real danger was within my body. I could get another job no matter that it would have been very inconvenient for me because I needed to work at the university to help pay for me to go through university, but I couldn’t get another leg. This change in perception of the real danger brought my immune system back on full and in two days my leg was back to normal.
Nature made us to see causation whenever things correlate, which serves us well when eating newly found berries or hunting wild game, but fails in many areas where coincidence is interpreted as causation, and in areas where lower incidence of a result makes causation difficult to see by an individual observer. That is where science and data analysis give accurate results that simple observation cannot.
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Animals can get infections but they mostly don’t get sick. They resolve the infection without much trouble. The only animals that can get sick with human type diseases are pets and that is done by first adversely influencing the owner. Same with children.
Yes, and the science that is needed to verify my observations is already done.
Animals can get very sick from many causes, including infections.
The vast majority of wild animals don’t get sick.
One of my dogs once found some small dead animal and was eating it in the yard. I had to wrestle with her to take it off her. It would have been dead for a long time as it stunk so bad I nearly vomited. But it did not hurt my dog one iota.
We have immune systems. It is not as if we are not armed, i.e., all animals including humans.
You are moving the goalposts.
This is what I said, “Animals can get very sick from many causes, including infections.”
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And your evidence is… one time your dog ate a stinky dead animal and didn’t get sick?
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Science is never done. Covid has been a good example as it condensed a lot of science into a short time period. The numbers and ideas changed as new data came in, and continues to do so. Does ivermectin work? Maybe,or maybe not. Depends on which study you look at. It may be years before anything definitive is known, if then. Where did Covid arise? Again, it may be years before it is sorted out.
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