Progress involves improving on the past. Once, we used leeches to suck out an excess of cancer-causing humours, or just blamed them on the wrath of the gods. In modern hospitals, we now image such tumours deep within the body, target them with synthetic chemicals or narrow beams of radiation, or excise them with clinical precision. As if the mass was its own entity, we can ignore the rest of the body and concentrate precisely the problem at hand. If all this fails, we have teams to ensure that dying is convenient and minimally disturbing to the routines of others.
A good friend died recently of a rare and aggressive cancer. From diagnosis, he had several months of generally positive life through a difficult time, maintaining a sense of humour, a rational view of the world and loyalty to friends. He had always been good at seeing things that others did not without being arrogant or self-opinionated. The sort of friend you felt would stick by you through difficult times (and did). For the purpose of this discussion, we will call him ‘Matt’.
Problem-based medicine
Matt’s cancer was treated in the modern way. A team specialised in scanning people scanned him as schedules allowed over a period of weeks, establishing the extent of spread. A team specialised in irradiating cancers irradiated a large part of his body to shrink the cancer (which helped). Another group specialised in poisoning cancerous cells assessed whether such poisons would be of benefit, and decided they would not. Another arranged devices to help him walk, as the cancer had stopped him doing so. Someone somewhere may have been tasked with dietary advice, but that did not seem to happen.
Cancer is a complex disease, influenced by metabolism, genetics, immune status and general well-being. These are also interconnected. The most financially profitable approaches involve killing cancer cells with chemicals or radiation and, more recently, harnessing the immune potential of the body’s T-cells (‘cellular immunity’), those that kill cells and pathogens that they identify as abnormal. The body’s own T-cell response needs certain micronutrients, such as vitamins and trace metals, that modern lifestyles and diets often cause to be insufficient. They are cheap (poorly profitable) and so the science around them attracts less sponsorship.
It was clear early on that Matt’s care would be ‘palliative’, which means the cancer could be shrunk a little but not stopped. Due to its placement and extent, it could not be excised. Remaining there in an otherwise unchanged environment, it would come back, probably fairly quickly, and that would be the end. The scanning team scanned occasionally to see what was happening, but otherwise the clinical teams had fulfilled their protocols. Cutting-edge cancer therapy had cut its edge, and there was nothing more to be done.
When the problem becomes insoluble
Matt was particularly fortunate in having neighbours and nearby friends who treated him as he would them. Being human, those who cleaned his house got to know him well, recognising his qualities. One night, he had a fall and was transferred to the hospital where most of his previous management had taken place. As he was designated not-for-resuscitation (NFR), he was placed under the palliative care team, deemed best for his insoluble condition.
To understand modern institutional palliative care, it is best to explain what happened next. Matt was placed in a room on the main corridor near the nurses’ desk. The door was left ajar so he could be observed. This room was painted grey, had no windows and no pictures on the wall. A couple of chairs, some fixtures for oxygen, a basin and antiseptic dispenser and a cupboard. Day and night became irrelevant, as in any windowless cell.
After some days, Matt was said to be non-responsive and “may not have long”, which surprised us as he had been quite stable and well-oriented shortly before. When friends visited, he could talk and interact and appreciated visitors, thanking them for coming. But later he would be reported to have lapsed into unresponsiveness again. This seemed confusing to those who knew him.
When I visited the first time, he was lying naked on the bed (the blanket was too small to cover him fully anyway) and wet, with an oxygen cannula dispensing oxygen into the air rather than his nose. He woke up when this was placed to serve its function and could respond. Over multiple visits, a nurse came in only with a syringe to inject what turned out to be his palliative care: ampoules of morphine and midazolam. Morphine dulls pain and mind and suppresses breathing; midazolam reduces the ability to respond, so that the recipient stops crying out for help when he wets himself, is embarrassed about being naked or is thirsty.
When staff were requested to withhold the midazolam, Matt was able to converse with others, express his needs and answer questions. He was very clear, not unexpectedly, that he would prefer to be home. Each time I returned, he was lying as I first found him, naked, wet and calling for help, or dosed out with chemicals. Then the midazolam would be injected again after visitors left. Food was limited as that required someone to sit with a spoon and friends could not always be there. The hospital was not staffed for this – or protocols did not allow it.
Similar treatment is used by inhumane jailors to humiliate prisoners if they want to break them down psychologically. Being busy ensuring that the digital documentation was up to date, the nurses did not have time to do much more. The institution is designed this way. This is not about how certain individuals treated another, it is about how all of us can treat others when our institution organises and encourages us to do so.
Lone individuals seldom act in a systematically abusive and callous way towards a stranger. When they do, we call them sociopaths, sick or criminals (of the worst sort). But an institution, made up of individuals, can do this easily. We drown the call of conscience and empathy in groupthink and routines. It is just the way the machine works, whether its trainloads from the ghetto, corralled refugees or forgotten faces locked in a nursing home. We receive permission to devalue others, not realising they are ourselves. In Western medicine it has allowed us to separate the tumour from the person, then where necessary kill the person before death, making it all so much less traumatic or intrusive on our own routines.
A human leaving
Thanks to neighbours and friends who cared, Matt was returned home on a stretcher, with visits by a good community health team and support from friends. He needed no medication, as he was not in much pain, just sometimes distressed as a man would be when unable to go to the toilet himself. He enjoyed music, remembered and chatted about old times and mutual friends, and enjoyed his favourite foods, though in small quantities before tiredness set in. Having not eaten much during two weeks in hospital, his body’s reserves were exhausted.
The midazolam and morphine, it turned out, had mainly served to help the institution function, preventing Matt from interrupting routine or requiring human contact. At home, human contact, music, sunlight through a window and conversation were natural rather than an imposition. This might be a revelation to some, especially in this age when we shut the elderly or dying away from their families for months at a time to ‘protect’ them from some virus or other. It suggests that a person with a foreseeable death may still be human, and that ‘DNR’ (do not resuscitate) printed on the clinical notes does not really change that status. The institution may dehumanise the people paid to care, but not the intended subjects of that care. They retain their intrinsic value.
Matt died after a few days at home, not naked to passersby in a grey windowless room on urine-soaked plasticised sheets, but at home surrounded by friends. He was still a person, a wonderful one, despite all that progress could achieve.
Dr. David Bell is a clinical and public health physician with a PhD in population health and background in internal medicine, modelling and epidemiology of infectious disease. Previously, he was Director of the Global Health Technologies at Intellectual Ventures Global Good Fund in the USA, Programme Head for Malaria and Acute Febrile Disease at FIND in Geneva, and coordinating malaria diagnostics strategy with the World Health Organisation. He is a Senior Scholar at the Brownstone Institute.
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And the people are kept distracted and divided whilst this madness plays out mostly in plain sight.
One hundred and fifty Tory MP’s on the Nut Zero take. Presumably when many of these are out of work later this year their bribe monies will switch to their incoming Labour counterparts.
Yep, the new excited batch of excited but useless MPs will soon be on the gravy train and I suspect a fair few of the outgoing lot will keep their snouts in the troff via lobbying of some description.
Oh the Grand Old WEF/ They had 10,000 lackeys/ They marched them up to the top of the COP/ And they marched them down again/ And when they were all signed up/ when the public were all kept down/ All the UN puppet scum, were neither up nor down
Cheers Varmint – class.
Cheers mate. ——-My wife laughed as well.
If you want to be sure of the outcome of an election, you’ll obviously have to buy all candidates which stand a chance to be elected. That’s the way to control a properly tuned demuckcracy: Eliminate voter choice by suitable candidate selection.
If we got the list in advance we might get to see if Reform / UKIP / other small parties have a chance of getting in?
Their Labour counterparts wouldn’t need bribing as they’re completely bonkers already. As for these Conservative nut jobs calling themselves Conservatives in the first place is beyond belief.
This sums it up.
I’m noticing an increase of commenters on MSM sites slowly coming round to the net zero / climate scams. Whether there will be enough to covert the brainwashed or not remains to be seen.
Sadly I reckon that things have got to get a lot worse before enough people think that stopping net zero is a high enough priority to strongly influence how they vote and these traitors are kicked out of power. Amongst the general population I wonder how many people realise they’re paying sky high prices for electricity due to subsidies and green mandates. Similarly when the cost of ICE cars and gas boilers increase massively because manufacturers are paying millions in fines because they can’t sell enough green crap will the majority of people realise why the prices are going through the roof.
And that pretty much sums up what western democracy has become.
Bureaucrats implement the policies of plutocrats and technocrats.
And politicians are responsible for selling it all to the general population.
Any politician who tries to sell a non-approved policy gets nowhere or taken down very quickly.
“Any politician who tries to sell a non-approved policy gets nowhere or taken down very quickly”——-Like Braverman, or Bridgen. ——–The globalist club members don’t want you in their exclusive club
I will never vote conservative again until and unless they unreservedly drop nut zero.
Conservative support for nut zero is not just plain idiotic but now shown to be venal as well.
Net zero is a financial, eco, social and political disaster. EVs are not ‘green’, eco-friendly nor economically rational. Visit a lithium strip mine for more info. Cobalt garnered with black slave labour seems to be fine with these virtue signalling idiots. Hydrocarbons are abiotic and have nothing to do with rocks or fossils.
As the article insinuates you can buy Pharma-ment or Net Zero-ment with about £50 mn. We saw this during Rona.
No surprise that the corrupt criminals in gov’t and the agencies are on the payroll of ‘big climate’.
We simply need to follow the money trails to find the ‘science’.
Yes we know…….But we are letting them away with it. We believe all the crap. We see a storm or a flood on TV and we just assume it is all climate change. ——-or at least most of us do.
People aren’t really assuming it’s all climate change, they keep being told so. This is really just as with COVID, just in slow-motion. The COVID disaster was always supposed to strike next month. The climate disaster next years, so to say.
These MPs are easily paid for. Any politician who drinks the nut zero koolaid avowedly hates their fellow man. We see the impact of nut zero in Africa, likely far more Africans have been killed by the world bank ban on investing in coal power than Jews were murdered by Hitler. The woke slaughter on the green alter goes unnoticed of course. Look how the Washington post celebrated this slaughter:
https://www.washingtonpost.com/news/wonk/wp/2013/07/17/the-world-bank-cuts-off-funding-for-coal-how-much-impact-will-that-have/
I agree. Africa (and other poor countries) have also been used in experiments with vaccines etc. Thank God so much less of Africa had the Covid jab, but they are being made to suffer for it in other ways.
Time to get Rolls Royce to donate a few SMR’s to these countries, make them independent of the West and keep their population at home as a bonus.
People should now realise if they have not done before that we are all being herded like sheep, and the sheepdogs are the globalist pretend to save the planet eco socialists seeking to control all of the world’s wealth and resources and using fear of a manufactured climate crisis to get us all into the pen. The Climate Industrial Complex controls the entire narrative. (The UN, WEF, Politicians, Technocrats, Liberal Progressive Media and Business Stakeholders). Whenever I hear a friend or relative say things like “Well the climate is definitely changing” I feel like shaking them by the lapels. But the power of the climate propaganda they see everyday on their 6 O’clock News leaves them so thoroughly brainwashed that they actually believe they can see global warming from their living room window. When you attempt to get them to see some sense they stare at you like you are from Mars. They ask “So you think you know more than the scientists”? ————-They are unaware that this has nothing to do with science. There can be little hope that the Climate Charlatans will not succeed as the vast majority of people simply refuse to escape from the herd of sheep. They accept losing their fantastic gas central heating, their car, their beef, their holidays, their affordable electricity, and they let the globalists throw them onto their back and sheer all the wool of them.
“Shaking them by the lapels”? Shaking them by the throat, more like!
“But the power of the climate propaganda they see everyday on their 6 O’clock News leaves them so thoroughly brainwashed that they actually believe they can see global warming from their living room window.”
Eloquent and sadly funny:
“global warming from their living room window.”
And that’s the truth of the matter.
Well maybe they should go upstairs and have a look out of their bedroom window for a clearer look. They might be able to see that the Polar Bears are doing just fine
Since I think this everytime I’ms scrolling past it: I absolutely love this picture, although I’m not convinced of the health benefits of Coca-Cola.
Except the Bear isn’t really drinking the cola. The photo is about as realistic as the Polar Bears demise. Whoever heard of an endangered species whose numbers have gone up 5 fold in the last 50 years?
The Coke bottle is obviously there because of its symbolic value as “American way of life” icon the other guys really despise. They’d almost certainly be calling teaching polar bears to drink Cola a cruel and unsual way of furthering their extermination. As always with these Americanisms, I find myself in disagreement with both sides. But I nevertheless really like the picture.
Good point about the cola as symbol of capitalism. And that ties nicely in with the fact that climate change isn’t actually about the climate, and is really an anti capitalist eco socialist agenda with climate as the excuse
But I think many are waking up, perhaps most among what we used to call the ‘working class’. In my experience with Lower Traffic Neighbourhoods (we have just had one installed in our area of south London), many are furious and not complying. They are not just furious about the LTNs, but about ULEZ, the bicycle lanes, the constant road works, the electric car fiasco, etc etc. They definitely see that it is an anti-motorist agenda. There are many more who are seeing all this now, as with the cash versus cashless stuff. We must keep fighting where and when we can.
They are not “green” billionaires, they are grifter billionaires and megalomaniacs
I wonder how many of them are on Mr Epsteins list
Most if not all is my guess.
The big con is persuading people that “climate change” is new, rather than educating them that the climate has never been stable for long. Avoiding investment in things that provide protection against weather related problems and taking the opportunity to blame someone else is on the agenda as well.
Very well put.
It is “climate” that isn’t new. ————-“Climate Change” is new since this actually means changes to climate allegedly caused by humans, and ofcourse it allows for all manner of policies to be put in place, and all manner of rent seekers holding out their hands for money from the western world who caused this manufactured crisis.
“…chaired by London Mayor and fireworks impresario Sadiq Khan” Love it!
One word..Traitors .
They really do not give a toss about the country or us.They all have their noses and more in the corrupt trough.
Retribution is coming !
I hope Retribution comes real soon for these parasites.
We need more psychopaths with access to weaponry. Maybe the yanks could spare a few?
Retribution for them will not come in this world, but one day we all have to face God on Judgement Day!! There, true justice will be dispensed!
I seem to recall UK taxpayers provide funds for WWF which is a charity. They should not be able to join political campaigns.
I hope Reform advertise the strong links between the Tories and these fanatical political campaign groups. As the economy implodes and people shiver following power restrictions their votes will evaporate (or maybe they will boil away).
The Labour and Lib Dem Parties plus SNP/ Greens are all fully onboard with this eco impoverishment crap as well. It just happens to be the tories in government at the moment. —-If anything the impoverishment will happen even faster under those other parasites.
They hate us and everything British. They should be strung up from the nearest tree.
Oh, they absolutely love us. That just want (and work to this end) that we hate ourselves so that our guilty consciences make us part with our money more readily.
That might be working with some in the middle classes, but I don’t think it’s working on here. I hate them more with every article I read, and I don’t feel guilty about anything.
You should lobby your Government officials – invest in an election and buy some politicians.
Another argument for outlaw supraregional electioneering clubs aka political parties. There’s principally nothing wrong with the Grantham Foundation fielding candidates in elections. But these should stand as Grantham Foundation candidates. Some people who very much believe in elected(!!1) would probably be suprised to learn that all of their so-called choices end up as vote for a Grantham Foundation candidate, ie, that they really don’t have a political choice at all, just one for their preferred hairdo.
Many organisations fund both sides, just to hedge their bets and guarantee influence. We need to check who is bankrolling the people we vote for and vote accordingly.
So the choice at election time is really between 2 bunches of pretend to save the planet socialists. ——Take your pick. Perhaps if we all voted for the Monster Loony Party the eco socialists might wake up
We need to cross through the names on our ballot paper and write ‘none of the above’. If enough did that, it might make an impact. I am not hopeful, but we must do something. Actually, I believe that at local councils level is where we could make most impact – I am too old, but younger people should seriously think about becoming independent councillors and start to make a difference (not just protest).
I’m not sure the OMRLP have enough cash to field candidates in all seats, unless you think Reform are one of their branches
The Tories need to be destroyed at the next election. It’s a bit of a stuck record, but this lot really are a shower of sh!t. Fully bought and paid for by Rockefeller and the rest. This is a great article, well written, factual and concise. Just follow the money to see who is in charge of the country. That’s the link that needs to be broken, how politics is paid for. This corruption needs to end. The vast transfer of wealth from the poor to the rich over the last few years is being weaponised to keep the poor in check. To take away genuine democratic choices.
I’m not voting for these globalist puppets anymore. They can all crash and burn as far as I am concerned. I will no longer comply!
This is not a problem limited to Tories. It seems like most MP’s are in the pay of people, or groups pushing their agenda’s and a few ‘donations’ is all it takes to get a change of policy, or vary voting intentions. We quite literally have the best parliament money can buy.
See if your MP is a supporter of the conservative Environment Network. Mine is and I have written to lambast him about it. The more that we harass the better!
https://www.cen.uk.com/our-caucus
Thank you, Chris. Superb reporting and analysis. Again.
I told my super marginal Tory MP (Felicity Buchan, who had a majority of 150 votes) that her membership of CEN guarantees I’m voting Reform.
The not-Conservative Party needs to burn to ash next general election if we’re going to have any chance whatsoever of getting an actual small-c conservative party worth voting for in the election after next.
I would say a good half of my family and friends usually vote Tory. Asking them now I can’t find a single one who is going to turn out for them. They seam to assume its not going to be as bad as predicted. I think that they are wrong, they will be ash.
Voting Reform won’t help anyone since they don’t stand a chance – it just gives more votes to Labour and we’ll have an even more appalling lot under Keir Starmer (of the Trilateral Commission). You need to put a cross through your ballot paper and write ‘None of the above’. But it’s important to go to vote and do this, otherwise they’ll simply say that non-voters don’t care or are too lazy or apathetic to vote.
At least voting reform means you are voting for a candidate, spoiling your ballot won’t change who get’s in, it just decreases the vote. It would need a large number of spoilers (who would all be voting for the same candidate normally) in your constituency to change the outcome.
But I don’t want to vote for Reform!! I don’t trust them any more than the other parties. I believe, for instance, that Richard Tice no more stood up against the Covid jabs than any of the other politicians. In any case, our area is a Labour stronghold and it is extremely unlikely that that will change.
And here’s the massive impact that Ed “The Moron” Miliband’s “Climate Change Act (Destruction of the Economy)” of 2008 has had on global emissions.
F….ing W…ker. ——–Remember Miliband gave us the climate change act but a tory (Teresa May) gave us the net zero amendment to that in 2019——-So we can see there isn’t much difference between a piece of crap like Miliband and a so called tory.
The dirty Tory Traitors are being bribed to trash our country. Pure filth.
What a nest of vipers! I will have no regrets about the Tories losing an election. However, Starmer and his equally awful brood will be as bad if not worse over Net Zero, so we’re in a cleft stick. As I’ve replied to someone below, our only option is to cross through all the names on our ballot paper at a GE and write ‘none of the above’. But we must go to vote so that ‘they’ can’t say we didn’t care.
Thank you, Chris, for consistently excellent articles in the DS.
A list of the member MPs?
https://www.cen.uk.com/our-caucus
Internal combustion cars versus spontaneous combustion cars.
Who are these politicians? Name names.
‘I know every man has his price, I just didn’t expect it to be so low’. Napoleon.