Coronavirus (SARS-CoV-2 / COVID-19) and Tinnitus

the only thing that would worry me from Mercola.com is if they or their lunatic CAM buddies weren't being harassed constantly by state and federal authorities

That's not what the letter says at all, it says that he cannot offer services which claim to treat or cure any disease without having a scientific basis for doing so. This applies to anyone offering medical services in the US. He has the right to blog and express his opinion about these treatments; he has the right to offer other treatments which are medically approved, and he EVEN has the right to offer treatments which aren't medically approved as long as he doesn't make unsubstantiable claims about them. I can't think of a lower reasonable bar for alt-med.

These people aren't being singled out because they are on to some secret cure; they're being singled out because they are peddling snakeoil and dangerous misinformation in a pandemic.

There aren't very many things our government is doing right now that I approve of as strongly, as making life hard for the Dr. Brownsteins and Ron Mercolas of the world.

I realize that this is one area where you and I are diametrically opposed, and so I have stayed out of much of this, but I'm going to take the time to respond to any and all Mercola related suggestions with vitriol and anger, because I believe he is a deeply reckless person with no moral compass who has made a career out of exploiting desperate people, and this forum is crawling with them.



Scammers, scammers, crooks crooks and scammers. Clearly animals are not psychic or my cat would be waiting for me to feed him every night.

edit: I will immediately cede that there are also plenty of credentialed MDs who have made careers out of exploiting people with misinformation. The existence of shitty doctors doesn't let other snake oil salesmen off the hook.

These things are complex; if they told me they were going to start flurodating water here, my first question would be "using sodium fluroide, or using hexafluorosilicic acid bought dirt cheap as industrial waste from Aluminum manufacture?" -- most people are not aware of the distinction, nor are they aware that a lot of that hexafluorosilicic acid is sourced from Chinese post-industrial and not necessarily tested as well as you'd hope.

Raising flags on issues like these is important, and a function of real journalism. Mercola isn't a journalist, he's just another peddler who knows a little bit more than the average person about some of these things, and then uses that to generate fear which he leverages to sell products that generally aren't really relevant to the issue at hand.

Reading about the "real" risks of these things is not hard to do (ex https://www.sciencedirect.com/science/article/abs/pii/S1462901113000087 ) but you need to go look the research horse in the mouth, not listen to the fast talking salesman with the dotcom e-commerce site masquerading as a "health portal". (My own takeaway on this particular issue is that I wouldn't bat an eye at USP NaF, and I would not want to drink water treated with postindustrial fluoride for all the reasons that article outlines).

 

Many of the excess deaths are due to the lockdown...

https://www.bmj.com/content/369/bmj.m1931

 

Anyone come forward that has been confirmed yet? If not, the wife and I were both confirmed Wednesday this week.

Houston TX

 

33 million people currently on unemployment is too much. The country has to start opening up, especially New York, where enough time has elapsed since the middle of the crisis, and enough people have had it, so that it is far safer now.

 

@Ed209 and his family were confirmed cases.

 

That seems pretty reasonable.

It would only mean that if every time you blogged, posted, tweeted, emailed, etc, you were "advertis[ing] that a product or service can prevent, treat, or cure human disease [for which you don't] possess competent and reliable scientific evidence, including, when appropriate, well-controlled human clinical studies, substantiating that the claims are true at the time they are made."

Is that the case?

 

If I'm reading this correctly, it means that 20,000 people that may well have survived if they had stayed in hospital or could have gotten to hospital have died. All because the NHS and social care system are not fit for purpose. Some will say, yes, but many of the people were old. I say, so what. They are still people, old or young.

The UK has been shown to be wanting in this crisis. If there were a war tomorrow, it would be screwed. This virus may well be the death of the Union, which will then leave all four constituent parts weaker and open to attack on many fronts. If it does collapse, it will be England that will still have to defend Great Britain (and the British Isles). Going off on a tangent.

 

Air Canada has 30,000 employees - they will be laying off 20,000 people, because they expect that after the lockdown is over they will end up with only 25% of the number of flights they usually have...

 

https://wolbbaltimore.com/2056678/z...nt-in-math-at-13-baltimore-city-high-schools/
13 schools make up a third of high schools in Baltimore, so there are 39 high schools in Baltimore. According to the article above, things look a little better in six other schools in Baltimore, where 1% of the students were found to be proficient in math. So the good news is that at 1-[(13+6)/39] =1-(19/39) = 1 - 0.487 = 51.3% of Baltimore high schools, more than 1% of the students are proficient in math.

https://www.bizjournals.com/baltimo...yland-school-districts-rank-among-top-10.html

$15,168 per student is basically twice what they spend in Utah.


@FGG In your opinion, what funding level would be enough to get those students to become proficient in math?

 

It is now 8th... still climbing.

 

I don't know. In the Raleigh example they increased funding and used data to determine how to use it effectively. You definitely need both.

 

They already have twice the funding of Utah...

Yes, you need the renovate the school building so that it looks nice, and you need to have the money to hire qualified teachers. I am sure that this is what Utah has been doing. Not sure what to do with twice that amount.

 

Back when they got us to go along with the lockdowns, wasn't the story about flattening the curve? In other words, as long as those deaths in Sweden aren't from the overwhelmed hospital system, aren't the countries with lockdowns just postponing the deaths [as they have more of the (now flattened) curve to go]?

 

Hard to compare cities to states as, outside of SLC and Park City, it's dirt cheap to live in Utah.

 

If districts are renovating buildings that don't need it, that's likely corruption, which drains the budget further. I should increase spending and use data (as Raleigh did) to see how that funding can help students. Raleigh did it through a massive school transportation overhaul and making a hard maximum on number of students/class as well as hiring more assistants for younger kids.

 

You are right. According to Salt Lake City School District 's 2018-2019 budget, in Salt Lake City they spend $9,691 per student. This is 61% (instead of 50% if we base this on the state of Utah figures) of what is being spent in Baltimore.

How can you possibly look at what is happening in Baltimore and proceed to keep repeating the above?! Are you saying that you think that in Salt Lake Cit (where the spending is 61% of what is being spent in Baltimore) a lot fewer students are proficient in math? Are you saying that it is Possible to mismanage the funding to such an extent as to waste more than half of it (wasting 40% would get one to the level of Salt Lake City, so they must be wasting more than half, if we are to assume that funding plays a significant role)? To believe that, you would have to believe that over half of the funding has been wasted for decades and nobody has noticed it.

 

People do notice and write about it. This is just one example:

https://www.baltimoresun.com/education/bs-md-ci-schools-money-returned-20180104-story.html

 

I am pretty sure that the funding figures reflected the projects that had actually taken place, and did not reflect the funds for the projects that got cancelled. Of course, I might be wrong.

 

https://www.sciencemag.org/news/2020/02/paper-non-symptomatic-patient-transmitting-coronavirus-wrong

 

The larger point is, obviously money can be mismanaged and wasted. There should definitely be real oversight. A fancier building doesn't help students (just like "good ol' boy" no bid construction contracts for schools don't... which happened not too far from here).

Somehow Raleigh increased funding and used data on how to spend it to get results.

Obviously, Baltimore can learn from this. Some city and county governments are more corrupt than others, though, unfortunately.

 

https://jamanetwork.com/journals/jamainternalmedicine/fullarticle/2766121

Don't worry guys, it's just t̵h̵e̵ ̵f̵l̵u̵ a virus with mortality an order of magnitude higher than the flu and as yet unknown long term consequences

 

If the city officials can be corrupt, so can the teachers (who could do all sorts of things that result in higher test scores [e.g., telling the students what to write, or fixing students' mistakes after the multiple choice tests were handed in, or even assigning an A to work that deserves a C, if the teacher is the grader, etc., etc., etc.]).

 

We will have lockdowns for as long as there is ONE bureaucrat who is worried of being accused of not taking enough precautions. It seems to me that at this point (when it is becoming clear that what had happened was an overreaction and some people should lose their jobs or even be sent to prison) it is all about them attempting to not lose face and pretending that a huge disaster was avoided due to their actions. Pathetic.

 

At least when I took standardized tests (which is on which school scoring is based), the teachers were not the ones administering them and they were sent and graded off site.

 

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Atlanta_Public_Schools_cheating_scandal

 

Did Raleigh miracle happen around 2009?

https://www.areavibes.com/raleigh-nc/schools/

Wait a second, 52% isn't good - Right?!!?

 

No, there was a scandal in the 2000 where they literally reversed all their successful policies because rich suburban parents didn't want their kids bused across the county. Even Colbert made fun of them reversing their resounding success.

 

Here is a bit on Colbert weighing in but the school board had shifted to the right a few years prior to this and cut budgets and changed a lot of the things that had made Raleigh a national (and international--some town in Britain apparently adopted some of the ideas) success story.

https://m.huffpost.com/us/entry/us_811048

I went to vet school in this area in the early 2000s and believe me the budget cuts and school board changes were the talk of the town and the news. By 2009, they were definitely seeing the effects and by 2011 they fully eliminated all the old policies and low and behold they are poor performing again.

 

Ah. So the testing coordinator was in on it too in Atlanta.

 

It could have been that after the corrupt people were gone, the testing began reflecting the true scores.