Mike Adams branches out into TB denial?

In a scathing attack on what he calls "gunpoint medicine", Mike Adams attacks the medical establishment for their supposed ability to imprison patients, force treatments on people against their will and generally be very very evil.

Health officials in Lawrenceville, Georgia have arrested and jailed Francisco Santos, a teenager who tried to walk out of a hospital and go home after being diagnosed with TB (tuberculosis). Instead of allowing him to leave the hospital, health authorities arrested and jailed the teen, throwing him in into a 15 x 20 foot isolation chamber and not allowing him to leave until he submitted to chemical treatments pushed by doctors at the hospital. Francisco is being described as "...a threat to public safety" due to his tuberculosis.

Francisco's plight is the latest episode in a growing number of "gunpoint medicine" episodes where individuals are being arrested at gunpoint and thrown into jails or detainment centers until they submit to treatment with pharmaceuticals, chemotherapy, radiation or surgery.

His recommendation? Don't see a doctor!

As these cases of Gunpoint Medicine clearly demonstrate, you now surrender your rights when you walk into a hospital. You are not a patient; you are a prisoner. And if the medical authorities, in their own opinion, perceive you as resisting their authority, they can have you arrested on the spot, without a court order, without a trial, and even when you pose no threat to others (such as having cancer). These medical arrests are taking place in clear violation of both the Fourth Amendment (protection from unreasonable search and seizure) and Fifth Amendment (due process) of the U.S. Bill of Rights.

More crankery below the fold.

Remember this the next time you enter a hospital or clinic: By subjecting yourself to the false authority of a doctor, you are in effect surrendering your freedoms and shall only be allowed to leave the hospital or clinic by the grace of the physician! If they decide that, for whatever reason, you should not be allowed to leave the hospital, you may be arrested at gunpoint and thrown into jail for an indefinite period of time until you agree to undergo their toxic -- even deadly -- treatments.
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All this explains why I continue to encourage people to avoid doctors altogether. It's much better to take care of your health through exercise, strong nutritional habits, superfoods consumption and outright avoidance of toxic chemicals. Stay healthy and you won't need to see a doctor... ever! (I've known many people who have never seen a doctor in their entire lives, and yet are extremely healthy and long-lived.) I don't visit doctors, and I foresee no need to ever visit one unless I suffer some sort of accident or acute injury.

If you value your freedom, stay as far away from conventional doctors as possible. As you've seen here, they can have you locked up at their discretion, even without a shred of evidence that you're really dangerous to others.

But wait. Isn't Tuberculosis a deadly infectious disease? Isn't there a compelling state and societal interest in not allowing people with a dangerous airbourne infectious agent from mixing with the general population? Well, apparently not.

Skeptics of this assessment will point out that Santos has a contagious form of TB and is a genuine threat to society. Therefore, the thinking goes, medical authorities are justified in locking him up against his will, without a trial or court order.

That's a fascinating bit of delusional thinking. If you believe that, then you must also believe that health authorities should round up all AIDS patients and throw them into detention camps "for the safety of the public." After all, if you believe that TB is a disease that's dangerous enough to lock people away for having, then why not AIDS? Why not HPV, Hepatitis, or any upper respiratory illness that might pose a health hazard to some senior citizen? Once you cross the line of arresting people against their will for showing symptoms of one particular contagious disease, then you have to follow through and arrest everyone with similarly dangerous diseases.

Of course, if that happened, half the country would be behind bars, because the truth is that there are people everywhere who carry infectious germs. Simply walking through any airport exposes you to countless strains of bacteria, fungi and viruses that might pose a risk to your health.

Wow. A lot of crankery here. Why don't we isolate people with AIDS and Hepatitis? Talk about apples and oranges comparisons. You don't get HIV or Hepatitis from being exposed to the same air as a sick individual, and negligent exposure of those diseases to people can result in criminal prosecution. And comparing cold viruses to TB is idiotic. Not only are they more or less impossible to control, the relative risk of a infection with a cold compared to TB is negligible. But that doesn't stop Adams from making some insane comparisons between forcing treatments on TB patients and some doctor-dominated police state.

And how about all the dangerous elderly drivers doped up on medication? I've seen some crazy Alzheimer's patients operating vehicles who should never be allowed to drive and are a clear threat to the safety of other drivers. Why aren't these people being locked up for the safety of the public? (I'm not saying they should be, but if you're going to be consistent here, locking up TB patients means locking up all kinds of other people...)
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Can you imagine the outcry if medical authorities started locking up AIDS patients? Don't dismiss this idea: It could be next. Any tyrannical health system that can stick a gun in the face of a teenage boy with TB and throw him in prison is perfectly capable of sticking a gun in the face of an AIDS patient and locking them away, too. Today it's TB, tomorrow it could be HIV. (Just wait for the "AIDS camps" to become official U.S. policy...)

The doctors are coming! The doctors are coming! They're going to lock up old people and AIDS patients! What a lunatic. No doctor in their right mind would think these are reasonable public health actions, and his psychotic demonization of the medical profession is suggestive of the psychology behind his HIV/AIDS denial, and general conspiratorial thinking about Western medicine.

Now I promised you some TB denial. Not only does Adams not understand the basic mechanism of TB infection, he also is under a deluded impression that it's caused by vitamin D deficiency.

Tuberculosis myths
This "highly infectious form of TB," for example, is largely a medical myth. Allow me to explain: The virus certainly does exist, and it can be passed through the air, but the most important point that still escapes the understanding of conventional medical authorities is that vitamin D prevents TB infections. The only people susceptible to TB infectious are those who are chronically deficient in vitamin D! That includes people who don't get enough sunlight (or who have been brainwashed into using sunscreen all the time) and who eat atrocious diets lacking in vitamin D sources like fish oils. The problem with TB is not simply the person walking around with the virus, it's the people who are in such poor nutritional health that they're practically begging to be infected by something.

This is why TB is now an epidemic in the UK, by the way: There's very little sunlight at that latitude, and more than 80 percent of UK citizens are vitamin D deficient. (It also explains the ongoing problems with dental health and bone fractures in the UK, but that's a different story...)

First of all, tuberculosis is spread by mycobacterium tuberculosis, a bacterium, not a virus. But what about Vitamin D, is there any truth to this claim at all? Well, a little bit, but Adams cherry-picks the literature to suggest that TB infection requires Vitamin D deficiency, which is not the case. Vitamin D is a immune modulatory chemical that can actually help cells kill the intracellular mycobacterium infection through the production of proteins called defensins. Vitamin D activates toll-like receptors which then activate the synthesis of a defensin called Cathelicidin. Before the development of antibiotic drugs that were highly effective against TB, one known beneficial therapy was exposure to sunlight and vitamin D treatment which would improve TB symptoms but didn't result in clearance of the infection. Vitamin D deficiency is frequently present in about half of TB patients. Further, mutations in Vitamin D receptor and some other genes involved in Vitamin D metabolism are thought to increase the risk of acquiring a TB infection although most studies to date are underpowered (PDF). Vitamin D deficiency in dark skinned people(people with darker skin have more difficulty synthesizing natural vitamin D from sunlight exposure), vegetarian diets and diseases like celiac disease which prevent Vitamin D absorption are strongly linked to TB risk, and Vitamin D might be a useful adjuvant therapy to the standard antibiotic therapy against TB. However, in all of these studies what you see is an increased risk with Vitamin D deficiency, and worsened disease with low or absent Vitamin D levels, and it's not clear that it's purely causative. It's quite likely based on the mechanism of action of Vitamin D in the development of host cell immune response that the Vitamin D needs of TB patients are much higher than those in the control groups. Vitamin D is clearly critical for the body's immune response to mycobacterium tuberculosis, and both susceptibility and remission is dependent on adequate innate immunity generated by defensin molecules. Dark skinned individuals living at high latitude are therefore more susceptible, however, people with light skin and perfectly normal Vitamin D levels also get infections with TB. Britain would certainly benefit from a public health measure to supplement foods with Vitamin D as we do in this country.

It is also of note that the reason TB is no longer a epidemic is because of the highly effective public health measures that were instituted in the 20th century to screen for, treat, and ensure compliance of TB-infected individuals. It is ironic that Adams uses the proof of the efficacy of these techniques to attack public health practice.

What's all this about doctors pretending to "protect the public" anyway? They claim to be locking up Santos in order to protect the health of the public, and yet they'll send patients home by the thousands with prescriptions for toxic pharmaceuticals that harm everyone! FDA-approved prescription drugs are now the 4th leading cause of death in the United States (tuberculosis isn't even close). I suppose if we were to really take steps to protect the general public, we should actually be locking up the drug-pushing doctors! They are right now killing far more patients than any infectious disease.

Think about it: Oncologists openly push dangerous chemotherapy drugs that cause permanent damage to the brain, heart, liver and kidneys, even while insisting that patients take no vitamins, superfoods or nutritional supplements to protect their healthy cells during the chemo treatments. General Practitioners send patients home with prescriptions for dangerous COX-2 inhibitor drugs, diabetes drugs, statin drugs and psychotropic drugs that kill, at minimum, tens of thousands of Americans every year through heart attacks, strokes, liver failure and suicides. Where is the call to protect the public from these dangerous chemicals that are causing casualty numbers resembling a world war?

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If guns are to be drawn at all, they should be drawn during the arrest of corrupt FDA officials, evil Big Pharma operatives and unethical food company CEOs who are knowingly killing hundreds of thousands of Americans each year with their highly-profitable chemicals, additives and medicines. Francisco Santos is not a threat to your health, but modern medicine certainly is! And the FDA is without question a threat to your health and safety. In previous stories on this site, I've documented how the FDA is far more dangerous to Americans than any terrorist threat.

All I can say is wow. One of the problems with using drugs that actually work is that they have side effects which are often dangerous. When one looks at the study the cranks are always referring to (another goddamned meta-analysis, sigh), you find the authors also said this:

We found that a high proportion of ADRs (76.2%) were type A reactions. This may suggest that many ADRs are due to the use of drugs with unavoidably high toxicity. For example, warfarin often results in bleeding. It has been shown that careful drug monitoring in hospitals leads to a reduction of many of these ADRs, suggesting that some type A and type B ADRs may be due to inadequate monitoring of therapies and doses.

Yes, real drugs are dangerous and should be monitored carefully. If you consider the probability of death in a patient not receiving Warfarin who needs it is incredibly high, it justifies the use of the drug which has a known high-risk side-effect profile. It's about a balance of risks. So, about 76% of these adverse drug reactions are for drugs with known high-risk profiles, and doctors are balancing the risk of giving the drug to the patient croaking from a disease like having a blood clot in the brain. Yes, this will result in some deaths, but a net prevention in loss of life. But thorough understanding of the data has never been a crank strong point. They see 100k deaths and say, doctors kill people! Rather than the real take-home message which is that medicines that work are often dangerous and should be prescribed with care. The study authors in no way would endorse a message that their research is an indication that people should not be given medication at all.

The paranoid conspiracies, straw men and other insanity does not end there, Adams entertains one of the craziest conspiracy theories I have yet seen.

The alternative is to turn the U.S. into a medical police state, where anybody with a cough is arrested at gunpoint, and AIDS patients are thrown into detainment camps, and anybody who refuses "treatment" with synthetic chemicals gets thrown into jail. Imagine being arrested for not taking your statin drugs, antidepressants or blood thinners. Big Pharma is trying to create a society where "treatment" with drugs is mandatory, and anyone who refuses to take their chemicals will be considered a criminal. Parents are already being arrested for not subjecting their children to chemotherapy or giving in to ADHD drugs. If this trend continues, it won't be long before anyone who rejects vaccinations, drugs and psychiatric medications will be considered a criminal (or terrorist). Parents, be warned: The State is out to medicate your child, and if you resist, you may have your children taken away!

That's right, the medical/pharmaceutical complex is out for world domination. Can you believe that anyone listens to this guy? Or Newstarget in general?