Allow me to vent . . . Among my recent peeves are those online purveyors of “home emergency drug kits”. One popular site, The Wellness Company, touts:
“Peace of mind with an urgent care at home . . . Have 8 prescription-only life-saving medications, including Ivermectin, generic Z-pak, and Amoxicillin, on hand. Every kit includes a Guidebook as an educational resource for safe use in the face of unforeseen medical emergencies and resource shortages.”
These are increasingly being advertised on conservative-leaning radio and TV shows. To underscore the point, The Wellness Company features as its spokesperson medical maverick Dr. Peter McCullough, a well-known, outspoken critic of mainstream medicine’s Covid management.
Deservedly so, McCullough highlighted safety issues with the fast-tracking and mandating of minimally-vetted mRNA vaccines, as well as urging grassroots adoption of controversial drugs like ivermectin and hydroxychloroquine during the pandemic.
I’ve featured him as a guest on Intelligent Medicine to air his views on Covid. He’s been reviled and defrocked (undeservedly, his board certification in internal medicine was revoked) but has remained the darling of MAHA stalwarts.
But I find it unbecoming that he’s now hawking a witches’ brew of powerful medications, easily obtained and stockpiled, to his many followers who have evidently completely lost faith in mainstream medicine’s ability to address their health needs.
It’s no accident that Covid undermined the confidence of large segments of the U.S. public in pronouncements by the health establishment. Since Democrats and the Biden administration were tied to some of the worst missteps, Covid widened polarization between proponents and critics of vaccine mandates, masking, and lockdowns.
Moreover, there’s a gulf between the political parties over self-reliance—between Liberals who view government-sanctioned institutional medicine as the answer, and Conservatives who profoundly distrust it. Among the latter, there’s a considerable tranche who are outright “preppers”, who have long stashed food and emergency supplies against a future Armageddon.
So why not antibiotics and other powerful drugs, to cover every conceivable medical eventuality when societal breakdown looms?
One of the commercials ominously intones: “What if you wake up one day with a fever and a sore throat?” The implication is that you better have some powerful antibiotics on hand.
Anyone with minimal medical literacy would realize that the vast majority of sore throats and upper respiratory infections are viral, which antibiotics don’t touch!
But lo, each kit contains a handy set of cards, that explain in simple layperson’s language, how and under what circumstances to deploy the drugs. These include, in an $1,199 “Field Emergency Kit”, powerful meds for up to 60 medical conditions, from diabetes and high blood pressure, to abdominal pain, anthrax, snake bites, malaria, sexually transmitted diseases, plague, and radiation exposure.
If I’d only had those cards in med school, perhaps I could’ve skipped the entire four-year ordeal and avoided decades of student loan repayments!
Moreover, you don’t have to get even a cursory virtual intake from a doctor to approve your trove of medications, except for some states that still require an actual face-to-face telemedicine consult. But rest assured:
“Immediately after kit purchase, please complete the required intake form sent to your email for one of our providers to evaluate. Once approved, expect to receive your kit within 2-3 weeks.”
What could possibly go wrong?
Does it sound self-serving or old-fashioned for me to humbly suggest that, just maybe, instead of facilitating self-empowerment, unleashing a torrent of powerful drugs into unqualified hands represents not a democratization of care, but an unprecedented threat to Americans’ health?
Doctors have long decried the stockpiling of antibiotics by the public. It facilitates casual and unnecessary antibiotic use, fosters antibiotic resistance, pollutes our waterways with residues that kill aquatic life, and creates serious side effects.
For example, the one time in the last 45 years that I took a self-prescribed antibiotic (Augmentin) in a misguided effort to speed resolution of a sinus infection so that I could be OK for a family Thanksgiving gathering, I immediately regretted it; my diarrhea was so bad that I quit the drug after a couple of doses, and attended Thanksgiving with a stuffy nose, that, as always, abated eventually on its own.
Haven’t we depleted our microbiomes enough with over-reliance on powerful acid-blockers and antibiotics?
While shopping on some of these sites, you can stock up on vogues like GLP-1 drugs, “Spike protein kits,” and methylene blue.
Ivermectin, once derided by health mandarins as “horse dewormer”, turns out to have some plausibility against Covid and even some cancers. But it’s now been enshrined by the medical counterculture as a cure-all. The government once punished doctors for prescribing it and forced pharmacies not to dispense it; now the forbidden fruit is readily available via a click of a mouse, its appeal super-charged by the previous ban.
Riding the MAHA wave, these companies have proliferated. I applaud efforts to make routine healthcare accessible to the masses. Telemedicine and AI algorithms have tremendous potential to help people circumvent obstacles to care, but these aggressive start-ups bear little resemblance to “Intelligent Medicine”. They’re businesses that exploit fear and ignorance.
Posing as an alternative to stodgy conventional medicine, they amplify the worst excesses of medical orthodoxy—over-treatment with powerful drugs instead of enlightened self-care.
Living near golf courses and Parkinson’s Disease
I vividly recall a patient I saw many years ago. She was trundled in by her family in a wheelchair. Her head bobbing uncontrollably, she managed a few syllables until her husband interceded:
“They don’t really know what’s going on with her. The doctors seem baffled. They said it resembles Parkinson’s Disease, but it seems to involve her whole brain, not just her ability to walk and talk.”
“So they treated her with Parkinson’s drugs,” he continued, “But they didn’t help. They ended up diagnosing her with ‘Atypical Parkinson’s Disease’ just to put a name on it.”
My heart sank because of the severity of this poor woman’s symptoms. I prefer working with patients during early phases of Parkinson’s, Alzheimer’s, or MS because there are good prospects for slowing or even reversing the declines, but whatever was afflicting this patient, it was advanced.
I pored over the woman’s records, noting the irregularities in her brain MRIs, and the varying opinions of all the specialists that she’d seen.
I then turned to the detailed patient questionnaire that her family had filled out. The first line of her intake form jumped out at me:
“It says here that your address is 16 Golf Drive?”
“Yes,” said the husband. “It’s always been our dream to retire to a golf community in Florida, and we moved there a couple of years ago.”
“And your wife was well before that?”
“Yes.”
“And how close do you live to the greens?”
“It’s great, doc, you just have to walk out from our patio onto the 8th hole. Until my wife got sick, we were able to golf practically every day. And they keep the grounds perfectly manicured, not a weed in sight! It’s paradise!”
I tried to modulate my tone as I gently explained to them that golf courses are notorious for the herbicides and pesticides deployed liberally to achieve their perfect green carpeting. Even then I knew they were linked to neurodegenerative conditions, especially Parkinson’s. Brain injuries to agricultural workers and Vietnam vets with herbicides like paraquat had long been acknowledged.
“So how come I’m not sick?” the husband asked.
“Different people have different capacities to handle toxic exposures. Some of us are ‘super rats’, others are like ‘canaries in a coal mine’, vulnerable to insults that others tolerate. Some of this may be genetically determined. Women, especially, may be more susceptible because they metabolize harmful chemicals less well.”
I endeavored to help the family with a menu of supplements including n-acetylcysteine, glutathione, and mitochondrial support nutrients, but I already anticipated the prognosis was grim. I suggested intravenous glutathione drips when they returned to Florida. But I don’t recall hearing from that patient again after our first encounter.
Only belatedly comes confirmation from last month’s study in JAMA: “Proximity to Golf Courses and Risk of Parkinson Disease”
The researchers looked at 419 individuals with Parkinson’s Disease, average age 73, and compared them to 5113 matched control subjects. They found that:
“ . . . living within 1 mile of a golf course was associated with 126% increased odds of developing PD compared with individuals living more than 6 miles away from a golf course . . . Individuals living within water service areas with a golf course had nearly double the odds of PD compared with individuals in water service areas without golf courses . . . Additionally, individuals living in water service areas with a golf course in vulnerable groundwater regions had 82% greater odds of developing PD compared with those in nonvulnerable groundwater regions.”
Marshaling numerous previous scientific studies, they explained:
“For years pesticides including organophosphates, chlorpyrifos, 27methylchlorophenoxypropionic acid (MCPP), 2,4-dichlorophenoxyacetic acid (2,4-D), maneb, and organochlorines, known to be associated with the development of PD, have been used to treat golf courses. Some studies have identified a link between golf courses and increased risk of adverse health outcomes. Pesticides such as paraquat and rotenone have been shown to induce Parkinson-like neurodegeneration in the substantia nigra, primarily through mechanisms involving oxidative stress, mitochondrial dysfunction, and dopaminergic neuron apoptosis.”
A clear instance where a retirement dream turned into a nightmare. Natural bug and weed control are the way to go, especially if you have a lawn where kids and pets frolic. Immaculate turf shouldn’t take precedence over a healthy brain.
