Comment by otikik | Hacker News Reader

Comment by otikik | Hacker News Reader

Is it this Karol Sikora?

> Promotion of alternative medicine

> Sikora and the School of Medicine at Buckingham have in the past been supportive of alternative medicine. For a short time, Buckingham offered a diploma in "integrated medicine" (a relatively recent euphemism for alternative medicine). Sikora was a Foundation Fellow of Prince Charles' now-defunct alternative medicine lobby group The Prince's Foundation for Integrated Health[24] and Chair of the Faculty of Integrated Medicine, which is unaffiliated with any university; it includes Drs Rosy Daniel and Mark Atkinson, who led Buckingham's "integrated medicine" course. > > Sikora is also a "professional member" of the College of Medicine, a patient-oriented healthcare lobby group also linked to the Prince of Wales that appeared shortly after the collapse of the Prince's Foundation. The College has been criticised extensively in the British Medical Journal for its promotion of alternative medicine. These claims have been contested by the College. He is on the advisory panel of complementary cancer care charity Penny Brohn Cancer Care (formerly the Bristol Cancer Help Centre) of whom Prince Charles is a patron, and is a patron of the Iain Rennie Hospice at Home. Statements by Sikora have been critical of unproven methods of alternative medicine, after Parliament member Lord Maurice Saatchi proposed a bill allowing doctors to use unproven experimental therapies, and he has spoken out against claims that an alkaline diet can cure cancer.

Source: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Karol_Sikora#Promotion_of_alte...

It sounds like he might actually have infringed Youtube's "Harmful or dangerous content" guidelines:

> Harmful or dangerous content > > Don't post videos that encourage others to do things that might cause them to get badly hurt, especially kids. Videos showing such harmful or dangerous acts may get age-restricted or removed depending on their severity.

Source: https://www.youtube.com/about/policies/#community-guidelines

With this reasoning, all food videos showing desserts with high calories and high sugar content should be banned, since obesity is an epidemic that kills and is harmful.

The guidelines are obviously written by a lawyer so Google can have it both ways. (To be fair, most content platforms would have similar lawyerly policies)

Not a bad idea. At least direct advertisement or false information about unhealthy food should be banned. This has already happened with tobacco or high caloric drinks in some countries like Singapore in physical stores.

These are relatively simple steps that would improve public health dramatically, I'm not really sure why these kinds of arguments are presented like some sort of self-evident zinger against censoring dangerous content.

I think it’s because people are uncomfortable with the idea that information can be harmful to the masses who might not be able to process it ‘correctly.’

> These are relatively simple steps that would improve public health dramatically

And nuking a city stops all crime in it. If you only look at one tiny aspect and ignore everything else, just about anything can be made to seem sensible.

Nudge theory agrees with you, and as such they would maybe not ban them outright, but just like cigarettes packs have a warning stating exactly as you said, high sugar, high fructose foods are a health hazard before the video plays

Alternative medicine is mostly bunk, but I absolutely don't agree that it constitutes "harmful or dangerous countent" or should be banned from Youtube. Disputing the consensus should not by itself be forbidden, even when the consensus is accurate and important.

That depends what the alternative medicine asks the patient to do. Anecdote: my mother was told to do coffee enemas in Tijuana to get rid of her colorectal cancer. She very seriously debated it with me.

Whose responsibility is that? Serious question.

The patient's, sadly. The one person whose problem-solving abilities are impaired. Quackwatch.org did help my mother decide things and move away from the treatments above.

> Disputing the consensus should not by itself be forbidden, even when the consensus is accurate and important.

I have a facebook page for sharing my take on non-monopoly medicine. I wrote a blog post for one of my websites commenting on a Spectator.co.uk article about how the Germans were doing much better with their SARS-CoV-2 patients than the Italians. The interviewed German doctor attributed their success to their making every effort to not ventilate their COVID-19 patients.

Facebook scanned my website and decided that it violated their "community standards", or some such claptrap. But the facebook robots let me directly link the same Spectator article to my facebook page. Facebook's algorithms must have changed between March and April, as they previously allowed my early-March post calling SARS-CoV-2 a 'weakling virus'. [I stand by that statement: the SARS-CoV-2 virus has mostly killed nursing home residents, ventilated patients, and other vulnerable populations (vitamin-D deficiency), and is entirely survivable for young/otherwise healthy people.]

Dr. Cameron Kyle-Sidell broke rank with consensus to share the experience of doctors on the front lines actually treating SARS-CoV-2 patients, by posting a few videos expressing his frustration at the standards his ICU was implementing while treating SARS-CoV-2 [0]. He single handedly changed the COVID-19 standard of care in the United States by objecting to the consensus policy of ventilating fully-coherent people, thereby preventing untold number of patients from being harmed with ventilation. A later Spectator.co.uk article was written by a Canadian M.D. who traced the abandonment of ventilation for SARS-CoV-2 patients to Dr. Kyle-Sidell's efforts. The Canadian opined that Kyle-Sidell really just tapped in to the mass of front-line workers' observations that aggressive ventilation was not helping.

Conventional medicine is founded on quicksand (mercury/blister agents/bloodletting/etc), got captured by the pharmaceutical industry in the early 1900's (over-reliance on asprin, heroin, etc), made some progress in the early 20th century anyways (antibiotics, imaging, lab tests, science), then was led astray by drug reps promoting new patent-medicines when the old patent medicines lost their protection.

A solid case can be made that the former consensus on SARS-CoV-2 was wrong, and that BY DEFERRING TO THE CONSENSUS OF THE MEDICAL MONOPOLISTS the platforms are promoting modern bloodletting.

[0] https://twitter.com/cameronks/status/1246765252307533825 / https://twitter.com/cameronks/status/1246762772400148480 - These two tweets from April 5th announced the Doctor's uploading his video to Vimeo and YouTube. Dr. Kyle-Sidell's video seem to have been the catalyst for the abandonment of the former consensus of proactively ventilating SARS-CoV-2 patients. [483]

> Dr. Cameron Kyle-Sidell broke rank with consensus to share the experience of doctors on the front lines actually treating SARS-CoV-2 patients, by posting a few videos expressing his frustration at the standards his ICU was implementing while treating SARS-CoV-2 [0]. He single handedly changed the COVID-19 standard of care in the United States by objecting to the consensus policy of ventilating fully-coherent people, thereby preventing untold number of patients from being harmed with ventilation. A later Spectator.co.uk article was written by a Canadian M.D. who traced the abandonment of ventilation for SARS-CoV-2 patients to Dr. Kyle-Sidell's efforts. The Canadian opined that Kyle-Sidell really just tapped in to the mass of front-line workers' observations that aggressive ventilation was not helping.

You've completely misunderstood this.

It's not the ventilation that was killing patients. It was the covid-19 that was killing patients.

We've reduced the numbers of people going onto vents. This has not reduced the numbers of people dying. Now they're dying with nasal oxygen in a care home, not on a vent in an ICU. It's a better death, but they're still dead.

> It's not the ventilation that was killing patients. It was the covid-19 that was killing patients.

I'm not a professional with years of slinging the lingo. But I think Kyle-Sidell's retweet of "Barotrauma is a real phenomenon" [0] implies [edit] that aggressive ventilation was actually what was killing people. Is it so unreasonable to propose that many of the prematurely-ventilated might have survived, if not for their ventilation?

Wikipedia has a page about Barotrauma, which is damage to bodies caused by pressure differentials: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Barotrauma

Dr. @erikfreyrMD's earlier tweet said "I don't know where this dogma of 'intubate early' came from. Intubation is a death sentence. " [1] (emphasis added).

[0] https://twitter.com/erikfreyrMD/status/1243775103071973376

[1] https://twitter.com/erikfreyrMD/status/1243697159037259776

[edit1: means -> implies]

> Is it so unreasonable to propose that many of the prematurely-ventilated might have survived, if not for their ventilation?

Yes, because we've stopped intubating people so early and they're still dying.

Do you have sources for any of your claims? My understanding is that there is a real medical discussion about when and under what circumstances it is appropriate to ventilate a covid patient. Some patients certainly die from ventilation who would otherwise have survived Covid. Some patients live due to venilation who would would otherwise have died.

Calling nitrogen mustard a ‘blister agent’ is unhelpful in this context.

"Blister agents" refers to obsolete medications such as the extract from Spanish fly [0], which was used to try to help President George Washington recover from his cold:

"other treatments they gave [George Washington] during that period were enemas and drugs to make him vomit and something called blisters, where they applied Spanish fly onto his throat, which raises a painful blister, again to remove these terrible humors that are caution the inflammation."

-Bloodletting and blisters: Solving the medical mystery of George Washington’s death, https://www.pbs.org/newshour/show/bloodletting-blisters-solv...

[0] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Spanish_fly [473]

Take a look at http://whatstheharm.net/

That should give you a better idea of what harms alternative medicine quackery can cause.

I have no doubt that believing dumb things can cause you to make bad decisions. I just don't agree that being wrong is "dangerous" in the normal sense of the word, and I don't think that banning people from saying dumb things is a good or effective solution.

It's another story when people are actively running interference. I've seen messages like "don't go to the doctor for your cancer", and I agree those should be suppressed. But that doesn't seem to be what's happening here.

Imagine a population of 1 user. A user puts of a video advertised as instructions for doing a dangerous task while leaving out vitally important steps necessary to the user actually performing the task safely. The user follows instructions and promptly dies. The user was responsible for their own actions but nonetheless its hard to argue that if we left the video up after we had identified the issue led we and the author are both complicit. We should have taken down the video. The user is still free to host their own videos but it wont achieve as much of an audience without the benefit of the platform.

Imagine a population of 1 million users. In one timeline evil, stupid misinformation isn't spread around and 1000 people die.

In another timeline it is spread around and 10000 people die. Warning labels can't help here because most of the people negatively effected are multiple steps removed from such a label. Like the first example we should have reduced its audience by taking it down entirely not added a warning label that 50-80% wont attend to.

I agree he's harmful.

I just wanted to put in a nice word for Penny Brohn. They very careful position themselves as complementary, not alternative, to conventional cancer treatment.

There was some work that looked at the outcomes of the Bristol Cancer Help Centre that showed poor outcomes, but that research didn't correct for the illness of the patients. Lots of people using the service were on palliative care pathways and were expected to die. They were using the service to get the death they wanted.

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