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Comment by SpicyLemonZest | Hacker News Reader

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.

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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.

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.

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.

> 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.

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]

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