We had the follow-up appointment with the Neurologist, Dr. Santiago this morning. I was accompanied by Jan, so, as always, contact her for the minority opinion. It started off slowly, with the blood pressure, pulse rate, O2 sats, etc. The nurse, Sherry, was frowning as she checked the paperwork, checked a couple of things out of the room and came back, still frowning.
The Doctor came in shortly and apologized for the fact that they still didn’t have the results of the Lumbar Puncture. He reported that it was the third time recently that they had problems getting the results. We talked about me being local, as opposed to driving a couple of hours to get here, and we were preparing to have to come back.
There was a knock on the door and someone, presumably Sherry, handed in a couple of sheets of paper (see below). She had presumably broken through barrier and gotten the results.
The Dr. then shifted the tone and delivered the good news.
The key information is on page 2 under the block labelled CSF. The “Beta-Amyloid Ratio” is reported as 0.092 while the Reference Range is “>or=0.073”. Therefore, I do NOT have Alzheimer’s Disease (or at least not yet).
Jan pointed out that at the bottom of page 2 that the test was performed by Mayo Clinic Laboratories. Thanks Mayo!!!
As we talked about the results the Dr mentioned that Sherry could be quite fierce over the phone and attributed the ability to get this done to her. After I got home, I called a florist (amazingly located on 2nd street) to order a flower arrangement to be delivered to her at work today to thank her. I just got a phone call from her thanking me; I think I made her day.
Aside for persons of XY gender. Many years ago, before my first patrol on the USS Sam Rayburn, the COB (Chief of the Boat) took aside all the people making their first patrol. He laid some facts on us as if they were handed down from Jehovah himself. The bottom line was people with XX chromosomes are queer for the sexual organs of plants. As an XY you don’t have to make sense of it, or even understand it at all – just accept it as a given. So, if you accept it as a given, go to a florist and make arrangements to send your wife/girlfriend the sexual organs of plants (flowers) once a week, or every two weeks, or for you cheap bastards at least once a month. Just do it, don’t analyze it, just do it. I took his advice and have never looked back. It really is true. In addition, I had them delivered at work so that all her co-workers could see that I loved her.
I’ll write more later this week on what my plans are moving forward.
Brief addendum. I see that I have inadvertently confused some of you. I mentioned sending flowers to Sherry as a sign of my appreciation for her tenacity in beating an answer out of the people we were depending on for answers.
I wrote the last paragraph over time, and revised it a couple of times, in order to reveal to some men, the truths I had discovered. In the last sentence I was referring specifically to Lindsay and the fact that I was sending flowers to her at work while I was deployed. I certainly did not mean to suggest any nefarious interest in other females.
I have made a most distressing discovery. Our medical establishment is apparently terminally broken. A little background: most of you realize that my wife suffered for 40 years with multiple sclerosis. She was fortunate/unfortunate enough to have lived through having no specific treatments for the disease through having a choice of over a dozen injectable or oral treatments.
One of the problems with trying to tease out effective treatments was a tremendous placebo effect, your belief in the treatment created a placebo effect that really did make the disease seem to be receding. It was virtually impossible to do a double-blind test with for instance bee-sting therapy.
Lindsay 2015 Medication List
Above is the 2015 list we used to manage her medications. We used the list as a discussion point at her doctor’s appointments. You can see she was taking Tecfidera (Dimetyl Fumerate) for MS, but she was also taking Prozac and Ritalin, off-label, as ancillary drugs that seemed to help with MS symptoms. In the times BT (before Trump) physicians, especially specialists, could prescribe virtually anything in the formulary that, in their judgement, might help with the disease process.
AT (After Trump) things changed. He mentioned two drugs, in particular, that might be helpful with COVID-19: Hydroxychloroquine and Ivermectin. Although some doctors were successfully treating patients there were two specific problems: They were well beyond the patent expirations and were available for low cost as generic drugs; and they had been endorsed by Orange-Man-Bad and thus were “Double-Plus-Ungood”.
When the podcaster, Joe Rogan came down with COVID-19 he took a number of drugs, including getting a prescription for (human) Ivermectin from his doctor. He was excoriated by CNN and other mainstream media for taking “horse de-wormer”. See HERE.
As of the Winter of 2021 it is well nigh impossible to get a prescription for Ivermectin in most parts of the country. In hospitals it will not be prescribed, sometimes even when ordered by the courts. See HERE and HERE. I have inquired of my doctor and she indicated that she is unable to prescribe it.
There are some studies emerging (like HERE and HERE) that seem to have significantly robust results. So why is it not possible to get a double-blind, placebo controlled study? Sadly, I think that it is that none of the major drug companies will fund it because Ivermectin and Hydroxychloroquine are both generic drugs.
There is some data out there. There is a doctor who analyzed a massive international study HERE. The presentation is information dense, but reminds me of many of the presentations of data for various MS treatments. Remember that this study was done before April 2021. This is not, as referenced by the media, a wack-a-doodle drug that has shown no positive results for COVID-19. I personally think that the deliberate obstruction of the use and investigation of this drug is criminal.
Credo (from Latin – ‘I believe’) is a statement of beliefs. The most notable examples are the Apostle’s Creed and the more expansive Nicene Creed which was promulgated by Emperor Constantine in 325AD to address some specific heresies at the time (and modified in 381 AD).
My use of the term today is to nail down some specific facts concerning COVID-19. If you read anything here that you think is erroneous I would welcome any proof that you have that I am wrong. Note that most of the info I am quoting from is from Wikipedia and NIH websites.
Note that the elderly death rate was exacerbated by some states returning COVID infected patients to their nursing homes rather than keeping them isolated to avoid infecting other vulnerable people.
What this indicates is that this is NOT the worst disease, evah. For comparison, lets look at the “Spanish Flu” pandemic of 1918.
Difference between the influenza mortality age-distributions of the 1918 epidemic and normal epidemics – deaths per 100,000 persons in each age group, United States, for the interpandemic years 1911–1917 (dashed line) and the pandemic year 1918 (solid line)
Note the large spike in children (especially under 4) and 25-34 year olds as well as the expected deaths of the elderly.
Notes^ Not pandemic, but included for comparison purposes.
Note the Typical seasonal flu at the bottom of the chart. Every year between 290,000 and 650,000 thousand people die worldwide. That’s EVERY YEAR. (Side note: none of us are getting out of this alive!)
From the Wikipedia page on COVID-19 pandemic deaths page HERE as of November 2021 there have been just under 5 million deaths worldwide – over two years. And there is also dramatic overcounting of deaths “With COVID” as opposed to deaths “Caused by COVID”. Due to the initial panic and the incentives. Estimates vary widely on the actual deaths caused by COVID-19, as well as the impact of co-morbidities.
“For example, the most recent polling from Civiqs shows that on the question of whether a given respondent is “extremely concerned” about the coronavirus, the divide between Democrats and Republicans, respectively, is 60 percent to 12 percent. By that same token, just 2 percent of Democrats are “not concerned at all,” while 33 percent of Republicans fit in that bucket.“
A more scholarly presentation of the “Politicization and Polarization in COVID-19 News Coverage”. It is a product of the National Institutes of Health. What I take from this is that any and all reporting is suspect and we have to look deeper to analyze what is actually going on.
5. The United States is unique in that public health issues are primarily the domain of each of the fifty states. Quite naturally, there rapidly emerged a red/blue split in response to mask mandates, requiring vaccinations, and the widespread closing of businesses, bars, etc. Despite radically different approaches to things like shutdowns, enforced quarantines, draconian government overreach in the end all of the states ended up with results that didn’t correlate to any of the approaches. Look HERE for maps and compare California and Florida or Texas and Michigan. Formal lockdowns & Government forced closings clearly don’t affect infection rates significantly.
6. The vast majority of people do not understand what being vaccinated really means. From Wikipedia,
“The terms vaccine and vaccination are derived from Variolae vaccinae (smallpox of the cow), the term devised by Edward Jenner (who both developed the concept of vaccines and created the first vaccine) to denote cowpox. He used the phrase in 1798 for the long title of his Inquiry into the Variolae vaccinae Known as the Cow Pox, in which he described the protective effect of cowpox against smallpox.[13] In 1881, to honor Jenner, Louis Pasteur proposed that the terms should be extended to cover the new protective inoculations then being developed “
From Wikipedia enty for Vaccine
A vaccine is a preparation that is administered (as by injection) to stimulate the body’s immune response against a specific infectious agent or disease. They vary in effectiveness from near 100% (for example Polio and small pox) to under 40% (annual influenza vaccine, based on what variants are expected in any given year). You can also get an immune response by actually being exposed to the disease. In my lifetime parents actively sought to infect children with chicken pox (see Pox Party) prior to a vaccine being available, since childhood infection was typically much milder and easier to manage than adult cases, which could be fatal.
As of November 2021, it is apparent that the initial mRNA vaccines are nowhere near as effective as initially hoped. Some of the most widely vaccinated countries (e.g. Israel & United States) have seen resurgences in infections of COVID-19 especially among the previously vaccinated. Reports from Israel have indicated that immunity due to actual infection is much greater than by vaccination. In my view, we would be much better off NOT vaccinating people 25 and under, but encouraging them to get the disease, since the chances of adverse effects by the vaccine is greater than the chances of adverse effects from the disease. Don’t wear masks, encourage people mingling and returning to life as normal. Over time the pandemic will end and COVID-19 will become endemic part of the normal background of viral diseases.
The attempt to prevent anyone, anywhere from falling ill to a widespread viral influenza is doomed to failure. In addition, some initial cases of myocarditis have been reported among young males 2 days after receiving vaccination for COVID-19; it seems counter-productive to insist on vaccination for the non-elderly until there is a fully tested, non-emergency authorized vaccine available.
Finally, the widespread fear and anxiety has been spread by opportunistic politicians for the purpose of encouraging statist principles. If you look at states with the tightest lockdowns you see overwhelmingly anti-democratic (note not the Democrat Party) politicians. The rush to inoculate 100% of the population with an emergency-use authorized (and protected against lawsuit) “vaccine” is a level of government overreach that is astounding. Consider the demand by the OHSA that every company with more than 100 employees must ensure that everyone get the jab (currently blocked by the courts, fortunately). Who elected them to demand such a thing?
