PAAM Medical Letter, Vol. 4, Issue 1, February 3, 2017
Dear Colleagues!
Welcome to the New Year and to the first 2017 issue of the PAAM Medical Letter! Thank you for being members and supporters of PAAM. We appreciate the help and community that we have formed.
To those new to PAAM and the PAAM Medical Letter, welcome!
Please note: This Letter is for your thoughtful consideration and personal research and is not to be taken as something dogmatic to believe in nor promote as something official from PAAM or the international anthroposophic medical movement.
As always we will start the issue with a meditative verse by Rudolf Steiner (Verses and Mediations CW 40). This one is translated by the late Ernst Katz, PhD (1913-2009) and his translated verse is found in his posthumously published new book, The Ten Commandments in Evolution: A Spiritual-Scientific Study, SteinerBooks, 2016. I was fortunate to have him as one of my professors at the University of Michigan. While reading this book I have felt that even in his death he is still teaching me.
The sphere of the Spirit is the soul’s true home,
And we will surely reach it
By walking the path of honest thought,
By choosing as our guide the fount of love
Implanted into our heart,
By opening the eye of the soul
To nature’s script
Spread out before us through all the universe,
Telling the story of the Spirit
In all that lives and thrives,
And in the silent spaciousness of lifeless things,
And in the stream of time – the process of becoming.
From out of Rudolf Steiner’s Calendar of the Soul comes the following mantric verses during this time of the year. Below are two sets of mantras, paired to their polar opposites so we can appreciate what our southern hemispheric brothers and sisters are experiencing as well as anticipate what is to come to us from out of the future.
Verse #43 and Verse #10
Verse #43
In the depths of winter
The true being of the spirit generates warmth;
It gives the world of appearance
Powers of existence through forces of the heart;
Defying the world's cold
The inner soul fire is growing ever stronger.
Verse #10
To lofty summer heights
Ascends the shining being of the sun
It takes my human feeling
With it into its own widths of space
Intuiting stirs in my inner self
Sensation, to me dimly heralding
You will one day recognize:
A divine being did feel you then.
Verse #44 and Verse #9
Verse #44
Ever grasping new sense enticements [stirrings]
My soul's clarity,
Mindful of the spirit-birth achieved, imbues
The confounding sprouting of world-becoming
With my thinking's creative, shaping will.
Verse #9
Forgetting my personal self-will
The world's cosmic warmth, announcing summer,
Pervades my spirit and soul being;
To lose myself in light
Spirit vision beckons
And dawning intuition powerfully announces to me:
Lose yourself to find yourself.
Attachment #1 (PubMed abstract) Influenza vaccines; Time for a Rethink by Peter Doshi, PhD, in JAMA Internal Medicine 6/2013. Given the winter’s influenza and flu-like illness season and the propaganda we experience regarding one’s flu shot, it is good to read a published scholarly article questioning the whole public health campaign and the medical practice of urgent and necessary influenza vaccination. Along with Tom Jefferson, MD, from the Cochcrane Collaborative, Doshi shows there is no real good evidence showing the unbiased efficacy of the influenza vaccine and that harms of the vaccine are not easily dismissed. Doshi reminds us that the influenza disease is also less fearful and harmful than advertised. As we all know, influenza A and B illness are, for most people, a relatively uncommon and self-limiting disease. Serious morbidity and mortality seem to be rare. The CDC’s estimates of anywhere from 36,000-60,000 deaths a year attributed to influenza are probably inflated because they count all deaths from pneumonia, respiratory complications and heart failure as all due to influenza—unlikely and difficult to prove. The CDC claims that the vaccine is approximately 50% effective is from biased data and ignores the known varying effectiveness in different age groups and from season to season (because of poor matching of the vaccine antigens with actual circulating strains). This is a short, well written article pointing to the unexamined claims and assumptions behind the campaign for influenza vaccination.
Attachment #2 Has a letter to the editor from representatives of the Infectious Diseases Society of America (IDSA) and the Society for Healthcare Epidemiology of America(SHEA) criticizing the Rethink article and Doshi’s measured but trenchant response. Many PAAM Medical Letter readers may remember a previous issue where a commentary in the BMJ by Peter Doshi was highlighted. There he shows and discusses CDC’s marketing of the “serious” disease of influenza and the efficacy and safety of the influenza vaccine. He points out the biased, “pseudoscience” (“the rhetoric of science”) the CDC uses to bolster its public health campaign.
Attachment #3 (BMJ abstract) is the commentary included again, so that readers can have a fuller picture of the mainstream literature’s criticisms of the science and belief behind annual influenza recommendations. Doshi writes well, succinctly and doesn’t mince his words.
While Doshi emphasizes that assessing for harms from influenza vaccines is inadequate in the medical research literature, he doesn’t go into the specific, potential, and troublesome toxic substances in influenza vaccines like ethylmercury (Thimerasol) still found in multi-dose vials, and aluminum salts used as adjuvants in most vaccines, including influenza vaccines. It appears that the preservative, Thimerasol, has been responsible for a range of neurotoxic effects, and aluminum is also neurotoxic and seems a likely agent inducing autoimmune syndromes, called ASIA (Autoimmune/Autoinflammatory Syndrome Induced by Adjuvants). What we still don’t know is how frequent these adverse reactions are occurring. We definitely need reliable information about this.
Attachment #4 (Clinical Infectious Diseases abstract) A 2014 placebo-controlled RCT of the influenza vaccine on influenza infections in Hong Kong children over three years. This is only proper, placebo-controlled trial on the influenza vaccine that I could find during a Medline search from 2014 (after Doshi’s letter to the editor in 2014) and Jan. 28, 2017. There are plenty of influenza “vaccine effectiveness” studies done during this time, but they are all some aspect of an observation study and are open to bias and confounders. Only this RCT by Cowling BJ, et. al. meets the criteria for a true study of inactivated influenza vaccine effectiveness that many like Doshi demand. This was a moderately sized study of 796 children, which means less frequent but important adverse reactions are not likely to be detected. While not mentioned in the abstract, the paper points out that in table 2 only the influenza A(H1N1) pandemic 2009 vaccine was significantly (p=.05) , but minimally, effective in the 2009 season (0.43 cumulative incidence of influenza illness for vaccinated vs. 0.59 cumulative incidence for placebo, a 28% RRR or 16% ARR). The other 4 influenza vaccines used (5 total influenza seasons in 3 years in Hong Kong!) were not significantly effective. This confirms the 2006-2010 Cochcrane meta-analytic conclusions that influenza vaccine effectiveness has not been shown, and the observational studies purporting 50-60% vaccine effectiveness in some populations are likely inaccurate because of methodologic issues and confounders not controlled for in those optimistic studies. Even most observational studies show that in the elderly the influenza vaccine effectiveness somewhere between near zero and 16%! Besides the modest size of the study, the other limitation is that it failed report any adverse reactions in either group and it doesn’t even mention if adverse reactions were specifically assessed. Their methods only mention looking for URI types symptoms every 2 weeks throughout the study. This RCT is an extreme example of not reporting adverse reactions, but most published RCTs give an optimistic light about the frequency, range and severity of adverse reactions. Only during the post-marketing period do we really learn about the range of adverse reactions and their frequency.
Attachment #5. This is a recent article JFK, Jr. published on the web. He is a tireless fighter for the environment and for vaccine safety. However, I find his quoting of scientific studies to be somewhat selective and misleading. I do, however, agree with his overall conclusion. Attached is an annotated & copied version of his article from the web. I have included the URL so you can go to the web site and click the many active links to the studies and sites he references.
Attachment #6 Branko Furst’s Radical Alternative: Is the Heart Moved by the Blood, Rather Than Vice Versa? This well written 2017 article by Walter Alexander nicely summarizes PAAM Member, Branko Furst, MD’s seminal work on the heart and circulation, providing a hemocentric view of blood flow and summarizing all the relevant science that points to the inadequacies of the heart as solely a propulsion-pump machine. There are great illustrations that I think you will find helpful in understanding the concepts. Enjoy. Thank you, Branko, for this contribution. (Article on NLM)
Attachment # 7 Last, and certainly not least, is “virtually all” the quotations available in English of Rudolf Steiner’s, regarding vaccination, karma and childhood illnesses, compiled by David Adams. This will be a useful reference! Steiner provides a much more comprehensive view about common childhood illnesses and their potential long-term beneficial effects compared to the modern narrow view that preventable illnesses are bad and need to be wiped out. Many might find his views radical or difficult to understand because he does require and assume a fair amount of understanding about anthroposophy, knowledge of the context of the quotes, and the development of more plastic, spiritualized thinking. In other places Steiner admits that all the many details in AM may not be correct, but many definitely are, however shocking, and he strongly felt that what was most important was to understand and appreciate the direction that anthroposophy can take medicine to be more human-centered, comprehensive, and able to work with the important spiritual dynamics of the human being.
ANNOUNCEMENTS
Peter Heusser’s new book, Anthroposophy and Science: An Introduction, 2016, is now available on Amazon.com. As mentioned before, this book gives a good understanding of the scientific foundations of AM and how much of science can be interpreted to be consistent with a fourfold view of the human being.
CONTRIBUTIONS
Thank you to all who have contributed to the PAAM Medical Letter. Please continue to do so! Also, please submit any comments, suggestions or questions. All are welcome.
On behalf of the PAAM Board and to you, the PAAM colleagues,
Ricardo Bartelme, M.D.