One thing from another

Learning as a child, teaching as an adult

History

I had at least four fathers. My biological father, my stepfather, my paternal grandfather, and the father of my best friend in high school. Only the last of these is still alive. One thing which each of them had in common was a facility with explanations about the world around us and how things work. Instead of facility, I thought to use the word alacrity, but my Pop pop could be grumpy when I asked him the meaning or spelling of a word. “There’s a very big dictionary on the book shelf at the end of the hall Scotty.” Yes, I knew that. It was the one that each of my siblings, cousins and myself would take turns sitting on at the dining room table during holidays growing up. “But you’re right here Pop pop, and you explain it so well.” That would usually get a look up from his Travis McGee novel and over the rims of his glasses, then an answer. Yes!

Because my dad had the first shift in this province of fathers, his patient explanations overshadow all others. Why is the sky blue? What makes wind? Are cats smarter than dogs? Why do dogs eat cat poop? (seriously, that made me doubt that dogs are smarter than cats) Do girls ever fart? Do all fish have teeth? (the movie Piranha had come out) How does Santa get down the Chimney? If God created the world, who created God? How does a lightbulb work? Why do you use a radar detector? That’s just for starters. Clearly he had his work cut out for him.

Learning from my dad, 1971

I marveled that he knew so much about so many things. As an adult, I remember my dad and think that it would be fair to say he was a Renaissance man. He played tennis and volleyball, and took up martial arts before his death. He built a passive solar house, restored a Model A Ford coupe with a rumble seat, had a beautiful garden, and was a decent cook by his third marriage. He was a successful salesman, an introvert who taught himself to be socially engaging, and was well-respected by his colleagues. He knew things, things that mattered. He had the answers to my questions, and on the rare occasion that he didn’t, he didn’t fake it.

Recent Past

One of my favorite novelists is Barbara Kingsolver. The last book I read by her was Demon Copperhead which is a story of life and love in the southern Appalachian Mountains of Virginia. A line early in the novel has stuck with me as I have struggled to master this novel medical realm of Covid. “If you care, you’ll learn one thing from another. Anybody knows a sheepdog from a beagle, or a Whopper from a Big Mac.”

In the emergency setting, knowing one thing from another can make a big difference in the how the day goes for the patient in your care. Was that Morphine (MS04) or Mag Sulfate (MgS04) which caused you to stop breathing? Before I hang your blood, are you Bill Jones (DOB 6/24/59) or Bill Jones (DOB 6/23/59)? Did that telemetry monitor just show you brushing your teeth, or did you enter a potentially fatal dysrhythmia of ventricular fibrillation? You know, things that matter.

I have a decent understanding of how drugs work, at what doses, through what mechanisms of action, and with what side effects. It helped to spend nearly a decade on the Pharmacy and Therapeutics Committee at Cayuga Medical Center in Ithaca. But I still relied heavily upon the expertise of my pharmacy colleagues while working in the Emergency Department (ED). When I started work in the trauma center at Upstate, this reliance grew, both because there were expert clinical pharmacists stationed in the ED itself, and because they actively participated in bedside care. During care of a trauma patient, it was Rob or Greg who was right behind me at the bedside, mixing drugs, passing syringes, reminding the team when the next dose of Epinephrine was due. They mixed the drips which made intubation work, hearts keep beating, blood pressure supply vital organs.

In this complex environment, I outsourced some of my learning. When the Covid vaccines were being rolled out, it was our pharmacist Greg to whom I turned. He had spent twelve hours watching expert testimony about the vaccines. I remember in the med room he assured me that the technology was at least a decade old, that they were safe, and he had done his homework in order to answer questions from colleagues like me. That was enough for me, because this was the guy who had my back when the chips were down, every damn time.

Present

I don’t outsource many of my questions anymore. Since I received two bad batch shots in January of 2021, I do my homework. In fact, I’ve read more studies in the last three years than the previous thirty. At this point, my study and clinical practice have propelled me into the position of trying to teach you.

The longer we are in practice at the Leading Edge Clinic, the more I encounter patients who still have almost both feet still in the land of conventional medicine. They still trust their PCP, their Cardiologist, their Gastroenterologist. The people who advised them to get the shots. They have been through the ringer, and haven’t been getting any answers. They are talking to me because their friend, family, neighbor, co-worker referred them. All they know is that they were told I might be able to help them.

This is a weak position from which to question the guidance of the trusted medical professionals in their lives. One way in which I approach this is by offering a framework. I suggest that when they next speak with their practitioner, they ask them this: “Sir/madam, can you please help me understand what is spikopathy, the pathologies it causes in long-haul and vaccine injury, and what you know about how to evaluate and treat those injuries?” I suggest that when that doctor/NP/PA gives them a blank stare, they remember it. You figure that into your calculations about whether their evaluation, testing, diagnosis and treatment is based upon reality.

The same practitioners may also tell you “We just don’t know much about long-haul and vaccine injury, and it will be years before we understand it and can effectively treat it.” My response is that today, not tomorrow or years from now, there is a graduate level course in long-haul and vaccine injury available at no cost. It is the eighty-two (and growing) part series by Dr Syed Mobeen, known as Dr Been. It is the Long Story Short series from the FLCCC Alliance. Any layperson or practitioner who watches and learns from that series will acquire knowledge that currently evades 99.9% of the practitioners in the United States, if not the world.

Along those lines, a patient recently told me that we need to share a list of medications that people experiencing spikopathy shouldn’t take. She was right. This is a start. In upcoming Substacks I will cover proton-pump inhibitors (PPIs), statins, and polyethylene glycol (PEG). In this Substack I’ll start with aluminum-containing over-the-counter and prescription medications. Examples are Maalox, Mylanta, Pepto-Bismol, Carafate or Sucralfate.

What are these products supposed to do? Aluminum hydroxide (Maalox, Mylanta) is a basic inorganic salt that acts by neutralizing hydrochloric acid in gastric secretions. Aluminum hydroxide is slowly solubilized in the stomach and reacts with hydrochloric acid to form aluminum chloride and water. It also inhibits the action of pepsin by increasing the pH and via adsorption. Bismuth subsalicylate (Pepto-Bismol) consists of trivalent bismuth and salicylate suspended in a mixture of magnesium aluminium silicate clay. The medicine forms a protective coating over the lower part of your esophagus, and partly coats your stomach. This helps protect them from stomach acid. It also has weak antacid properties that may help reduce too much stomach acid.

Sucralfate/Carafate works by forming a barrier or coating over a gastric ulcer. This protects the ulcer from the acid of the stomach, allowing it to heal. More technically, it dissociates in the acid environment of the stomach to its anionic form, which binds to the ulcer base. This creates a protective barrier to pepsin and bile and inhibits the diffusion of gastric acid. Sucralfate also stimulates the gastric secretion of bicarbonate and prostaglandins.

Why use aluminum in these antacids? One word, flocculation. If your house is connected to a municipal sewage system, when you flush the toilet the waste flows to your local sewage treatment plant. It is common practice in the United States to add aluminum powder to the raw sewage in order to make the solid waste settle out of the solution, so that it can be collected and removed. How does that work? Aluminum is what chemists call a cation. It has a +3 charge. The organic waste from your poo has a negative charge. Aluminum binds to the organic waste and this joint venture becomes sludgy. Ergo, flocculation. What happens when you ingest medications which have aluminum? Flocculation, in your blood. Sludging, in…your…blood.

It is not rare that during my first visit with a patient who has post-acute sequelae of Covid (PASC) or vaccine injury they will have one of these medications on their list. Or, as we progress through the visit, it comes out that they take one of these medications, Carafate being the worst. That is the moment when I try to explain to them that we have a bit of work to do just to get to the starting line of healing.

When I assert to you that 100% of the population has microclotting, regardless of vaccination status, the import of what I shared about aluminum gathers weight. For now, I’ll direct your questions about microclotting to Dr Jordan Vaughn’s presentation on Microclotting at the FLCCC Alliance in May 2023. We have lost the controls in this dystopian medical experiment, and we have all been contaminated by spike. On a scale of 0-4, the best we have seen when testing blood for our patients is a 1.5. This was only one patient, and after months of anticoagulation therapy. Dr Vaughn, who I consider the United States national expert on microclotting, after testing thousands of patients, would assert that the best score we see in the general population is microclotting at a level of 1 out of 4.

Some of you are old enough to remember the white stick which your dad or grandad had in the medicine cabinet and would use to stop bleeding from a cut suffered while shaving. I’m old enough that I still have one of these. Safety razors have mostly made this a thing of the past, but that white stick was a styptic pencil. Anhydrous aluminium sulfate is the main ingredient and acts as a vasoconstrictor in order to disable blood flow. The stick is applied directly to the bleeding site and it stings. The high ionic strength promotes flocculation of the blood, and the astringent chemical causes local vasoconstriction. It has 56% aluminum.

If you doubt that the little bit of aluminum in these medications is enough to cause trouble, I’ll give you a couple of examples. One of my unvaccinated patients is a band teacher who was relatively stable. Then he went on a trip to Disney with his students. He took along his travel kit, in which he had a travel deodorant with aluminum, and travel hair gel, with aluminum. During the trip he drank soda out of aluminum cans. After the trip his health deteriorated dramatically. When we had the next visit, he reported symptoms reflective of microclotting: severe headache, vision changes, arm and leg muscle pain, joint pain, GI upset. Shedding was contributing to these changes. When he returned to his non-aluminum deodorant at home, and stopped using his aluminum containing hair gel, he saw improvement in his symptoms.

Another patient is a radiologist who had symptoms reflective of microclotting, with cognitive issues, headache, myalgia and joint pain. With the simple intervention of eliminating his habit of drinking seltzer out of aluminum cans, he achieved a remarkable reduction of his symptoms. Just avoiding this tiny amount of aluminum had enough impact that this trained medical professional could clearly identify the benefit.

Sucralfate/Carafate contains 21% aluminum by weight. A typical regimen of 1 g 4 times/day contains 828 mg of elemental aluminum. I used to love Carafate, and would introduce patients to it by saying it was an old-fashioned drug which was very effective at helping heal peptic ulcer disease or esophagitis. Ironically, the underlying autoimmune dysregulation, antibody response, mast-cell activation, and microclotting from spikopathy can easily lead to heartburn and gastrointestinal dysregulation. Along comes a general practitioner or gastroenterologist and they prescribe Carafate. The result is a catastrophic escalation of microclotting, as each dose of aluminum provokes more and more and more flocculation or sludging in the patient’s blood.

What are your alternatives to these aluminum containing drugs? First and foremost, knowledge. Dr Sherry Rogers recently updated her classic No More Heartburn: The Safe, Effective Way to Prevent and Heal Chronic Gastrointestinal Disorders. Buy it, read it, and act upon it. Take time to chew your food, drink less liquids with your meals, drink less alcohol, eat fewer processed foods, and limit caffeine intake. Try using oral liquid aloe vera, apple cider vinegar, and slippery elm bark to heal your inflamed gut. Eat a healthier diet, and cultivate a more robust microbiome, preferably with cultured foods and liquids rather than proprietary pills and potions promising probiotic nirvana. For the unfortunate with bleeding ulcers, get a juicer, and drink raw cabbage juice. There were two excellent studies from the late 1940s and 1950s which demonstrated this intervention to be a safe and quick way to completely heal ulcer craters. See references here and here.

One thing from another. If you care, you’ll learn.

P.S. This last week I appeared on the Shaun Newman Podcast episode #554. The content of his show has taken a giant turn from focusing on sports to discussing current events in Alberta and Canada. We had a fun and informative visit together. After this podcast was released on Friday December 22, 2023, bad actors hacked Shaun’s website and diverted web traffic to a bogus site in Indonesia. They stole his domain and registered it under GoDaddy. We understand from expert cyber security consultants that the cost of such a job for a talented hacker would be $20-40,000. Somebody, some organization, or some government (Canada?) doesn’t want Shaun broadcasting. My translation is that in the content of our discussion, we are over the target. Don’t let Them win. Please give a listen, and share with others.