Where are all the shepherds?

Posted on July 21, 2017 by cedwardpitt

In “The Myth of Icarus”, Icarus, full of the folly that comes with pride, flew too high and the sun melted his wings.

Dr Caroline Leaf is the modern day Christian version of Icarus, foolishly flying higher and higher, deluded by her self-importance and unaware of the weakness and fissuring of her presumed competence.

But unlike the myth of Icarus where only Icarus himself paid the ultimate price, Dr Leaf isn’t the only person flying too close to the sun, but she is encouraging the church to follow her lead.

Dr Caroline Leaf is a communication pathologist and self-titled cognitive neuroscientist. Unfortunately, despite no training or experience whatsoever in psychiatry, psychology or even basic counselling, Dr Leaf has assumed the role of a mental health expert for the church.

Having the untrained Dr Leaf lecture Christian congregations on mental illness is an absolutely absurd proposition – it’s like having a plumber give a public lecture about coronary bypass surgery. Yet the uncredentialed Dr Leaf continues to speak at church after church after church about mental health and illness, given a free license as if she were a psychiatrist with decades of experience.

And my question is “Why”?

Why do pastors and church leaders give Dr Leaf a free pass to speak from their platforms on a subject that she is objectively unqualified to speak on? Where is the public process of due diligence? Where is public demonstration of accountability that undergirds the reverence, the sacred gravitas, of the church pulpit? Why do our church leaders stay silent when unqualified preachers poison their congregations with saccharine subterfuge?

Where are all the shepherds? Why aren’t they shepherding?

Dr Leaf’s latest e-mail newsletter aptly demonstrates what the church needs protecting from – an entire e-mail encouraging people to withdraw from psychiatric medications. Her bias is clear – psychiatric medications are harmful and you can withdraw from them if you want to. If you do, you’ll feel better.

This might as well be unsolicited, unlicensed medical advice. There’s no discussion about the nuances of psychotropic medication, or the proven benefits. She then encourages people to look for more information by reading books or visiting websites that are known to be unhinged or, at best, clearly biased against medications for mental ill-health.

In the past, Dr Leaf has clearly shown her ignorance when it comes to psychiatric medications. She has accused them of everything from being poisonous to being unspiritual. Never once has she acknowledged the scores of research papers that confirm the judicious use of psychiatric medications saves lives and extends the lifespan of those who take them.

Now, she has advised people that they can stop their medications and promotes unscrupulous and biased sources of information to help. This isn’t just ignorant, this is dangerous. [1]

Will it take the untimely death of one of their congregation before our church leaders say ‘enough is enough’? It will be all too late then.

It’s time for our church leaders to stand up for the congregations they lead and denounce the teaching of Dr Caroline Leaf. Her ignorance and her arrogance are becoming a dangerous mix. Our pastors can’t wait until blood is on their hands before they’re forced into action – they need to act now, before it’s too late.

~ ~
If you are concerned about the medications you’re taking or you think you don’t need them any more, for heaven’s sake don’t just stop taking them or try and wean yourself. Go see your doctor for advice specific to your medication and your situation.

Don’t believe me? https://psychcentral.com/lib/discontinuing-psychiatric-medications-what-you-need-to-know

DISCLAIMER: Just in case anyone was wondering about my motives, I declare that I have no connection with any pharmaceutical company. I do not accept gratuities of any form from any sales representative. I don’t eat their food, I don’t take their pens, and I don’t listen to their sales pitches.

References and bibliography

[1] Valuck RJ, Orton HD, Libby AM. Antidepressant discontinuation and risk of suicide attempt: a retrospective, nested case-control study. J Clin Psychiatry 2009 Aug;70(8):1069-77.

‘Vagina’, and other ‘offensive’ medical terms

Posted on September 3, 2014 by cedwardpitt

Back in my university days, I emceed a 21st birthday party for a friend of mine. One of the games I got everyone to play was the peg game.

The premise is simple enough. Everyone gets a clothes peg at the beginning of the party, and whoever had the most pegs at the end of the party was declared the winner. In order to get other people’s pegs, you had to catch them saying certain words that I arbitrarily chose to be forbidden. The words I banned just happened to be “Happy”, “Birthday” and “Craig”, the name of the party boy. It made singing “Happy Birthday” at the end of the night more challenging, but everyone still had a great time.

The peg game on a cultural scale is the modern scourge of political correctness. Terms like ‘manhole’ are replaced by ‘personal access units’ to avoid upsetting women, while ‘baba black sheep’ has been changed to ‘baba rainbow sheep’ in some schools, in case the nursery rhythm could be deemed racist. Meanwhile, ‘brainstorming’ is unacceptable because it may offend epileptics.

Proving that the centuries-old terminology of medicine is not immune from the PC plague, the Journal of Sexual Medicine has published an article in which the authors declare that the term ‘vulvovaginal atrophy’ should no longer be used because the word ‘vagina’ is not publicly acceptable [1].

Perhaps I’m just old and inflexible now, but to me this smacks of puerility and paternalism (sorry … authoritarianism, just in case I offended fathers). Lets face it, lots of medical terms have stigma attached to them, or are in some way publicly unacceptable. Lets rename herpes for a start … how about ‘Blistering of the Reproductive Parts’ or BoRP for short, unless someone is offended by the term ‘reproductive’. Maybe, ‘Blistering of ones bits’ … damn it, that’s shortened to BooB, which is an offensive reference to mammary glands. ‘Blistering of bits’ … but then that’s shortened to BoB which is offensive to people named Robert. I guess we’re stuck with ‘herpes’ then. In the end, it doesn’t matter what term you use, because the connotation or stigma is in the meaning of the word, not the word itself.

And how childish is it to be offended by the word ‘vagina’ in the first place. Half the planet has one for goodness sake. Refer to it by any other word, and no one cares. Va-jay-jay, flower, pussy, muffin, her ‘Downton Abbey’ … there are too many euphemisms to list. To me, they all sound like they belong in either the playground of a kindergarten, or a high school boys locker room (depending on the term, of course). And yet somehow the neutral, anatomical term is apparently less acceptable.

What really worries me is the example this sets for our children. I went to great pains to teach my children the anatomically correct words for their body parts from an early age, and answer their questions about their ‘private parts’ openly without embarrassment. Why? Not just because I’m a doctor, but because they’ll grow up to view their bodies as normal and natural, not shameful or taboo. This is beneficial for their health and for protection from child-sex predators. From The Atlantic magazine, “Teaching children anatomically correct terms, age-appropriately, says Laura Palumbo, a prevention specialist with the National Sexual Violence Resource Center (NSVRC), promotes positive body image, self confidence, and parent-child communication; discourages perpetrators; and, in the event of abuse, helps children and adults navigate the disclosure and forensic interview process.” [2]

What sort of example does it set when, as has happened in the US, a biology teacher was suspended because he said ‘vagina’ in class, or a Michigan State politician was removed from their parliament because she said ‘vagina’ on the floor of the chamber? What sort of example does it set when major medical journals are advocating that neutral, anatomical words are considered offensive? A poor one, I’d wager. All it achieves is to further stigmatise our bodies while impeding good communication, “reinforcing the culture of secrets and silence perpetrators rely on for cover.”

Rather than stop using the word, we just need to get over it. I’m not suggesting that we go around yelling ‘vagina’ at the top of our lungs, or gratuitously slip it into conversation at every opportunity. Lets be mature adults instead. Lets talk about any parts of our body in an appropriate context, without shame or condemnation. That’s how we protect our most vulnerable, and live in a truly progressive society.

References

Portman, D.J., et al., Genitourinary Syndrome of Menopause: New Terminology for Vulvovaginal Atrophy from the International Society for the Study of Women’s Sexual Health and The North American Menopause Society. J Sex Med, 2014 doi: 10.1111/jsm.12686
Buni, C., The Case for Teaching Kids ‘Vagina,’ ‘Penis,’ and ‘Vulva’. The Atlantic, 2013, Atlantic Monthly Group, Washington USA

Needles of Death

Posted on July 23, 2013 by cedwardpitt

“Acupuncture caused womans heart to implode.

A woman in the prime of her adult life had that life ripped away by acupuncture, a known deadly complementary therapy. Worse, though, is that acupuncture therapists don’t warn of these potentially fatal outcomes or actively hide them.

Ernst(1) documents two cases of healthy women who have had their lives torn away from them as murderous acupuncture needles were inserted into their vital chest organs causing them to instantly fail. Each woman would have died in agony as their heart and lungs were unable to get blood to their body’s vital organs.

One woman, a forty-four year old lady, had an acupuncture needle pushed into her heart, causing severe pain and breathlessness. When she alerted the acupuncturist to her peril, his “cure” was to insert another needle, causing a full-blown cardiac arrest.

Another woman, twenty-six years old, died after an acupuncture needle was inserted into one of her lungs causing the lung to collapse. She eventually died from a tension pneumothorax, in which the punctured lung leaks air into the chest cavity with every breath, compressing the other chest organs like a Boa Constrictor. A tension pneumothorax is one of the most terrifying ways to die.

Acupuncture is a multi-billion dollar industry. Despite its potentially fatal consequences, it goes on, unabated and unregulated. People need to be warned before more lives are lost to the needles of death.”

Do you feel scared of acupuncture after reading this? Should you believe it?

These sort of beat up articles occur all the time. A case report which links a vaccine or drug to an adverse outcome is exaggerated with highly emotional language and posted on conspiracy-driven anti-vaccination blog or site. Then it gets sent around on Facebook or Twitter like an intellectual virus, taken as evidence of the evils of corporate western medicine by people who take the information on face value.

The latest that came across my Facebook page was of a claim that a 16 year old girls ovaries shrivelled after being exposed to the Gardasil vaccine for the Human Papilloma Virus/cervical cancer.(4)

The problem that these anti-vaccine activists have is that case studies, while interesting, have no evidentiary weight behind them. Trying to make a case study out to be definitive proof for anything is like putting a grain of salt into a swimming pool and suggesting that you have salt-water. How many cases of premature ovarian failure have been reported as a direct result of the Gardasil vaccine? I don’t know the exact answer to that, but I’d be surprised if I couldn’t count them on one hand. Compare that to the hundreds of thousands of women vaccinated with the Gardasil vaccine.

One of the respondents to the anti-Gardasil blog(4) said, “This vaccine has never prevented a single case of oral, cervical, or anal cancer …” Actually, it has likely prevented thousands.(2) Case studies can’t see the bigger picture.

And for every case study against western medicine, there are just as many against complementary medicines and practices. (There would be more, except that the dearth of regulation of the alternative and complementary therapy industry means that most of the adverse outcomes of alternative treatments go unreported).

Braun et al(3) report the case of a twenty-nine year old woman discovered to have an entirely treatable early form of cervical cancer on a pap smear, who died in agony from widespread metastatic cancer of the cervix, despite thirteen years of various complementary medicines (a homeopathic therapy consisting of a vitamin C-containing regimen and subcutaneous administration of mistletoe lectins, “regional hyperthermia”, Horvi-Reintoxin enzyme therapy, and pyrogenic lysates of bacteria combined application of Carnivora-Mistletoe-Ukrain). This woman’s cancer was caused by HPV-18, which would have been prevented by Gardasil (if it was available to her.)

The point of the story is this: All treatments have side effects or complications. If you look hard enough, you will find case reports of direct or associated illness from just about any traditional or complementary therapy. But case studies are not good evidence. They do not see the bigger picture. They can not be generalised.

In trained hands, and for the right uses, acupuncture can be a very powerful therapeutic tool. Acupuncture still does more good than harm.

In trained hands, and for the right uses, Gardasil and vaccines in general are very powerful preventative tools. Vaccines still do more good than harm.

Neither are “needles of death”.

References

1. Ernst E. Acupuncture – a treatment to die for? Journal of the Royal Society of Medicine. 2010 Oct;103(10):384-5. PubMed PMID: 20929887.

2. Jin XW, Lipold L, Sikon A, Rome E. Human papillomavirus vaccine: safe, effective, underused. Cleveland Clinic journal of medicine. 2013 Jan;80(1):49-60. PubMed PMID: 23288945.

3. Braun S, Reimer D, Strobl I, Wieland U, Wiesbauer P, Muller-Holzner E, et al. Fatal invasive cervical cancer secondary to untreated cervical dysplasia: a case report. Journal of medical case reports. 2011;5:316. PubMed PMID: 21767367. Pubmed Central PMCID: 3156764.

4. http://www.thelibertybeacon.com/2013/07/22/gardasil-destroys-girls-ovaries-research-on-ovaries-never-considered-10497/

Dr C. Edward Pitt

Faith, Hope, Love, Science.

Tag Archives: medicine

Where are all the shepherds?

Needles of Death