Helen, you’ve landed on the right question, and I think the answer is harder than Dr. Varon’s piece lets on. What made Dr. Leale irreplaceable wasn’t compassion alone — plenty of protocol-followers are compassionate. It was that nothing in his training, his licensure, or his career advancement depended on producing the answer somebody else was…

Read more

Wgaspar — you’re pointing at the right thing, and the flip-flop is the diagnostic.

Pollution from a diesel generator does not care whether the generator is powering a steel mill, a hospital, or a GPU farm. PFAS in groundwater behaves the same whether the cooling tower belongs to a chemical plant or a data center. If a concern is real, it does not…

Read more

Helen — your list is a useful starting point. Since last January, I’ve been working out the seven concerns and your post prompted me to finish my draft. I published the result this morning: two concerns are real (diesel and evaporative cooling in the wrong locations), the other five don’t survive scrutiny. My report also looks at where the…

Read more

For anyone attending tomorrow’s tick-borne webinar with Dr. Cole, Dr. Lindley, and Dr. Fynn — read Kris Newby’s Bitten: The Secret History of Lyme Disease and Biological Weapons (Harper Wave, 2019) before or after.

Newby is a Stanford-affiliated science writer who got the deathbed interview with Willy Burgdorfer — the scientist Lyme is named…

Read more

Hello,

Saw your medical writer posting. It’s not the role for me — I’m not credentialed in clinical research methodology or IRB protocol drafting, and I wouldn’t pretend to be. But the posting prompted a thought worth sharing.

I’m a retired LAPD officer (1980–2000) and 20-year licensed private investigator who founded the Office of Medical and…

Read more

@dickatlee — your friends are asking the right question at the right time, and the fact that they’re not reflexively accepting the recommendation is the right instinct. A few things worth knowing as they think it through.

The vaccine itself. TICOVAC (Pfizer, FDA-approved August 13, 2021 — package insert at…

Read more

@IMA-HelenT and @flatulus maximus — you’re both describing the same operation. The pressure to decide now is the tell. Real medicine has time for a second opinion. Sales floors don’t.

A book that nails this almost perfectly is Stephen Klaidman’s Coronary: A True Story of Medicine Gone Awry (Scribner, 2007) —…

Read more

Los Angeles – Peter Cornell – if he hasn’t yet retired. And unless it’s too far, The Rand Institute Deerfield Florida is good too. Decades of high-performance experience.

Helen — thank you, and I’m sorry to hear about your friends. The biopsy-type question is exactly the right one to be asking now, because the answer determines what they’re actually being treated for.

Two distinctions worth knowing:

Tissue biopsy vs. liquid biopsy. A tissue biopsy (core needle, surgical excision) examines actual cells under a…

Read more

Weogo — your instinct is sharper than the textbook answer. Helen’s right that ELISA and Western blot are distinct from PCR. But there’s a deeper question underneath what you’re asking.

The Western blot doesn’t actually measure antibodies. It measures binding events between your blood serum and proteins of a specific molecular weight, separated on…

Read more

Helen:

The question in the title is the right one. The honest answer is both, depending on what produced the label.

Three lab tests do most of the trapping in modern infectious-disease diagnosis: the ELISA, the Western blot, and PCR. The industry says they detect proteins, antibodies, and viral genetic material respectively. None of them does…

Read more