• A logical mind dealing with an illogical world.

    A logical mind dealing with an illogical world.

I hope you will read and sign my petition for reinstatement of my rightful privileges in the ACS.

I have been a Fellow in good standing in the American College of Surgeons (ACS) for over thirty years. Founded in 1913, the ACS is the oldest and largest organization representing surgeons in the world. Its mission used to be to further excellence in surgery and support surgeons and our patients. This is no longer the case.

In 2020, the ACS leadership declared war on surgeons and surgery. It claimed that the ACS is structurally racist, that surgeons- especially white surgeons are racists, and that surgery itself is racist. No evidence to support any of these shocking claims has ever been provided. This messaging by the ACS leadership goes so far as to support the unbelievably toxic claim that patients do better when operated on by a surgeon of their own race. You cannot find any claim more poisonous to the relationship between surgeons and their patients. Imagine meeting your surgeon who is of a different race than yours and worrying whether their implicit racism will prevent them from giving you the best care. This is an insult and a slap in the face to all surgeons who go to work every day committed to the best care of the patient before them, regardless of race, ethnicity, gender, sexual orientation, or any other irrelevant characteristic. We all take the same oath to serve every patient to the best of our ability.

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I have a friend and medical colleague who is, I daresay, smarter than me but shares my ethics and attitude toward medicine and the practice thereof. To us, medicine is about the patient in front of us and doing our utmost to provide competent, compassionate care on the same level as we would wish for ourselves and our loved ones.

Our major area of disagreement has been the past three years of the Covid pandemic, more specifically how it has been managed. Unlike me, he bought into many of the policies of the bureaucratic medical establishment exemplified by Drs. Fauci, Birx, Redfield, and Collins. In our friendly debates and discussions about how the pandemic has been managed/mismanaged he answers my opinions and references to multiple sources that I happen to consider credible (see below) with a single response, which is whatever the CDC is recommending. This pertains to wearing masks, social distancing, and, especially the role, effectiveness, and potential dangers of the new mRNA vaccines. He is vaccinated; I am not.

There is room for debate on many fronts related to these vaccines. Never an anti-vaxxer, I approached them with a cautious skepticism. I was skeptical of the rapid rollout, the glowing promises made for them, and concerned regarding the absence of long-term data for something so novel and universally recommended. There is little question that vaccination of the elderly and other high risk persons saved lives by mitigating serious disease, especially during the more virulent Delta variant surge of Covid. I caught Delta and as a healthy, adult over 65, I can say it was no picnic, although I was never hospitalized and recovered, I feel, fully.

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You can’t make this stuff up. I recently received an email from a website for cosmetic gynecology. Yes. You read that right- cosmetic gynecology. It featured a video by a “urogynecologist” on his technique for performing a “Barbie labiaplasty”. I have performed labiaplasties, but I confess I had never heard of this so, out of professional curiosity, I viewed the video.

The operation involved a complete amputation of the labia minora at the vaginal introitus (opening), along with removal of skin on either side of the clitoris and clitoral hood. The surgeon, who I will not name and, of course, practices in California, extols how nicely the surgery produces the “clamshell” look, which is the goal. His website lists his stellar credentials and features a gallery of before and after crotch shots showing the beautiful results of these surgeries.

The intent of the Barbie labiaplasty is to produce a look to the external female genitalia that matches that on the iconic Barbie doll by Mattel. Barbie, by the way, has never been crafted to be anatomically correct. If she were a real person, her measurements would be 39-18-33. She would be 5 foot 9 inches tall and weigh about 110 lbs. How’s that for realistic? Check under the skirt and you will find…..nothing.

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Dr. Harry P. Schultz

When I transferred to the University of Miami as a junior student, my pre-medical education began in earnest. Competition was fierce for medical school admission, and it was critical for pre-medical students to do not just do well, but very well, in the core subjects: physics, calculus, physiology, organic chemistry, and physical chemistry. The last two were spoken of in hushed tones as the most difficult of the undergraduate curriculum. Many an aspiring medical student’s hopes were dashed on the rocks of organic chemistry and “p-chem.”

My organic chemistry professor was Harry P. Schultz. Dr. Schultz was a legend among pre-medical students for his personality and classroom behavior. He was known to ask a question and then run to the back of the auditorium challenging anyone to answer before he exited. He was no nonsense when it came to teaching and grading and I and my classmates spent countless hours in the library reviewing chemical reactions for his exams. I would carry a stack of 3X5 cards when walking about the campus with questions on one side and answers on the other. Despite the difficulty of organic chemistry, Dr. Schultz was one of the most popular teachers on campus and it was a rite of passage to take organic chemistry with him. He passed away at 102 on Pearl Harbor Day 2020.

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The media’s new narrative that a lab leak scenario has only recently become more likely, because of the emergence of new information, is false. The information on a lab origin was always readily available and shows that, from the very beginning, the lab leak theory was the only viable theory.

                                                          Hans Mahnke and Jeff Carlson

Real fatigue at the end of a long day of surgery in the West Bank in 2005.

If you are like me, you are tired of hearing about Covid. I get it, truly I do. I wish we could go back to before the pandemic when all we had to deal with was Trump derangement, hyper-partisan politics, impeachment hoaxes, systemic racism in America, and impending climate doom. Happy days for sure.

Unfortunately, we can’t just forget Covid and shouldn’t. Why? We owe it to the millions who died directly from the virus and to the even more millions who died indirectly from the catastrophic mismanagement of Covid by our public health authorities. We owe it to children and young adults who may never make up the loss in education from school closures that went on long after science showed they were unnecessary and harmful. We owe it to those who lost jobs and businesses that some of them had spent a lifetime building. We owe it to all who suffered in some way and need to hold to account those who were responsible in some way for the devastation of our country and the world by their actions and inactions.

Despite the seemingly back-to-normal appearance of life around us, we are still dealing with Covid related issues and probably will for the next generation. A major health system still has social distancing signs and floor stickers telling patients where to stand. Signs in the lobby request those who are unvaccinated to wear masks despite the fact that science, real science, shows these measures to be essentially worthless.

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This is still up on the Mayo Clinic website and continues to perpetuate misinformation regarding Covid, information that is factually false or misleading.

Mayo says this about Ivermectin: “The drug ivermectin, used to treat or prevent parasites in animals and in humans, isn’t a drug used to treat viruses. The FDA hasn’t approved use of this drug to treat or prevent COVID-19. Taking large doses of this drug can cause serious harm. Don’t use medications intended for animals on yourself to treat or prevent COVID-19.”

The statement is misleading in that, while it states the FDA does not approve use of Ivermection for Covid, it makes no mention of off-label use. The FDA has approved Ivermectin as an anti-parasitic drug for people and physicians are thereby within perfectly legal and ethical rights to use it for other purposes if they feel, in their medical opinion, that it might be beneficial. Off-label use of FDA-approved drugs is a standard practice that has been part of mainstream medicine for decades.

The FDA has claimed that it never prohibited use of Ivermectin for Covid. This is disingenuous given the power of the FDA to regulate drugs. As a result of the FDA “recommendation” against the use of Covid, pharmacies refused to honor prescriptions by physicians in contrast to other off label drug usage. Some physicians were threatened with loss of their license for prescribing Ivermectin  for Covid, some have had their licenses suspended, and laws were passed in California to this effect.

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“This is the way the world end. No with a bang, but a whimper” T.S. Eliot

This should terrify everyone and prompt an avalanche of letters to our elected representatives to stop the insanity:

Boston University has announced in a pre-print publication, that has not yet been peer-reviewed, that its researchers combined the genetic material from the original SARS-CoV-2 virus that causes Covid with that from an Omicron variant. The resulting chimeric virus is thousands of times more infectious than the original and has a mortality rate of 80% in mice genetically engineered to mimic human response to viruses. Why are we doing this after an almost certainly laboratory-engineered viral pandemic that has killed an estimated 18 million people worldwide? Do these scientists have a death wish? Are they clueless? Are they completely morally bankrupt? Do they really have such hubris that they believe they are immune to the possibility of a laboratory containment failure such almost certainly occurred in Wuhan?

It is frightening that the National Institutes of Health was in the dark about this and is now investigating whether it should have been informed about this very incredibly dangerous research. The Boston University scientists, in response have essentially said, “F—k off”, albeit a bit more professionally, claiming they have no obligation to seek approval or inform anyone including the NIH, further claiming they took no NIH money for this research.

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The list of media narratives that have proved to be fraudulent or simply wrong is long and grows ever longer. The Trump-Russian collusion hoax, the Hunter Biden computer “fabrication”, the Ivermectin as horse de-wormer misrepresentation, and the Covid lab leak as the delusion of conspiracy theorists were all embraced and promoted by “experts” and the main stream media, and all were wrong. Easily, provably wrong.

Now we have the story circulating that Governor DeSantis wants to ban books from K-12 schools including some considered classics, such as Of Mice and Men, by John Steinbeck or To Kill a Mockingbird by Harper Lee. This has become widespread in the media. The only problem is, it is false.

One of my close friends has a neighbor who is a Canadian snowbird. The neighbor just returned to spend the winter in Florida. When my friend spoke to him and expressed his opinion of how good a governor Desantis has been for Florida, the Canadian neighbor strongly disagreed and gave as one example the claim derived from the news media of DeSantis banning books in Florida. My friend had not heard this particular story and, true to form, he researched it carefully. Below is his response to his Canadian neighbor:         

                                                            

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My $800 prescription Costa del Sol sunglasses are falling apart. I justified the purchase, banking on the reputation of Costas for durability and their lifetime warranty, knowing that if my prescription changed in time, I could just replace the lenses and keep the frames. Now the rubberized portions are breaking down and coming off the plastic stems. I don’t abuse them. I keep them in a case when not wearing them and I don’t wear them all that often in rugged outdoor activities for which they are supposedly designed.

I took them to the optician, where I bought them, and she informed me they no longer carry Costas because the quality and support have gotten so bad. The lifetime warranty has been replaced with a two year limited warranty, so I am SOL. She said the decline began when Costa was bought by the French eyeglass company, Essilor, and accelerated in 2018 when Essilor merged with Luxottica to become the single largest supplier of eyeglass lenses and frames in the world. EssilorLuxottica now owns Oakley, Ray-Ban, Chanel, Coach, Polo Ralph Lauren, Prada, Costas, and dozens more.

What does this have to do with the state of medicine today? It shows what corporatization does to small firms that start out producing a high quality, popular product or service. The firm loses its soul. The same thing has happened to medicine.

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My maternal grandfather, a retired physician, once took me on a walk around his neighborhood in Rio de Janeiro, Brazil when I was somewhere around five or six-years-old. “I want you to meet a very distinguished gentleman,” he said. In those days, his neighborhood street was cobblestone with high curbs on either side.  Today, we have big trucks with air-conditioned cabins and large, rotating brushes to sweep off our street. Back then, street sweepers were day laborers, most of whom lived in the ‘favelas’ (slums) for which Rio is known. They were transported each morning to their respective locations throughout the city with their large garbage cans on a hand cart, broom, and shovel to sweep the gutters.

As we approached one of these street sweepers, Vovo (grandpa in Portuguese) greeted the middle-age black man by name and the greeting was returned with a smile, “Bon dia, Dr. Abel (my grandfather’s first name).” Vovo introduced me as his grandson and we shook hands. Vovo inquired about the man’s wife and children and they spoke for perhaps 5 minutes or so before we left and the man resumed work. I later learned that he was one of my grandfather’s patients from years earlier.

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