By Joseph Varon

September 13, 2026

When was the last time your doctor actually examined you? I do not mean when someone checked your blood pressure, copied your medication list, looked at your laboratory results, or listened briefly through a shirt before returning to the computer. I mean examined you. Looked at you. Watched you breathe. Felt your pulse. Looked at your eyes. Examined your neck. Listened carefully to your heart and lungs. Palpated your abdomen. Watched you walk. Noticed the color of your skin, the movement of your hands, the expression on your face, and the thousand other small pieces of information that a human body offers to someone who has learned how to observe it.

For most of the history of medicine, this was not an optional ritual performed before ordering the “real tests.” This was medicine. Today, increasingly, it is treated as something quaint, inefficient, or unnecessary.

I have spent most of my professional life taking care of very sick people. Critical care is one of the most technologically intensive areas of medicine ever created. I love technology. I have watched mechanical ventilators breathe for patients who could no longer breathe for themselves. I have used ultrasound, CT imaging, sophisticated hemodynamic monitoring, extracorporeal technologies, molecular diagnostics, and laboratory measurements that physicians a generation before me could only have dreamed about.

I would never want to return to a world without these tools. But after decades at the bedside, I have also learned something that becomes more obvious, not less, with experience: technology is most powerful when it extends the physician’s senses. It becomes dangerous when it persuades the physician that those senses are no longer necessary.

The Patient Before the Data

Experienced clinicians understand something that is remarkably difficult to teach in a lecture hall or classroom. Sometimes you walk into a room and know immediately that something is wrong. You may not yet know what it is, but you know it before the laboratory does. The patient is breathing differently. His skin looks different. She answers a question a fraction of a second more slowly than she did several hours earlier. Posture, speech, facial expression, respiratory effort, or level of attention changes. None of these observations is magical. They are data, collected by a biological instrument trained through thousands and thousands of encounters: the physician.

When I round in an intensive care unit (ICU), I can learn an enormous amount before touching the computer. I can see whether a patient is fighting the ventilator. I can hear secretions from the doorway. I can see accessory muscles contracting. I can recognize when someone who looked reasonably comfortable earlier suddenly looks exhausted. I can see peripheral perfusion, diaphoresis, agitation, abdominal distension, or a subtle change in mental status. None of this means I should ignore the arterial blood gas, the chest radiograph, the CT scan, or the monitor. Of course I need them. The mistake is believing that because those measurements are more technologically sophisticated, they are necessarily more real than what is happening directly in front of me.

Medicine once began with the patient and proceeded toward testing. Increasingly, it begins with testing and eventually works its way back toward the patient. Abraham Verghese and colleagues have described this inversion of the diagnostic process, in which clinicians may encounter an image or electronic representation of a patient before encountering the patient himself. That change sounds subtle. It is not. Once the CT scan, laboratory panel, consultant note, medication list, and previous diagnoses have entered our minds, we no longer approach the patient without preconceptions. The data have already told us what we are supposed to see.

This is one reason the physical examination should never be reduced to nostalgia. Its value is not that physicians once carried black bags and made house calls. Its value is epistemological. It provides an independent stream of information. The history and physical examination can support what the tests tell us, but they can also contradict them. That contradiction is often where important medicine begins. A normal number should make us reconsider an abnormal observation, but an abnormal observation should also make us reconsider a normal number.

The Screen between Us

Something extraordinary happened to the architecture of the medical encounter. The physician and patient used to face each other. Today, they frequently face a computer.

A widely cited time-and-motion study of ambulatory physicians found that during the clinic day physicians spent approximately 27 percent of their time in direct clinical face time with patients and nearly half their time on electronic health records and desk work. For every hour of direct clinical face time, physicians spent almost two additional hours on electronic documentation and related desk activities during the workday. The electronic medical record was introduced as a tool for storing information. Somewhere along the way, the physician became one of the tools used to feed the electronic medical record.

This has consequences that go well beyond physician irritation or burnout. Attention is a finite resource. When I am looking at a screen, I am not fully looking at you. When I am clicking boxes, reconciling lists, responding to alerts, and documenting everything necessary to satisfy billing, regulatory, legal, and institutional requirements, I am performing work. But that work is not the same thing as observing a patient. We have confused documentation of care with care itself.

The modern medical record can create a remarkable illusion of precision. A note may contain a beautifully populated physical examination with normal findings listed across multiple organ systems. Anyone who has practiced modern medicine knows the uncomfortable truth: sometimes the completeness of the electronic examination exceeds the completeness of the actual one. Elder and colleagues warned years ago about examinations transformed by templates and drop-down boxes into records that may look more impressive than what truly occurred at the bedside.[2] The computer makes it possible to document fifteen normal observations in seconds. Unfortunately, it cannot guarantee that anyone actually made those observations.

The irony is striking. Never in history have physicians possessed more information about their patients, yet we may sometimes know them less. We know their hemoglobin from three years ago. We can review every medication prescribed by another physician. We can scroll through imaging reports, genetic data, vaccination histories, risk scores, and dozens of laboratory trends. We may possess thousands of data points about a human being who has received only a few minutes of our undivided attention.

The Physical Examination Is Not Primitive Technology

There is a tendency to speak about the physical examination as though it were the horse and buggy of diagnosis, something admirable in its time but sensibly replaced by superior machinery. That misunderstands what examination is. A physical finding is simply another diagnostic test. It has sensitivity, specificity, likelihood ratios, false positives, and false negatives, just like laboratory measurements and imaging studies. The Rational Clinical Examination movement made precisely this point decades ago, arguing that clinical findings should be subjected to the same rigorous evaluation applied to other diagnostic tools.

Some physical findings are poor. Some are excellent. Some things we were taught generations ago probably deserve to disappear. There is no virtue in preserving an examination maneuver merely because an old professor taught it to us. Evidence-based medicine should apply to the stethoscope as rigorously as it applies to an MRI scanner. But there is a tremendous difference between saying that certain bedside findings are unreliable and concluding that bedside observation itself has become obsolete.

The evidence also suggests that inadequate examination can cause harm. In one collection of cases involving physical-examination failures, missed or delayed diagnoses were common, as were unnecessary testing and treatment. Reviews of diagnostic error continue to identify deficiencies in history taking and physical examination as important contributors. These are not arguments against technology. They are arguments against voluntarily throwing away information before making decisions.

Consider something as simple as breathing. A pulse oximeter gives me a number, and that number can be enormously useful. But it does not tell me everything I learn by watching someone breathe. Two patients can have identical oxygen saturations while one is resting comfortably and the other is approaching respiratory failure. Respiratory rate, depth, pattern, accessory muscle use, paradoxical movement, ability to speak, mental status, and fatigue matter. Anyone who has managed respiratory failure has seen a patient whose monitor still looked reassuring while the patient absolutely did not.

The same is true throughout medicine. An echocardiogram can characterize cardiac anatomy better than my stethoscope ever will. Still, jugular venous distension, cool extremities, edema, diaphoresis, or altered mentation may tell me instantly that circulation is failing. A CT scan can show me an abdomen in exquisite detail, but it cannot substitute for knowing whether that abdomen has suddenly become rigid and exquisitely tender. Technology provides resolution. Examination provides context. Good medicine requires both.

We Are Losing the Teachers Too

Skills disappear surprisingly quickly when institutions stop rewarding them. Medical students enter training fascinated by physical diagnosis. They buy stethoscopes, learn cardiac sounds, practice neurologic examinations, and struggle to distinguish normal from abnormal findings. Then they enter the clinical environment and observe what the system actually values. They watch residents review laboratory values outside the room. They watch teams conduct portions of rounds around computers. They learn that ordering a test is often faster than finding someone who can teach them how to elicit a finding.

They discover that no billing system awards extra productivity points because a physician spent ten additional minutes teaching a student how to examine jugular venous pressure. Eventually they absorb the real curriculum of modern medicine: what the institution measures matters, and what it does not measure becomes optional.

Research has documented deficiencies in physical examination skills among medical trainees and has shown that bedside teaching itself has declined. Particularly troubling is evidence that greater time in training does not automatically produce better examination technique. One direct-observation study found physical examination technique correlated with recognition of clinical signs, differential diagnosis, and clinical judgment, yet performance actually deteriorated during internship. That should concern us. We may be creating a system in which physicians accumulate more medical knowledge while simultaneously losing some of the mechanisms through which they apply that knowledge to real human beings.

Clinical medicine has always depended on apprenticeship. You can learn the physiology of aortic stenosis from a book. Still, there is something different about standing beside an experienced cardiologist who places your stethoscope exactly where the murmur is clearest and tells you what to listen for. You can memorize the manifestations of cirrhosis, but you remember them differently after someone shows you spider angiomas, ascites, muscle wasting, and asterixis in a real patient. You can watch a thousand videos about respiratory distress, but watching an experienced intensivist recognize impending fatigue at the bedside teaches something that no multiple-choice examination can measure.

Once one generation loses those skills, the next generation has nobody to teach them. That is how knowledge disappears from a profession. Not through a decree announcing that the skill is forbidden, but through gradual neglect until eventually nobody remembers that it mattered.

Touch Is Also Communication

Another element of the physical examination is harder to quantify, and perhaps for that reason easier for modern medicine to discount. Examination is a form of human communication. When a frightened patient comes to see a physician, he does not simply want information. He wants to know that someone competent has assessed him. There is a difference between saying, “Your CT scan looks fine,” and sitting beside the patient, listening to his story, examining the area that hurts, and then explaining why the findings are reassuring. The diagnostic conclusion may be identical. The human experience is not.

[…]

Via https://brownstone.org/articles/medicine-has-forgotten-how-to-touch-the-patient/

By Alan Cassels

August 26, 2026

A recent article in the New York Times on the increasing rates of heart disease in young women (Why Are More Young Women Developing Heart Disease?) was amusingly frivolous and about as fact-free as an article about health advice can be.

The key thrust of the article is that any woman who wants to preserve and improve her health should become informed of her “numbers.” Which is to say, she should know her blood pressure, cholesterol, BMI, and hemoglobin A1C (a measure of average blood glucose levels) which are claimed to be “important for assessing risk.”

The Times quotes Dr Priya Freaney, director of the Women’s Heart Care program at Northwestern Medicine: “Knowing your numbers is your most powerful tool,” [she said] “And it’s never too early to start.”

What numbers are we talking about? Well, apparently doctors recommend “all adults strive for these levels:”

• BP (Blood Pressure) under 120 mm Hg / 80 mm Hg
• LDL (Low-density lipoprotein) under 100 mg/dL
• HbA1C (Hemoglobin A1C ) of 5.6 or lower
• BMI (Body-mass index) under 25

Now the four Horsemen of the Apocalypse, blood pressure, blood sugar, cholesterol, and BMI, threatening to strike you down in your healthy middle age unless you submit to the testing, treating (ie: medications and lifestyle changes), and a retesting paradigm which can lead many to become obsessed by the numbers.

By the way, these four measures have one thing in common: They are typically treated with a prescribing pen that has been carefully guided in your doctor’s expert hands by the helpful people in the pharmaceutical industry. Just saying…

Let’s approach these four with a bit of basic epidemiology, examining the wisdom of telling people of “average risk” to aim for these targets. Obviously, people with pre-existing conditions or those with inherently much higher or multiple risks (such as levels that are in the red flashing light category) involve a different calculus.

But for the sake of evaluating the drive to push people toward these health targets, what do the highest quality studies ultimately say about the value in chasing these numeric targets in healthy people?

Numericide Number One: Blood Pressure at 120/80

I will always remember that old quip from an aging physician: “High blood pressure is better than no blood pressure at all.” But the question one should ask is this: If you lower your blood pressure does it lead to a reduction in your chance of a cardiovascular event or dying?

First off, despite what many guidelines and health care providers say about knowing your numbers, what they should have said was know your cardiovascular risk numbers (your percentage chance of having a heart attack or stroke over the next 10-30 years) not your numbers of cholesterol, blood pressure, or glucose numbers. Those are what we call ‘surrogate markers’ and the only reason to lower these numbers is to possibly reduce your risk of heart attacks and stroke. It’s not that these surrogate numbers are useless — rather they are the wrong numbers to worry about.

[…]

For starters, the target of 120 is not an evidence-based but an “expert-recommended” target, and in case you wondered, having a blood pressure of 130/80 or 140/90 is not the death sentence that your doctor might warn you about. Your blood pressure often jumps all over the map and how and when you measure it can significantly impact that number. It climbs as we get older, naturally. Like grey hair and wrinkles. Chasing this number is one of the biggest uses of a doctor’s time and causes considerable (and frequently unnecessary) worry in patients.

Me? I wish our doctors would have spent time learning more about evidence appraisal and how to properly do shared decision-making with their patients because the decision around the treatment of surrogate numbers is very dependent on a person’s values and preferences.

[…]

The magical “120” comes from the SPRINT trial, a particularly odious piece of work that tortured the data until it showed some benefit of a BP <120 comparted to divergent targets such as <140 in a high-risk population. What most physicians aren’t going to learn is that any apparent benefit evaporated once intensive treatment stopped.

The SPRINT team was behind the 2017 guidelines recommending the 120/80 BP target, but you need to know these guidelines have been discredited for good reason. For instance, the process to produce them was riven with documented conflicts of interest. Again, Big Pharma’s interests are more than well-represented on the guideline production team and their participation automatically broadens the category of people who should take their drug. No — surely that can’t be true? It is true, and to quote a refrain from the movie Airplane, stop calling me Shirley.

The AAFP, American Association of Family Practice— the largest primary care organization in the US — refused to endorse that target. Why? Because, in their words, there were “no significant benefit for all-cause mortality, cardiovascular mortality, myocardial infarction, or renal events.” Let me translate: People don’t live longer or better because you guilt-tripped and drug-equipped them into getting their blood pressure down to 120/80.

There’s also another reason and that has to do with how unsafe it can be to push people’s blood pressure to ridiculously low targets. Not only does this drive people crazy (because many of them have to take two or three or four medications to lower their BP numbers) but it can also lead to falls, fractures, kidney injury, and so on, especially in older adults.

One study in JAMA Internal Medicine found that taking antihypertensive medications was associated with an increased risk of serious fall injuries. SPRINT itself showed nearly double the rate of serious adverse events possibly or definitely related to the antihypertensive drugs.

[…]

Numericide’s Number Two: Low-Density Lipoprotein, or LDL, under 100 mg/dL

This is one of the most aggressively, and irrationally pursued targets: LDL cholesterol. I went back into the data to ask this question: Is there any substantive evidence that an otherwise healthy person with an LDL under 100 mg/dL lives any longer than a person who has an LDL above 100mg/dl?

Basically, should healthy people (what we call ‘primary prevention’) who don’t have a history of a heart attack or heart disease be pushed to get their LDL from, say, 120 to 80 mg/dL? Will this make them live longer?

Sorry to be the bad news bear here, but in a nutshell: No.

The evidence is weak and the absolute benefit is very small. When I mean very small, it’s way smaller than most people expect.

The most comprehensive recent review was published in JAMA in 2022. It was huge, pooling 18 trials of statins for primary prevention including over 85,000 people. The rate of all-cause mortality was statistically significant yet the absolute difference between those who drove their cholesterol that low and those who didn’t was a meagre 0.35%.

The NNT (number needed to treat to prevent one death) was 286.

Another way to say this is that your chance of a normal healthy person dying if they take a statin to drive their LDL below the 100mg/dl target is almost one in 300. Others have strongly contested this number, saying that driving cholesterol down to those levels makes absolutely no difference to the length and quality of a person’s life.

What about older people? You’re in for a surprise here—because in the elderly the situation reverses. A study published in the BMJ in 2016 identified LDL-related studies in the elderly. It found that in a total of over 68,000 elderly people, there was an “inverse association between all-cause mortality and LDL.” Translation: older people with higher LDL levels lived longer! This makes it even more egregious that much of the population taking cholesterol-lowering drugs are over 65 and in the category where they actually need higher cholesterol to stay healthy. 

And then there are the harms of cholesterol lowering drugs, like statins which we know cause muscle weakening, elevated liver enzymes, and diabetes, effects that are consistent across many studies.

Doctors know this from real life experience: most patients (up to 75%) stop taking their statins within 2 years — whether it’s from the adverse effects, the costs or the hassle.

Numericide’s Number Three: HbA1C (Hemoglobin A1C ) of 5.6 or Lower

The crazy low levels at which they tell people to drive their HbA1C down to make me bonkers. What is most nutty is that this nefarious hunt for “prediabetes” which is the granddaddy of all disease-mongering tactics is sold under the logic of ”Why wait until you have full blown diabetes when you can find the ‘pre’ signs early?”

To be clear, the 5.6% is not a treatment target — it’s the “prediabetes diagnostic threshold.” In the ever-reductive world of diabetes “normal” keeps shifting. “Normal” is now considered below 5.7%, prediabetes is 5.7–6.4%, and diabetes is diagnosed at ≥6.5%.

The actual treatment target for most adults with diabetes is <7.0%, a level that sadly labels tens of millions of healthy people as diseased. If you have an HbA1C slightly over 7 and your doctor is pushing a metformin prescription at you, it’s time to push back!

Here’s the core point: the evidence does not support that driving HbA1C to 6.5% or lower extends life. The best available data from two big studies — the ACCORD trial and a meta-analysis from the BMJ — show two very surprising things: either no mortality benefit or actual harm from intensive glucose control.

[…]

Furthermore, there is the opposite thing that could harm you, hypoglycemia — which is often caused by aggressive drug treatment is, in itself, a potent killer.

Just remember that these thresholds are always changed in a uni-directional way, always made lower to expand the pool of patients who allegedly need to be on drugs. This is a process that takes place under the well-documented influence of pharma money, research, and experts, expanding the market for diabetes drugs at each step.

The major push to label people as “prediabetic” — a condition that, incidentally the WHO says shouldn’t be medicalized — is flat-out, brazen disease-mongering.

Having said that, extremely high blood sugar (HbA1C consistently above 9–10%) can cause real harm — kidney failure, blindness, neuropathy, infections. The point isn’t that glucose doesn’t matter at all; it’s that the marginal benefit of pushing from 7.0 to 6.5% or lower does not save lives, and the harm, both in terms of money, medical busy-ness of checking and rechecking your blood sugars, and the harms of the drugs are all real and quantifiable.

Eating a higher quality diet and getting sufficient exercise is the foundation for anyone worried about their blood sugars. Those who are told they have “pre-diabetes” should ignore that advice and refuse to be pasted with a sticky label that causes harm.

Numericide’s Number Four: BMI under 25

Body Mass Index (BMI) is a measure of body weight relative to height, often used to screen whether someone may be underweight, at a healthy weight, overweight, or obese. We need to screen because overweight people live shorter lives, right?

Not necessarily.

We are told that the aim for everyone, concerning this fourth Horseman of the Apocalypse, BMI, is 25. Not only is this absurdly low, but it is essentially meaningless as a measure of health on its own. Anyone with any good musculature whatsoever is going to have a BMI over 25. Why is that? Because muscle weighs more than fat.

It comes down to where the weight sits. A muscular person with BMI of 30 has a different risk profile than a guy with a BMI of 30 who is sedentary with a big beer gut — but the BMI treats them identically.

Where did this “25” come from?

The BMI 25 cutoff comes from a 1995 WHO technical report establishing four categories of body weight (underweight, normal, overweight, obese) and was loosely based on actuarial life insurance data. This threshold was not derived from outcome-based evidence and a BMI of 25 was not linked to any mortality inflection point.

What about someone who has, say, a BMI of 30. Should they get that lower? 

The claim that someone at BMI of 30 has a meaningfully shorter life expectancy than someone at BMI of 25 is not supported by the best available observational evidence.

The largest and most influential meta-analysis on this question was published in JAMA in 2013 and it pooled 97 studies with over 2.88 million participants and more than 270,000 deaths. The findings were mind-blowing: Being overweight was associated with significantly lower all-cause mortality than normal weight.

[…]

Via https://brownstone.org/articles/four-forms-of-numericide/

By Sasha Latypova, 9 September 2026

This is Part 2 of the Cancer Causation series. Part 1 is HERE.

In this post, I am republishing a booklet written in 1892. Mass vaccination, especially of children and women, and laws mandating vaccines had begun in earnest in the mid-1800s. By the end of the century, it was recognised, at least by some doctors, that vaccines induce cancer, which had already begun its unstoppable rise in “civilised” populations, in perfect correlation with increasing “access to modern medicine”. The booklet is as follows.

The Increase of Cancer

(Reprinted from The TOSCIN, of March 12th, 1892.)

By William Tebb, Printed By Wertheimer, Lea & Co., Circus Place, London Wall, I892

SIR,—As the medical journals are reluctant to give currency to suggestions which, throw discredit on certain dogmas of the orthodox medical church, I venture to ask permission, in the interest of the public health, to address your readers on a subject of admitted public importance, the causation of the remarkable and mysterious recrudescence of cancer during the past 30 years. And surely, sir, the study of the sources of any malady, particularly one of so grave and destructive a character, is as well deserving of consideration as the multitudinous but abortive attempts to effect a cure.

I may mention, as an inspiring motive for this communication to the impartial columns of THE TOSCIN, that several of my friends and acquaintances have, after acute and protracted suffering, succumbed to cancer, the origin of which their friends declare to be unaccountable except on the theory below, so that I hardly need an apology for bringing the matter before the attention of those of your readers who are interested in the public health. Cancer, like leprosy, is an incurable disease; and none of the vaunted remedies have stood the test of experience. It can be disseminated like leprosy, and is increasing at an alarming rate. The deaths from cancer in England and Wales are returned by the Registrar-General, thus :— Or per million living.

Cancer is reported to be increasing not only in England and the Continent, but in all parts of the world where vaccination is practised.

Dr. H. McAul Alston, Acting Resident Surgeon, Colonial Hospital, Port of Spain, Trinidad, in the Annual Report to the Surgeon General, dated 5th of April, 1887, says (p. 7):—

“A noticeable feature of the diseases of patients admitted is the increasing number of the cases of cancer.”

Sir James Paget observes:—

“The richest and poorest alike seem to be subject to it; so do the worst and best fed; those that are living in the best conditions of the atmosphere, and those that are immured in the worst; those that are cleanly, and those that are foul; those of all temperaments and of all occupations; those that appear healthy, and those that are diseased. We can hardly lay our hands upon any of the various circumstances of life in the various orders of society in this country, to which we can refer as rendering one more or less liable than another to the acquirement of the cancerous constitution.”

It is claimed that cancer is hereditary and is occasionally due to local injury, but is it not obvious that there must be some antecedent constitutional taint or diathesis to give rise to the development of the disease? To what, then, is this condition really due? Sir James Paget also says cancer is due to a morbid condition of the blood, and some of your readers will have little difficulty in pointing out one cause of the morbidity. It is allowed by physicians that cancer may be caused by impregnating the blood with impure matter.

Dr. Joseph Jones, President of the Louisiana Board of Health, a well-known pathologist, says that this disease is inoculable; that cancer may be propagated by inoculation, or by the injection of cancerous matter into the veins. He adds:

“We will have accomplished our purpose in recording these facts if we succeed in directing the attention of the profession to the necessity of greater attention to the condition of the subjects selected for the propagation of the vaccine disease.”

Drs. Von Bergman and E. Hahn have demonstrated this by the recent notoriously inhuman experiments at the Berlin Hospital. The Medical Press, December 5th, 1888, quotes Dr. Hahn as:

“Disposed to believe that, in many cases of recurrence, it is quite probable that the disease has developed anew, as the result of accidental inoculation.”

In The British Medical Journal, June 29th, 1889, Mr. Jonathan Hutchison, F.R.C.S., says that, with due care in the transplantation of a bit of living tissue, cancer may be transferred.

There is probably no method by which inoculation is practised on so large a scale as in vaccination and re-vaccination. It is not now denied by the medical profession that vaccination is an exciting cause of infantile syphilis, and, according to the Registrar-General’s returns, Vaccination Mortality, No. 433, dated 1877, and Infant Mortality, No. 392, dated 1880, the increase in Infantile Syphilis, since vaccination has been compulsory, is fourfold.

Mr. Hibbert, formerly Secretary to the Local Government Board, said in July, 1880, that this terrible increase was one of the most unsatisfactory features of the Vaccination Acts, and a reason why further legislation was needed. Dr. William Forbes Laurie, late medical director of a metropolitan cancer hospital, was thoroughly convinced that the increase of cancer was due to vaccination, and he wrote to Members of Parliament, inviting them to visit the hospital, and witness the terrible result of the vaccine operation. He says this increase of cancer is attributed by some medical men to the large amount of syphilitic disease with which vaccine lymph is impregnated, and by others to the direct impregnation “of healthy persons with lymph imbued with scrofulous and cancerous matter.”

And the late Dr. Dennis Turnbull, who made cancer his particular study for thirty years, declared in the public press his conviction that vaccination and re-vaccination is the most prolific cause of this disease. Mr. Keuchenius, late Colonial Secretary to the Holland Government, called the attention of the Second Chamber to the alarming spread of cancer in the Netherlands, which was coincident with the spread of vaccination, and (as he believed) due to poison conveyed in the vaccine virus.

The British Medical Journal for May 19th, 1885, in a leading article on the increasing fatality of cancer, says:—

“Our negligence in dealing effectually with other diseases may also favour its dissemination, for if syphilitic inflammation. may become cancerous, it is clear that the spread of syphilis has scattered throughout the population innumerable possible seeds of cancerous degeneration.”

Some time ago the Hospital Gazelle reported that fifty infants had been admitted into one hospital suffering from syphilitic disease, and that from some of these infants vaccine lymph had been taken. Assuming that the theory of the British Medical Journal is correct, this is an indication how the cancer spreading virus may be distributed.

In his recent work on cancer (Churchill, 1891), Dr. Herbert Snow calls attention to the fact that cancer is:

“Almost absent in the savage, while rapidly increasing in prevalence among the civilised.”

The savage it may be noted will not allow his blood to be poisoned with vaccine virus, hence he escapes that morbidity under which cancerous tumours find nutriment. Where the system has become thoroughly infected with this morbid tendency, cure by extirpation or otherwise is admitted to be impossible, and the suffering caused by the apprehension of being the victim of so dreadful an affliction may well engage the attention of your benevolent and thoughtful readers. Dr. Aitken says:

“The normal course of cancerous tumours we now know to be that of steady increase, a steady and certain progress towards death.”

It would, however, be unbecoming in me to dogmatise upon a subject which is admitted to be a puzzle to the medical profession, but I venture to hope that medical practitioners who have had the opportunity which clinical observation affords will no longer keep silence, but in the interests of the public health say whether the suggestion I have ventured to make is borne out by facts within their own experience.

Yours faithfully,

WILLIAM TEBB. Devonshire Club, St. James’, London.vaccine lymph had been taken. Assuming that the theory of the British Medical Journal is correct, this is an indication how the cancer spreading virus may be distributed.

In his recent work on cancer (Churchill, 1891), Dr. Herbert Snow calls attention to the fact that cancer is:

“Almost absent in the savage, while rapidly increasing in prevalence among the civilised.”

The savage it may be noted will not allow his blood to be poisoned with vaccine virus, hence he escapes that morbidity under which cancerous tumours find nutriment. Where the system has become thoroughly infected with this morbid tendency, cure by extirpation or otherwise is admitted to be impossible, and the suffering caused by the apprehension of being the victim of so dreadful an affliction may well engage the attention of your benevolent and thoughtful readers. Dr. Aitken says:

“The normal course of cancerous tumours we now know to be that of steady increase, a steady and certain progress towards death.”

It would, however, be unbecoming in me to dogmatise upon a subject which is admitted to be a puzzle to the medical profession, but I venture to hope that medical practitioners who have had the opportunity which clinical observation affords will no longer keep silence, but in the interests of the public health say whether the suggestion I have ventured to make is borne out by facts within their own experience.

Yours faithfully,

WILLIAM TEBB. Devonshire Club, St. James’, London.

[…]

Via https://sashalatypova.substack.com/p/vaccines-all-injected-biologics-are