Miracle Drugs
Today I want to share with you a story about a specific miracle drug and discuss a few others, none of which the pharmaceutical industry wants you to know about. But first, I want to explain why that’s the case and tip you off to several thousand miracle drugs that aren’t miracles at all and explain how you can improve both the quality of your life and its duration, principally by avoiding them.
But before I diverge into the weeds, the miracle generic drug in question is DMSO, dimethyl sulfoxide. It has been shown to be immensely beneficial in saving ischemic tissue, such as heart muscles and brain cells after an artery becomes obstructed in a heart attack or stroke. It has also shown miraculous improvements (I dare not say “cures”) of muscle and tendon injuries, varicose veins, various maladies of the eyes and many more. A bit further down (and you can skip down if you want to get started) I’ll have several links to fine articles generated by A Midwestern Doctor, a knowledgeable physician and researcher who posts these articles anonymously for reasons that should be obvious by now. I’ll leave it to AMD to fill you in, because he’s already connected the dots, so no need for me to rehash it further.
It is important to begin by stating that the United States of America has the absolute worst healthcare outcomes of any developed nation, and in some areas, it is worse than third world countries. For example, during the recent covid pandemic, the US lost over 3700 per million population, or just under 0.4%. 1.2 million Americans died from a disease that killed no one in Cambodia, and less than 50 in the medically backward nations of Chad, Western Sahara, North Korea, Sierra Leone, and 29 others (data from Worldometer.com). Further, indigenous people like the Hadza, the Innuits, the Aborigines, and the Bushman, rarely if ever die from cancer, heart disease or dementia, and live into their nineties with a full set of teeth and no dental carries. Why do we not emulate them?
Up until the middle of the twentieth century, less that 2% of Americans suffered from chronic illnesses. During the nineteenth century, that number was less than 0.5%. But in 2024, 62% of Americans suffer with some debilitating chronic issue such as arthritis, stenosis (narrowing of arteries or the joints of the spine), Crohns, ulcerative colitis, fibromyalgia, MS, cancer and more, including a plethora of autoimmune disorders. Most of these were completely unknown 200 years ago and claimed so few lives as to be unmentioned in medical literature. Why might that be?
Best-selling author and economist Thomas Sowell once said that virtually all of the new laws being passed these days are passed to cure problems created by laws passed in prior years. Dr. Sowell is correct. Shakespeare’s Dick the Butcher, in the play Henry VI suggests that in order to live freely “The first thing we do, let’s kill all the lawyers.” For background, when I bought my first house in 1970, the contract was a single page, the title report as well, and it was my responsibility to determine the suitability of the property, Caveat Emptor! Today the file of documents to purchase a home in California can contain as much as 300 pages. All of these additional documents, some of which originated as clauses added to contracts that I wrote as a Realtor in the 1980s (and yes I’m sorry) were the result of lawsuits where a buyer “suddenly” discovered that the roof leaked, the swimming pool heater didn’t work properly, or by golly, someone dumped used motor oil on the back corner of the property. Once a way is found to create money by litigation, litigation flourishes.
I update Dick the Butcher with this: “The first thing we do, let’s kill all the pharmaceutical researchers.” I’m writing this just days after the murder of United Healthcare’s CEO, so I must clarify that I’m not suggesting violence as the remedy here, merely borrowing an allegorical metaphor. And Sowell might add that nearly all the miracle drugs introduced since WWII have been created to solve issues caused by the drugs and industrial chemicals from prior generations.
If you raised your children on a rural farm, free from chemical fertilizers, pesticides and herbicides, if you followed regenerative (archaic) farming techniques, fertilizing crops with dead fish and animal manure, and drinking water from a natural spring on your property, it is highly unlikely that your child would ever experience a chronic disease. It is a fact that virtually all of these diseases that our ancestors didn’t know about are lifestyle diseases, caused by eating things that aren’t really food, drinking beverages designed in Dr. Jekyll’s laboratory, and being deluged with artificial chemicals and medicines, EMF radiation, breathing polluted air and drinking polluted water, and failing to get adequate sunlight.
Fluoride was supposed to improve dental health; it doesn’t. It does, however, result in diminished IQs. Forever chemicals like PFAS (Teflon, etc.) along with herbicides and pesticides have caused a significant diminishment of sperm counts as well as disrupting normal endocrine function. Lead in gasoline? Sure, we stopped using it (and MTBE as well) but the residue of these mistakes is still with us and will be for generations.
All of this began, innocently enough, with the creation of Germ Theory, a belief that all illnesses are the result of tiny organisms (germs, bacteria, viruses, and even tiny parasites) of which we were completely unaware for millennia. Shortly before the Civil War, a brilliant doctor by the name of Ignatz Semmelweis theorized the existence of these tiny creatures, based on a mortality study. He knew that his hospital was experiencing infant mortality at a rate of nearly 20%. One in five babies died, and far too often the mother died as well. At the same time, he discovered that a nearby birthing clinic, staffed only with midwives, was seeing mortality of about 4-5%. After scrutinizing their methods, he determined that the problem was likely due to doctors performing autopsies on dead babies and mothers, and then returning to the delivery room to assist with another birth.
Semmelweis believed that some unseen malady, a tiny microorganism, the cause of the death of the recently autopsied victim, was accompanying the doctor back to the maternity ward. At the birthing clinic, autopsies were the duty of medical examiners at nearby hospitals and were not conducted on site. By the simple process of sanitizing and disinfecting doctors prior to all patient interactions, today infant mortality is a tiny fraction of 1%. Sadly, like Van Gogh who never profited to any significant extent from his work, Semmelweis was only recognized for his brilliance after his death. While there is a hospital and a medical school bearing his name in Austria, his recognition came largely after he passed.
But then came the inevitable, consequence of his discovery, blaming every single death, illness, or discomfort on “germs.” While it makes sense to sanitize yourself, or your doctor, after contact with poisons, dangerous chemicals, or persons afflicted with serious pathogens, we have figuratively discarded the babies with the bathwater. Because of overly stringent sanitation practices, and especially mothers in two-income families who can’t make time to breast feed, we’ve raised generations of children with immune deficiencies. We’ve also seen an explosion of autism, food allergies, diabetes, and mental disorders.
If you assist a baby bird to emerge from its shell by breaking the shell away as soon as the baby bird’s beak pokes that first hole in it, the bird will die. The process of breaking out of its shell is essential to the bird’s development. Similarly, mothers milk and exposure to dirt, grime, and normal “germs,” are essential to the development of a child’s immune system. You do great harm to your child by shielding him or her (I’m not a fan of neutral pronouns) from nature. For those unaware, you should know that of the billions of bacteria and microbes teeming on this earth, the vast majority are beneficial. When you kill them all, you kill many allies.
For example, both your intestines and your epidermis, your external skin, are literally teeming with microscopic life forms — trillions of them — that assist you in digesting food, assimilating nutrients and maintaining the health and integrity of your skin. One of the very worst things you can do for yourself is to slather on antibacterial “hand sanitizers.” One of the next worst is taking antibiotic medications prematurely. In the majority of cases, your cold or flu will resolve without them, and your immune system will be stronger as a result. As one example, I’ve never had a flu shot and I’ve only contracted an influenza virus once. That single exposure, which resolved without intervention, left me with an immune system that has managed to protect me from subsequent exposures, and I’m a guy who trained with a few hundred other athletes, many of whom came to workouts despite a minor cold or flu, and worked in some of America’s largest gyms, where colds and flus incubate. More on all of that for another day, let’s discuss miracle drugs.
Two hundred years ago, there were no miracle drugs and there was no pharmaceutical industry, as we know it today.
Snake oil: The wild west saw a number of traveling salesmen peddling secret elixirs that were touted to cure everything from halitosis, arthritis, and gout to eczema, dandruff and the common cold. Modern doctors would have you believe these guys were all con artists, but the fact of the matter is that these miracle remedies contained a number of natural herbs whose efficacy was learned from Native American medicine men. They may not have been able to raise the dead, but they did provide enough benefits that the traveling salesmen were able to make a living.
Then, at the beginning of the twentieth century, a group of wealthy industrialists decided that there was too much financial potential in healthcare to leave it to the simple country doctors that had replaced the folk-medicine practitioners of earlier times. In the 1800s, it was not unusual for doctors to only be doctors because their fathers were doctors, and to learn what they knew about medicine from other doctors, including learning of medicinal herbs from indigenous “medicine men.” It was once a practice to treat infections by packing mud on the wound, something for which today’s doctors would be jailed. And yet, the population was healthier.
Wait, you say, healthier? Yes, as stated earlier, less than 2% suffered with chronic illnesses, no one died from ischemic heart attacks (blocked arteries). MS, ALS, Alzheimer’s, Parkinson’s, fibromyalgia and many more maladies we regularly see today were simply unheard of. If they existed at all, their effects were so limited as to be undocumented in medical literature from those times.
Meanwhile, that consortium of wealthy industrialists, men like Rockefeller, Carnegie, Mellon, Morgan, Stanley, Kellogg, and a few others, decided that they should standardize medical education, in order to take control of it for the purpose of promoting the creations of their laboratories. It may have begun innocently enough, and let’s assume they meant well, but the result 110 years later just couldn’t be much worse.
It began with a few simple tweaks. The medicine men and country doctors used an herbal tea made from the bark of willow trees to alleviate pain. They used other herbs like St. John’s Wort for mood elevation and ephedra for congestion. It is likely that the “snake-oil salesmen” wandering the new west were peddling elixirs made from herbs that were likely helpful to many who bought them. But the chemists in places like Rockefeller’s labs at IG Farben, decided to analyze these herbs, and design new and improved products based on them.
They decided, errantly, that the salicins in willow bark were the “active ingredient” and first created sodium salicylate, and then acetylsalicylic acid (aspirin). Years later they would concoct ibuprofen, acetaminophen, naproxen, and eventually fentanyl, stronger and stronger pain killers. They similarly found the “active ingredients” in ephedra, creating Sudafed (pseudo ephedra) and a plethora of other medicines they could patent and then sell at a tremendous profit. This practice brought us the first generation of “miracle” drugs, that seemed more powerful than their herbal progenitors, but brought along a new phenomenon, side effects. You see, there was no “active ingredient” in those herbal remedies. The herb, with all of its components, was the active ingredient. When you only received a part of the remedy, and a supercharged version of it at that, the results were adverse outcomes like stomach issues and even ulcers from aspirin, and hyperactivity, sleep disturbances and even in some cases psychotic behavior from Sudafed. Drugs created since that time often have far more deadly adverse effects, like Thalidomide, originally marketed over the counter for anxiety, sleep disorders and morning sickness, which caused birth defects. Vioxx reduced pain for some while causing fatal strokes for over 100,000 others. PPI medications to relieve minor stomach discomfort were found to induce leukemia.
It is important to know that there is no such thing as side effects, only effects. The alleged “side” effects are simply dose and time dependent, with the problematic (damaging or possibly fatal) dose being also dependent upon your individual immune system. One person can take Tylenol for years and suffer no apparent damage, while another will experience irreversible liver damage. The same holds true for ibuprofen, which has been shown to cause significant issues with intestinal blockage and kidney damage. Perhaps our newest miracle drugs are the GLP-1 agonists like Ozempic and Mounjaro, which have recently been linked to serious intestinal blockage and even death, on top of which, whatever weight you lose will come back as soon as you stop taking them.
It’s important to know that the latest miracle drugs are developed in the laboratory by isolating what researchers deem to be the specific cause of a disease, and then creating drug that will attack that one single factor. But the problem arises that these drugs affect more than just their target, which is how we get adverse effects or reactions. Sometimes these adverse effects can be considerably worse than the illness for which they were designed. SSRIs, statins, weight-loss drugs and more, can be more dangerous than what they purport to cure. SSRIs have been linked to psychotic breaks and extreme violence, statins have been shown to increase all-cause mortality while providing negligible or no benefit, and the new weight-loss drugs have recently been associated with death and disability.
Here’s my suggestion: When your doctor writes a prescription, go to the pharmacy and have it filled. Then, before you pay for it, open the package and find the insert. Somewhere, usually about six to ten paragraphs down, you’ll find the list of known adverse effects, which only includes those that have been shown to definitively arise from the drug. If anything on that list scares you, consider the possibility that you might be better off without this “miracle” drug, especially if you’re dealing with a minor illness that has a reasonable chance of resolving on its own. If so, just hand it back to the pharmacist with a polite, “I don’t think this medication is worth the risk.”
During the first ten years of the new millennium, over 500 new miracle drugs hit the market. In the following ten years, nearly a third were recalled or assigned “black box” warnings, urging you to be certain that your malady was worth the risk that accompanied these drugs. And the reason for all of this is simple: Money. New miracle drugs that *might* cure your condition can generate huge profits.
So the pharmaceutical industry blossomed from companies like Farben, who originally developed industrial and military chemicals, into the multi-trillion-dollar cabal that it is today. And all of this was exacerbated by the almighty dollar. The largest single source of funds for politicians and political action consortiums (PACs) as well as TV, Internet, and print advertising, is — by far — the pharmaceutical industry. This is why you can’t trust CNN to tell you that any of these drugs might be dangerous; they wouldn’t dare. And we’ve recently seen that our elected officials in Washington have taken millions from Big Pharma, with Bernie Sanders and Liz Warren appearing to be eight-figures deep in the pockets of the drug peddlers.
The folks at Merck knew Vioxx was dangerous but considered it profitable enough to be worth the risk. Just as Ford knew their new Pinto, in 1971, was a dangerous car, but decided to sell them anyway and fix the problem in subsequent years. Chevrolet knew the same about the Corvair. And in all three of these instances, the companies came away with a net profit, and not a single executive or other employee saw any legal consequences for deliberately causing death to thousands of people. They had to pay out lawsuits, but those only diminished their profits slightly. Killing people with defective products is a profitable venture!
Only the United States and New Zealand allow direct to consumer advertising of prescription medications, but Pharma also can and does get their names in front of you when you find out the newscast your watching is brought to you by (Pfizer, J&J, Merck, etc.) It is estimated that the industry will spend in excess of $30 billion advertising drugs you can’t buy without your doctor’s approval in 2025, and a portion of that money will go to your doctor advising him or her of all the reasons why he or she should prescribe this or that wonder drug, while forgetting or downplaying the potential negatives. And it is important for Pharma’s bottom line that doctors prescribe the newest drugs, which are still under patent, and discourage generics, which leads me to the essence of today’s subject!
There are two types of doctors, those who believe only in Germ Theory, and those who still believe in something called Terrain Theory, the idea that building a strong body and strong immune system is essential, and drugs are only to be used as a last resort. A very wise and competent physician that I know, and who falls under that second category, publishes a Substack under the nom de plume A Midwestern Doctor. He does so for his own protection, because Big Pharma, the AMA, and our government health bureaucrats would like to crucify him. I follow his writings, and I am linking several of his articles to this one, as he goes into significant detail describing a generic drug that I’ve used for years, DMSO.
So without further ado, here are the writings of A Midwestern Doctor. There’s quite a bit here, but worth your time. I’ve used DMSO over the years for muscle and tendon injuries but only recently became aware of some of its other uses. You should be able to read these without subscribing: