 At a base level, the population does not understand risk. Less than a third of educated respondents are risk literate: https://www.allianz.com/de/ueber-uns/brand/brand-in-action/making-cents/risk-literacy-and-choices.html
“Around two-thirds of the population have little to no awareness of the health, work, housing, liability, and cyber risks” - https://group.vig/en/investor-relations/ir-news/ir-meldungen/everyday-risks-international-study-reveals-low-risk-literacy-among-the-population/ Risks of death are one and the same with health risk. The number one cause of death is heart disease. It is the top risk, both globally and in the US. Cancer is a relatively close second. Accidents, like falling or overdosing on “safe” medications, are third. The next seven are infections/illnesses and organ damage: https://www.cdc.gov/nchs/fastats/deaths.htm Every one of these top ten has a substantial decrease in risk through lifestyle and behavioral alteration. Yet when we observe trends in the most recent decades, health risk is only climbing. The population is not getting healthier. One might wonder why the top health risks have skyrocketed in the past fifty years if public health authorities, scientists, and media outlets have been correct, honest, and effective in their messaging. Upon examination, it appears as though they collude to make and keep the population risk illiterate through various forms of misdirection, distraction, and intentional deceptions. The number one killer is reduced through unconditional forgiveness: https://pubmed.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/17466400/ https://pubmed.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/14593849/ https://pmc.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/articles/PMC5055412/ https://fincham.info/papers/2014-ajcardiology.pdf https://pmc.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/articles/PMC10120569/ https://www.apa.org/monitor/2017/01/ce-corner https://www.cnn.com/2019/06/05/health/forgiveness-health-explainer https://greatergood.berkeley.edu/article/item/the_new_science_of_forgiveness Some of the most informed and educated people are shocked when learning this. Might that be a problem, considering the grudge culture in which we now live? Being agitated by disagreements, politics, and differing opinions is a common phenomenon. In fact, there are whole ideological movements which claim that words are violence, and that any degree of disagreement is unforgivable. Does this popular phenomenon seem to be addressing the number one risk? Is constant political grudge a risk-literate behavior/belief? Is it improving the mental and physical health outcomes at a population level? The number one and two killers are cut by ceasing tobacco, ceasing alcohol, losing weight, and exercising: https://www.uspreventiveservicestaskforce.org/uspstf/recommendation/tobacco-use-in-adults-and-pregnant-women-counseling-and-interventions https://pmc.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/articles/PMC7935481/ https://ebccp.cancercontrol.cancer.gov/recommendation.do?topicId=102271 https://ascopubs.org/doi/10.1200/EDBK_200093 https://www.who.int/news/item/03-02-2026-four-in-ten-cancer-cases-could-be-prevented-globally https://pmc.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/articles/PMC12010775/ https://www.cancer.org/cancer/risk-prevention/diet-physical-activity/acs-guidelines-nutrition-physical-activity-cancer-prevention.html https://www.iarc.who.int/featured-news/world-cancer-day-2021-physical-activity/ The number three killer is reduced in risk if you just get off your phone and lift weights. Is it fair to say that these risks and their interventions dominate social media posts, media headlines, and trending scientific discussions? Just in your day-to-day interactions with people, are these objective measurable facts of the undeniable top risks a regular talking point? Are they as seriously wrestled with as the trending social media outrage of the day? Instead, a very popular answer about top risks is gun violence. The majority of American respondents rank this quite high in risk evaluation. In a 2023 poll, 70% of respondents ranked gun violence as THE top concern: https://source.washu.edu/2025/07/gun-violence-remains-top-st-louis-public-health-concern-but-mental-health-addiction-rising/ . Respondents even ranked food insecurity and extreme weather ahead of the real top three risks. But nearly 60% of gun violence is suicide. And a very modest estimate is 15% for gang violence. Mass shooting is a vanishingly small percent. Even attempting to use the most alarmist and biased interpretations, a perpetrator using gun violence against you does not rank in your top fifty risks. There is no way the public could conceivably know this from the way it’s portrayed by public health authorities or media outlets. Largely, what we see is entertainment sensationalism blotting out the productive conversation. Specifically, what we see in a discussion like this is exploitation of something called availability heuristic and a subset of base-rate fallacy called base-rate neglect. For the discerning reader, know that these two phenomena are constantly working to misinform you. Essentially, once you succumb to emotionally powerful narratives, you abandon accuracy to focus on rare or nonexistent events. As we venture further into specified discussions of risk, the degree and volume of lying increases. It is not simply a phenomenon of news headline sensationalism or mistaken wording provoking your outrage/attention. Experts appear to want you to misunderstand truth. In scientific publications, the representation of vested interests generates extreme bias. We could go down the list of the opioid epidemic, Vioxx, thalidomide, tobacco company-funded research, and a litany of other recent scandals where officials approved dangerous treatments and scientific consensus is driven by lies from different industry pressures. The blog has covered this before: https://www.elev8wellness.com/wellblog_best_nutrition_training_coaching_experts/conflicts-of-interest-in-science-and-human-health-have-reached-the-tipping-point https://www.elev8wellness.com/wellblog_best_nutrition_training_coaching_experts/why-cant-americans-get-healthy Experts want the public to believe the wrong things, or at the very least remain in a confused and highly impressionable state. And as much as we could cover many MANY more examples (like how in 1971 researchers found a link between Johnson and Johnson talcum powder and ovarian cancer, but hid the truth for over a decade), Iet us focus on HOW liars ruin institutional science messaging to damage the public’s understanding of health risk through a variety of intentional abuses of methodology. On this subject there are a multitude of ways which people who think they are smart dupe the general populace. This article will stick to only three (but do keep availability heuristic and base-rate neglect in mind), because there are too many to cover. The reader must understand that the number of ways news and science messaging ARE manipulated is beyond a normal person’s imagination. A normal person is not looking to collude to deceive others at an industrial scale. Thus, the breadth of mendacity is difficult to apprehend. And a normal person does not have a zealous, religious commitment to upholding the dogma that modern authorities are infallible gods without bias, error, or mistake. So a normal person can’t really fathom the degree to which numbers can be manipulated and approved even by peer review, seemingly genuinely, to misrepresent reality. This article will cover just three abuses of methodology which are purposely weaponized to confuse the public about risk: the measure of and emphasis on relative risk; biased endpoints; and biased duration of study. These aren’t the only ones. These may not even be the most prevalent. But they are a few sleights-of-hand which the layperson and even specialist miss most of the time. They also happen to be the very means by which the tobacco lobby made their case, how the FDA approved Vioxx and OxyContin as safe, and essentially how all medical products and drugs are still assessed for effectiveness and/or safety. Relative risk is a statistical term to measure the difference in percent between two percents or incident rates (of risk between two groups). Let’s say that your normal risk of death from roller skating is 1% per thousand hours of activity (ie - out of a large sampling, one person dies for every one-hundred people who each roller skate one-thousand hours). And let’s say that wearing a headband lowers your risk to 0.8% per thousand hours. Your change in risk is 0.2%. And because 0.2% is 20% of 1%, a biased statistician argues the difference between 1% and 0.8% is 20%. That is relative risk in a nutshell. Calculated upward, 0.2% is 25% of 0.8%. It is often first represented as a ratio toward the more dangerous group (NOT wearing headband has 1.25 risk ratio compared to wearing). And there is some more unpacking to be done in a longer discussion about baseline elsewhere. But for now, consider that in news summaries, the lay audience will generally see this figure in the percent format, again, because it LOOKS big and scary. Clearly, the risk rise or decrease is actually 0.2%. This is real risk, sometimes called “absolute risk” and “absolute risk reduction” in order to sell the idea that there are multiple entirely legitimate ways of looking at risk. There aren’t. There is only one way. Liars love to tangle themselves in knots by downplaying ARR (absolute risk reduction) and playing up RRR (relative risk reduction). And if the headband lobby wanted to sell a lot of headbands, we could guarantee that we would be reading about life-saving headbands which lower risk AT LEAST 20%. Or even more deceptively, they’d perhaps phrase it that you have a 25% increased risk of death by NOT wearing that headband. Deep in the double-asterisked footnote, maybe we’d find the 20% figure is an RRR. But by then, there would already be headband mandates. And many people might not allow children to enroll in school without a headband. All of this over a possible 0.2% difference in risk. Never mind that at ten hours of roller skating your risk is 0.01%; thus, your risk with or without the headband would only change by 0.0002% per hour of activity. This is why Mark Twain popularized the statement, “lies, damned lies, and statistics.” In a way, relative risk is entirely a fiction. It is a legitimate tool in dataset analysis; but it simply does not honestly translate over to many risk choices in the real world. No one uses relative risk in his personal life. No one. Earnestly and in good faith ask professional epidemiologists or statisticians if they refuse to touch the music and climate controls in their cars while driving. They will have no clue what you’re referencing. But manipulating music controls raises risk 190%; and manipulating climate control raises risk 460%: https://usnddc.org/wp-content/uploads/2023/03/Crash-risk-driver-distraction_lit-review_10-1.pdf. To put this in perspective, smoking cigarettes raises risk of all cancers 150 to 300%. You drop your risk of motor vehicle death more by ceasing music and climate controls than you lower risk of anything else in all of public health by engaging in the experts’ recommended interventions. Reread that sentence. Reread it again. But no one ceases car controls, because anyone with an IQ above 85 knows full well that absolute risk reigns supreme. That is, instead of 2-5 deaths per 10,000 hours of driving, risk will be closer to 1 death for every 10,000 hours of driving if you touch no dashboard knobs and buttons. Your intelligent brain knows the absolute risk is all that matters. The absolute risk reduction is less than a tenth of one percent. So you don’t care. Even the biggest fraudster zealots who push relative risk narrative in every other discussion do not care AT ALL about relative risk in the real world. But you better believe that if someone could make a billion dollars from people never touching music control or climate control dials in a car, we’d all be familiar with the figures. Relative risk is absolutely ludicrous when applied as scaremongering lies at population level research. Imagine we study two groups, one with a 2 in 100,000 incidence of death and another with a 6 in 100,000 incidence. Even if we can guarantee a strong causal variable (we cannot), the difference in risk is incredibly tiny (if it exists at all - do keep in mind that any two groups will have small variances due to no single or obvious causal factor). It’s a 0.004% difference. But the way it most often will be represented in a peer-reviewed journal is a 3.0 ratio or 300% “of” or 200% additional rise in risk. This is relative risk. Your real risk (absolute risk) hasn’t changed meaningfully. There was no reshuffling of the top ten risks. There was no sizable statistical signal. But a “300% increased risk” will command headlines if someone stands to gain money or power from it. It will command headlines if it secures the current trending lie in a scientific consensus. If it can agitate people, it will go viral in social media. That number will not gain traction if it stands to unseat power. It will not gain notice if it's sober-minded. It has little to do with accuracy. It has everything to do with money and authority. We incorrectly believe that every modern scientific paradigm succeeds because of how aligned it is with actual truth; but do not forget Thomas Kuhn’s correction on this matter: “A new scientific truth does not triumph by convincing its opponents and making them see the light, but rather because its opponents eventually die, and a new generation grows up that is familiar with it.” That’s the repeated historical reality without exception. Even in studies where no one overtly stands to profit, relative risk is so normalized as the discussion point that it still misleads educated onlookers. Food allergies have skyrocketed in the past forty years in the Western world. Thanks to relative risk, many people have confused themselves about the causes and the interventions because of one single underpowered study whose results were hyperbolized via relative risk lies. That study, the LEAP study, only examined peanut allergy. Often, people tout its findings as discovering that early exposure eliminates all allergies; and avoidance of exposure is what causes allergies. But that isn’t what the study found at all. Infants in the study who were exposed to peanuts ended up with an 11% incidence of allergy at 60 months: https://www.nejm.org/doi/full/10.1056/NEJMoa1414850. That’s higher than the global baseline of childhood peanut allergy by a lot (less than 1%). To be clear, exposed infants in this study ended up with an ELEVEN-FOLD higher incidence of peanut allergy than the average person in the non-Western world. That’s 1,100% in relative risk language. In the non-Western world, childhood peanut allergy prevalence is as low as 0.0% in rural settings (eg - South Africa) and often no higher than 0.22% in some urban settings (eg - Korea) whether or not infants had ANY exposure (ie - rural South Africans and Koreans do NOT include peanuts in early childhood foods). Moreover, nine children in the early exposure group of the LEAP study had to discontinue participation in exposure because they were developing such severe reaction. Their data is excluded from the final results. With their data excluded, both the exposure and non-exposure groups had similar rates of hospitalization. Thus, in practical terms, there was very little difference. A difference, yes. But not an explain-all level of difference. The primary discovery was that on a skin prick test, very young infants had a 10% reduction in positive allergy tests if exposed to peanut early. At 60 months, the reduction was about 15%. This figure is misconstrued all the time, even by pediatric allergists, as a 70% to 81% (relative risk) reduction. Worse than that, some “quote” the study as proof that exposure eliminates allergies. No. That is an egregious abuse of the data. Early exposure does seem to be a valuable tool for some people some of the time. It is nowhere near eliminating. It amounts to a ten to fifteen percent (absolute risk) reduction on average. The sum total explanation of food allergies is complex and is strongly related to beneficial bacterial exposure, such that cesarean births and maternal or infant use of antibiotics raises risk. We see clearly that rural communities with no exposure to peanuts often end up with no allergy to it at all. So exposure makes for a terrible explanatory framework. None of it can be boiled down to a single smoking gun. Food exposure does not and cannot overcome the risks of early and repeated antibiotic use, the over-sterilization of modern environments, etc. But as long as liars command the audience with relative risk, people will continue to misunderstand these and any other research findings. And remember, this study did not even seem to have obvious financial or ideological reasons to drive bias. It was merely a faux pas by virtue of our insistence on using relative risk to misrepresent reality. And then people kept exaggerating the already-inflated figure, rounding up until the stated "conclusion" no longer has any connection to reality at all. The way research endpoints are abused to lie is sneakier. Let’s say we want to evaluate the effectiveness of vitamin C on the common cold. Biased researchers will lower the dose to a known ineffective level. A one-hundred-plus year tidal wave of affirming evidence confirms the effectiveness of vitamin C. But there are very powerful people who still want it belittled in the public health discussion. It’s cheap. It’s not particularly profitable, and this specifically pertains to what people would NOT buy or buy into if they comprehended the effectiveness of vitamin C. Vitamin C effectiveness casts doubt on the need for other profitable therapies. Thus, biased researchers merely shift the goalposts by measuring a wrong endpoint, like hospitalization or death. Almost no one dies or goes to the hospital for the common cold to begin with. So we are not going to see a statistically significant drop in this already almost-zero incidence rate. The peer-reviewed conclusion can legitimately be that there was no significant difference between the vitamin C group and the non-vitamin C group when we use a deceitful endpoint like this. By the time the research reaches classrooms or news headlines, it’ll be dumbed all the way down to “new research shows vitamin C wholly ineffective.” If researchers had selected an adequate dose and a meaningful endpoint (like severity or duration), perhaps we could sift out a signal. Better than that, they could’ve used an honest baseline, like tissue or blood sampling, since we don’t even know if the added vitamin C group started as same, lower, or higher levels of vitamin C before the study. This is yet another duplicity worked into these types of studies. The dosing doesn’t matter without referencing the corresponding change in blood serum or tissue sample values. By definition, vitamin C deficiency is a disease which lowers the body’s capacity to continue mounting immune response to everything. It’s curious that effectiveness would even be assessed by external dose rather than an internal concentration. But more likely than not, if authors or their patrons don’t want to show benefit, on top of wrong endpoint, they’ll shift the goalposts on the duration of the study as well. And duration is the third manipulation we are examining. Imagine researchers evaluate 90-day post-cold outcomes for the vitamin C in question. Given the only time we would see severity or duration decline (if the vitamin C works) is in the initial days, looking at 90-day post-cold instead is a way to cheat the outcome again. A very recent example of this is in 2024 claims about HPV vaccination. Conveniently, the vaccinated cohort (young girls) was only studied for a short duration (where almost no one develops cervical cancer): https://academic.oup.com/jnci/article/116/6/857/7577291 . And they were compared to older women (the main time in life someone develops the cancer). If you cut off analysis with women before they reach an age where the cervical cancer can present, the duration of analysis is purposely set to obfuscate a genuine comparison. On top of that, the same researchers did not account for the healthy patient effect (when healthier people with better socioeconomic background are more frequently the vaccinated): https://medcheckjp.org/wp-content/uploads/2024/06/Eng-no-29rr.pdf . There is an actual name for this: healthy-vaccinee-bias. Not just that, but the authors of the study outright lied. They claimed NO CASES of cervical cancer in the vaccinated group (again, young kids), while their own dataset showed multiple cases in the 14-year-old group and at least one case in the 12-13 range buried in the tables. These are excluded from their summaries. This was not a placebo-controlled trial. It is a retrospective observational study, the weakest evidence we can summon in publications. On the other hand, in HPV vaccine random controlled trials (actual reliable studies), they show much worse risks of other cancers in the vaccinated cohort. Look closely at the summaries in the medcheck link. But again, which findings caught headlines? Solid studies which showed increased risk of other cancers from HPV vaccination? Or a weak and dishonest study which deceptively claimed ZERO cases of cervical cancer in the young, newly-HPV-vaccinated group? https://publichealthscotland.scot/news/2024/january/no-cervical-cancer-cases-detected-in-vaccinated-women-following-hpv-immunisation/ Why would that be? It couldn’t possibly have to do with Merck making $5.2 billion on the HPV vaccine ALONE last year. It must simply be because of superior science and integrity in expert institutions, of course. And that HPV product couldn’t possibly be REALLY increasing multiple cancers incidence, could it? It’s probably entirely coincidental that last year Merck also made $29.5 billion off of Keytruda, the number one selling anti-cancer immunotherapy. It could not ever be a possibility that the same company raking in billions would vend a promoting cause of cancer while also vending the treatment for the cancer, right? Merely spurious conspiracy theories, surely. Now, we have examined three simple ways these three shell games are played. But the reader must understand that we are attempting to summarize industrial duplicity. There is a Gordion knot of wrongthink that has been at work for decades with intentional fraud in the trillions of dollars. And some of its misused tactics are baked into the cake of how legitimate research would be done as well; so the vigilance to skewer abusers of the methods is quite low. Frankly, scrutiny is nonexistent among peers in a scientific specialty. It is exclusively OUTSIDERS and non-specialists who uncover all scientific fraud: https://goodscienceproject.org/articles/addressing-research-fraud/ https://nymag.com/intelligencer/article/why-scientific-fraud-is-suddenly-everywhere.html This is a giant refutation of the alleged “we police ourselves” argument in expert circles. Sometimes the claim is parlayed as “science is self-correcting.” No. They don’t. It’s not. Ever. That is a canard. Only external oversight ever polices anybody. And if you have developed an entire industrial complex which disinvites outsiders and naysayers, none of us should be shocked that internal oversight is nonexistent. The totality of academic, sociological, and financial pressures is for specialists in a field to NOT police themselves. Like any other domain where oversight is low, human incentive to cheat and steal is highER. There are so many more ways researchers and authorities lie. There is more than an article could possibly cover. There is more than anyone could ever possibly know. First, the inverse of the three abuses already covered is also abused to lie. When a relative risk signal is high, but researchers don’t want to show that, they flatline the statistical significance or selectively exclude the confidence intervals which would showcase the real outcome. This is the mirror of a more common lie, called p-hacking. All of these techniques are a marketing ploy, not science. Look no further than experts’ own refusal to cease music and climate controls while driving a vehicle. They don’t actually care about relative risk in their own lives. Occasionally they punt to another flavor of dissemblance, called odds ratio. Though this CAN be a way to see signal in statistical noise for uncommon events, we must keep in mind that the tobacco lobby used these precise methods to sow doubt about the carcinogenic effect of cigarettes for decades: https://pmc.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/articles/PMC1114216/; https://fingertips.phe.org.uk/static-reports/public-health-technical-guidance/Basic_statistics/Odds_ratios_relative_risk.html. To be absolutely damningly clear, WE KNOW that lying researchers used odds ratios and relative risk to argue quite effectively against the undeniable cancer-causing effects of smoking. And they are still the standards of modeling to tell us about everything in public health to this day. When people dismiss absolute risk and try to shuttle it out of the discussion for preeminent emphasis on relative risk and/or odds ratios, it is intentional deception. It’s not an accident. It’s always dressed up as a sophistication that the non-in-group non-specialist “simply doesn’t understand.” But that kind of gaslighting and credentialist insult is a strong sign that liars have run out of tactics. Professional epidemiologists, mathematicians, and statisticians have been warning us about the abuse of relative risk and odds ratios for decades. This is not some far flung YouTube conspiracy. It is in the literature of the gatekeepers themselves. Deeks “When can odds ratios mislead?”: https://pmc.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/articles/PMC1114127/ “Relative risk reduction: Misinformative measure in clinical trials and observational studies”: https://pmc.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/articles/PMC9647013/ “Ratio measures in leading medical journals: structured review”: https://pmc.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/articles/PMC1702463/ “Two common ways you might misinterpret medical research” https://www.acp-online.org/two-common-ways-you-might-misinterpret-medical-research/ “What’s the Risk: Differentiating Risk Ratios, Odds Ratios, and Hazard Ratios”: https://www.cureus.com/articles/39455-whats-the-risk-differentiating-risk-ratios-odds-ratios-and-hazard-ratios “Expert quotes and exaggeration in health news”: https://wellcomeopenresearch.org/articles/4-56 “Questionable utility of the relative risk in clinical research”: https://www.sciencedirect.com/science/article/pii/S0895435620311719 “Exaggerations and Caveats in Press Releases and Health-Related Science News” (PLOS One): https://pmc.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/articles/PMC5158314/ There are so many more ways to cook the books than even these. More complicated variations of dishonest numerical manipulation include dividing findings into tertiles, quartiles, or quintiles, in order to generate groupings or amplify signal favorable to your bias. There are papers in epidemiology which warn against this practice (collectively called quantile stratification or post-hoc stratification), but it still happens. And on and on the data dredging goes. Sometimes when the endpoint shows something researchers don’t want to be true, they will simply claim methodological flaws around that endpoint to have their own paper retracted. And sometimes a retraction for methodological flaws or conflicts of interest in the findings comes fifty years later: https://www.publichealth.columbia.edu/news/historians-unearth-conflict-interest-prompting-retraction-lancet-journal . When a longer study is beginning to show a signal researchers or donors didn’t want to be true, they will end the study or shorten the duration. Conflicts of interest are not known. When we read COI disclosures, we are seeing the very tip of a massive iceberg. They include only select financial disclosures, like a grant or a funding group; but totally absent from these are intellectual or academic conflicts of interest, personal relationships, and ghost writers. With regard to financial conflicts alone, the fact is at least half the time authors do NOT even disclose these: https://www.madinamerica.com/2022/01/undisclosed-medical-conflicts-of-interest/. But when we get to competing affiliations or questionable relationships which materially influence editors and authors, none of these get shared: https://pmc.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/articles/PMC7819374/; https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Conflicts_of_interest_in_academic_publishing If none of that were bad enough, the very controls for confounders rely on proprietary models. That is, any time two groups are being compared in order to identify the impact of one variable, researchers must try to account for all other variables which could’ve impacted outcomes. There is an analytical tool called a common risk‑adjusted Cox regression which can do a good job at this some of the time. But the exact methodology of how much to control for each variable is not fully disclosed in all published findings. Even if disclosed, it cannot truly be done. Keep this in mind for later. Most of published scientific research cannot be replicated. So the fact that authors make very large claims about risk without us knowing PRECISELY how they accounted for comorbidities and confounders is a material concern. If their findings were easily and regularly reduplicated by others, then we might not have the need to dismiss most of published scientific findings. But they aren’t. So we must. Distrust “the Science”. This is even the case if authors applied absolute godlike honesty in their regressions. We must keep in mind that the most rigorous application of regression models relies on assumptions that researchers know all or at least most of what would confound the comparisons and to what degree. That is not possible. There will always be unknowns. And if there aren’t, how can we be sure? Professional review of Cox and regression show us that even when we all agree we think we have a good handle on the causes, these methods fail to nail down the precision we would all like: https://www.annualreviews.org/content/journals/10.1146/annurev-statistics-040320-114441; https://onlinelibrary.wiley.com/doi/10.1111/risa.12865. When regression is questioned, dogmatists will invoke something called Mendelian randomization; but this is a Gish gallop, punting the fundamental problem of unknowability further down the line. This just lands us at even more analytical problems, like collider bias, horizontal pleiotropy, instrumentation and selection issues. Strictly speaking, each attempt to provide precision and clarity on causal relationships generates numerically more opportunities for error, lies, and manipulations. Mendelian randomization can show us that people who increasingly buy more expensive shoes across their lives as an independent act of buying expensive shoes become wealthier. Of course, that is not the direction of the causal arrow at all. As people get wealthier, they tend to buy increasingly more expensive shoes. And it is precisely why even randomization cannot suss out cause. This happens frequently with cholesterol, as a clear example. People who become increasingly healthier tend to have an average decrease in cholesterol. Cholesterol did not cause the health or lack of health. Rather, the health or lack caused all. Cholesterol is a downstream outcome, not an upstream cause. Randomization connects average correlates. It does not tell us anything about causal direction unless we assume the conclusion in our premises. This is, in fact, why in the public health arena we find that somewhat-informed people are more belligerently wrong than uninformed people. They know enough to include a conclusion in their assumptions, but not enough to know they are assuming a conclusion. This creates circular “arguments” which do not amount to arguments at all. “Look at how bad this bad cholesterol is; it caused these bad things, and that’s how you know it caused them, because of how bad it is” is a fairly accurate summary of how somewhat-informed people present the reliability of regression and randomization on public health subjects. We cannot even get to a discussion, because the very topic debated is already assumed in their premises. Relative risk is a lie. Wrong endpoints are lies. And selective duration is a lie. Even when no bias obviously influences them, they are still untrustworthy. Even when conflicts of interest are known and regression or randomization is applied well, it’s not the safeguard people think. Moreover, selective duration is often wrapped up in obfuscation of confounders or total removal of cause. A good pointed example is the bisphosphates (bone density drugs) pharmaceutical interest. Fall risk vanishes when people get strong. Strong people don’t fall and they don’t break. But public health messaging for fracture prevention focuses exclusively on taking bisphosphates, NOT on exercise. In fact, research tends to avoid looking at the reduction of fall entirely, even though it is THE cause of fractures. The claims of drug efficacy rely solely on removing non-fall elderly from the statistics. The drugs reduce absolute risk 0.5 to 1% per year for 3-5 years. Strengthening confers a 30% absolute risk reduction within the same timeframe AND keeps lowering risk afterward, which the drugs do not and cannot do. Even AI engines are strongly biased by industry propaganda on this topic. It takes tons of re-prompting to get any AI engine to properly compare the massive risk reduction from strengthening against the very weak evidence of minor average benefit from bisphosphates. Like pharma-biased researchers and apologists, AI applications will generate relative risk figures to amplify the next-to-nothing signal of fractures during fall RATHER than look at risk OF fall itself (THE cause of fractures). This is an intentional deception to make ineffective or even negative efficacy look like it is productive. And make no mistake: this is done all the time for medical products. AI is so good at regurgitating the lies and parroting all of the fraudulent propaganda within scientific research that when Meta trained its artificial intelligence on 48 million science papers, the AI could only produce misinformation: https://www.cnet.com/science/meta-trained-an-ai-on-48-million-science-papers-it-was-shut-down-after-two-days/ . We have to pause and reflect on the danger here. Industrial scale deception used to take a lot of man hours where many liars and vested interests had to collaborate clandestinely. Now, AI makes it possible to farm out the work and import it directly to your brain in broad daylight. And it is working. ChatGPT users are dumber and getting dumber: ChatGPT as a cognitive crutch: Evidence from a randomized controlled trial on knowledge retention - ScienceDirect. But ChatGPT and other AI modules also work intently to worsen mental health in the users: https://www.mentalhealthjournal.org/articles/minds-in-crisis-how-the-ai-revolution-is-impacting-mental-health.html; https://www.pbs.org/newshour/show/what-to-know-about-ai-psychosis-and-the-effect-of-ai-chatbots-on-mental-health. Think back to the availability heuristic and base-rate neglect fallacies mentioned in the beginning of this article. The AI users are both dumber and more emotionally agitated, which WILL supercharge those two influences. And clearly, anyone who has tested the honesty and veracity of AI engines on a subject he knows well can see that AI lies constantly. AI engines hallucinate. They fabricate facts and events. And they just generally encourage the users to become worse versions of themselves in every measurable way. This is without even referencing their extreme and absurd bias which companies have deliberately coded into their functions. Examples run the gamut from failing basic math ( https://www.reddit.com/r/learnmath/comments/1k4uiy6/why_does_chatgpt_mess_up_basic_math_like/?solution=d068e241a7f33b43d068e241a7f33b43&js_challenge=1&token=bbbe4bf1c9a2b5160829c4be34da5861830574b1cff24c43cb8437a8fb4caf31&jsc_orig_r=&utm; https://community.openai.com/t/chatgpt-simple-math-calculation-mistake/62780) to generating anachronistic or ahistorical photos ( https://www.axios.com/2024/03/01/meta-ai-google-gemini-black-founding-fathers; https://www.aljazeera.com/news/2024/3/9/why-google-gemini-wont-show-you-white-people ) to a more curious and interesting example where ChatGPT will quote any religious text EXCEPT passages from the Quran. As of the writing of this article, you can visit OpenAI and prompt to recite any passage from any religious text; and it will recite the passage, unless from the Quran. For some very odd reason, especially if the Sura is a contentious passage possibly involving violence, ChatGPT will not recite the passage; but it will give you a lengthy apologetic on the proper way to interpret the Sura. Who can even guess at the thinking behind this? It’s simply nonsense. AI programs predominantly “learn” from the very institutional resources which have been colluding to misinform the public about health risk. All of the lying authorities are the bedrock source code for artificial intelligence. AI does not think. It doesn’t reason. It is not a person. It cannot apply critical skepticism or properly weigh evidence. When pushed into a corner to substantiate facts with incontrovertible sources for its unfounded claims, it will avoid the discussion and repeatedly regurgitate evidence-free positions from the supposed experts or authorities. You can test this with any debated topic where the popular side presents wordplay and circumstantial inferences. Cholesterol hypothesis is a good example. But simply select any subject you know incredibly well where the popular position or recommendation is questionable; and see how much effort you have to put in to get the AI to tell the truth. If you can’t think of any subject you know well and where you disagree with the popular conclusion, that itself may be a problem. AI bots are machines which amplify public health duplicity grandly. They are juiced up Trojan Horses which people are willingly inviting into their own minds; and we can already see the impact is inordinately negative. It would be a mistake to write off the nonsense in AI hallucinations and ahistorical revisionism as simply glitches. When we see a clear pattern of deliberate efforts to confuse the public while hiding under the veil of fact-checking and intelligence, we would be wise to believe our eyes. There’s a saying when we identify repeated suspicious activity within systems: it’s not a bug; it’s a feature. The deceptions are so vast and so prevalent that there is no good way to get a handle on them. In fact, more formally-educated people are more likely to be duped by bad science, not recognizing their own confirmation bias and/or in-group bias. This is repeatedly the finding in surveys. On average, the more formal education a person receives, the less likely he is to scrutinize and evaluate evidence and argument of his in-group, deferring instead to institutional claims, even when wholly unfounded: https://www.pewresearch.org/science/2024/11/14/public-trust-in-scientists-and-views-on-their-role-in-policymaking/ . Education correlates to increased hostility toward out-groups, regardless of the strength of their arguments or evidence: https://heterodoxacademy.org/blog/research-summary-education-ideological-prejudice/. This is a serious quandary. Sociologically, we are all at a very big disadvantage when it comes to finding holes in false claims from sources we are inclined to trust (as a product of perceiving shared identity with the source); and we are primed to disregard powerful and otherwise compelling true data from sources we distrust (as a product of perceived unshared identity with the source). The clearest and most overt examples of this are how most people jump to name-calling when confronted with any resistant information. It is human impulse to NOT wrestle with argument or evidence and mentally check out by calling your “opponent” some political opposition or ideological designation. Now add to that propensity the continuous echo chamber afforded to these people with habitual ChatGPT use. It does not require much imagination to see where our “informed public” is heading. Being duped is actually quite easy, no matter how smart the onlooker. Oxford mathematician, Norman Fenton, has created a lot of independent content showing how easily we are fooled. One very short video drives the point home quickly: https://youtu.be/9j98PtJxn7A?si=alZq0ZmFP0tZavO2 And Fenton has even better content showing causal paradoxes (starting at timestamp 8:16): https://youtu.be/qvZlzQ5_a7A?si=ohON-XOM45w5JB3x Some shorter analyses of tricks and errors in statical assessment are here: https://youtu.be/1WAbV6hCUIg?si=HjvXWxzVXIy8xFxZ https://youtu.be/RdcOqKSv6nE?si=8UkyJDKjv3fhZBhm https://youtu.be/6hHKr9Ig36E?si=rZcQZf_IfRJmeUDt But sadly, he was maligned and deplatformed at the height of the pandemic because of the implications of his presentations on critical thinking and statistics manipulation. To that end, the dangers of manipulations in science are growing, because people are unwilling to critically evaluate liars when the lies sound good and unwilling to listen to sound argumentation when the argument hurts. We would do well to recall Mark Twain’s quip: “it’s easier to fool people than to convince them that they have been fooled.” These phenomena collude to damage risk literacy. Institutions and expert researchers are making intelligent discussion harder and harder. And that is not simply wordplay. Prior to the pandemic, ivermectin was affirmed as effective against viruses by not just scientific consensus, but UNANIMITY: https://www.nature.com/articles/ja201711.pdf Even at the beginning of the pandemic: https://www.nature.com/articles/s41429-020-0336-z. Compare that to how most people view it today. The prevalent negative view against ivermectin was invented in the past five-and-a-half years. Is it evidence-based? Or is it incentive and ideology-based? A recently-published study (sat on its conclusions for years before releasing findings) which aimed to dismiss the capabilities of ivermectin claimed it had no effect WHILE showing it reduced symptom duration by a full two days: https://www.principletrial.org/principle-a-guide/examining-the-evidence-ivermectin-and-covid-19-in-the-principle-trial. Why did authors reaffirm their commitment to its ineffectiveness WHILE showing it reduces the disease effect by two days? Well, because the hazard ratio they computed was only 1.14. And they claimed a hazard ratio needs to exceed 1.20 to be significant. Again, micro-statistical manipulation and arbitrary plotting of measurement jargon is used to lie to your face. A 14% faster time to recovery is what actually happened. But authors decided to present this as a 1.14 ratio and limit claimed benefit to only that which exceeded 1.20. Their claim of insignificance is bolstered by the severe/death outcomes appearing comparable. We can give them that. But again, this is trusting that regression was honestly and fairly applied, that it even COULD be thoroughly applied, that selective manipulation of confidence intervals or quantiles did not occur, that flatlining or other p-hacking did not take place, and that some other underhanded dealings did NOT occur during their exceedingly prolonged/delayed publication. Has anyone replicated their findings? Well, no. But it looks like we should simply trust their datum as the final word, confirming our preconceived conclusion with no independent thinking on the matter at all. In this example we are seeing that regression can change results, Bayesian choices change results, different endpoints draw our focus toward different ideas of benefit, and a 14% signal can be dismissed entirely, after suspiciously keeping data secret for years. Ivermectin does not require strong feelings, nor is it convincingly effective. But we can safely assume if someone could make $29.5 billion per year from it, no one would be calling a 14% signal of faster recovery nothingness, and the regression would have been computed to show a larger signal between the treated and untreated groups. There is no level of cynicism too excessive for expert scientific claims. They are not forthright. They have hidden conflicts of interest. Their results cannot be replicated by other labs. They are steeped in malfeasance with statistical manipulation. No matter how charitable we might want to be, the breadth and depth of deceptiveness and in-group collusion does not deserve it. The brazenness of their lies and the shamelessness of their corruption and ineptitude is hard to not take incredibly seriously. It’s embarrassing that people who think of themselves and their in-group as unquestionable gods cannot pony up with convincingly defensible positions. “Because I said so” or “because the experts say so” is not a defensible statement. If they simply cease name-calling, cease their credential purity tests, cease insulting, then we can be convinced. If they simply become more convincing, and have honest discussion, then they can earn the right to be heard. But what we must not ever do is give a pass to the presumed arbiters of truth in society. If institutional authority wants to command obedience, then its proclamations require a degree of skepticism that is just next-to-impossible. That’s the cost of doing business. Pay up, or shut up. If they desire a godlike command of public audience, they do not ALSO get a pass on scrutiny. They may choose one or the other. They can demand a hearing. Or they can improve communication of evidence and argumentation. But no one gets to demand obedience and invoke all the same hand-waving that tobacco-lobby liars used. It’s unconvincing when they respond to skepticism as though it is an inconvenience they're too good to be bothered by. Increasingly, we must move our baseline response toward experts beyond merely skepticism. It will be wiser to always begin with contempt. Deep unwavering contempt. And then, if experts can prove through tireless commitment that they are worthy of a hearing, then our position may move from contempt to cautious consideration. The days of blind faith and unearned respect are long over. The public does not understand risk even among the most inarguable and non-debated risks. When it comes to health-related risk research, where someone stands to profit, the public does not stand a chance at finding the truth. In 2005, the editor-in-chief for the British Medical Journal tried to warn everybody, saying, “Medical Journals Are an Extension of the Marketing Arm of Pharmaceutical Companies”. In the intervening years, review after review has found that the vast majority of scientific findings in peer-reviewed journals cannot be replicated (the very hallmark of what is supposed to make science Science). Here, we observe researchers lying within their own papers, summarizing one claim while their own data shows the opposite. Deception via abuse of relative risk, endpoints, and manipulation of duration are rife. They’re only the tip of the iceberg. And smart and educated people are not insulated from the trickery. They are more susceptible when the claims align with their identity, and even more so when steeped in the use of AI programs. People have attached their political, philosophical, and/or social identities to upholding wrong claims, rather than exert in-group suspicion/skepticism. It’s a firestorm of negative pressures. And they are colluding to ensure we all misunderstand health risk.
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 Between 8 and 13 years ago I made a number of posts on the dangers of common medications, including acetaminophen (APAP). I rewrote two of those and synthesized them into this blog entry over 6 years ago: https://www.elev8wellness.com/wellblog_best_nutrition_training_coaching_experts/hey-preachy-youre-a-riskier-drug-addict-than-everyone-on-illicit-substances . So this past week presented a number of awkward moments for me, since I just in one day learned that other people were still unaware APAP has significant risks. I did not realize this wasn’t common knowledge, given there are warnings literally on the label.
First, do keep in mind that Tylenol has been THE LEADING over-the-counter cause of emergency room visits in the United States: https://pubmed.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/15239078/ And it has long been THE leading overdose during pregnancy: https://pubmed.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/16351032/ When I first saw these stats in 2004 and 2005, it concerned me a lot. Already, I had never found it even mildly effective in my own pain management; for me, it does absolutely nothing. But at this time I also began specializing in dealing with clients who had complicated health issues and pain pathologies. So the subject kept coming up. And I increasingly took a more cautious stance about its use. That’s over 21 years where I’ve been not particularly trusting of it in a professional and research setting. This was the same period of time where criminality at the FDA and fraud in science was generating the opioid crisis, which has now claimed over half a million American lives JUST from the approved prescription use side of the equation (closer to 1 million overall): https://journalofethics.ama-assn.org/article/how-fda-failures-contributed-opioid-crisis/2020-08. We need not dig into it too deeply; but this was also the height of the era of peer review abuse, slowing down scientific discovery and doing the bidding of industry interests, which continues today: https://pmc.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/articles/PMC1420798/ https://pmc.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/articles/PMC1140949/ https://blog.operationmedschool.com/home/is-peer-review-everything-it-implies As a general rule, I don’t get caught up in discussions about autism, because it’s a subjective symptomatic diagnosis. There is no THE autism. In a symptomatic diagnosis we are placing one name on many different things because of some common symptoms. As such, there is no THE cause. Symptomatic diagnoses have no single cause. They have an array of risk factors. Contrast this against an acute diagnosis based on an objective lab test, like Influenza A, wherein we might point to infectious exposure as THE cause. However, even then, exposure is not a sufficient explanation, since many people do not succumb after exposure. Infection itself also requires nuance in understanding, because not everyone infected with Influenza A showcases the exact same symptoms for the exact same duration. In fact, even with objective test-based diagnoses, there are other risk factors, which include the resilience of the patient, genetic variables, viral load, and much more. Parkinson’s is a good example where there is no THE Parkinson’s. There are many people with a cross-section of interrelated symptoms who carry the same diagnostic naming. There is no ONE cause. Brain trauma is a risk factor. Autoimmune irregularities are a risk factor. TIA and stroke are risk factors. There are others. Nicotine use is NEGATIVELY associated (ie - reduces risk). There is no THE cause. It’s a symptomatic diagnosis. We hope to improve this with certain imaging. But we aren’t there yet. Leave that all aside. APAP is a fascinating subject without even thinking of autism. Reexamining the many possible downstream effects of APAP is a strong scientific discovery tool. It may help to explain why some people are more susceptible to certain infections, autoimmune diseases, cancers, cardiovascular disease, metabolic disorders, joint deterioration, inability to recover, chronic fatigue/pain/heartburn, thyroid irregularities, infertility, heavy metal exposure, and central nervous system damage. 30-40% of the population has at least one MTHFR variant that can lead to reduced glutathione capacity (the very means by which our bodies deal with APAP). This means that at least a tiny population cannot clear APAP well enough to the point those people will incur other unexpected damage to systems which are not the liver. There is a vast expanse of individual responses based on MTHFR variants (or none) alone. Even small doses of APAP deplete glutathione (your body’s strongest detoxifying agent against heavy metals and the ROS produced during infections) from an otherwise healthy body. High doses overwhelm the glutathione pathway completely. Thus, APAP can be a problem for lots of people at a variety of doses. A lethal dose (LD50) of any compound is what we are confident will kill half the populace, which in normal distribution means some 25% will die at a lower dose and 25% at a higher dose. There will be a few extreme outliers, people who die at trace amounts and people who suffer few consequences at insanely high dosing. Those are simply immediate fatality stats. Non-fatal damage happens at much lower dosages and much more frequently. Prevalence of long-term consequence is wholly unknown. We know it exists. And we sometimes see it in liver failure many years later. But specific brain damage numbers are opaque. This is critical to consider before wading into the subject. Personal anecdote and sample bias are not helpful in this conversation, in the same way that people who are alive today despite not wearing any seatbelts in the 1970s cannot tell us that seatbelts are useless. Similarly, that 98% of the populace can eat a lot of peanuts to no detrimental effect is not a helpful fact for giving advice to the 2% who may die from a fleck of peanut dust. Pause. Reflect on this. Over 90% of a population can have no obvious negative experience with a sometimes-fatal compound. This is absolutely essential to keep in mind when we are going to entertain debates over damage that happens to less than 10% of people. Whatever the various causes or risk factors are will not be evident to “almost everyone.” I place 700lbs on my spine and it makes my spine healthier. That doesn’t mean I should tell you you’re a liar when you say that you strained your back lifting a few pounds. I squat deep with 600lbs and my knees improve from that stimulus. This doesn’t mean that the same dosage of the prescription will work for others. George Burns smoked nearly every day of his 100 year life. That doesn’t mean he would’ve been right to tell you that smoking is good for you. I jumped out of an airplane. I’ve climbed cliffs with no harness. So those things are good for you and safe, right? There are alcoholics and cocaine addicts in way better shape than you, with way better overall health than you have. So that behavior is good and safe, right? Obviously not. We have to have the maturity to acknowledge individual variance, combined effects in different landscapes, and that many substances or circumstances do not have universal same risk or lack thereof. Even if many people survived really stupid things, it doesn’t logically follow that it’s safe or good for all people for all time. The American Academy of Pediatrics considers a fever productive all the way up to 102.2: https://publications.aap.org/pediatrics/article/127/3/e20103852/65016/Fever-and-Antipyretic-Use-in-Children. Fevers are fundamentally a healthy response to combat disease. Febrile seizure above 103 is an actual risk; so when the risk-reward warrants it (~102.5 and up), it could then be a good time to risk the drug. Many people, I assume, don’t know any of this either. So the chances that a lot of people have overreacted to and shut down productive fevers or pre-productive fevers WHILE inhibiting the liver is probably pretty high. This will ASSUREDLY cause downstream adverse side effects. If you pair this with heavy metals and/or free radicals from infection it would make perfect sense that you raise risks of neural damage. That’s without factoring the aforementioned MTHFT variants. And this is not conjecture. In 1980 researchers confirmed brain uptake of APAP in animal models: https://pubmed.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/7325924/. This was confirmed in humans in 1992: https://pubmed.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/1633071/. A mounting tsunami of studies since indicates that in infants/youths, the target of APAP is the brain, NOT the liver: https://www.e-cep.org/m/journal/view.php?doi=10.3345/cep.2022.01319. In fact, we have case studies of youths who ONLY take damage to the brain with APAP overdose (while the liver is seemingly not overwhelmed): https://ejnpn.springeropen.com/articles/10.1186/s41983-024-00910-z#ref-CR10. None of this is theoretical. APAP does cross over to the baby’s brain in utero AND in comparable concentrations to that administered to mothers: https://pubmed.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/27806383/ https://hsrc.himmelfarb.gwu.edu/smhs_pharm_facpubs/736/ The idea that mothers’ livers would somehow stop all APAP is not based in any known physiology. The placenta provides little barrier to the concentration. And the fetal liver is incapable of buffering as well. Whatever APAP mom takes, the baby’s brain receives. In studies. In reality. Not hypothetically. If we want to get into hypotheticals, the concern rises. It does not lower. We can imagine a mother with multiple MTHFR variants, an infection, AND heavy metal exposure. We can easily imagine a newborn with multiple MTHFR variants, an infection, AND heavy metal exposure. The confluence of these risk factors presents an incredibly high risk of fetal brain injury and newborn brain injury. It MAY be that this is a rare event. But to conclude it never happens or cannot happen is anti-science. Returning briefly to the big question of autism, again, I don’t like it. It’s too broad a term across too broad a group of different people. Obviously it includes a bunch of people with no real brain injury or really any serious developmental challenge at all. There are brilliant functional kids who carry the diagnosis of ASD. Most of these are just kids who are wired a little differently and have uncommon interests. That makes the entire debate a dishonest one to begin. Instead, if we focus solely on “profound autism,” where THE diagnostic criteriON is a sub-50 IQ (along with almost or no verbal ability) there is a glaring problem for all of us. According to the CDC profound autism assuredly doubled without any change in diagnostic criteria across a modern 16 year period: https://rutgershealth.org/news/first-large-study-profound-autism-finds-rising-problem-disparate-impacts. https://journals.sagepub.com/doi/10.1177/00333549231163551 This is not explained by an expansion of the diagnosis. This is the same diagnosis. Why would acute brain damage occur in early development at a twofold increase from 2000 to 2016? Well, it turns out that APAP usage did increase during that period: https://www.clinicaladvisor.com/news/acetaminophen-use-increased-between-2011-2016-cold-flu-seasons/ Also, from 1994 to 2014 the childhood vaccine schedule increased from 7 recommended vaccinations to 16: https://www.clinicaladvisor.com/news/acetaminophen-use-increased-between-2011-2016-cold-flu-seasons/ Correlation is no smoking gun. People have to tread lightly seeing something like this and claiming it proves causation. But worse than that is to look at these numbers, know the pharmacokinetics and physiology, and say there CANNOT be any causal relationship. Clearly, impaired glutathione, increased neurotoxicity, and increased aluminum and mercury exposure, EVEN IF SAFE FOR 95% OF THE POPULACE, becomes a risk of neurological damage at some point. This is not controversial. This does not mean vaccines are wholly unsafe or that Tylenol is wholly unsafe. There are other trends which play a role. What it likely means is they are among a suite of several risk factors, particularly for some people under some circumstances, AND we should ALSO consider the factors of aging parents, cumulative toxic load, EMF exposure, etc. The false dichotomy is not helping. Being “provax” OR “antivax” is not an appropriate or sophisticated choice. And gleefully destroying world-class scientists’ lives and careers for them daring to question the sacred cow is a little absurd. If we are to believe we truly are a modern scientific society, voices of dissent and inquiry shall not be suppressed or minimized by a priestly class of truth holders. APAP’s history is even more fascinating to consider than the pharmacokinetics and epidemiology. Acetaminophen (APAP) was first synthesized in 1878. From 1887 to the 1940s it was the effective compound (although people didn’t know it at the time) in the most widely used analgesic at the time, Phenacetin. Pay attention. Before Tylenol the brand, “tylenol” the ingredient was THE MOST WIDELY USED analgesic since the 1880s. Phenacetin was still in use until the 70s and 80s. In 1948 researchers learned that the popular Phenacetin converted into acetaminophen in the body; and in 1955 a reformulated “Tylenol elixir” hit the market. Curiously, Phenacetin is now considered a known carcinogen. APAP’s carcinogenicity is debated, with over 100 high quality studies showing the possibility, but with mixed interpretations. Phenacetin dosing was 300mg 4-6 times per day: https://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/books/NBK304337/. Fractional conversion to APAP was 0.871. Thus, people were getting severe negative side effects from Phenacetin at an equivalent intake of 1,000 to 2,000mg of Tylenol. Concluding that Phenacetin alone was the problem and that Tylenol poses little-to-no risk is an objectively low-IQ take. Frankly, none of this is even remotely debatable outside of the recent layperson political outrage. Aspirin and ibuprofen and naproxen are openly and unanimously linked to birth defects. APAP gets a pass from some of the populace even though the other drugs have lower toxicity profiles. I’ve come to conclude that a lot of people’s positions on pharmaceuticals are no more than rhetorical devices aimed at ending inquiry and the advancement of science. “No one believes…” “Consensus is…” “The experts say…” “There is no evidence of…” These and others are merely attempts to shift to an impossibly unassailable position, uninterested in evidence or arguments entirely. So I’ve developed a way for all of us to cut through the noise; and on this topic it’s three simple questions whose answers are totally unanimous. Not consensus. Facts. Will ALL mothers have livers which prevent ALL toxins from getting to the placenta? Will ALL placentae block all toxins from getting to baby? Will all fetal livers block all toxins from reaching the brain? Incuriosity is an illness of the mind with few remedies. People who aren’t interested in learning are immune to evidence, facts, reality, and science. All the same, it makes for a fascinating reflection on whether APAP played/plays a role in “unexplained” phenomena, like SIDS and childhood leukemias, ALS, and “idiopathic” pathologies of all sorts. Asthma included: https://pubmed.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/15878691/. We can sweep all considerations of autism aside, and APAP is still implicated in other rare diseases by virtue of how it damages some individuals. Again, not as THE cause. But as A risk factor.  She nonchalantly slapped a high-five and strutted off after she finished the race. You wouldn’t believe this little girl only minutes prior worried whether she could finish, and months prior believed she couldn’t run at all. She believed she was “not like those kids”. She had begun to believe the great lie: don’t bother trying; gods and stars and fairies and genetics and the Fates generate your life for you.
It all started with my son. With him, when he was as young as two, he and I might set out on a ten-hour adventure any given Tuesday, Thursday, Saturday. And sometimes on a Monday, Wednesday, Friday a smaller adventure might sneak in as well. He’d hike until he couldn’t. Then he’d ride my shoulders until he could. Repeat. For years. He played soccer. He ran. A lot. With my daughter, it’s not that she never did that. But the dynamic was different. My son enjoyed pushing her in the stroller. She logged fewer miles. The pandemic struck when she was four, turning five. She didn’t play soccer. She didn’t run. Not much. Roughly three years ago, my wife began to notice our daughter get out of breath much more easily than our son. It wasn’t necessarily cause for concern over a pulmonary issue and/or asthmatic condition. One kid was more trained than the other. One hit the pandemic at four. The other hit the pandemic at eight. To me, even the most “innate” athlete we still discover enjoyed lots of playful activities which trained up his or her ability “on accident.” When this doesn’t happen, people errantly believe a kid “just doesn’t have ‘IT’.” There is no “IT.” Mozart’s father was a violin teacher. Steve Wozniak’s father was an engineer for Lockheed Corporation. Savants have access to tools we don’t tend to notice. The Michael Jordans of the world are “inherently gifted”, except that they practiced tens of thousands of hours before even being proficient, let alone prodigious. We see wunderkinder perform some adult-like skills, and our brains trick us into thinking they didn’t somehow practice the skill in a way we don’t classically recognize long before that “talent” became overt. Conversely, when a kid doesn’t excel, we errantly think they just don’t have “IT.” There is no “IT.” There is simply training and landscape. And when school and athletics are deleted from society for two of your child’s most formative years, it’s a factor in the training, obviously. Clearly, there are real physical boundaries. Rudy could not become 6’5”, 290lbs; and therefore it’s unlikely he’d be an all-time NFL D-line. But he did get on the field at Notre Dame; so who are we to tell him not to even try to go as far as his unknown physical limits will take him? We don’t know the limits of potential or the future. WE DON’T KNOW. Check your hubris. Most sad of all was to see a lie enter my daughter’s mind and words. She began to use disempowering phrases and fatalistic language. Beyond sad, fatalism is the greatest sin of all. To commit your mind to a redemption-less and unchangeable world is devilry, literally. We see it in disagreements and politics where any other person with any other view gets a Nazi label, unable to ever regain his or her humanity in the eyes of the person wielding the name-calling. And when this least-charitable assessment of others comes home to roost, seeing in ourselves impossible victimhood, we let the demons win. And I don’t think that’s a metaphor. Thus, when my daughter was excited last year to get into Girls on The Run, a nationwide program aimed specifically at empowering young girls, needless to say I was hopeful. Compounded on to that was an earnest request from my daughter to “train” with me (her words) in order to become faster. And we did. And she did. Ultimately, we saw her hit peak speeds of 10mph when she was eight-years-old (small for her age, as well, mind you - smallest in her classes). This year she actually got into GoTR (having been waiting-listed last year). She and we were pumped. At the end of April/beginning of May, it’s customary in GoTR to do a practice 5k. At that point they will have been training (gently) at least twice weekly for over six weeks. My daughter asked if I would join her for the practice, and help her. I assured her that I would pace her run, which she at first took to mean run at MY speed. “No, no… I will help you run what you will first think is too slow in order to guarantee you finish.” As a parent, I don’t believe in making hard promises without caveats, since life soon teaches you that other variables crop up over which you have zero influence or control. But I felt this prudent. The boost of confidence helped, but I could still see some doubt as the day of practice approached. When I showed up that fateful Thursday at 2:45, I figured we would hit the trail right away. But these girls had just been through a full school day and needed to recharge/decompress first. It was snack time. It was crafting time. Bathroom breaks abounded. Finally, we went outside; and then began the warm-ups, stretching and words of affirmation. Afterward, the group chose a seven-letter word whose each letter would be penned on the girls’ arms one-at-a-time for every lap completed (it’s precisely seven long rectangles around the school to finish a 5k). Then came the sunglasses getting handed out. I began to notice I was likely the only parent intending to run the entirety with my daughter, and certainly the only man there. Finally, we lined up for the photo start. I could sense my daughter’s nerves heighten. I just looked at her and smiled. She smiled back. In a blur, the “race” began and every single other girl took off in an all-out sprint, disappearing around the first corner. Like a scene from a cartoon, as the dust cleared, there we were just running along deliberately and relaxed. Only the two of us. A new doubt rose in my daughter: “dad, why are we going so slow?” Without hesitation, I said, “one - so that you can finish and be energized at the end, rather than tired and defeated; two - so that you finish ahead of most of the girls.” You could see the 10-year-old mind wrestle. She didn’t say anything back. But I realize it is a hard concept even for adults to see how they will beat others who have a massive lead. There is a great quote about how people overestimate what they can do in a day and underestimate what they can do in a year. Small persistence defeats motivated spurts. As we soon rounded the first corner, already two girls, entirely winded, were sitting on the curb. So, we just ran on past them. Next up, we came across a group of six girls walking doggedly. So, we just ran on past them. We then turned the second corner and came upon another group of four girls slogging a very slow walk. So, we just ran on past them. In less than half of a lap we’d overtaken twelve kids. The first full long side instantly became trickier. As we came upon the next group of four girls walking, we got a front row ticket to the ego show. As we began to overtake them, pride drove them back to a run to get all of ten feet ahead of us. They were out of breath and stopping again, DIRECTLY (and rudely, I might add) in front of us. Our pace didn’t slacken. So, we just went wide to run around them; but then they burst ahead again, making a concerted effort to wall off the path in front of us as they dropped to a walk yet again. Keeping pace, we overtook them twice more like this before the third corner. I laughed. My daughter asked what was so funny. “They’ll be lucky if they can even finish now; they’re toast.” And this is how every successive lap proceeded. Never did one girl overtake my daughter, despite several being avid runners and third year participants. She, on the other hand, lapped many. But none of that even mattered. In fact, beating others doesn’t matter at all. The critical event was that she confronted the lies and limiting beliefs. And she experienced what it is to be “The One Who Can.” Steady. Paced. And, at the end, she could sprint like so many others could only do at the beginning. She wasn’t tired. She wasn’t beat. She was energized and joked about doing a 10k right then and there. Two-and-a-half weeks later, up came the final event at the fairgrounds with some three to four-thousand girls and an untold thousands of running buddies and spectators. My wife ran at my daughter’s side. My son did as well, and he did an exquisite job executing a perfect pace support for her, all the while carrying her water bottle for her. I instructed my son to start too slow, never push her, and allow her to open up the pace after the first mile IF she appeared relaxed, rested, easy-breathing, and, of course, if she naturally sped up a hair. This, by the way, is how all youths should be coached, particularly if they aren’t “innately” athletically inclined. It’s an exercise physiological fact that some 99% of children do not yet make the enzymes involved in anaerobic efforts. Yet even some of the “best” youth sports programs don’t seem to know this. What this means is kids should not be pushed to get to out-of-breath status. Yet most youth programming does exactly this REPEATEDLY, which DEtrains athleticism. It destines a lot of otherwise athletic kids to negative experiences which keep them disempowered for a lifetime in some cases. It was a great energy. There was no doubt in the air. Positivity abounded. I have to give credit to GoTR. Anyone in charge and anyone with a mic was telling the girls all the right things. Only empowering things. And when the run started, there was my family pacing it out. I waited just after the one mile mark to see they were slightly ahead of what I expected. Not too fast. My daughter was relaxed. But it was about two minutes before I thought they’d cross the one mile mark. It was roughly half the speed my son could do in cross country last year. So he was fine. And my wife, despite showing up largely unprepared, was getting by. I cheered them on and then made my way to catch them at the two mile mark. The same experience occurred again. I had figured they ran a little hot at the opening, and would slow in the second mile. But it was the opposite. The pace had come up. But, she was still relaxed. Near the finish, I didn’t know what to expect. It turned out she had largely held the line and not slowed a hair even at the end. I told her if she felt pretty good that she could finally punch it. And she took off, sprinting across the finish line. If she’d walked 80%, it would’ve still been a win. GoTR is doing an amazing service for these girls. The grand win was going from the lies to the truth. The cult of disempowerment and fatalism is alive and well; but it failed to claim this child. It failed. The lies failed. None are “the ones who cannot”, except when we bend a knee to the crushing weight of the lies. She bent no knee. She stood tall. She ran. And she runs. And now she says, “I am the one who can.”  “Being happy’s out of style
Feeling sad is all the rage The story's kinda boring though Might be time to turn the page Oh Maybe life is good And everything is fine Maybe take a breath Maybe do it twice I know you're in pain But that's a part of life And, baby, life is good And everything is gonna be alright” - Em Beihold About 17 months ago I had a massive uptick in my income of dollars, energy, and positivity/joy. Losing a few clients and connections who drained time and energy was such a force multiplier for good that it made me rethink other areas of life where my ROI was potentially much more negative than I was willing to admit to myself. So I left social media about 10 months ago, and the trend of benefit not only continued but accelerated. Reader, consider the following, because it will change your life for the better if you allow it. Tech giants know. In a 2011 New York Times interview, Steve Jobs revealed his children had not used the newly released iPad, stating, “We limit how much technology our kids use at home.” Bill Gates in a 2017 Mirror interview, said his kids weren’t allowed phones until age 14, and even then, screen time was restricted (e.g., no phones at the dinner table). In a 2015 open letter to his newborn daughter, Mark Zuckerberg emphasized real-world experiences over digital ones, saying, “We want you to stop and smell all the flowers.” In a 2017 Q&A mentioning his daughters (then very young), he said they weren’t yet using tech heavily. In a 2018 New York Times interview, Sundar Pichai (Google) said he and his wife restricted their son’s screen time, including banning devices during meals. A 2018 Irish Independent article cited Evan Spiegel’s (Snapchat founder) protective stance toward his daughter’s potential social media use. Leaked Meta documents (2021, via Frances Haugen) showed Instagram’s negative impact on teen girls’ body image. Jonathan Haidt and others note tech elites often send their kids to low-tech schools (e.g., Waldorf), reinforcing a narrative of restricted digital exposure. Chamath Palihapitiya (Facebook vice president for user growth, 2007–2011) is even more outspoken. His most notable early statements came in 2017 during a Stanford Graduate School of Business talk, where he expressed “tremendous guilt” over his role in building tools that he believes are “ripping apart the social fabric of how society works.” He criticized the “dopamine-driven feedback loops” of likes and shares, arguing they erode civil discourse and foster misinformation globally—not just in the U.S. He also revealed he barely uses Facebook himself (only a handful of posts in seven years at that point) and doesn’t let his kids touch it, famously saying they “aren’t allowed to use that shit.” This bluntness grabbed headlines and sparked debate, especially since it came from someone who’d helped make Facebook a juggernaut. Since then, Chamath has doubled down. In a 2019 Yahoo Finance interview, he elaborated on his kids’ zero-screen-time policy, linking excessive social media use at a young age to poor mental health. He wants his children to build resilience through real-world experiences—playing, failing, winning—rather than digital validation. By 2021, on CNBC, he called out Facebook again, saying it could’ve fixed its misinformation issues years ago but prioritized short-term profits over ethics. More recently, in 2024, Chamath endorsed Florida’s social media ban for kids under 14, calling it “obvious and sensible” on X. He framed it as a parent’s relief. He’s not just critiquing from the sidelines but advocating for systemic change, informed by both his Silicon Valley past and his current role as a father. It’s not just kids. There’s a solid and long-growing body of evidence that social media harms adults. Studies consistently show a link between heavy social media use and increased symptoms of anxiety and depression in adults. A 2018 University of Pennsylvania study found that limiting social media (Facebook, Instagram, Snapchat) to 30 minutes daily reduced loneliness and depression significantly compared to unrestricted use. A 2022 MIT Sloan study tied the rollout of Facebook on college campuses to a 7% rise in severe depression and 20% in anxiety disorders among young adults. A 2018 York University study showed young women felt worse about their bodies after engaging with posts from peers they deemed more attractive. This effect isn’t age-specific—adults of all ages report lower self-esteem from similar comparisons. The American Psychological Association notes that constant exposure to “highlight reels” can distort reality perception, increasing dissatisfaction across age groups. HelpGuide.org (2025) highlights how engagement with social media platforms leads to compulsive use, and is linked to anxiety, depression, and even physical ailments in adults. PHYSICAL AILMENTS. Think about that. A 2017 study in the American Journal of Preventive Medicine tied this to perceived social isolation—ironic for a “connection” tool. Social media use, especially before bed, disrupts sleep, a key mental health pillar. The U.S. Surgeon General’s 2023 advisory noted this as a harm across ages, with adults also affected. A 2019 JAMA Psychiatry study found that three-plus hours daily on social media doubled poor mental health outcomes. A 2020 Pew Research stat showed 44% of U.S. internet users faced harassment, often on social media, which UC Davis Health (2024) links to severe self-esteem and mental health damage. This isn’t just a youth issue—workplace or personal conflicts spill online, amplifying stress. Fear of missing out (FOMO) drives compulsive checking, worsening loneliness. A 2013 PLOS ONE study on Facebook use found declines in subjective well-being among young adults, a trend echoed in broader adult populations per NAMI (2024). The paradox: more “connection,” yet more isolation. The 2018 Pennsylvania experiment showed cutting social media time directly improved mental health. Similarly, a 2024 analysis by Jonathan Haidt and Zach Rausch (from X posts) reexamined data and found reducing use for over a week improved mental health. The CDC reported a 57% suicide rate increase among 10-24-year-olds from 2007-2017, overlapping with social media’s rise. While not adult-specific, MIT Sloan’s college study extends this to young adults, showing mental health declines post-Facebook access. It’s evident that people should spend as little time on phones and screens and social media as possible. I knew that long before last year, having been an extreme late adopter, never even creating a social media presence until 2015; and at that point I begrudgingly joined because I thought it was a necessity for my business. Over the next 5 years I began to realize it was not only no benefit to me, but it came at a time and focus cost. The less time I’m online, the more money my business makes, and the more I can really connect with real people in my real life. That’s compounded benefit on top of the time I get back. That’s on top of the long-studied and aforementioned mental health benefits of avoiding social media. The foundational three problems are sensationalism, active propaganda, and algorithmic suppression. The sensationalism of news and the nonstop nature of social media generates unending grudges, real and imagined. If you always have enemies and can never let a newfound slight go, you can never free yourself from anxiety. Harvard has covered this: https://www.health.harvard.edu/mind-and-mood/the-power-of-forgiveness#:~:text=Practicing%20forgiveness%20can%20have%20powerful,esteem%3B%20and%20greater%20life%20satisfaction. And so has Johns Hopkins: https://www.hopkinsmedicine.org/health/wellness-and-prevention/forgiveness-your-health-depends-on-it But it goes beyond the sensational. Social media companies actively involve themselves in misinforming users, which adds to the mental health crisis they’ve already generated. Documents released starting December 2022 by journalists like Matt Taibbi and Bari Weiss provide internal evidence of content moderation decisions to propagandize the public. Documents showed U.S. officials, including from the Biden administration and FBI, requested removal of specific accounts and posts, many containing factual critiques of policy (e.g., COVID vaccine efficacy debates). A notable case involved the suppression of a tweet by Dr. Martin Kulldorff, a Harvard epidemiologist, questioning mask efficacy for children—later a topic of legitimate scientific debate. The files revealed a "visibility filtering" system that reduced reach of certain tweets without notifying users, those from moderate/conservative voices or skeptics of mainstream narratives, even when not false. Stanford’s Dr. Bhattacharya was shadowbanned for lockdown critiques later validated by studies (e.g., a 2022 Johns Hopkins meta-analysis on lockdown inefficacy). The Missouri v. Biden (2023–ongoing) lawsuit explicitly shows federal officials coerced social media companies to censor content, including true information. Court filings cite emails where White House officials pressed Twitter to remove posts questioning vaccine mandates, some from credible sources. A July 2023 injunction limited government-platform coordination, proving credible evidence of overreach. Before Congress, Mark Zuckerberg acknowledged mistakes in content moderation, including temporary removal of posts later deemed accurate. A 2018 Meta statement confirmed that posts rated false by fact-checkers lose about 80% of future views. Sadly, fact-checking is incredibly biased —e.g., a 2021 study by the Media Research Center showed PolitiFact disproportionately targeted moderate or conservative claims, often mislabeling factual statements. If true content is misjudged, it’s deamplified. During the pandemic, social media platforms aggressively moderated content to “combat misinformation,” although it exclusively targeted factual and scientifically-grounded perspectives if they happened to favor centrist or simply NOT extreme-far-left views. Early in 2020–2021, Meta, Google, Twitter and major news outlets labeled posts suggesting COVID-19 originated from a lab leak as misinformation and removed or deamplified them. Facebook reversed this policy in May 2021 after growing scientific debate and a Biden administration call for investigation made it the only credible hypothesis remaining. Internal emails from the "Twitter Files" revealed pressure from U.S. government officials, including the White House, to censor content questioning official narratives, even when rooted in expert opinion. And a whole book could be written on algorithmic suppression and media/social media propaganda. There are boundless numbers of compilation videos showing popular news personalities parroting the precisely identical talking points and lies for years on end. When Dick Cheney last year endorsed a democrat candidate, that was a jump-the-shark moment. But with the amount of propaganda already in action, people just sort of ignored the implications of an earnest endorsement by one of the dirtiest bloodthirsty warmongers in contemporary history. The propaganda fever pitch kept rolling in 2024 when social media outlets and conventional media outlets used precisely the same wording on multiple occasions to describe a delusional reality which viewers could see was false with their own eyes: https://youtu.be/1kKUye23KBQ?si=7EO7TR5asMc7xAfa https://youtu.be/3P5bz8dC7-k?si=zlRLwqm8gPvVZu_R It’s not even remotely isolated. There are numerous examples of talking points verbatim regurgitated by multiple news outlets: https://youtu.be/ksb3KD6DfSI?si=a5PpwqBev7Gih6jC And we all witnessed an incessant stream of lies for two years straight from widely-believed news sources: https://youtu.be/qWLc8dHW0T4?si=DoogPL5bvM8NR6pn https://www.instagram.com/reel/Cllpjp9jqdo/ https://www.instagram.com/reel/CllpmbxoTde/ https://youtu.be/zI3yU5Z2adI?si=hSo_WSIj3xf7QE29 https://youtu.be/zI3yU5Z2adI?si=sp1DN52NeKx3GHo5 One of the wilder examples involves the suppression of the news about Hunter Biden’s illegal foreign dealings (specifically in Ukraine in 2014 while the US overthrew its democratically-elected government: https://www.cato.org/commentary/washington-helped-trigger-ukraine-war) during the 2020 U.S. presidential election. The news was initially flagged as potential misinformation by Twitter and Facebook. They blocked users from sharing related articles’ URLs, citing its "hacked materials" policy, and locked the New York Post’s account for weeks. Internal documents later released via the "Twitter Files" showed that Twitter staff debated the decision, with some acknowledging the lack of clear evidence of hacking. Subsequent reporting by outlets like The Washington Post and The New York Times in 2022 confirmed the authenticity of Biden laptop data, including emails verified through cryptographic signatures. Facebook reduced the story’s visibility pending fact-checking, a move announced by Andy Stone, a Facebook spokesperson, on October 14, 2020. Of course, last year President Joe Biden issued a blanket pardon for Hunter Biden extending back to the non-coincidental year of 2014, even after President Biden repeatedly promised not to: https://www.pbs.org/newshour/politics/biden-broke-a-promise-pardoning-his-son-hunter-raising-questions-about-his-legacy Hoaxes abounded, which I need not get into. I am no fan of any famous person, any wealthy tycoon, or any politician, particularly a blowhard who is all three; but the ridiculous hyperbolic vilification of one contemporary man as the worst boogeyman in history went beyond the unbelievable and absurd: https://m.youtube.com/watch?v=Bd0cMmBvqWc https://m.youtube.com/watch?v=VOkrxuZRUnk https://youtu.be/VMuDsjRs8Ns?si=Q5DDjaXKLQG0Hp3N Being on social media is an established detriment to mental health, with mainstream news outlets pulling up a close second. The very sources we thought we could rely upon for being informed are actually embroiled in misinforming us and amplifying our anxiety and negative emotions. Even its creators agree. Even social media founders agree. Even news outlets who were/are involved in propagandizing the public agree (on occasion). And I think, if you really reflect on your own state of mind, you too will know it to be true. More recently, Mark Zuckerberg added that social media is over anyway (https://www.newyorker.com/culture/infinite-scroll/mark-zuckerberg-says-social-media-is-over ). Algorithms have long pushed people to see advertisements and not friends, large companies and not small businesses, narratives and not discourse. People can feel it in their bones that real world interaction is orders of magnitude superior to online time. Virtual reality isn’t reality. Internet is not reality. Social media is fake. News is fake. TV is fake. But people in real life can be authentic. Take a break or at least limit your time, for your own sake, for humanity’s sake. You may not need to step away completely for 10-17 months like I did. But if you do, I guarantee you’ll feel better. Frankly, the world will heal. The benefits of social media reached their end between 2014 and 2024. And if you end social media for a day, a week, a month, a year, or forever, you can end its detrimental impact on you, on your community, and society.  Methylene blue is a versatile compound with a long history of use in medicine, biology, and other fields. Technically, it's a salt used as a dye and a medicine which came to be taken as a supplement by experimenters in the fitness industry and anti-aging communities/enthusiasts. Olympic athletes are using it. It’s blowing up in the social media sphere. Anecdotes are hyperbolic and nearly unbelievable. Below is a detailed list of 30 pros and 30 cons associated with methylene blue, based on its known applications, effects, and limitations. Could it be a fit to bring your workouts or performance to the next level? Read and decide for yourself.
Pros: 1. **Antimicrobial Properties**: Effective against bacteria, fungi, and parasites (e.g., in treating malaria). 2. **Antioxidant Effects**: Acts as a potent scavenger of free radicals, protecting cells from oxidative stress. 3. **Neuroprotective**: May improve cognitive function and protect against neurodegenerative diseases like Alzheimer’s. 4. **Mitochondrial Support**: Enhances mitochondrial function, boosting cellular energy production. 5. **Treatment for Methemoglobinemia**: A well-established antidote for this condition, restoring oxygen-carrying capacity in blood. 6. **Low Cost**: Relatively inexpensive to produce and use in medical settings. 7. **Mood Enhancement**: Shows potential as an antidepressant by modulating brain chemistry. 8. **Anti-Inflammatory**: Reduces inflammation in certain contexts, aiding tissue recovery. 9. **Cancer Research**: Investigated for its ability to selectively target cancer cells in photodynamic therapy. 10. **Vasodilatory Effects**: Can improve blood flow by relaxing blood vessels. 11. **Memory Enhancement**: Improves short-term memory and cognitive performance in studies. 12. **Antiviral Potential**: Exhibits activity against some viruses in experimental settings. 13. **Staining Agent**: Widely used in histology and microbiology for visualizing cells and tissues. 14. **Reverses Cyanide Poisoning**: Used in combination therapies to treat cyanide toxicity. 15. **Long History of Use**: Has been safely applied in medicine for over a century. 16. **Low Toxicity at Therapeutic Doses**: Generally well-tolerated when used appropriately. 17. **Septic Shock Treatment**: Helps stabilize blood pressure in cases of septic shock. 18. **Photodynamic Therapy**: Enhances the effectiveness of light-based treatments for infections or cancer. 19. **Improves Hypoxia**: Increases oxygen delivery in low-oxygen conditions. 20. **Anti-Aging Potential**: May slow cellular aging by protecting mitochondria and reducing oxidative damage. 21. **Fungal Infection Treatment**: Effective against superficial fungal infections like candidiasis. 22. **Versatile Administration**: Can be given orally, intravenously, or topically depending on the need. 23. **Rapid Action**: Quickly metabolized and acts fast in acute conditions like methemoglobinemia. 24. **Biofilm Disruption**: May help break down bacterial biofilms, aiding antibiotic efficacy. 25. **Potential in Psychiatry**: Explored for treating bipolar disorder and psychosis. 26. **Dye Applications**: Useful in surgery to mark tissues or detect leaks (e.g., in urology). 27. **Anti-Parasitic**: Historically used to treat parasitic infections like schistosomiasis. 28. **Improves Wound Healing**: Promotes tissue repair in some topical applications. 29. **Research Tool**: Valuable in studying cellular respiration and redox reactions. 30. **Synergistic Effects**: Enhances the efficacy of other drugs or therapies in combination. Cons: 1. **Staining Risk**: Can temporarily turn skin, urine, or mucous membranes blue or green. 2. **Gastrointestinal Upset**: May cause nausea, vomiting, or diarrhea in some users. 3. **Drug Interactions**: Can interfere with serotonin levels, risking serotonin syndrome when combined with SSRIs. 4. **Photosensitivity**: Increases sensitivity to light, potentially causing skin reactions. 5. **Limited Research**: Some uses (e.g., anti-aging, neuroprotection) lack large-scale clinical trials. 6. **Toxicity at High Doses**: Excessive amounts can cause methemoglobinemia, ironically the condition it treats. 7. **Allergic Reactions**: Rare but possible hypersensitivity reactions in some individuals. 8. **Headaches**: A common side effect reported by users. 9. **Dizziness**: Can cause lightheadedness or vertigo in some cases. 10. **Not FDA-Approved for All Uses**: Many applications remain off-label or experimental. 11. **Potential Mutagenicity**: High doses may damage DNA in preclinical studies. 12. **Cardiac Effects**: May increase heart rate or blood pressure in sensitive individuals. 13. **Bitter Taste**: Oral administration can be unpleasant for some. 14. **Short Half-Life**: Requires frequent dosing for sustained effects in some treatments. 15. **Contraindicated in G6PD Deficiency**: Can cause hemolysis in people with this genetic condition. 16. **Staining Medical Equipment**: Can complicate procedures by staining tools or surfaces. 17. **Limited Solubility**: Challenges in preparing certain formulations for administration. 18. **Variable Bioavailability**: Absorption can differ widely between individuals. 19. **Potential for Overuse**: Misuse in alternative medicine circles without proper guidance. 20. **Skin Irritation**: Topical use may cause localized burning or itching. 21. **Interference with Diagnostics**: May skew results of certain blood or urine tests. 22. **Not Suitable for Pregnant Women**: Safety in pregnancy is not well-established. 23. **Monoamine Oxidase Inhibition**: Acts as an MAOI, posing risks with certain foods or drugs. 24. **Fatigue**: Some users report tiredness or lethargy as a side effect. 25. **Liver Strain**: High doses might stress liver metabolism over time. 26. **Unpleasant Odor**: Some formulations have a noticeable chemical smell. 27. **Psychological Effects**: Rarely, may cause confusion or agitation. 28. **Resistance Risk**: Overuse in antimicrobial applications could foster resistance. 29. **Regulatory Restrictions**: Availability varies by country, limiting access for some. 30. **Lack of Standardization**: Dosing and purity can vary in non-pharmaceutical-grade products.  Researchers at Johns Hopkins called for a closer look at medical error, publishing a paper which estimated up to 440,000 Americans die each year due to it: https://blog.petrieflom.law.harvard.edu/2016/10/14/medical-errors-the-third-leading-cause-of-death-in-the-us/. Naysayers fiercely attacked that figure. Their primary argument centered around how many people included in the estimate might have or would have died anyway. Unfortunately, I could never find one of these apologists account for a variable which might push the estimate UP. As I scoured arguments against the Johns Hopkins figures, sadly, each and every article worked earnestly to push the number as far down as is conceivable, ending up somewhere between 20,000 and 90,000. But we know that medical error is UNDERreported. No profession admits fewer mistakes than health authorities: https://jaapl.org/content/early/2021/05/19/JAAPL.200107-20#:~:text=In%20a%20survey%20of%20U.S.,patients%2C%20while%20only%20five%20percent. And the medical culture actually encourages their ranks to avoid admitting mistakes: https://www.statnews.com/2017/01/13/medical-errors-doctors/. So it’s hard to say what the figure actually is.
I think we might all agree, “too high.” Almost anything else gets the public fired up though. In 2021, over 26,000 Americans were murdered (NOT counting medical error), almost 21,000 were firearm-related: https://www.cdc.gov/nchs/fastats/homicide.htm. The vast majority involve handguns, not rifles. Mass shootings account for a tiny fraction of these, around 700. Total of youths who die in mass shootings: less than 35. Any number more than 0 is too many. 34 kids killed by a firearm in mass shootings is 34 too many. Maybe 20,000 to half a million people killed by medical error is also something we should look into. Our unwillingness to challenge medical authority and organizations in medicine is pretty wild and certainly anti-modern. But our fonts of authority on health need more scrutiny, not less. We are now seeing a number of pandemic experts, like Deborah Birx, walk back positions on the safety of mRNA vaccines and call for Covid19 investigations for transparency: https://www.msn.com/en-us/health/medical/dr-deborah-birx-we-need-transparent-panel-on-covid-origins/ar-BB1m4gtI. This is a position which was called anti-science and anti-vax as recently as six months ago if the wrong person stated it. Pundits who once made fun of ivermectin are now taking it: https://www.yahoo.com/news/chris-cuomo-makes-ivermectin-face-210453781.html Influential experts and commentators agree 110% with what they dismissed as conspiracy theorizing only 1-4 years ago. And that’s fine. Absolutely people should be able to change their minds. Things are on the move. We can disagree over many different perspectives and worldviews. But the point remains: at ALL times, our outcomes will be superior when scrutiny of authorities goes UP, not down.  As we age, our bodies experience changes that can impact mobility, independence, and overall health. However, strength training is one of the most effective ways to combat these challenges and maintain a higher quality of life.
1. Preventing Falls and Injuries Falls are a leading cause of injury among older adults, often resulting in fractures or long-term disabilities. Strength training helps by improving:
These benefits enhance joint and muscle stability, particularly in the legs and core, reducing the likelihood of falls and related injuries. 2. Managing Blood Sugar and Preventing Diabetes Aging can reduce insulin sensitivity, which increases the risk of type 2 diabetes. Regular strength training helps:
By improving insulin sensitivity, strength training plays a preventive role against diabetes in older adults. 3. Supporting Heart Health Cardiovascular health becomes increasingly important with age. Strength training offers several benefits for heart health, including:
These positive effects contribute to a healthier heart and reduced risk of vascular conditions. 4. Combating Osteoporosis and Sarcopenia As we age, we lose both muscle mass and bone density. Strength training helps combat these conditions in two ways:
5. Promoting Longevity The most compelling reason to incorporate strength training into your routine is its association with longer life. Studies show that regular strength training in older adults is linked to:
These cumulative benefits help reduce the incidence of chronic diseases, contributing to a longer, healthier life. 6. Overall Quality of Life Incorporating strength training into daily routines significantly enhances health outcomes. It helps:
With the right approach, strength training can be a cornerstone of healthy aging, showing that it’s never too late to build a stronger, healthier future. Reduction of Fall Risk: - Rodrigues, F., Domingos, C., Monteiro, D., & Morouço, P. (2022). A Review on Aging, Sarcopenia, Falls, and Resistance Training in Community-Dwelling Older Adults. International Journal of Environmental Research and Public Health*, 19(2), 874.[](https://pubmed.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/14552938/) - Daly, R. M. (2017). Exercise and nutritional approaches to prevent frail bones, falls and fractures: an update. Climacteric, 20(2), 119-124.[](https://pubmed.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/14552938/) - Fragala, M. S., Cadore, E. L., Dorgo, S., Izquierdo, M., Kraemer, W. J., Peterson, M. D., & Ryan, E. D. (2019). Resistance Training for Older Adults: Position Statement From the National Strength and Conditioning Association. Journal of Strength and Conditioning Research, 33(8), 2019-2052.[](https://pubmed.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/14552938/) Improvement in Glucose Sensitivity: - Villareal, D. T., Banks, M., Siener, C., Sinacore, D. R., & Klein, S. (2006). Physical frailty and body composition in obese elderly men and women. Obesity Research, 14(6), 929-937. (.)[](https://www.nia.nih.gov/news/how-can-strength-training-build-healthier-bodies-we-age) - Ishiguro, H., Kodama, S., Horikawa, C., Fujihara, K., & Saito, K. (2016). In search of the ideal resistance training program to improve glycemic control and its indication for patients with type 2 diabetes mellitus: A systematic review and meta-analysis. Sports Medicine, 46(1), 67-77. - Sigal, R. J., Kenny, G. P., Boule, N. G., Wells, G. A., Prud'homme, D., Fortier, M., Reid, R. D., Tulloch, H., Coyle, D., Phillips, P., Jennings, A., & Jaffey, J. (2007). Effects of aerobic training, resistance training, or both on glycemic control in type 2 diabetes: a randomized trial. Annals of Internal Medicine, 147(6), 357-369. Reduction in Cardiovascular Disease Risk: - Cornelissen, V. A., & Fagard, R. H. (2005). Effects of endurance training on blood pressure, blood pressure-regulating mechanisms, and cardiovascular risk factors. Hypertension, 46(4), 667-675. - Pattyn, N., Coeckelberghs, E., Buys, R., Cornelissen, V. A., & Vanhees, L. (2014). Aerobic interval training vs. moderate continuous training in coronary artery disease patients: a systematic review and meta-analysis. Sports Medicine, 44(5), 687-700. - Williams, M. A., Haskell, W. L., Ades, P. A., Amsterdam, E. A., Bittner, V., Franklin, B. A., ... & Stewart, K. J. (2007). Resistance exercise in individuals with and without cardiovascular disease: 2007 update: a scientific statement from the American Heart Association Council on Clinical Cardiology and Council on Nutrition, Physical Activity, and Metabolism. Circulation, 116(5), 572-584. Combating Osteoporosis and Sarcopenia: - Fiatarone, M. A., Marks, E. C., Ryan, N. D., Meredith, C. N., Lipsitz, L. A., & Evans, W. J. (1990). High-intensity strength training in nonagenarians. Effects on skeletal muscle. JAMA, 263(22), 3029-3034.[](https://pmc.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/articles/PMC4324332/) - Charette, S. L., McEvoy, L., Pyka, G., Snow-Harter, C., Guido, D., & Wiswell, R. A. (1991). Muscle hypertrophy response to resistance training in older women. Journal of Applied Physiology, 70(5), 1912-1916.[](https://pmc.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/articles/PMC4324332/) - Nelson, M. E., Fiatarone, M. A., Morganti, C. M., Trice, I., Greenberg, R. A., & Evans, W. J. (1994). Effects of high-intensity strength training on multiple risk factors for osteoporotic fractures. A randomized controlled trial. JAMA, 272(24), 1909-1914.[](https://pmc.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/articles/PMC4324332/) Reduction in All-Cause Mortality Risk: - Ruiz, J. R., Sui, X., Lobelo, F., Morrow, J. R., Jackson, A. W., Sjöström, M., & Blair, S. N. (2009). Association between muscular strength and mortality in men: prospective cohort study. *BMJ*, 338, a439. - Artero, E. G., Lee, D. C., Lavie, C. J., España-Romero, V., Sui, X., Church, T. S., & Blair, S. N. (2012). Effects of muscular strength on cardiovascular risk factors and prognosis. Journal of Cardiopulmonary Rehabilitation and Prevention, 32(6), 351-358. - Katzmarzyk, P. T., & Craig, C. L. (2002). Musculoskeletal fitness and risk of mortality. Medicine & Science in Sports & Exercise, 34(5), 740-744.  At least 23% of adults in America have mental illness: https://mhanational.org/issues/state-mental-health-america
At least 88% are metabolically unhealthy: https://www.liebertpub.com/doi/10.1089/met.2018.0105 And it’s getting worse every year. From 1960 to 1980, childhood chronic illness prevalence went from about 1% to about 3%: https://pmc.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/articles/PMC1646496/#:~:text=Data%20from%20the%20National%20Health,parents%2C%20educators%2C%20and%20physicians. In the following 40 years, it doubled, doubled again, doubled yet again, and about doubled once more: https://pmc.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/articles/PMC5010981/ https://www.cdc.gov/healthyschools/chronicconditions.htm#:~:text=In%20the%20United%20States%2C%20more,%2C%20and%20behavior%2Flearning%20problems. Essentially, it went from 1 out of every 100 kids in the 1960s to where it is now: 1 out of every 2 kids. Subdivisions of disease look even worse. The definition, categorization and screening for autism did meaningfully change from 1968 (DSM-II) to 1987 (DSM-III) and to 2000 (DSM-IIIR). But it has not since. In the last 20 years the prevalence went from 1 in 200 to 1 in 36. People try to do hand-waving and dismissal when comparing the 1960s estimate of 1 in 15,000 against the current Californian boys prevalence of 1 in 20. Wave your hands all you like. We are not in stasis. We are not getting better. And we are not getting only a tiny bit worse. Any in-depth analysis of public health trends shows overall worsening and at younger and younger ages. Thus, we are left with a simple question: why can’t people get healthy? Or one might simply wonder, “if it’s impossible for us to make an improvement, can we at least slow the rate of detriment?” This question plagued me long before I entered the fitness industry. However, in the over two decades I’ve been a health and fitness professional, it seems the deeper question is, “Are People Too Rigid to Be Helped?”. I’ve only seen the critical thinking capability of people decline along with a total collapse of American public health by every measure. It’s gotten me to wonder if people are simply too inflexible in their cognitive ability to be helped, even when it’s their own personal best interests of getting healthier. Also, it’s made me ponder a chicken-and-egg scenario, wherein the physical health of most people is so bad that it’s perhaps too much to expect that they’d become sharper in their reasoning. If they can’t get healthy, perhaps they can’t think clearly. If they can’t think clearly, perhaps they can’t get healthy. If we zoom out and look broadly at outcomes directed by modern day keepers-of-truth and the priestly caste, things aren’t getting better. Absolutely, since antibiotics and sanitation at the beginning of the 20th century, public health mostly improved until the 1970s. Since the civil rights movement from 1954-1968, many great steps undeniably followed for society. However, the overall trajectory since the 1970s sees a definite deceleration in progress and/or reversals. There are whole webpages dedicated to the dramatic worsening of overall prosperity since the 1970s: https://wtfhappenedin1971.com. Specifically, in medicine and health sciences, the bar today is so low that it’s embarrassing: https://www.westernstandard.news/news/half-of-ucla-med-students-fail-basic-tests-since-lowering-standards-for-minorities/54812. Certainly, since the beginning of the Department of Education on May 4, 1980, American students have steadily worsened when compared to international students. Black and minority illiteracy collapsed almost entirely until 1979: https://nces.ed.gov/naal/lit_history.asp. In fact, that year was the narrowest EVER gap between white students and non-white students. In the years since, we have moved to a place where 85% of black students are “functionally illiterate”: https://thehill.com/opinion/education/579750-many-of-americas-black-youths-cannot-read-or-do-math-and-that-imperils-us/. Thus, just broadly, our citizens do not have basic literacy, let alone advanced thinking skill. Things are not improving. Contemporary studies don’t raise my hope. Less than 5% of American adults can consistently tell the difference between a statement of fact and an opinion: https://misinforeview.hks.harvard.edu/article/fact-opinion-differentiation/ To be clear, this is not an evaluation of WHETHER the fact is true or untrue. The statement of fact may be untrue. The opinion may be true. Or vice versa. But people cannot tell the difference between them. This has an obvious impact on healthiness. Without a doubt, those in positions of authority are working against the average person. We can see it in how pharmaceutical companies own media and the very regulatory agencies which are supposed to be protecting us from those same companies: https://www.elev8wellness.com/wellblog_best_nutrition_training_coaching_experts/conflicts-of-interest-in-science-and-human-health-have-reached-the-tipping-point And simply stated, researchers at Ivy Leagues are actually not very smart or honest: https://www.elev8wellness.com/wellblog_best_nutrition_training_coaching_experts/red-meat-research-from-harvard-faculty-who-are-sloppy-liars-idiots-ordered-by-the-justice-department-to-return-millions-in-stolen-funds-and-owned-by-foreign-interests Over and over again, we see “health authorities” champion superstitions, anti-science and pseudoscientific proclamations. As I’ve detailed before, the anti-scientific position of “scientific consensus” has been outright abysmal with regard to the radical mastectomy, Barry Marshall’s research on H. Pylori, and many unsafe medications, most recently notable are the vioxx scandal and the opioid scandal/crisis. But the embarrassments have no end. The flu vaccine effectiveness is negative: https://pmc.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/articles/PMC6518843/. The efficacy is so low as to be nonexistent. Moreover, when we factor in people’s increased risky behaviors once vaccinated, the effectiveness is worse than being unvaccinated. It’s not merely that public health experts’ lies and half-truths are so pervasive and prevalent. It’s that “authorities” are so overconfident in their superstitions that they exuberantly partake in suppression of speech and thought. When children like Maddie de Garay became permanently paralyzed (https://downloads.regulations.gov/FDA-2021-N-1088-129763/attachment_1.pdf ) by the mRNA vaccines during the late 2020/early 2021 youth trials, the public never even had a chance at informed consent. Pfizer labeled the adverse reaction as “stomach ache.” A healthy Ontario boy died shortly after his mRNA vaccination, along with 400 other deaths and 10,000 serious adverse reactions suspiciously tied to mRNA vaccine rollouts: https://torontosun.com/news/local-news/warmington-health-canada-deems-400-deaths-after-receiving-covid-vaccine-low . Nonetheless, these very concerning cases have their reactions listed as “rash” or other non-serious response. Numerous legitimate researchers have been raising concerns in peer-reviewed publications about our hurried adoption of the novel vaccine technology. But they are minimized, dismissed, and vilified. Now, maybe these are merely coincidences. Maybe it is totally dumb luck that Sweden had far better outcomes than the US while not locking down, while not closing schools, while not enforcing youth mRNA vaccination, while abiding by the heterodoxy of the Great Barrington Declaration formulated by Stanford and Harvard researchers. Maybe. Unlikely. But maybe. Maybe the US being the only country on earth to recommend infants receive three mRNA Covid vaccinations before nine months old is just a fluke, a glitch, and not a feature of a strategically-designed public health machine aimed at destroying its citizens’ vibrancy and turning them into lifelong sickly customers. Maybe. But really, people can just look around. Look at the average populace around you. People are not healthy or fit. People are not independent thinkers. They’re generally regurgitating verbatim talking points from corporate media. Or simply look at an average classroom. The percent of children with severe special needs is outrageous. The number of children with major physical challenge and mental/emotional instability is climbing. Obviously. As such, I charitably gift a fair bit of my personal time to help clarify a number of health and fitness topics, pulling from extensive professional experience, my own personal experiments, and also the overwhelming evidence in the field. I make nothing from this. I don’t want notoriety. I purposely take months or years off of social media platforms precisely because I do not crave attention. I have a family and multiple businesses to attend to in the real world with real people. My online presence is purely to teach and to learn. I make nothing from it. I want nothing for it, except to beneficially impact the handful of people willing to grow. It is exclusively downside, a cost both in the time I could be making money or with my family, and a cost in the actual money to pay for a business website and hosting. The ROI is negative. An extreme loss. In fact, even this is an understatement, because almost everything I share which is iconoclastic or heterodoxy gets de-amplified, suppressed, or hidden. Unlike online influencers, I have a real company with a physical storefront; and giant tech companies collude to delegitimize any genuine outlet like mine from showcasing dissent. My early Facebook posts on Parkinson’s gained up to half a million views. A one-off YouTube video I made on knee-related orthopedic issues gained hundreds of thousands of views and tens of thousands of engagements. My brief efforts at Instagram peaked around twenty-thousand followers and interactions in the thousands. Our website once had a single day with tens of thousands of visits. However, after 2018, with each blog entry on conflicts-of-interest and the prevalence of non-replicable scientific research, we could actually measure the linear suppression of our visibility by Google and Meta algorithms. It turns out that the speech suppression machines ramped up at precisely that time period: https://judiciary.house.gov/sites/evo-subsites/republicans-judiciary.house.gov/files/evo-media-document/EIP_Jira-Ticket-Staff-Report-11-7-23-Clean.pdf https://oversight.house.gov/release/the-cover-up-big-tech-the-swamp-and-mainstream-media-coordinated-to-censor-americans-free-speech-%EF%BF%BC/ https://www.pbs.org/newshour/amp/politics/zuckerberg-says-the-white-house-pressured-facebook-to-censor-some-covid-19-content-during-the-pandemic Ironically, in the aftermath of algorithm suppression, I made a lot more money. It pushed me to spend less time on charitable online posts which make nothing for me; and the more I focus on my live business which has always made my entire income, obviously, the better it is for me. But from time to time I still share, explain, cite and offer pieces of advice for those who are curious. Many aren’t curious. That’s fine. In discussions, however, I find that even some of the curious people have a genuinely hard time understanding the material, even when dumbed down, even when devoid of opinion, even when simplified to totally non-debated facts for simple takeaway. No shame. Lots of complex topics can be confusing. But when people cannot decipher whether a statement is opinion or fact, genuinely I am not sure where to begin. Thus, some years ago I built a critical thinking guide: https://www.elev8wellness.com/wellblog_best_nutrition_training_coaching_experts/4-tips-to-sift-conflicting-science https://www.elev8wellness.com/wellblog_best_nutrition_training_coaching_experts/validity-and-soundness https://www.elev8wellness.com/wellblog_best_nutrition_training_coaching_experts/induction-is-not-deduction https://www.elev8wellness.com/wellblog_best_nutrition_training_coaching_experts/opinion-versus-argument https://www.elev8wellness.com/wellblog_best_nutrition_training_coaching_experts/correlation-is-not-causation-trend-is-not-even-close-to-mechanism https://www.elev8wellness.com/wellblog_best_nutrition_training_coaching_experts/settled-science Yet still, I find that people simply struggle to weigh input. In some circles, insults become a sort of shorthand to refuse any sort of discussion, thought, debate, engagement, evidence or argument. Slurs take the place of thoughtful discussion. “Racist” and “nazi” and “bigot” and “______phobe” and “pseudo_____“ have lost any relevant meaning. They are too often the universal language of low-IQ people dodging thoughtfulness and flexible learning. I have encountered even highly educated people insisting that anyone who doesn’t perfectly agree with them is always one of three things: unintelligent; crazy; or evil. This itself is the Ableism or Bulverism Fallacy tied into Ad Hominem Fallacy. It assumes ones own opinion is already conclusively THE TRUTH; therefore, any dissent or disagreement must be explained exclusively by attacking the opponent instead of the opponent’s arguments or evidence. This isn’t a gloom-and-doom rant. We should recall that there are wonderful stories of progress. There are powerful examples of rags to riches, destitution to prosperity, rock-bottom to pinnacle, despair to salvation, scientific research breakthroughs, and glimmers of hope all around. That said, there is no denying that the past decade people have been competing for who is the bigger victim. Abdication of personal responsibility is the norm. A willful rejection of self-discipline is the norm. Victim narrative is the norm. Participation ribbon culture is the norm. It’s not a coincidence that the popularity of getting dumber, more opinionated, and more unhealthy all coincide. It’s particularly vexing for me in health and fitness topics. We can see the abject failure across fifty years of experts and authorities in public health. Yet somehow, a small percent of the populace keeps coming back to them, like an abused spouse defending her abusive husband. The good news is that trust in institutions and “experts” is vanishing: https://www.pewresearch.org/science/2022/02/15/americans-trust-in-scientists-other-groups-declines/ https://news.gallup.com/poll/651977/americans-trust-media-remains-trend-low.aspx But really, there are still some 29% of people who claim to have “great confidence” in the opinions of demonstrably wrong and corrupt officials, when a healthier figure would be 0%, and a more reasonable claim would be “SOME confidence.” Sadly, 36% of the population claims to trust media a “great deal/fair amount”, when we know that they colluded with intelligence agencies to suppress speech/truth: https://oversight.house.gov/release/the-cover-up-big-tech-the-swamp-and-mainstream-media-coordinated-to-censor-americans-free-speech-%EF%BF%BC/ A multi-year congressional investigation into Covid measures found that nearly every single “conspiracy theory” which media suppressed or pilloried was correct: https://oversight.house.gov/release/final-report-covid-select-concludes-2-year-investigation-issues-500-page-final-report-on-lessons-learned-and-the-path-forward/ The experts are wrong, and not a little. The voices of media were wrong, and not a little. And we now know for a fact that they lied repeatedly. Is it any wonder that the percent of the populace who trusts them is quite similar in quantity to the percent of the populace who is mentally ill? At a bare minimum, I hope we can all see there is a big problem with authorities, experts, the modern priests, AND a problem in the individual and society. Once we do, of course, the questions still remain regarding solutions. Simply, there are four notions to keep in mind. Foremost, I argue we must reject authorities. We must reject authoritarianism in all its forms, for now and forever. It’s actually quite weird that totalitarianism crept into liberal philosophy the past four decades. Suppression of thought and speech was a hallmark of fascism, which so ironically was embraced by “the left” during Covid lockdowns and online debate. That’s perhaps too complex to totally unpack. But suffice it to say, as a de facto default baseline, we must respond with immediate disapproval toward any and all figures of authority. Don’t listen to me. Don’t listen to others. Hear a person out. Pause. Reflect. Cross-reference. Ponder. Then, if it seems prudent, make up your mind for yourself about whether you will allow that expert’s input into your framework of acceptable conclusions. Second, remember your acceptance is provisional and contingent. It’s not final, ever. If at any point better evidence or questionable circumstances arise, you may reject that conclusion again. Third, remember that the universe is predictable and run by consistent physical laws. Everything has a cause or causes. Perhaps nothing has been more injurious to modern health than the mystification of health, fitness, and disease. The Postmodernism push to make truth relative was wrong. It’s time to move back to Empiricism. Experts have worked earnestly to convince the populace that autoimmune diseases and autism and cancers “just happen.” This is anti-scientific and anti-modern thinking. Nothing “just happens.” Everything is the outcome of prior causes and influences. It’s not mystical. We don’t need superstition wrapped up in our sciences. Pathologies have causes. Policies and substances have unintended consequences and shift health risks one direction or another. We can debate TO WHAT DEGREE any given behavior or substance shifts risk. But when people completely dismiss any sort of risk or influence from a whole category of drugs or treatments, that isn’t scientific. That’s religious mystical hoodoo. Fourth, given that the physical universe has real palpable causes, we’d do well to accept accountability and seek greatness. If we are mystical premodern simpletons, sure, the Fates are happening to us, we are powerless by every measure, and all is pointless and futile. But if we are modern scientific people with agency and will and determination, we impose outcomes on our surrounding environment. With this in hand, we can both accept the consequences of our actions and direct ourselves toward better ones. Instead of exasperation and disempowered futility, we have agency and empowered greatness. Of course, with random chaos as the framework, how could people possibly get healthy? If there are no causes, why consider altering them? With inflexibility and a religious adherence to listening to the experts (ie - authoritarianism), how could society improve? By definition, it cannot, because the bedrock of that society is built upon destroying any outside criticism, any non-authority input, any possible improvement. That society is a totalitarian regime. However, on the contrary, with agency and empowered greatness, you better believe people will get healthy. A free society which rejects authorities can keep making progress. It can keep improving its tactics. It embraces advancement. It embraces growth. It rejects dogma. It embraces difficult questions, uncomfortable ideas, and new and better ways. Let us be the free society, where people take responsibility for their own futures, and where the totalitarian keepers-of-truth are turned to ash, eradicated forever, and held to a standard of accountability commensurate to the power they so thirsted to impose on humanity.  This claim has been making its rounds in the internet for some months. I could not determine on what hard statistics, if any, people are basing this claim. Certainly, the AVERAGE fitness of the vast majority of the populace plummits as time goes forward. So there is some truth to it. In my experience, which is considerable now (over the two-decade mark of professional training and coaching), people do rapidly get weaker after teenage years. And it is true that widespread health and fitness statistics are worsening and at an accelerating rate. As people age, they get weaker. Weakness raises risk OF fall and risk FROM fall and risk IN recovery. That is, the weaker you are, the more likely you are to fall. Moreover, the likelier you are to take serious injury. Moreover again, you are likelier to get sick or even die in the hospital subsequently. In graphs of death from fall, the prevalence in a population is precisely linear with strength loss. However, there is also a large body of evidence that older populations can make immense progress if they train. And our concept of what older populations can tolerate in training needs some updating. I have worked with clients in their 70s and 80s who absolutely can and do sprint, and they get faster with training over time. Simply put, if you train to get slow, you get slow. If you train to be faster, you get faster. If you train to get stronger and have better balance, you get stronger and improve balance. If you train to get weaker and have terrible balance, you get precisely what the inactivity and avoidance bargained for you. I live this. I don't just study it. I don't just have thousands of case studies from over twenty years of 70,000+ hours of experience in the field. I live this. In my son's recent endeavors to run faster, and in pondering this meme making its circles in the social media, I began to wonder: how fast can I sprint nowadays? About ten years ago I was able to hit 19.0 to 20.0 mph on free runner treadmills. And although I seldom train sprinting in the conventional sense (as opposed to just really faster rower or airdyne or cycling), I KNOW I am still pretty fast. But I did not know PRECISELY. So I set out about a month ago to see. Day one I was still able to top out the treadmill at a respectable 12.0 mph. Currently, I canNOT maintain it (as I haven't trained this in years) for minutes at a time; but I can hit it for 10-30 seconds, depending on the incline. It equates to the pace of a 5 minute mile. My treadmill goes no faster. So all I had readily-available at my finger tips was incline. At 12.0mph, each 1% incline reduces the per-mile time by 10 seconds. At 12%, that's the same force required to run 15.0 mph on a flat surface, a 4-minute-mile pace. Steadily, every two days or so, I tried another couple percent higher. Ultimately, I was able to hit 12.0 mph at 12% for 10-20 seconds. On the free runner treadmill at Lifetime, my son and I topped out at pretty high speeds, my highest being 16.2 (pictured above are two screen captures from videos of my attempts, one at 16.0 and the other 16.2). It's no 19-20... yet. But I also haven't been earnestly training it for years. I suspect in a few months I could surpass my prior sprint speeds. Speed and power are essentially the very top progression of strength, agility, balance, coordination. Thus, sprinting is critical in some format for everyone. It has to be based on the individual's ability. But there is no real reason anyone should avoid going fast eventually. Train it gradually. Be patient. But you may be surprised at just how rapidly you can regain ability you might've thought impossible. And it assuredly will go a ways to dispel the meme that's making its rounds. Truly, you'll be surprised simply be incorporating it for even 4-6 weeks. I was. At my buddy's gym today I tried 12.5mph at 15% incline, which equates to the same amount of force to go 17.31 mph on a flat surface ( see video below). It's actually pretty funny how slow a 6'3" guy at 270+ lbs of bodyweight looks even at 12.5mph. Now I realize not everyone out there is already training 1,000lb belt squats and insane lower body lifts - so yes, of course, I had a head start of a significant advantage to retraining the high speed. But for each person out there, there will be a small impact and speed at which you can start. Maybe it's a walk. Maybe it isn't even a walk. I have had clients who need to begin with cycling. We work up to a walk and/or reverse walk very very gradually. But once they have enough strength, we can tolerate impact in the training. That process can take a year with compromised individuals. I know. I have trained people like this many times. But afterward we can take single-leg impact. Then they can jog. For short bursts, then they can run. Ultimately, many will regain moderate sprinting capability. And among people who have been diligently training incredibly heavy strength, the road back to fast runs and sprints is unimaginably short. Let us all be curious about where we are with regard to this skill and work at curating it.  This screenshot is from my online banking application for Elev8 Wellness’ first business account. I opened that account with $100 on Thursday, December 28, 2012. I left my prior employer on Thursday, January 10, 2013, and I began accepting retainer payments for Elev8 Wellness the following day, Friday, January 11. In the course of five days I made $37,992.68, receiving four paid-in-full agreements in one day (January 14, totaling 26.6k), and then began shifting solely to month-to-month agreements immediately afterward to ensure my steady “salary” for the next 11.5 years (and still going).
I hadn’t spent anything on that business other than my LLC’s registration with the state of Minnesota and professional liability insurance in December 2012. I hadn’t yet paid commercial rent, technically not even having a sole dedicated business space until the February afterward. I hadn’t bought any equipment. I didn’t have social media or a website. I didn’t have a business card. I was not even thinking about advertising or marketing. Literally, I simply sat down with people in person, presented value, and asked for their support. “You have to spend money to make money” may be a lie - a lie which Forbes tackled that same season: https://www.forbes.com/sites/actiontrumpseverything/2013/02/09/you-have-to-spend-money-to-make-money-and-other-lies-people-tell-entrepreneurs/ What you definitely have to do is you have to make a lot of money in order to be worthy to spend even a tiny amount. You have to be valuable. You have to know how to communicate. You have to be incredibly honest with yourself and others, but bold, and painfully humble, knowing your responsibilities do not just evaporate when you have a goal or a dream. Then you get the privilege to spend money. Long after, you GET to spend money. To continue making money or to scale up, yes, of course, you will spend. In the eleven-and-a-half years since, my costs have risen DRAMATICALLY. Under private health insurance in 2015, our total health costs for my family were a hundred thousand dollars. Monthly business space costs are 5k minimum. Costs are a privilege and an opportunity. I received that opportunity as a consequence of my incredible sacrifices and willingness to go without for myself for a very long time. To this day, I still get paid last. Uncle Sam. Kids. Family. Biz. Investments. Then, long after, I get to eat, get to rest, get new clothes, get to visit friends and family. And oftentimes, coming last in the equation, I don’t get to rest or visit friends and family. But never, ever, ever, did I FIRST spend money in order to make it. I have started and run several businesses of consequence. I have managed big teams. I have worked for myself exclusively for nearly twelve years, and on other businesses for over thirty. I do it to the tune of being able to support my family, my community, and a lot of causes. You don't have to spend money to make it, not initially. It can save you time on learning curves. It can save you on time with skilled labor. Money can save you a lot of time when you hire mentors and teachers. But you don't HAVE TO spend it. That's errant. It's a tool like any other, which users may distribute in place of other effort. All the same, you'll still have to figure out how to generate and present value, how to be honest, how to communicate. Money can't buy any of those. |
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