You know, growing up as a kid back in the ’80s, it was cute to be a child and get excited whenever some “discovery” came about from the scientific community…but when I became an adult, I had to think critically about subject matter that was presented before me. If I can think critically, why can’t other people?
Answer: They cannot think critically.
Most people will believe anything…until they’re proven otherwise.
If some news article stated that an “HIV-positive” two-year old has been “functionally cured”, obviously “functionally cured” would need to fall into question. But, if people cannot think critically, how would they go about questioning the bizarre term “functionally cured”?
The overwhelming majority of people, in general, hold in their possession a level of stupidity that is, without a shadow of a doubt, legendary–so legendary that if one of them were to volunteer to be a contestant on Jeopardy! to go up against two other contestants on the show and those other two contestants were a rock and shoehorn, I’d bet the farm on the shoehorn. That’s how legendary their natural-born stupidity is. People who found themselves elated with joy over the news of an infant getting “functionally cured” of a supposed “HIV-infection” fell hook-line-and-sinker for the bait and got snagged-up like the dumb idiots that they are–and mainly for the reason that none of them understand actual science.
People who think critically in regards to “things scientific” know that science is universal. It is this universality that distinguishes scientific disciplines like math, physics, chemistry, et al from the pseudosciences such as medicine, psychology, psychiatry, sociology and others.
That is what “universal” means: the ability to predict with absolute accuracy, without fail.
This is why medicine is not science. Just because people work in laboratories where they use test tubes and play around with chemicals doesn’t make them “scientists”. You cannot predict who will live or die after a drug has been administered to them; you cannot predict who will become ill. Even if you had ten people in a room exposed to influenza, HIV or whatever, there is no way that you can predict who will contract those diseases. Ten people have pneumonia, you give them the all the exact same treatment, some will live, some will die and you cannot explain with any great certainty why those who survived did and why those who died did.
There is no science in pharmaceuticals either. The only thing they’re able to tell you is that when you combine certain chemical compounds a particular way, you end up with a type of drug. Will the drug work? Not on everyone, so how could it possibly be science if you can’t even predict the outcome for whom the drug was designed for as to whether or not the drug will work.
In the case of the two-year old infant being “functionally cured” of HIV, antiretroviral treatment was started on the first day of post-natal life (within “30” hours post-delivery, to be exact), possibly before reservoirs of the virus could establish themselves in either the blood, immune system, brain of the infant, etc. So what’s the difference between reservoirs of the HIV-virus establishing themselves in an infant and an adult? In a typical adult, the infection usually would have been active for some uncertain time before treatment is implemented. This provides an opportunity for HIV to establish reservoirs in lymph tissue, bone marrow, the genitourinary tract and as already aforementioned, the brain. The HIV-virus tends to remain dormant for an uncertain time. In turn, this leads to the possibility that the reason why gradual reduction of the viral load, in an adult, accompanied by treatment, takes most of that particular individual’s lifetime. Another problem that you have to deal with is the fact that scientists cannot control where a viral vector inserts genes therefore, it is possible that the genes may be inserted in places that may not be beneficial. Also, you have to be aware of any potential “trade-off” whenever some doctor or scientist applies therapy, moreover, gene therapy to a person stricken with an infection. How can one know that a treatment, or treatments, will not cause other [or, in some cases, further] complications that might eventually lead towards the contraction or development of another illness?
In regards to how countries handle issues with HIV, I’ll let you know that a country like Romania once practiced something called “micro-transfusions”. For those that need further detail, a doctor would transfuse a small quantity of whole blood into a newborn for the purpose of strengthening its immune system naturally. The whole blood from an adult already contains numerous antigens against various diseases. Understanding this, you can tell that Romania was more than elated to get a discount on whole blood from the American Red Cross–blood that was contaminated with HIV and the American Red Cross didn’t feel like testing it or removing it from the blood supply for monetary purposes. As a result, a lot of Romanian infants were infected with HIV from the tainted blood until it was discovered. Shortly there afterward, the World Health Organization banned the practice of “micro-transfusions”. Please understand that the American Red Cross is a quasi-national private corporation operating under the auspices of the United States of America. For those of you who clamor over the convenience of Google, go back to the 1980s and take a gander at the legislation that was enacted by Congress to “shield” the American Red Cross for legal liability because they refused to test the blood supplies and shipped tainted blood off to second-world and third-world countries. And here, in the United States, the American Red Cross will sell that tainted/untested blood to your local hospital for $750/pint and that same hospital will double the price and charge the insurance companies you subscribe to so that they’ll be able to utilize the “necessary” and yet expensive medical technology in order to clean the equipment that’ll be used to test the blood supplies. The money has to come from somewhere (U.S. taxpayers).
Exactly what is a “micro-transfusion”? It’s a form of therapy and therapy is exactly what the doctors at the University of Mississippi administered to the then newborn baby “30 hours” post-delivery. Is it plausible to suspect that the methodology of the therapy that was administered to the Mississippi infant was influenced and paralleled to the now-banned Romanian practice that were “micro-transfusions”? I think so. I don’t know for certain because I’m not a clinical researcher. I’m not prancing around in a laboratory (yet) to Mozart, slinging test tubes all-around and chanting “Unsymmetrical Dimethylhydrazine!” all over the place.
How this relates to the “functionally cured” two-year old from Mississippi is the possibility that the newborn either was not infected in the womb or became infected during delivery (as was posed in a few of the earlier articles from yesterday). I’ll bet the farm that the newborn was never infected with “HIV” in the first place. That may be difficult for those of you who refuse to utilize the skill of critical-thinking and the application of distinguishing fact from fiction; science from pseudoscience.
People thought I was joking around the other day at work when I made the statement that researchers should communicate with other researchers because society as a whole does not care at all about the scientific process, they only care about “miracles” and what better way is there to continue deceiving people than to perpetrate and be seen as “miracle” workers than telling the global community that an “HIV-positive” two-year old has been “functionally cured” of HIV. You see, if researchers were truly benevolent as they envision themselves to be, then there’s no way that they would allow people to fall for the delusion that medicine is science when in fact it’s not. Allowing this delusion to spread, it gives them false hope, thinking that medicine will save them and though there’s a possibility that it might, therein lies no absolute certainty that it will.
And it is certainty that distinguishes Science from pseudoscience or art–and medicine is an art, not science.
—Desmond
arheliean.com 