Sandra C 🐭

I can’t believe she didn’t die! 2012, I’m taking orthopedic call at the local Hospital when I’m notified about a 99 year old woman that came into the ER with a broken femur from a fall. Now as was routine, patients with orthopedic surgical needs often were admitted to the hospital by an internal medicine doctor working as what is known as a hospitalists. They would evaluate the patient to see if they were surgical candidates and then would contact us to address their options to treat the injury. This nice 99 year old woman was pretty spry, lived independently and enjoyed working in her garden at home. She had what was known as a distal femur feature, which means the break occurred just above the knee. After a long discussion about the pros and cons of various treatment options, she and her family had decided that surgery was the best chance she had to get back to hopefully walking and being independent. The hospitalists cleared the patient for surgery and later that day we had it scheduled. My job at that point was to get her femur fixed and rehabbing as quickly as possible. Another consideration that when operating in elderly patients is to try and be as time efficient as possible in order to 1. Minimize blood loss and 2. Minimize time under anesthesia, as we known that lengthy anesthetic exposure can often lead to cognitive problems post op for many folks. Anyway I was starting the procedure in which I planned to put a contoured plate along the lateral (outside) of the femur which would be held in place which several screws. I had dissected through the soft tissues, used clamps to bring the fracture into appropriate alignment had the plate in place and was starting to put in the screws. The anesthesiologist, peaked over the drape and said “Shawn, you need to stop operating”. Now this is something that I had only heard one other time in my career, back when I was doing trauma surgery in Afghanistan. I quickly ask what was up and she said that she was arresting, in other words her heart had stopped . At this point the anesthesiologist initiated a code and asked me to start chest compressions. I began doing this while my assistant packed the surgical incision and applied a sterile dressing. I remember hearing a bunch of crackling sounds coming from her chest as I was pushing in her sternum. Likely some of her ribs were cracking as she was pretty old and frail. She regained somewhat of a normal heart rhythm after they hit her with the various cardiac drugs and she was the wheeled out of the room sporting what is somewhat humorously referred to as a positive Q sign. Basically, tongue hanging out and down to the side, while an endotracheal tube is taped in place. The mouth looks like the letter Q If you have a cardiac arrest in a hospital you have about a 25% chance of surviving to go home and at 99 years of age the odds get way worse. As I saw her being wheeled away I thought to myself, I’ll never see her alive again. The next morning at around 6 am I get to the hospital and pull up my patient list on the computer. I’m somewhat surprised to find out my 99 year old was, 1. Not dead and 2. Not in the ICU. I’m honestly pretty pleasantly surprised by this and go up to see her. She was sitting up in bed eating breakfast and was pissed off at me because her chest hurt! I explained to her what had happened and what options were available. Going back to the OR was ruled out by the anesthesia team and I ended up removing the plate at the bedside, closing the incision and putting her in a brace and then eventually a cast. She healed the fracture and went back to gardening. She definitely defied the odds and might be one of the oldest people ever to survive a code and still go home!

23 mins in. Rough recording but shows you Makis true colors. I wouldn’t be posting this if it were not for Makis posting a Substack that entirely edited out my critiques of him and erected a false argument about this.

1) One of the most jaw-dropping discoveries I made while researching “The Autism Vaccine” took place in Austria. I was initially intrigued by the autism story when I realized that the first time aluminum had been used in a U.S. pediatric vaccine was 1932.

Pork gets a lot of grief in carnivore circles. It's not beef, which counts against it. It has PUFAs, which sounds damning. And it carries two thousand years of religious taboo, from Leviticus to the Quran, which has a way of embedding itself in cultural intuition long after the theology has left the room. So let's be fair about what pork actually is. Pork is a superfood. Not in the way that word has been debased by bags of goji berries in health food shops. A genuine, nutrient-dense animal food that has sustained entire civilisations. Thiamine: pork is the richest common dietary source of vitamin B1. More than beef. More than lamb. Thiamine is critical for glucose metabolism, nerve function, and cardiac health: and its deficiency, beriberi, was historically catastrophic in populations eating refined rice. The traditional populations eating whole pork alongside their rice didn't get beriberi. The ones eating polished white rice without the pork did. The pork was doing work. Selenium. Zinc. Complete protein. Choline for liver function and brain development. Carnosine. B vitamins across the board. It is an animal food. It does what animal foods do. Now the PUFA question, because it deserves a direct answer rather than a dismissal. Yes, pork fat contains more linoleic acid than ruminant fat. This is real. The pig, unlike the cow, has a simple stomach and cannot biohydrogenate polyunsaturated fat, cannot take the problematic seed fat and convert it into saturated fat the way a rumen can. What goes in largely comes out. Pigs raised on grain and soybean meal will have fattier, more linoleic acid-rich tissue than pigs raised on a more natural diet. Here's the context that changes everything. If you have already removed seed oils, you have already removed the industrial cooking oils. If you have removed legumes, you have removed soybean-derived everything. If you have removed nuts, you have removed the other major linoleic acid sources. You have, in the process of cleaning up the obvious problems, already addressed the bulk of your PUFA load. In that context, pork's linoleic acid content is not the marginal straw that breaks the metabolic camel's back. It is a manageable contribution from a whole food that was never the issue. The issue was always the bottle on the kitchen counter. The bottle is gone. And then consider: pork is the staple meat of Asia. The cooking traditions of China, Vietnam, Korea, Japan, Thailand: cuisines built on pork belly, slow-braised shoulder, trotters, ears, offal, these are not the cuisines of populations historically defined by metabolic disease. The metabolic disease arrived with the industrial food, the refined carbohydrates, the vegetable oils. Not with the pig. The religious prohibition on pork is ancient, contextual, and pre-refrigeration. The carnivore prohibition on pork is aesthetic, recent, and optional. Eat the belly. Render the lard. Use the lard to cook the rest of the pig. Beef is exceptional. Pork is not beneath it. They're different tools. Both animal. Both complete. Both doing what no bag of seeds ever managed.

You can be 80% carnivore and change your life. You can eat meat and dairy Monday to Friday and feel better than you have in years. You can have a piece of birthday cake at your nephew's party and it changes nothing. You can go on holiday, eat the local food, enjoy it, and come back to eating beef without the holiday counting as a failure. You can be a work in progress. You are allowed to be a work in progress. The person who eats well 80% of the time and sustains it for five years is healthier than the person who eats perfectly for three weeks, falls off, and spends the next year feeling like a failure. Consistency over time beats intensity over weeks. Buy the mince. Cook it in butter. Add more butter. Do this most days. The rest can figure itself out.

"The science is settled." They said that about lobotomies. Drilled into the skull, severed the frontal lobe, sent the patient home quieter. Twenty thousand performed in the US alone. The surgeon got a Nobel Prize. They said it about radium. Sold in toothpaste. In face cream. In water tonics for "vitality." The factories that made it left a radioactive legacy that required federal cleanup eighty years later. The women who painted the watch dials were told to lick the brush to keep a fine point. They said it about smoking during pregnancy. Doctors endorsed specific brands. Camel ran ads with physician testimonials. "More doctors smoke Camels than any other cigarette." The settled science of the 1940s. They said it about mercury for syphilis. Rub it on the skin. Inhale the vapour. The cure was frequently worse than the disease. The disease, at least, took years. The mercury took weeks. They said it about bloodletting. For two thousand years. Every major illness. Every fever. Every infection. Open the vein, release the corruption. George Washington was bled of roughly forty percent of his blood in twelve hours on his deathbed. By doctors. Who were certain. They said it about margarine. Heart-healthy. Scientifically proven. Cardiologist-approved. The trans fat content was not discussed, because the people funding the studies were not in the business of discussing trans fat content. They are now saying it about red meat. About saturated fat. About cholesterol. About the LDL hypothesis that has never survived a randomised controlled trial with all-cause mortality as the endpoint. Settled science is where investigation stops. It is also, reliably, where the funding starts.

Retraction—Today, we retract an unsigned 1977 commentary suggesting talc powder containing asbestos was not harmful. The Lancet was informed that the author had undisclosed competing interests and breached publication ethics. /4