Tuskegee for everyone

After “Covid,” I finally understand in a personal, real way why the Tuskegee experiment made American blacks permanently distrustful of the medical industry. Every American should now understand this, but too many don’t.

In 2010, I had a heart attack at age 36. Complete blockage of the right coronary artery. I am so thankful for the acute care, the acute technology, that allowed the doctors to open my artery back up and save my life.

Between the fact that I only waited about 20 minutes from the onset of symptoms to call 911, and the fact that a cardiac team operated on me within an hour and 15 minutes, my life and my heart were saved. For the curious, my ejection fraction after the infarction was 55%—I escaped permanent, serious heart damage.

Western medicine is very good in emergencies like this. We can so often save people from death or the next worst outcomes of heart attack, stroke, and traumatic injury. It’s miraculous. Thirteen years after I nearly died on a gurney I still choke up with gratitude to Dr. Terrien and the cardiac team from the University of Vermont hospital. I would be dead without them, and without the volunteers from St. Michaels’ ambulance service, who arrived at my house in five minutes.

This incredible ability to save patients in extremis colors our overall view of the Western medical system. This is a mistake. While we’re very good at “plumbing” emergencies in the human body, our medical system is very bad indeed viewed from a big-picture perspective. It is corrupt, cult-like, amoral, and in some ways actively evil.

The same system, the same medical network, that saved my life, might have then turned around and killed me. It’s certainly done so to many others with this “vaccine.” In late 2020, my general practitioner urged me repeatedly to get the vaccination. He is a good man; I believe he means well. But he was captured, like all of his colleagues, by a false narrative.

I said no. Word was starting to leak out about myocarditis. Oh, you had to get a magnifying glass to see the complaints; they were so quickly buried or disappeared from any online platform. And you had to make a quick decision to decide which “side” to trust; everyone in authority told you that you were “crazy” or were listening to “un-evidenced conspiracies.”

My doctor said he was very concerned for my heart vis-a-vis Covid. I told him I was even more concerned about my heart—it being mine, and knowing viscerally what it had already been through—and that’s why I wouldn’t take it. My gut intuition was screaming DANGER at me. Thank God I listened to it. Read the coda to this essay for another example of how listening to my intuition about my body helped save my life.

Countless other people said no. Countless other people listened to the warning signs going off in their heads. And now we know that we were right. These vaccines are killing people, they’re provoking chronic illness, and they’re going to kill more people over time.

All for an illness that was never a danger to almost anyone who wasn’t old or already seriously sick. Just like the flu. Just like other respiratory ailments. But all of a sudden, we forgot everything we knew. Our doctors forgot everything they knew, and all of their experience.

The government, the CDC, and all major media urged us to take a vaccine that was developed in less than a year. The federal government and state governments tried to legally force injections on us. Millions of Americans were coerced into taking this—fucking poison on pain of losing their jobs, their homes, or physical access to their families.

This is the greatest moral medical scandal in history. Not “in recent memory.” In all of world history. The scope of it is breath-taking, which is part of the reason so many resist seeing it. But every day, more and more fearful people are beginning to accept that it is real, and it is evil.

If history books survive, this episode will far outstrip any prior medical scandal. And it is not just a medical scandal. It is a legal, political, and moral scandal.

My faith in the medico-legal complex is permanently gone, and has been replaced with active mistrust. For your sake, reader, I hope to God it is for you, too.

There were signs that something was seriously wrong with Western medicine before Covid, signs that I noted. I do know that many people saw these signs for decades before the scales fell from my eyes. But it took personal experience for me to see.

In the months after my heart attack I was placed in the cardiac rehabilitation program. The exercise regimen was good; the dietary advice was not. They instructed me to follow the utterly flawed USDA food pyramid, but even more zealously.

Eat mostly whole grains! (All grains are carbohydrates, and no, being a complex carbohydrate does not make those carbs anything but carbs that take longer to become sugar when you digest them. Sugar, not fat, promotes heart disease.) Eat very little meat! Eat almost no fat from meat! Drink skim milk!

Dangerous advice. 10 years after my heart attack, my own cardiologist finally came around. “Josh, the dietary advice is bullshit. Ignore what they tell you. Keto is your best option.” You could have knocked me over; I had already figured this out from other sources. Finally, a Western doctor who admitted that Western medicine gave the exact wrong dietary advice, and they were doing it even to known heart patients.

There is no certain path or decision-tree that will give me, or you, the “right” medical answer every time. All information is imperfect in some way or another. But I believe today that trusting the Western medical system’s advice on chronic illness, long-term dietary patterns, and much else, is too dangerous.

Your intuition is not infallible either, but in my view, you’re better off trusting it than not. Listen to what your gut is telling you, especially when it’s flashing danger signs.

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Coda: What to do if you think you’re having a heart attack

This was my experience, which was characterized by male—typical heart symptoms. Women have a different symptom pattern, and they should educate themselves on that pattern right away. There are men and women, of course, who experience some or all of either sex’s symptom patterns.

But the advice on intuition warnings from your body applies to both sexes.

1. Most important—The sense of DOOM. Listen to it. Call 911 when you get the feeling in your body and in your emotions that something is terribly wrong. This is what saved me. Something in me knew. My physical pain was bearable enough that I could have rationalized it away as bad heartburn, but it wasn’t. My body and my mind knew I was going to die.

2. One week before my heart attack, I had what I only realized later were two episodes of acute angina (sharp heart pain). Twice I had about a 30-second period where I felt huge pressure in my chest, a sensation of burning in my lungs, and it was uncomfortable to take a deep breath. I also felt twinges in my left arm.
   
   I rationalized these away. I should not have. What was happening was that a blockage in my right coronary artery was sliding in and out of place, intermittently blocking blood flow to my heart. As you see, a week later it broke loose and rolled into place like a boulder blocking an underwater cave.

3. My heart attack began with a strange sensation of pressure behind my breast bone. It felt at first like bad heartburn. But there was something “off” about it, and antacid did nothing.

4. Within a few minutes I felt pain radiating down the left side of my body, beginning in my jaw and traveling down my arm to my finger tips. This is classic male-pattern “referred pain” from a heart attack.

5. I was sweating and pale in a cold room. And the sense of DOOM got worse by the minute.

6. If you have it, chew a large dose of aspirin after you call 911. Aspirin, the actual chemical, not “any pain killer I colloquially refer to as aspirin.” Not ibuprofen, not Tylenol. Aspirin. It’s a blood thinner. Chew the equivalent of at least two full adult doses (650 mg total) to get it into your system as fast as possible. You may thin your blood enough to allow at least a trickle through. Tell the ambulance crew every drug you’ve taken.
   
   Give yourself every chance you can. The first thing the medical team does is to start pushing industrial-strength clot-dissolving and blood-thinning drugs in an IV. For me, these did not work. I vividly remember the increasing tone of worry in the ER doctor’s voice as he kept commanding the staff to push more clot-busters, and then more, as the surgical suite was prepped.

7. Stay lying down or at least seated until the ambulance gets there. My pain was only 4.5 to 5 on a scale of 1 to 10. It was not the dramatic, heart-clutching pain you see in the movies (though that happens to many men). I didn’t really believe I was having a heart attack, but I was. The ambulance crew insisted I lie down and not move. Get ahead of this. Don’t walk it off. Don’t be a fool.

A word on alcohol. Comparing blood tests and lipid panels (measuring the kinds of fats and other metabolic components in my blood) from before and after I was a drinker clinched it. More than my smoking, more than being fat, I drank myself into a coronary. No one on my care team ever mentioned alcohol; they were too busy yammering about smoking and smoking only. This was a terrible mistake.

No, I’m not saying smoking is good for you, or that it didn’t contribute to my infarction. It did. But it wasn’t the main component. My alcoholism was. Let me illustrate.

The day of my heart attack, my triglycerides were an astounding 770. The top of the normal range is 150. Triglycerides, a type of fat, are the major marker/contributor to heart disease (I’m speaking generally; do further reading on the subject for detail). The nursing staff said they were shocked that I wasn’t also in pancreatitis at this level.

I continued to be a nightly drunk for years after my heart attack, though I had quit cigarettes.

In 2019, my lipid panel showed that my triglycerides had crept up again to a dangerous 550, even on medication. In June of 2020, I had a come-to-Jesus moment of shock-horror at my drunkenness and what I had done to myself and people around me. I quit cold turkey on June 3.

Two months after quitting drink, I had another lipid panel. My triglycerides were down to a wonderful 130. Ladies and gentlemen: I drank myself into a heart attack. Have you considered that you might be doing the same?

I hope you find this helpful.