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Here’s Why You Can No Longer Find Home Remedies Online

Google Is Burying Alternative Health Sites to Protect People from “Dangerous” Medical Advice

For their unorthodox views, some physicians are being treated as medical heretics. Google’s search engine algorithm has essentially ended traffic to their websites.
Tuesday, August 6, 2019
Barry Brownstein

In Ray Bradbury’s classic novel Fahrenheit 451, firemen don’t put out fires; they create fires to burn books.

The totalitarians claim noble goals for book burning. They want to spare citizens unhappiness caused by having to sort through conflicting theories.

The real aim of censorship, in Bradbury’s dystopia, is to control the population. Captain Beatty explains to the protagonist fireman Montag, “You can’t build a house without nails and wood. If you don’t want a house built, hide the nails and wood.” The “house” Beatty is referring to is opinions in conflict with the “official” one.

If you don’t want a man unhappy politically, don’t give him two sides to a question to worry him; give him one. Better yet, give him none. Let him forget there is such a thing as war. If the government is inefficient, top-heavy, and tax-mad, better it be all those than that people worry over it.

When making decisions, we often face conflicting theories. Daily, we face choices about what to eat. Although the government issues ever-changing dietary guidelines, thankfully, the marketplace supports personal dietary decisions ranging from carnivore to vegan. We are free to choose our diet based on our evaluation of the available evidence and the needs of our bodies.

When we face health issues, decisions become tougher. There is an orthodox opinion, and there are always dissenting opinions. For example, the orthodoxy recommends statins to reduce high cholesterol. Others believe high cholesterol is not a health risk and that statins are harmful.

Nobel laureate in economics Vernon Smith was taking a prescribed statin and recently observed the impact it was having on him:

In the last week I had a very clear (now) experience of temporary memory loss. I did a little searching and found this article summarizing and documenting the evidence over many years.

Smith continues,

Such incidents have been widely reported, but the problem did not arise in any of the clinical trials, but neither were they designed to detect it.

Smith had to weigh the purported benefits against the side effects:

Statin effectiveness in reducing heart/stroke events needs to be weighed against this important negative. Since I am actively writing, this is a primal concern for me, and I have stopped taking it.

A free person understands that there is no one “best” pathway. Although experts have knowledge, a free person takes responsibility, makes a choice, and bears the consequences. We never know what the consequences would have been had we made a different choice.

Some people don’t like to take responsibility for health choices. They prefer to do what they’re told by the doctor.

“Do you understand now why books are hated and feared?” asks Ray Bradbury’s character Professor Faber in Fahrenheit 451. Faber responds to his own rhetorical question:

Because they reveal the pores on the face of life. The comfortable people want only wax moon faces, poreless, hairless, expressionless.

Bradbury is reminding us that life is messy. Often there is no comfortable one-size-fits-all solution to the challenges we face.

Despite the evidence against statins, the medical orthodoxy would like you to believe that those who question statins are being hoodwinked by fake news. The orthodoxy wants you to believe there is one size for all.

There are good reasons to be concerned that we are losing access to information with which to evaluate opposing sides of health issues.

Duke University’s Dr. Ann Marie Navar is the Associate Editor of JAMA Cardiology. In her article, “Fear-Based Medical Misinformation,” she rails against the “fake medical news and fearmongering [that] plague the cardiovascular world through relentless attacks on statins.”

She writes many patients remain concerned about statin safety. In one study, concerns about statin safety were the leading reason patients reported declining a statin, with more than one in three patients (37 percent) citing fears about adverse effects as their reason for not starting a statin after their physician recommended.

Dr. Navar takes the position that concerns about safety are “fake medical news,” spread in part by ignorant patients via social media. Don’t worry, she counsels, reports are incorrect when they claim “that statins cause memory loss, cataracts, pancreatic dysfunction, Lou Gehrig disease, and cancer.”

Fake news? Dr. David Brownstein (no relation) disagrees:

The Physicians Desk Reference states that adverse reactions associated with Lipitor include cognitive impairment (memory loss, forgetfulness, amnesia, memory impairment, and confusion associated with statin use). Furthermore post-marketing studies have found Lipitor use associated with pancreatitis. Other researchers have reported a relationship between statin use and Lou Gehrig’s disease. Finally, peer-reviewed research has reported a relationship between statin use and cataracts. Statins being associated with serious adverse effects has nothing to do with fake news. These are facts.

To be sure, more physicians would agree with Dr. Navar than Dr. Brownstein, but should treatments be dictated by those on one side of the argument? After all, due to human variability, statins may both save some lives and impair or kill other people.

With some doctors questioning whether to prescribe statins for everyone, there is a large financial incentive to stifle debate.

Can you imagine a future government-controlled health care system, completely captured by the pharmaceutical industry, mandating statins for everyone? I can.

There are good reasons to be concerned that we are losing access to information with which to evaluate opposing sides of health issues, like the statin debate. Already Google is “burning” sites that question the medical orthodoxy about statins.

Mercola.com, operated by Dr. Joseph Mercola, is one of the most trafficked websites providing alternative views to medical orthodoxy. If I were researching statins, I would certainly read several of the numerous essays questioning statin use and the cholesterol theory of heart disease. Essays at Mercola.com usually provide references to medical studies. Personally, since Dr. Mercola sells supplements and I am a supplement skeptic, I read his essays—like I read all medical essays—with a grain of salt.

Dr. Kelly Brogan is a psychiatrist who has helped thousands of women find alternatives to psychotropic drugs prescribed to treat depression and anxiety. In her book, A Mind of Your Own: The Truth About Depression and How Women Can Heal Their Bodies to Reclaim Their Lives, Brogan reports that one of every seven women and 25 percent of women in their 40s and 50s are on such drugs. She explains,

Although I was trained to think that antidepressants are to the depressed (and to the anxious, panicked, OCD, IBS, PTSD, bulimic, anorexic, and so on) what eyeglasses are to the poor-sighted, I no longer buy into this bill of goods.

For their unorthodox views, Dr. Brogan, Dr. Mercola, and others like them are treated as medical heretics. Dr. Brogan and Dr. Mercola have documented (here and here) how a change in Google’s search engine algorithm has essentially ended traffic to their websites.

From time to time, Google updates algorithms determining how search results are displayed; there is nothing inherently nefarious in such actions. Google has achieved its market position by doing a better job than other search engines.

According to Dr. Mercola, before Google’s most recent June 19 algorithm update,

Google search results were based on crowdsource relevance. An article would ascend in rank based on the number of people who clicked on it.

After their June 19 algorithm update, Google is relying more on human “quality” raters. Google instructs raters that the lowest ratings should go to a “YMYL page with inaccurate potentially dangerous medical advice.” YMYL stands for “Your Money or Your Life.” Google says,

We have very high Page Quality rating standards for YMYL pages because low-quality YMYL pages could potentially negatively impact users’ happiness, health, financial stability, or safety.

Does that sound reasonable? If a site argues for treatments other than the medical orthodoxy then, by definition, the site can arouse readers’ cause for concern and, for some people, unhappiness. Do we really want Google to assume the role of Bradbury’s firemen?

Google wants to protect you from conflicting opinions. And if you don’t think that’s a problem, imagine sometime in the future when searching for information on monetary policy you only find results for Modern Monetary Theory.

Google thinks its intention to “do the right thing” is enough to prevent abuses; some Google employees would disagree.

Google is not eliminating access to alternative health pages; it is making it harder to find them. Typical health searches will still generate plenty of “facts,” just not conflicting facts. In Fahrenheit 451 Captain Beatty explains the government’s strategy: “Give the people contests they win by remembering the words to more popular songs or the names of state capitals or how much corn Iowa grew last year.”

Instead of “conflicting theory,” Captain Beatty explains the strategy is to “cram” the people “full of noncombustible data, chock them so damned full of ‘facts’ they feel stuffed, but absolutely ‘brilliant’ with information.”

Filled with “facts,” Captain Beatty explains, people will “feel they’re thinking, they’ll get a sense of motion without moving.” Beatty assures Montag that his fireman role is noble. Firemen are helping to keep the world happy.

The important thing for you to remember, Montag, is we’re the Happiness Boys, the Dixie Duo, you and I and the others. We stand against the small tide of those who want to make everyone unhappy with conflicting theory and thought. We have our fingers in the dike. Hold steady. Don’t let the torrent of melancholy and drear philosophy drown our world. We depend on you. I don’t think you realize how important you are, to our happy world as it stands now.

The only way Google will maintain its dominance is to continue to meet the needs of consumers. Whether Google continues to “burn” websites is up to us. Google will continue to sort out unorthodox views as long as “we” the consumer continue to rely on Google’s search engine.

Barry Brownstein

From FEE, here.

Join the Belated Bandwagon!

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  3. Gedolim Oppressing the Orphan (TRUE STORY by Rabbi Daniel Eidensohn Shlita)
  4. קדושת ציון Kedushas Tzion
  5. תיקוני תשובת המשקל לפגם הברית ועוד – חלק שני
  6. Living Under the Zionists Is ‘Galus’, While New Jersey Is Like Eretz Yisrael?!
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  8. Did You Know Rabbi Aryeh Kaplan’s ‘Living Torah’ Is Online?
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  10. ‘Don’t Speak Against Berland’ – Wait, REALLY?

See past popular articles here.

Your INOCULATION Against Projections, Forecasts, Prognostications…

In one brilliant article by Robert Alexander Nisbet titled “The Year 2000 and All That“.

Historical determinism, blindly accepted for centuries (to evade Emuna!), was summarized by Leibnitz, “The present is big with the future, the future might be read in the past, the distant is expressed in the near”.

In an approach akin to the Austrian Economic Schools‘ unconcealed contempt for econometrics, Nisbet bites hard:

So, what self-important secular prophets are really doing, unawares, is teaching “a great deal that is important to know about present conditions, present structures, and present rates and their apparent relation to the recent past”.

In a phrase, the “Gamblers’ Fallacy”:

…

Unfree computers cannot predict free human action either:

The only kind of “prediction” possible is the “boring” type:

True, institutions, structures, established ways of behavior, will extend themselves into the future just as geographic terrain will. There will be, barring catastrophe or the appearance of the Genius, or the Prophet, or the Maniac, or the Random Event, technology, schools, kinship systems, magazines like COMMENTARY, and so on. This is safe predicting, for all we are predicting is persistence. And I do not depreciate this, for we would be a lot farther along in our understanding of the actual dynamics of change if there were real understanding, real acceptance, in the theoretical terms of social science, of the phenomena of stability and persistence of ways of social behavior. Wilbert Moore, in a wise utterance in the Daedalus issue, calls attention to our typical exaggeration of change in society and to our common confusion of change—actual, significant change—with mere motion, activity, and movement.

Read the rest of it here…

The Lawless, Anti-Torah Israeli Regime

A State of Law and Order? G-d Forbid!

Friday, 22 January 2016

The expression, ‘a state of law and order’ has been bandied around a lot in Israel over the past few years. Most recently, the mantra has taken on a renewed and intense fervor. Yet, it’s fevered declaration not only undermines the actual rule of law, but has become to be an existential threat to the very nature and destiny of the Nation of Israel.
Israel is charged with being a nation of Justice and Righteousness, and while the rule of law plays an important role in establishing justice, it is not the only, nor even the central pillar. There have been many states built around the value of law that were anything but righteous. Many societies that placed the value of order above all else, were void of any semblance of justice.
In fact, elevating the value of law and order above all others precludes the creation of a just and righteous nation. In such a society, law and order simply become a vehicle for demanding loyalty to a repressive state bureaucratic mechanism. It creates a society of rules, not mores; demanding obedience through fear of punishment and retribution, not compliance through consent and approbation.
A society focused on ‘law and order’ creates an adversarial dialectic between the state and its citizens, whereas when society’s emphasis is on the values of justice and righteous, a natural harmony between the nation and its leadership can flourish.
In a Torah society, magistrates and marshals (police) neither create nor are they above the law. In fact, the opposite, they are held to a higher standard. Even a king is subservient to the Torah.
While the political elites in the State of Israel shout their mantra of ‘law and order,’ a recent survey by the Midgam Institute (http://www.israelnationalnews.com/News/News.aspx/206136), reveals that nearly three-quarters of the population thinks that these same elites are buried up to their elbows in corruption.
The Torah demands that there be ‘shofitm’ (judges or magistrates) and ‘shotrim’ in every gate. The two go hand in hand. Not only does the Torah recognize that local leadership is key for the vitality of the nation, it suggests that enforcement without adjudication is a detriment to the health of the community. Pushing for a police station in every town, without local courts and judges will eventually lead to a type of a police state, in function, if not in name.
We see this dichotomy through the Bible’s description of two very different models of government, that of King Saul’s and King David’s.
While King Saul’s leadership was favorable and popular at the beginning of his rule, when his kingship lost legitimacy (despite retaining the reigns and power), Saul became ruthless and oppressive, lashing out at anyone who he perceived (even without evidence) as a threat. King Saul even ordered the slaughter of the kohanim-priests and the Tabernacle at Nov. (The parallel with the current regime restricting Jewish access to the Mount should not be lost).
Yet, when King David ‘loses’ the kingdom, by losing the heart of the nation, he accepts the judgment, and despite retaining the tools of power (including a well-fortified capital), he doesn’t fight the people’s will, but recognizes the judgment and leaves. David’s stepping down from power, recognizing that he was no longer leading, allowed him to later return to lead the nation. It is no small coincidence either that the Temple (the heart of the nation) plays a central role in David’s rule. In fact, it is David’s purchase of the field on Mount Moriah, the building of an altar and the bringing of offerings that stops the plague caused by Shaul’s destruction of Nov. Justice and righteousness is the salve for strict authoritarianism.
According to the Torah model, the leaders are not only under the same law, they are actually held to a higher standard.
The Torah does not demand fealty to a bureaucratic state mechanism (this is not to suggest that conformance with societal rules and norms is not a value) but rather demands loyalty to G-d, His Torah, and His prophets. Unlike some who have suggested otherwise, an observant Jew does not ‘believe in the state,’ but rather, it is the observant Jew’s duty to push the state into becoming a vehicle of G-d’s Will. A state that expresses any other will is an anathema to the Torah ideal and does not represent the Jewish Nation.
From The Jewish Nation, here.

Yet ANOTHER Rightist Call to Shut Down Haaretz Online… (Who’s Next?)

The nakba that is Ha’aretz

by Victor Rosenthal
One who becomes compassionate instead of cruel, will ultimately become cruel instead of compassionate…
Midrash Kohelet Rabba (a discussion of this is here)The lead editorial in Ha’aretz today is headlined “The Nakba isn’t Going Away,” and it touts a longer article by investigative journalist Hagar Shezaf published last week, about how Defense Ministry personnel have collected and sealed documents that describe the alleged expulsion and other ill-treatment of Arabs at the time of Israel’s War of Independence and afterwards.

The editorial accuses Israel of “expulsion, looting, murder and rape” in 1948. There is no doubt that some of these things did occur, although it is also true that we were far kinder to the Arabs than they would have been to us if they had won. I don’t object to the publication of such facts, although Ha’aretz has a tendency to exaggerate the extent and cruelty of our deeds and to accept the narrative of our enemies uncritically. What I do violently object to is their attribution of moral guilt and demand for some kind of accounting for it toward the Palestinians.

The editorial concludes:

Israel at age 71 is strong enough to address the moral failings of its past. The Nakba won’t go away. It’s still there in the landscape, in the rows of pear cactus of the abandoned villages, in the many arched houses of Jaffa and Haifa, and in the memory of the Palestinian community in Israel, and in the territories and across the border.

Instead of censoring and concealing things, the history of Israel’s establishment and the Palestinian society that was uprooted should be studied and taught. Commemoration signs should be put up at the sites of destroyed villages, and the moral dilemmas that have accompanied Israel since 1948 should be faced. Such recognition won’t resolve the conflict, but it will place dialogue between Jews and Palestinians in Israel on a foundation of truth instead of lies, shame and concealment.

No, this is absolutely not what “should” happen. Israel was born in war, a war that was forced on it by Arabs who couldn’t abide Jewish sovereignty, and who planned – in the words of Abdul Rahman Azzam, Secretary-General of the Arab League – “a war of extermination and momentous massacre which will be spoken of like the Mongolian massacre and the Crusades.” A pity, for the Ha’aretz editorial board, that we won the war and now have “moral failings” to address as a result. But we did, and there is no reason to be apologetic about it, or to get nostalgic over the losses of our enemies, who, incidentally, have not stopped murdering us whenever the opportunity presents itself.

Perhaps they wouldn’t be murdering us today if we had followed the same policy in 1967 that the Jordanians did when they conquered Judea/Samaria and part of Jerusalem in 1948. Every single Jew living in areas under their control was forced to leave at gunpoint. Some were murdered. Synagogues were destroyed, gravestones uprooted, and not a trace of the former Jewish inhabitants was allowed to remain. Did newspapers in Jordan call for a “dialogue” or agonize about their “moral failures?” To ask the question is to answer it.

War is ugly, especially when two peoples are fighting over a piece of ground. There were massacres and rapes on both sides (Benny Morris believes that he has evidence for at least a dozen rapes committed by Jewish forces, something that surprised both Morris and me). I think that he is correct when he says that “the entire [Jewish] leadership” understood that there would be no Jewish state as long as there wasn’t a large Jewish majority, and that it was absolutely necessary to encourage the Arabs to leave.

And that isn’t a moral problem. It was them or us, quite simply; and our claim on the land was stronger than theirs and we had fewer alternatives. Would Israel have survived its first 19 years if significantly fewer Arabs had fled in 1948? I doubt it. And if the Arabs had won the war, Azzam’s threat would surely have been carried out.

This is a fact of human life. It has always been so. Population transfers have occurred after almost every major war. Indeed, we were not cruel enough. I think that in the long run, there would have been fewer victims on both sides and more security in the region as a whole if Israel had expelled the Arabs of Judea, Samaria, and Eastern Jerusalem in 1967.

Just a note about “investigative journalist” Shazef. She works for Ha’aretz, but she is also paid by a European foundation, supported in part by George Soros’ Open Society Foundations, the Flemish (Belgian) government, and other European sources, to write anti-Israel articles. But naturally she doesn’t let that cloud her journalistic judgment. Naturally.

What is the matter with Jews like the ones on the Ha’aretz editorial board? Why are they obsessed with bashing their country, the one that may have given their parents and grandparents a home when no other country would? Why do they find it so easy to understand the pain of the Palestinian Arabs, who themselves have brought so much pain into the world, but they can’t cut Israel a break? Why do they advocate national suicide for their own people out of concern for others? That isn’t morality, it’s stupidity.

We do not have to feel “shame” for 1948, and we have nothing to be ashamed of today, when the IDF shoots Arabs dead when they climb border fences. Gideon Levy, another Ha’aretz operative, eloquently mourns poor Abdallah Gheith, a teenager who “dreamed of praying at the Al-Aqsa Mosque,” and was shot climbing the fence. According to Levy, his father took him and a cousin to the fence and dropped them off! I am sure that he just wanted to live his dream of praying at al-Aqsa, aren’t you? Levy calls the border policeman that shot him a “murderer.” I call him someone doing a dangerous job, protecting traitors like Levy and the rest of the Ha’aretz gang from young men like Gheith, who might stick a knife in their necks on the street.

Because “traitor” is not too strong a word. Israel’s War of Independence never ended; every few years it flares up, but between times smolders in a deadly way. And the Ha’aretz newspaper, 60% owned by publisher Amos Schocken, who controls its editorial policy, is a brigade in service of Israel’s enemies. Although its Hebrew edition is the by far the least popular of Israel’s major newspapers, its English edition and website in English are widely read by government officials and businesspeople around the world. By presenting an almost uniformly critical view of Israel and Israelis in its opinion pages, and by slanting news reports to present Israel in the worst possible light, Ha’aretz contributes to the campaign to demonize and delegitimize Israel that is part of the international effort to destroy it.

This constitutes treason. I understand that a free press is an important part of a free country, and that makes it difficult to shut down or prosecute a newspaper. But why do we need Ha’aretz when we have Aljazeera and Palestinian Authority newspapers?

I would like to understand what Schocken, Levy, and the others see when they stand in front of the mirror. After all, they are Israelis too. Does this cause them to feel the “shame” that they want all of us to feel? Or do they see themselves as courageous fighters for the “truth,” which is that Israelis are murderers and Arabs saintly victims?

It’s the latter, of course. They are not “self-hating” Jews, because they clearly love and value themselves. It’s just the Jewish people that they hate.