A very odd year
By Sebastian Rushworth, M.D. | December 26, 2020
I graduated from medical school in January 2020. Long before starting to study to be a doctor, I had become interested in how diet and health are related, with a particular interest in the paleolithic diet. I think this was borne primarily out of my strong interest in evolution and biology – it just made sense that the diet humans were evolutionarily adapted to over the course of millions of years would also be the diet that is healthiest for us.
During my five and a half years of medical training, a few things became clear to me. First, while doctors receive a lot of training in how to deal with medical emergencies, they are taught extremely little about how to avoid chronic disease and maximize long term health, and much of what they are taught is wrong. Over those years, I think I received a total of three lectures about nutrition. In other words, three hours during five and a half years were spent learning about how to avoid chronic disease in the first place.
One of those lectures, during the last few months before graduating, struck a very strong chord. The lecturer showed a powerpoint slide, and said, “this is your bible. This is what you are going to tell people.”
Here’s what was on that list:
- Eat more fruit and vegetables.
- Eat more fish.
- Eat more whole grain cereals.
- Eat less sugar.
- Eat less saturated fat.
- Eat less salt.
- Eat low fat dairy.
- Eat less meat.
Since I have a strong personal interest in nutrition, and have spent a lot of time going through the science, I knew that at least half of the advice on that list was complete nonsense, not supported by the scientific evidence. And yet we were being told that this was our “bible”. Just the word chosen showed clearly that this was not science we were being taught, it was religion.
Another problem with medical school is that we were taught what to do in different situations, but we were rarely given any nuance in terms of the probability of success, or size of benefit, of a treatment. For example, we were taught that, after someone has a heart attack or a stroke, they should be prescribed a statin. But we were never told what that would really mean for the patient. How much longer could they expect to live?
I decided that, after graduating, I would start a blog about health and medicine, to try to get the truth out as much as possible, both to patients and to colleagues in the medical profession. Apart from helping others, it would also allow me to delve deeper in to many of the topics I hadn’t been taught in medical school.
Anyway, three days after graduating, I started working in the Emergency Room of one of the hospitals in Stockholm. For the next few months I was too busy to think further about my blog idea. And then, just a few months in to my new job, came covid.
It came suddenly, seemingly out of nowhere. One day it was something happening far away, in other countries, in Italy and South Korea, and China. The next it was everywhere. For a while, it felt like every single covid test I ordered came back positive. I even had a case where a patient came in with a nose bleed, and for some reason someone decided to take a nasal swab to test for covid. The test came back positive.
Now, I don’t want to give the impression that the Emergency Room was being overwhelmed, because that would be false. I went from seeing eight or more patients per shift to seeing two or three. While a very large proportion of the patients were covid positive, there were in total many fewer patients than usual. All the usual suspects in the Emergency Room were gone.
Official statistics bear this out. They show, for example, that hospital admissions for heart attacks in Stockholm were down 40% during the spring covid peak. Presumably people were choosing to stay home rather than go to the hospital and risk getting covid. And presumably this was resulting in unnecessary deaths – indirect deaths, not due to the virus itself, but rather due to the hysteria surrounding the virus.
This continued for about a month, and then the covid patients started to disappear. More and more of the tests came back negative. I noticed that the official statistics were telling the same story. From mid-April until early August there was a continuous decline in the number of people dying of covid in Sweden.
I follow the medical literature quite closely, and there seemed to be a clear consensus among the experts at that point that covid was not a seasonal virus. Putting these two pieces of data together, the decline in deaths and the lack of seasonality, I figured that we must have reached the point of herd immunity in Sweden. I was surprised that it came so quickly, but if both suppositions were true, then nothing else could explain what we were seeing in the data.
I figured that, if this was the case, then the virus could not possibly be anywhere near as deadly as it was being portrayed in the media. Only 6,000 people had died, out of a population of 10 million, and the pandemic was over. So it seemed.
I was given a few weeks holiday in late July, and with more time on my hands, I decided to start the blog that I had been planning for several months. Around this time I had a conversation with my mother, who follows the mainstream news media closely, about covid. I hadn’t been following the news myself, but had rather been going straight to the source for my information, looking at the official statistics and the scientific studies, and it became clear that we had very different world views in relation to covid.
From my perspective, based on my experience in the hospital, and what was being shown in the official statistics and scientific studies, it was clear that covid was no worse than a bad flu, of the kind seen several times per century. It was certainly nowhere near as bad as the horrific 1918 flu pandemic, which is estimated to have killed 3% of the world’s population, and which was particularly dangerous to young people. And yet covid was frequently being compared to that pandemic in the media.
By summer, it was clear that covid was nowhere near as bad as had initially been feared. In Stockholm a large field hospital had been erected to deal with the expected deluge of covid patients, but it never had to take a single patient. And yet, the reaction from media and governments seemed more in line with a global ebola outbreak than a bad flu.
I realized that my mother was typical of most people, who were getting their news from the mainstream sources, and so I decided to write an article about it on my new blog. After writing the article, I sent it to Malcolm Kendrick, a British doctor I admire, who had written a couple of very skeptical articles about covid, in order to see what he thought about it. He liked it so much that he asked if he could re-post it on his website.
I had a feeling that the article might generate some interest, but it immediately went viral. In less than two weeks, my blog had received half a million visits. The Spectator newspaper in the UK contacted me and asked to reprint my article, as did several other newspapers and blogs. And multiple TV and radio channels asked to interview me.
It was clear that there was a huge hunger for an alternative view of the pandemic to that being presented in mainstream media. At the same time, I had only just started the blog, and it wasn’t really a blog about covid. My main interest is in what people can do to maintain their long term health, and that is what I want my blog to be about. So, although I wrote the odd article about covid over the next few months (mainly because I kept getting a large number of e-mails from people asking me about my opinion on different things to do with covid), I tried to focus on the other things, that I personally think are more important and interesting over the long term.
Then came autumn, and with it the second wave. Considering that the consensus among the “experts” was that covid wasn’t seasonal, I was surprised, again. “Non-experts”, like Ivor Cummins, who had said all along that covid was acting in a seasonal manner and would be back in autumn, were right. And with the second wave came a renewed wave of hysteria that was in many cases worse than the first time around.
In Sweden, that was certainly the case. The Swedish government struck a much more alarmist chord the second time around, even though it was clear that the first wave had been much worse, at least in terms of the number of people dying. And even though there was now robust evidence that the fatality rate was much lower than had been believed initially, and increasing evidence that the fear mongering and lockdowns during the first wave had done much more harm than good, there were renewed calls for even stricter measures. Just as with the official dietary guidelines, the mainstream response to covid started to feel more like it was based on religion than on science.
Amid the renewed hysteria, I was contacted by a publisher here in Sweden, who asked me to write a book about covid, to get a more nuanced and scientifically sound view out in to the public arena than was being presented in mainstream media. I’ve now been working on that book for a few months, and I’m currently putting the finishing touches to it. It will be out in the early part of 2021, in English and Swedish, and my hope is that it will contribute to changing the way the world thinks about covid.
Let’s hope 2021 ends up being a saner year than 2020.
You might also enjoy my article about how many years of life are lost to covid, or my article about how long immunity to covid lasts after infection.
Share this:
- Click to share on Twitter (Opens in new window)
- Click to email this to a friend (Opens in new window)
- Click to print (Opens in new window)
- Click to share on Facebook (Opens in new window)
- More
- Click to share on Skype (Opens in new window)
- Click to share on Pocket (Opens in new window)
- Click to share on Reddit (Opens in new window)
- Click to share on Telegram (Opens in new window)
- Click to share on Pinterest (Opens in new window)
- Click to share on Tumblr (Opens in new window)
- Click to share on WhatsApp (Opens in new window)
- Click to share on LinkedIn (Opens in new window)
Related
December 26, 2020 - Posted by aletho | Mainstream Media, Warmongering, Science and Pseudo-Science, Timeless or most popular | Covid-19
5 Comments »
Leave a Reply to roberthstiver Cancel reply
This site uses Akismet to reduce spam. Learn how your comment data is processed.
Featured Video
Whitney Webb on the Oxford-AstraZeneca Eugenics Links
For more videos go to the Aletho News – Video Category
or go to
Aletho News Archives – Video-Images
From the Archives
The War on White Supremacist Terror
By CJ Hopkins | Consent Factory | August 8, 2019
If you enjoyed the global corporatocracy’s original War on Islamicist Terror, you’re going to love their latest spinoff, The War on White Supremacist Terror. It’s basically just like the old War on Terror, except that this time the bad guys are all white supremacists, and Donald Trump is Osama bin Laden … unless Putin is Osama bin Laden. OK, I’m not quite sure who’s Osama bin Laden. Whatever. The point is, the Terrorists are coming!
Yes, that’s right, some racist psycho murdered a bunch of people in Texas, so it’s time to “take the gloves off” again, pass some new kind of Patriot Act, further curtail our civil liberties, and generally whip the public up into a mass hysteria over “white supremacist terrorism.” … continue
Aletho News Original Content
Three Mile Island, Global Warming and the CIA
By Aletho News | January 9, 2012
There appears to be something about launching bombs or missiles from afar onto cities and people that appeals to American military and political leaders. In part it has to do with a conscious desire to not risk American lives in ground combat. And in part, perhaps not entirely conscious, it has to do with not wishing to look upon the gory remains of the victims, allowing American GIs and TV viewers at home to cling to their warm fuzzy feelings about themselves, their government, and their marvelous “family values”. Washington officials are careful to distinguish between the explosives the US drops from the sky and “weapons of mass destruction” (WMD), which only the officially-designated enemies (ODE) are depraved enough to use. The US government speaks sternly of WMD, defining them as nuclear, chemical and biological in nature, and “indiscriminate” (meaning their use can’t be limited to military objectives), as opposed to the likes of American “precision” cruise missiles. This is indeed a shaky semantic leg to stand on, given the well-known extremely extensive damage to non-military targets, including numerous residences, schools and hospitals, even from American “smart” bombs, in almost all of the bombings listed below.
Moreover, Washington does not apply the term “weapons of mass destruction” to other weapons the US has regularly used, such as depleted uranium and cluster bombs, which can be, and often are, highly indiscriminate. … continue
About Aletho News’ Name
Blog Roll
Visits Since December 2009
- 4,269,986 hits
Looking for something?
Archives
Calendar
Categories
Aletho News Civil Liberties Corruption Deception Economics Environmentalism Ethnic Cleansing, Racism, Zionism Fake News False Flag Terrorism Full Spectrum Dominance Illegal Occupation Mainstream Media, Warmongering Militarism Nuclear Power Progressive Hypocrite Russophobia Science and Pseudo-Science Solidarity and Activism Subjugation - Torture Supremacism, Social Darwinism Timeless or most popular Video War Crimes Wars for IsraelTags
9/11 Afghanistan Africa AIPAC al-Qaeda Argentina Australia BBC Benjamin Netanyahu Bolivia Brazil Canada Central Intelligence Agency China CIA CNN Colombia Covid-19 Da’esh Donald Trump Egypt European Union Facebook FBI France Gaza Germany Google Hamas Hebron Hezbollah Hillary Clinton Human rights India Iran Iraq ISIS Israel Israeli settlement Japan Jerusalem John Kerry Korea Latin America Lebanon Libya Middle East National Security Agency NATO New York Times North Korea NSA Obama Pakistan Palestine Press TV Qatar Russia Sanctions against Iran Saudi Arabia Syria The Guardian Turkey Twitter UAE UK Ukraine United Nations United States USA Venezuela Washington Post West Bank Yemen ZionismRecent Comments
almostvoid on Court invalidates Balfour Decl… almostvoid on Court invalidates Balfour Decl… almostvoid on The Vaccine (Dis)Information W… almostvoid on Signs of life: Are the masses… almostvoid on Hazardous Mask Wearing almostvoid on African governments are crushi… roberthstiver on Russia expects to win big from… brianharryaustralia on Russia expects to win big from… brianharryaustralia on China announces MASSIVE oil… ontogram on Israel’s killing of Pale… brianharryaustralia on Israel’s killing of Pale… 10 to 1 on Wind Power Did Cause The Texas…
Aletho News
- Whitney Webb on the Oxford-AstraZeneca Eugenics Links February 25, 2021
- China announces MASSIVE oil & gas discovery in Bohai Sea February 25, 2021
- Russia expects to win big from rapidly expanding LNG market February 25, 2021
- Israel’s killing of Palestinian man at checkpoint was ‘extrajudicial execution’, concludes report February 24, 2021
- Israel said to warn Hamas leader not to run in polls February 24, 2021
- African governments are crushing opposition using Israeli spyware February 24, 2021
- Forbes Blames Global Warming for Record Cold – Science Disagrees February 24, 2021
- Teacher: I Won’t Force Kids To Wear Masks & I Won’t Wear One Either February 24, 2021
- Hazardous Mask Wearing February 24, 2021
- Understanding the Kennedy Assassination February 24, 2021
- Leak shows UK attempt to “derussify” former Soviet bloc February 24, 2021
- US Navy held three FONOP in the South China Sea since Biden’s inauguration February 24, 2021
- CRITICAL THINKING IS DANGEROUS! READ LESS TO LEARN MORE! NEW RESEARCH BY “EXPERTS!” February 24, 2021
- US Supreme Court Backs Grand Theft Election 2020 February 24, 2021
- No, NY Times, Climate Change Does Not Threaten Power Grids February 24, 2021
- Trend in Global Fires February 24, 2021
- WSJ Magazine Promotes False Tuvalu Myth in Bill Gates Climate Change Article February 24, 2021
- Bill Gates admits his ‘large carbon footprint’ makes him a ‘strange person’ to pressure others – as he plugs climate-change book February 23, 2021
If Americans Knew
- Gaza Memorial Playground In Mary Hughes Thompson’s Name February 24, 2021
- Dr. Fauci: use Israeli prize money to buy vaccines for Palestinians February 22, 2021
- Grandmother dies of heart attack after Israeli soldiers storm her home February 19, 2021
Not A Lot Of People Know That
- The Absurdity of Climate Hysteria-Erl Happ February 25, 2021
- Guardian Wants To Make Ecocide An International Crime February 25, 2021
- Texas Blackouts–Critical New Data Revealed February 24, 2021
Sebastian Rushworth M.D.
- Is moderate alcohol consumption healthy? February 19, 2021
- Will the mediterranean diet make you live longer? February 13, 2021
More Links
Contact:
atheonews (at) gmail.comDisclaimer
This site is provided as a research and reference tool. Although we make every reasonable effort to ensure that the information and data provided at this site are useful, accurate, and current, we cannot guarantee that the information and data provided here will be error-free. By using this site, you assume all responsibility for and risk arising from your use of and reliance upon the contents of this site.
This site and the information available through it do not, and are not intended to constitute legal advice. Should you require legal advice, you should consult your own attorney.
Nothing within this site or linked to by this site constitutes investment advice or medical advice.
Materials accessible from or added to this site by third parties, such as comments posted, are strictly the responsibility of the third party who added such materials or made them accessible and we neither endorse nor undertake to control, monitor, edit or assume responsibility for any such third-party material.
The posting of stories, commentaries, reports, documents and links (embedded or otherwise) on this site does not in any way, shape or form, implied or otherwise, necessarily express or suggest endorsement or support of any of such posted material or parts therein.
The word “alleged” is deemed to occur before the word “fraud.” Since the rule of law still applies. To peasants, at least.
Fair Use
This site contains copyrighted material the use of which has not always been specifically authorized by the copyright owner. We are making such material available in our efforts to advance understanding of environmental, political, human rights, economic, democracy, scientific, and social justice issues, etc. We believe this constitutes a ‘fair use’ of any such copyrighted material as provided for in section 107 of the US Copyright Law. In accordance with Title 17 U.S.C. Section 107, the material on this site is distributed without profit to those who have expressed a prior interest in receiving the included information for research and educational purposes. For more info go to: http://www.law.cornell.edu/uscode/17/107.shtml. If you wish to use copyrighted material from this site for purposes of your own that go beyond ‘fair use’, you must obtain permission from the copyright owner.
DMCA Contact
This is information for anyone that wishes to challenge our “fair use” of copyrighted material.
If you are a legal copyright holder or a designated agent for such and you believe that content residing on or accessible through our website infringes a copyright and falls outside the boundaries of “Fair Use”, please send a notice of infringement by contacting atheonews@gmail.com.
We will respond and take necessary action immediately.
If notice is given of an alleged copyright violation we will act expeditiously to remove or disable access to the material(s) in question.
All 3rd party material posted on this website is copyright the respective owners / authors. Aletho News makes no claim of copyright on such material.
Read with interest. The Swedes seem a sensible people; why isn’t their government latching onto this young MD and making his prescriptions their “formulary bible”?
LikeLike
Classing all deaths as covid is a way of starting a panic which is what msm is up to.
BTW salt has the highest bodily demand. An athlete in training may need over 10 grams a day to get sodium and chlorine for the digestive system. Before fridges this would be par as preservative.. We also have the acid/alkali balance
with sodium being a major alkali. Lack of salt can kill and even raise BP. This is why we crave salt.
Saturated fat is ok especially grass fed.
LikeLiked by 1 person
“Like!” Appreciated. Back in “my” day, I ran 21 26.2m marathons in the space of 18 consecutive years @ ages 43-60 (PR 3:29:14 at age 47). I needed a lot of salt and other minerals, sugars, foodstuffs…never did it scientifically, but, among other things, I built up a personal immune system that’s got to be world class and that holds until my present 77 yo (I still exercise extensively). I’ve not feared the corona virus from day 1, taking no special precautions…probably will be coerced into taking one of the vaccines…don’t expect any adverse reaction and, at my age, who cares? The human body, if treated right, is a gift that keeps on giving until the inevitable end. Cheers.
LikeLike
Yes only half a gram of salt could kill an athlete -there is no salt in food unless added so even junk food can be good if you are lacking sodium
Potassium 4g calcium 2g magnesium 1g sodium 10g + depending on lifestyle is about right
Some people have died with low salt dieting packets.
Demonising salt is crazy
LikeLike
“Like!” Dam’ — can’t get this system to let me use the “Like” feature consistently….
LikeLike