Shorts

Jule Klotter

Google Censorship

On August 26, 2019, pharmacologist Joe Graedon published an online article about recent changes in Google’s search algorithm. These changes have essentially “buried” the popular website People’s Pharmacy that he co-founded with his wife, medical anthropologist Terry Graedon, PhD. For four decades, the Graedons have provided information, using the scientific literature and anecdotal experiences from their readers, about drug side effects, drug interactions, and home remedies in a nationally syndicated newspaper column and a public radio show, heard on many NPR stations. The radio show typically consists of news about recent studies and interviews with researcher-doctors. Graedon reports that popular articles about drug side effects (eg, lisinopril and prednisone), which once elicited hundreds of comments from readers, have virtually disappeared from Google’s search engine, showing up only when the article title is typed into the search. Articles about problems that occur when withdrawing from drugs, such as tramadol, duloxetine (Cymbalta), and Zyrtec, have also been hidden.

Graedon says that another website whose mission is to help people understand the risks and benefits of medicines (MedShadow.org) has “also seen its traffic drop like a rock.” That website reports: “’On June 4, 2019 our site traffic dropped from 13,029 visits a day to 6,301…in one day. It has not recovered.”

Joe Cohen, developer of another website devoted to the science supporting non-pharmaceutical therapies (SelfHacked.com), reports that the abrupt decline in several alternative medicine websites is not due to technical SEO (Search Engine Optimization) issues. When the web traffic for SelfHacked began to decline in the later part of 2018, he and co-workers improved site speed, user experience, content quality, and fixed SEO issues: “Those SEO changes actually helped us quite a lot with the ‘dumber’ search engines such as Bing and DuckDuckGo, but our Google traffic kept going down….Google is simply not ranking any sites that are not on their ‘approved’ list.”

Cohen took the highest point of traffic in the past 1.5 years for several alternative medicine websites and standard medicine websites and compared the numbers to each site’s traffic on August 22, 2019. The traffic on Mercola.com, the alternative site with the highest domain rating, showed 100% decline from its highest traffic months before. (The higher the domain number, the more “authority” a website has, and the more emphasis a search engine has given it—until now.) Dr. Andrew Weil’s site had an 84% decline, Dr. Kelly Brogan’s site declined 85%. Many of these sites no longer appear in a Google search unless the website name is included in the request. Meanwhile, Healthline and its affiliated site MedicalNewsToday had a 120% and 230% increase in their traffic respectively. Traffic to the websites for Cleveland Clinic, Pharmacy Times, Mayo Clinic, and Sloan-Kettering all increased by 92% or more.

Barry Brownstein, a professor emeritus of economics and leadership at the University of Baltimore, writes, “There are good reasons to be concerned that we are losing access to information with which to evaluate opposing sides of health issues.” He refers to an article by Ann Marie Navar, MD, associate editor of JAMA Cardiology, in which she claimed patient concerns about statins’ adverse effects were being caused by “‘fake medical news.’” Brownstein writes: “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.”

Kate Raines, writer for The Vaccine Reaction, points out that Google has a largely unrecognized conflict-of-interest. In 2015, Google’s co-founders re-organized Google and its subsidiary organizations so that all come under the umbrella of a new corporation called Alphabet. In addition to Google and companies devoted to cybersecurity, artificial intelligence, investment funds, and various technologies, Alphabet includes Verily with its focus on healthcare and managing disease, and Calico, which focuses on biotech and lifespan extension. Recently, Verily has joined with GlaxoSmithKline to create Galvani Bioelectronics in order to “’enable the research, development and commercialization of bioelectronic medicines.’”

While Google is the most used search engine, it is not the only one. I have used both Ecosia and DuckDuckGo. Several others are available. If you are interested in getting a range of information, I suggest that you take time to test your options with requests for information about “statin side effects” or another highly debated topic and see which ones give the most diverse responses.

Brownstein B. Google Is Burying Alternative Health Sites to Protect People from ‘Dangerous’ Medical Advice. August 6, 2019. https://fee.org.

Cohen J. Health Websites that Have Been Crushed by Google’s Censorship (and those crushing it). August 26, 2019.

Graedon J. Is Google Censoring Drug Side Effect Information? August 26, 2019.

Raines K. Google Joins the Pharmaceutical Industry. August 23, 2019.

Low-Dose Naltrexone for Chronic Pain

What objective evidence supports the use of low-dose naltrexone (LDN) for chronic pain and inflammatory conditions like fibromyalgia (FM)? Denise K. Patten and colleagues at Regis University School of Pharmacy (Denver, Colorado) looked at LDN’s mechanisms of actions and available human studies to answer that question in their 2018 review article. Unlike opioid medications that induce Toll-like receptor 4 (TLR4) signaling and produce inflammatory effects, naltrexone inhibits TLR4. As a result, the production of the pro-inflammatory cytokines interleukin-6 (IL-6) and tumor necrosis factor-alpha (TNF-α)—and associated cytokines—decreases. Blocking TLR4 also inhibits the production of nitric oxide (NO), an inflammatory factor that enhances pain sensitization.

In addition to this anti-inflammatory effect, LDN (1-4.5 mg per day) temporarily blocks opioid growth factor receptors until the drug is metabolized. The oral half-life of naltrexone is four hours, and it is excreted mostly via urine. During this temporary blockade, T and B cell proliferation is reduced. Once the naltrexone has been excreted, the body compensates by increasing opioid growth factor (OGF) production and increasing the number and sensitivity of the OGF receptors on the nuclear membrane. These activities produce a rebound effect that enhances the regulation of cell growth and immune response.

The clinical studies investigating LDN use for fibromyalgia are quite small. The review authors cite a 10-week University of Alabama study involving eight women with fibromyalgia that looked at LDN’s effect on serum cytokine levels and participants’ pain/symptoms. The women took 4.5 mg each night at least an hour before bedtime. The Alabama researchers found that LDN inhibited pain-related cytokines, including TNF-α and IL-6. In addition, the participants, as a group, reported a 15% reduction in FM-associated pain and an 18% decrease in overall symptoms—even though the study lasted just 10 weeks. In addition to the Alabama study, another small study (n=11), in which LDN-using participants took part in mechanical, thermal, and cold pain assessments every two weeks, reported statistically significant improvement in daily pain, stress, and fatigue (Younger, MacKey. Pain Med. 2009;10(4); 663-72); and a double-blind crossover study with 31 participants found a significant reduction in pain with LDN, compared to baseline and to placebo (Younger et al. Arthritis Rheum. 2013;63(2):529-38.).

The review authors note that LDN may also be helpful in other chronic pain disorders, including diabetic neuropathy, chronic back pain, and complex regional pain syndrome, according to published case reports.

“Despite the fact that LDN has been demonstrated to be safe and well tolerated, the evidence showing any efficacy regarding analgesic, anti-inflammatory, and disease progression effects is still preliminary,” Patten et al write. Large, double-blind, controlled clinical trials are required in order to add FM and pain-related conditions to FDA’s approved list of conditions for naltrexone use; right now, it is only approved (at the oral dose of 50 mg) to treat opioid and alcohol addictions. Low-dose naltrexone is made by compounding pharmacists. Patten et al suggest that these pharmacists “could potentially contribute significantly to the literature if they were able to design a study examining the efficacy of LDN” since they have access to patients taking it.

Parkitny L, Younger J. Reduced Pro-Inflammatory Cytokines after Eight Weeks of Low-Dose Naltrexone for Fibromyalgia. Biomedicines. 2017;5(16).

Patten DK, Schultz BG, Berlau DJ. The Safety and Efficacy of Low-Dose Naltrexone in the Management of Chronic Pain and Inflammation in Multiple Sclerosis, Fibromyalgia, Crohn’s Disease, and Other Chronic Pain Disorders. Pharmacotherapy. 2018.

Neural Therapy for Chronic Pain

A Swiss group investigated the effect of neural therapy on 280 patients (176 women and 104 men) with long-standing, chronic, severe pain issues that did not respond to conventional treatment. Most suffered from spine and back disorders (n=155), followed by other motor system disorders (n=41), headache (n=34), and other pain conditions (n=50). All patients were referred to neural therapy by their physicians or doctors of chiropractic.

Neural therapy (NT) uses injections of local anesthetics, such as procaine, to treat functional, inflammatory, and pain disorders: “The local anesthetic can disrupt the escalating vicious circle of nociceptor activity – sympathetic excitation – circulation disturbance – neurogenic inflammation – muscle hardening, etc. in different sites at the same time.” In addition to disrupting pain perception, local anesthetics decrease neurogenic inflammation.

For this Swiss study, patient data on age, sex, duration and severity of pain, diagnosis, and outcomes of previous treatments were collected before NT began. During consultations throughout the next 12 months, the researchers documented information about NT use, change in pain, medication use, and any adverse effects or complications. The patients needed an average of 9.2 consultations during the year. At the last visit, patients were asked to evaluate their current pain level and use of pain medication.

At study’s end, one of the 280 reported that his pain was worse; 60 patients reported having no change in their pain; 52 had a “slight improvement”; 126 patients had “considerable improvement”; and 41 were pain-free. Of the 193 patients taking pain medication before having NT, 50 (25.9%) reported no change in their use of medication at study’s end; and 143 patients (74.1%) reported using less or no medication. “No adverse effects or complications occurred except minor, spontaneously resolving hematoma and mild dizziness lasting up to 15 minutes following treatment, which in patients with normal blood pressure was assessed as the known systemic procaine effect and simultaneous, mild vasovagal reaction.”

Egli S, et al. Long-term results of therapeutic local anesthesia (neural therapy) in 280 referred refractory chronic pain patients. BMC Complementary and Alternative Med. 2015;15:200.

EMF and Neurological Deaths

A 2019 article in Medical Hypotheses posits that the rise in background electromagnetic field (EMF) radiation, interacting with petrochemicals, hormone-disrupting chemicals, agricultural chemicals and other environmental pollutants, has a major role in the rising rates of neurological diseases and associated deaths. The British authors’ hypothesis was instigated by two studies: a Swedish study that analyzed national mortality data on Alzheimer’s from 1948 until 2014, and a British cluster study that looked at the high incidence of motor neurone disease in an English village. The graph in the Swedish study showed that the incidence of Alzheimer’s increased at a five-degree angle from 1948-1988, then shot up at a 75-degree angle from 1990-2014; the change was attributed to the increase in background EMF. Increased EMF exposure was also a factor in the cluster study; the village was near a busy airport.

To investigate a possible relationship between neurological deaths and EMF exposure, the authors used WHO global mortality categories of neurological disease deaths (NDD) and Alzheimer’s and dementia deaths to calculate total neurological mortality (TNM) rates per million for people aged 55-74 and for those over-75 in 21 Western countries. The data shows “the relative sudden upsurge in neurological morbidity in the Western world” after 1989. Moreover, neurological disease deaths have increased in people age 55-74 years, which is below the life expectancy for these countries. In the United Kingdom, a new British charity, Young Dementia UK, has many clients under age 50; and the British Parkinson’s Society now has set up a “Young Persons” section.

The authors report that a study out of China found evidence that resveratrol may reduce oxidative stress due to EMF exposure. The study compared 186 male workers with occupational exposure to high-voltage electricity lines and 154 male subjects (age and BMI matched) with insignificant exposure as reference control. The EMF-exposed workers, unlike the control group, had elevated urinary levels of 8-hydroxy-2-deoxy-guanosine (a biomarker for oxidative DNA damage) and F2-isoprostane (an indicator of oxidative stress associated with cancers).

Participants in both the EMF group and the control group were randomized into subgroups that received either a placebo or resveratrol (500 mg twice a day) for one year. “Compared to placebo…daily dietary intake of resveratrol was found to significantly reverse the adverse effects of ELF-EMFs on exposed workers,” according to this study’s authors. The authors point out their results apply to men with occupational exposure to high-voltage electricity lines; resveratrol may or may not affect damage from short-term or other types of EMF radiation.

Zhang D, et al. Resveratrol may reverse the effects of long-term occupational exposure to electromagnetic fields on workers of a power plant. Oncotarget. 2017;8(29):47497-47506.

Pritchard C, Silk A, Hansen L. Are rises in Electro-Magnetic Field in the human environment, interacting with multiple environmental pollutions, the tipping point for increases in neurological deaths in the Western World? Medical Hypotheses. 2019;127:76-83.