Author Archives: Mark Schauss

About Mark Schauss

History was always a passion for me since I was a little kid. Even majored in it in college. Loved my Russian history professor, the late Dr. Paul Avrich who inspired this podcast. Also to my mother Alla who kept the Russian side of me going. Wish I had listened to her to learn Russian when I was younger.

Glucosamine Study – Another Sham Article by NEJM

For three weeks in a row, the pharmaceutical industry has trotted out their loyal horses, and printed articles in the New England Journal of Medicine on how poorly nutritional and herbal supplements worked as opposed to placebos and their stellar medications.  The news media picks up exactly what the companies want them to report on, not the entire truth.

Week after week, flawed studies are paraded out, written by people with vested interests (paid shills) for the pharmaceutical industry who is seeing their profits erode because of the dangerous side effects of the medications they tout as life savers. 

In this particular study, the big news supposedly was that glucosamine and chondroitin sulfate did little better than placebo in controlling pain in arthritic joints but boy did Celebrex work (guess who funded the authors?).  In actuality, in severe cases, the nutritional supplement was superior but no one seems to focus on that.

The flaws in the study include a very high drop out rate (20%), small sample population and a very high placebo effect.  Placebo’s in this trial were incredibly effective, way beyond what is found in almost all other placebo controlled studies.  All in all, this paper wouldn’t have seen the light of day in a respectable journal unless it is another in a series of articles that fit an agenda perpetrated by the editorial staff of the New England Journal of Medicine.

How pathetic.

Plague Time – The New Germ Theory of Disease

Another fabulous book that should be on every health care practitioners bookshelf and should be read by anyone interested in the causation of disease. It is a must read that will open your eyes about the relationship between infection and diseases like schizophrenia, coronary heart disease, cancer, and much more. Dr. Paul Ewald writes in an easy to understand and flowing manner which makes the read enjoyable. Click on the book to go to Amazon.com and pick up a copy.

Plague Time : The New Germ Theory of Disease

Budget cutting the wrong way

While I agree that our government is bloated and needs to have a lot of pork barrel programs cut but one of the proposals in the recent budget submitted to Congress is absolutely wrong.  The Commodity Supplemental Food Program which helps low income seniors, mothers, infants and small children get nutritionally balanced food helps 4,800 people in Nevada alone each month.  Can someone please explain to me what the reasoning behind this cut is? I would venture to say there are a number of other areas we can cut without hurting people who rely to some extent on this program.

Another budget proposal which should also get everyone up in arms is the proposal to triple the cost of health insurance for our veterans.  These are people who risked their lives to protect our country and this is how we treat them?  George Bush keeps telling us to support our troops in Iraq and I’m all for it.  But to cut health services for veterans is appalling. If anything, we should be improving their lives and continue to say “thank you for everything you sacrificed for us.”

If our elected officials were really interested in making tough decisions and wanted to cut the waste, there are a lot of other programs they could cut without harming our senior citizens and veterans.  Shame on them.

NBC Coverage of the Olympics

Is is just me, or are the NBC announcers covering the Winter Olympics just the biggest bunch of whiners?  All I keep hearing is how bad all of the athletes are, how bad their ski runs are, how dull the skating is, yada yada yada.  Seeing as most of them are ex-athletes, I’m wondering whether professional jealousy is their motivation behind the hyper criticism.

Hey, NBC, we’re not watching as much as usual because your annoying us to no end.  Be more positive, please before I turn is off way before the end of the games.

Improvements seen using anti-fungal drugs. Is it really because of the yeast?

One common thread I read about in many newsgroups relating to autism is the use of antifungal drugs like Nystatin and Flagyl to treat this common neurological disorder.  There is a lab that claims to have a series of markers that prove that many autistic children have yeast (that nonsense will be the subject of another blog later this month) and it is a major part of their disease.  They go on to show that they have many case studies from parents showing remarkable recoveries because of the use of antifungal therapy.  This they go on to pontificate, is proof positive that they are right.  Sorry, but that isn’t proof as there may be a stronger alternative reason.

One of the things that antifungal drugs may do is they may downregulate Phase I detoxification which is typically high in autistic children. The importance of this? If a child is toxic from solvents, heavy metals or other environmental insults, upregulated Phase I (increased) may create more neurotoxic byproducts than the Phase II detoxification system can handle.  When we give the child an antifungal and they do better are we really just killing yeast or are we releaving the pressure caused by the neurotoxins floating around their system?

Well then, if we are lowering the Phase I detoxification pathway by using antifungals, isn’t this good regardless of why?  Absolutely not.  By abusing these kind of drugs we increase the likelihood of creating a new drug resistant fungus that may cause incalcuable long term damage to the child. Upregulating Phase II detoxification also known as conjugation reactions, is a better, safer and more productive choice.

Biochemical Individuality. A Brilliant Theory That No One Uses.

The term biochemical individuality, coined by the late Dr. Roger Williams, means that every one of us are unique biochemical entities that should be treated uniquely whether it is with pharmaceuticals or nutritional supplements.  Both conservative allopaths and alternative medical practitioners claim to understand the concept, but very few really get it. They bluster about how their theory takes our uniqueness into account but it all amounts to a bag of hot air.

I’ve seen health care practitioners claim that no one ever does well on N-Acetyl-Cysteine, and others who claim everyone needs it.  They both should be made to sit in the corner and write in their spiral notebook, “people are different, not everyone is the same” one hundred times or until their fingers bleed, whichever comes first. I’ve been at lectures of a well respected scientist who will said that “everyone needs supplemental vitamin E.”  This came from the same man who quoted Dr. Williams in many of his books. We should all be going into a moral epileptic fit when we hear such nonsense.

Conversely, we here that herb XX doesn’t work on disease YY as a proportion of people showed no improvement.  If you read the study though, there were a goodly sized number who did get better.  The authors, in their fervor to get published, didn’t bother to ask the question, “which subgroup got better and was there a biochemical profile that fit a pattern we could use to pinpoint those people?”  We can’t do that because if we do that we might genuinely help people get better. ARRRGGGGHHH!!!  Makes you want to go into the corner of a dark room and just cry.

The company I founded, Carbon Based Corporation (www.carbonbased.com)has focused its entire existence on the ideal of helping health care practitioners fully access the concept of biochemical individuality through its interpretive lab reports.  Others have similar reports which they took from us, but all they do is look at one or two types of tests as though everyone is either made of fatty acids or simple blood chemistries.  I guess they follow the adage, if all you have is a hammer, then every problem is a nail.  What I believe is that there are many possible solutions and ways of getting there and to pigeon hole yourself into one or two tests as the be all is somewhat myopic at best.  This is why I have helped develop interpretations over 30 different tests and hundreds of different combinations knowing that you can’t build your “health house” with just a hammer, you need saws, bricks, screwdrivers, glue guns, etc.

Each person is different. Let’s force our health care providers to treat us all that way and not like cattle going to slaughter.

Increased Spending on Science Needed

While I am always a little hesitant for our government to open its purse strings and spend our money, a bill proposed by a bi-partisan group of U.S. Senators needs our support.  Called the PACE Act (Protecting America’s Competitive Edge) it is a first step towards increasing spending in the field of science and math. Instead of spending money on pork barrel projects like bridges in Alaska that no one will use, we need to help stimulate an improvement in our worldwide standing in science, math and engineering.

By improving our educational system, not with the failing rhetoric that is “No Child Left Behind”, but with better funding for education (note I didn’t say more, I said better) especially in fields of science and math.

Funny Website

To everyone’s life a little humor must fall.  If you’re willing to throw political correctness to the wind and want to see what’s really going on in the world.  You have to go to http://www.fark.com .  It’s someplace I visit each and everyday.

Iraq – A different point of view (maybe)

Recently, at my Rotary club, I invited Ty Cobb to speak at our club (no, not that one, although THAT would have been one hell of a trick) about the subject of Iraq.  Ty got back from Iraq last year where he worked to help the country develop a democratic government. His speech made me rethink what is really going on in the Arab, especially in Iraq.

One of the most important comments he made was how incredible it was to see the democratic process unfold in a country that has never had the right to vote.  He described a town hall meeting where women in burqa’s and women in jeans sat next to businessmen and Imam’s, all with vastly differing ideas about how Iraq should be run. It was amazing occurrence, yet the media, right wing and left wing gave very little coverage of this historic event. I guess it wasn’t sexy enough to be covered yet in my opinion, it was a truly historic event.  How sad that we don’t ever get to see the human side of what’s going on.

Mr. Cobb was asked a question from the audience about what the most important thing was in Iraq.  Was it religion?  Was it democracy?  Was it differences between ethnic groups?  Was it money?  Sitting next to him at the podium, I got to see his reaction which was immediate, even before the question was fully answered.  He unequivocally said “Money!”  The bottom line is “How do I feed my family and when the hell is my electricity going to be turned on.”

What struck me was the thought that this is really the issue in the Middle East, Africa, Asia and even here in the United States of America. “It’s the economy stupid.”  You want to know the fastest way to create and train a suicide bomber?  Give him no hope of making a good life for himself, make it so he feels like his life is worthless, keep him unemployed and unemployable. Then have a crazed Islamist (not Muslim, big difference) who promises a better afterlife and bingo, suicide bomber.  Want to stop them?  Don’t get up on the podium and tell them to relax and not take a cartoon seriously, find a way to give these people hope.  If these young men and women had a hope for a good life and employment, the ranks of the suicide bombers would dry up rapidly.

Is the Bush administration doing this?  Yes and no.  Their rhetoric is oppositional and exactly what the extremists want to hear.  Their actions in Iraq and Afghanistan are exactly what needs to be done, despite what the media would have you believe.  Improvements in Iraq are happening, the people are putting together militias to fight the insurgency but you wouldn’t know it if you turned on the news.  Our people in Iraq are trying to do the right thing but our government, and I mean the executive branch as well as Congress isn’t doing enough.

You can’t have Vice President Dick Cheney’s former employer Halliburton getting a no bid contract to rebuild Iraq, overcharge us the US taxpayers (it’s not the government their ripping off it’s you and me) and expect the people and the media to not doubt every damn thing you do.  If it smells like…. I don’t have to paint that picture do I?

On the other side, you have idiots from the left telling us to just pull out and blow everything we have done already. In my opinion, there was no justification for us to go to Iraq. Having said that, the reality is that we are there and we have to make things right.  While there are a lot of similarities to Vietnam, there are some major differences (for another blog) that give us a good chance to succeed.

Oh for a leader who doesn’t tell me everything is ok when it isn’t and for an opposition that has ideas and not a group of nay sayers.