I am about to show you just how ignorant even some of the best college professors are and the people who don't use common sense to question what those college professors teach them. I am convinced that one of the many reasons why God put me on this journey through this medical hell was to write this essay by exposing me to the really bad medicine we humans still have.
Note that, when I say what this medicine would have done to you, I am assuming that you are a normal person and not a former marathon athlete, you know, a freak, who would be more likely to survive.
I hate going to see a doctor, especially in an emergency room; doctors and nurses scare the living hell out of me. I figure that I will very likely die because of what they don't teach these doctors and one doctor and two nurses at a reputable hospital, one of the best in the nation, almost killed me and would have if I had not stopped them and know that they would have almost certainly killed you but we will get to that story later.
In the news you will regularly see that tens of thousands of people are killed every year by bad surgeries in just the US but it is much, much worse than that. You see, there are at least 3 to 5 times as many who are ALMOST killed by bad surgeries and many, many more who are killed every year by not being diagnosed or being diagnosed improperly or are treated improperly that you never hear about.
Based on what I have seen, I am convinced that at least half a million people are killed just in the US by bad medicine every year and that is a very conservative estimate. It could easily be more than one million people a year being killed by bad medicine and the US still has the best medicine in the world. Most of you don't know it but your medicine sucks.
When I look at today's medicine, I get the same feeling most doctors would get if they went back in time 200 years and watched George Washington get bled to death by his doctors.
In the last 50 years I have not met one doctor or nurse who has studied any of the sports sciences or sports medicine and you would think they would want to so they would know how to treat athletes, especially marathon athletes like me, but there is a nasty little critter called academic ego and arrogance that prevents them from studying any of the sports sciences or sports medicine.
What makes this even worse is that, over the past 20 to 30 years, the all-knowing, all-wise, highly educated, upper class trash intellectually superior, overpaid, natural elite college professors who got the right degrees from the right universities started teaching the doctors and nurses NOT to listen to their patients because we is are be a bunch of dummies, you know, stupid peasants, who couldn't possibly know nuttin'. Why, if you don't gots one of dem thar MDs from one of dem thar MD factories, you cain't know nuttin'. Only dems can knows anything.
This all began about 200 years ago when the students brought sports into the universities and started playing informal games against teams from other universities. You see, most of dem thar academies gots their prestige from "being of the mind" and having nothing to do with physical work, which was beneath them, so that the students bringing sports, you know, something involving physical work, into the academic domain was a travesty and blasphemy, insulting the intelligence of the academe. Poor widdle things.
Their attitude was that anything that had to do with physical work was demeaning and beneath them and the people involved in that physical work gots to be dummies and cain't possibly know nuttin' and this sick arrogant attitude has continued among most lefty academe and even among many conservative academe until this day. You is are be stupid peasants.
This was back in the days when the only kids who went to college were upper class so the college professors fought back by expelling any students who were involved in sports because the academe couldn't dare let sports become associated with their world or they would lose prestige.
BTW, they were wrong and didn't lose any prestige from it but still persist to believe their arrogant stupidity.
This continued for a few decades until some of those students became the wealthy leaders in their communities who were financing the universities with big donations and required the universities to accept sports to keep getting those big fat donations, after all, the academe loved that money and wouldn't work for free so they were forced to accept sports to keep making their living teaching great sounding stupid crap to spoiled rich kids.
These lefty academe have been trying to destroy sports, especially collegiate sports, ever since then. They quickly organized behind closed doors and have been waging war against sports and that is exactly what Title 9 is all about. They thought for sure that Title 9 was going to make it possible for them to get rid of collegiate sports, from which these same demented academe make huge amounts of money but their twisted egos are worth more to them than their bank accounts.
Today, they are trying to use Title 9 plus the transgender thingy to destroy all sports in college by destroying women's sports with the transgender thingy and then using Title 9 to destroy men's sports.
Therefore, to this day, they began teaching that people involved in sports, you know, physical education, coaching, and the sports sciences were the stupidest people on campus and couldn't possibly know nuttin' in spite of the fact that most of these same academe can't pass the prerequisites for the biology courses the PE and coaching students were required to take to get a degree. Less than 10% of the people who graduate from any university can pass freshman and sophomore hard science courses, forget about junior and senior level hard science courses, you know, the courses all PE and coaching students have to pass to get a degree, yet, you go to any university and the academe there will tell you that the dumbest students on campus are the PE and coaching students.
The ugly truth is that PE and coaching is the fourth hard science on every university campus because of all of the hard science they have to study. Every year, students flunk out of PE and coaching, go across campus, and get degrees in the soft sciences, many get Ph.D.s. This means the PE and coaching students have to be some of the most intelligent students on any campus and definitely are more intelligent than anyone who graduates with a soft science degree.
For those of you who don't know, the other three hard sciences on any campus are science, engineering, and math.
Also, for those of you who don't know, I have studied all of the hard sciences including biology, physics, nuclear physics, astrophysics, calculus, chemistry, meteorology, geology, engineering, all of the sports sciences, sports medicine, and others along with the history and archaeology of every continent on this planet, everything to do with business management and finance, education, and many other topics. I am a very well educated man who has known some really stupid college professors.
I have taken some of the toughest courses on any college campus, such as endocrinology, and have never had a course that I considered to be difficult.
The only reason I need doctors and nurses is to run tests, write prescriptions, and perform surgeries. I can do everything else in taking care of me and they don't like that.
More than 10 years ago, after they finally listened to me and began running tests on me, the doctors all began telling me that I should have died at least 2.5 to 3 years before they began running tests on me, you know, more than a decade ago.
What should that tell you?
That they don't know how to keep anyone alive who got as sick as I got and all of their other patients would have died. YOU would have almost certainly died. They just threw up their hands and gave up on me but I didn't because I know things about the function of the human body they don't know and I am still alive more than a decade later, you know, more than a decade after all of their other patients would have died and they kinda sorta don't like me still being alive.
Let me give you a few examples of the really bad medicine I have seen commonly practiced in the US. Let's start at the beginning of this horrid medical journey God put me on to teach me just how bad modern medicine really is.
My health began failing in the late 1980s in Los Angeles, California and I began going to see doctors telling them that my health was failing and I needed them to run tests to find out what was wrong with me. I know that I was put on this journey in part because I had put too much faith in doctors.
Their response to me in LA, later in Albuquerque, and then in Alamogordo was, "You're not sick, you're just getting old." I got really tired of hearing that one. Every time I explained to them that I had studied biology up to premed, had studied all of the sports sciences, and had studied sports medicine and that I should know when I am sick and am just getting old but not one of them listened to me because I didn't have the right degree from the right university so I couldn't know nuttin'.
Not one of them listened to me for the next 15+ years, not one, and all of them refused to run any tests on me to find out if there was something wrong with me. By the time someone finally agreed to run tests on me, I had become so sick all I could do was sleep 15 to 20 hours a day, fix one or two TV dinners a day, and spend the rest of the time sitting in a chair staring at 4 walls. I was almost dead and my illness had plunged me into poverty but there weren't nuttin' wrong with me.
You have to understand that I should have never gotten as sick as I got and should have never been plunged into poverty by my illness because, if any of those earlier doctors had run tests on me, we could have begun therapy to turn my health around before I got that sick.
Finally, at Ben Archer Clinic in Alamogordo, New Mexico in the early 2000s, a nurse practitioner agreed to run tests on me but stated on the way out of the examining room door, "Personally, I don't think we will find anything."
Two weeks later, when those test results came back, she was singing a different song, baby. I got a call from the clinic and was immediately asked, "How soon can you come in?" There was a wee bit sense of emergency to her voice...OK, quite a bit.
Found something, did we?
They got me in that afternoon. Gee, that was fast.
I was seated on the examining room table when that nurse practitioner came into the room very tightly clutching my medical records to her chest and a look of stunned horror on her face. She didn't sit down on her little rolling stool like she normally did; she backed up against the wall and a window in front of me staring at me with that look of stunned horror, with a death grip on my medical records, and, at least four times during that 20 minute session, she loudly blurted out, "YOU.ARE.VERY.ILL!", you know, like she had to tell me.
Found something, did we?
She never questioned me again when I told her something was wrong and I needed tests run; she just ran the tests. As a matter of fact, she worked very closely with me for about the next 10 years to help me find out what was wrong and why I was dying and I was almost dead sitting there on her examining room table. She couldn't believe I was still alive and for very good reasons we would find out later.
I went through 15+ years of medical hell to reach that point because not one quack would run a test on me to see if there really was something wrong with me because they are all being taught to not listen to their patients but it gets better because the medical hell and poverty they caused still ain't over yet, baby, after more than 30 years. The struggle continues but we now know that I have Hypervolmic-Hyponatremia or high water blood level and low salt blood level caused by a virus I got from my second ex wife.
To say the least, I am furious, very, very furious at the terrible medicine we are getting today; medicine that would have killed you. They almost killed me and denied me almost half of my life with their very bad medicine; 30 years of medical hell that should have been the most productive 30 years of my life. I will be 70 this coming April.
Now, let's go back to when the nurse drew the first blood for the first tests at Ben Archer. When my blood started flowing into those test tubes, I saw two really big signs that something was wrong that the nurse did not see and, after I pointed them out to the nurse, she quickly dismissed them as "being normal" but I knew better.
First, my blood was such a dark red it had a black tint to it and healthy blood is a nice rich medium red. Second, my blood was so viscous or thick that it didn't just quickly flow into the test tubes like water (blood is better than 70% water), it oozed into those tubes like thick mud.
What should that tell you?
It should tell you that my red blood cell count per unit of blood was too high and that nurse should have called a doctor to point out that something was wrong with me. They actually have a medical term for such thick, dark blood called Hypervolemia or high red blood cell blood level, which is potentially terminal; it will kill you. People die from cardiac arrest every year from this problem, especially marathon athletes who abuse EPO.
And she and other nurses are not trained to notice the color and viscosity of your blood as first warning signs? Why?
In the sports sciences we are but not in your medicine. In the last 30+ years, I have not seen one nurse or doctor who has paid attention to the color or viscosity of your blood when drawing blood; not one.
What happens with this type Hypervolemia is that your blood becomes so viscous that it is difficult for your heart to push it through your arteries and veins causing your heart to burn more oxygen per minute than can be supplied by such slow moving blood so that your heart can no longer function and you go into cardiac arrest and die.
Note that there are two types of Hypervolemia. One if high water blood level and the other is high red blood cell blood level and, just from seeing the blood flowing into those test tubes, I knew I had a high red blood cell blood level but the nurse didn't.
As dark and viscous as my blood was going into those tubes, that nurse should have been screaming the hospital emergency signal, Code Blue, because I was on the verge of cardiac arrest.
But I remembered the importance of that blood later when we were running tests and trying to find out what was wrong with me and I later found out why it was that dark and viscous and it weren't good, baby.
You have to understand that there are two main reasons why your blood could be that dark and viscous, both of which we were trained to deal with in sports medicine. If you are severely dehydrated, your blood will become that dark and viscous just before you die because the water in your blood has decreased, concentrating the red blood cells, and, if you are persistently subjected to hypoxia or low oxygen blood level, your blood will become that dark and viscous and both mean that something is wrong with you.
Therefore, the viscosity and color of my blood told me something was wrong so why didn't it tell that nurse that? Because her lousy college professors didn't train her to know that?
Most of you would have died before things got that bad for you and we are just getting started, baby.
Now you need to understand that, because of the poverty caused by my illness, I was forced to use Medicaid and Medicaid doesn't pay doctors enough for them to spend any time doing pathology research so that, if the doctor can't quickly tell from the test results what is wrong with you, you are screwed because they won't do any pathology research to find out what is wrong with you. Good old socialism hard at work screwing you.
Fortunately, with me, I can go to sites set up for doctors to do pathology research at the Mayo Clinic and CDC sites, I can read and understand those sites, and can do my own pathology research. You also have to know that, when doing pathology research, you must find out what is really wrong with you, you can't just grab or straws or you won't be able to fix what is wrong with you and I really wanted to fix what was wrong with me. Therefore, in doing pathology research, you have to remain open minded, objective, and scientific in doing your research or you are just wasting your time.
My nurse practitioner or PCP (primary care provider) had sent me to a specialist for tests, the nurse over there had left to run the tests, and I was sitting on their examining table with a poster in front of me telling me the symptoms for a new ailment at that time I had never heard of called sleep apnea. I read that poster through more than half a dozen times and the symptoms kept matching my symptoms 100% so, when I returned to my PCP, I asked her about it and she said, "why not, we can try it and see." She was listening to me, baby, and that made a huge difference.
The test is run at night while you are sleeping in their research facility so the doctors and technicians can monitor things like your sleeping, oxygen blood level, and other things.
After I got up the next morning, the technician took me to sit in a chair in the monitoring room and another technician soon came in with a piece of paper in her hand with the test results and medical diagnosis. She sat down next to me and the first words out of her mouth were, "You should have died at least 2.5 to 3 years ago." You would have, which is how sick I was. My medical condition was diagnosed as "severely life threatening".
You have to understand that your body has sensors spread throughout your cardiovascular system to monitor your oxygen blood level to keep your oxygen blood level as close to 93% as possible. If you blood level gets over 93%, the extra oxygen can cause nerve and brain cell damage so your body will slow your respiratory and heart rates to cause your body to burn up enough oxygen to return your oxygen blood level back to 93%. Also, if your oxygen blood level drops below 93%, your brain will increase your respiratory and heart rates to get more oxygen into your blood because not enough oxygen will cause nerve and brain damage.
With sleep apnea, the muscles in your mouth and throat lose their normal muscle tonus while you are sleeping, which causes them to relax too much while you are sleeping, if you are lying on your back, the muscles will fall back against the back of your throat, and cuts off the air flow into your lungs. Without more oxygen going into your lungs, your body continues burning up oxygen and decreases your oxygen blood level. When your oxygen blood level drops below 70%, that is diagnosed as "life threatening" because you will probably go into cardiac arrest because there will not be enough oxygen in the blood to sustain heart functions. Better than 90% of the people who die from sleep apnea die from cardiac arrest because of this.
What happens with a normal cardiovascular system, where you heart is about the size of your fist, is that, as your oxygen blood level continues to decline, your heart rate keeps increasing up past 100 beats per minute towards about 160 to 180 beats per minute, where the heart will burn up enough of the remaining oxygen so that it can no longer get enough oxygen to continue life functions, you go into cardiac arrest, and die.
But my cardiovascular system is very different from yours. My resting heart rate, when I was competing in bicycle road racing, was 37.5 bpm, which meant that my heart is larger than both of my fists combined, my arteries, arterials, and veins are much larger, and I have at least 10 to 20 times more capillaries, which means my heart can move more blood in less time with less effort or by burning less oxygen.
Now, I don't care if I live to be 200 without exercising ever again, my cardiovascular system won't atrophy down to more than a maximum of about 10 to 20 percent below what it was when I was competing so that it will ALWAYS move much more blood in much less time with much less effort and my resting heart rate should never go over about 40 to 45 bpm, which almost no doctors and nurses know and we will get to later because knowing that about a former athlete can be life critical.
For this particular discussing and medical problem, it saved my life because, when you are sick enough for your heart rate to go over 100 bpm, my heart rate will only go up to about 50 bpm, meaning my heart will be moving much, much more blood in much less time while burning much less oxygen so that my heart can continue functioning with a much lower oxygen blood level than your heart can. When you are severely ill with a resting heart rate of 160 to 180 bpm, you know, about to die, my resting heart rate will only be about 80 to 100 bpm, which will help keep me alive when you die.
When they tested me, my oxygen blood level was going way down to 59%, which would have killed almost all of you long before it got that low. It also means that I am much more likely to die from brain death than cardiac arrest in the case of hypoxia because my heart will probably keep beating after my brain stops working.
Now this explains why my blood was so dark and viscous, which is why it should have been a huge red flag to the nurses and doctors. The regular nightly hypoxia being caused by my severely life threatening sleep apnea had caused my body to produce many more red blood cells to increase the amount of oxygen my blood was carrying to keep me alive causing that type of hypervolemia for me.
Therefore, the color and viscosity of my blood should have been a huge red flag telling the doctors and nurses that I was dying and needed medical help but not one of them ever realized that.
Why?
Because their stupid college professors don't know it because they have not studied the sports sciences and sports medicine so the stupid college professors can't teach them such things, causing us to have medieval medicine when it should be even more advanced.
One of the first things every doctor and nurse should notice is the color and viscosity of the blood when they are drawing blood because it can tell you a lot.
Remember that I told you that my resting heart rate should never go over 40 to 45 bpm unless I am sick?
Well, it is later and time to talk about that because it almost got me killed by their really bad medicine.
Decades ago, when my normal resting heart rate was still fixed at 42 bpm because I was still exercising, even though I was no longer competing, I got hit by a car, which caused a concussion, which caused me to be taken to the emergency room at one of the top hospitals in the US. Fortunately for me and what saved my life, I was still conscious, aware of my surroundings, and able to communicate. If not, they would have killed me because they don't know squat about sports sciences and medicine.
They wheeled me into the examining room on a gurney, a nurse came in, took my pulse as the first thing, and was out of there like a shot, returning only seconds later with a doctor and another nurse. Both nurses turned to two mobile units which had supplies and tools, were frantically going through the draws pulling out instruments and opening medical packages, while the doctor took my pulse. When the doctor finished taking my pulse, he told the first nurse, "Call the cardiologist!"
I asked, "Why?"
He said, "Because your heart rate is too low."
I knew what the problem probably was so I asked, "How low is it?"
He said, "42 beats per minute."
I said, "That is normal for me because I am a marathon athlete."
They all three froze, looked at each other, and you could have heard a pin drop.
Without asking me a thing, they were getting needles, drugs and a defibrillator ready to start stabbing me in the heart with those needles, filling my heart with drugs, and shocking the crap out of my heart to force my resting heart rate above 60 bpm, which would have fried my heart and killed me had I not stopped them because their idiot college professors didn't teach them to ask one simple question of a patient and they don't know crap about sports medicine, you know, "have you ever been an athletes, especially a marathon athlete and, if so, what was your lowest resting heart rate."
In the last half century, I have not had one doctor or nurse ask me that question and it still haunts me when I see doctors because they still don't know this and it adversely effects my medical treatment because, they can't tell that, when my heart rate goes above 50 bpm, I am pretty sick so they just dismiss my illness as not being that bad when they should be more serious about it and when I try to explain this to them, they don't listen because I don't have one of dem dar MDs from the right university, their stupid college professors told them otherwise, and I couldn't possibly know nuttin'. Why, I just gots to be wrong.
The reason I am writing this rant is because I just had to take a trip to the hospital emergency room and it wasn't pleasant.
I went to the hospital because I realized I was in the early stages of toxic shock, which can kill you.
For those of you who don't know, toxic shock is caused by either a person have a serious infection or two or more infections, it can kill you, and should always be a concern for doctors in an emergency room.
They ran blood tests on me and found that I had two infections at the same time, which should have put concern for toxic shock at the top of their list but the doctor told me my symptoms were not that of shock.
I was surprised, I was stunned. But I thought, "OK, I am human and have been pretty sick so I could be wrong," but what the doctor didn't know is that, after I see doctors, I always go on the Internet to places like the Mayo Clinic and CDC sites to see if what they told me was right and even check out the prescriptions to make sure I got the right stuff. The Mayo Clinic site said I was in the early stages of toxic shock.
Also, the nurse started monitoring my heart rate, after they started me on two IVs for two different antibiotics, I asked her what my heart rate was, she said, "59, that is a little low," I asked, "For whom," she said, "For most people," and I responded, I am not most people and that is high for me.
People, my heart rate was telling me that I was very sick but she saw it as saying that I was fine with not much wrong. My heart rate should never get over 50 bpm unless I am sick. She and the doctor thought I was alright because my heart rate was that low but I knew I was very sick because my heart rate was that high.
Do you see the difference a little information can make?
I tried to explain my resting heart rate to her so she could more accurately monitor my condition and she refused to listen because her all-knowing, all-wise, highly educated, grossly overpaid, intellectually superior, natural elite college professors who got the right degrees from the fight universities told her otherwise.
I was talking to a wall, baby, so I monitored my own heart rate and when it started going down to 54, they got a little antsy while I kept reassuring them that it was looking better. No matter how much college you have studied, the quacks won't listen to you because you is are be a stupid peasant who cain't know nuttin'.
I just know that someday I will be taken into an emergency room unconscious and they will fry my heart and kill me. I am more concerned about that than I am about terrorists because doctors and nurses scare the living hell out of me and that is just a sample of the bad medicine I have seen over the last 30+ years. There was much more I have had to slug my way through to survive but this essay has already gotten pretty long.
Over the years, I have often wondered, "How many people have they killed with their bad medicine caused by academic arrogance?"
I am convinced that every biology professor, medical school professor, doctor, and nurse should be required to study at least some of the sports sciences and sports medicine. I believe that that one thing a lone will help improve modern medicine by as much as 20 to 50 years very quickly and will save many lives.
John 3:16 For God so loved the world, that he gave his only begotten Son, that whosoever believeth in him should not perish, but have everlasting life.
You better....