“In the fall of 2022, Dr. William Dugal, then 32, contracted COVID-19 and began experiencing unusual symptoms…”1
Physical reality of living as a finite and mortal human is not at all like a book on biology, medicine, or philosophy of causation. When you feel/sense that your feet are going numb but you are trained to think and say the following… to make sense of it…
It started numbness in my feet, almost like my shoes were too tight, and it progressed to where I was having trouble walking…
We can readily observe a split between statements in nouns and verbs, which is a profound difference how we describe how we live versus how we encode how we live into formal knowledge through nouns. There are no nouns-abstractions-systems-objects in you (you are never a what, you are not a noun) but an I live/breathe/sense/walk/talk/love/hate/eat in some kind of manner, in the way (not any way) … that is typical of your kind of people…
It is through such magical conversion of verbs into nouns and extracting nouns out of I live we can begin to manipulate some objects that we made up within you to help you get better via a complex web of inferences in the realm of scholarship of words connected to the sciences of measurements, which all rest on some philosophical understanding how things work in this world and what a good way to live is. We rid you of the body and you, by dis-em-body-ing and dis-animat-ing2 you… to put it all back together to heal you.
What we are doing has to do with formal reasoning. Reason has to do with fitting something together into a coherent whole. So we break stuff down, we are very good at it!, to put it all back together as a whole, we are not as good at that… But we try and succeed at times, mostly through experimentation. We try, fail, and try again. We do not always follow very strict rules of formal philosophy or formal science to accomplish what we find worthy. We fudge and fumble. A LOT. At times, we succeed without actually knowing how we did it. It is SCARY.
When you cannot walk following a cold, we have no idea why it happened to you. We will never know why you sneezed and coughed yourself unable to walk and do all the things that constitute I live… It is impossible to know. Most of the time we have no idea what caused what. The fact that we know nothing of why this misfortune befell upon you personally does not stop us from being decent at helping you get well.
Why do we try to figure out what caused your dis-ability to I live? First of all, long ago we came up with an idea that a cause was a thing. Various peoples opined on many ways to order causes as well as attribute causation to either external or internal agents. Then, if we know the cause… we came to believe that we can do something about it. There is no one school of thought of causation. In reality, we apply very different ways to establish causation aka we make it up… in various contexts… colloquial as sensed by people, philosophical, religious, formally scientific, politically scientific, medical, legal, statistical, etc… In all of those cases, we use logics (there is more than one) and some methods to make up this causation to direct it towards some goal. We want to do something to achieve some goal that we find desirable. One and the same event in relation to another event may be ruled as causative in one context and non-causative in another context. Usually, we figure out how to achieve small broken up goals that are subordinated to some other overarching goal.
To help you live whole/healthy/holy, we make up words then concepts to use in some ordered manner to help you heal, which has to do with being whole and unbroken. One of such philosophical devices is a syndrome. A syndrome is not a disease. The biggest differentiator between the two is establishing a cause. We tend to believe that we know the cause of a disease (compare a cold vs COVID-19; colloquial flu vs a formal diagnosis of influenza) while we do not know the exact cause of a syndrome.3
In medicine, not epidemiology or Journalist Truths, we diagnose for the purpose of treatment. We usually gather history, a narrative account of what happened, then supplement it with some observation of physical manifestations via senses, and increasingly or solely with some visualizing and/or measuring technology to compare a body that deviates from a norm to some arbitrary standard of an average human, as we made up to help us make actual physical people, who are not just bodies, feel better when they are sick.4
For the purpose of demonstration, I will make up a story, not a medical history, of Dr.Dugal (I do not know if it is true or not, but I will match it to the following imagination of a journalist who likes to read between the lines). Regular people tend to sense and make sense of everything that happens to them through a story rather than formal notation and arrangement of events that are typical for scholars or scientists. In all cases, making sense or finding meaning and arranging it in some order, makes up what we call knowledge and wisdom.
Dr. Dugal was in surgery residency, when government declared a COVID-19 pandemic. He got vaccinated against the disease, when a vaccine became available. In the fall of 2022, Dr.Dugal felt his feet were going numb and went to the hospital because he thought there was something wrong.
A story preserves the totality of all events that a narrator or an interrogator finds pertinent to illness. It is arbitrary and varies a lot between people. We should have probably begun with the Neanderthal ancestors of Dr.Dugal to tell a complete story of causation but I could not reach them for commentary of all the things they ate, all the strains of colds they had, and what they did wrong otherwise. When we talk to a patient to write medical history, we are trying to match parts of the story to some suspected diagnoses to actually help this man get better, not establish the cause of his misfortune.
If Dr.Dugal did not receive a vaccine during the time immediately preceding the onset of his symptoms, we decidedly do not care about events in distant past. Noting vaccination instance may serve some future purpose for Dr.Dugal in particular or by extension to contribute to epidemiology of disease (which is a syndrome in this case that has many known and unknown precipitating events; the word disease means different things in different contexts for different purposes) and vaccination.
Here comes Sharyl Attkisson looking for the causes of universal injustices. She is asking questions that we cannot answer. She asks questions of no relevance to Dr.Dugal, who is probably not plagued by them. It is more likely he wonders why did THIS happen to ME?! Will I ever be well? A more typical question for the people who follow the way of science would be “Why did this particular person become paralyzed when others did not and what makes a particular group of people susceptible to become paralyzed, following a bout of a cold or vaccination?”
The reason we ask such questions in the realm of science today is to detect those who are likely to become paralyzed and prevent it, if it is connected to what we call and infectious disease in this case — by vaccination, abstaining from vaccination, or amending the body to become agreeable for vaccination.5 While we hope to prevent a case of an illness in a particular person, we do it by applying medicine to all people to see the overall reduction of a particular disease in all the people. Some people may get harmed, but most of the people may benefit, when we speak of a particular disease. We sacrifice few for the benefit of many. The underlying philosophy behind these questions and answers has to do with a belief that we must not ever suffer anything. Totalitarian annihilation of suffering. In practical terms of governance, sick people cost, lose, and waste money. Illness is somehow related to economy and wealth.
When we speak of the imaginary scenario of a person who got vaccinated against COVID-19 and got hospitalized due to the suffering we call Guillain-Barré syndrome (GBS), the only true statement in regard to vaccination we could make would be that some particular regimen of so many doses of a particular COVID-19 vaccine did not prevent severe illness and hospitalization following a case of COVID-19 illness in this particular person. If a person did not get vaccinated, we could make a statement that a vaccine definitely did not cause GBS. Otherwise, and unvaccinated person was hospitalized due to severe illness following a case of COVID-19. We would not be able to prove anything contrary to what happened in individual cases.
Individual members of the public, individual physicians, and generic government bureaucrats ask identical questions about disease and prophylactic medications to prevent it when they should be asking very different questions as their interests are not the same, although they do intersect somehow.
Twitter Suspension. Is it right or wrong, good or bad to vaccinate if both a bout of cold and administration of a vaccine may be followed by exactly the same Guillain-Barré syndrome, albeit, with different events that lead to it. Two paths, two different etiologies that result in the same physical suffering, under the umbrella of the same label for this suffering.
What is the Cure for Ignorance? Ask! How do we establish the background philosophy of living of this particular person to understand if vaccination is appropriate for him or her based on the way this person lives rather than typical protocol application of vaccines to all or particular risk groups.6 We cannot guarantee anything for you personally. We cannot prevent anything in you personally.
The question you should be asking — what is a good way to live for you and for us as people? Is Poison Path the way to health?7
Holohan Meghan. Man, 32, became fully paralyzed days after getting COVID. This was his 1st symptom. Today.com June 13, 2024.
You live as not just a body.
If we put a standard average statistical body together, it will be unable to live. We approximate averages to fit the non-average you to keep you whole.
When you respond to vaccination in a way that deviates from statistical average majority, we call it an abnormal reaction. It is obviously a fiction since you react in a way that is normal for you. A norm is another abstract concept we make up for some purpose.
A risk group is another concept made up by us to accomplish something. A risk group is an artifical, non-physical phenomenon.
Health has different meanings for different people in different contexts in different circumstances which are particular to people at this place at this time. Universal One Health is an aberration and atrocity that annihilates many kinds of peoples.
Reading the first few paragraphs, I began thinking if a person did start to experience some type of numbness/paralysis post illness (given the pride of doctors in the early days of covid vaccines to suggest that feeling unwell after it was a sign “it’s working”, I think I can qualify a vaccine as “post illness”), there are solutions outside of the western conventional framework that don’t look at the cause as much as considers the effect. As I read on, I saw you shared the underlying premise.