Free speech

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JD2020
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Free speech

Post by JD2020 »

I learned of Dr. Bredesen's research - was it in 2014? - from the daily email update from Dr. Mercola.
I learned of the book, 2016 I believe, from the same.
I had already been collecting information in years prior (Grain Brain, etc), largely introduced to me from Mercola's daily email.
Today's email states:

Why I’m Removing All Articles Related to Vitamins D, C, Zinc and COVID-19

Dr. Mercola says he has received personal threats.

My mother has been in decline for quite a while. In 2018, my father gave me the opening to share the information I had compiled. I pulled everything together, tied together some of the riskier meds (30 years of PPIs, for one), tied together certain family health vulnerabilities, shared information about the program and successes. He initially said he was very impressed by the information I presented....he then sent my email to their doctor, who completely shut down the whole thing.

I was on FB last night. We have Lyme in the family and I follow one of the Lyme docs. He is one of the Greats in the Lyme community, and he has been working to make a difference with Covid. When he mentions Ivermectin, his posts are deleted. Last night, he referred to "that drug that starts with an I and ends with an n".

Discussions of ways to help oneself (certain vitamins) and successful treatments (Ivermectin), are suppressed. We all pay the price for this suppression of information. Traditional docs are unwilling to even acknowledge much less explore a program that reverses symptoms of cognitive decline - I believe because they have not yet been told by the FDA or CDC that the program has been approved. My mom, all of our loved ones, pay the price.

I am having trouble wrapping my head around this reality. Suppression of speech. Censoring of medical information, theories, ideas. Doctors who won't explore what is really the only possibility of reversing dementia. How is this possible in this country? (Rhetorical question, I suppose) Thanks for listening.
ApropoE4
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Re: Free speech

Post by ApropoE4 »

Mercola is one of the top sources of medical disinformation. He is first on a recent list of the top sources of anti vax "information".

By spreading disinformation he's causing hundreds of thousands of needless deaths and he should absolutely be silenced.

https://252f2edd-1c8b-49f5-9bb2-cb57bb4 ... 366ee5.pdf
JD2020
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Re: Free speech

Post by JD2020 »

oh dear. Well, I guess reasonable people can disagree. The million dollar question is who gets to determine when someone should be silenced...even if everything he says is untrue, every single thing, by what right does a "free" country that supposedly values free speech silence him? If not for Dr. Mercola, I would not know about Dr. Bredesen's work.

And what about Dr. Horowitz (Lyme doc) being silenced on FB?

What if mainstream medical says that Dr. Bredesen is dispensing false info? In fact, I have personally dealt with two MDs who have said just that. Do they have the right to silence him? I am glad that they do not. Again, who (or what) is the force that gets to make the decision to silence another person?
buck3Maureen
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Re: Free speech

Post by buck3Maureen »

Well said. I think Dr. Mercola was one of those who had information on the ªdebunked lab leak hypothethisª, that now is not so debunked.
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TheBrain
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Re: Free speech

Post by TheBrain »

I have great respect for Dr. Mercola, as I do for Dr. Bredesen and many other doctors who don't follow the mainstream narrative. Free speech is dying—if not already dead—in this country.

And censorship is the first step toward totalitarianism. History bears that out. I hope we can reverse course.
ApoE 4/4 - When I was in 7th grade, my fellow students in history class called me "The Brain" because I had such a memory for detail. I excelled at memorization and aced tests. This childhood memory helps me cope!
LawrenceJ
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Re: Free speech

Post by LawrenceJ »

Fascinating and terrifying. And there are several moving parts to this whole area (free speech vs helpful/lifesaving treatments). I think at least one issue faced by health administrators was that they had no confidence that anything less nuanced than a vaccine (so not vitamin D status, not Ivermectin, etc) could put a dent in the infection rate, ICU chaos and deaths. Which I suspect most on this forum would agree is not at all true, but it drives policy decisions to a disproportionate degree.

(Ivermectin is going to get its day, perhaps, if this very thorough overview of past, present and future research is any indication. For a really deep dive: https://www.albertahealthservices.ca/as ... review.pdf)
Quantifier
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Re: Free speech

Post by Quantifier »

Facebook is a commercial company that exists to make money, not a public service. They are not violating anyone's rights by not allowing posts they don't like, as unpleasant that is to people who have come to rely on them. There are plenty of other blogging platforms, and ways to create reach to said platforms.
StevenL
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Re: Free speech

Post by StevenL »

" there are several moving parts to this whole area (free speech vs helpful/lifesaving treatments"

It is a tough one. Free speech vs yelling fire in a theater. When is something misinformation and who decides?
I would think that as far as privately owned sites like FB, Twitter, Youtube etc, the site owner gets to decide unless the gov steps in for some reason, which has yet to happen.

But nobody restricts our ability to speak out in public, to host a private site and say what we want. People can come see or not.

As far as this specific Doc, - I've seen Mercola behind good info over the years but I've seen him incorporating a lot of "Woo" that was pretty much gossip level conjecture with scientific sounding adornment. So common these days. His "Brand" seems to be about providing "alternate" info more than strictly vetted or documented. It's hard to sort out, and feels to be only curated for info that will appeal to the target viewer profile. Understood, but I've stopped paying attention there. If something is valid, it will rise to the top via other better curated sources.

I just went to Mercola's site. Still full of engaging alternative content. At the moment they are showing Tucker Carlson to support their antivax stance. So there is a reliable source of public health information if there ever was one. And somebody with no agenda other than the truth, right?

But if the quality of the supporting sources doesn't convince you - well, I have noticed in the last year that Mercola puts a nice little "FACT-CHECKED" badge right next to any opinion they publish to make sure nobody has to look for themselves to find out if any claims or assumptions might be unsubstantiated. So glad they verified their own information for us! Now we can just accept anything they say and save all that work.

Content, content content. It's what pays the bills!
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Julie G
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Re: Free speech

Post by Julie G »

But nobody restricts our ability to speak out in public, to host a private site and say what we want. People can come see or not.
True, but access to non-Pharma sanctioned sites is becoming more and more limited. Prior to a shift that occurred almost two years ago, (see Google as Big Brother) search engines used an algorithm that allowed the sites with the most hits to show up first on searches. For instance, our community was always in the top 5 using the search term "ApoE4" during that uncensored period. Now, on mainstream sites like Google, we are relegated to the 7th page. On alternative sites (Bing, Yahoo, DuckDuckGo) we are still showing up in the top 5 which is likely indicative of our true traffic. This censorship issue with regard to health is coordinated and real. Scary.
Nebo
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Re: Free speech

Post by Nebo »

Most hits isn't a good proxy for content and it suffers the problem of suppressing newer information. Would that they be censoring the newer sites? Sorry, but this is one of those things that REALLY grates me so here we go...

Search is a VERY hard problem and I truly don't think enough people think about it before crying censorship or know enough about the fundamental challenges. There are trillions of sites, new ones every day.

Let us think of an innocent query: "banana". What do you show? Do we want to show nutritional information, wikipedia, recipes using banana, fruit in general? Let's think more, there will be hundreds of thousands of pages returned and you have to, in some programatic fashion, decide what to "trust" for lack of a better word. Billions of people query your engine, you have to define trust some how. So what is trust? What makes a site trustworthy? SSL certificates? Age? There are too many sites for any human to verify them.

Let's say you have that, now let's think about content. This time we looked for "banana bread recipe". Once again, countless results. How do you decide what recipe is most relevant? Do we take regional content (IE I'm making this query from California) into context? How about how many other recipes that site holds? Some sites have ratings for a recipe, how valuable is that? Should we consider how fresh the page is? If we do that what about the older tried and true recipes?

I caution anyone who spits out a quick answer to anything here. The original algorithm you speak of was PageRank and the internet has grown past it.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/PageRank

From someone who works/has worked for many of the big tech companies it truly is frightening that the public, many who are very under informed on how programs work or the scale they operate, thinks things are malicious (not saying they sometimes aren't, recommendation engines have a personal place in hell from my POV) when really they just can't grasp what the problem actually is. Every engineer hits that point, usually early in his/her career, where they have the "if we just..." and eventually realize no, we can't "just" and the problem is massive.

Simply put, you're not wrong but you're far from correct. And, FWIW, "apoe4 forum" query in google is the top result. So there is no censorship, Google is distinguishing context between "apoe4" and "apoe4 forum". "apoe4 discussion" is result 2, "apoe4 community" is the top result.
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