Welcome to the conversation!
The most recent CWP discussion took place on a Tuesday evening. A few of the topics discussed were vitamin D, confounding factors in research, TSH and informed consent.
As usual, the Q&A lasted 90 minutes and consisted of general health questions from the audience. We have provided a condensed and paraphrased recap of the session below. Please contact us if you would like to know how you can participate in the conversation!
INTRO: Pam always has a delightful and organized way of running the show during CWP. Her warm greeting and friendly reminder about maintaining the boundaries set within the discussion create a comfortable atmosphere for Wellness Forum members. CWP is more of an informal educational discussion with friends and colleagues at a local coffee shop, than a lecture hall-style discourse. It's relaxing, there's humor involved and sometimes even a quick visit from Sir Winston, Pam's jet-black Maine Coon cat (who is a celebrity in his own right). While the group refrains from asking questions that are too personal about their own health, general health questions of just about any nature are fair game. Throughout the conversation, Pam alternates back and forth between live questions from the group, and questions from the write-in that are emailed to her in advance. After a brief intro, it's time to jump in!
Pam: Hello everybody!
Member: Hi, Pam!
Pam: Hi! Let’s take a question from the live group. Who'd like to go first?
Member: Hi, Pam! I’ll go first.
Pam: Okay, go right on ahead.
Member: This is about the vitamin D issue. I have listened to three or four doctors who all have good stuff to say in general, but they all believe that it is very important to take a vitamin D supplement. They say this study shows it, and that study shows it, and I don’t really know what to do because I don’t think I really need it.
TOPIC 1: Vitamin D
Pam: Yeah well, I have a couple things I can say about that. I'm actually stunned that so many doctors tell their patients and general audiences that they need to be taking a vitamin D supplement, but they don’t ever talk about actually going out into the sunshine. The consequences of no sun exposure are significant. But we’re going to be addressing that in my July 9th workshop, so we'll set that point aside for today. For now we’ll stick to just the topic of vitamin D. I’ll say two things about it.
The first thing, and this is why we are so focused on consumers being educated at Wellness Forum Health, a doctor can be just swell in one area, for example COVID treatment or reversal of heart disease. A doctor might be very knowledgeable, spot on even on that one topic, but not necessarily reliable on other topics. And this is why it’s important to always check out the validity of the information or advice you’ve been given.
The second thing I will say is that many times studies are cited that do actually show benefit. But they are not controlling for confounding factors. And I’ll give you an example of one because this is an important piece to take into consideration. So, we know for certain that when people get sick, their vitamin D levels go down. There are hundreds upon hundreds of studies that show this. And because this happens with such a wide range of diseases, there are many experts in this area who say inflammation in the body due to sickness causes vitamin D levels to decrease. There are a lot of different hypotheses about why inflammation would lower vitamin D levels, but what we do know for sure is that they go down when you are sick, and when you get well, they go right back up.
Let’s take an example of a study cited to support supplementation with vitamin D. In this study, COVID patients were administered vitamin D while they were sick. When these patients got better, their vitamin D levels increased. The question that remains is whether the increase in vitamin D levels happened because of supplementation, which in turn made them better, or were they going to get better anyway, and the vitamin D levels naturally rebounded as a result of the inflammation in their bodies going down? The confounding factor here would be the fact that we have hundreds and hundreds of studies that show reverse causation. Even though that’s the confounding factor, the study doesn’t take it into consideration.
Let’s pause for a moment. Does everybody follow me on that?
Members: Yeah. I get it. Yep!
Pam: Okay, good. Let me know if you don’t. And I have one more thing to say about this. There’s also the issue of a study showing statistical significance versus a clinically meaningful outcome. What that could mean is that the COVID patients recovered in 48 hours less time than the patients who didn’t take the vitamin D. But again, what you don’t know is what the confounding factor in that case might be. First of all, it may not be statistically significant if they were sick for a month, because recovering two days sooner than the control doesn’t make much of a difference. The second thing, again, reverse causation. Some of these people might have been sicker than others, and that would be a confounding factor. So anyway, the point I want to make is that I don’t think that these doctors are lying when they cite a study showing that vitamin D works. But they may not be reading the studies very well to account for the types of things that I just talked about. I hope that all made sense to everyone. Please speak up if you want to add anything to this topic or have a follow up question.
Alright. Who would like to ask the next question?
Member: Pam, could you talk a little bit about thyroid levels?
Pam: Sure!
TOPIC 2: TSH
Member: Is a level of 5 TSH too high?
Pam: You know, it’s not, and that's one of many metrics where the diagnostic parameters have been changed. As a result, many people are being diagnosed with hypothyroidism who don’t have it. And another thing to be especially careful of is that as you age, some numbers change and ratchet up. TSH levels are one of them.
Health Briefs Library Excerpt:
Pam has been talking about the overdiagnosis of hypothyroidism for many years. In an article she recently authored, Pam pointed out the following:
“TSH levels increase as people age, and studies of centenarians show that higher TSH levels are associated with increased longevity.[i] It is particularly dangerous to over- diagnose and overtreat hypothyroidism in the elderly since overtreatment can cause cardiac arrythmias and decreased bone density.[ii]
Pam: Some good studies in the UK have shown that they don’t medicate anybody whose TSH level is under 20 if they are senior citizens, which would make a lot of endocrinologists in our country apoplectic. But the numbers change as you age, and that doesn’t necessarily mean that there’s something wrong with you. There’s no benefit that’s been established for medicating otherwise healthy people who have high TSH levels at an older age.
Member: Thanks, Pam!
Pam: And let me just say that right now, healthcare has been set up to prescribe more drugs, prescribe more supplements, to make people more dependent upon medicine, which forces people into spending more time with doctors. This has an insidious effect because people are outsourcing their health to doctors and medical centers. It makes people more neurotic about their health. It makes people feel like aging is a disease. It also makes them feel like they can’t pay cash for health services because everything is so expensive, mainly because it is all so excessive.
Health Briefs Library Excerpt:
According to Pam, “… it is only recently that doctors started measuring TSH levels in asymptomatic people. Lab results, which formerly measured a few biomarkers like plasma cholesterol and fasting glucose, have grown longer and longer as more and more biomarkers are being measured in mostly healthy people – a process we refer to (at Wellness Forum Health) as disease mongering. The more doctors look for abnormalities, the more of them they find, and diagnosing people with more and more conditions is profitable for both medical centers and drug companies. It may not, however, benefit patients. The U.S. Preventive Services Task Force advises against testing asymptomatic adults for thyroid function.[iii]
Pam: I hope that helps. Who would like to ask a question?
Member: I have a question about the COVID vaccine.
Pam: Okay – what would you like to know?
Member: I have direct experience with a couple who both got the COVID shot and both of them became magnetized at the site of injection on their arm. And then I saw a video of undertakers attempting to embalm people who apparently had the COVID shot and all this white wormish-looking stuff came out of them. So, is there something to any of this?
TOPIC 3: Confounding Factors and Informed Consent
Pam: You know, a lot of people had side effects, but I would imagine that your friends are not magnetized anymore?
Member: No, they’re not.
Pam: The bottom line is that there are a lot of reasons that could have happened, ranging from contamination to the spike protein circulating in the body longer, which could point to the way the injection was made. But the point is that your friends detoxified whatever was causing the magnetization, right?
Member: Right.
Pam: I’m glad they detoxified whatever was causing that, but that still doesn’t make it okay. I want to be crystal clear here. I am not saying that just because you’re not magnetized anymore everything is fine. Because it’s not fine. Nobody should have received these shots. It was an ill-conceived program from the beginning, and at some point, there will be ramifications for the people involved with mass marketing this product to the public. But having said that, we know that not everyone was injured as a result of taking this vaccine.
I am actually going to be offering a class on this in the very near future for anyone whose interested in doing a deep dive into the research to find out what we do know for sure versus what is just unsubstantiated click bate that only serves to instill fear in people.
I also want to mention the video you referenced earlier with the embalmers pulling stuff out of peoples’ bodies that they were attributing to the COVID jab. I remember when that came out. And the problem was that the footage from this video can be traced back to 2019, but the COVID shot wasn’t administered until the end of 2020, and the beginning of 2021. If embalmers were finding these mysterious clots back in 2019, that really shoots some holes in the narrative presented in that video.
Placing the COVID shot aside, let’s look at the confounding factors that might contribute to people being so sick in this country right now. Let's recall in 2020 all medical centers and hospitals had shut down for everything except for COVID. But people didn’t stop having heart attacks. They just stopped going to the hospital. People didn’t stop having chest pains, they just didn’t have it checked out. And people who would have had blood tests done and found out they had leukemia didn’t find out until it was a whole lot more advanced, right? And people’s habits got worse during that time, as well. In the history of this country, people never consumed as much alcohol per capita as they did during the lockdowns. And that’s a known risk factor for heart disease. And by the way, people who are drinking a bottle of wine every night aren’t doing it while eating vegetables and rice, okay? So I may sound like I’m defending these dreadful COVID shots, but I’m not. What I am saying is that it just isn’t as clear-cut as claiming that all this is due to the shot. What would be much more helpful, and I don’t think this is possible, but if we could find a healthy population of people, in great shape, who got this COVID shot and did not have their lives disrupted with lockdowns or any of the nonsense that was associated with COVID. It would be interesting to see if their health ended up declining as a result. Unfortunately, this group doesn’t exist because we live on a very sick planet right now. We have to get to a place where we have a more educated population when it comes to health, and we have to start requiring clear, informed consent discussions in medicine where its required to inform patients about what they're getting into with drugs and procedures, and if they are not informed, the provider gets sued. That’s going to be our next round of lawsuits when we’re finished with COVID. We’re going to start going after lack of informed consent because every single state has a law which says before they do anything to you, they have to tell you what the risks and the benefits are, what alternatives are available and what happens if you choose to do nothing. Has anybody here ever had that type of in-depth discussion with their doctor?
Members: Um, no. No. Nope.
Pam: No? Well then, the law has been broken. And if everybody was fully informed, most of what we are talking about here would go away because people would either follow doctor’s recommendations while being fully informed knowing fully what the consequences may be, or they may decide to do nothing, and I suspect that would be the case more so than the former. And I know we spent a lot of time on this, but this is such an important topic that deserves some extra attention.
Member: Yeah. I agree. Thank you, Pam
Pam: You’re welcome! Thank you for that question. And this was fun, but it's time to say good bye. Great questions, as always. And we will do this again soon! Good bye, everyone! Thank you!
CONCLUSION: A video recording of CWP is always emailed to members on the following business day after the session takes place, so even if you miss the live session, the recording is still made available. Pam always keeps her members in the loop.
[i]Atzmon G, Barzilai N, Hollowell JG, Surks MI, Gabriely I. “Extreme longevity is associated with increased serum thyrotropin.” J Clin Endocrinol Metab. 2009 Apr;94(4):1251–1254.
[ii]Gluvic Z, Obradovic M, Stewart A et al. “Levothyroxine Treatment and the Risk of Cardiac Arrhythmias – Focus on the Patient Submitted to Thyroid Surgery.” Front Endocrinol (Lausanne) 2021 Nov;12:758043
[iii]https://www.uspreventiveservicestaskforce.org/uspstf/recommendation/thyroid-dysfunction-screening
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