Medicine has made great progress abandoning harmful treatments since its accidental euthanization of President George Washington in 1799. But modern medical practitioners are still figuring out how to optimally treat many conditions.
An Achilles' heel is a weakness in spite of overall strength, which can lead to downfall.
My stories of the Taxi Wars are of humanity's struggles against the machines we've created for ourselves. One of my common observations was of people who are not helped (and often harmed) by standard medical practices. While this post is not directly related to my experiences as a taxi driver, it is highly relevant to humanity's struggle against our Medical Machine.
Modern doctors sometimes decide their patient's tissues are low on oxygen and prescribe various amounts of supplemental oxygen. A little extra oxygen is sometimes helpful. But investigators have repeatedly confirmed this fundamental fact: oxygen in excess is always toxic.
Hyperventilation is when someone breathes too rapidly. This causes too much carbon dioxide [CO2] to be expelled from the blood. As discussed below, medically-administered oxygen also removes too much CO2 from the patient's blood, resulting in Medical Hyperventilation.
While certain patients may seem to initially benefit from oxygen therapy, the science is clear enough to this simple former taxi driver that I do everything I can to caution people to not let their doctors hyperventilate them to death. I further believe there are perfectly reasonable therapies for poor oxygen saturation levels that incorporate the antidote for oxygen toxicity and thereby prevent Medical Hyperventilation. The evidence for these positions is summarized below.
There is no polite way to point out to the medical guild that their cavalier use of pure oxygen is not so different from the bloodletting, calomel (mercury) and blister agents that were used to finish off President Washington. The media will not jump to the cause of holding Medicine to account for their anti-scientific use of oxygen. Alas, I offer a proposal for a distributed second-guessing of the medical industry's backwards practice.
If enough of us inquire whether
a hospital routinely inadvertently deteriorates their patients with pure oxygen, the
hospitals will hopefully stop harming patients with anti-treatments
that Paul Bert and J. Lorrain Smith precisely identified as harmful 143 and 122 years ago.