Since I no longer have the time to respond to all the correspondences I want to respond to, I began doing monthly open threads where I could focus on addressing the remaining questions that had accumulated over the last month and tagging each open thread to a topic I’d wanted to write about but didn’t feel quite merited its own article. In this month’s open thread, I’ll share my thoughts on a question many ask; what motivates the public figures we listen to and how can we know who to trust?
Unfortunately, one of the most challenging aspects of human interactions is accurately assessing someone’s character, especially when you can only observe them from a distance, and in turn, one of the most common errors I see people make is to ascribe beliefs or motivations to someone they don’t have a strong basis for (and often are completely wrong).
Ultimately, I believe this arises because humans are complex beings with so many good and bad facets that the way someone is perceived by someone else is primarily a product of which facets of them are being seen rather than who they actually are. In turn, one of the things I’ve always found immensely frustrating about politics is how someone I know is a destructive sociopath is seen as a saint because the media highlights a positive facade of them while another person I know is genuinely interested in making the world a better place is instead seen as a monster because the undesirable aspects of their personality are continually focused on by the media.
Note: given how much many of the wonderful and dedicated people I’ve gotten to know throughout this movement (e.g., Robert Malone) have been attacked for things that are not at all reflective of who they are, I often feel it’s unfair my anonymity has allowed me to never have my own shortcoming be subjected to widespread scrutiny. Likewise, from the start, I made the decision I did not want the Forgotten Side of Medicine to be about me, so I’ve made a point to only share the aspects of myself which I feel are helpful for readers to know (e.g., because it will inspire them to do what they were always capable of or because it makes them see they aren’t the only person who feels the way they do).
However, while it’s largely impossible to know what ultimately motivates someone, I often put a lot of thought into this as when I get it right (which normally requires discarding any biases or preconceived notions I have), that insight is valuable as it allows me to accurately predict what they will do in the future (e.g., past actions are the best predictor of future behaviors). Since the subject of “motivations” is such a common topic in discussions I see, I wanted to dedicate this month’s open thread to it—particularly since I’ve found the prominent figures in our movement I’ve gotten to know personally all share very similar motivations.
In turn, I’d like to start by sharing a few of my own motivations.
The Archivist
Although I generally reject labels, the one I’ve always been drawn to is being an “archivist.”
This arose because when I was much younger, I noticed the common thread underlying the problems in most people’s lives was that they’d never done the work to choose a unifying purpose for their life and instead were anxious and desperate for an ideal to follow (especially since our culture had systematically removed many of the things which previously provided that meaning), and so would adopt whatever was presented to them, regardless of how detrimental it was to their lives or how unhappy it made them.
Since I’d just started high school when I realized this, I knew I still didn’t know enough of the world to feel confident in the purpose I’d commit to myself to. So as a stopgap, since I noticed my peers were filling that void by adopting a harmful addiction, I decided to become addicted to information under the rationale that it wouldn’t create an actual addictive dependency (making it easy to quit when the time was right) and when it was all said and done not be a complete waste of time (which is wasn’t as if I hadn’t done this for decades I could not have written this Substack).
Once I started diving into that field, I found I was drawn to important information which had been lost in the sands of time, especially as I kept on finding a recurring pattern—amazing technologies that could revolutionize our lives had instead been buried to protect an existing monopoly.
As my actual purpose was ultimately shifting to trying to understand the truth of the world, my interest grew to focus on if these technologies were legitimate. A large part of my desire to be a doctor in turn was founded in it being a concrete way to ascertain if they indeed worked (whereas with many other “conspiracy theories,” I couldn’t see a way to prove or disprove them).
Note: my essential conclusion is that some of those technologies (e.g., DMSO and UVBI) performed as claimed, some were overblown (but still are quite useful if utilized appropriately), some used to work but no longer do because of the increased toxicity of our modern environment, and many others were simply overblown hype.
I came to see how easily these technologies were lost and how many of their inventors who dedicated their lives to promoting them had all said the same thing—in the future there will be a time when the world will be ready for their work and it will sprout from the ashes. As such, I gradually decided I wanted to be an archivist who could help keep the candle of that knowledge alight during my time on the Earth so that far into the future when the time was right, someone else could use it to ignite a flame everyone would see.
Note: this is analogous to how doctors I know who spent decades of blood, sweat, and tears trying to bring the public’s awareness to the vaccine safety issue (and whom much of my work is built upon) ultimately have only had a fraction of the reach newcomers to the vaccine safety field have had since the world was awoken by the disastrous COVID vaccines and hence the time was right for that truth to ignite.
In turn, I kept on running into very unusual situations where I met the previous custodians of that knowledge and took it as a sign fate was entrusting me with the opportunity to preserve it (while simultaneously rewarding my service by drawing me closer to my goal of understanding the fundamental truths of our world). However in doing that, I was left with one major issue—I wasn’t sure what an effective way was to pass it on enough that the right person would be able to find it when they searched for it. As such, my focus had been primarily on knowledge accumulation in the hope an answer to the other question would eventually present itself.
As such, when I realized Substack had put me in the rather unexpected position of being able to widely disseminate this information (something I had not expected would be possible in my lifetime), that became my goal—hence the title I chose for this publication.
That essentially is why I have put so much work into writing fairly detailed articles on a variety of subjects (now comprising millions of words) but simultaneously have been quite methodical in how I’ve approached that gargantuan task and not covered subjects I don’t yet feel it’s the right time to divert my available energy into writing about them (especially if the information is essentially already out there for anyone who looks for it).
In turn, I continually receive correspondences asking me to cover (or look into) specific topics that are already in the queue (but realistically will take years to get to). Put differently, because of how many things I feel compelled to cover, I know that in the long run it’s actually faster for me to go at a slow methodical pace than a fast one which leaves a lot of holes I’ll have to go back and fix later.
Note: early in my knowledge accumulation process, I realized it saved me a lot of time to strongly consider both sides of argument, since if I allowed myself to become biased and only see what I wanted to see, it would lead to a lot of faults in my understanding of a topic which would take a lot more work to correct down the road once I ran into data that clearly disproved my existing beliefs on a subject.
Likewise, this is also why I struggle so much with how time to put into each article, as I feel for what I’m trying to do, it’s incredibly important for them to be accurate, free of bias (e.g., I will always seriously discuss the merits of both sides of an argument—especially if I initially disagree with one side but a lot of people believe it) but on the other hand, if I spend too much time doing that, it becomes impossible to produce content at a rate where it’s realistic for me to complete the goal I set out for this publication (sharing the Forgotten Sides of Medicine).
For instance, once I saw the timelines in motion and the course of the wave that was propagating through the society, I realized it would be incredibly important to write a piece about the most important aspects of Hurricane Helene the day after the Vice Presidential debate (as that was when I expected the wave to crest), and to be able to do so in a manner that was objective and impartial (which was a bit challenging as I had very strong feeling about the situation due to my direct connections to it). Since Wednesday ended up being a busy work day and every day mattered for the people stranded there, at midnight, I made the call that I needed to skip a detailed edit and just send the article out—which led to three unfortunate typos in it that dozens of people then pointed out since those errors reversed my intended meaning (i.e., in the subtitle I said it was bad to “put people before profits” and in the article I wrote 2020 instead of 2024 which implied trust in medicine significantly increased rather than decreased from the COVID response). Overall, given how everything’s worked out, I feel I made the right call, but I run into this situation all the time, and it’s immensely frustrating!
Similarly, throughout my medical training, I had to deal with the same situation hundreds of times—a patient shows up with debilitating chronic pain (e.g., from a spinal surgery, a severe injury or arthritis) which was being poorly managed by physical therapy and (toxic) pharmaceuticals who over and over was told nothing else could be done for them regardless of how unlivable their life was—and while I knew most of them could get their lives back with DMSO, the only thing I was ever allowed to do was manage the frequent side effects of their current drugs. I cannot begin to describe how frustrating this was, and that was why I vowed to myself that if I ever got the chance to do it (which I never thought would happen), I would make the public aware of the alternative DMSO offered for those patients. In turn, that’s why now that I can, I’ve been willing to put so much time into presenting the case for DMSO (e.g., in this article).
Note: somewhat analogously, I’ve found it very frustrating that the management for sports injuries has always essentially been “throw NSAIDs at them,” despite the fact they often do very little, they create chronically weakened tissue at the repair site and have significant toxicity—whereas DMSO rapidly treats musculoskeletal injuries and has none of those issues. Similarly, I’ve seen so many sad cases of permanent disability from a stroke, spinal cord injury or head trauma that I know could have been prevented (or partially healed after the fact) if the FDA had not maliciously buried DMSO, and it is so immensely painful to live with that knowledge as you care for these patients (or to be labeled as insane and met with hostility if you try to explain it to your colleagues).
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