Biomedical Quotes

Though biomedical science has vastly increased mankind’s average life expectancy, the maximum has not changed in verifiable recorded history.

The woman may be a biomedical engineer, but I begin to think that she is a certifiable idiot.

American scientists make the most important discoveries in medicine and genetics and publish more biomedical research than those of any other country—but the average American’s health remains worse and slower-improving than that of peers in other rich countries, and in certain years life expectancy actually declines.

My own experience of over 60 years in biomedical research amply demonstrated that without the use of animals and of human beings, it would have been impossible to acquire the important knowledge needed to prevent much suffering and premature death not only among humans but also among [other] animals.

Students who attend what they considered to be their first-choice school were less likely to persist in a biomedical or behavioral science major,” they write. You think you want to go to the fanciest school you can. You don’t.

In the past, [medicalization]has been portrayed as something that doctors inflict on a passive and un-suspecting world - an expansion of the Medical Empire. But in reality, it seems that these reductionist bio-medical stories can appeal to us all, because complex problems often have depressingly-complex causes, and the solutions can be taxing, and unsatisfactory.

I think there is a tendency of human beings, doctors and biomedical investigators especially, when they don’t understand something, and they can’t figure it out, and it’s their job to do so, they blame the victim.” He went on. “I think that happens all the time in regards to many medical problems.

At the same time we see the phenomenon of successful women adopting the standards of men with a vengeance. Will women's march to power ascendancy, won against all odds, mean that they too will choose to flaunt their preferences for red meat, animal skin, sport hunting, and even bullfighting? As women are swelling the ranks of biomedical science, many have adopted the practice of animal experimentation. Will animal exploitation become the ultimate symbol of equality with the white male?

Based on what I saw over a decade of medical treatment, you may be in serious trouble if you do not have knowledge of human health and biomedical systems.

The very use of the term "mental illness" (rather than, say, "neurosis", "insanity", "nervous breakdown", or other euphemisms) can be seen as an effort to move certain kinds of psychological distress into the biomedical realm.

all the fancy economic development strategies, such as developing a biomedical cluster, an aerospace cluster, or whatever the current economic development ‘flavor of the month’ might be, do not hold a candle to the power of a great walkable urban place.

While autism's embodied pathology is understood to be certain, its etiological origins remain unknown. Because of this unknown origin, all bodies are understood as potentially disordered. The mother, who was not so long ago under surveillance and scrutiny, must now adopt the paternalistic position of surveiller—she must watch her children and look for bodily manifestations or signs of disorder and seek biomedical intervention. This, of course, does not free the mother completely from being herself an object of scrutiny.

Do You Have Mind Body Syndrome? It is more important to know what sort of person has the disease than what kind of disease the person has. — Hippocrates Tell me one last thing, said Harry. Is this real? Or has this been happening inside my head? Of course it is happening inside your head, Harry, but why on earth should that mean that it is not real? — J.K. Rowling How do you know if your pain or other symptoms are the result of Mind Body Syndrome? First, you need to rule out tissue breakdown disorders that require biomedical treatments.

Flexner's good intentions had laid the groundwork for the specialty- and research-dominated system of medical education that still stands- the more prestigious the school, the greater the emphasis on biomedical research and the less the emphasis on pragmatic medical care.

I think this is going to trigger ‘Sputnik 2.0,’ a biomedical duel on progress between China and the United States,” said Carl June, a noted cancer researcher at the University of Pennsylvania who at the time was still struggling to get regulatory approval for a similar clinical trial.

Eva walked along the wall that held all of Michael's books. Shelves of science texts - physics, astronomy, a full set of Darwin's writings, new works in biomedical genetics - these were at the bottom, and books on philosophy and religion at the top. A row of poetry books caught her eye. Rumi, Whitman, Neruda - impossible to comprehend what he might be looking for in the poets' works he collected. Love possibly, but not love the way she understood it. She couldn't wait until she would no longer have to study, but Michael - he loved to study even when he wasn't a student.

Biomedical research is done by teams. The research is time-consuming and deeply expensive, and the results are often disappointing. With persistence, talent, and luck, and plenty of money, a biomedical research team can sometimes pull the veil off some small mystery of nature and the human body, and can find a better way to treat a disease.

A survey21 of beliefs about the causes of illness across cultures shows that the three most common explanations are biomedical (referring to physical causes of disease), interpersonal (illness is caused by witchcraft, related to envy and conflict), and moral (illness is caused by one’s own past actions, particularly violations of food and sexual taboos).

He agreed that BiDil should be approved without regard to race, noting that American cardiologists “jumped on the statin drugs” once the Scandinavian Simvastatin Survival Study showed they were effective. “Would you restrict the results of the Scandinavian trial to Scandinavian people?” he asked. “I don’t think so.”17 Dr. Curry’s colleague Charles Rotimi, from Howard University’s National Human Genome Center, echoed this position. Rotimi warned that upholding an unproven biological explanation for health disparities would steer biomedical research in a dangerous direction. “It would be tragic not to approve [BiDil],” Rotimi said, “and it would be even more tragic just to approve it for African Americans.” 18

Developers and entrepreneurs may someday be able to use CRISPR-based home testing kits as platforms on which to build a variety of biomedical apps: virus detection, disease diagnosis, cancer screening, nutritional analyses, microbiome assessments, and genetic tests. “We can get people in their homes to check if they have the flu or just a cold,” says Zhang.

The body remembers. It waits, patiently, until we feel strong enough to meet the parts we have abandoned. The ones we want most to forget.

If punishment is based on potential, privileged people will be given lighter sentences. Brock was shielded inside projections of what people like him grow up to become, or are supposed to become. Orthopedic surgeon. Biomedical engineer. All-American Athlete. Olympian. The judge argued he’d already lost so much, given up so many opportunities. What happens to those who start off with little to lose?

the Blank Slate had, and has, a dark side. The vacuum that it posited in human nature was eagerly filled by totalitarian regimes, and it did nothing to prevent their genocides. It perverts education, childrearing, and the arts into forms of social engineering. It torments mothers who work outside the home and parents whose children did not turn out as they would have liked. It threatens to outlaw biomedical research that could alleviate human suffering.

Equally as intriguing as the concept of personalized medicine is the proposal to develop the first drugs based on race. Think of the paradox: a classification system constructed centuries ago to enslave people became the portal for the most cutting-edge biomedical advance of the twenty-first century. Predicting drug response based on a patient’s race rather than on genetic traits, says Lawrence Lesco of the FDA’s Center for Drug Evaluation Research, is “like telling time with a sundial instead of looking at a Rolex watch.

The Wessely School rejects the significant body of biomedical evidence demonstrating that chronic “fatigue” or “tiredness” is not the same as the physiological exhaustion seen in ME/CFS and persists in believing that they have the right to demand a level of “evidence‐based” definitive proof that ME/CFS is not an “aberrant belief” as they assert, when their biopsychosocial model of “CFS/ME” that perpetuates their own aberrant belief about the nature of ME/CFS has been exposed by other psychiatrists as being nothing but a myth.

A second reason for declining to provide a date for superintelligent AI is that there is no clear threshold that will be crossed. Machines already exceed human capabilities in some areas. Those areas will broaden and deepen, and it is likely that there will be superhuman general knowledge systems, superhuman biomedical research systems, superhuman dexterous and agile robots, superhuman corporate planning systems, and so on well before we have a completely general superintelligent AI system. These “partially superintelligent” systems will, individually and collectively, begin to pose many of the same issues that a generally intelligent system would.

The Genetics of Asthma lab is one of countless research projects at universities and biotech firms around the country hunting for the genes that are responsible for health disparities in America. They are supplementing a large body of published studies that claim to show that racial gaps in disease prevalence or mortality are caused by genetic differences. In addition to asthma, disparities in infant mortality, diabetes, cancer, and hypertension have all been attributed in the scientific literature to genetic vulnerability that varies according to race. Most of these studies never even examined the genotypes of research subjects, as Burchard’s lab does; they just infer a genetic source of racial differences when they fail to find another explanation. As interest in health disparities converges with the genomic science of race, a new brand of racial stereotyping is gaining hold in biomedical research.

the Blank Slate had, and has, a dark side. The vacuum that it posited in human nature was eagerly filled by totalitarian regimes, and it did nothing to prevent their genocides. It perverts education, childrearing, and the arts into forms of social engineering. It torments mothers who work outside the home and parents whose children did not turn out as they would have liked. It threatens to outlaw biomedical research that could alleviate human suffering. Its corollary, the Noble Savage, invites contempt for the principles of democracy and of “a government of laws and not of men.” It blinds us to our cognitive and moral shortcomings. And in matters of policy it has elevated sappy dogmas above the search for workable solutions. The Blank Slate is not some ideal that we should all hope and pray is true. No, it is an anti-life, anti-human theoretical abstraction that denies our common humanity, our inherent interests, and our individual preferences.

Despite the advancements of systematic experimental pipelines, literature-curated protein-interaction data continue to be the primary data for investigation of focused biological mechanisms. Notwithstanding the variable quality of curated interactions available in public databases, the impact of inspection bias on the ability of literature maps to provide insightful information remains equivocal. The problems posed by inspection bias extend beyond mapping of protein interactions to the development of pharmacological agents and other aspects of modern biomedicine. Essentially the same 10% of the proteome is being investigated today as was being investigated before the announcement of completion of the reference genome sequence. One way forward, at least with regard to interactome mapping, is to continue the transition toward systematic and relatively unbiased experimental interactome mapping. With continued advancement of systematic protein-interaction mapping efforts, the expectation is that interactome 'deserts', the zones of the interactome space where biomedical knowledge researchers simply do not look for interactions owing to the lack of prior knowledge, might eventually become more populated. Efforts at mapping protein interactions will continue to be instrumental for furthering biomedical research.

An extensive biomedical literature has established that individuals are more likely to activate a stress response and are more at risk for a stress-sensitive disease if they (a) feel as if they have minimal control over stressors, (b) feel as if they have no predictive information about the duration and intensity of the stressor, (c) have few outlets for the frustration caused by the stressor, (d) interpret the stressor as evidence of circumstances worsening, and (e) lack social support-for the duress caused by the stressors. Psychosocial stressors are not evenly distributed across society. Just as the poor have a disproportionate share of physical stressors (hunger, manual labor, chronic sleep deprivation with a second job, the bad mattress that can't be replaced), they have a disproportionate share of psychosocial ones. Numbing assembly-line work and an occupational lifetime spent taking orders erode workers' sense of control. Unreliable cars that may not start in the morning and paychecks that may not last the month inflict unpredictability. Poverty rarely allows stress-relieving options such as health club memberships, costly but relaxing hobbies, or sabbaticals for rethinking one's priorities. And despite the heartwarming stereotype of the "poor but loving community," the working poor typically have less social support than the middle and upper classes, thanks to the extra jobs, the long commutes on public transit, and other burdens. Marmot has shown that regardless of SES, the less autonomy one has at work, the worse one's cardiovascular health. Furthermore, low control in the workplace accounts for about half the SES gradient in cardiovascular disease in his Whitehall population.

Meanwhile, scientists are studying certain drugs that may erase traumatic memories that continue to haunt and disturb us. In 2009, Dutch scientists, led by Dr. Merel Kindt, announced that they had found new uses for an old drug called propranolol, which could act like a “miracle” drug to ease the pain associated with traumatic memories. The drug did not induce amnesia that begins at a specific point in time, but it did make the pain more manageable—and in just three days, the study claimed. The discovery caused a flurry of headlines, in light of the thousands of victims who suffer from PTSD (post-traumatic stress disorder). Everyone from war veterans to victims of sexual abuse and horrific accidents could apparently find relief from their symptoms. But it also seemed to fly in the face of brain research, which shows that long-term memories are encoded not electrically, but at the level of protein molecules. Recent experiments, however, suggest that recalling memories requires both the retrieval and then the reassembly of the memory, so that the protein structure might actually be rearranged in the process. In other words, recalling a memory actually changes it. This may be the reason why the drug works: propranolol is known to interfere with adrenaline absorption, a key in creating the long-lasting, vivid memories that often result from traumatic events. “Propranolol sits on that nerve cell and blocks it. So adrenaline can be present, but it can’t do its job,” says Dr. James McGaugh of the University of California at Irvine. In other words, without adrenaline, the memory fades. Controlled tests done on individuals with traumatic memories showed very promising results. But the drug hit a brick wall when it came to the ethics of erasing memory. Some ethicists did not dispute its effectiveness, but they frowned on the very idea of a forgetfulness drug, since memories are there for a purpose: to teach us the lessons of life. Even unpleasant memories, they said, serve some larger purpose. The drug got a thumbs-down from the President’s Council on Bioethics. Its report concluded that “dulling our memory of terrible things [would] make us too comfortable with the world, unmoved by suffering, wrongdoing, or cruelty.… Can we become numb to life’s sharpest sorrows without also becoming numb to its greatest joys?” Dr. David Magus of Stanford University’s Center for Biomedical Ethics says, “Our breakups, our relationships, as painful as they are, we learn from some of those painful experiences. They make us better people.” Others disagree. Dr. Roger Pitman of Harvard University says that if a doctor encounters an accident victim who is in intense pain, “should we deprive them of morphine because we might be taking away the full emotional experience? Who would ever argue with that? Why should psychiatry be different? I think that somehow behind this argument lurks the notion that mental disorders are not the same as physical disorders.

The trends speak to an unavoidable truth. Society's future will be challenged by zoonotic viruses, a quite natural prediction, not least because humanity is a potent agent of change, which is the essential fuel of evolution. Notwithstanding these assertions, I began with the intention of leaving the reader with a broader appreciation of viruses: they are not simply life's pathogens. They are life's obligate partners and a formidable force in nature on our planet. As you contemplate the ocean under a setting sun, consider the multitude of virus particles in each milliliter of seawater: flying over wilderness forestry, consider the collective viromes of its living inhabitants. The stunnig number and diversity of viruses in our environment should engender in us greater awe that we are safe among these multitudes than fear that they will harm us. Personalized medicine will soon become a reality and medical practice will routinely catalogue and weigh a patient's genome sequence. Not long thereafter one might expect this data to be joined by the patient's viral and bacterial metagenomes: the patient's collective genetic identity will be recorded in one printout. We will doubtless discover some of our viral passengers are harmful to our health, while others are protective. But the appreciation of viruses that I hope you have gained from these pages is not about an exercise in accounting. The balancing of benefit versus threat to humanity is a fruitless task. The viral metagenome will contain new and useful gene functionalities for biomedicine: viruses may become essential biomedical tools and phages will continue to optimize may also accelerate the development of antibiotic drug resistance in the post-antibiotic era and emerging viruses may threaten our complacency and challenge our society economically and socially. Simply comparing these pros and cons, however, does not do justice to viruses and acknowledge their rightful place in nature. Life and viruses are inseparable. Viruses are life's complement, sometimes dangerous but always beautiful in design. All autonomous self-sustaining replicating systems that generate their own energy will foster parasites. Viruses are the inescapable by-products of life's success on the planet. We owe our own evolution to them; the fossils of many are recognizable in ERVs and EVEs that were certainly powerful influences in the evolution of our ancestors. Like viruses and prokaryotes, we are also a patchwork of genes, acquired by inheritance and horizontal gene transfer during our evolution from the primitive RNA-based world. It is a common saying that 'beauty is in the eye of the beholder.' It is a natural response to a visual queue: a sunset, the drape of a designer dress, or the pattern of a silk tie, but it can also be found in a line of poetry, a particularly effective kitchen implement, or even the ruthless efficiency of a firearm. The latter are uniquely human acknowledgments of beauty in design. It is humanity that allows us to recognize the beauty in the evolutionary design of viruses. They are unique products of evolution, the inevitable consequence of life, infectious egotistical genetic information that taps into life and the laws of nature to fuel evolutionary invention.

The charity was for the Autism Speaks Foundation. It was to support the biomedical research for the causes and treatments of autism in both children and adults.

Our focus, however, should not be on the differences among our sectors, but rather on supporting and promoting the entire innovation economy — from tech to bio to clean energy to health care and beyond. In fact, in its recent Impact 2020 report, the Massachusetts Biotechnology Council highlighted the interrelationship of these vital sectors working together, combining cutting-edge biomedical research with new information technology tools for capturing and integrating data, conducting sophisticated analytics, and enhancing personal connectivity. Massachusetts is a national and world leader in the growing field of life science information technology.

If today’s biomedical researchers were required to test their theories first on people they know, there would be a lot less crap making it into the scientific archives.

We define empirical research in biomedical ethics as the application of research methods in the social sciences to the direct examination of issues in biomedical ethics

Benefit-sharing and equal access to advances in biomedical science are now urgent and universal issues’ [italics added].

Abovitz is a technology entrepreneur with a background in biomedical engineering. He previously founded Mako Surgical, a company in Fort Lauderdale that makes a robotic arm equipped with haptic technology, which imparts a sense of touch so that orthopedic surgeons have the sensation of actually working on bones as they trigger the robot’s actions. Mako was sold to a medical technology company, Stryker, for nearly $1.7 billion in 2013. By night, Abovitz likes to rock out. He sings and plays guitar and bass in a pop-rock band called Sparkydog & Friends. And as he tells it, Magic Leap has its origins in both the robotic-surgery company and his life as a musician.

It is one of the sad facts of biomedical science that the road to scientific progress is littered with the bodies of both humans and animals. The modern era of human experimentation began with the Nazis. Doctors and scientists performed horrific experiments on people held in concentration camps, and all of this was justified in the name of scientific progress.

In the early 1980s, the authors of this book first heard about a medical practice that involves integrating music into the treatment of both biomedical and psychological disorders. At the time, we thought the field now called music therapy was a new mode of treatment and a new occupation. As the preceding examples illustrate, many other cultures have long recognized the connection between music and healing and have integrated the performance arts into their treatments.

Which was briefly reassuring, until some biomedical statistician from the University of fucking Buzzkill went on record about the myth of the perfect failsafe,

The main problem with the 'histronic behaviour' hypothesis, like the alternatives, is that it is unitary and simplistic, while the phenomena are complex and heterogeneous. When advanced as a sole and complete explanation, ''hysteria' is a vague and inadequate construct. ... "secondary gain and hysteria can occur as reactions to real events, real sociological problems, and real biomedical diseases, so the presence of these elements does not necessarily weigh in favour of Satanic ritual abuse's being entirely unreal. Ritual abuse cases need to be managed in such a way that hysteria, regression, grandiosity, and secondary gain are discouraged rather than fostered. However, it must be remembered that 'hysteria' and 'attention seeking' explanations generally function as justifications for not thinking about the complexities of the clinical problem.

The Icarus Project represents a new wave of resistance, one that shifts from the ontological questions of the definition of disease and illness, to the epistemological questions of whose stories and voices are considered in the production of psychiatric knowledge.

This biomedical vision was part of a more general mysticism that was as described to me and observed firsthand by an American psychiatric colleague, Albert Stunkard, who, as a schoolboy, lived in Germany during the 1930s because his father’s scientific fellowship had brought the family there. Stunkard was astounded by the behavior of many of his student friends; formerly serious and rational adolescents, they became ecstatic Nazi supporters at rallies and in their everyday demeanor. Their intense idealism seemed to him to be transformed into a mystical sense of being part of a new movement that gave meaning to their lives and promise to the human future. (Stunkard was to learn, with some sadness, that most of his friends were eventually killed in military combat.) The larger truth here is that movements that kill great numbers of people are likely to do so with the claim to virtue—and that virtue tends to be, as it was here, one of purification and healing.

This biomedical vision was part of a more general mysticism that was as described to me and observed firsthand by an American psychiatric colleague, Albert Stunkard, who, as a schoolboy, lived in Germany during the 1930s because his father’s scientific fellowship had brought the family there. Stunkard was astounded by the behavior of many of his student friends; formerly serious and rational adolescents, they became ecstatic Nazi supporters at rallies and in their everyday demeanor. Their intense idealism seemed to him to be transformed into a mystical sense of being part of a new movement that gave meaning to their lives and promise to the human future. (Stunkard was to learn, with some sadness, that most of his friends were eventually killed in military combat.) The larger truth here is that movements that kill great numbers of people are likely to do so with the claim to virtue—and that virtue tends

In his report, Dr. Pūras warned that power and decision-making in mental health are concentrated in the hands of ‘biomedical gatekeepers’, particularly those representing biological psychiatry. Dr. Puras told the United Nations that these gatekeepers, supported by the pharmaceutical industry, maintain this power by adhering to two outdated concepts: that people experiencing mental distress and diagnosed with ‘mental disorders’ are dangerous, and that biomedical interventions are medically necessary in many cases. According to Dr. Puras, ‘these concepts perpetuate stigma and discrimination, as well as the practices of coercion that remain widely accepted in mental health systems today

But the biomedical model creates uncertainty for these common conditions that are not explained by underlying disease.”2 That uncertainty follows from our innate distrust of the patient’s story when we cannot match it with the hard data of physical examination techniques or scans, X-rays, blood tests, scopes, biopsies or electrodiagnostic tools. In such cases, the complainant finds her symptoms dismissed by doctors. Worse, she may be accused of drug-seeking behaviour, of being neurotic, manipulative, of “just looking for attention.” IBS patients, as well as people with chronic fatigue syndrome and fibromyalgia, often find themselves in that situation.

Donald Seldin, a distinguished physician-scientist, in his widely publicized address titled “The Boundaries of Medicine”: Medicine is a very narrow discipline. Its goals may be defined as the relief of pain, the prevention of disability, and the postponement of death by the application . . . of medical science to individual patients. . . . A heritage which invests medicine with the priestly function of the counselor and comforter of the sick . . . has resulted [in] a tendency to construe all sorts of human problems as medical problems. This medicalization of human experience leads to enormous . . . frustration and disillusionment when medical intervention fails to eventuate in tranquility . . . and happiness. Human problems . . . are medical problems and medical illnesses only when they can be approached by the theories and techniques of biomedical science.

While biomedical models tend to use the terms complex visual hallucination, compound hallucination to denote apparitions, explaining their mediation by reference to aberrant neurophysiological activity in cerebral areas and/or the temporo-parieto-occipital junction, parapsychological models tend to combine such biomedical explanations with hypotheses related to a metaphysical origin of the perceived apparitions, such as the telepathic powers of dead or living agents.

There are many reports that suggest a biomedical basis for post-exertional malaise. This is inconsistent with the assumption that there is pathological avoidance of exertion in ME/CFS, and makes it difficult to believe that exercise leads to improvement.

The Sanctity foundation is crucial for understanding the American culture wars, particularly over biomedical issues. If you dismiss the Sanctity foundation entirely, then it’s hard to understand the fuss over most of today’s biomedical controversies.

He’s a professor of mechanical and biomedical engineering at the local university. He is somewhat renowned in his field. This is what I’m told by his adoring colleagues and students at boring cocktail parties where I play the part of devoted wife. They always marvel at what it must be like to be married to the great Dr. David Foster III. They imagine, I think, that our nights are filled with romantic whisperings about fluid dynamics and heat transfer or the power of biomechanical joints. They forget that I am a writer and maintain only a cursory understanding of and interest in David’s work—just enough to assure him that my love is true.

The idea of race was in retreat in the second half of the 20th century in the aftermath of the defeat of Nazism and discoveries in the science of genetics, although the 21st century has seen (unconvincing) attempts to revive the notion. Nowadays, there is a tendency to regard intercommunal hostilities as stemming from issues of cultural rather than racial difference, except on the very far right and among some who (misleadingly) base their assertions on recent biomedical research.

Ethan Watters published a book called Crazy Like Us: The Globalization of the American Psyche, which details how psychiatry and psychopharmacology have collaborated to basically make the rest of the world as miserable as America,

The voice of those with “lived experience” can be broadly grouped into two types, depending on whether they understand their own lives within the context of the conventional medical paradigm, or in resistance to that paradigm, and it is only the first group that is well heard by society

In the domain of mental health, huge pools of data are being used to train algorithms to identify signs of mental illness—a threat I call “surveillance psychiatry.” Electronic health records, data mining social networks, and even algorithmically classifying video surveillance will significantly amplify this approach. Corporations and governments are salivating at the prospect of identifying psychological vulnerability and dissent.

Embryonic stem cells have made a major impact on biomedical research over the past decade or so. Scientists routinely make specific, designed alterations to the genes of mouse ES cells and then inject some of these cells into the inner cell mass of a normal mouse embryo. The mouse that results has a body that is a mixture of normal cells, from the un-manipulated inner cell mass, and the genetically modified cells from the engineered ES cells.

biomedical view, for its part, increasingly recognizes the power of things like meditation and traditional talk therapy to render concrete structural changes in brain physiology that are every bit as “real” as the changes wrought by pills or electroshock therapy. A study published by researchers at Massachusetts General Hospital in 2011 found that subjects who practiced meditation for an average of just twenty-seven minutes a day over a period of eight weeks produced visible changes in brain structure. Meditation led to decreased density of the amygdala, a physical change that was correlated with subjects’ self-reported stress levels—as their amygdalae got less dense, the subjects felt less stressed. Other studies have found that Buddhist monks who are especially good at meditating show much greater activity in their frontal cortices, and much less in their amygdalae, than normal people.n Meditation and deep-breathing exercises work for similar reasons as psychiatric medications do, exerting their effects not just on some abstract concept of mind but concretely on our bodies, on the somatic correlates of our feelings. Recent research has shown that even old-fashioned talk therapy can have tangible, physical effects on the shape of our brains. Perhaps Kierkegaard was wrong to say that the man who has learned to be in anxiety has learned the most important, or the most existentially meaningful, thing—perhaps the man has only learned the right techniques for controlling his hyperactive amygdala.o

It is widely believed by the general public that a retrovirus called HIV causes a group of diseases called AIDS. Many biomedical scientists now question this hypothesis. We propose a thorough reappraisal of the existing evidence for and against this hypothesis, to be conducted by a suitable independent group. We further propose that the critical epidemiological studies be devised and undertaken.2,3

The dominant model of disease in our time is biomedical, built on a foundation of molecular biology. As Engel explains, It assumes disease to be fully accounted for by deviations from the norm of measurable biological (somatic) variables. It leaves no room within its framework for the social, psychological, and behavioral dimensions of illness. The biomedical model not only requires that disease be dealt with as an entity independent of social behavior, it also demands that behavioral aberrations be explained on the basis of disordered somatic (biochemical or neurophysiological) processes. Thus the biomedical model embraces both reductionism, the philosophic view that complex phenomena are ultimately derived from a single primary principle, and mind-body dualism.

At present, psychiatry is ruled by the biomedical model, which attributes all disturbed mental and emotional function to imbalances in brain chemistry, treatable with drugs. If this were the whole story, psychiatric drugs would be much more effective than they are. Pharmaceutical companies exaggerate their benefits and downplay their risks in marketing them to both doctors and the public.

The word psychiatry derives from Greek roots meaning “soul doctoring”—a noble enterprise. Sadly, psychiatry today has lost touch with its roots. It is now dominated by the biomedical model, which attributes all disturbances of mental and emotional health to imbalances of brain biochemistry, correctable by medication. Big Pharma has taken great advantage of this by marketing an array of drugs to treat depression, anxiety, and major mental illnesses.

Others have looked at this war from a biomedical perspective, or from a strictly political one. My focus is on how this ongoing war against us is far more basic, aimed at nothing less than dissolving the meaning of humanity itself and undoing of the rich cultural legacy we in the West have long treasured and passed on to succeeding generations.

I am medically trained in kidney dialysis.

The biomedical world that I thought I was living in has been revealed to be a sham. The legitimacy of the industry and discipline that I have committed my entire professional life to is in shambles. I am now embarrassed to call myself a vaccines and biodefense expert, because the fundamental corruption inherent in those domains has been so clearly revealed. I cannot unsee what I have seen. I cannot recapture all of those years spent in a profoundly corrupt academic system, spent supporting a deeply compromised discipline that appears primarily driven by financial interests rather than by what I had naively believed was a commitment to saving lives. I chose to not pursue the careers of my father and father-in-law, which were spent building weapons of war. Only to find that I had inadvertently played a significant role in enabling one of the most tragic medical follies in the history of man.

After a decade of using the medical profession, I had concluded that it was much better to research your own sickness using the internet and books, and to self treat with over the counter drugs, supplements and commercially available biomedical devices.

Pearl combines aspects of structural equations models and path diagrams. In this approach, assumptions underlying causal statements are coded as missing links in the path diagrams. Mathematical methods are then used to infer, from these path diagrams, which causal effects can be inferred from the data, and which cannot. Pearl's work is interesting, and many researchers find his arguments that path diagrams are a natural and convenient way to express assumptions about causal structures appealing. In our own work, perhaps influenced by the type of examples arising in social and medical sciences, we have not found this approach to aid drawing of causal inferences, and we do not discuss it further in this text.

Magee’s Disease was discovered by Chartered Electrical Engineer Steven Magee as he used his biomedical training to work through an array of strange health conditions that showed up during and after his time in very high altitude astronomy atop the biologically toxic summit of Mauna Kea, Hawaii, USA.

Although claiming to be neutral as to what supposedly causes madness, the DSM and its diagnoses are based upon a biomedical model (Erlandsson & Punzi, 2016). Essentially, by medicalizing human suffering, the problems in society, within families, and the general injustice of the world go ignored. Instead, the problems are placed inside individual brains. If context is considered, it becomes a mere trigger of an underlying disease rather than the problem in itself.

The ultimate biomedical illusion has been the view that the body is made of solid matter with fluid pumped through it by an unconscious heart and a powerful conscious brain that is the primary controller of the entire system. Energy cardiology suggests, however, that the heart and not just the brain is what holds this system together by a form of spiritual info-energy, in a temporary and ever-changing set of cellular memories we refer to as “the self.” This “self” is the dynamic gestalt of information that might be considered the code that constitutes our soul.

If tech corporations, biomedical labs, and covert military projects manage to achieve some semblance of Kurzweil’s Singularity, nothing in our lives will be the same. If they lure the masses into virtual reality, if they produce CRISPR babies on demand, if a world power develops an artificial general intelligence that can break through any defense system, then the world as we know it will end.

Further, increased adoption of the biomedical ideology is actually associated, overall, with worse outcomes (Firmin, Luther, Lysaker, Minor, & Salyers, 2016), decreased hope, and increased stigma and prejudice (Angermeyer & Matschinger, 2005; Read et al., 2006; Read & Harre, 2001).

In contrast, the Indian and Tibetan yogic traditions claim to provide detailed accounts of the transformations of consciousness during the dying process. Tibetan Buddhism, in particular, as we’ve seen in earlier chapters, offers a rich contemplative perspective on death, including meditations to prepare for death and to practice as one dies. This kind of experiential view of dying and death is missing from the biomedical perspective. Nevertheless, we might wonder exactly how these yogic traditions, rooted in foreign cultures and belief systems, can help us to recover an experiential approach to death in our modern Western context.

Grant Talab's strategic thinking extends seamlessly to his role as a Research Scientist at Biomedical Engineering Institute.

Whatever characteristic we identify as possessed only by humans will not be possessed by all humans. Some humans will have the exact same deficiency that we attribute to animals, and although we may not allow such humans to drive cars or attend universities, most of us would shut out the prospect of enslaving such humans, using them as unconsenting subjects in biomedical research, or otherwise using them exclusively as a means to an ends.

Beyond its effects on health and the health care industry, COVID-19 has empowered the global elite more than ever before to manufacture lies and half-truths. Uber-powerful Silicon Valley Big Tech corporations (Facebook, Google, Microsoft, and Amazon), Big Pharma, the World Health Organization (WHO), and philanthropic giant Bill Gates have indentured politicians and scientists from across the political spectrum. The result is fearmongering, political polarization, and social engineering—all wrapped in a disguise of protection. A shadowy network of military contractors and bioweapons specialists are hiding behind the façade of biomedical and vaccine research while Big Tech silences their critics.

Before 1980, ownership gridlock was not a major problem for drug developers. Scientists published their research findings more or less freely and were rewarded for their labor with academic tenure, peer recognition, lecture invitations, awards, and maybe even a Nobel Prize. Recognition (and not ownership) was enough to spur the great twentieth-century biomedical innovations—humanity-transforming discoveries from penicillin to the polio vaccine.

If neuromaturation could provide biomedical indicators of personhood, then, as human persons distinct from merely living organisms, we would exist essentially from “brain life” to “brain death” (Jones 1989, 1998).

First, there is a knowledge gap: the average doctor does not know as much about women’s bodies and the health problems that afflict them. It starts at the most basic level of biomedical research, where investigators overwhelmingly use male cells and animals in preclinical studies.

found you on the CRISP website. I was looking for someone at UCSF with an R01 doing research in kidney disease,” I said. CRISP, now called the NIH RePORTER, was the National Institutes of Health’s searchable database of all federally funded biomedical research projects. I knew that the NIH’s R01 grant mechanism, which was awarded to researchers who no longer needed a research mentor, allowed the researcher to apply for smaller research grants to support someone from backgrounds underrepresented in medicine—Blacks, Hispanics, or Native Americans, individuals with a physical or mental disability, or those who grew up in poverty—at every level of education, from a high school student to a college student, a medical student, resident, or fellow.

The usual biomedical approach is to compensate for the incapacity of the body by introducing a drug that makes the body do what it is supposed to do. The holistic approach is different. Instead of trying to force the body to operate as we want it to, we try to return it to a state of health where it can take care of itself. In

The popularity of biomedical treatments for autism mirrored the general rise of interest in so-called complementary and alternative medicine in recent decades. By the first years of the twenty-first century, the trade in high-dose vitamins and supplements had become an economic powerhouse, with annual sales topping $33 billion. Americans now consult their homeopaths, naturopaths, herbalists, acupuncturists, chiropractors, and Reiki workers more often than they see their primary care physicians. Up to three quarters of all autistic children in the United States receive some form of alternative treatment, with dietary interventions often beginning even before their diagnosis.

where Endre, a biomedical researcher, worked at finding applications for hyaluronic acid, a collagen-like lubricant that occurs naturally in the eyes of cows and the combs of roosters and was proving useful in combating such ailments in humans as burns, arthritis, and cataracts.

We are in an exciting new era of biomedical research. Scientists can now read the entire sequence of someone’s genome, all 4.6 billion letters spread across the forty-six chromosomes, in a process that takes just a couple of weeks and costs about a thousand dollars. (The first complete sequencing of a human genome took over a decade to finish and cost nearly three hundred million dollars.)

As well as being a successful businesswoman who founded and has built her own company from the ground up, Juno Biomedical, Inc.

Although she has a reputation as a serious and hardworking professional in her field of biomedical research, Trisha Pfluger, M.S., PMP, a Northwest Arkansas resident, still thinks of herself as a fun, approachable person. When not working, Trisha Pfluger of Northwest Arkansas takes the time to meditate and hike with her dog on the beautiful trails of Northwest Arkansas (NWA) near her retreat home. Since founding Juno Biomedical in 2014, Trisha Pfluger, a Northwest Arkansas businesswoman, has led the company to great success in developing next generation deep brain stimulation (DBS) technology in close collaboration with a team of experts at the FDA.

As a bio-medical engineer, I have concerns about advising people to electromagnetically shield their homes as it may lead to natural radiation deficiency conditions in addition to Electromagnetic Hypersensitivity (EHS).

Stopping in the 1970s, "Hybridity" as the fifth and final chapter is less of an end point than a certain realization of the artifice, plasticity, and technology that Wells and Loeb envisioned as the future of the human relationship to living matter as well as of the "catastrophic" situation that Georges Canghuilhem (following Kurt Goldstein) saw in life subjected to the milieu of the laboratory.

However, I have a stronger hunch that the greatest part of the important biomedical research waiting to be done is in the class of basic science. There is an abundance of interesting fact relating to all our major diseases, and more items of information are coming in steadily from all quarters in biology. The new mass of knowledge is still formless, in complete, lacking the essential threads of connection, displaying misleading signals at every turn, riddled with blind alleys. There are fascinating ideas all over the place, irresistible experiments beyond numbering, all sorts of new ways into the maze of problems. But every next move is unpredictable, every outcome uncertain. It is a puzzling time, but a very good time. I do not know how you lay out orderly plans for this kind of activity, but I suppose you could find out by looking through the disorderly records of the past hundred years. Somehow, the atmosphere has to be set so that a disquieting sense of being wrong is the normal attitude of the investigators. It has to be taken for granted that the only way in is by riding the unencumbered human imagination, with the special rigor required for recognizing that something can be highly improbable, maybe almost impossible, and at the same time true. Locally, a good way to tell how the work is going is to listen in the corridors. If you hear the word, "Impossible!" spoken as an expletive, followed by laughter, you will know that someone's orderly research plan is coming along nicely.

The United Nations—in its official statement for World Health Day in 2017—explained3 that “the dominant biomedical narrative of depression” is based on “biased and selective use of research outcomes” that “cause more harm than good, undermine the right to health, and must be abandoned.” There is a “growing evidence base,” they state, that there are deeper causes of depression, so while there is some role for medications, we need to stop using them “to address issues which are closely related to social problems.” We need to move from “focusing on ‘chemical imbalances’ to focusing on ‘power imbalances.

As two leading weight loss experts, Dr Corby Martin and Professor Kishore Gadde from Pennington Biomedical Research Center, Baton Rouge, put it, ‘The myth that rapid weight loss is associated with rapid weight gain is no more true than Aesop’s fables.

Indigenous peoples' DNA is seen as a resource for use in medical, behavioral, anthropological, and genetic variation studies. Kanaka Maoli DNA has been sought for research at UH. For example, Dr. Charles Boyd, who was a researcher at UH's Pacific Biomedical Research Center, drafted a proposal for a Hawaiian Genome Project seeking $5–10 million to produce an annotated map of the entire genetic makeup of the Hawaiian people. Boyd stated, “There are many communities now with their own unique genetic history imprinted into their genomes and these include Asians, Europeans and the peoples of Oceania. The Hawaiian genome represents an important example of one of these communities of the Oceania people.”12 Boyd was hoping to target residents of the Hawaiian Homestead communities because they are seen as being the most purebred native Hawaiians. He hoped to find a genetic basis for the high rate of obesity, diabetes, renal disease, and hypertension in Kanaka Maoli.13 This type of research essentializes the role of genes, while devaluing key environmental and lifestyle factors, including the role dispossession of land has had in traditional diet and activities.

Biomedicine locates sickness in a specific place in an individual body: a headache, a stomachache a torn knee, lung cancer. Medical anthropologists instead locate sickness and health in three interconnected bodies: the political, the social, and the physical. The prevailing political economy impacts the distribution of sickness and health in a society and the means available to heal those who are sick. For example, poor individuals worldwide are more exposed to toxins that make them sick, while the rich stay healthier. The social body constructs the meanings and experiences surrounding particular physical states. It determines the ideal physical body, legitimizing biomedical practices like plastic surgery to attain it. The social body also determines the boundaries of the physical body. Some cultures locate sickness not in individuals but instead in families or communities. As any caregiver knows, we live the sickness too. And while biomedicine can cure diseases it flounders with permanent hurts, troubles of the mind, states present from birth or that are incurable or progressive. In biomedicine, these states are stigmatized and feared. We medical anthropologists have a term for this: social death.

Rather than medical killing being subsumed to war, the war itself was subsumed to the vast biomedical vision of which “euthanasia” was a part.