By Davis Taylor
July 9, 2024
It's dawning on many that the "science" they were raised to believe is chock full of fairy tales. Recently, when watching a video by Dr. Sam Bailey, I realized that part of my own family history-concerning my paternal grandfather's ailment-includes some of that fairy tale dust. More on that video later.
My grandfather died when I was a toddler and, growing up, I heard that he was a good man (a husband, father, and mechanic), with a Renaissance man quality, who painted landscape art and built contraptions in his spare time. However, I also heard of the tragic turn his life took when he developed severe ulcers and died at the age of forty-nine, shortly after undergoing a surgery which removed a third of his stomach.
My father always stressed two things about that surgery: the pain my grandfather was in following it; and its unfortunate timing because my father was told years after the surgery, by a doctor, that it had just been proven that ulcers are caused by bacteria and curable by antibiotics. Thus, the reasoning goes, the surgery was avoidable-if only they'd known.
Dr. Barry Marshall is often credited with having proven that the bacterium Helicobacter pylori (H. pylori) causes gastritis and ulcers via an experiment in which he participated. That experiment is the subject of an article published in 1985 in the Medical Journal of Australia.
It turns out that Dr. Sam Bailey has reviewed Dr. Marshall's so-called seminal experiment and found it to be "peppered with pseudoscience methodologies." In her video entitled, " Can you Catch Stomach Ulcers", she walks us through the 1985 article discussing the experiment. Her analysis illustrates why the public should scrutinize all scientific studies that impact their lives, including those used by politicians to justify public policy, rather than simply relying on what they're told about them.
In her video, Dr. Bailey notes the following things about the experiment.
- As part of the experiment, Dr. Marshall intentionally consumed a concoction said to contain H. pylori (then called Campylobacter pylori).
- The experiment lacked an adequate sample size, as Dr. Marshall was its sole subject.
- The experiment lacked a control group.
- Dr. Marshall altered the natural environment of his stomach at the onset of the experiment because three hours before consuming the three-day old concoction reportedly containing H. pylori, he took a drug to suppress the hydrochloric acid in his stomach.
- Following ingestion of the concoction, Dr. Marshall self-reported having an upset stomach.
- On the 10th day following ingestion of the concoction, a gastroscopy was performed on Dr. Marshall which found inflammatory changes in his stomach lining and the presence of H. pylori in biopsies.
- On the 14th day following ingestion of the concoction, another gastroscopy was performed on Dr. Marshall, which found no H. pylori and that his stomach lining inflammation was resolved. Also on that day, Dr. Marshall began taking a course of antibiotics, which he continued for a week, and he reportedly felt completely back to normal within one day of beginning the antibiotics.
In summary, during Dr. Marshall's experiment, which had an insufficient number of subjects and lacked a control group, he took a drug to suppress his stomach acid prior to ingesting the concoction reportedly containing H. pylori and the inflammation in his stomach lining was already resolved prior to him beginning a course of antibiotics. Clearly, the experiment failed to follow the scientific method and failed to prove that H. pylori causes gastritis and ulcers, as it's generally accepted as having proven.
In her video, Dr. Bailey discusses other experiments conducted regarding the issue of whether H. pylori causes gastritis and ulcers, which also failed to show such causation (e.g., a 1984 experiment, which attempted to infect pigs with H. pylori to show that it causes peptic ulcers and failed to demonstrate this; and a 1992 experiment involving four rhesus monkeys whose stomachs were internally sprayed with a substance containing H. pylori, which found that none of the monkeys became ill or developed ulcers, that only one monkey developed any significant inflammation in its stomach, and that the levels of H. pylori in the monkeys' stomachs fluctuated weekly from positive to negative).
Dr. Bailey fairly sums up the situation regarding H. pylori in her video. She describes it as a "scientifically untenable paradigm" because over 80% of those "infected" with H. pylori are reportedly asymptomatic, and it's simultaneously said to be part of the natural stomach ecology and to also cause gastritis and ulcers. The pieces of the story simply don't add up. And, certainly, the doctor who told my father years ago that it was proven that H. pylori causes ulcers was conveying a fairy tale, not a proven fact. The Final Pandemic: An... Buy New $24.99
Before concluding, one key point should be made-that "falsification" does not require an immediate "replacement." When learning that an accepted scientific "fact" is actually false, the human mind tends to want an immediate alternative explanation-to know the alternate "thing" that actually caused something to happen, to replace what's been proven to be false. Thus, when it's shown that H. pylori has not been proven to cause ulcers, we tend to immediately ask, "Well then, what does cause ulcers?" The answer to that question seems uncertain at this point. A multitude of factors may be involved in the development of ulcers. Dr. Bailey discusses some of them in her video.
Conclusion
Dr. Bailey's website is useful for anyone being told they're at risk from a pathogen. She's working her way through the purported pathogens, inspecting the so-called foundational studies which proved them to be illness-causing (and, in the case of viruses, to exist). Thus far, she's found that a slew of them failed to follow the scientific method and, due to flawed methodology, failed to prove much of anything.
It may be wise to have Dr. Bailey's website saved to favorites these days, considering that we're now being told another pathogen is on the verge of endangering humanity-this time bird flu. It seems we could all use a good foundation inspector at this point.