RE: An Unnecessary Evil, Memoir Monday #8

[deirdyweirdy]

I heard one of the Bigelsen brothers speaking at Anarchapulco. Fascinating stuff. If we can diagnose illness from a simple blood sample and treat the condition with homoeopathy, it makes the entire medical-industrial complex redundant.

Comments

[carolkean]

One drop of blood: didn't Theranos make this claim?

that Theranos' technology could use a drop of blood to instantly test for a host of medical conditions.
.... a modernized blood test, advertising a cheap finger prick that could run any commercially available blood diagnostic on a device about the size of a large PC at lower cost than conventional labs that take up entire rooms.
Elizabeth Holmes recruited big names to her board of directors, like former Secretary of State Henry Kissinger and former Secretary of Defense James Mattis, and drew hundreds of millions of dollars in private investment. Feted at conferences, gracing the covers of glossy business magazines, Holmes was held up as an icon of female leadership and achievement. And in 2014, she became the world’s youngest female self-made billionaire, and her company was valued at over $9 billion.

But The Wall Street Journal reported in 2015 and 2016 that Theranos' devices were inaccurate and that the company was secretly resorting to running blood tests on other companies' machines, the very ones her company was supposed to be disrupting.
But the technology was faulty. Whenever someone would ask how Theranos could do what it purported to do, Holmes and others would respond that discussing the inner workings of their machines would reveal trade secrets. Theranos had simply repurposed commercially available blood analysis technology to run on smaller amounts of blood, The Wall Street Journal revealed in October 2015.

More here: https://www.nbcnews.com/business/business-news/elizabeth-holmes-verdict-theranos-trial-rcna9022

[deirdyweirdy]

Of course this could be the case with the Bigelsens, however, they seem genuine and anxious to share information. No matter whether you believe we're in a simulacrum, a video game or a world created as a test where we earn eternal punishment or reward, don't you think that it's pretty perfectly designed? Isn't it the sort of perfection which would include a simple diagnostic tool like this?

[carolkean]

This has been on my mind, actually, esp. "a world created as a test where we earn eternal punishment or reward" - and reading of the Bigelsens led me today to reading about "psychic Edgar Cayce (pronounced Casey), who died in 1945 at age 67..."

Cayce, asked about Judas Iscariot, said the soul of Judas, the betrayer of Christ, was at that moment inhabiting the body of a man then alive. "But he said the man (with Judas` soul) was leading a constructive life, and it would have been devastating for him to learn who he once had been."
.... Lynn Sparrow conducts seminars for ARE ... telling us about Cayce, "a very ordinary man with an extraordinary ability." Born in 1877 in a rural part of Kentucky, the son of an uneducated farm couple, he quit school in 9th grade, then held jobs as a bookstore clerk and an insurance salesman, when at age 21 he inexplicably lost his voice. In the struggle to eventually regain it, he would discover that while in a trance, he could diagnose an apparently limitless range of illnesses and prescribe treatment; thousands of people believed themselves to be cured by the methods that Cayce directed.

https://www.chicagotribune.com/1987/05/17/the-search-for-past-life/

[deirdyweirdy]

Interesting! There are more things in heaven and earth an' all that.