Exposing the vast but unrecognized dangers of steroids and the forgotten causes of autoimmune disease

Story at a Glance:

•Corticosteroids are amongst the most widely used drugs in medicine, but ever since their discovery, serious concerns about their safety have arisen, leading to lower and lower “safe” doses being used that were later recognized as not safe either.

•Many of the effects of steroids reflect a common criticism of modern medicine. By focusing on treating symptoms, the body's innate healing mechanism is suppressed, leading to more severe illnesses emerging later.

•This article will hence review the wide range of severe side effects of steroids, the rationales behind their common uses in medicine, and the rationality of each application (as many uses have risks that greatly exceed their benefits).

•Many excellent conventional and natural alternatives now exist to steroid therapy, further weakening the justification for these unsafe drugs. Those alternatives will be reviewed in this article.

•In many cases, there is an underlying cause of the disorder that a steroid is used to treat, which the patient can often treat without relying upon a prescription. Unfortunately, due to the pharmacologic focus of our medical system, there is a general lack of awareness of the non-pharmacologic options freely available to patients.

•Since steroid therapy is commonly used to treat autoimmune disorders, this article will review the conventional and integrative therapies that reliably treat autoimmune disorders (e.g., rheumatoid arthritis, fibromyalgia, thyroiditis, polymyalgia rheumatica, and inflammatory bowel disease) without requiring toxic pharmacologic interventions that expose patients to significant harm.

Many of the problems we currently see in medicine are not new, but rather iterations of things that have been forgotten and occurred countless times in the past. For example, the COVID mRNA vaccines are not the first time the medical field has experienced irrational exuberance for a dubious remedy, even as some of their colleagues spoke out against it (at great risk to their professional standing). Here, we’ll look at what happened with corticosteroids, both because it provides a critical window into much of what’s gone awry with medicine and because steroids are some of the most problematic but widely used medications on the market.

Allopathy

Because of the work that has been done to enshrine our system of medicine as the gold standard everything else must measure up to, many are not aware it is just one of many approaches to healing that has been developed throughout history, or even that in previous eras, it had its own label rather than just being “medicine.”

Note: one of the major challenges I run into when writing is that there is no widely accepted term for our system of medicine, as they either simply assert it is “the standard” (e.g., conventional medicine or modern medicine) or frame it in a cultural context (e.g., “Western Medicine”). Of the accepted options, “biomedicine” is probably the most accurate (but largely unknown to the general public), whereas “standard medicine” (a term I made up) has become my favorite as it encapsulates it being the orthodox approach, the need of medicine to treat patients through standardized algorithms that ignore their individuality, and highlights J.D. Rockefeller’s monopolization of medicine in the early 1900s (as he named his oil monopoly “Standard Oil”).

Almost two thousand years ago, Galen, a Greek physician in Rome, collated, systematized, and refined existing approaches to medicine, particularly those originating in Greece, and then disseminated them worldwide. Central to Galen’s approach were the importance of anatomy (gained through continuous dissections) and the humoral theory of disease, which dominated Western medicine until around the 1850s.

For context, Hippocrates' humoral theory of disease posited that health depended on the balance of four bodily fluids, known as humors: blood, phlegm, yellow bile, and black bile. Each humor was associated with specific qualities (hot, cold, wet, dry), elements (air, water, fire, earth), and temperaments (sanguine, phlegmatic, choleric, melancholic). Within this framework, disease resulted from an imbalance of these humors, caused by factors such as diet, environment, or lifestyle. Treatments, including bloodletting, purging, and dietary changes, aimed to restore humoral balance.

While this framework somewhat resembled what other cultures had come up with (e.g., the “fire” of the five elements in Chinese Medicine and “Pitta” of Ayurveda largely matched “yellow bile”), like surgery, it was more unique in its tendency to use forceful measures to correct a perceived humoral imbalance in the body. This in turn, gave way to a system of medicine where drugs that created dramatic physiologic changes (e.g., mercury, lead, arsenic, and opium) became the therapeutic mainstays of Western medicine, particularly since it was much easier to tell a drug “worked” if it created a dramatic effect.

Unfortunately, in many cases, those dramatic effects (e.g., it rapidly inducing vomiting) were due to the drug being highly toxic so many were injured by these early drugs, which in turn required the medical profession to aggressively double-down on the importance of their approach (particularly since so many people were being severely poisoned by mercury based drugs).
Note: during my training, another doctor proudly showed me the bag his father had brought to many visits, and sure enough, it had mercury in it (which remarkably the doctor did not even realize was mercury).

Because of the poor outcomes this form of medicine often produced, a variety of alternative approaches came into existence (e.g., Homeopathy in 1796, Eclectic Medicine in 1827, Osteopathy in 1874, Chiropractic in 1895 and Naturopathy in 1901), all of which were based on supporting the body’s ability to heal itself rather than trying to force the body into its desired state. To cement this distinction, the founder of Homeopathy used the term “Allopathy,” (“allo” means ‘other’ or ‘different’) as it highlighted allopathic medicine’s tendency to use external interventions (e.g., drugs or surgery) that created effects opposite to the existing disease in order to bring the body towards its desire state.
Note: initially, Allopathy was a derisive term, but in time some MDs adopted it to distinguish themselves from their competition, however once Allopathy used a variety of monopolistic tactics around 1910 to take over the medical marketplace (which was necessary to save the dying profession), Allopathy faded into obscurity and Allopaths simply referred to themselves as “doctors” while Allopathic medicine became “medicine” (and all the other approaches to healing largely faded into obscurity despite many offering immense benefit to patients).

As Allopathic medicine evolved (e.g., new drugs were discovered) it gravitated towards drugs which suppressed the unpleasant symptoms in the body (e.g., fevers or skin eruptions), in part because this matched its pre-existing mentality of forcefully overriding illness and in part because this was the easiest way to create a dramatic change in a patient (hence inspiring confidence in both the doctor and patient).

At the same time however, the competing schools of medicine became more and more aware of the damage Allopathic remedies created and gradually concluded that while suppressing symptoms could lead to short term improvements, it often also lead to the subsequent creation of severe illnesses (which coincides with Allopathic medicine being excellent at treating acute emergencies but poorly equipped to treat chronic diseases).

A key insight during this debate (Hering’s Law of Cure) came from a Homeopath who concluded that healing occurs in a specific order (e.g., from the inside out, from the head down, and in the reverse order of symptom appearance) and that disease occurs in the opposite direction (e.g., initially at a superficial level and then eventually at a deep one). Thus, by allopathically suppressing symptoms (which were often the body’s attempt to expel a pathogenic factor), rather than curing the illness, the pathogenic factor was instead pushed deeper into the body, creating a more severe illness in the future.

Note: Chinese medicine holds a similar perspective and argues that the defensive energy of the body which reacts to illness (the “Wei Qi)” functions to prevent external pathogenic factors from penetrating into the body. Chinese medicine in turn maps a progression of increasing severity of disease as the pathogenic factor travels from the superficial to the deep energy channels of the body (something I believe correlates with increasing blood stasis and loss of zeta potential obstructing larger and larger vessels). As such, Chinese Medicine’s treatments are often aimed at expelling a pathogenic factor rather than counteracting the symptomatic reaction to it. Conversely, some schools of Chinese medicine advocated for suppressing the initial reaction to the more dangerous plagues (as this was lifesaving at the time), but acknowledged this resulted in a chronic infection in the future.

Throughout my career, I have seen numerous extremely compelling cases of Hering’s Law of Cure (e.g., children with significant reactions to vaccines being given Tylenol for their fevers and then experiencing a much more severe illness, such as autistic regression, or COVID-19 patients crashing after their unpleasant fever is suppressed). Unfortunately, this principle remains largely unrecognized, and as a result, many standard medical practices are simply aggressive suppression of symptoms.

Note: Hering’s Law of Cure subsequently expanded to recognize that the “deeper” layer of physical symptoms were emotional and mental in nature, and then even deeper ones were spiritual symptoms

The Global Loss of Vitality

Early on, when I began reading about the largely forgotten history of medicine, I was struck by two things:

•How profoundly damaging many of the early Allopathic remedies were (e.g., I’ve previously written about the smallpox vaccines, and this book does an excellent job at shedding light on the damage mercury did over the centuries).

•How much healthier people (who weren’t poisoned by a mercury prescribing doctor) were and how much more effective many natural therapies were in the past than they are now.

This second point prompted me to begin asking older doctors (from various medical schools) if they had observed a general decline in human vitality in the patients they saw at the start of their careers compared to the end, and all of them shared that they had. Additionally:

•They noted that beyond patients becoming much sicker and having conditions they’d never seen before, it was also much harder to treat them as each therapy they used had shifted from making a dramatic improvement to a more minuscule one, which required numerous successive treatments to bring about an improvement.

•They typically attributed this shift to a loss in human vitality. They cited a variety of correlates (e.g., the average human body temperature dropping, people becoming less able to mount fevers, infants being less able to produce a brisk cry, or increasing degrees of fluid stagnation in their patients).

•They stated some of the treatments that had been developed by their profession were specifically made to address this loss of vitality, as their original treatments no longer worked. Conversely, some shared that when patients were placed in environments that restored aspects of their vitality (e.g., by being somewhere with exceptionally clean air), much less needed to be done to improve their condition.

•One doctor I spoke to had asked this same question of their mentor, while another had asked a mentor who’d also asked their mentor—all of whom corroborated that this decline in vitality had been continually in motion since at least the late 1800s.

Note: typically this decline in vitality proceeds in a linear fashion and then spikes at certain times (e.g., after the introduction of the smallpox vaccine, the 1986 law which granted immunity to vaccine manufacturers and led to a rapid proliferation in the vaccine schedule, and after the COVID vaccines). In each case, this increase in disease gets normalized and forgotten by the next generation of doctors (who entered practice after the last wave of sickness had become the “new normal”) and by the time its noticed, it’s often too late for them to share it (e.g., I was just speaking to a colleague who entered practice in the early 1970s and remarked that he used to have many patients in their 90s and 100s who were very mentally clear, that the dementia we frequently see in the elderly now was quite rare then, and that time it was rare to see cancers except in fairly old patients).

In turn, while I thought this model of decreasing vitality was valid (particularly since countless datasets have shown an explosion in the rates of chronic illness over the decades), it was much harder to say what was responsible as a good case could be made for so many different factors in our environment that the answer one arrived at was nearly guaranteed to be the product of one’s biases and specific focus rather than an objective assessment. Nonetheless, when I asked a variety of skilled practitioners who’d successfully treated the “unsolvable” chronic illnesses over the decades, they shared that they typically found the root issue in those diseases was one of the following:

•Heavy metal toxicity
•Dental issues (particularly root canals).
•Pharmaceutical drugs
•Vaccines
•Chemical toxicity
•Dysfunctional dynamics perpetuating in their family constellation
•Electrosmog (e.g., EMF sensitivity)
•Toxic scars (e.g., from surgeries)

Note: while not a direct cause, many also believed the demineralization of our soil (which leads to nutritionally deficient foods) and modern technology making us be disconnected from all the natural rhythms that regulate the body were also major contributing factors.

When I looked at all of this, I realized a common thread over half shared was them creating fluid stagnation (or exacerbating the consequences of fluid stagnation such as insufficient nutrients being present in the remaining blood that reaches tissues—something, which for example, often underlies macular degeneration).

Next, since Chinese Medicine holds one of the longest medical records of humanity, I was curious to see if it had observed any significant changes in humanity’s health and found out that around 1830, the concept of “blood stasis” became established as a primary cause of disease (and since that time has come to be seen as having a greater and greater importance). Since many of the highly unusual and severe injuries caused by the smallpox vaccine, introduced in 1796, matched those attributed to blood stasis in Chinese medicine, I looked up when it was first introduced to China—1805, which corroborates this theory.

Note: all of this could easily be expanded into multiple books. For those wishing to learn more, I covered the smallpox and blood stasis aspect of it in more detail here, the general loss of vitality here, how vaccines cause fluid stagnation here and the data demonstrating the profound damage vaccination has done to our society here.

Because of this, I am inclined to believe that the introduction of the smallpox vaccine (and the vaccines that followed) radically shifted humanity's health, and that much of this was a direct consequence of the fluid stagnation (e.g., due to a loss of physiologiczeta potential) that humanity experienced. However, while there is a good case for my argument, it could also be a product of my own biases, as my approach to medicine places a heavy emphasis on fluid stagnation, and I constantly see how it links to a myriad of diseases).