A friend, one of several HIV-positive women I know who must remain anonymous because of the impact her views could have on her family if they became public, told me that one of my Red Flags pages was featured at TheBody.com, along with books and websites from a number of other people who have questioned the HIV=AIDS=Death dogma. The people at this website did not apparently intend my inclusion as a compliment, the title of the page is "GOTCHA! Grossly Over-Exaggerated (or Incorrect) "Treatments" or "Cures" for HIV or AIDS" (colour and bolding as in original).
The first problem with this page is almost trivial – few rethinkers waste time promoting treatments or cures for AIDS (with or without quote marks) because they believe it is a meaningless concept, although there are exceptions, such as Dr. Hulda Clark. Nobody has a problem dealing with any illnesses present in people tagged as having AIDS, but it makes no sense to treat all AIDS-defining conditions in the same way. Furthermore, what is AIDS-defining varies dramatically depending on where the diagnosis is made, with three major definitions in the United States, Other wealthy countries and the Third World, including most of Africa. You can read more about my thoughts about the definitions of AIDS (and whether a tomato is a fruit, vegetable or both) at redflagsdaily.com/crowe/2003_dec16.php.
My web page that TheBody.com picks on is a lecture I gave to Christine Maggiore’s group Alive & Well in 2003 highlighting parallels between modern beliefs about HIV and AIDS with medieval Christian beliefs. And, no, I was not recommending exorcism as a treatment to rid your body of HIV.
The major problem is that TheBody.com also lists a set of guidelines for determining whether to trust information on the internet. They are not terribly bad guidelines, some parts are actually quite good. The problem with them stems from the irony that there are many examples of mainstream information that fails these guidelines miserably, and much alternative information that passes with flying colors.
TheBody.com is certainly not above criticism, and might just have a teensy-weensy conflict of interest. Please turn to their home page and scroll to the bottom. Now for a word about their sponsors:
Funnily enough, determining whether a website has financial conflicts of interest was not one of the ways by which one is supposed to evaluate internet information, yet any observer of modern medicine knows that this is one of the most important biases, particularly because money buys the sophistication and spin-doctoring that is evident from the slickness of TheBody.com’s home page. One of the questions is whether the information source is trying to sell me something, but it is the indirect conflicts of interest that are more insidious, such as the doctor who is wined and dined so often by a drug company that he feels duty bound to recommend their products, even though he does not directly benefit from their purchase.
TheBody.com’s “questions to consider when determining if information is reliable and truthful” are:
They also provide a list of indicators that show that information that should not be trusted, because it:
I thought it would be interesting to compare information that I have produced versus one of the most prominent HIV/AIDS information resources out there, the US Government’s NIAID website “The Evidence that HIV Causes AIDS”, a page that starts by stating:
By comparison, I have chosen my web page that comes closest to dealing with treatment, a page with extensive quotations on Highly Active Anti-Retroviral Therapy (HAART) – aras.ab.ca/haart.html. I chose this page because it is not clear which of my web pages TheBody.com is really trying to refer to. But given that it is about treatment for HIV/AIDS, it seems appropriate.
The ranking system that I have chosen is to assign two points to each category. A website gets two points if it fully meets TheBody.com’s requirements or guidelines or answers their question positive, one point if it partially meets them and 0 if it does not meet them at all.
I have summmarized all the questions for space considerations and restated the questions in some cases so that the answer "Yes" is good (1 or 2 points) and the answer "No" is bad. In some cases the purpose of the question is not clear so I have not assigned any points.
| Guideline | aras.ab.ca/haart.html | Points | NIAID Website | Points |
|---|---|---|---|---|
| Author Identified? | Yes | 2 | No | 0 |
| Accurate Contact Information? | Yes | 2 | No | 0 |
| Sources Listed? | Yes, this page is just a list of scientific citations | 2 | Yes | 2 |
| What is the intention? | It is not clear how this question can be ranked. The intention of aras.ab.ca is to raise questions about AIDS treatment, the intention of the NIAID page is to reassert that HIV causes AIDS and that resistance is futile. | |||
| Are they doing this for profit? | Some books are sold, but they are not for profit | 1 | The multi-billion dollar budget for US medical bureaucracies such as NIH are fully dependent on maintaining fear and faith, fear of infectious diseases, and faith that these government agencies can protect people from them. | 0 |
| Are they trying to give me general information? | The intention of this question is not clear. Is general information a good thing or a bad thing? | |||
| Updated within last two years? | Yes | 2 | Last updated in 2003 | 0 |
| Information found in other places? | It is not clear whether this is a good thing or not. It certainly discourages innovation to insist that information is only valid if repeated multiple times, and only encourages the spread of incorrect information in an attempt to achieve this goal. | |||
| Fair and Balanced? | This is far too much a matter of opinion and I will have to leave this decision to individuals. What is a balanced discussion of slavery? One that weighs the benefits to the white landowners versus the detrimental effects to the black slaves? What is so essential about balance if you genuinely feel that the evidence is strongly skewed to one side or the other? | |||
| Based on more than a single study or expert? | Yes | 2 | Yes | 2 |
| Based on more than anecdotal evidence? | Yes, although anecdotes are important and some are included. | 2 | Yes, although anecdotes are essential to some of their points, including fulfilling the third of Koch’s postulates as stated by them (“transfer of the suspected pathogen to an uninfected host, man or animal, produces the disease in that host”). | 2 |
| Admits uncertainty? | Yes | 2 | No, the purpose of this paper is to deny that there is uncertainty about whether HIV causes AIDS. | 0 |
| Mentions potential risks? | Yes | 2 | Yes, but attempts to minimize them, e.g. by saying “antiretroviral drugs can have toxic side effects. However, there is no evidence that antiretroviral drugs cause the severe immunosuppression that typifies AIDS, and abundant evidence that antiretroviral therapy, when used according to established guidelines, can improve the length and quality of life of HIV-infected individuals” | 1 |
| Positive mentions of other treatments? | Positive mentions of treatments that are ineffective or unsafe is hardly a good thing. It is not clear how this could be ranked. | |||
| Describes how treatment will affect quality of life? | Yes | 2 | Implies that the quality of life will improve with antiretroviral drugs. Even the drug-company-funded glossy magazine Poz has questioned this. | 0 |
| Total Scores | Total for aras.ab.ca/haart.html | 19 | Total for NIAID | 7 |
TheBody.com has made some excellent points about evaluating internet information, particularly that related to HIV and AIDS. Unfortunately they have obviously not used their own ranking scheme, but have put it on the same page as several web sites and information sources that they want to diss, leaving it up to the reading to draw the erroneous conclusion that these sources are invalid, and that those that agree with the main thrust of the pharmaceutically-funded TheBody.com’s positions are valid.
It is not just me ranking my own work, other authors included on their list include the very careful researcher John Lauritsen, author of the classic “AZT: Poison by Prescription”, Christine Maggiore, author of the well-referenced book “What If Everything You Thought You Knew About AIDS Was Wrong”, virologist Dr. Stefan Lanka, Emergency MD Dr. Valendar Turner and MD Roberto Giraldo. Their work would rank similarly high based on the standards of TheBody.com.
Some of the sites I am not familiar with and perhaps some of them really are fully of grossly erroneous information.
By TheBody.com’s own standards, they have produced a website to avoid, unless you want to suspend disbelief and accept that pro-drug information funded by drug manufacturers is unbiased. For me, that’s a hard pill to swallow.
Copyright © David Crowe,