Tag: health care

Why Observational Studies Lie to You

If you’ve spent five minutes paying attention to medical news, you’ve undoubtedly seen the headlines: “People who take statins have 30% fewer heart attacks!” or “Breast cancer screening makes women live longer!” or “Menopausal Hormone therapy lowers Alzheimer’s risk.”

These all sound wonderful, don’t they? Just swallow a daily pill, or submit to regular screening, and you’ll join the ranks of the immortal. Were only life so simple. 

Yet before you rush off to demand a prescription, let me introduce you to one of the sneakiest, most persistent mirages from the world of medical research, which we call the “Healthy User Bias.”

Readers of Brownstone were recently introduced to this concept related to the Covid vaccines in an article entitled “A Hall of Mirrors of the Healthy Vaccinee Effect,” which demonstrated that those who were vaccinated were not the same as those who weren’t. Very frail people and those close to death were less likely to get vaccinated, which is understandable, and so those who didn’t get the jab died at a higher rate than those that did. Simple, right?

Understanding this single concept may not, overnight, elevate your medical BS detector from “gullible consumer” to “battle-tested skeptic,” but to be fair, it might help. 

The Kale-Eating, 6 AM Jogger Effect, and the Placebo Effect

What is the Healthy User Bias? It’s embarrassingly simple. In observational studies—where researchers merely watch what people do in the real world rather than running an experiment—the people who voluntarily take preventive drugs or pop daily supplements are fundamentally different from those who don’t. No surprise there, right? 

On average, “healthy users” are wealthier, better educated, and more health-obsessed. They are seriously more obedient when it comes to vaccines (including the Covid vaccine). These sorts of people want to do the best they can within their powers, which includes things that involve some friction: they eat organic kale, jog at dawn, wear seatbelts, don’t smoke, and visit their doctors regularly. They love tests of all kinds. 

A 2006 meta-analysis quantified the healthy user effect (which they called the healthy adherer effect) across 21 studies. What they found is mind-blowing in its implications. It found that those who religiously took their prescribed pills (which we call ‘good adherence’), even if it was a placebo, showed a 44% reduction in mortality (which was identical to adherence to proven beneficial therapy). All this shows is that the obedient, healthy people are more likely to do what most physicians want: they take their medication as ordered by their doctors.

When researchers observe people over ten years and notice they have fewer heart attacks and fewer strokes the light goes on. Hey, they might live longer! This is where pharmaceutical cheerleaders jump up and down, declaring: “Look! It was our pill!”

No. Sorry, it most likely wasn’t the pill. It was the person who took the pill. It was the fact that the patient was already doing 27 zillion other things to stay healthy. Maybe they had a gene that said: don’t do stuff to excess that are known to be bad for you (ie: smoking, drinking, committing violent crimes, extreme sports, being grossly overweight, being a couch potato, etc)

The pill was just along for the ride. Observational research routinely mistakes a healthy lifestyle for pharmaceutical magic. 

By now you’re saying, Okay Mr. Alansmartypants, gimme some examples. 

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The Treatment Was Worse Than the Disease

On December 12, 1799, George Washington returned to Mount Vernon after several hours on horseback in snow, hail, and freezing rain. The next day he developed a sore throat and hoarseness, and in the early morning of December 14 he awoke struggling to breathe and swallow. Doctors were called, and what happened next is now one of the most talked-about medical cases in American history.

Washington did not lack medical care. In fact, he received a lot of attention from three skilled physicians, who used the treatments they thought best for someone as sick as he was, such as repeated bloodletting and other methods meant to reduce inflammation and restore balance. Late that night, Washington died.

Even now, more than 200 years later, we are not sure exactly what disease killed Washington. Some experts have suggested acute bacterial epiglottitis, severe pharyngitis, peritonsillar infection, or other causes of upper-airway blockage [1]. What is clear is that Washington lost a large amount of blood, by most estimates about 80 ounces, through repeated bloodletting while he was already very sick. His doctors did not mean to harm him. They thought removing blood would control the inflammation, but it made him worse. Their actions followed a long-standing medical tradition, supported by accepted theories, experience, and the authority of many generations of doctors.

It is easy to look back at this story and feel superior because of our modern knowledge. Today, we understand things like oxygen delivery, blood volume, shock, infections, airway care, IV fluids, antibiotics, and advanced life support. Washington’s doctors did not have this knowledge. But calling them primitive misses the real point. They were trained doctors using the best knowledge they had to try to save their patient. The real question is not why doctors in 1799 believed bloodletting would help. Instead, we should ask which treatments we use today with the same confidence that future doctors might find hard to believe.

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COVID Hospital Protocols: ‘This Kind of Cruelty Will Not Be Repeated’

During Sen. Ron Johnson’s (R-Wis.) roundtable on COVID-19 hospital care today, Brad Seiler described the desperate effort to get his wife, Gail, out of a hospital after staff told him she was “unsavable.”

When Brad finally got her discharged, he said hospital staff wouldn’t let them leave through the main entrance. Instead, Gail was taken down a freight elevator used to transport bodies to the morgue and escorted out through doors used by funeral homes.

A nurse told him, “She’ll be dead tonight, or before you even get home.” Gail survived.

“Today, Gail is alive, healthy, active, and enjoying life with our grandchildren and children,” Seiler said.

Seiler was one of 21 patients, family members, doctors and nurses who testified at the “COVID-19 Hospital Protocols: Real Stories from Real People” roundtable. Johnson said that as of Sept. 26, his office had received 583 testimonies from people in 46 states.

“Today I am providing a platform for these stories to be told so that this kind of cruelty will not be repeated,” Johnson said.

‘It is our responsibility to make sure this never happens again’

Stephanie Williamson of New Jersey described losing her husband, Dave, after what she said was a series of decisions made without informed consent or family input.

“My children never saw their father again. Dave’s dad never saw his son,” Williamson said.

She said she was pressured into consenting to her husband’s intubation.

“The night my husband was intubated, I realized I was coerced into consenting to put him on a ventilator,” she said.

Williamson said she had waited four and a half years to tell her husband’s story.

“This is about humanity,” she said. “Patient care should not be driven by reimbursements. A doctor’s hands should never be tied, and no patient should ever be left alone. It is our responsibility to make sure this never happens again.”

Florida registered nurse Donna Lowery said she was fired after 31 years on the job because she advocated for a hospitalized patient and recommended ivermectin. Lowery said once the drug was stopped, the patient deteriorated quickly, was placed on a ventilator and died.

“For me, there was a patient. There was a family in need of help, and there was a choice,” Lowery said. “I chose to help. I paid for that decision, but I would make it again.”

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‘Trans-Identifying Nurse’ Charged With 4 Counts of Child Abuse After Abusing a Premature Baby Girl in the Hospital

A now-former nurse at Helen DeVos Children’s Hospital in Grand Rapids, Michigan, has been charged with four counts of child abuse after a tiny premature baby girl in the neonatal intensive care unit was found with multiple broken bones and bruises covering her body, including her tongue.

The accused is 43-year-old Kieran L. Ansley of Niles, Michigan. A warrant was authorized in early September, WOOD-TV reported.

Ansley faces two felony counts of second-degree child abuse, each carrying up to 10 years in prison, and two misdemeanor counts of fourth-degree child abuse.

Ansley appeared in Grand Rapids District Court this week, remains free on bond, and is required to wear an electronic tether. The next hearing is set for early November.

The infant was born in November 2025 at 23 weeks, weighing one pound, one ounce. She spent months in the NICU fighting to live. By early April she had made it past her due date and was two days from going home.

“She was born at 23 weeks: 1 pound, 1 ounce,” grandfather Robert Steavens told WOOD-TV. “And she made it through her due date, ready to go home. And then two days before she was ready to go home, this happened.”

On the evening of April 2, the child’s mother left the unit with her daughter appearing fine. She returned about 6:30 a.m. the next morning.

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Vance Fraud Task Force Condemned as ‘Smokescreen’ for Booting 700,000 More People Off Healthcare

The Trump administration is planning to boot more than 700,000 people from their Affordable Care Act coverage as part of a purported initiative to root out fraud in the program—an effort that campaigners said is nothing more than a pretext to kick more people off healthcare.

Vice President JD Vance, who is leading the White House’s “Task Force to Eliminate Fraud,” announced the planned ACA purge during a press conference on Tuesday alongside Centers for Medicare and Medicaid Services Administrator Mehmet Oz, whose agency has touted a right-wing think tank’s dubious claim that millions of ACA enrollees are on the program improperly.

Vance insisted during Tuesday’s press conference that the administration is putting itself “under an extraordinary burden of proof” to ensure its mass removal doesn’t impact people who are eligible for ACA coverage, but advocates were not convinced.

“Vance’s task force is a smokescreen for kicking people off coverage,” declared the advocacy group Protect Our Care. The organization’s president, Brad Woodhouse, said in a statement that Vance’s task force “is nothing more than a bullshit distraction—a political stunt designed to throw even more people off their coverage while pretending to save taxpayers’ money.”

“At a time when millions of Americans are already losing coverage and facing skyrocketing costs, Vance and this administration are making the crisis exponentially worse,” said Woodhouse. “They are piling on more red tape, more confusion, and more opportunities for people to lose the coverage they rely on. Families need coverage they can afford and count on when they get sick. Vance’s task force won’t accomplish that. It’s a smokescreen for an administration whose sole mission is to make it harder to get and stay covered but to shower billionaires with tax breaks instead.”

Millions of people have lost ACA and Medicaid coverage since the start of President Donald Trump’s second White House term, due in large part to a Republican budget law that cut Medicaid by more than $800 billion and did nothing to extend enhanced ACA subsidies, sending premiums soaring.

Trump administration officials have baselessly claimed that their anti-fraud efforts were the key driver of ACA enrollment declines this year.

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Vaccine-Injured Canadians Finally Got a Hearing. Health Canada Was Absent.

For years, vaccine-injured Canadians have described being ignored, gaslit, and left to navigate serious illness with little help or compensation. Their questions extend beyond their own medical care: Who knew about the risks? How were reports of injury investigated? And who is responsible for helping them now?

Other countries have opened their pandemic decisions to public scrutiny. According to the Allison Inquiry’s organizers, more than 30 democracies have held some form of inquiry into their pandemic response. Though those proceedings have differed in scope and conclusions, Canada has yet to hold a national public inquiry of any sort.

Conservative MP Dean Allison decided Canadians should not have to keep waiting.

With lawyer Shawn Buckley as inquiry counsel and a volunteer team behind him, Allison organized four days of hearings on Parliament Hill focused on COVID-19 vaccine injuries. More than 1,400 people applied to testify. From September 8 to 11, roughly 50 witnesses took the oath, including injured Canadians, bereaved families, physicians, and researchers.

The hearings had limited powers. They could not compel witnesses or subpoena records, and their terms prohibited findings of fact or conclusions. Even within those limits, witnesses could explain publicly what had happened to them and what they wanted investigated.

Health Canada did not testify.

CBC published a report on the final afternoon. Global News aired a segment two days after the hearings closed. The testimony itself deserves attention: families describing lives upended, physicians recounting their attempts to report injuries, and researchers questioning how those reports were handled.

IMA readers will recognize several participants, including Senior Fellow Dr. Jessica Rose, Senator Ron Johnson, and Dr. James Thorp. Below are eight witnesses and excerpts from their testimony. For those seeking help with symptoms after vaccination, IMA’s free post-vaccine treatment guide offers a resource to discuss with a treating clinician.

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Another Act of Betrayal, Another Act of Air Force Inspector General Complicity

A federal court has ruled that the Air Force inappropriately diverted thousands of service members from the Integrated Disability Evaluation System (IDES), which is a congressionally mandated process for evaluating disabilities.

The court determined that an unauthorized prescreening process, known as Initial Review-in-Lieu-of (IRILO), violated the Administrative Procedure Act. IRILO effectively prevented wounded, injured, or sick service members from receiving the medical evaluations and protections they are entitled to.

The decision, made by the U.S. District Court for the Eastern District of Virginia, highlighted that the Air Force lacked the authority to create such a process.

The lawsuit, filed in July 2025 by former Air Force personnel, including Kathleen L. Watts and Robert Newman, argued that this prescreening mechanism denied them consideration for medical retirement benefits due to their medical conditions incurred in the line of duty.

Although the case illustrates a significant issue where service members were stripped of their rights and protections under federal law, the prescreening process remains in place for now, as the court has yet to finalize a remedy for the matter. Meanwhile, as this could potentially impact tens of thousands of service members, the possibility of a larger class action hangs in the balance.

The Gateway Pundit interviewed retired Air Force pilot and advocate for injured service members, Jeremy Sorenson, who stated, “The US Air Force has long known that the IRILO is a completely illegal process. But, because it ‘saves’ the Air Force money, senior leaders have refused to correct it.” In August 2023, Sorenson informed Lt. Gen. Stephen Davis (SAF/IG) that the Air Force was using the IRILO to improperly deny Airmen entrance into the congressionally-mandated Disability Evaluation System processing (IDES).

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Medicine Has Forgotten How to Touch the Patient

When was the last time your doctor actually examined you? I do not mean when someone checked your blood pressure, copied your medication list, looked at your laboratory results, or listened briefly through a shirt before returning to the computer. I mean examined you. Looked at you. Watched you breathe. Felt your pulse. Looked at your eyes. Examined your neck. Listened carefully to your heart and lungs. Palpated your abdomen. Watched you walk. Noticed the color of your skin, the movement of your hands, the expression on your face, and the thousand other small pieces of information that a human body offers to someone who has learned how to observe it.

For most of the history of medicine, this was not an optional ritual performed before ordering the “real tests.” This was medicine. Today, increasingly, it is treated as something quaint, inefficient, or unnecessary.

I have spent most of my professional life taking care of very sick people. Critical care is one of the most technologically intensive areas of medicine ever created. I love technology. I have watched mechanical ventilators breathe for patients who could no longer breathe for themselves. I have used ultrasound, CT imaging, sophisticated hemodynamic monitoring, extracorporeal technologies, molecular diagnostics, and laboratory measurements that physicians a generation before me could only have dreamed about.

I would never want to return to a world without these tools. But after decades at the bedside, I have also learned something that becomes more obvious, not less, with experience: technology is most powerful when it extends the physician’s senses. It becomes dangerous when it persuades the physician that those senses are no longer necessary.

The Patient Before the Data

Experienced clinicians understand something that is remarkably difficult to teach in a lecture hall or classroom. Sometimes you walk into a room and know immediately that something is wrong. You may not yet know what it is, but you know it before the laboratory does. The patient is breathing differently. His skin looks different. She answers a question a fraction of a second more slowly than she did several hours earlier. Posture, speech, facial expression, respiratory effort, or level of attention changes. None of these observations is magical. They are data, collected by a biological instrument trained through thousands and thousands of encounters: the physician.

When I round in an intensive care unit (ICU), I can learn an enormous amount before touching the computer. I can see whether a patient is fighting the ventilator. I can hear secretions from the doorway. I can see accessory muscles contracting. I can recognize when someone who looked reasonably comfortable earlier suddenly looks exhausted. I can see peripheral perfusion, diaphoresis, agitation, abdominal distension, or a subtle change in mental status. None of this means I should ignore the arterial blood gas, the chest radiograph, the CT scan, or the monitor. Of course I need them. The mistake is believing that because those measurements are more technologically sophisticated, they are necessarily more real than what is happening directly in front of me.

Medicine once began with the patient and proceeded toward testing. Increasingly, it begins with testing and eventually works its way back toward the patient. Abraham Verghese and colleagues have described this inversion of the diagnostic process, in which clinicians may encounter an image or electronic representation of a patient before encountering the patient himself. That change sounds subtle. It is not. Once the CT scan, laboratory panel, consultant note, medication list, and previous diagnoses have entered our minds, we no longer approach the patient without preconceptions. The data have already told us what we are supposed to see.

This is one reason the physical examination should never be reduced to nostalgia. Its value is not that physicians once carried black bags and made house calls. Its value is epistemological. It provides an independent stream of information. The history and physical examination can support what the tests tell us, but they can also contradict them. That contradiction is often where important medicine begins. A normal number should make us reconsider an abnormal observation, but an abnormal observation should also make us reconsider a normal number.

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Trump Announces $500 Obamacare Rebate Checks to Nearly 1 Million Americans “Wrongly Ripped Off” by Biden Administration

President Trump announced in a video statement on Thursday that rebate checks for families who were “wrongly ripped off” by the Biden Administration through the Obamacare exchange and healthcare.gov will be delivered ahead of the November elections. 

Checks to nearly one million Americans across 30 states will be delivered in “just a few weeks,” Trump said. The White House announced that checks will be sent to those eligible beginning in October.

Trump announced the initiative, dubbed the “Working Families Obamacare Refunds,” in a video statement.

WATCH:

Trump: Today, I’m very thrilled to make an important announcement on the cost of health care affecting hardworking families all across the United States. Our administration has discovered that under Sleepy Joe Biden, American households buying health insurance through the Obamacare exchange, which is a disaster, and the healthcare.gov were massively overcharged, to put it mildly.

They were forced to pay excessive fees, totaling at least $500 million. The last administration knew about this and they studied it, but they kept the money. They just kept it. They never let anyone know. Our administration is doing the right thing and giving the money back to the people who were wrongly ripped off.

Nearly one million hardworking Americans in 30 states will soon be getting refunds of $500 each with a check sent to their home address. In many cases, these refunds will cover the entire spike in your insurance caused by Democrats, who solely work to protect big insurance companies. The big insurance companies own the Democrats.

Congress must now quickly pass the Great Health Care Plan. It’s called the Great Health Care Plan. Cost of healthcare for all Americans is coming down under my plan. We will stop all payments to big insurance and give the money directly to the people, who will then be able to buy better health care at a much lower cost and keep the money and keep the difference.

We’ll have maximum price transparency and require all prices to be posted in plain, beautiful English, and we will get insurance companies to disclose their profits and how many claims they deny, so that we know the good ones from the bad. But the relief begins with refunding everyone who was overcharged. The rebates are going out in just a few weeks. Thank you very much.

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U.S. Supreme Court Rejects New York Healthcare Workers’ Bid to Revive COVID Vaccine Mandate Lawsuit

The U.S. Supreme Court today declined for a second time to take up a case brought by New York healthcare workers who lost their jobs after the state denied their requests for religious accommodations from its COVID-19 vaccine mandate, SCOTUSblog reported.

The justices rejected a petition asking them to reconsider their June decision not to hear Does 1-2 v. Hochul, the lawsuit healthcare workers brought against the state. The court denied the request without asking New York Gov. Kathy Hochul to respond.

“This ruling is definitely a sad day for the workers who stood up and said no,” said Michael Kane, Children’s Health Defense (CHD) director of advocacy and member of New York’s Teachers for Choice, which also challenged New York’s vaccine mandate in the courts.

Kane said he was “not surprised” by the decision.

The plaintiffs represented a handful of healthcare workers, he said. “But over 30,000 were fired in New York state because of this horrendous policy from Gov. Hochul. The policy didn’t allow for any religious exemption from vaccination. On its face, it is illegal. It is unconstitutional, but the politics of the thing seems to be playing out instead.”

The workers filed their lawsuit in 2021, challenging a now-repealed New York state law mandating that workers in some healthcare-related positions get the COVID-19 vaccine.

In 2022, a federal court dismissed the lawsuit, and in 2024, the 2nd U.S. Circuit Court of Appeals upheld the dismissal. In 2025, the workers appealed to the U.S. Supreme Court.

In an unusual move, the Supreme Court asked the U.S. Department of Justice solicitor general to weigh in. In May 2026, Solicitor General D. John Sauer wrote an amicus brief recommending the court deny the appeal.

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