Does Anaesthesia Cause Addiction and Degenerative Illness?

A call for Medical Regime Change

In a comment, just posted by a reader of this site on an earlier article reporting on a complaint to the International Criminal Court charging the pharmaceutical companies with genocide, an interesting new question emerged:

Could the practice of anaesthesia as promoted by the medical profession for surgical interventions have hidden but serious consequences on neuron activity and brain capacity?

The case for such a scenario is made in a comment by Marjorie Steakley who is a peace activist and a medical critic. She says that those within the [peace] movement

"... are always trying to shut me up about medical regime change, in no small reason that some of the local leaders are part of the medical-industrial complex themselves, and think that diverting war expenditures to a national health insurance plan will solve all our problems. This Complaint blows their argument out of the water, and affirms that I am right, and that the peace movement is doomed to fail unless it embraces medical regime change with the same unbridled alacrity that it embraces fair trade, human rights, and environmental stewardship."

I could not have agreed more and said in my reply:

yes, we DO need medical regime change just like we need to change - away from fossil fuels to new forms of energy production.

The current administration in the US seems to be paving the way for more testing and more drugs, especially of the psychiatric kind, to dumb us down further as well as feed the monster, the pharmaceutical genocide industry, with fresh finance. If we are to have peace, we must find a way to remove those that feed violence. Psychiatry, with their drugs and their shock "therapies" is a prime candidate.

Here following is Marjorie's comment, open to further input from you - the readers...

Thank you for posting this Complaint to the ICC. Although I am in the local peace movement and am a medical critic, it never occurred to me that medical militarism is directly linked to Iraq and the Patriot Act. I thought that it was merely conservation of social principles that medical violence and geopolitics were so similar. It is entirely possible that the medical-industrial complex ORDERED the 9/11 terror attack to facilitate neocon military escapades and domestic civil liberties curtailment otherwise impossible. It is an incontrovertible historical fact that the upper-class male medical cartel is directly responsible for the medieval witch hunts, in which 100s of millions were tortured and burned at the stake, as well as being directly responsible for the Nazi Holocaust (otherwise Nazi Germany would have been a conventional apartheid regime). It is the pseudoscientific medical ideology of eugenics that is directly responsible for the development of modern racism as we know it.

Although anesthetics are not sold at the local drug store, the Complaint should include general anesthesia, a class of dangerous pharmaceutical agents. It was never tested on animals or in clinical trials, so the past 150+ years have been a barbaric human experiment in violation of international law.

Horace Wells, the inventor of general anesthesia, became addicted to it, and committed a sulfuric acid attack against sex industry workers in NY under its influence. He was arrested, and committed suicide in prison, writing a suicide note saying that his hands shook so badly that he could barely hold his pen, and that his life was ruined. His widow, Elizabeth Wales Wells, said that anesthesia was "an unspeakable evil." The first modern recreational drug epidemic was the imbibing of volatile anesthetics in the 1850s. One curious student in Detroit bought a bottle of chloroform for inhalation, and became addicted from a single use. The top 19th century expert on addiction wrote that ether and chloroform were the most addictive substances known, far worse than cocaine or opiates. Even the pro-medical Julie Fenster admitted that surgical narcosis ushered in the modern epidemic of addiction. The truth keeps rearing its ugly head.

Wm. Morton and Chas. T. Jackson, who introduced surgical narcosis to the public, both died of mysterious brain diseases from self-experimentation. Jackson had a peculiar dementia that afflicted him for the last 7 years of his life. Jackson was the brother-in-law of Ralph Waldo Emerson. David Shenk's book on alzheimer asserted that Emerson almost certainly died from that disease. It never occurred to Shenk that Jackson might have experimented on Emerson. Wells had mood swings and parkinsonlike shakes from his self-experimentation. How much parkinson is caused by surgical narcosis? Alcohol is known to cause alzheimer; it follows that ALL depressants, including surgical narcosis, sleeping pills, and anxiety drugs, also cause alzheimer. How much 'bipolar' is caused by downers (incl. anesthetics), uppers (incl. caffeine, tobacco, & antidepressants), or a combination thereof?

How can poisoning a person into a coma NOT cause brain damage? My mother volunteered, without any prompting from me, that surgical narcosis impairs one's creativity and imagination. In the Global South, where most people can't afford allopathic medicine (as noted in the Complaint), the 'generation gap' is unheard of and unthinkable. In the Global South, listening to new vernacular music is a family experience: whole families -- children, parents, and grandparents -- gather around the cheap transistor radio or cassette player to listen and enjoy together. It is inconceivable for the parents and elders to dislike such new music as Western elders do, and in totalitarian regimes, mature Global Southerners risk their lives to get their hands on it. I believe this is because Global Southern peasants are almost never anesthetized. Moreover, look how the schools and society have been dumbed down: I believe this is a societal adaptation to the accumulation of anesthetic-induced brain damage in the population. It has gotten to the point that normal mental function has been labeled 'ADHD' or whatever they're calling it this week. Thus, the best and brightest are being brightsized by forced drugging into the sub-adult mental function of the anesthetized nation. The anesthetized nation is comparable to global warming: compare the accumulation of CO2 in the atmosphere from fossil fuels, causing physical climate change, to the accumulation of low-level brain damage in the world population, causing global social climate change. It is incontrovertible that most Americans are functioning at a sub-adult level. Robt. Bly calls this "swimming with the half-adults."

Finally, Eve Ensler, examining rape, says that my vagina is a village. If so, then my consciousness is a major city. Depriving a human being of one's consciousness is to deprive one of the essence of one's humanity. I can't imagine a more humiliating & degrading experience than being intentionally deprived of one's consciousness (for the record, this includes electroshock, which should be included among the crimes against humanity inflicted by the medical-industrial complex). The definitive response to such utter helplessness, which far exceeds infancy, is to commit violence. Look how violent society has become since the invention of surgical narcosis in 1846. The past 100 years have been more violent than all previoius eras combined. The Dark Age is NOW.

A previous message touched upon the adulteration of our food supply by industrial capitalism, even though it exceeded the scope of the original Complaint. The Complaint itself touched upon fossil fuel as a motive for attacking Iraq, & as raw material for pharmaceuticals. It did not address global warming, or asthma, cancer, birth defects, infertility, & endocrine damage caused by exhaust from fossil fuels. All this is irrefutable evidence that the entirety of industrial capitalism is a global upper-class conspiracy that can only be stopped by an unified progressive movement. The local, national, and international peace activists are appallingly myopic in this regard, to my constant dismay. The locals complain that I'm 'off-issue' and are always trying to shut me up about medical regime change, in no small reason that some of the local leaders are part of the medical-industrial complex themselves, and think that diverting war expenditures to a national health insurance plan will solve all our problems. This Complaint blows their argument out of the water, and affirms that I am right, and that the peace movement is doomed to fail unless it embraces medical regime change with the same unbridled alacrity that it embraces fair trade, human rights, and environmental stewardship.

As a teenager, I was baffled why local and regional blocks were withheld from surgical patients even though they were cheaper and safer, and had been around since the '20s. Now I know that this non sequitur was one of many entrance ramps to discovering the most appalling abomination of all time.

You can contact Marjorie Steakley by e-mail at mesteakley@bigplanet.com

See also:

May 2007: Penn Study Finds Inhaled Anesthetics Could Lead To Early Onset Of Alzheimer's Disease
Every year over 100 million people undergo surgery worldwide, most under general anesthesia with an inhaled drug. These drugs clearly affect cognitive ability at least in the short term, but the growing concern is that inhaled anesthetics may affect a person well beyond the perioperative period, even permanently. Several factors appear to play a role in this subtle loss of cognitive ability, most notably age.

 

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posted by Sepp Hasslberger on Sunday June 27 2004
updated on Tuesday December 7 2010

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Readers' Comments

Anything that causes the brain to black-out, lose conciousness, also causes damage to tissues.
Physical or chemical stress of extremes doublessly has the effect of reshaping our capacity or blunting it. It's aggressive, at best a risky experiment every time it is performed.

Posted by: Sepp on July 14, 2004 07:31 PM

 

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Posted by: Paul C. Herson on February 6, 2009 04:25 PM

 

I am in total agreement. Moreover, caffeine, like all stimulants, causes heart disease, stroke, breast cancer, prostate cancer, PMS, hot flashes, and seasonal allergies. I am very fortunate because my childhood brand loyalty had been to Orange Crush, which contains no caffeine, and consequently never became addicted to it. I am adding your website to my Links page, and appreciate your work.

I also have another update regarding brain damage caused by general anesthesia, this time a human study.

The URL to the Med Page Today article is as follows:

http://www.medpagetoday.com/Surgery/Anesthesiology/7805

Posted by: Marjorie E. Steakley on October 18, 2009 03:32 PM

 

Here are my comments on the 2 updates: Eckenhoff (study from '07) claims that there may be some anesthetics that don't cause neurodegenerative disease and implies that injectable anesthetics might not promote amyloid plaques. As a former research tech and anesthetist of rodents, it is my experience that injectable anesthetics are WORSE because their chemical half life in the body is much longer and consequently they take much longer to wear off. This is why most anesthetization, particularly overseas, still includes volatile agents. I remind that alcohol, the world's first anesthetic, is imbibed rather than inhaled, and is a known cause of alzheimer. The commentary on the Monk study (Jan. '08 issue of ANESTHESIOLOGY) claims that some sort of "intervention" can somehow "block" the brain damage induced by general anesthesia. Both these claims are as ludicrous as claiming that a formulation of gasoline can be made that doesn't cause anthropoietic climate change.

There is only one way to prevent or stop this brain damage: don't anesthetize the patient.

Furthermore, neither study even touches the issue of depression caused by anesthetization. I believe that not only is there a neurochemical mechanism at work, but also the humiliation of being deprived of one's consciousness and memory is psychologically devastating beyond imagination. As horrible as sexual assault is, the temple of the Holy Spirit doesn't reside in the reproductive tract; it resides in a human being's consciousness.

Finally, another issue is also not addressed by either study: the cocktail of injectable "pre-anesthetics" whose sole purpose is to "impair memory of perioperative events." I find such drugs morally reprehensible, clearly indicating that they are trying to hide something, e.g. sexual assault, abuse of employees in front of patients, and extrajudicial execution. I have a zero tolerance policy regarding secrecy: I do not accept excuses and do not negotiate with state-sponsored and corporate-sponsored terrorists. Since these drugs do absolutely nothing to mitigate pain, they must be abolished immediately. Such abolition will also make them harder to obtain on the streets, making acquaintance rape harder to commit and easier to prosecute.

Posted by: Marjorie E. Steakley on October 19, 2009 08:17 PM

 

Thank you Marjorie, for an interesting discussion and addition to the article. I wish we'd see more research into anesthesia. This situation of no research to confirm that anesthesia isn't harmful reminds me very much of the situation with vaccines. Apparently there is an argument on vaccines as follows: "Since we know vaccines work, it would be unethical to do a study involving a placebo arm. So we can't study vaccinated against non vaccinated people." Let alone that you could match up voluntary vaccine objectors with those who do take the vaccine, but of course it isn't then a double blind, placebo controlled study, the only kind that seems acceptable in this day and age to prove anything.

Posted by: Sepp on October 20, 2009 02:33 PM

 

The reason there is so little research into long-term effects of anesthesia is because they know what the results will be and are afraid that Matthias Rath will add them to his Complaint to the ICC, resulting in significant criminal sanctions. There would be a class-action lawsuit which would make the tobacco suit look like a small claims court case.

Both studies were poorly designed in an attempt to minimize the devastating effects I saw in the rodents that I had anesthetized as a research tech in 2 institutions in 2 states. Animals that went directly from induction to recovery and never experienced maintenance resumed their play as though nothing had happened, while those subjected to approx. 5 min. of maintenance at no deeper than stage 4 (just above reflex) sat for the rest of their lives with a look of horror in their eyes, until they were euthanized and dissected. A postdoc in one lab was astounded by the obvious difference.

This experience is also mentioned in the footnote to slide 39 of "Autobiography of an Anesthetized Patient." The ideal protocol for the Monk experiment (Jan. '08) would be to compare the cognitive function of anesthetized patients to that of nerve block patients of the same age undergoing the same surgery, and for the tests to be sensitive enough to detect depression and subtle losses of creativity and imagination that creatives would notice. This is the fine honed mental function that makes life worthwhile. Patient groups should also have been stratified according to duration and stage (5-12), since "major surgery" implied that they were all below reflex. And the sample sizes should've been much larger. And the Eckenhoff study should've included injectable anesthetics, since all anesthetics work through the same neurochemical pathway.

When I have a chance, I need to track down the URL of another study of music on earphones with a patient-chosen playlist as an effective anesthetic-sparing technique. Slide 51 of "Autobiography" features this and several other reforms gleaned from an astute viewing of THE EMPIRE STRIKES BACK, and the slide's footnote features additional reforms not suggested by the movie. Of course, slide 50 indicates that most surgery is unnecessary, and slides 24 and 50 call for proper utilization of nerve blocks. The show and its postscript (.DOC) can be downloaded at the following link, following the instructions there:

http://assumetheopposite.com/Powerful_PowerPoints.html

Both are also available on Slide Share

http://www.slideshare.net/mesteakley/autobiography-of-an-anesthetized-patient

and
http://www.slideshare.net/mesteakley/postscript-to-autobiography

and the show by itself without the postscript is also available on Author Stream

Hopefully soon I can get in touch with a musician with high-powered music software who might be able to resolve a technical issue, enabling me to upgrade the Author Stream version of the show to have an embedded functional soundtrack without any action on the part of the user, the way I had intended it to be seen.

Regarding testing vaccines, the solution is easy: over the past 2 weeks alone, several people at church evinced significant reservations about them and some were coerced into vaccination. Such ambivalent persons are perfect subjects for a double-blind, placebo controlled study that would address their (and our)concerns. Again, the moral will to do the experiment is all that is lacking.

Posted by: Marjorie E. Steakley on October 20, 2009 04:51 PM

 

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