Back to the Dark Ages
The advent of the internet and its ability to disseminate information has clearly been phenomenal. There is no question that our age should be called the information age and we are all happily participating by writing our comments into our favorite social medium. We feel so connected all of a sudden.
There is important news being spread around, and I wouldn't do without it. But let's face it what I have to say in Facebook is liked by maybe 8 people on the average. I guess what I have to say does not have much impact even though I try to sound intelligent.
What is more disturbing is the shocking lack of depth coming not from me but from the big newspapers. This is particularly true when it comes to scientific articles that are meant to inform on pharmaceuticals and their toxic nature. Here is an example: A new drug comes out and you read about how it will affect the stock market. That's not irrelevant, but it is also not really telling the whole story.
The information we are given about the drug's effectiveness is more like what the village population would have received from the lord of the manor or the church in the middle ages. And everyone believed it. Red wine was good for you when you were sick. Wine was also really good for business and the monastery where it was grown. Mercury was considered a God-sent for many ailments. Every learned doctor would use it for all kinds of ailments. Even scientists were ignorant about the long-term effects of mercury on your body. Tyco Brahe essentially died of mercury poisoning because he didn't know how it affected the kidney.
In spite of many advancements in science mercury was still written up as a diuretic in the 1960s in spite of the fact that it was known in our "enlightened times" to cause kidney damage.
We all know about the middle ages. They were the dark ages, and people didn't know anything. But what is really shocking today is that mercury toxicity is still looked at as if we were in the dark ages.
Mercury is clearly toxic. You can read about it everywhere on the internet. But what it does is largely unknown by the majority of the population. The content of mercury in amalgam fillings is not questioned even though it causes injury to vital organs. The injection of an organic mercury compound is not questioned. The use of skin-whitening creams is not questioned. It's as though we had not learned anything in spite of all that information that abounds. It's still as if we have to listen to the lord of the manor who tells us there is nothing wrong with that everyday toxin.
Here is why: Mercury is insidious in its toxicity. It causes dementia as it accumulates, and once you are affected there is no return because it causes you to forget what you once knew. You sink into the dark ages. "Quem Mercurius perdere vult, dementat prius" as the German chemist Alfred Stock said in 1926. He knew what it did to him and he too had a very hard time convincing the world about what he knew.
There is important news being spread around, and I wouldn't do without it. But let's face it what I have to say in Facebook is liked by maybe 8 people on the average. I guess what I have to say does not have much impact even though I try to sound intelligent.
What is more disturbing is the shocking lack of depth coming not from me but from the big newspapers. This is particularly true when it comes to scientific articles that are meant to inform on pharmaceuticals and their toxic nature. Here is an example: A new drug comes out and you read about how it will affect the stock market. That's not irrelevant, but it is also not really telling the whole story.
The information we are given about the drug's effectiveness is more like what the village population would have received from the lord of the manor or the church in the middle ages. And everyone believed it. Red wine was good for you when you were sick. Wine was also really good for business and the monastery where it was grown. Mercury was considered a God-sent for many ailments. Every learned doctor would use it for all kinds of ailments. Even scientists were ignorant about the long-term effects of mercury on your body. Tyco Brahe essentially died of mercury poisoning because he didn't know how it affected the kidney.
In spite of many advancements in science mercury was still written up as a diuretic in the 1960s in spite of the fact that it was known in our "enlightened times" to cause kidney damage.
We all know about the middle ages. They were the dark ages, and people didn't know anything. But what is really shocking today is that mercury toxicity is still looked at as if we were in the dark ages.
Mercury is clearly toxic. You can read about it everywhere on the internet. But what it does is largely unknown by the majority of the population. The content of mercury in amalgam fillings is not questioned even though it causes injury to vital organs. The injection of an organic mercury compound is not questioned. The use of skin-whitening creams is not questioned. It's as though we had not learned anything in spite of all that information that abounds. It's still as if we have to listen to the lord of the manor who tells us there is nothing wrong with that everyday toxin.
Here is why: Mercury is insidious in its toxicity. It causes dementia as it accumulates, and once you are affected there is no return because it causes you to forget what you once knew. You sink into the dark ages. "Quem Mercurius perdere vult, dementat prius" as the German chemist Alfred Stock said in 1926. He knew what it did to him and he too had a very hard time convincing the world about what he knew.
posted by Birgit Calhoun at 9:22 PM
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