About gall stones

Jay and others,
Perhaps we are not that far apart on our view of parasites, especially since I
think it behooves us all to steer clear of the fundamentalists on both ends of
any spectrum. Fundies tend, perhaps as a reaction to violent rejection, to
stretch and belabor their case to make their point. It’s my feeling that HULDA
CLARK, or her lackies, have, in their quest to make a point, to make their
mark on the world, have done exactly that.
I’m no Clark groupie myself, in fact I try to avoid books that have the word
“ALL” in it. That’s just one area where, IMO, she went over the top and into
the fundy world. By staking her reputation on one fluke, or tying “all” disease
to one theory of etiology, she has jeapordized her entire reputation as a
scientist. It’s likely that once the McCarthy/Ashcroftian Quackbusters get done
eviserating her, her good work could also be irredeemably lost. She’s been
sued and will most likely wind up in prison like other extremists, nuts,
pioneers, visionaries, revolutionaries, and geniuses. In more violent days,

Copernicus, Galilo and other visionaries could lose their heads to
fundamentalistic lynch mobs and the goons of the Inquisition.
In summary, I think Dr Clark has applied some clairvoyance, some intuition,
and some genius to the flat world of scientific thought which allowed her to
temporarily burst free from the stiffling manacles of the reigning scientific
paradigm and breathe some clean air. Her most-true insights may someday
be redeemed, pulled from the smoldering ashes below the witch-burning
stake and salvaged. For the time being, we all lose, mostly due to her own
self-sabotage. Her message has been conflated into some reductionistic and
literalized graphic gobbletygook that people have rushed into popularity.
Additionally and regrettably, her work has also been prostituted into
commercial venues for gain, and that is a terrible pollution and loss of the
good that was very likely to have been there. It’s unfortunate that the
censorial, myopic and provincial Puritans who savagely attacked her, and
perhaps provoked her to retreat to weird extremes, are probably just as
wrong, have cooked their own books to make their case, and are perhaps far
more dangerous to the society we live in than the Hulda Clarks of the world.
For those who think parasites are the machinations of fearmongers, the
ignorant and the simpleminded, I think you are in for a rude awakening. And
soon. Americans who refuse to look at the GLOBAL VILLAGE we all live in
now are living in the past. In every war we have had millions of GIs returning
bearing unknown bugs. The first wave of Desert Storm troops (over 500,000)
cannot give blood because of their exposure to Leishmaniasis from the Sand
Flies. Viet Nam was even worse. Immigration laws being ever more relaxed
we have a steady stream of parasite-laden people flowing into our country
daily. Thanks to NAFTA and WTO we have millions of tons of raw fruit,
vegetables, meat, fish, eggs and dairy products innundating our homes,
institutions, supermarkets and restaurants. The list of new problems is far too
long to list here. With the conservative CDC reporting over 50 million cases
of food-borne illnesses annually ( and 9000 known deaths/year) we are
going to be learning a whole lot more about parasites in the near future.
Average T-lymphocyte killer cell counts, which are one measure of the
immune system, should be over 200 and are now down to an average of 25
in the US. Environmental toxins and pollutants increase daily in the food, air
and water thanks to ever more lax legislation, regulation and enforcement.
The WHO now counts parasites as one of the Top 6 killers of people in the
world as parasites kill more people than cancer. WHO and other
organizations estimate that 55 million US children have parasites. There are
over 100 parasites that can live in the human body with over 1/3 of them
residing in the digestive system. Candida albicans alone can generate
thousands of waste products known to be neurotoxins. Oh, yes, we are going
to be seeing more bugs.
Hello! Can you say “Cryptosporidium”, “Blastocystis”, “Giardia”, “Entamoeba”,
“Trichomonas”, “Candida”, “Borrelia”, or “Toxoplasma”? I look into my crystal
ball and see more Latin terminology coming into everyone’s vocabulary in the
near furture,
Will in Minneapolis