By A Midwestern Doctor
The Forgotten Side of Medicine
June 3, 2026
I feel one of the greatest issues in healthcare (which is a reflection of the society at large) is that things are so rushed that there isn't time for doctors to connect with their patients. Because of this, a lot of the most critical parts of medicine get missed, and I've known so many patients who were harmed by the medical system because of the 15 minute visit model. As such, my original goal here was to connect with everyone who reached out to me, but now, due to the amount of work I feel obligated to put into the articles and just how many people contact me with urgent questions, that's no longer possible.
I eventually decided that the best option I had was to try to address as many potential questions as possible in the articles post monthly open threads where anyone could ask what they wanted to, as that way I could efficiently get through the pressing questions I was not able to answer throughout my articles and then pair those threads with a shorter topic I'd wanted to cover, which this month will be the forgotten ways for restoring sinus health, healing the eustachian tubes and treating colds and flus (including the extensive data DMSO is a miraculous therapy for these conditions).
Note: on Thursday I posted an article highlighting how a doctored and misleading poll had caused Trump's administration to partially abandon the vaccine issue. On Friday, he signed an executive order which set policies in motion to both create a safer (and greatly reduced) vaccine schedule and to make it much harder for the pharmaceutical industry to control the process by removing the power unelected officials and advisors had to set vaccine policy. This is a huge victory and I deeply grateful for each of you who has helped bring attention to this matter.
Hantavirus Hysteria
I have long viewed the annual hyping up of pandemics as annual CDC tradition they do to justify their budgets that the media happily goes along with because disease hysteria gives them a way to hook viewers without threatening any powerful interests.
Robert F. Kennedy Jr., in 2021, provided a far more detailed breakdown of this enterprise in The Real Anthony Fauci, where he documented a "two-decade strategy of promoting false pandemics as a scheme for promoting novel vaccines, drugs and Pharma profits" where institutional machinery learned to manufacture urgency by cycling through one hyped pathogen after another, each accompanied by media fear, vaccine campaigns, and things like massive livestock culls or Tamiflu pushes. Most importantly, the multibillion-dollar preparedness industry that grew around this cycle, faces no accountability when the pandemics inevitably fail to materialize or the promoted therapies turn out not to work.
As best as I can tell, this all was the result of infectious disease mortality steadily declining throughout the 20th century (due to improvements in sanitation, nutrition, and living conditions), which reduced the day-to-day urgency that had originally justified large public health bureaucracies and created the need for something else to justify their existence. This new model kicked into gear in 1976: after seeing a few signs that a novel swine flu which had appeared at Fort Dix could be a repeat of the 1918 influenza (which remains far and away the worst pandemic in modern history), the CDC director pushed for an emergency mass-vaccination campaign-despite the FDA's influenza expert (Dr. Anthony Morris) stating there was no risk of a severe pandemic and Morris defying his superiors to alert the public.
The proposal made its way to the White House, where President Ford, facing an election year, endorsed it and gave the campaign the political momentum it needed to move forward (along with immunity the manufacturers had demanded). As Morris warned, the pandemic never materialized, but the emergency vaccine (released a month before the election) injured a significant number of Americans, contributing to Ford's loss. Following the election, doubts grew, and after six weeks, the vaccine was suspend. Upon inauguration, Ford's Assistant Health Secretary resigned and Carter's Health Secretary fired the CDC director (providing some accountability), but most of those responsible were never held accountable and the pandemic machine became entrenched in the health bureaucracy.
Note: officially, this vaccine was pulled because it caused Guillain-Barré syndrome in roughly 1 in 100,000 recipients. I do not believe the injuries were actually that rare-if they had been, they could have easily been swept under the rug (particularly since most GBS cases recover). Rather, I suspect the real scope of harm was much larger: I have seen patients who were injured by this vaccine (most recently, someone told me they refused the COVID vaccine because they still had permanent complications from the 1976 shot), a friend who was in practice at the time told me that roughly half of his 50-100 patients took the vaccine against his advice due to the media pressure, with two then developing GBS, and there was at least one reported instance where three elderly people who received shots within the same hour at the same clinic all had fatal heart attacks-deemed, of course, "unrelated" to the vaccine.
Below is what this cycle has looked like since 1976. For viruses that secured significant supplemental CDC or federal funding, I have marked them with dollar signs ($ = modest boost, =significant,$ = massive appropriations).
1976: Swine flu,$$$ seasonal flu$
1977-1980: Seasonal flu$
1981: HIV/AIDS$$$ emerges (wall-to-wall "mystery plague" coverage begins), seasonal flu$
1982: HIV/AIDS$$$ (escalating media panic, NIAID funding expansion), seasonal flu$
1983: HIV/AIDS$$$ (Fauci takes over NIAID; crisis narrative drives AZT development), seasonal flu$
1984: HIV/AIDS$$$ (budget growth accelerates; media saturation), seasonal flu$
1985: HIV/AIDS,$$$ seasonal flu$ (largest influenza B epidemic since 1968-69)
1986-1987 HIV/AIDS,$$$ seasonal flu$
1988: HIV/AIDS,$$$ seasonal flu,$ hemorrhagic fever with renal syndrome$(brief media attention)
1989-1992: HIV/AIDS,$$$ seasonal flu$
1993: Hantavirus$ (Four Corners outbreak-"mystery killer" headlines, CDC "emerging threat" framing), HIV/AIDS,$$$ seasonal flu$
1994-1996 HIV/AIDS,$$$ seasonal flu$
1997: Avian influenza H5N1$$ (Hong Kong-"next pandemic" headlines, mass poultry culls); HIV/AIDS$$$ seasonal flu$
1998: Avian influenza continuation,$$ seasonal flu$
1999: West Nile virus$$ (mosquito panic maps, "deadly new threat" coverage, initial CDC emergency response and surveillance buildup, also was repeated in subsequent 2002 and 2012 outbreaks), seasonal flu$
2000: Seasonal flu$
2001-2002: Anthrax attacks$$$ (wall-to-wall bioterror coverage, massive biodefense funding surge); seasonal flu$
2003-2004: SARS$$ (global quarantines, "killer coronavirus" fear, sustained front-page coverage), seasonal flu$
2005-2006: Avian influenza H5N1 resurgence$$ (Fauci warns of "time bomb," "millions could die" headlines, Tamiflu stockpiled at billions in cost), seasonal flu$
2007-2008: Seasonal flu$
2009-2010: Swine flu H1N1$$$ (WHO pandemic declaration, vaccine drives, mass culls, heavy sustained coverage), seasonal flu$
2011: Seasonal flu$
2012-2013: MERS$ ("next SARS" headlines, camel-linked global risk stories), seasonal flu$
2014: Ebola$$$ (West Africa-"global catastrophe" coverage, travel panic, wall-to-wall for months), seasonal flu$
2015: Zika$$ emerges (microcephaly panic, birth defect maps, Fauci pushes $2B+ for vaccine research), seasonal flu$
2016: Zika$$ peak (sustained fear coverage, mosquito control campaigns); seasonal flu$
2017: Yellow fever$ (outbreak coverage, vaccine campaigns), seasonal flu$
2018: Nipah virus$ (India-"next Ebola" headlines, brief but intense coverage), seasonal flu$ (2017-18 season estimated 61,000 deaths-one of the worst modern seasons, heavy media coverage)
2019: Seasonal flu$
2020-2021: COVID-19$$$ (non-stop global coverage, unprecedented funding and mandates); seasonal flu$
2022: COVID-19,$$$ Monkeypox$$ (WHO emergency declaration, "new threat" coverage despite low risk/deaths, Jynneos vaccine contracts), avian influenza H5N1 resurgence$$ (mass poultry culls), seasonal flu$
2023: Marburg virus$ ("Ebola-like" warnings), COVID-19,$$ avian influenza continuation,$$ seasonal flu,$ "tripledemic" coverage$
2024: Avian influenza H5N1,$$ in dairy cattle (renewed "pandemic potential" coverage, vaccine development), COVID-19,$ seasonal flu$
2025: Seasonal flu$ (worst flu season in 15 years-heavy media coverage, highest hospitalization rates since 2009), COVID-19$
2026: Hantavirus$ (Andes virus cruise ship outbreak-13 cases, 3 deaths, CDC deploys response team, passengers quarantined in Nebraska, wall-to-wall coverage), seasonal flu$ COVID-19$
Of these, only a handful actually turned into a significant public health issue: COVID-19, HIV/AIDS, the 2009 swine flu (which spread widely though it was milder than predicted) and Ebola (which devastated West Africa but was largely contained outside the region). Everything else either fizzled, was contained to small clusters, or involved therapies and vaccines that turned out to be ineffective or unnecessary at the scale promoted. Yet nearly all of them secured additional CDC funding, and every single one received similar significant media coverage-leading to RFK Jr. describing the whole process as "Groundhog Day" playing out over and over.
Because of this, I initially argued with people over the annual pandemic hysteria and then switched to being completely disengaged each time it happened. The sole exception to this was COVID-19, because starting in the middle of December 2019 (when the Wuhan outbreak was discussed on anonymous online message board), there instead was no mainstream coverage of it, despite it finally having the rare mix of characteristics needed to create an actual pandemic, and as it grew and spread, the media did all they could to downplay it (e.g., "it's just a flu bro," and framing concerns about it as right-wing xenophobia towards the Chinese)-leading me to suspect something was seriously amiss.
Note: New York City officials encouraged attendance at Lunar New Year events in Chinatown in early February, telling people not to change plans due to "misinformation" 1, 2 and Nancy Pelosi visited San Francisco's Chinatown on Feb 24 and urged people to visit shops and restaurants there to support the community against stigma. 1
Given my cynicism towards this industry, I still was a bit surprised they next chose to make a big deal out of monkeypox as the disease is very difficult to transmit (requiring prolonged physical contact and its spread was almost entirely constrained to sexually active homosexual males). However, this still did not prepare me for this year's Hantavirus hysteria-a disease people every year occasionally get from coming into contact with things (e.g., feces, urine, nesting materials) infected rodents have left in their vicinity-that is by far the rarest in the United States (roughly 30 cases a year), and except for one rare South American strain (which has very poor transmission), can never be transmited from person to person, making it even less likely than monkeypox to become a global health catastrophe. Nonetheless, after one person got that strain prior to a cruise, 12 more people in close contact on that same cruise then got it (ultimately resulting in 3 deaths, one of whom was the original recipient) and appropriate quarantine measures were implemented (effectively ending the "outbreak") a national media hysteria and endless discussions on managing hantavirus still followed.
Managing Pandemics
Having now watched this process for decades, I have three general thoughts on all of it (which I rarely see enter the discussion):
• In most cases, the viruses which are actually dangerous reciprocally have low transmission, in part due to the fact that it's hard for animal viruses to jump to humans and even harder for them to jump from other humans to humans, and in part because evolution will pressure viruses that easily transmit between people to become less lethal so they can better spread. Because of this, it's very rare for a "catastrophic pandemic" to be able to emerge (COVID-19 being the key exception due to it being artificially engineered to be both dangerous and easily transmissible, which allowed it to be briefly be dangerous before evolving to a more benign form), and when dangerous viruses emerge, they typically have a low enough transmissibility that they can be managed with standard quarantine measures (as we saw with hantavirus).
Note: the other exception was the 1918 influenza, and to this day (despite having extensively researched it) I am still not sure why that disease became so deadly.
• With give or take every disease on the list I previously provided, attempts were made to make a vaccine, all of which to varying degrees failed, with the most "successful" attempts (for flu and COVID) having poor efficacy due to the fact the strains constantly change so the vaccines rapidly became outdated and needed to be rereleased each year.
• A central dogma in modern medicine is that while bacterial and fungal infections can be easily treated, viruses can't, and at best, you can have selective inhibitors for viruses (that are often quite toxic) which partially mitigate the infections-which is a shame as having a way to treat their novel pandemics each time they emerge would be infinitely cheaper and effective than the hodgepodge of costly (and often ineffective) measures we use now.
The third point is where my focus has been drawn, as while lackluster therapeutics exist for viral infections, many "alternative" therapies exist for these infections, which as far back as the early days of AIDS we were using as every authority told us "nothing could be done." However, the central issue was that those "umbrella therapies" (detailed further here) tended to be broad and non-specific in their antiviral activity, making them a direct threat to the lucrative market of developing individual therapeutics and vaccines for each emerging pandemic.
For instance, in a particularly sad example, when Africa was being overrun with Ebola in 2014, ozone advocates Robert Rowen MD and Howard Robins DPM, at the president's invitation, went to Sierra Leone on an ozone medical mission trip and publicly chronicled what occurred as the trip progressed. There, they trained well over a hundred doctors and staff (including at the government Ebola treatment center) on how to administer ozone, but despite the president's support, were abruptly blocked by the health ministry from applying it officially to patients for "unknown reasons." As there was no approved treatment for Ebola (and the majority of cases were fatal), healthcare workers treating patients (who were not always bound by the same government restrictions) eagerly sought ozone and in the documented ebola cases where it was used, recipients fully recovered (along with ozone appearing to prevent ebola exposures from developing into disease). 1, 2, 3
While I have no direct proof, I am relatively certain the ozone treatments were abruptly aborted due to outside lobbying as that outbreak became a major international testing ground for experimental Ebola therapies and vaccines. Numerous organizations (e.g., the WHO, CDC, NIAID, BARDA, INSERM) conducted or supported clinical trials and research efforts focused on candidates such as the monoclonal antibody cocktail ZMapp, and vaccine platforms like rVSV-ZEBOV (later commercialized by Merck as Ervebo). These initiatives involved substantial funding and resources and the partially effective or promising therapeutics and vaccines developed from this work were later celebrated as important advances in biodefense and outbreak preparedness research. However, beyond costing far more than what locals could afford, ZMapp only partially worked on one strain of Ebola, while in outbreaks from other strains, it was useless, which includes the one currently sweeping through Africa where there is a desperate effort to develop new therapeutics.
Airway Disinfection
When viral illnesses are not treated and progress to becoming severe, it is often necessary to use more powerful antiviral therapies like ozone. However, in the earlier stages of the illness (when they have not yet penetrated into the body) a variety of treatments have high efficacy (e.g., C19early.com compiled the research showing dozens did for COVID-19).
Note: one pooled analysis of all research for each COVID-19 treatment found that there was no correlation between efficacy and the treatment being recommended to treat COVID-19; rather it simply was all the expensive and proprietary options which had some amount of data behind them which then entered the treatment guidelines.
Remarkably, one of the most effective COVID treatment options found was simply using something to clean out the nasal cavity early in the illness-but to this day few people are aware of it because public health officials never told us about it. In turn, while many off-patent COVID treatments were suppressed, I found the sidelining of nasal disinfectants particularly frustrating as, with a small bit of education, this option was accessible to virtually everyone and hence could have completely changed the course of the pandemic.
Furthermore, one of the key discoveries that caught my attention early in the pandemic was that SARS-CoV-2 (the virus which causes COVID) has a strong preference for upper airway tissue, particularly the nasal cavity and nasopharynx, where the virus typically replicates for several days to two weeks after infection and in most individuals, the infection remains limited to these upper airways until it is cleared by the immune system. However, in patients who progress to severe disease, the infection eventually migrates to the lower respiratory tract, leading to severe pneumonia, and in the most severe cases, the virus then entering the bloodstream. 1, 2, 3, 4, 5
What this essentially meant (and what the nasal disinfection studies hence showed) was that if you could eliminate SARS-CoV-2 in the upper airway before the infection had a chance to progress to the lungs, you had a very good chance of not only preventing severe COVID-19 but also greatly reducing the course of the illness itself (as many COVID symptoms result from the immune system trying to eliminate the virus in the upper airway). Furthermore, as COVID-19 evolved into a less severe disease, later variants showed an even stronger preference for the upper airway 1 (which is why Omicron was for more transmissible but much less dangerous and essentially vaccinated the entire population against COVID-19).
In turn, I found that telling people to clean out their upper airway (e.g., sinuses) to be one of the most effective things I could tell people to do (particularly since you could immediately either pick up the supplies or overnight them with Amazon in essentially every part of the United States) and before long, I had people ask if this also worked for the flu because they had done the protocol for what they thought was COVID but later learned was actually the flu but nonetheless rapidly recovered.
In each case, I essentially said: "I actually developed this for treating colds and flus, but once I saw the data for COVID-19, I realized that it probably would work for COVID as well and it did."
Note: Similar to SARS-CoV-2, the viruses responsible for common colds and influenza also initially replicate in the upper airways. Influenza viruses have a mixed tropism - they preferentially infect upper airway epithelial cells but can more readily infect lower airway and lung cells than SARS-CoV-2 or rhinovirus. As a result, most flu cases stay in the upper airways, but progression to viral pneumonia occurs more often than with other common respiratory viruses. In contrast, rhinoviruses (the leading cause of colds) show the strongest preference for upper airway tissue and very rarely reach the lungs in otherwise healthy people. 1, 2, 3, 4
Additionally, while I did not focus on using DMSO to treat COVID-19, a randomized trial of 1,252 COVID-19 patients, found a DMSO-containing oral spray (with zinc iodide and xylitol) used 5-10 times daily reduced the proportion of symptomatic patients from 68% to 3% by day 7, and viral PCR positivity from 93% to 9% by day 7, compared to standard care alone.