Dr John Campbell and blood clots

It's all not unknown for busy GPs and nurses to have little time to keep up with the latest research and practice.

Good communication is essential.

But we need the people with brains the size of planets as well, otherwise there's nothing to communicate

MayBee70

Perhaps you should do a web chat with DrJohn so we could all bow to your superior knowledge Algerias. . I’m sure he’d be quite open to that.

Oh just stop it. Am I allowed to say grow up and stop being so nasty?

If not, report me and get me deleted.

I was going to ignore your posts to be honest but I’m not having someone diss Dr John who has helped more people emotionally over the past year or so than some of us will do in our whole lifetime. And he doesn’t claim to be an expert. Which is why I like him.

I didn't diss him.

I said he wasn't an internationally renowned scientist and when you asked for examples of where he'd got things wrong I gave 2. Scientists know that sometimes they have to change their minds about things when the facts change and I'm sure Dr Campbell is the same.

I watch him as well, sometimes I agree with what he says and sometimes I don't.

So what was the 2016 paper that he talked about. Presumably that has been peer reviewed?

I don’t know. But he usually states if something has been peer reviewed or not peer reviewed. I don’t read the links because they’re too scientific for me.

Ok. I haven't listened to him before. Maybe the 2016 paper is in the links.

NotSpaghetti

So what was the 2016 paper that he talked about. Presumably that has been peer reviewed?

I don't know. I watch him a couple of times a week and think he's usually sound (but not always). That's why I was interested that he obviously feels strongly about the issue and France and Denmark have instructed medics to aspirate when administering the AZ vaccine. I doubt if the two governments are acting on a whim.

As he says he might not be a scientist or a doctor but he has been vaccinating people for over 40 years so he must know something about it! And if there’s even the slightest chance that it could save someone’s life it should be considered. It wouldn’t surprise me if the minister he wrote to didn’t have to find out what aspirate meant!

Well, it is somewhat surprising that the minister who replied to him was Nadhim Zahawi, who is responsible for the government's Vaccine Taskforce. I wouldn't expect him to know all the scientific data or the arguments for and against, but he has a team of people working for him and I would expect him to respond with some knowledge. I didn't listen to it personally, but I understand he did a car crash of an interview on Radio 4 Today. It doesn't inspire confidence.

Have to say as a retired medical doctor I'm not impressed with John Campbell.

I hear words come out of his mouth that are right-sounding and I simply don't find WHAT he is doing and HOW he is doing it consistent with his claim to want to help people, protect people from COVID and put down disinformation.

With half a million followers and weekly revelations that professional propagandists are paying influencers on YouTube to promote anti-vaccine conspiracy theories I find Campbell's YouTube channel worryingly enigmatic.

His 'comments' threads attached to his videos are almost exclusively anti-vaccine activists engaged in a war against worryingly few vaccine promoters and anti-conspiracy-theory rationalists, and these agitators are quoting "Dr" John on his own videos claiming he is a medical doctor with expert authority AT ODDS with the consensus of medical research and vaccine research and citing the abundance of distractive trivia he presents his audience on various claims for alternative therapies and unproven medicine.

He knows full well that he is being quoted as a "medical" doctor in the comments of his own videos and he knows full well that anti-vaccine conspiracy intrigues are being promoted there voraciously.

For some reason inexplicable to me he repeatedly fails to turn off the comments for the harm they clearly represent. Perhaps he likes the audience and the activity too much, but I rather expect someone who was not seeking attention or popularity and just wanting to put down myths, focus hearers on vaccinating and staying safe, and dispel conspiracy conjecture ought to know that referring to self as 'Dr' and proceeding to deliver highly medical advice relating to prescribed treatment, vaccines and virology to lay people who mostly don't understand and are seeking reassuring authority, will give the impression that he is an authority which those who repost him and quote his insistences on pursuing wild deviations into speculative and anecdotal treatment as part of their anti-vaccine rhetoric.

I have to be inclined to agree with the government scientists and the medical mainstream on this one. In communicating on a critical subject keep the main thong the main thing, don't fill peoples minds with distractions, the potential for unwise reckoning, too many options.

GP's and consultants are already seeing this all the time thanks to 'Doctor Google' - patients who've consulted chiropractors, dieticians, nutritionists, nurses, retired non-specialists before they come in for consultation and spend most of their time trying to direct diagnosis and treatment and fighting for wholly unfit or speculative treatments, supplements, vitamins, drug choices - and then get frustrated when we don't support those demands and take the tone that we're withholding something superior from them. They end up with entirely false expectations which have, one far too many occadions, been very damaging to them.

I don't really think people who need a vaccine here and now need to have their head filled with what doctors in Peru are experimenting with. I'm sure patients in Peru wish they were getting treatment in America or Europe.

Very worrying. He could turn off the comments and put an end to being misrepresented by anti-vaccine theorists ON HIS OWN YouTube.

Oh thank God. Put your tin helmet on Pammy1949

Pammy - I haven't seen this man before but agree he should turn comments off if that's the sort of comments he's getting.

Given that, and he may be questionable, I think this one thing about injecting for certain into the muscle seems reasonable. Strangely, I did say to my husband that I wondered how they were certain the injections were going into muscle - we even looked up a set of "working drawings" of the shoulder and I'm afraid we just shrugged.
So maybe you can help me here Pammy... if there is a tiny chance it might not be in the right place, why don't we take a little extra time on it? What harm would it cause?

I suggest that people that dismiss DrCampbell should check out his blogs from the start of 2020 when he warned people about what was happening in China and saying there was danger of a pandemic. He’s actually done more to reassure me pandemic wise over the past 18 months or so than anyone in government and most people on this forum. And, as I’ve said before, he puts links to everything so people can check it out for themselves. Why shouldn’t we be interested in what is happening in other countries given that it’s a worldwide pandemic which started in another country.

Pammy, this is the new paper which has yet to be peer reviewed:
www.biorxiv.org/content/10.1101/2021.06.29.450356v1.abstract?%3Fcollection

The 2016 paper I think I'd have to listen again to know what to look for there.

Pammy Which disinformation have you heard from John Campbell?

I'm not a regular follower of his YouTube channel, so maybe I've missed something. However, as far as I can tell, he has never been against vaccinations. I admit that I don't read the comments under his videos.

With all due respect to medical doctors, they aren't always right. I suspect they are sometimes too busy to keep up with all the latest developments. Sorry to say I've experienced this with GPs. On one occasion, a consultant had to write to my GP to enforce treatment, which the GP was denying me - nothing to do with over-zealous use of Google.

I started this thread because I was curious more than anything else. I know nothing about giving vaccines, but it does appear that Campbell isn't the only one asking questions.

I find his videos very interesting. He obviously has a great deal of knowledge and is quick to say when he doesn't. He is used to teaching so communicates at a level most of us could understand. He is also quick to tell us this paper has only just been published and has not yet been peer reviewed. It will be and we can then make our minds up about what that says.

To me, it sounds very plausable. It has been acted on in other countries. Maybe it will be here. I would feel happier if they did this when we come to boosters. I cannot see any medical downside for not doing so.

growstuff

Pammy Which disinformation have you heard from John Campbell?

I'm not a regular follower of his YouTube channel, so maybe I've missed something. However, as far as I can tell, he has never been against vaccinations. I admit that I don't read the comments under his videos.

With all due respect to medical doctors, they aren't always right. I suspect they are sometimes too busy to keep up with all the latest developments. Sorry to say I've experienced this with GPs. On one occasion, a consultant had to write to my GP to enforce treatment, which the GP was denying me - nothing to do with over-zealous use of Google.

I started this thread because I was curious more than anything else. I know nothing about giving vaccines, but it does appear that Campbell isn't the only one asking questions.

I really would like a reply from Pammy. I have listened to DrJohns blogs since the start of last year and have found them informative and helpful. If someone is going to accuse him of fuelling the anti vacc movement etc I really feel they should give exact examples of anything in his blog that does that. Or information that is definitely incorrect. It’s important that those people more knowledgeable than him give those of us that are gullible enough to have faith in what he says that information. As for the comments on his blogs I don’t think he reads them anyway and neither do I. He’s been doing his blogs for many years and has developed a thick skin when it comes to internet trolls.

I’m not Pammy but I like to put my oar in….

Dr Campbell does have a responsibility to monitor the comments on his videos. I had a quick look at they are heavily weighted towards the “don’t take the vaccine” kind of thing. While Dr Campbell clearly doesn’t agree with that, it would take seconds to turn off the ability to comment and just remove a channel for the deniers to spread their disinformation.

Dr Campbell has never claimed to be a medical doctor, certainly, but his use of the title “Dr” does suggest that he is using it to add credibility to his videos. He is a very good communicator, IMO, and explains things really well. But he does have some hobby horses – Ivermectin, and aspiration for instance, and when you look at some of the comments on this forum you can see that people think we should be following his ideas. Well I’m sorry, and this is where I’ll get unpopular, he’s an interpreter of research, not a researcher. I’ve seen him referred to on this forum as somebody who “knows more about infectious diseases than most”. That’s misrepresenting his field of knowledge, I’m afraid.

I would say that the last thing we need is a populiser of science telling people that there are things that the government should be doing when there is no justification for it. I heard him make a comment about UV light and the virus yesterday that I know for a fact isn’t true, so it makes me wonder about some of the other things he says, that are not in an area I know much about. IMO, he’s good to listen to when it comes to seeing the latest trends and figures explained, but not when it comes to proposing about new treatments.

But, given that we need people to have the vaccine and there is obviously a small risk from the AZ vaccine and the Pfizer one, should we not be doing everything possible to find out why there is a small risk and what can be done to eliminate that risk. All he’s saying regarding aspirating the needle is let’s eliminate that from our enquiry by doing it and seeing if it makes a difference. Surely we owe it to those people that have been affected by the problems. He was advocating the wearing of masks ages before the government mandated it. He said people could be asymptomatic ages before the PM realised it. When I was worried that the vaccines wouldn’t work it was DrJohn that kept me up to date with what was happening. And, if he does get something wrong he’ll be the first person to admit it.

The aspiration is not a zero sum game though; as I understand it there are negative aspects to it to, not least that it is painful. I say again, I'm not a medic, but the actual risks of the blood clots is tiny and maybe more people would be put off by thinking it was going to be painful that thinking that blood clots are a problem.

Before anybody asks me to defend that, let me say just please don't ask me. People with actual knowledge and expertise in this, all over the world, have decided its not worth it. Some countries have decided otherwise, and that's their prerogative, but most have decided not to. So let's just get on with it. Things should be questioned, for sure, but frankly, not by unaffiliated people who have a popular YouTube channel.

Dr Campbell is sometimes right and sometimes wrong. But he does not represent any medical authority and no matter how good a Nurse Educator he is, questioning the authority of those who actually have to be accountable, and making people think there are questions to answer is, IMO, unacceptable.

So we shouldn’t eg question the WHO that have, quite frankly got quite a few things wrong thus far?

Anyone can have doubts about the WHO or any other group. But establishing ourselves as authorities who need to be listened to is something else. Other than undermining his subscribers' confidence in the medical authorities he disagrees with, what does his advocacy of aspiration, or Ivermectin, or anything else, actually accomplish?

It wouldn’t surprise me if he hasn’t persuaded more people to wear masks and get vaccinated than a lot of other people have. He was advocating the wearing of masks when even JVT, who I do admire was following WHO guidelines and saying mask wearing was a waste of time. I’d need to look at the timeline but it wouldn’t surprise me to find that he was saying we should do testing and tracing when Chris Whitty decided it was a waste of time because the virus was already spreading in the community.