I have long LUVED me some Kara. I read her stuff devotedly when I was covering the Silicon Valley Digital Health IT startup conferences turf (nationwide, actually) as part of my HHS HIT "Meaningful Use" initiative gig based out of Las Vegas. Kara's tagline at the time was "The Grumpy Lady of Tech."
Major Fanboy here kept hoping (to no avail) that Kara would show up at one of the Health 2.0 / WinterTech events. That woulda been way cool. Sigh...
My Bay Area history goes back to 1967. Arriving from the eastern U.S., I took up residence in North Beach (bar band musician at the time). I quickly became one of those "Summer of Love" hippies. I still have great life-long friends there.
BTW: Also relevant to Kara's topic, "The Good Death."
FAST FORWARD TO KARA SWISHER 2026
Rahm Emanuel. What a dynamite podcast segment this was.
Speaking of Emanuel, how about equally brilliant brother Dr. Zeke? Last night while awaiting Kara's documentary debut I watched Real Time with Bill Maher. One of his guests? Ezekiel J. Emanuel, MD.
Bought his book (of course):
Yeah. Yes indeed. Just getting started on this book.
Zeke Emanual was materially involved with the authoring of the PPACA—"Obamacare." I followed those developments closely, writing about them on another of my blogs. e.g., see "Public Optional." Prior to those days, I'd written my first grad school paper ("argument analysis & evaluation") on the PNHP "Single Payor" argument published in JAMA in 1994.
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I have a bit of tangential personal experience related to these topics. to wit, excerpt from my memoir about my late elder daughter Sissy.
The search for survival and healing
Should you or a loved one be beset by advanced and life-threatening cancer, gird yourself for an overwhelming onslaught of information, much of it in conflict, all of it ostensibly requiring your immediate consideration and action lest you accede to fatal delay.
My empirical triage effort began within days of Sissy's admission to County. While we were still struggling to come to grips with everything coming fast and furious from the doctors and medical administration, well-meaning friends and acquaintances began peppering us with unsolicited advice and literature, some of it conveying a bizarre ignorance that would leave me floundering for the politic response that would not demean and offend. Pejorative retort suppression would become an ongoing emotional exercise (repeatedly aided by the quiet and gentle reproach of my saintly wife).
It commenced with a reprint of an"article" hawking a book wherein it would be recounted in further detail just why "all cancers" were caused by intestinal flatworms! (The author ended nearly every sentence with one or more exclamation marks!) The curative regimen would simply involve purging the gastrointestinal tract of these carcinogenic parasites through a regimen including colonics and herbal mixtures. The boyfriend delivering this wonderful news was utterly sold on its merit: Salvation was at hand!
Mercifully, Dr. Wren got me off the hook on this one with a diplomacy worthy of a Secretary of State.
Next would come the "Hoxsey" video, a slick production exuding first-class "documentary" production values-- sinister in tone-- detailing the history of the miraculous herbal anti-cancer "formula" purportedly discovered by one uneducated Harry Hoxsey decades ago while treating horse hide lesions on his father's farm. The video-- replete with ominous background music and newsreel headline cutaways-- recounts the foul banishment of this alleged "savior" to Mexico by the greedy and venal American Medical Association. The Hoxsey clinic in Tijuana today still attracts innumerable desperate cancer sufferers bereft of more conventional clinical options and ready with cash.
After close consideration, I had no choice but to count myself in the company of those regarding this stuff as the worst sort of quackery.
Essiac tea (brand name: Fluoressence). The story is told that a Canadian nurse-- one Rene Caisse-- was the recipient of a mysterious healing herbal recipe used by an Ojibwa tribal medicine man that caused all manner of malignancies to disappear in short order. It is predictably alleged that the Canadian counterpart to our A.M.A. in concert with Ottawa would see to the suppression of this wondrous substance.
Proponents of this beverage invariably mention that "Essiac" is "Caisse" spelled in reverse. In my case, no particular epiphany would be forthcoming in the wake of this "Sgt.-Pepper-Played-Backwards" intimation, and, after much digging concerning the ingredients and their asserted efficacy, I could find nothing clinically interesting in Essiac.
"Resonance" machines? What? Another phone number slipped to me at the hospital had me listening to a sales pitch extolling a $1,500"radionics therapy" device used to destroy tumors by resonating with the electro-biological "cancer frequency" of malignant tissues.
Right.
Not flatworms! No, it was "bacteria in the blood," the result of diet, specifically consumption of items such as chicken, that was the source of all cancer, another "doctor" explained to me over the phone from his Tijuana clinic. "We can't get the docs in the States to understand this," he intoned with weary resignation. His methodology: purge the blood through a revised diet that, among other things, eschewed chicken and mandated the consumption of lamb. Why? A devotee of this practitioner had a ready retort: "Y'ever watch chickens eat? They peck at the ground, picking up all kinds of bacteria." Oh.
Lamb, on the other hand, came from "root-eating" livestock that, while foraging through the subterrain, ingested the beneficent, supposedly cancer-curing below-ground nutrients central to this serum antiseptic "therapy." We could come down to the Tijuana clinic for an initial two-week stay for blood assessment and initiation of therapy. $2,500 per week. But, according to our locally referred contact-- 'he'll work it out with you if money is a problem; he's a very compassionate man. He really cares for his patients, he takes the time to listen to their concerns.'
In contrast to the "arrogant, narrow-minded, greedy, and indifferent" American clinicians who controlled medical practice in The States (the oft-repeated mantra of the more strident segment of the "alternative healing" movement) clearly implicit in this appeal.
The foregoing comprise a more or less representative sampling of our experience thus far with the quackery end of the alternative therapy spectrum, a distribution of propositions whose opposite terminus abuts the breadth of mainstream clinical research and practice, where methods as yet"unproven" but more logically reasonable and promising vie for acceptance by the medical establishment. In the middle lie tougher calls: does shark cartilage really shrink tumors, functioning as an angiogenesis inhibitor? (one skeptical journal article called it "the laetrile of the 90's") Hydrazine sulfate? (also reported on extensively in the mainstream clinical literature and generally-- though not uniformly-- dismissed as 'ineffective.') Nucleotide Reductase? Plant oils? Blue-green algae?
All of these unconventional therapeutic assertions-- many of which would prove to be merely unproductive, outlandish, maddening distractions-- would have to be checked out while also slogging through the vast archives of mainstream clinical literature, a quest that would take me through the most recent three years of month-by-month National Cancer Institute (NCI) hepatoma citations. Also, I began-- and continue to this day-- keyword-searching the Medline indices for anything related to Sissy's condition that might prove useful…
I used to joke to Sissy about us getting "some Healing Burgers."
Again, Kara Swisher Fanboy exhorts you.
I set up my Xfinity box to record this 1st episode, but CNN went from Bill Maher to an hour-long "breaking news" special on the JD Vance talks on Iran that had just concluded (in failure) after 21 hours in a meeting in Pakistan. So, my Kara recording didn't take. Frustrated and irritated, I signed up for the CNN Premium Subscription ($69.99 annual) so I could watch the segment. CNN is gradually going tiered "Freemium" like a lot of network / cable / streaming news media these days.
I have to say, this first Kara Live Forever episode was well worth the entire annual fee. It is that good. There are reportedly to be five more, in what they now tout as "Season One."
UPDATE
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| Link here. |
UPDATE: OK, I just finished listening. I feel measurably better, both physically and in terms of being better at connecting a number of important dots. Kara rocks.
ERRATUM
Is Kara "NSFW?"
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CODA
Kara Swisher has the Pedal to the Metal these days
I hope y'all find all of this stuff interesting and useful.
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