I serve as a medical information resource to an Orlando political talk show called “The American Adversaries.” So, when this very public medical event happened, I became Chris Hart’s on-air guest. His co-host is Mike McBath, a former Detroit Lions player who is still actively involved in player issues. While doing my homework, I found lots of doctors making diagnoses. It did not matter whether the vocalist was in the front or the back row, he was singing in unison with the choir. This raises a serious question for these doctors. “Didn’t your medical school make you take a class on ‘differential diagnosis’?”

Let me ‘splain this for you. If you have high blood pressure, your doctor should do a good history, an examination, and some tests before he decides on the proper treatment for your blood pressure. Do you have:

• Morbid obesity
• Family history of hypertension
• Periodic sweating and fast heartbeat
• Or (many more)?

The point of all this is to make certain that the doctor is tackling the actual problem causing the high blood pressure. If he doesn’t, you’ll get a treatment that, at best, won’t help and, at worst, might be dangerous. Most of us are familiar with this in the epidemic of diagnosis of Attention Deficit Hyperactivity Disorder. Lots of bright kids are getting (mal)treated with medications when their only problem is that they’re bored in school. The proper treatment for them is more challenging school work, not medications.

Just as hypertension and bored kids need proper diagnoses, the Damar Hamlin incident cries out for the same. And all those doctors making armchair diagnoses should slow down until they see all of Hamlin’s chart. In particular, they should stop claiming that anyone who implicates the clot shot is spreading misinformation. I haven’t seen Hamlin’s chart, so I can’t say for certain what caused his cardiac arrest, but I can be responsible and explain what may have happened. Notice that I said “may,” not “did.”

There are at least four possibilities that must be in the differential for Hamlin’s arrest.

1.    Commotio cordis

2.    Sudden death following COVID vaccination

3.    Adrenaline-induced lethal arrhythmia following chronic COVID vaccination-induced myocarditis

4.    Chronic underlying structural or electrophysiological cardiac pathology manifesting at that moment.

It’s crucially important to understand that those four don’t include all the “rare birds” listed by Dr. McCullough. Further, all of them would look exactly the same during the seconds from contact to collapse. All of them would stop his heart from pumping at the same moment. From the time his heart stopped until he passed out would be on the order of ten to fifteen seconds. That’s simply because your brain and body haven’t used up the oxygen the bloodstream already delivered.

Anyone who has watched a hunting show knows that an elk or moose can run hundreds of yards before collapsing, even after its heart has been destroyed by the bullet.

Ditto for Damar Hamlin. He made the tackle, stood up, and fell over when his brain and muscles exhausted the oxygen they already had.

We can wipe one of those choices off the list right away. Top-line professional athletes get really serious cardiac exams before their team signs the final contract. So, Hamlin is virtually certain no to have had any big-time anatomic or electrical problems with his heart before he joined the Buffalo Bills.

Commotio cordis (Latin for “commotion of the heart”) happens when a small dense object impacts the sternum (breast bone), creating an electrical impulse at exactly the wrong moment in the cardiac cycle. This “R on T” phenomenon puts the heart into ventricular fibrillation, a rhythm that doesn’t pump any blood. This is the “diagnosis” being shouted everywhere in the internet. But nobody claiming “This is it!” has a clue. There just isn’t any public medical data on Hamlin’s event. All we have is the Monday Night Football video and a clock.

Commotio cordis is most common in teenagers, whose chest walls are more flexible than adults. But even there, it’s rare, with only twenty or so cases in the US each year. Common missiles are softballs, hockey pucks, and similar small items. They strike the sternum, in the center of the chest, very close to the heart.

In Hamlin’s case, a frame-by-frame inspection of the event shows that the runner’s right shoulder pad struck Hamlin on the right side of his chest. This pad is designed to reduce impact forces, so it’s very unlikely that it would have generated any appreciable shock.

In fact, multiple knowledgeable observers, including Mike McBath, have commented that there was nothing unusual about the tackle. Hamlin was throwing the runner to Hamlin’s left as the runner tried to escape around Hamlin’s right. The runner’s helmet never impacted Hamlin’s chest.

This doesn’t mean that commotio cordis has been completely ruled out. It just makes it much less likely. And there are two other possibilities we must consider. The first is that Hamlin was in that short window for myocarditis and sudden death after the mRNA COVID shot. With no information to confirm this, we must put that in the “question mark” box.

A closely related possibility is chronic myocarditis from the COVID shot. This creates a susceptibility to adrenaline, leading to bad heart rhythms. In fact, it appears that all sudden death incidents, both after COVID and COVID shots, are directly due to surges of adrenaline.

Once again, Mike McBath confirms that during a game, at the moment of intense activity like making a tackle, personal adrenaline peaks. If Hamlin had this sort of subclinical chronic injury from the mRNA shot, the moment of the tackle could easily have set off a lethal event.

The events after Hamlin’s collapse also point us to the “vaccine,” which we know he had taken because he is not one of the two Bills who did not get the full original course. He was defibrillated very quickly, and this should have been able to convert him to a stable rhythm. But it took nine minutes to get a stable heart rhythm re-established. This suggests more serious underlying pathology, as we’d expect with a vaccine injury.

The careful reader will notice that I have not said, “Hamlin’s injury is due to xxx.” I just don’t have that information. The multitude of commentators voting for commotio cordis could be right.

But the information we have lines up better with a vaccine injury. Finally, I do not have high hopes for complete recovery. A nine-minute resuscitation is likely to lead to severe brain injury from lack of oxygen. But his early recovery of language function does point toward a better outcome than most.

The NFL should mandate that all its players and staff be examined for vaccine-induced cardiac injury. It would be a great service to them and to America.

Ted Noel MD is a retired Anesthesiologist/Intensivist who podcasts and posts on social media as DoctorTed and @vidzette. His DoctorTed podcasts are available on many podcast channels.

Somehow Joe thinks that the feds need to “ensure…pregnant women and those experiencing pregnancy loss—have…access…[to] emergency medical care.” But that’s been the law since 1986 under the Emergency Medical Treatment and Labor Act. The only reason for listing this is to make people think that Dobbs took those rights away. Somehow, Biden’s also afraid that Dobbs took away access to contraception, so that’s included. But ObamaCare mandates access to contraception and is not part of the abortion question. We must make you afraid. Be very afraid!

Now comes the Big Lie. “HHS will increase outreach and public education efforts regarding access to reproductive health care services—including abortion….” Really? Abortion is not reproductive health care and never has been. It’s not health care at all, except in extremely rare circumstances. And here, with my thirty-six years in medicine, I think I can speak with some authority.

Reproductive health care starts with medical care that helps a woman become pregnant. It then works to ensure the health of the woman and the baby during the pregnancy, and finally the healthy delivery of the baby. That’s it. The word “abortion” isn’t in that description because abortion is designed to fatally destroy reproductive health. It’s the exact opposite of reproductive “health.”

Don’t get me wrong. There are a few extremely limited circumstances where a medically performed abortion becomes proper. Basically, if prenatal studies show the baby has an unsurvivable defect, it may be appropriate to abort that baby. I have participated in one such procedure. One. In thirty-six years.

If the pregnancy will kill the mother, then neither the baby nor the mother will survive, and it is appropriate to terminate the pregnancy. I participated in one such termination. One. In thirty-six years. Unfortunately, the mother’s illness was so advanced that she did not survive, either.

These are extremely unusual and sad circumstances. My experience is almost certainly representative of the broader medical community. Some physicians in obstetrics or anesthesiology may see a few more cases and some will see none. But there simply aren’t enough to support even one abortion “clinic.” Ordinary hospitals and operating rooms are more than adequate.

While I’m ruminating on “health care,” the subject of “pregnancy loss” must be addressed. This falls into two major forms. The first is ectopic pregnancy, where the zygote typically implants in the fallopian tube rather than the uterus. As the embryo grows, it creates a life-threatening problem for the mother. It can happen for many reasons, but the most common is promiscuous sex accompanied by sexually transmitted infections. The fetus must come out for the mom to survive. It’s common and is simply not in view in Dobbs. But Biden must make you afraid.

The second form of pregnancy loss is spontaneous abortion. Most often a mother will lose a pregnancy early on due to severe fetal genetic or developmental abnormalities. We do a D&C (dilation and curettage) to remove any remaining products of conception. This prevents maternal complications. A few other mothers are “spontaneous aborters” due to having an incompetent cervix. Of interest, women who’ve had multiple Planned Parenthood abortions are significantly more likely to abort spontaneously.

Joe can’t let you know the truth. So, he wants to convene volunteer lawyers to “protect[] the right to travel out of state to seek medical care.” Under the Constitution, we all have the right to travel for whatever reason we want. It doesn’t need to be protected because it’s universally known to be the law. But you must be made fearful. Be very afraid.

The only place where the EO actually enters into the realm of reality is its discussion of HIPAA. Patient privacy has been the law since 1996. Every time you visit a doctor, you must sign a HIPAA form that says who is allowed to know about your medical care. And this does create a question about how state prohibitions on abortion might be enforced. Because your care is privileged, I can’t walk into a clinic and ask if you had an abortion. But states have other tools.

First, any facility that provides medical care is licensed by the state. This means that it is inspected, and its records are examined. If the facility is found to be violating state law, it can be shut down. So, the little abortion clinic I drive by regularly won’t need its cadre of life defenders on the sidewalk.

Abortion proponents like to scream “My body, my choice!” And that’s true. But if you made the choice to have unprotected sex, it’s no longer just your body. There are now two bodies. And your task is to protect that defenseless child. “But it’s not a child because it can’t survive outside the womb!” At this point, I must ask how many twenty-somethings carrying their protest signs can survive by themselves. But that might require Lefties to think.

Ted Noel MD is a retired Anesthesiologist/Intensivist who podcasts and posts on social media as DoctorTed and @vidzette. His DoctorTed podcasts are available on many podcast channels.

Congress saw an opportunity to “do something,” and “wasn’t willing to let a ‘crisis’ go to waste.” The ultimate result is the National Firearms Act of 1934 (“NFA”), which was later amended by the Gun Control Act of 1968 (“GCA”). The net result is that certain firearms and firearm-related items have seriously disfavored status, completely unrelated to anything having to do with crime or Constitution.

The NFA states that for certain items such as machine guns and suppressors, the purchaser must pay a $200 tax and then wait for extended periods for the federal government to decide that it’s okay for him to have the item. But the Supreme Court said in Bruen that “lengthy wait times in processing license applications or exorbitant fees deny ordinary citizens their right to public carry.”

The Bureau of Alcohol, Tobacco, Firearms, and Explosives (“BATFE”) routinely violates this idea with wait times of a year or more before issuing permits. Granted, they’re purchase authorizations, not carry permits, but the same idea applies. When you have a constitutional right to a weapon or suppressor, all other considerations require extremely careful examination.

When I go to a dealer to purchase a firearm, I must first fill out Form 4473 and pay a $5 fee to run a National Instant Check System (“NICS”) background check. If I fail the check, I’m out the fin and must go through an appeal process. Only when that is finished can I buy the gun. But ordinarily, I’m cleared out the door in minutes because I have a Florida license to carry. Without the license, it’s a three-day wait. Not exactly the same as waiting for a trial after January 6 but still….

But for my silencer, I had to send in my fingerprints, fill out a form, pay my $200, do not pass Go, and wait. And wait. And wait. When I look at the legal rules to own a suppressor (“silencer”), there are three basic criteria:

• I’m legally eligible to purchase a firearm in a state that allows suppressors.
• I pass the BATFE background check.
• I pay the $200 tax.

That’s it. In short, all this could be done in the five minutes it took to do the NICS check because it’s functionally the same background check. Add in the two C notes, and everything should be over in the time it takes to ring up the transaction. But so far, I’m at eleven months and counting. That definitely qualifies as a “lengthy wait time.” Even if we throw in the fingerprints, that shouldn’t take more than a day, since police can routinely get prints run in hours.

Suppressors are legal. You heard me correctly. This is an essential key concept. Because I am a lawful gun owner, the only material difference is that I must pay the extra tax. Thus, the process does not describe a prohibition. Rather, the NFA is “to provide for… taxation.” Unfortunately, it’s also a way some bureaucrat who decides to shut you down to deny you your lawful exercise of your Second Amendment rights. Bruen, however, declared that if you are not a legally prohibited person, your right is exactly that: a right.

The NFA also covers “short barreled rifles,” “short barreled shotguns,” “machine guns,” “any other weapon,” and “destructive devices.” All of these, except for explosives, have the same conditions for possession. A brief overview will show how arbitrary these definitions are.

A short-barreled rifle has a barrel under 16 inches or a length of less than 26 inches. But!!! If the buttstock of an SBR is exchanged for a “brace” that can be secured to the shooter’s forearm, it’s now a pistol and doesn’t need to be taxed under the NFA. So, my AR pistol at 27 inches with a brace and a 10-inch barrel is legally a pistol and I’m free of the BATFE. But if I add a vertical foregrip for about $25, it suddenly becomes “any other weapon” and I must pay the $200 and go to BATFE for a blessing that may come next year. Of course, it’s still longer than the Israeli TAVOR battle rifle (26 ¼ inches) which is legally an ordinary rifle outside BATFE’s tax scheme regardless of any accessories I add.

Shotguns get more insane rules. They must have 18-inch barrels. Why? It’s just as arbitrary as 16-inch barrels for rifles. In United States v. Miller (1939), the Supreme Court ruled against weapons that did not have specific military applications. Sawed-off shotguns were not military weapons in 1939 but became key guns the “tunnel rats” carried in Vietnam. So, they are presumptively protected. But for the moment, BATFE gets its pound of flesh.

Another shotgun rule is particularly silly. You can fire .410 shotgun shells in many 45-caliber revolvers. But if you put a smooth bore barrel on the revolver instead of the rifled one, you now have “any other weapon,” again subject to tax. But such a revolver might be particularly valuable for home defense, which is clearly a protected right under Heller and Bruen.

We could go on, but it’s clear that BATFE has been acting in a way clearly hostile to Second Amendment rights by unreasonably delaying approval to purchase various firearms and accessories. Further, the law under which it operates is the very definition of “arbitrary and capricious.” Florida Statutes 120.57 2.d explains that “A rule is arbitrary if it is not supported by logic or the necessary facts; a rule is capricious if it is adopted without thought or reason or is irrational.” The Supreme Court has applied this definition in multiple cases.

We might suggest that restricting private ownership of explosives could be legal. The imposition of these excise taxes might be a lawful act. But levying a tax on the exercise of a constitutional right is a clear infringement of that right. If I want to buy a fully automatic weapon and pay for the immense amount of ammunition it eats just because it has the giggle switch (full auto selector), that is my right. I become liable when I misuse it, just as I would become liable for misusing a single shot derringer or a delivery truck.

Imposing extra taxes on a constitutionally protected activity is a prior restraint on that right. First Amendment cases have clearly held prior restraints to be unlawful. Lengthy wait times are similarly unconstitutional. And the provisions of the NFA are arbitrary and capricious. That must include the GCA prohibition on private ownership of automatic weapons manufactured after 1969. We must therefore conclude that the bulk of both the National Firearms Act and Gun Control Act is unconstitutional in both its text and application. SCOTUS should strike them both down at the earliest opportunity.

Ted Noel MD is a retired Anesthesiologist/Intensivist who podcasts and posts on social media as DoctorTed and @vidzette. His DoctorTed podcasts are available on many podcast channels.