Another Deadly Medical Fraud Exposed

Another Deadly Medical Fraud Exposed

Oops! The medical science/pharmaceutical industry, as enabled by doctors, has perpetrated yet another massive fraud that, once again, has cost untold numbers of lives while generating astronomical profits for their industry and doctors.

We live in a for-profit-at-any-cost, corporate-created, media-perpetuated delusional world; a world in which so-called scientific research shows that only natural things such as the sun, our own genes, natural remedies, even natural drugs like marijuana, etc., can cause us harm, create cancers, and kill us. But somehow, inexplicably, in the realm of corporate-sponsored non-sense non-science, chemically and known carcinogen laden processed foods, personal care body products, pharmaceutical drugs and vaccines, etc., are safe, and even good for us…nothing to fear there.

In this delusional world doctors used science to promote cigarettes as “smooth and soothing to the back of your throat”…Oops, a cancer epidemic! Doctors used science to scare us away from natural animal fats, in favor of chemically synthesized trans-fats. Oops; skyrocketing increase in heart disease and death! Sorry! And, most recently and ongoing, doctors use science to make us afraid of the sun, having us opt instead to coat our bodies, from infancy and throughout our lives, with chemically laden sun-screens. Unsurprisingly, oops and more deaths, yet again!

Recent research published in the British Journal of Dermatology shows that garbage science and rampant misdiagnosis, NOT the sun, are responsible for the statistical rise in rates of melanoma, the deadliest from of skin cancer. They wrote: “We conclude that the large increase in reported incidence is likely to be due to diagnostic drift, which classifies benign (non-cancerous) lesions as stage 1 melanoma.”

In fact, there is good scientific evidence that appropriate exposure to the sun prevents skin and other cancers, while rates of melanoma are rising among indoor workers with less sun exposure!

It defies common sense, let alone good science, to believe that after tens of thousands of years, within the last 75 years, our genes have gone haywire and are now killing us; that naturally occurring foods and remedies are more dangerous than their synthetic chemically altered versions; and that the sun, the source of life on our planet and many documented health benefiting and protective properties, has recently and suddenly turned against us.

What has changed in the past 75 years are:

1. The industrial revolution, including the industrialization of our food supply, and the concomitant rise of pervasive highly toxic pollutants and carcinogens in our air, soil, water, and foods

2. The corporate sponsored scientific revolution in which our carefully cultivated unquestioning belief in what is largely corrupt and self-serving science is used against us.

3. The rise of corporate medical care that emphasizes profits over patient lives and thrives on creating and perpetuating diseases rather than cures. Its nemesis is health!

Our trust in nature has been severely undermined. Nature has imbued all life forms with an adaptive code for survival. Nature’s most basic survival mechanism, hardwired into that code, is health. We have been given a miraculous gift and personal responsibility to nurture and safeguard our own health. The more we accept that responsibility, the more we optimize our own genetic potential for health throughout our lives.

Hallelujah! They Passed Health Care Reform!

The bill is far from perfect, but doing nothing was to let the insurance and pharmaceutical companies continue their reign of terror unabated. This bill is a decent beginning...100 years in the making.

If, for no other reason, it was a crushing defeat for the fear-mongering, lying, and self-serving antics of the GOP leadership!!

Waiting for Health Care Reform

Waiting for Health Care Reform

"We're waiting for the day when getting sick doesn't mean going broke. We're waiting for emergency rooms that aren't overcrowded. We're waiting for our policymakers to take action and fix the problem. We're waiting for the nation to have the best health care system. We are waiting for health care reform!"

On May 11^th, representatives from the insurance industry, the pharmaceutical industry, the hospital industry, the medical device manufacturer’s industry, doctors and the medical establishment (AMA) met with President Obama and agreed to slow growth in health care by 1.5%, thus shaving $2 trillion in savings over the next 10 years.

Three days later, they rescinded that promise.

Everything about this scenario highlights the principle flaws and failures of all attempts at so-called health care reform, to date.

I recently read that:

“Public policy is like sausage: you do not want to see how it is made, and the end product is not good for your health.”

All of the parties who met with the White House are representatives of the medical-pharmaceutical-insurance industrial complex. There was nobody there representing us, the people/consumers. It is clear that we, the people, do not have a seat at the table, let alone a voice, and that enormous profound decisions will be made relative to our health, health care and related expenses without our input.

That is dangerous and does not bode well for us. The reason: what you and I call health care expenses, they call profit.

The medical-pharmaceutical-insurance industrial complex is, above all else, a commercial, for-profit industry. As long as the business incentives of profit and growth dominate, the costs of care will continue to spiral higher. That is the essence and nature of business.

This point could not have been driven home more poignantly when the parties reneged on their promise. After all, their promise had nothing to do with killing profits, just with slowing growth by 1.5%; more precisely, slowing the annual rate of growth from the current 6.2%, to a rate of 4.7%. This, according to them, would be 2 trillion dollars less profit over 10 years ($200 billion dollars per year). That sounds like a lot, but this is an industry that generated $2.4 trillion in 2006, with anticipated revenues of $4.3 trillion by 2017.

Ultimately, they couldn’t even agree to curtailing profits by about 8%!

From our perspective as consumers, the system has failed us. The for-profit system continues to drive up costs, stressing the viability of businesses, government and individuals, excluding more and more people, at the same time providing inefficient and inconsistent quality of care. Yet, this for-profit health system refuses to reform. And, with each passing year, as their power and influence grows, the reform we need becomes more difficult to achieve.

The entire system needs drastic overhaul and reform, way beyond the mere creation of a unified payer, which has virtually nothing to do with controlling costs. Piecemeal attempts at reform evoke false hopes, much like CPR, which fails almost 100% of the time “because of the largely overlooked fact that it is being performed on the already dead.”

Ultimately, as David Mechanic says in his book The Truth About Health Care:

“At some point we as a nation will have to decide whether we wish to design our health system primarily to satisfy those who profit from it, or to protect the health and welfare of all Americans.”