Health Care In America
"Good advice is always certain to be ignored, but that's no reason
not
to give it."
--- Agatha Christie:
Even with free universal health care, no one is safe from the
incompetent,greedy and dangerous medicine men. Whether we pay for
health care or it becomes free to all, something has to be done to
improve the quality and the safety of the care to the patient.
As author, Vernon Coleman,(What Doctors Don't Tell You) said, "The
person most likely to kill you is not a relative or a friend, or a
mugger or a burglar or a drunken driver. The person most likely to
kill you is your doctor.
More and more Americans are waking up to the reality of our medical
community and its corruption and dangers.
" I often say a great doctor kills more people than a great general.
"
- Gottfried Leibnitz
SEE Gangsters in Medicine.
GANGSTERS IN MEDICINE
By Thomas Smith
NewsWithViews.com
Disease in America.
Some of the economics of Medicine.
Exceptions to the rule.
Takeover of the American medical Association.
Treatment instead of cure.
Insurance fraud.
Government coercion in medical practice.
What to do.
The Journal of the American Medical Association recently re****ted
that
as many as 106,000 deaths occur annually in US hospitals due to
adverse reactions to prescription drugs that are properly prescribed
by physicians that use them as directed by the drug companies.
Even worse, the National Council for Patient Information and
Education
re****ted that an additional 125,000 deaths occur annually due to
adverse reactions to drugs that the physician never should have
prescribed. In these deaths the doctor did not follow the
instructions
on proper administration of the drugs. For example, Glucophage, a
diabetic oral hypoglycemic, should never be prescribed for patients
with Kidney disease or Congestive Heart Failure because it can cause
fatal Lactic Acidosis in these patients. A warning label is
prominently placed on the medication container to warn of this
potential misuse.
However, JAMA re****ted that almost 1/4 of the patients who had been
prescribed Glucophage had Kidney damage or Congestive Heart failure
or
both.
The annual death toll from synthetic prescription drugs, both from
the
correctly prescribed and the incorrectly prescribed, amounts to about
231,000 deaths every year. To put this into perspective, this is the
equivalent of a world trade center disaster every week for over a
year
and a half or the crash of two fully loaded 747 aircraft every day of
the year.
No information was re****ted on the number of outpatient and doctor's
office deaths caused by these very same drugs when prescribed by
these
very same doctors. The re****ted figures alone, however, make drug
deaths caused by physicians the third leading cause of death in the
US. It is far ahead of accidents, drunk driving, homicides, airline
accidents, as well as all other disease with the sole exceptions of
cancer and heart disease.
Many of these drugs responsible for the death statistics cited are
diabetic drugs. None of these drugs cure or even were intended to
cure
diabetes. During the time a patient is on the drugs his body is
suffering great damage due to the uncontrolled progress of the
disease. This is in addition to the risk and damage caused by the
drug
itself.
According to Dr. Mendelsohn, author of "Confessions of a Medical
Heretic", 2.4 million unnecessary operations are performed every year
and they cost over 12,000 lives. When the records of six New York
hospitals were examined it was found that 43% of the Hysterectomies
that were performed were medically unnecessary.
No one should ever submit to any surgical procedure without first
obtaining several unrelated medical opinions, at least not here in
the
United States. Women are particularly vulnerable to this type of
victimization.
Disease in America.
According to the World Health Re****t 2000 the United States ranks
twelfth, that is second from the bottom, in their thirteen country
survey of sixteen available health indicators. We are dead last for
low birth weight and neonatal and infant mortality. We rank between
ninth and twelfth for all life expectancy categories between one year
and 40 years. Another study ranked the United States as fifteenth in
the twenty-five industrialized countries studied.
Diabetes, Hypoglycemia, Hyperinsulinemia are so widespread in the
United States that it is estimated that over half the population
exhibits one or more symptoms of these life destroying diseases.
Symptoms of Adult onset diabetes are now being routinely noted in six
year old children. Obesity and it's related Endocrine dysfunction are
commonly observed in teenagers. Heart Failure, a symptom of advanced
Type II Diabetes, remains in the top three killer diseases in the
Westernized countries.
Although the cause and cure for Type II Diabetes and related
endocrine
failure has been increasingly well understood in the scientific
community for the last forty years, this disease is not being cured
by
todays orthodox treatment regimens. In order to find a cure it is
necessary to seek alternative medical approaches to this disease.
Some of the economics of Medicine.
A large part of this medical disaster that the United States
currently
experiences is due to the way our medical community is organized.
Basically it is not organized to heal and to cure disease; the
medical
community, particularly at its upper levels, is a commercial venture
organized to make money for its practitioners.
Although the record of the United States Medical community in the
cure
of disease is deplorable, the same cannot be said for its ability to
produce income and profit. For example, for the top fifteen
pharmaceutical companies, including such names as Abbot, Wyeth,
Hoffman-La Roche, Merck and others, the second quarter revenue for
2002 was re****ted as $63,520.6 million and the corresponding re****ted
income was 11,731.8 million respectively. This is second only to the
defense industry in the United States.
In 1997, the latest year for which we have the figures, the earnings
of physicians were re****ted by Broad as averaging around $200,000 per
year. The lowest re****ting specialty, Rheumatology re****ted $158,500
and the highest, cardiovascular surgeon, re****ted $363,300. When
examining the numbers, we noted that the high salaries seemed to be
concentrated in members of the AMA. Those belonging to less powerful
trade unions did not fare nearly so well even though they did most of
the actual patient care work. For example, the median staff salary of
registered nurses was $35,256
The Cardiac surgeon, for example, does nothing whatsoever to cure
cardiac disease. Three to five percent of the heart surgery patients
die on the operating table. Cardiac surgery provides no better three
year survival rate than no treatment at all. A Harvard survival study
of 200,000 patients revealed that the long term survival rate of
patients subjected to surgery was no better than the survival rate of
those that had no surgery.
Of course, your cardiac surgeon will not tell you this when you need
to make a decision on whether or not to elect cardiac surgery.
Never in history have so many ac***ulated so much wealth for
providing
their customers or clients or patients with so little real benefit.
Exceptions to the rule.
Many doctors of integrity are as much victims of the system as are
their patients. Today's doctor is not free to treat disease as his
conscience dictates. He is forced to administer approved protocols
whether they are known to work or not. To deviate from these approved
protocols invites law suits, peer criticism and censure from State
medical licensing boards.
This writer knows of two local doctors who tried to buck the
establishment and really help their patients. Both lost their license
to practice medicine. One is currently working as an administrator in
a California hospital and the other has started a nutritional clinic.
Takeover of the American medical Association.
This sad state of affairs is directly traceable to the takeover of
the
American Medical Association by the Carnegie and Rockefeller
foundations in the early part of the twentieth century.
At the turn of the century the medical community was in a sad state
of
disrepair. There were no qualifications to become a doctor. If one
wanted to be a doctor it was only necessary to hang out a ****ngle and
start the practice of medicine. Medical schools were poorly financed,
often taught contradictory medical philosophies and had little impact
on the practice of medicine. In 1910 the American Medical
Association,
todays AMA, was on the verge of bankruptcy. Few doctors belonged to
it
and even fewer paid any attention to it. Quackery of all kinds was
rampant. The market was flooded with fake cancer cures and 80 proof
liver tonic.
It was in this environment that Rockefeller and Carnegie moved in and
bought the AMA and then used it to take control of the entire United
States medical establishment. In 1910, Henry Prichard president of
the
Carnegie foundation, bought control of the AMA for the sum of
$10,000.
He then financed the publication of the Flexner re****t, as it was
then
called, to gain popular sup****t for the changes that were to be made
in the medical community. With public backing secured by the
publication of the Flexner re****t, Carnegie and Rockefeller commenced
a major upgrade in medical education by financing only those medical
schools that taught what they wanted taught. Predictably, those
schools that had the financing churned out the better doctors.
In return for the financing, the schools were required to teach
course
material that was exclusively drug oriented. That is why today our
doctors are so heavily biased toward synthetic drug therapy and know
little or nothing about nutrition.
Dr. David Edsall, former dean of Harvard medical school, said "I was,
for a period, a professor of Therapeutics and Pharmacology, [at
Harvard] and I knew from experience that students were obliged then
by
me and by others to learn about an interminable number of drugs, many
of which were valueless, many of them useless, some probably even
harmful...."
For a time, these changes actually improved the practice of medicine
in the United States. Then, as the distorted medical curriculum began
to churn out doctors whose only concern was prescribing synthetic
drugs, things began to deteriorate into what we see today.
Today the average medical doctor receives 3 hours or less training on
nutrition despite the fact that our bodies are constructed entirely
of
what we eat and drink. Today's doctor receives much of his ongoing
education from detail men. The detail man is the drug company
salesman
whose job it is to teach the doctor how to use the latest drugs.
Treatment instead of cure.
Even with all of this history the medical doctor retained a great
deal
of his autonomy through the 1930's and into the late 1940's. In 1949
another major change took place in the medical community that set the
stage for the disaster we see today. It was in 1949 that the medical
community reorganized itself into the competing medical specialty
groups we see today. Prior to 1949 a doctor was a doctor; he dealt
with all disease and injury. After 1949 this was not so.
The reorganization established many of the specialties that we know
today. It was then that the Cardiac Specialist, the Endocrinologist,
the Hepatic and Biliary Specialist and many other professional
specialty groups were formed. The symptoms of the then raging
epidemic
of Type II Diabetes were divided among the specialty groups so that
each group had their own set of proprietary symptoms.
The story given out for the reorganization was that it would help to
focus more attention on the then current Diabetes epidemic. However,
in practice it caused the entire medical community to treat their own
proprietary symptom set and nobody focused on curing the disease
anymore. This was the origin of the "treat the symptom" and "ignore
the cause" philosophy that now dominates the entire medical
community.
This was the turning point event that led to the removal of the word
"cure" from the medical vocabulary. Today, if you mention the "c"
word
around your doctor he will usually glaze over and pretend not to hear
you. He only responds to the word "treatment".
Under the Rockefeller and Carnegie influence their pharmaceutical
firms started to pour out the vast array of synthetic drugs that the
doctors trained to their medical school standards now prescribed
almost to the exclusion of any other remedies. Among the first drugs
to be marketed this way were the oral hypoglycemic agents. They were
deliberately designed to treat the symptom while not curing the
disease.
Insurance fraud.
Since the name of the medical game was money, a means had to be
devised to provide the patient with money that could only be used to
pay for approved medical treatment. Enter the insurance company
concept. Today employees have, as an im****tant part of their
remuneration for their work, a health insurance policy. This health
insurance policy does not pay for all health related needs; it only
pays for those health related services that are approved. These, of
course, are the synthetic drug therapies that are known to work
poorly, if at all.
In order to secure effective medical treatment from the alternative
sector of the economy the patient must pay for it himself; insurance
companies specifically exclude virtually all alternative treatment.
One wonders why so many continue to pay for an insurance program that
cannot, even in principle, be of any real benefit to them.
Government coercion in medical practice.
In the ordinary course of events, good medicine would eventually
drive
out bad medicine. As more and more people discover ways to maintain
and improve their health, without drug therapy, they will simply
abandon bad medicine and resort to alternative therapies.
Indeed, this is happening. Also happening is a concerted government
effort to discredit and declare unlawful those effective therapies
that represent the greatest threat to orthodox medicine. In the last
fifty years many effective cures have been developed for many of the
major killer diseases that we have. In each instance the developer
has
been branded a quack, his business has been ruined and in some cases
he has been sent to jail.
Even with outright governmental attacks on those that would promote
effective therapies in America, the tide is turning. More and more
Americans are waking up to the reality of our medical community. More
and more they are finding it to be a fraud and they are turning to
less conventional treatments and modalities.
Informed Americans that require effective medical treatment for
anything more serious than a head cold are turning away from orthodox
drug quackery in droves. The medical community is trying hard to make
it illegal to refuse their treatment. A major effort is currently
underway (Codex) to severely restrict the availability of nutritional
supplements to those that use them throughout the world. Our
government is seriously considering mandatory vaccination programs.
Many believe that our Food and Drug Administration, FDA, represents
the American people and that the FDA acts to insure that our food and
drugs are safe and effective. Nothing could be further from the
truth.
The FDA acts entirely to restrain and manage competition between and
among those that manufacture our food and drugs. They do this only
for
the purpose of minimizing competition in business. Rockefeller is
famous for proclaiming the only sin is competition.
Willy Ley, a former head of the FDA, said it best when he said "What
the Food and Drug Administration does and what the public thinks that
it does are as different as night and day".
Today in America the practice of medicine is not free. It is one of
the most tightly controlled commercial enterprises in the world. That
is why it produces such extraordinary income for it's favored and
such
misery, disease and death for its victims.
What to do.
Given the growth of the medical monster that ate the United States,
what can we who live here do to effectively manage our own health.
Perhaps the single most im****tant thing that we all must do is to
recognize that our health is our most im****tant possession. We have
no
choice but to accept total responsibility for our own health. To
leave
such an im****tant consideration to someone who clearly has much to
gain by lying to us just does not make sense. Typically, we buy our
cars and houses with a great deal more wisdom than we bring to the
doctor's office when we go there.
The modern orthodox medical community treats symptoms; they do not
cure disease. When you visit the doctor, it is perfectly in order for
you to ask bluntly whether or not the treatment he wants to give you
will cure the disease you have.
Some years ago, when I had a serious case of Type II Diabetes, I
asked
my doctor that question about the treatment he offered me. First he
pretended he did not hear me. When I persisted and made eye contact
and repeated the question he replied "this is the prescribed
treatment". Such an evasive answer to such a direct question sent me
to the library where I did the research to get a better answer. I
quickly discovered that the drug he offered me would not only not
cure
the disease, but that it was guaranteed to put me on the road to
becoming an invalid long before my time.
Fortunately I rejected his treatment. I went on to search the
scientific literature where I quickly found what I needed. It had
nothing to do with synthetic drugs. It took me about 3 1/2 months to
fully reverse my diabetes. That was seven years ago. The disease
remains in full remission to this day.
There is one im****tant caveat that must be mentioned at this point.
If
you are currently under a doctors care and are dissatisfied with the
results you are getting, do not just stop taking the prescribed
medication. Get your doctor, or another doctor if yours will not
cooperate, to help wean you off prescription drugs and to help you to
devise a workable alternative therapy. Many of these synthetic drugs
will produce serious side effects if they are abruptly discontinued.
When I had the problem I had not yet taken prescription medication.
After accepting full responsibility for your own health, the second
most im****tant consideration is to do your homework and learn about
the disease or disability that you have. Buy books, attend seminars,
subscribe to newsletters, search the internet, learn about what it
takes to actually reverse the disease that afflicts you. Investigate
alternative medical practitioners. Many Naturopaths and Chiropractors
can be of great help in actually curing disease. Do not fall for the
idea that only doctors are smart enough to understand these things.
Look for that unusual doctor that will risk really trying to help
you;
and, realize that he is taking a substantial risk when he does so. In
other words, do the best you can to find something better for
yourself
than what your doctor offers. Help each other. If you discover
something im****tant, don't be afraid to share the information. Be
vocal when government organizations attempt to restrict or deny your
access to natural nutritional supplements.
If you are fortunate to find a doctor with this kind of integrity,
understand the im****tance of what you have found and give him all of
the sup****t that you can give. There is a medical doctor in
California, we will call him Doctor Q, that refused to compromise his
integrity in his practice of medicine. He ended up in jail, put there
by his fellow doctors. His patients got together, got him out of jail
and had a special bill passed in the State legislature to protect his
practice of medicine. Today he still runs a flouri****ng practice
where
he ministers to patients from all over this country. He is actually
curing disease not just treating it.
Third, after accepting responsibility for your own health and
becoming
informed, recognize that medicine is a business. Your doctor is a
paid
consultant just like your electrician or plumber and he is listed in
the same yellow pages. You have every right to get the information
for
which you are paying. When your doctor retreats into arrogance and
refuses to provide direct answers to direct questions, consider
getting another doctor. There really are many safe and effective
therapies that go far beyond drugs. However, we must demand them on
the firing line, in the doctor's office, when we need them.
--- 2000 Thomas Smith - All Rights Reserved
Thomas Smith is a reluctant medical investigator having been forced
into seeking a cure for his own Diabetes because it was obvious that
his doctor would not or could not cure it. He has published the
results of his successful Diabetes investigation in his special
re****t
entitled "Insulin: Our Silent Killer" written for the layman but also
widely valued by the medical practitioner. This re****t may be
purchased by sending $25.00 US to him at PO Box 7685 Loveland,
Colorado 80537. He has also posted a great deal of useful information
about this disease on his web page www.Healingmatters.com He can be
reached by telephone at: 1 (970) 669-9176 E-Mail:
Val...@[EMAIL PROTECTED]
Disturbing Truth About Doctors and Your Medical Safety
http://www.alternet.org/healthwellness/51949/
Medical Malpractice Caps are Unwarranted by the Payout of Claims Data
Each year, the debate in state legislatures around this country
regarding the so called need for tort reform and caps on medical
malpractice cases intensifies. Big medical cor****ations and insurance
companies, who are only motivated about increasing premium revenue
and
decreasing payments to victims, lead the fight with big dollar
lobbying campaigns. Unfortunately, these lobbying efforts rarely
contain accurate facts and figures and in the end, leave innocent
victims of malpractice with little or no recourse for even blatent
acts of malpractice.
http://medmalblog.thecochranfirmno.com/archives/cat-medical-malpracti...
Our Tax Dollars Are Being Used to Kill People
Doctors May Be Third Leading Cause of Death
by Joseph Mercola, D.O. Pharmaceutical Industry News
Joseph Mercola, D.O.
Dr. Mercola is a licensed Osteopathic physician and board-certified
in
family medicine. He served as the chairman of the family medicine
department at St. Alexius Medical Center for five years and has been
trained in both traditional and natural medicine. Dr. Mercola has
been
practicing natural medicine actively since 1990 and is the publisher
of www.mercola.com, the most visited health site on the internet.
View all articles by Joseph Mercola, D.O.... Doctors Are The Third
Leading Cause of Death in the US, Causing 250,000 Deaths Every Year
This week's issue of the Journal of the American Medical Association
(JAMA) is the best article I have ever seen written in the published
literature do***enting the tragedy of the traditional medical
paradigm.
This information is a followup of the Institute of Medicine re****t
which hit the papers in December of last year, but the data was hard
to reference as it was not in peer-reviewed journal. Now it is
published in JAMA which is the most widely circulated medical
periodical in the world.
http://www.chattanoogahealth.com/Articles/2135/1/Doctors_May_Be_Third...
Doctors are just the same as lawyers, the only difference is that
lawyers merely rob you, whereas doctors rob you and kill you, too.
- Anton Chekhov
--- Gordon Gekko
"Greed is good."
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