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Medical Mayhem
"The greater the doubt, the greater the awakening; the smaller the doubt, the smaller the awakening. No doubt, no awakening." --G. -C. Chang
"The important thing is not to stop questioning." --Albert Einstein
The U.S. has a catastrophically fragmented health care system that provides incentives for sick care instead of prevention. The system is in dire need of reform -- reform to save lives, to save families and to save money for both patients and the American health care system.
Stand with more than 450,000 doctors who support health care reform. Call Congress: (202) 224-3121.
Americans take more prescription drugs than anyone else on the planet.According to the CDC, approximately 750,000 Americans are rushed to the emergency room each year because of reactions to prescription drugs. At least 200,000 Americans each year end up dying from reactions to prescription drugs. Unfortunately, the big pharmaceutical companies spend billions of dollars advertising their pills in the mainstream media, so the mainstream media has a very strong incentive to cover up the truth.
Each year in the US:
12,000 deaths from unnecessary surgeries;
7,000 deaths from medication errors in hospitals;
20,000 deaths from other errors in hospitals;
80,000 deaths from infections acquired in hospitals;
106,000 deaths from FDA-approved correctly prescribed medicines.
The total of medically-caused deaths in the US every year is 225,000.
This makes the medical system the third leading cause of death in America, behind heart disease and cancer. 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.
2.1 million people in America, every year, are hospitalized as a result of reactions to FDA-approved medicines. Annually, 36 million serious adverse reactions to those drugs occur. Labeled mental disorders are not based on factual biological evidence. At least 300,000 people are suffering from brain damage (tardive dyskinesia) as a result of being administered major tranquilizers.
So, inclusive health coverage for many more Americans under the Obama Plan means these horrendous figures will rise. This is the dirty secret. Obama and his allies are promoting a medical system that is the third leading cause of death in America. It’s that stark and it’s that simple. The Obama Plan involves appointing an “expert panel” to decide what treatments Americans should be given for what diseases, under the new regime. This insurance plan will capture more and more of the population in the cross-hairs of chemical warfare. No amount of squirming or arguing is going to change that.
The Saddest Truth of All When it Comes to Your Health
The #1 killer in our society is not cancer or heart disease. The #1 killer is the health care system itself(something doctors call iatrogenic death). This includes death from:
- Medications
- Surgical errors
- Hospital-acquired infections
- Diagnostic machines
- Hospital-acquired malnutrition
To protect yourself, particularly when it comes to your prescription drugs, obviously, you can't depend on the namby-pamby FDA to protect you from unsafe drugs.
Safety for Sale: The Ugly Truth about the FDA
The fact is, FDA scientists live under enormous pressure from their supervisors to keep information about side effects to themselves, knowing their jobs and promotions are at stake. In turn, supervisors are pressured by influential politicians and bureaucrats who receive support of various kinds from powerful pharmaceutical companies.
Approval by the FDA Does Not Make a Drug Safe
The government's own General Accounting Office found that up to 50% of drugs approved by the FDA had serious post-approval side effects!
Pharmaceutical companies donate as much as 10 million dollars to major medical schools (What do you think they want in return?).Brainwashing continues after medical school as drug companies spend 2.5 billion dollars wooing doctors through sponsored educational seminars, visits to pharmaceutical headquarters and 315,000 parties and events.
Studies published in medical journals are often ghostwritten by pharmaceutical company scientists (And of course, most doctors believe what they read in these "reputable" journals).
Shameful scare tactic are used to frighten elderly people into getting flu shots they don't really need (And even puts them at higher risk for Alzheimer's).
Phony Epidemics
The history of the decline of infectious disease is a history of improved sanitation, alleviation of overcrowding, the rise of the middle class, and above all, the betterment of nutrition. This decline in disease occurred before the introduction of antibiotics and widespread vaccination.
These are the figures on the last several “epidemics.” They are not yearly; they are grand totals, to date; global totals, except in the case of West Nile (US only):
SARS: 774 deaths.
WEST NILE: 1159 deaths.
BIRD FLU: 262 deaths.
SMALLPOX: (terrorist threat): 0 deaths.
SWINE FLU: 25,000 deaths.
To give perspective, globally, 250 thousand to 500 thousand people die of ordinary flu-like illness every year. Yet this higher death rate accrues no interest as an epidemic. It is only the “teaching (brainwashing) moments” of the phony epidemics that are promoted by health agencies (e.g., CDC and WHO) and their pharmaceutical allies, who rake in billions by manufacturing new vaccines.
In a National Survey, 45% of Specialists Report a Recent Medical Error
Authors provide a 'top ten' list of safety recommendations
Otolaryngologist Dr. David Roberson has first-hand experience with medical errors. He remembers one near-miss in a patient about to receive a cochlear implant – and says it typifies the kinds of mistakes he and his colleagues have turned up in a national survey.
"I looked at the CT scan carefully to determine if the cochlea would accept the implant," recalls Roberson, from the Department of Otolaryngology and Communication Disorders at Children's Hospital Boston. "I asked a colleague to look at it also, and he commented that the auditory nerves looked small. I then ordered an MRI which showed the patient had no auditory nerves on either side. I came close to performing surgery and putting a major device in a child's head when there was no possibility of benefit, since she had no auditory nerve. I didn't look carefully enough at the entire scan."
Roberson and colleagues sent a brief, anonymous survey to 2,500 members of the American Academy of Otolaryngology-Head and Neck Surgery, and received 466 responses (19 percent). Of these, 210 physicians -- 45 percent -- reported that a medical error had occurred in their practice in the past six months. Errors occurred in all phases of patient care; 78 (37 percent) caused major injury or harm, and 9 (4 percent) were fatal. Both adults and children were affected.
Errors were carefully classified. The largest category, accounting for 19 percent, was technical errors during procedures, and 56 percent of these caused major injury or harm. Next were medication errors (14 percent); these included dosage mistakes and giving medications to which the patient was allergic, or that were contraindicated. Testing errors (10 percent) included physician errors (ordering incorrect tests; not reviewing tests; not acting on the results) and lab errors (lost specimens; errors in labeling and interpretation of results). Surgical planning errors (scheduling mistakes; failing to ensure that all preoperative studies were complete; and judgment errors, such as undertaking surgery when it was risky) accounted for another 10 percent. Younger physicians were more likely than physicians over age 50 to report errors (approximately 60 versus 40 percent).
Other errors included:
* Equipment errors – equipment not available or improperly assembled; equipment failure (9.4 percent)
* Errors in post-operative care (8.5 percent)
* Wrong site surgery – wrong patient, wrong organ, or wrong side (6 percent);
* Drug errors during surgery (4 percent)
* Communication errors (4 percent)
Roberson and colleagues believe that the proportion of physicians encountering an error -- 45 percent –- is an underestimate. They suggest that doctors may not be trained to recognize errors, and may tend to recall errors that have serious consequences but overlook minor ones. In one of two editorials accompanying the study, Dr. Lucian Leape of the Harvard School of Public Health concurs, "In the absence of a significant adverse event, most clinicians do not recognize (or admit) errors." Leape adds that the study provides a unique and useful classification scheme for medical errors. "Not only does this scheme make clinical sense, it would seem to have applicability to other surgical specialties," he writes. The study is the cover article in the August 2004 issue of the journal Laryngoscope. "The probability of an otolaryngologist erring on any individual decision is miniscule," the authors note. "However, because we all make millions of medical decisions, we will all make many errors during our careers… Most errors are made by good or outstanding providers."
The Journal of the American Medical Association recently reported 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 reported 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 reported 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 reported on the number of outpatient and doctor's office deaths caused by these very same drugs when prescribed by these very same doctors. The reported 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 Report 2000the 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, is 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.
Plutocracy
When the government of any nation forgets its people and, instead, focuses on defending and promoting the interests of powerful corporations, you no longer have a Democracy. Instead, you have a Plutocracy, where the wealthy elite control the political process and use laws to further enrich themselves at the expense of the public.
It's an accurate description of what's happening in America today: The public is no longer represented by the Senate, the FDA, the USDA or the EPA. Instead, each of these governmental bodies (legislative for the Senate, executive for the other departments) is now operating in the interests of corporations. Campaign finance reform, of course, is impossible under such circumstances, since no corporate-controlled Senate will ever vote to cut itself off from corporate money. Thus, the only outcome of the situation is a further erosion of the integrity of U.S. legislative processes to the point where the public is impoverished, the nation is bankrupt, and the corporations run the government.
Big Business and Big Government are now merging to become a unified system of financial exploitation of the people. The corporations financially rape the people, and the government keeps it legal.
Senators of both major parties -- Democratic and Republican – join together in the mass betrayal of U.S. consumers. While Republicans certainly have stronger ties to drug companies, when push comes to shove Democrats will sell out their constituents just the same. The pocketbook of no citizen is safe when Congress is in session, and any voter who thinks one political party or another is going to come to the rescue and actually protect the interests of consumers is hopelessly naive.
The Insurance/Pharmaceutical Industries’ Influence on Medical Doctors
A doctor’s skills of observation, physical examination and deductive reasoning, which used to be considered his most essential diagnostic tools, have now been replaced by reliance on narrowly interpreted lab tests and lists of numerical diagnoses allowable by insurance plans. The health insurance industry has forced the entire practice of medicine to restrict itself to pre-approved numbered codes for both the diagnosis and the treatment of all health conditions. Drugs or surgery are usually the only therapies offered by modern medicine, even when they are inappropriate. So if an illness does not show up clearly on a lab test or fit a diagnostic code, and if there is no known surgical or drug treatment for the symptoms, then it is as though the problem is non-existent.
Medical doctors today are constricted by medical licensing boards, the health insurance and pharmaceutical industries, and their patients’ expectations of quick recovery. As a result of these influences and a certain bias in their training, they think and practice primarily pharmaceutical medicine, seeking to prescribe the appropriate drug for the condition. Because of the ever-present threat of a malpractice suit and the conservative influence of peer review boards, medical doctors have become much less willing and able to try something different to help their patients.
Malpractice is not decided just on the basis of the harm suffered by the patient, but on the consensus of the medical profession about what would be considered “proper” protocol in that particular situation. So, to protect themselves, most doctors have become much more orthodox in their practice of medicine. Their training no longer prepares them to explore beyond lab tests or routine signs and symptoms, nor do they often, if ever, consider truly alternative therapies. It has become unrewarding and down right dangerous to do any real thinking when it comes to diagnosis and treatment.
In addition to the fact that medical training is now dependent on huge pharmaceutical corporations for funding, modern medicine is currently in the stranglehold of insurance companies. Under our present medical system, most physicians’ incomes come primarily from insurance companies. Paperwork created by the insurance industry and licensing boards that is required of therapists, physicians, clinics and hospitals demands that each patient be given what is called an “ICD” (International Classification of Disease) code for their medical condition. This ICD code puts a name on your disease or condition. No one can fit in the cracks. You must have an ICD code to classify your illness.
Everyone is required to have an ICD. If there is no ICD, the financial medical wheel quickly comes to a halt for that patient and for the doctor treating them. Records are incomplete without these codes and bills cannot be submitted to insurance companies without them. Consequently, physicians must identify the patient’s diagnosis with an ICD code or the insurance companies will not pay them.
Patients also depend on the insurance companies to pay for whatever therapy they receive, but an insurance company will only pay for certain therapies that are approved as appropriate for each ICD code (diagnosis). If the doctor does not use an approved therapy for his diagnostic (ICD) code, there will be no payment. Without insurance coverage of the costs, most patients as well as most doctors are unwilling to proceed with any medical treatment. As a result many conditions rarely get treated, even if the physician knows it exists.
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 reported as $63,520.6 million and the corresponding reported income was 11,731.8 million respectively. This is second only to the defense industry in the United States.
Most American families are aware of the rising cost of medical treatment in the United States. A simple visit to an emergency room now costs hundreds--even thousands--of dollars, while long-term care for the elderly can run as much as a new home. A new study, released in Washington on Dec. 10, 2002, called What's Behind the Rise? A Comprehensive Analysis of Health Care Costs was conducted by experts from the University of Southern California, the Lewin Group and HealthShare Technology. They used data from more than 3 million people nationwide. According to the study, inpatient hospital costs grew by 5.9% annually during the period 1998 to 2001, roughly twice the rate of inflation. "The overall rise in inpatient costs, due to its sheer size, contributed the largest amount to the rise in hospital spending--34 percent," the report said. Growing salaries for doctors and their staff and the cost of insu;rance account for a large portion of rising costs. "Hospital wages--including physician, nursing and the wages of other health care professionals--account for 20 percent of the ris in inpatient expenditures," noted researchers.
While the study found that new technology in hospitals accounts for 19 percent of the rise in costs, researchers also discovered that so-called hospital "under-utilization"--or not enough sick people requiring new technology--accounts for 15 percent of cost increases. According to the report, 18 percent of rising inpatient costs is related to hospital consolidation. Every 1 percent increase in market share due to consolidation leads to a 2 percent increase in inpatient expenditures. Also, researchers found that incomes in a given area, as measured by state per-capita disposable income, accounts for 10 percent of the rise in spending. This means that hospitals will charge what administrators feel the region can afford.
In 1997, the latest year for which there are figures, the earnings of physicians were reported as averaging around $200,000 per year. The lowest reporting specialty, rheumatology reported $158,500 and the highest, cardiovascular surgeon, reported $363,300. When examining the numbers, it was 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 has so many accumulated 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.
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 shingle 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, today's 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 Report, as it was then called, to gain popular support for the changes that were to be made in the medical community. With public backing secured by the publication of the Flexner report, 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 important 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 a 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 important thing that we all must do is to recognize that our health is our most important possession. We have no choice but to accept total responsibility for our own health. To leave such an important 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.
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. After accepting full responsibility for your own health, the second most important 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, and learn about what it takes to actually reverse the disease that afflicts you. Investigate alternative medical practitioners. Many Naturopaths, Chiropractors and Acupuncturists can be of great help in actually curing disease. Do not fall for the idea that only medical doctors are smart enough to understand these things.
Look for that unusual doctor that will risk really trying to help you; and, realize that s/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 important, 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 importance of what you have found and give him all of the support that you can give. There is a medical doctor in California 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 flourishing 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.
How The Federal Government Is Chasing Millions Of Good Doctors Out Of The Medical Profession
Most Americans do not realize this, but we are on the verge of a major doctor shortage in the United States. All over America, good doctors are going broke. The way that our health care system is currently set up, they simply cannot make it. These days a lot of politicians are warning us about the dangers of "socialized medicine", but the truth is that we already have it. About half of all health care dollars in the United States are now spent by the federal government, and a lot of health insurance companies base reimbursements on what the federal government does. In addition, there are a whole host of parasites that have gotten between the doctor and the patient these days. Everyone wants a piece of the health care pie. Health insurance companies, pharmaceutical giants, lawyers, health care "administrators" and government bureaucrats all make a sweet living off of the doctor/patient relationship. It really is sickening. And now Obamacare is going to make things much, much worse. As you will read about later in this article, a stunning percentage of doctors say that they plan to leave the medical profession because of Obamacare. What this means is that we are headed for a chronic doctor shortage and there is a good chance that there will be no doctor for you when you really need one in the years ahead.
Today, approximately 40 percent of all doctors in the United States are 55 years of age or older. Large numbers of them are getting ready to retire.
Even before Obamacare was passed, we were already facing a massive shortage of doctors in the coming years. The American Association of Medical Colleges has projected that we will experience a shortage of more than 150,000 doctors over the next 15 years.
Unfortunately, the passage of Obamacare is going to make this crisis even worse. A whole host of surveys have shown that a massive number of doctors in America are headed for the exits because of the new health care law....
*According to a Merritt Hawkins survey of 2,379 doctors for the Physicians Foundation that was conducted in August 2010, 40 percent of all U.S. doctors plan to "retire, seek a nonclinical job in health care, or seek a job or business unrelated to health care" at some point over the next three years.
*A shocking IBD/TPP Poll taken in 2010 found that 45 percent of all U.S. doctors are considering leaving the medical profession or retiring early as a result of Obamacare.
At the moment, there are approximately 960,000 doctors in the United States.
So what is going to happen if a couple hundred thousand of them suddenly leave the medical profession?
Already we were in desperate need of a lot more doctors. The following comes from an article in the Wall Street Journal....
Health-care reform will add an estimated 32 million people to the ranks of the insured, driving them to seek medical attention that in the past they may have avoided due to expense. The aging population will also create much greater demand. The number of seniors who need more medical care is expected to soar to 72 million by 2020—nearly double today's number.
So what is going to happen if the number of doctors starts declining rapidly?
Most Americans think of doctors as being "wealthy", but that is not the reality of what is going on out there these days as a recent CNN article explained....
Doctors in America are harboring an embarrassing secret: Many of them are going broke.
This quiet reality, which is spreading nationwide, is claiming a wide range of casualties, including family physicians, cardiologists and oncologists.
Americans spend more on health care than anyone else in the world and yet thousands upon thousands of doctors are going broke.
How can that be?
Well, one huge contributing factor is the mismanagement of the federal government.
Existing government programs already reimburse physicians at rates that are often less than the actual cost of treating a patient. Estimates suggest that on average physicians are reimbursed at roughly 78% of costs under Medicare, and just 70% of costs under Medicaid. Physicians must either make up for this shortfall by shifting costs to those patients with insurance — meaning those of us with insurance pay more — or treat patients at a loss.
So guess who has to make up the difference?
You and I.
When we go to see the doctor we get smacked with a huge bill in order to make up for the Medicare and Medicaid patients.
Things have gotten so bad that a lot of doctors won't even see Medicare and Medicaid patients anymore.
Just check out what some researchers found when they called around to doctors in Illinois back in 2010. The following comes from an article in the New York Times....
The study used a “secret shopper” technique in which researchers posed as the parent of a sick or injured child and called 273 specialty practices in Cook County, Ill., to schedule appointments. The callers, working from January to May 2010, described problems that were urgent but not emergencies, like diabetes, seizures, uncontrolled asthma, a broken bone or severe depression. If they were asked, they said that primary care doctors or emergency departments had referred them.
Sixty-six percent of those who mentioned Medicaid-CHIP (Children’s Health Insurance Program) were denied appointments, compared with 11 percent who said they had private insurance, according to an article being published Thursday in The New England Journal of Medicine.
Today, one out of every 6 Americans is on Medicaid. Without Medicaid, millions of children would not receive health care.
But now large numbers of doctors are rejecting patients on Medicaid because they simply cannot afford to treat them.
And now as Obamacare is fully implemented over the next few years it is going to make our health care mess a whole lot worse.
Obamacare is going to burden our doctors with a gigantic mountain of new regulations and red tape. It is going to become incredibly difficult to make a living as a doctor and the federal government is going to be pretty much running the entire health care system.
Did you know that Obamacare is so oppressive that it is even causing the cancellation of new hospitals?
In addition, as Obamacare is fully rolled out the wait to see a doctor is likely to get much longer. If you urgently need to see a doctor you may simply be out of luck.
If you doubt this, just check out what happened in Massachusetts. As a result of Romneycare, the average wait to see a doctor in Massachusetts is now much, much longer....
In fact, we have already seen the start of this process in Massachusetts, where Mitt Romney’s health care reforms were nearly identical to President Obama’s. Romney’s reforms increased the demand for health care but did nothing to expand the supply of physicians. In fact, by cracking down on insurance premiums, Massachusetts pushed insurers to reduce their payments to providers, making it less worthwhile for doctors to expand their practices. As a result, the average wait to get an appointment with a doctor grew from 33 days to over 55 days.
Is that the kind of health care system that you want?
The more doctors that leave the system, the worse that things are going to get.
We need a system where doctors can make a living. It is just as simple as that.
The following is one example of a doctor that is going broke from a recent CNN article....
Beau Donegan, senior executive with a hospital cancer center in Newport Beach, Calif., is well aware of physicians' financial woes.
"Many are too proud to admit that they are on the verge of bankruptcy," she said. "These physicians see no way out of the downward spiral of reimbursement, escalating costs of treating patients and insurance companies deciding when and how much they will pay them."
Donegan knows an oncologist "with a stellar reputation in the community" who hasn't taken a salary from his private practice in over a year. He owes drug companies $1.6 million, which he wasn't reimbursed for.
The following is another example from that same article....
Dr. Neil Barth is that oncologist. He has been in the top 10% of oncologists in his region, according to U.S. News Top Doctors' ranking. Still, he is contemplating personal bankruptcy.
That move could shutter his 31-year-old clinical practice and force 6,000 cancer patients to look for a new doctor.
Are you starting to get the picture?
There are already not enough doctors, and the number of doctors is going to continue to decline unless something is done.
We need to fundamentally restructure the way that health care is done in the United States. What we are doing now is not working, and Obamacare is going to make things much worse.
Today, the average medical school student graduates with over $295,000 of student loan debt.
So if doctors can't make any money, then where is the incentive to go into so much debt?
Something has gone very wrong.
It isn't as if we are not spending enough money on health care. Just consider the following stats....
-According to the Bureau of Economic Analysis, health care costs accounted for just 9.5% of all personal consumption back in 1980. Today they account for approximately 16.3%.
-Over the past decade, health insurance premiums have risen three times faster than wages have in the United States.
-According to a report released in 2010, Americans spend approximately twice as much as residents of other developed countries do on health care.
So we are definitely spending more than enough money on health care.
So where is it all going?
Well, it is going to the parasites....
-According to a report by Health Care for America Now, America's five biggest for-profit health insurance companies ended 2009 with a combined profit of $12.2 billion.
-The chairman of Aetna, the third largest health insurance company in the United States, brought in a staggering $68.7 million during 2010. Ron Williams exercised stock options that were worth approximately $50.3 million and he raked in an additional $18.4 million in wages and other forms of compensation. The funny thing is that he left the company and didn't even work the whole year.
-According to the CDC, the percentage of Americans that say that they have taken a prescription drug within the last month has risen to almost 50 percent.
-Lawyers are certainly doing their part to contribute to soaring health care costs. According to one recent study, the medical liability system in the United States added approximately $55.6 billion to the cost of health care in 2008.
Are you starting to understand?
This gigantic mess is causing an increasing number of Americans to seek medical care outside of the country. According to numbers released by Deloitte Consulting, a whopping 875,000 Americans were "medical tourists" in 2010.
Our health care system is irretrievably broken. The federal government has messed it up beyond all recognition and it is not going to get better any time soon.
