Category Archives: In the Money

Greed does not heal – it kills.

Top Ten Ways the American Health Care System Fails

obamacare_weblogFrom time to time, medical experts reverse course on certain practices and procedures when science dictates a change in the standard of care. One classic example of a “reversal” is when hormone therapy for menopausal women came to a screeching halt when so many women developed blood clots, stroke, and breast and uterine cancers.

In an attempt to determine the overall effectiveness of our medical care, the Mayo Clinic tracked the frequency of these medical reversals over the past decade and published a report in Mayo Clinic Proceedings, August 2013.

The results are discussed by lead researcher Dr. Vinay Prasad in the featured video. Prasad and his team found that reversals are common across all classes of medical practice, and a significant proportion of medical treatments offer no benefit at all. Continue reading

How doctors make fake diagnoses for diseases

RappoportI never grow tired of explaining this issue, because people write to me with the assumption that they understand disease diagnosis. And they don’t. They’re not off by a little bit. They’re off by a mile.

Two of the most prevalent tests for diagnosing diseases are antibody tests and what’s called the PCR.

Prior to 1984, it was well understood by most doctors that the presence of antibodies specific to a given germ meant: the patient’s body had contacted and successfully thrown off the germ.

Antibodies are scouts for the immune system. They “go hunting” for germ invaders and ID them, so other troops can knock them out. That’s the conventional view. Continue reading

Top Cancer Centers Off-Limits Under Obamacare

obamacare_weblogSome of America’s best cancer hospitals are off-limits to many of the people now signing up for coverage under the nation’s new health care program.

Doctors and administrators say they’re concerned. So are some state insurance regulators. An Associated Press survey found examples coast to coast.

Seattle Cancer Care Alliance is excluded by five out of eight insurers in Washington’s insurance exchange. MD Anderson Cancer Center says it’s in less than half of the plans in the Houston area. Memorial Sloan-Kettering is included by two of nine insurers in New York City and has out-of-network agreements with two more. Continue reading

Death by Murder

surgical_instrumentsEighteen patients in North Carolina may have been exposed to a fatal brain disorder similar to ‘mad cow’ disease after undergoing surgery with instruments that had not been properly sterilised.

Surgeons at the Novant Health Forsyth Medical Center in Winston-Salem operated on the patients on January 18 using tools that had been used on a man suspected of having Creutzfeldt-Jakob Disease (CJD), the hospital said in a press statement.

The surgical instruments were sterilised using standard hospital procedures, but were not subjected to the enhanced sterilisation procedures necessary on instruments used in confirmed or suspected cases of CJD, the hospital added. Continue reading

Boy, 7, born with rare cancer loses his insurance because of Obamacare…leaving his parents needing $50,000 to pay for life-saving chemotherapy

Hunter AlfordLittle Hunter Alford needs chemotherapy to treat the rare and deadly cancer he was born with but has lost his health insurance under an administrative blunder seemingly caused by Obamacare.

While the president’s signature policy promised that no one with a pre-existing condition would not be covered, the Affordable Care Act has seemingly caused the seven-year-old Gainesville, Texas, boy to face an agonizing wait for treatment as his parents battle to get him back on his insurance plan.

‘Why would you cancel a kid?’ asked his mother Krista Alford. ‘I really want to send Obama and all of them pictures of my son. He has scars all over his head. He doesn’t want to leave the house because he’s afraid people are going to make fun of him because he’s bald.’

While mom Krista and dad Ron go out their minds with worry, Hunter – who was born with an extremely rare form of cancer called Plexiform Hishocyne Neoplasm – is battling the disease which has now spread to his brain. Continue reading

Whistle-blowers expose huge drug company scam

Worked undercover at Johnson & Johnson

generation-rxFor nine years, Judith Doetterl kept a secret.

She never said boo about the drug she was selling or the allegations that her employer, a pharmaceutical giant, was wining and dining doctors to boost sales.

She never told anyone she was working undercover with federal investigators or that she was one of five employees at the center of one of the biggest pharmaceutical whistle-blower cases ever.

Monday, the Buffalo woman went public with her tale of intrigue, risk and great reward.

“They wanted to right a wrong,” Daniel C. Oliverio, Doetterl’s lawyer, said of the five former employees in the case. “To this day, their primary goal was, ‘This must end.’ ”

Overnight, Doetterl and the others – including Camille McGowan, Oliverio’s other client in the case – went from little-known former sales representatives for Johnson & Johnson to whistle-blowers now credited with exposing one of the biggest pharmaceutical scams in years. Continue reading

Susan G. Komen Walk for the Buck$

Editor’s Notes: While on a road trip to Kansas City, Kansas, Dr. Kelley once told me, that every time in his life that he put money first in his life, “the Good Lord, knocked me up the side of my head and reminded me that money is not what life is all about.”

Is the Komen organization doing any good? Probably – from the standpoint of awareness – but once again, the International Medical community is not interested in “finding a cure,” for if they were, they would they would have paid attention to the study conducted of Kelley’s work, commissioned at the behest of Sloan-Kettering and conducted on their behalf by Nicholas Gonzalez. They didn’t – and the con-job continues with bogus fund-raising “Marches for the Cure.”

The following column was posted on June 11, 2013, in the Daily Mail. The link is provided at the end of this column. Its original title was, “Susan G. Komen CEO making $684,000 a year as breast cancer organization faces nationwide race cancellations and flagging donations (Ed.)

Susan G. Komen founder Nancy Brinker

Susan G. Komen founder Nancy Brinker

Between 2007 and 2009, Brinker billed the non-profit $133,507 in expenses while working full-time for the federal government

While the country’s largest breast cancer charity, Susan G. Komen, announced it was cancelling half its 3-day races nationwide next year, CEO Nancy Brinker’s compensation package has increased considerably in the past two years.

And at $684,000, the pay itself is enough to raise eyebrows, not to mention Brinker’s 2012 announcement she would be stepping down as Komen CEO.

Her announcement came in August in the wake of the early 2012 controversy over the charity’s short-lived decision to pull funding from Planned Parenthood to provide breast cancer screenings. Brinker has remained listed as the organization’s CEO in the ten months since.

According to NBC News, Brinker has received a 64 percent raise since 2010 despite a steep drop in donations made to the organizations and in participation in Komen’s signature races nationwide.

Komen says Brinker’s raise came prior to last year’s defunding debacle. Continue reading

‘Scandal?’ The FDA’s Just Doing Its Job

It’s gradually emerged in recent months that the Food and Drug Administration not only spied on its employees, but did so on a massive scale — collecting tens of thousands of employee emails to one another, as well as to journalists, members of Congress and congressional staff workers. The FDA also intercepted draft statements to the Office of Special Counsel, which investigates complaints of whistleblower harassment and reprisal. This monitoring, authorized by the agency’s chief counsel, was clearly a deliberate policy of the highest levels of FDA leadership.

So what problem was all the surveillance directed against? Embezzling? Sexual harassment? No. The FDA was out to punish whistleblowers for talking out of school about dangerous radiation levels in medical imaging devices approved by FDA for mammograms and colonoscopies.

That’s right. FDA leadership was out to prevent employees from talking to members of Congress — which the civics books tell us safeguards the public safety and welfare by, among other things, creating regulatory agencies like the FDA — about the very kinds of concerns the FDA was allegedly created to address. Continue reading

U.S. warns workers on cancer-causing mineral erionite

Federal health officials are calling for protective measures at job sites where workers may be exposed to erionite, a cancer-causing mineral similar to asbestos that is found in rock and soil in at least a dozen western states.

An advisory published Tuesday by the National Institute for Occupational Safety and Health recommended a series of steps to prevent employee exposure to eronite fibers at sites such as gravel quarries and road projects. The NIOSH alert noted that erionite was responsible for “remarkably high” rates of mesothelioma, a lethal form of cancer that devastated several Turkish villages where erionite was concentrated in rock and soil. Continue reading

Emord: RECENT PROOF FDA IS CONTROLLED BY BIG PHARMA

If you harbored romantic notions that an Obama FDA would be less controlled by the pharmaceutical industry than a Bush FDA, think again. The case of Avandia proves once again that FDA will sacrifice the health of the American people to defend the economic interests of its favored regulatees, the big drug companies.

In an April 2, 1999 internal memo to his superiors FDA medical reviewer Dr. Robert I. Misbin objected to FDA approval of the GlaxoSmithKline Type 2 diabetes drug Avandia. He expressed concerns “about deleterious long term effects on the heart” from the drug. Continue reading

GAO: The Influenza Pandemic

March 24, 2009Once again, in our endeavor to make you THINK for yourself – we bring you a complete US Government document. This was first published by the Government Accountability Office, and ostensibly dealt with the issue of National Planning and Preparedness Efforts. Dated? Yes – but you tell us – just what has changed? Why are so many people ill and dying? Why such an increase in Autism and other diseases? (commentary updated, July 20, 2018) Click on the link below and follow through to the complete report (pdf)…

INFLUENZA PANDEMIC: Sustaining Focus on the Nation’s Planning and Preparedness Efforts

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SARTRE: Latrogenic Diseased Health

“Medicine by quacks and medical gangsters in control of the American Medical Association, this organization has become one of the most vicious rackets in the country.” – Charles Lyman Loffler

“I was under medication when I made the decision not to burn the tapes.” – Richard M. Nixon

The overriding theme from the DemocRAT clones running against the Fearless Leader, wants to charm you into accepting their formula for eradicating all your ailments. Much of the next presidential campaign will discuss, compare and knock each plan, while the central issue remains silent. Is the condition of national health enhanced with the centralization of mandated medicine?

If you are one among the majority that view government as a benefactor, you will be looking for the most you can get out of the system. Continue reading

Big Brother: Coming Soon to a Health Store Near You!

One more step toward…

Forget terrorism for a minute, because right now it’s time to activate the level orange bureaucracy alert…

Last year, I wrote in Real Health about our government’s attempt to wrap their greedy tentacles around the supplement industry with a bill before Congress ironically monikered the “Dietary Supplement Fairness Act.” To refresh your memory (or bring you up to speed if you weren’t one of my readers back then), this bill ostensibly provided tax-based subsidization for vitamin and nutrient supplements – “nutraceuticals” by their nomenclature. Sounds good, right? Continue reading

Ellison: What Is The FDA’s Mission Statement?

People want to trust that their so-called elected government is doing the right thing when it passes regulations to enhance public safety. When the Pure Food and Drug Act was passed in 1906 a new watchdog agency, The Food and Drug Administration (FDA), was born. It would be many years before we as a nation had such luxuries as refrigeration, sanitary food processing standards, and good manufacturing processes (GMP), so in many respects, this law was necessary. So, what exactly does the FDA do? Continue reading

Ellison: Skeletons in the FDA’s Closet

It is time that the actions of the Food and Drug Administration (FDA) speak for themselves and Americans began to question their own absorbent use and blind-loyalty to FDA approved drugs. If not, you too may become a FDA statistic. The FDA’s financial ties to “big-pharma” have caused millions of preventable deaths over the last 30 years.

In 1996-97 the FDA approved a drug known as Posicor (a chemical called mibefradil dihydrochloride) for the treatment of high blood pressure (hypertension). Prior to approval, the data from the congestive heart failure trials presented at a FDA Advisory Committee meeting on Posicor showed that more patients treated with Posicor died than those taking a placebo!  Continue reading