Desperate patients pay up because they have nowhere else to go — and their distress is deliberate and designed.
If you’ve heard anything about insulin lately, it’s probably been palpable outrage over soaring prescription prices or dubious optimism about Eli Lilly’s recent release of its new version that, at half the price, will cost an arm or a leg but not both. Continue reading
Erin Brockovich
Erin Brockovich, the environmental consumer advocate, took to the Guardian to proclaim, “The weedkiller in our food is killing us.”1 She has vowed to bring down this global industry behemoth to help save both our collective health and the planet’s.
Ms. Brockovich is speaking about glyphosate, the herbicidal ingredient in Monsanto’s Roundup, one of the most widely used agricultural chemicals in the U.S. In no uncertain terms, reflecting on a recent jury award of $289 million (later reduced to $78 million) to Dewayne Johnson, a school groundskeeper dying of cancer, Brockovich states… Continue reading
In 1994, then Senator John D. Rockefeller issued a report revealing that for at least 50 years the Department of Defense had used hundreds of thousands of military personnel in human experiments and for intentional exposure to dangerous substances. Materials included mustard and nerve gas, ionizing radiation, psychochemicals, hallucinogens, and drugs used during the Gulf War. What else has ‘OUR’ government done for the good of mankind?
1931 Dr. Cornelius Rhoads, under the auspices of the Rockefeller Institute for Medical Investigations, infects human subjects with cancer cells. He later goes on to establish the U.S. Army Biological Warfare facilities in Maryland, Utah, and Panama, and is named to the U.S. Atomic Energy Commission. While there, he begins a series of radiation exposure experiments on American soldiers and civilian hospital patients. Continue reading
Old Age, Bad Health, And Government Insurance
NOTE: This seventeen year old column, has even greater meaning today, in 2019, as it did when it was first penned by the author. (Ed.)
Whatever caused a free society to think that government could answer to real human need? That is not and never has been its goal or its purpose, yet Americans in ever increasing numbers continue to look in that direction for answers to basic problems of being human. As long as the Social Security system continues to exist, there will be a shackle on the souls of Americans from the cradle to the grave – a shackle that spits in the face of human decency and laughs at real human need. Continue reading
I swear by Apollo Physician, by Asclepius, by Health, by Panacea and by all the gods and goddesses, making them my witnesses, that I will carry out, according to my ability and judgment, this oath and this indenture. To hold my teacher in this art equal to my own parents; to make him partner in my livelihood; when he is in need of money to share mine with him; to consider his family as my own brothers, and to teach them this art, if they want to learn it, without fee or indenture; to impart precept, oral instruction, and all other instruction to my own sons, the sons of my teacher, and to indentured pupils who have taken the physician’s oath, but to nobody else. Continue reading
Judge Reduces Jury Award against Bayer’s Roundup to $78.5 Million
A California judge reduced by more than $200 million a jury verdict linking Bayer’s Roundup weed killer to cancer but upheld the jury’s findings that the company acted with malice.
San Francisco Superior Court Judge Suzanne Ramos Bolanos said the $250 million in punitive damages awarded by the jury must be slimmed down to match the $39.25 million in compensatory damages that the jury found appropriate. If the plaintiff agrees to the reduction by Dec. 7, no new trial is needed.
Bayer-Monsanto Corruption in Action: Judge Suzanne Ramos Bolanos is considering doing Bayer-Monsanto’s bidding and overturning the jury’s verdict in the Roundup-cancer trial awarding $289 million to DeWayne Lee Johnson. Some jurors are coming forward urging the judge to let their verdict and award to Johnson stand. The judge’s decision could come sometime today. And we hope that Judge Bolanos makes the right decision. Stay tuned…
RELATED: ‘The world is against them‘: New era of cancer lawsuits threaten Monsanto
A landmark verdict found Roundup caused a man’s cancer, paving the way for thousands of other families to seek justice
Deborah Brooks, whose husband Dean Brooks died of cancer after using Roundup. Photograph: Dan Tuffs for the Guardian
Dean Brooks grasped on to the shopping cart, suddenly unable to stand or breathe. Later, at a California emergency room, a nurse with teary eyes delivered the news, telling his wife, Deborah, to hold out hope for a miracle. It was December 2015 when they learned that a blood cancer called non-Hodgkin lymphoma (NHL) was rapidly attacking the man’s body and immune system. Continue reading
A neuroscientist explains what tech does to the reading brain
For anyone who has ever been a reader, there’s much to sympathize with in Maryanne Wolf’s Reader, Come Home. The UCLA neuroscientist, a great lover of literature, tries to read Hermann Hesse’s Glass Bead Game, an old favorite, only to realize that she finds him boring and too complex. She wonders why he ever won a Nobel. And Wolf, who previously wrote Proust and the Squid: The Story and Science of the Reading Brain, is horrified that this is what has happened to her ability to concentrate.
Reader, Come Home is about, as its subtitle states, “the reading brain in a digital world.” The Verge spoke to Wolf about how technology is changing the brain, what we lose when we lose deep attention, and what to do about it. Continue reading
Wherever one goes on social media or any other public forum, one of the main thrusts of conversation is the apparent mental deterioration of the American public. Today’s Americans are not only more ignorant than previous generations, but as illustrated by our violent politics and social chaos, we appear to have lost the ability to function as civilized people. Much is explained by our deplorable educational system, but the loss of the ability of many people of all ages to rationally think and act cannot be explained away simply by bad schools or toxic entertainment. Even the most credulous are beginning to believe that there is some underlying reason for the collapse of the American intellect, something that is more basic than bad teachers, schools and curricula—and they’re right. Continue reading
On October 1, the U.S. Food and Drug Administration (FDA) released the final results of a “special assignment” that tested for levels of glyphosate, the weed-killing chemical found in the blockbuster herbicide Roundup. They also posted results for a competing herbicide, called glufosinate, in corn, soy, eggs, and milk during the fiscal year 2016. [1] Continue reading
Stress levels are sky-rocketing among every age group, and students adjusting to their first year of college may be particularly vulnerable.
All around the world, young adults making their first foray into college and the real world are struggling with depression, anxiety and other mental health disorders
Schools have taken steps to meet the psychological needs of their student body, but a far smaller fraction of the students utilize on-campus counseling services, but that hasn’t curbed rising rates of mental health disorders among students around the world, according to the new Columbia University study. Continue reading
The report recommends that pediatricians take a more active role in explaining to parents the value of childhood play.
Kids need to play. It seems like an obvious statement, as central to childhood as eating peanut butter-and-jelly sandwiches and chasing fireflies. For generations, parents have known that a play-filled childhood is essential for healthy physical and mental development. They didn’t need to read the latest research findings on play. They didn’t need experts to tell them it’s important. They just knew it. Kids are designed by nature to play, and parents have generally let them. Continue reading
Why physicians are leaving their practices to pursue other careers…
Here is the quote of the day: “With the [enforcement] of EHRs, I had to spend more time as a scribe. One night a child I was treating had a seizure and I couldn’t get the medicine to enable them to breathe because their chart wasn’t in the system yet. This kid was fixing to die and I, the doctor, couldn’t get the medicine. It was demoralizing.” The profession has allowed non-physicians to control the practice of medicine. This is the result. Too many physicians are employed by large firms and hospital groups which generates dissatisfaction with their profession. Unless things change, expect more of the same. ~ Rosemary Stein, MD
“After 20 years, I quit medicine and none of my colleagues were surprised. In fact, they all said they wish they could do the same.”
The news that New York University will offer free tuition to all its medical school students, in the hope of encouraging more doctors to choose lower-paying specialties, offered hope to those wishing to pursue a career in the field.
However, becoming a doctor remains one of the most challenging career paths you can embark upon. It requires extensive (and expensive) schooling followed by intensive residencies before you’re fully on your feet. The idea, generally, is that all the hard work will pay off not only financially, but also in terms of job satisfaction and work-life balance; then there’s the immeasurable personal benefits of helping people, and possibly even saving lives. In terms of both nobility and prestige, few occupations rank as high. Continue reading
THINK about this the next time you go to get your prescription filled!
The federal World Trade Center Health Program has counted 9,795 first responders and other New Yorkers with cancer deemed 9/11-related
NEARLY 10,000 people have suffered cancers linked to the toxic dust and smoke resulting from 9/11.
With the 17th anniversary of the September 11, 2001 terror attacks a month away, the federal World Trade Center Health Program has counted 9,795 first responders and other New Yorkers with cancer deemed 9/11-related. Continue reading