Category Archives: Perspectives…

A wide range of lessons and commentary about many health related issues. Many are point-blank op-ed pieces based upon personal experiences by the writers (as patients or witnesses IE, spouses, children…) – or even by some doctor’s and other medical practitioners, who actually have a conscience – in addition to some spiritual issues addressing our well-being..

The EPA says a chemical in Monsanto’s weed-killer doesn’t cause cancer — but there’s compelling evidence the agency is wrong

Editor’s NOTE: Correct me if I am wrong, but in reading through this posting, although the writer does alright presenting both sides of the case, to me it appears that she is more supportive of the Bayer-Monsanto position. As for me – I spent 21 months ‘In Country.” I did not love the “smell of Agent Orange in the morning!” ~ Jeffrey Bennett, Editor and Publisher

Gardeners Alva and Alberta Pilliod say they used Monsanto’s Roundup spray to keep weeds off their driveway for more than two decades, applying the herbicide while wearing flip flip flops, shorts, and tank tops.. Now, they both have Non-Hodgkin’s Lymphoma (NHL). In a lawsuit, they were awarded $2.05 billion in damages in May.

School groundskeeper Dewayne Johnson, now in his 40s, also used to spray Roundup up to 30 times every summer. He has the same blood cancer as the Pilliods, and won nearly $80 million in a suit last year.

A third man, Edwin Hardeman, used Roundup for more than 25 years to keep weeds off his oak trees. He got NHL, too. A jury in California ruled in March that Roundup was a “substantial factor” in his diagnosis.

More than 13,000 similar lawsuits have popped up in the US. Almost all are being filed by gardeners, groundskeepers, and other professional weed-whackers who allege that their consistent, repeated use of Roundup gave them cancer. Continue reading →

Instagram queen Selena Gomez says ‘social media has been terrible’ for millennials

The third most followed person on Instagram also warned social media is ‘selfish’ and ‘dangerous’

Influencer Selena Gomez (right) has been actively criticizing social media.

Selena Gomez has had enough of social media — even if it can’t get enough of her.

The 26-year-old singer and Taylor Swift bestie is the third most popular person on Instagram with more than 150 million followers (behind soccer star Cristiano Ronaldo and pop singer Ariana Grande.) But the “I Can’t Get Enough” artist blasted the platforms that have given her such a high profile, calling them “dangerous” and “selfish” during a Cannes Film Festival press conference on Wednesday. Continue reading →

When “Blowing Smoke Up Your Ass” Was Much More Than Just A Saying

Discover the shockingly literal and thoroughly disturbing 17th-century medical origins of the idiom “blowing smoke up your ass.”

L0057782 Resuscitation set, Europe, 1801-1850
Credit: Science Museum, London. Wellcome Images, [email protected]

“Oh, you’re just blowing smoke up my ass,” is something you might hear someone say when they think you’re just telling them what they want to hear. But in 18th-century England, blowing smoke up one’s ass was an actual medical procedure, and no, we aren’t kidding.

According to Gizmodo, one of the earliest reports of such a practice took place in England in 1746, when a woman was left unconscious after nearly drowning. Continue reading →

An Open Letter to Senator Maureen Walsh

Dear Senator Walsh,

I am a Nurse. This morning I was greeted by a headline that read,

“Senator states that nurses ‘probably play cards for a considerable amount of the day’ in amending rest breaks bill”

Twatwaffle Walsh

Stunned by the headline, I read – and then re-read – the article. I was dumbfounded that a legislator would make such an ignorant statement and thought that perhaps your words were taken out of context . I took the time to locate and watch the video of your speech, given in front of the Washington State Senate. I wanted to be sure that I understand fully what, exactly, you were trying to communicate. You see, because I’m an responsible adult and a professional, I believe that I need to have all of the facts before I weigh in on a subject. As a nurse, I’m guided by the principle of do no harm. Your words make it clear that you don’t share that same standard so allow me to educate you. Continue reading →

U.S. Detention Centers Quarantine More Than 2,000 Migrants Over Mumps, Other Outbreaks

More than 2,000 detainees at immigration detention facilities across the country have been quarantined because of outbreaks of mumps and other contagious diseases.

In a statement to Newsweek, U.S. Immigration and Customs Enforcement agency spokesperson Brendan Raedy confirmed that as of March 7, there were a total of 2,287 detainees “cohorted for exposure to a detainee with a contagious condition,” including mumps. Continue reading →

Contagion Invasion

Part 1: What ever happened to the principle of protecting our borders against dangerous diseases?

Keeping Americans safe from dangerous diseases was a solemn duty adhered to with the upmost meticulousness since our colonial times. When our federal government began assuming control over immigration, weeding out contagious diseases was the quintessential application of the “few and defined” powers of the federal government against “external” threats that James Madison envisioned as the entire purpose of a federal government in Federalist #45. Has that principle been upended in the era of political correctness? Continue reading →

A Government Guide to Keeping Insulin Unaffordable: 3 Easy Steps to Hogtie a Market

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 →

Brockovich: We Are Being ‘Slowly Poisoned To Death’ By Monsanto

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 →

A Short History Of Secret US Human Biological Experimentation

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 →

Venable: What A Deadly Combination

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 →

The Oath of Hippocrates

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 →

UPDATE: The Judge IS Dirty?

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

‘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 →

It’s not a zero-sum game

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 →