I’ve enjoyed meeting with Dispatches from a Scamdemic readers. While those I’ve met have a pleasing intensity, they’re grounded and retain a sense of humor, despite the longstanding lunacy around them. Who knew that Grandma Killers could be so nice?
I remember in one of my favorite books NATURAL CAUSES the author said that one day she just woke up and realized she was old enough to die and that she was not going to spend what was left of her life endlessly searching for that thing that might kill her - through scans, xrays, blood tests etcetera etcetera etcetera. I adopted that same attitude and have been so much happier and healthier ever since. Way before coronamania.
Outstanding article. At the risk of being overly simplistic, since the inception I have viewed Covid and the Med/Pharma establishment as simply a new stage in the surveillance state roll-out that began allegedly in response to 9/11. Vaccines and digital tracking are the tools being used to link the individual to the state.
The loss of independent physicians is heartbreaking and a great loss. Now all physicians are employed and must march to the tune of the company. Hospitals are not paid for quality. In fact, in a shocking reality that is difficult to understand - hospitals and health systems actually make more money when there are more complications and the care is poor.
Most healthcare CEO's say 50% excess off the top could be eliminated. And that's just a start.
And in a striking hard to believe reality - its the administrative costs that are skyrocketing because of government hyper-regulation. So 40% of the payout is going to administrators who essentially do nothing except creat a reason for their existence.
My husband is a physician assistant in an ER. The changes he's seen (and I get to hear about) in just the last ten years alone is depressing. The ER management group he works for has changed three times as the hospital seeks to improve profits by micro-managing healthcare. It's no longer about helping people (if it ever was), it's about making money for the board and administration. Business people who don't even understand how to take care of sick people are now in charge. Having adequate staffing, efficient processes and enough available beds is a thing of the past. In today's ER, their vision includes providers triaging out in the lobby so they can bill for services rendered before the patient walks out when they refuse to wait any longer, or allowing the number of ICU nurses available for seriously ill patients to drop along with the experience level (last week my husband was brought in to a room by a panicking young nurse who thought her patient was coding when a monitor had simply come loose). It now takes numerous hours to get scans and blood work complete which puts lives in danger. Some of the problem is due to staffing shortages but many of the staffing shortages are self-inflicted, due to resources being diverted to more profitable causes. One of their current protocols involve running extensive tests/scans/evaluations on patients involved in traumas no matter what the provider's physical exam shows, since anything labeled "trauma" in billing gets tens of thousands in reimbursement. It truly has become a reality show based in follow the money, at least in the ER. Now, in my fifties, at an age where I am more likely to see my parents, family and friends needing acute medical care, the foundation of the medical establishment is cracking and I'm not sure how long we have before it becomes complete unreliable. I'm thankful that I have my husband's expertise to rely on as plan A, but plan B is pretty shit-covered, and I worry about the others, who don't have support, that will get thrown into the system and spit out, with varying outcomes. We can't rely on medical institutions and pharma like we have in the past. We definitely need to make ourselves a higher priority when it comes to our health. The notion that the healthcare industry will "save us" if something goes awry is less reliable than ever. Don't wait to take care of yourself, make positive choices now-eat healthier, eat less, move more, find stress relief that works for you (meditation, stretching, deep breathing, etc) and regularly do something that you truly enjoy. Unfortunately, if you don't, it's going to be hit or miss as to what type of care you get going forward.
Just like the cattle that are led thru the maze of cattle pens to their eventual demise- Americans are led like pawns thru the medical minefield of fear and deception. We can live our unhealthy lifestyles- consuming too much sugar, too much alcohol, too many pills, getting little exercise, etc.- cause we can get a prescription that fools our brain into thinking we can outwit what is naturally gonna happen anyway(premature aging and death). How much is 20% of GDP? Trillions every year. I agree that medicine is a religion- very few ever back down from what their shepherd says, excuse me, doctor says. Mark, another good essay on reality in America. Two very detrimental items in American history which continue to take America down: when the Fed took over our monetary system and when the medical establishment began the fear based rhetoric of Big Brother Pharma knows best. Keep em coming Mark!
It’s a pertinent point and evidence shows that better nutrition, better personal hygiene, better sanitation, clean water, less crowed accommodation, has made a greater contribution to improved health than the trillions spent on medical care. Just a simple thing like hand washing particularly after using the lavatory has vastly reduced spread of disease and improved health.
A critical question should be asked of all new treatments/drugs/tests: how many people have to be treated/drugged/tested to save one life? FDA statistical life value is $7.9 million, so if cost is higher than that, don’t do it because that has an opportunity cost… could the money be better spent elsewhere with greater benefit or more lives saved?
Taking cancer research. This has been on-going for decades with billions and billions spent, a plethora of drugs. Yet real improvements are only marginal. A cure is always ‘just round the corner’ and ‘great strides have been made’, but people are still dying of the same cancers in increasing numbers.
We are in a society which has been encouraged to believe that every hiccough is a disease which should be checked out, every ailment must be treated, every malady has a cure - even death can be eliminated.
The two biggest risks for disease are genetics and age. There is nothing anyone can do about either. George Burns quipped he was looking forward to reaching 100 because very few people die over a hundred.
Average age of a CoVid death in the UK was 82 - life expectancy is 81. We are spending billions on saving people who are on borrowed time and sacrificing the health and lives of young people with decades of life left. Insane; evil.
Why do people go and get their cholesterol, checked, blood pressure checked, checked for diabetes, screened for this cancer and that cancer - they are never away from the doctor/hospital?
That’s not looking after your health, it’s somewhere between a hobby and an obsession. Take up golf!
These folk end up on multiple medications. Blue pill for blood pressure, green pill for diabetes, yellow pill for cholesterol, white pill for the stomach ulcer one of the other pills - but nobody is sure which - is causing, the striped pill to remind you to take the other pills and purple pills for the depression caused by taking all the pills and regular screening to check the pills aren’t giving you cancer.
The body is really good at letting you know when something is really wrong.
One other very serious aspect. The scope of public health has now expanded to include private health. Our waistline, diet, our vaccination status, our blood pressure, whether we have diabetes, seat belts/baby seats in cars, smoking, alcohol - personal responsibility taken away, all now socialised, a matter of public concern. Result: blossoming bureaucracies full of prodnoses.
The excuse is burden/cost on healthcare services, protecting others (granny but never grandpa), saving others inconvenience. If you don’t wear a seat belt - it’s not fair on the emergency first responders and hospital staff who have to deal with trauma… because apparently that’s not their job.
To underscore what Mark is saying, about 70% of the drugs in the prescriptions that patients consume is rejected into the urine. This is because they are artificial chemicals (sometimes real poisons like chemotherapy!!) that the body is doing its best to purge you of. In the case of the highly artificial birth control "pill", the estrogen in the pill is a highly artificial form that is 100 TIMES more potent than the estrogen produced by our bodies (mostly by women's bodies). Therefore, the body rejects that chemical (ethinyl estradiol - EE2) at 90%!! That is correct, the overwhelming majority of the "estrogen" consumed by women to prevent pregnancy is rejected into the urine and enters the biosphere. Our sewerage treatment processes were originally designed in the 19th century and they haven't changed very much. If you are lucky and the sewerage that that urine enters is treated by a Sewerage treatment plant (some of it is just dumped in rivers), we are lucky if 50% of the EE2 is captured by the bacteria in those processes. That is, almost half of the EE2 from the Pill (and others sources such as the estrogen fed to dairy cows, in the US), enters the biosphere where it is concentrated up the food chain and WE consume it. Some of the "biosolids" (dead bacteria) from the sewerage treatment process capture some of the EE2 (and other human derived chemicals, many!!) and they are added to farmers fields as low cost fertilizer. So you are eating those pharmaceuticals through at least 2 pathways. Believe me when I tell you that the ~50% decline in male fertility over the last 60 years is in large part due to the avalanche of these "Endocrine disrupting chemicals" (EDCs).
Of course, this is not an accident. Nor is the slavery to the medial industrial complex. The only answer is to become aware of your food (more good fats!! such as avocado, wild fish, and nut oils like coconut, almond, etc.) and reduce carbs and especially sugar! Finally, we eat way too much protein!! IT may "lose us some weight" but good fats are the way to go with more water!
One hip replacement and two revisions later, I can say confidently that I should have left my congenital hip deformity alone. Maybe less pain but all the working out and training has not changed the weakness on my left side. I am done with conventional medicine. Thank you, Mark for reinforcing my decision to pursue alternative medicine.
Jun 17, 2022·edited Jun 17, 2022Liked by Mark Oshinskie
The Medical/Industrial complex, like Eisenhower's Military/Industrial complex, might be said to be a subset of the Political/Financial complex, although you probably couldn't put the thickness of a sheet of paper between any of them. The search for the next dollar drives everything, the market must grow.
I'm just gonna stop "liking" all these posts - they're all excellent, but at a certain point it's just redundant. So if you posted a response, here's your notice: I liked it - I liked it quite a bit. You people are truly excellent.
My profile pic is of my 7th great grandfather, Arthur Middleton, who was a Founding Father and signer to the Declaration. I've been thinking of him lately - what would he think of our current predicament, etc., etc.
He was taken captive when the British sacked his plantation, and he died very young from the hardship of imprisonment in Florida.
I've not a doubt that he would be disgusted at what I've allowed to happen.
At this point I am welcoming hard economic times, as it might be the only way to get folks to focus on the con job that is our federal government in the US.
Spot on again, Mark. I haven't been to see a doctor in 9 years (they were not helpful at all, anyway) and aim for it to be many, many more. Not there is actually much availability for healthcare in Ontario now anyway. But let's face the real problem as I see it - our friends, our neighbours, our coworkers, who we have found out to our dismay are much weaker and thoughtless conformists than we ever imagined.
Great message. Remember the saying an ounce of prevention is better than a pound of cure? Our medical pharmaceutical interventions are the pound of cure, while the clean water, sanitation and single ingredient whole foods are the ounce of prevention.
Nowhere today do we have a standard of care in any discipline that promotes prevention. The ADA and AHA were both founded and funded by the Seventh Day Adventist Church and two of their most successful members, Post and Kellogg, as in C. W. Post and W. K. Kellogg of the well known cereal companies. By installing undisclosed agents with an activist bias against traditional human food sources in favor of powdered wheat, we were set up perfectly for Dr. Ancel Keyes, diet heart hypotheses which states cholesterol cause heart disease (not true). Replacing thousands of years of evolution and decades of medical experience with religious dogma and pseudo science has set us on the path that resulted in us being where we are today. Fascinating deep dive from Belinda Fetke, wife of Dr. Gary Fetke who is my source and has cited all of her sources for what I am repeating.
I remember in one of my favorite books NATURAL CAUSES the author said that one day she just woke up and realized she was old enough to die and that she was not going to spend what was left of her life endlessly searching for that thing that might kill her - through scans, xrays, blood tests etcetera etcetera etcetera. I adopted that same attitude and have been so much happier and healthier ever since. Way before coronamania.
Outstanding article. At the risk of being overly simplistic, since the inception I have viewed Covid and the Med/Pharma establishment as simply a new stage in the surveillance state roll-out that began allegedly in response to 9/11. Vaccines and digital tracking are the tools being used to link the individual to the state.
The loss of independent physicians is heartbreaking and a great loss. Now all physicians are employed and must march to the tune of the company. Hospitals are not paid for quality. In fact, in a shocking reality that is difficult to understand - hospitals and health systems actually make more money when there are more complications and the care is poor.
Most healthcare CEO's say 50% excess off the top could be eliminated. And that's just a start.
And in a striking hard to believe reality - its the administrative costs that are skyrocketing because of government hyper-regulation. So 40% of the payout is going to administrators who essentially do nothing except creat a reason for their existence.
My husband is a physician assistant in an ER. The changes he's seen (and I get to hear about) in just the last ten years alone is depressing. The ER management group he works for has changed three times as the hospital seeks to improve profits by micro-managing healthcare. It's no longer about helping people (if it ever was), it's about making money for the board and administration. Business people who don't even understand how to take care of sick people are now in charge. Having adequate staffing, efficient processes and enough available beds is a thing of the past. In today's ER, their vision includes providers triaging out in the lobby so they can bill for services rendered before the patient walks out when they refuse to wait any longer, or allowing the number of ICU nurses available for seriously ill patients to drop along with the experience level (last week my husband was brought in to a room by a panicking young nurse who thought her patient was coding when a monitor had simply come loose). It now takes numerous hours to get scans and blood work complete which puts lives in danger. Some of the problem is due to staffing shortages but many of the staffing shortages are self-inflicted, due to resources being diverted to more profitable causes. One of their current protocols involve running extensive tests/scans/evaluations on patients involved in traumas no matter what the provider's physical exam shows, since anything labeled "trauma" in billing gets tens of thousands in reimbursement. It truly has become a reality show based in follow the money, at least in the ER. Now, in my fifties, at an age where I am more likely to see my parents, family and friends needing acute medical care, the foundation of the medical establishment is cracking and I'm not sure how long we have before it becomes complete unreliable. I'm thankful that I have my husband's expertise to rely on as plan A, but plan B is pretty shit-covered, and I worry about the others, who don't have support, that will get thrown into the system and spit out, with varying outcomes. We can't rely on medical institutions and pharma like we have in the past. We definitely need to make ourselves a higher priority when it comes to our health. The notion that the healthcare industry will "save us" if something goes awry is less reliable than ever. Don't wait to take care of yourself, make positive choices now-eat healthier, eat less, move more, find stress relief that works for you (meditation, stretching, deep breathing, etc) and regularly do something that you truly enjoy. Unfortunately, if you don't, it's going to be hit or miss as to what type of care you get going forward.
Just like the cattle that are led thru the maze of cattle pens to their eventual demise- Americans are led like pawns thru the medical minefield of fear and deception. We can live our unhealthy lifestyles- consuming too much sugar, too much alcohol, too many pills, getting little exercise, etc.- cause we can get a prescription that fools our brain into thinking we can outwit what is naturally gonna happen anyway(premature aging and death). How much is 20% of GDP? Trillions every year. I agree that medicine is a religion- very few ever back down from what their shepherd says, excuse me, doctor says. Mark, another good essay on reality in America. Two very detrimental items in American history which continue to take America down: when the Fed took over our monetary system and when the medical establishment began the fear based rhetoric of Big Brother Pharma knows best. Keep em coming Mark!
It’s a pertinent point and evidence shows that better nutrition, better personal hygiene, better sanitation, clean water, less crowed accommodation, has made a greater contribution to improved health than the trillions spent on medical care. Just a simple thing like hand washing particularly after using the lavatory has vastly reduced spread of disease and improved health.
A critical question should be asked of all new treatments/drugs/tests: how many people have to be treated/drugged/tested to save one life? FDA statistical life value is $7.9 million, so if cost is higher than that, don’t do it because that has an opportunity cost… could the money be better spent elsewhere with greater benefit or more lives saved?
Taking cancer research. This has been on-going for decades with billions and billions spent, a plethora of drugs. Yet real improvements are only marginal. A cure is always ‘just round the corner’ and ‘great strides have been made’, but people are still dying of the same cancers in increasing numbers.
We are in a society which has been encouraged to believe that every hiccough is a disease which should be checked out, every ailment must be treated, every malady has a cure - even death can be eliminated.
The two biggest risks for disease are genetics and age. There is nothing anyone can do about either. George Burns quipped he was looking forward to reaching 100 because very few people die over a hundred.
Average age of a CoVid death in the UK was 82 - life expectancy is 81. We are spending billions on saving people who are on borrowed time and sacrificing the health and lives of young people with decades of life left. Insane; evil.
Why do people go and get their cholesterol, checked, blood pressure checked, checked for diabetes, screened for this cancer and that cancer - they are never away from the doctor/hospital?
That’s not looking after your health, it’s somewhere between a hobby and an obsession. Take up golf!
These folk end up on multiple medications. Blue pill for blood pressure, green pill for diabetes, yellow pill for cholesterol, white pill for the stomach ulcer one of the other pills - but nobody is sure which - is causing, the striped pill to remind you to take the other pills and purple pills for the depression caused by taking all the pills and regular screening to check the pills aren’t giving you cancer.
The body is really good at letting you know when something is really wrong.
One other very serious aspect. The scope of public health has now expanded to include private health. Our waistline, diet, our vaccination status, our blood pressure, whether we have diabetes, seat belts/baby seats in cars, smoking, alcohol - personal responsibility taken away, all now socialised, a matter of public concern. Result: blossoming bureaucracies full of prodnoses.
The excuse is burden/cost on healthcare services, protecting others (granny but never grandpa), saving others inconvenience. If you don’t wear a seat belt - it’s not fair on the emergency first responders and hospital staff who have to deal with trauma… because apparently that’s not their job.
Seems like a nice power outage would help, about a month of no juice, no tv....folks would snap out of it, the ones that live through the blackout.
To underscore what Mark is saying, about 70% of the drugs in the prescriptions that patients consume is rejected into the urine. This is because they are artificial chemicals (sometimes real poisons like chemotherapy!!) that the body is doing its best to purge you of. In the case of the highly artificial birth control "pill", the estrogen in the pill is a highly artificial form that is 100 TIMES more potent than the estrogen produced by our bodies (mostly by women's bodies). Therefore, the body rejects that chemical (ethinyl estradiol - EE2) at 90%!! That is correct, the overwhelming majority of the "estrogen" consumed by women to prevent pregnancy is rejected into the urine and enters the biosphere. Our sewerage treatment processes were originally designed in the 19th century and they haven't changed very much. If you are lucky and the sewerage that that urine enters is treated by a Sewerage treatment plant (some of it is just dumped in rivers), we are lucky if 50% of the EE2 is captured by the bacteria in those processes. That is, almost half of the EE2 from the Pill (and others sources such as the estrogen fed to dairy cows, in the US), enters the biosphere where it is concentrated up the food chain and WE consume it. Some of the "biosolids" (dead bacteria) from the sewerage treatment process capture some of the EE2 (and other human derived chemicals, many!!) and they are added to farmers fields as low cost fertilizer. So you are eating those pharmaceuticals through at least 2 pathways. Believe me when I tell you that the ~50% decline in male fertility over the last 60 years is in large part due to the avalanche of these "Endocrine disrupting chemicals" (EDCs).
Of course, this is not an accident. Nor is the slavery to the medial industrial complex. The only answer is to become aware of your food (more good fats!! such as avocado, wild fish, and nut oils like coconut, almond, etc.) and reduce carbs and especially sugar! Finally, we eat way too much protein!! IT may "lose us some weight" but good fats are the way to go with more water!
May God save us from our foolishness!
Ian in Vancouver
One hip replacement and two revisions later, I can say confidently that I should have left my congenital hip deformity alone. Maybe less pain but all the working out and training has not changed the weakness on my left side. I am done with conventional medicine. Thank you, Mark for reinforcing my decision to pursue alternative medicine.
The Medical/Industrial complex, like Eisenhower's Military/Industrial complex, might be said to be a subset of the Political/Financial complex, although you probably couldn't put the thickness of a sheet of paper between any of them. The search for the next dollar drives everything, the market must grow.
Excellent piece again, Mark, thank you!
I'm just gonna stop "liking" all these posts - they're all excellent, but at a certain point it's just redundant. So if you posted a response, here's your notice: I liked it - I liked it quite a bit. You people are truly excellent.
My profile pic is of my 7th great grandfather, Arthur Middleton, who was a Founding Father and signer to the Declaration. I've been thinking of him lately - what would he think of our current predicament, etc., etc.
He was taken captive when the British sacked his plantation, and he died very young from the hardship of imprisonment in Florida.
I've not a doubt that he would be disgusted at what I've allowed to happen.
"Second, the skeptics are physically fit and detractors of the medical industry"
boom
a lazy body and a lazy mind , does this sound like the average american sheeple ? naaaaahhhhh :-(
At this point I am welcoming hard economic times, as it might be the only way to get folks to focus on the con job that is our federal government in the US.
As for Canada - too far gone.
Spot on again, Mark. I haven't been to see a doctor in 9 years (they were not helpful at all, anyway) and aim for it to be many, many more. Not there is actually much availability for healthcare in Ontario now anyway. But let's face the real problem as I see it - our friends, our neighbours, our coworkers, who we have found out to our dismay are much weaker and thoughtless conformists than we ever imagined.
Great message. Remember the saying an ounce of prevention is better than a pound of cure? Our medical pharmaceutical interventions are the pound of cure, while the clean water, sanitation and single ingredient whole foods are the ounce of prevention.
Nowhere today do we have a standard of care in any discipline that promotes prevention. The ADA and AHA were both founded and funded by the Seventh Day Adventist Church and two of their most successful members, Post and Kellogg, as in C. W. Post and W. K. Kellogg of the well known cereal companies. By installing undisclosed agents with an activist bias against traditional human food sources in favor of powdered wheat, we were set up perfectly for Dr. Ancel Keyes, diet heart hypotheses which states cholesterol cause heart disease (not true). Replacing thousands of years of evolution and decades of medical experience with religious dogma and pseudo science has set us on the path that resulted in us being where we are today. Fascinating deep dive from Belinda Fetke, wife of Dr. Gary Fetke who is my source and has cited all of her sources for what I am repeating.