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Author Topic: Corporate Profits over Patient in the Health Care Field  (Read 17712 times)

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AGelbert

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Corporate Profits over Patient in the Health Care Field
« on: December 14, 2013, 12:29:41 am »

"Statins for Everyone, and Forget Supplements!”
 


December 10, 2013

Dangerous new heart health guidelines could put millions at risk. Action Alert!  :o


For years, the American Academy of Pediatrics has recommended statins for children as young as 8. Recently, the American Heart Association (AHA) and the American College of Cardiology (ACC) issued new cholesterol guidelines and an online risk calculator that may make 33 million healthy Americans dependent on statins.

That same day, the US Preventive Services Task Force (USPSTF) declared there is “insufficient” evidence that nutritional supplements can help prevent heart disease. Coincidence?

The message from powerful, monopolistic medical organizations is loud and clear: “preventive” heart health should come from an expensive prescription bottle. Unfortunately, the AHA and ACC’s new guidelines are based on a flawed understanding of the role of cholesterol in overall health. They champion the overuse of a damaging (but lucrative) class of drugs.


Even within the conventional medical community, the new guidelines are extremely controversial. Many doctors—including the ACC’s own past president—are calling for the delay of their implementation and the shutdown of AHA’s online risk calculator, which may overestimate a patient’s risk for heart attack or stroke by 75% to 150%! Top heart researchers warned AHA over a year ago that their calculator was fundamentally flawed, but the AHA claims they never received the researchers’ critiques.

As illustrated by the AHA’s risk calculator, the focal point of the new guidelines is to put millions more Americans on statins. Statins, the most widely prescribed class of drug in the world, are supposed to reduce LDL levels, which mainstream medicine has deemed “bad cholesterol” and the main cause of heart disease. However, as we detail below, there is an abundance of strong evidence to the contrary.

The guidelines recommend that those with a risk level of even 7.5% for either heart disease or stroke should take statins as a “precaution.” Translation: under the new guidelines, patients should be prescribed statins—drugs designed to reduce cholesterol—whether or not they actually have high cholesterol. This ignores evidence that statins not only fail to reduce the risk of death, but fail to reduce even some patients’ chance of getting heart disease.

Worse, statins are an incredibly dangerous class of drugs that should not be prescribed lightly: their side effects are well documented, to the extent that the FDA requires they be disclosed in labeling.

They can cause memory loss, significantly increase your risk of type 2 diabetes, block the health benefits of omega-3 fatty acids, and cause serious muscle aches and pains that can make it impossible to sleep. We don’t always realize how critical good sleep is to our health.

Additionally, statins should not be used as a “precaution” when non-drug interventions may be more effective in preventing heart disease. For example, the Lyon Diet Heart Study found that the Mediterranean diet was three times more effective than statin drugs in preventing recurrent heart disease. This is because a holistic approach, such as a change in diet, addresses heart disease and its contributing factors. (Please see our “Natural Ways to Support Heart Health” article for more information.)

The Lyon study also supports the idea that the very premise on which statins are based—“LDL bad, HDL good”—is a gross oversimplification. In fact, LDL has some crucial health benefits—it can even provide protection from cancer. In addition, studies show that lower levels of LDL don’t necessarily lessen your risk of heart disease, and high cholesterol may not cause it:

In 2008, a major study showed that lowering LDL levels doesn’t necessarily decrease the risk of having a heart attack. Another study, released in 2011, shows that raising HDL levels does not always translate into a healthier heart.

As noted in an article by Dr. Mark Hyman, as many as 75% of people who have heart attacks have normal cholesterol.

One rigorous study showed that patients treated with two drugs that successfully lowered cholesterol did not have a reduced risk of heart attack.

Cholesterol is found everywhere in the body. As medical chemist Shane Ellison explains, if high levels of cholesterol truly caused plaque (the fatty substance that causes heart attacks and strokes) rather than simply being a component of plaque, plaque blockages would be found not just in the heart and brain, but everywhere in the body, too. This could be why there are no studies proving that high cholesterol causes heart plaque. Meanwhile, low total cholesterol has its own documented health risks, including depression.

So if there’s significant evidence that statins are neither safe nor effective, what’s behind the AHA’s new guidelines? It seems simple to us: Big Pharma’s statin industry is valued at $29 billion—and the drug industry is a major funder of the AHA. That may not be the whole story, but it is enough to warn all of us.

A glance at AHA’s 2011-2012 fiscal year shows that 25% of the AHA’s budget came from corporations—with $15,369,726 coming from Big Pharma, medical device manufacturers, and health insurance providers. Additionally, of the fifteen panelists who authored the new guidelines, six reported ties to drug makers that sell or are developing cholesterol drugs.

With the recommendations of major medical associations—and, therefore, the decisions of physicians—being influenced if not dictated by the pharmaceutical industry, it is vitally important that natural health practitioners and organizations are standing up for patients. Mainstream medicine is awash in a sea of cash-fueled “guidelines” that fail to consider even the basic science behind heart health.

Action Alert! Ask the AHA and ACC to revise their guidelines!

http://www.anh-usa.org/statins-for-everyone-and-forget-supplements/
He that loveth father or mother more than me is not worthy of me: and he that loveth son or daughter more than me is not worthy of me. Matt 10:37

AGelbert

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DNA Testing: Do You Have a Right to Test Your Own DNA? FDA Says No!  :o  >:(

December 10, 2013

There’s a reason your government is whittling away at your healthcare options and driving costs out of control—and not a good one.

America spends over $2.6 trillion a year (18% of our GDP) on healthcare. At the same time, government is tightening the regulatory reins on nutritional and natural methods to support health—an approach that isn’t lowering healthcare spending, but raising it!

On November 22, the FDA sent a warning letter to 23andMe.com to stop its inexpensive ($99 per test) “do-it-yourself” genetic testing service for health screening and ancestry purposes, because consumers could be “misled” and harm themselves by “self-treating.” For example, the FDA posits that an individual who learns they have a predilection for cancer would, as a result, undergo unnecessary preventive surgery, chemotherapy, and other “morbidity-inducing actions.”


The FDA’s argument is, quite clearly, a straw man: of course patients have to obtain medical advice before making major health decisions—it’s not as if consumers can go under the knife without significant medical consultation! The FDA’s true message is clear: because individuals can’t be trusted to make sound health decisions, they don’t have a right to private information on their own DNA. 


It’s also worth noting that FDA action against 23andMe was sparked, in part, by a complaint by UnitedHealth Group, the largest publicly traded health insurer. UnitedHealth isn’t exactly an unbiased observer—they want access to information about your DNA. After all, if individuals were allowed to keep their DNA test data private, they wouldn’t have to share their results with insurers who, for example, could use an inherited health risk to deny insurance or charge exorbitant rates.

The FDA’s stance on DIY genetic testing could very well drive up healthcare costs. Besides premiums being raised on those forced to report DNA results to insurance companies, in-office testing is far more expensive. As tests are priced anywhere from $300 to $3,500, this could significantly add to the overall cost of healthcare.



http://www.anh-usa.org/do-you-have-a-right-to-test-your-own-dna/
He that loveth father or mother more than me is not worthy of me: and he that loveth son or daughter more than me is not worthy of me. Matt 10:37

AGelbert

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Doctored: The Disillusionment of an American Physician

Sandeep Jauhar

Farrar, Straus and Giroux

EXCERPT

ONE

Awakening



A young doctor means a new graveyard.


—German proverb


Snippet:

It was a few minutes past seven-thirty when I arrived at the hospital, and I was late for morning report. I pulled into the attending physicians’ lot and parked between two cars whose license plates read “BEAN DOC” and “GAS MD.” At the sliding glass doors leading into the lobby, two patients in teal hospital gowns were leaning on their IV poles, sucking hungrily on cigarettes. I skipped down a concrete stairwell to the basement. The corridors were deserted, save for a tardy first-year fellow racing ahead of me.

When I walked into the conference room, a fellow was presenting a case from overnight. About a dozen fellows and a half-dozen faculty members were there. The fellows rotated each month through the various cardiac subspecialties: electrophysiology (which focuses on arrhythmias, or heart rhythm disturbances), echocardiography (cardiac ultrasound), nuclear stress testing (which uses radioactive tracers to noninvasively detect coronary disease in hearts under stress from exercise or certain drugs), cardiac catheterization (Rajiv’s specialty), heart failure, the general consultative service, and the cardiac care unit (where the most critically ill patients of any subspecialty usually ended up). As faculty members we were responsible for teaching the fellows: scrubbing in with them on procedures, going on rounds with them, and instructing them over discussions at morning report or noon seminar. In the conference room, Rajiv and two of his interventional colleagues were sitting together, arms folded, legs crossed, in purple scrubs, like some sort of academic tribunal. My brother looked at me sharply, glanced at a phantom wristwatch, and winked. I quietly took a seat in the back.

The fellow was trying to explain his management of a critically ill patient the previous night. “The patient’s pulmonary artery saturation was in the mid-forties, so I ended up putting him on some dobutamine and gave him a little fluid back,” the fellow said. “He started putting out some urine, and his blood pressure went up. Over the next twelve hours, his oxygenation improved dramatically.”

Dr. Morrison, one of the interventional cardiologists, demanded to know why the fellow had given the patient intravenous fluid.

“At that point his central venous pressure was two,” the fellow said defensively, describing a state of dehydration. “His pulmonary artery diastolic pressure was six, and his wedge pressure was like eight.”

“And you’re sure the transducer was zeroed and level?” Morrison pressed him. “We see this a lot with the residents. They look up at the monitor and quote a pressure, but it’s just garbage.”

The fellow hesitated. “When we first put in the catheter, the wedge pressure was in the thirties—”

“Well, see, that’s what I’m saying,” Morrison interjected, as if the fellow had just made his point. “This guy wasn’t dehydrated! He was in florid heart failure. This is a textbook case of acute heart failure, from the frothy sputum to the missed myocardial infarction.”

“Anyway, good case,” the chief fellow said, trying to move things along.

“What this patient really needs is a doctor,” Dr. Morrison added caustically.

“As opposed to a plumber like us?” Rajiv shot back, coming to the fellow’s defense.

“Exactly,” Morrison replied, laughing. (Interventional cardiologists who relieve coronary obstructions with stents are often disparagingly referred to as plumbers.)
Full Excerpt

Review

In his acclaimed memoir Intern,

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=lcdDLRUJ5k8&feature=player_embedded
http://www.sandeepjauhar.com/
Sandeep Jauhar chronicled the formative years of his residency at a prestigious New York City hospital. Doctored, his harrowing follow-up, observes the crisis of American medicine through the eyes of an attending cardiologist.


Hoping for the stability he needs to start a family, Jauhar accepts a position at a massive teaching hospital on the outskirts of Queens. With a decade’s worth of elite medical training behind him, he is eager to settle down and reap the rewards of countless sleepless nights. Instead, he is confronted with sobering truths. Doctors’ morale is low and getting lower, and when doctors are unhappy, their patients are apt to be unhappy as well. Blatant cronyism determines patient referrals, corporate ties distort medical decisions, and unnecessary tests are routinely performed in order to generate income. Meanwhile, a single patient in Jauhar’s hospital might see fifteen specialists in one stay and still fail to receive a full picture of his actual condition.


Unwilling to accept the prevailing norms, Jauhar fights to keep his ideals intact. But he, too, finds himself ensnared in the system. Struggling to pay back student loans and support a wife and son on his hospital salary, he resorts to moonlighting for a profit-driven private practice that orders batteries of tests just to drum up fees and ward off malpractice lawsuits.


Provoked by his unsettling experiences, Jauhar has written an introspective memoir that is also an impassioned plea for reform. With American medicine at a crossroads, Doctored is the important work of a writer unafraid to challenge the establishment and incite controversy.

http://us.macmillan.com/books/9780374141394

« Last Edit: August 16, 2014, 10:38:22 pm by AGelbert »
He that loveth father or mother more than me is not worthy of me: and he that loveth son or daughter more than me is not worthy of me. Matt 10:37

AGelbert

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He that loveth father or mother more than me is not worthy of me: and he that loveth son or daughter more than me is not worthy of me. Matt 10:37

AGelbert

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MORE PROOF that CNN is a FASCIST CORPORATE PROPAGANDA OUTLET: 
 


https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=WsLuR3X6cpg&feature=player_embedded

Multiple SHORT AUTISM from vaccine U-tube videos at link below

https://www.youtube.com/watch?feature=player_embedded&v=WsLuR3X6cpg&list=PLJpPObXpZncOfT0bG2ghgkVb2Nxjd_bNe

Next World Health TV

How CNN Caused A Vaccine Story It Tried To Crush To Instead Go Viral   ;D
 
"Hear This Well" Project

One After Another After Another After Another   


 In August of 2014, Autism Media Channel published bombshell recordings of a CDC autism researcher who blew the whistle on systemic fraud and data-tampering inside the CDC. The main stream media, months later, kept a near total silence on the explosive story.

 But when CNN's health reporter condescended to parents of autistic children by insisting "vaccines do not cause autism" and adding, "some people don't hear this well," she accidentally triggered a social media video revolution. Parents began recording one minute videos documenting that their children were developmentally normal until they got a certain round of vaccinations.

 This is the channel where all the "Hear This Well" videos are gathered, now numbering in the hundreds. They tell the true story  of vaccines and autism the mainstream media refuses to tell.  >:(
I wrote about this when it first happened:

 http://www.theepochtimes.com/n3/933954-autism-parents-reply-to-cnn-hear-this-well/


--Celia Farber


 Celia Farber is an investigative science reporter and cultural journalist who has written for several magazines including Harper’s, Esquire, Rolling Stone, SPIN and more. She is the author of “Serious Adverse Events: An Uncensored History of AIDS” (Melville House Press/ Random House). Known for bold exposes of the pharmaceutical industry and related media cover ups, Celia Farber shines a spotlight on the very subjects that have been taboo for too long: What is Cancer? Does HIV cause AIDS? Do Vaccinations Cause Brain Damage? And many more...


 Visit her website at www.truthbarrier.com
- See more at: http://www.nextworldhealthtv.com/videos/vaccination/how-cnn-caused-a-vaccine-story-it-tried-to-crush-to-instead-go-viral-.html#sthash.Es6WVADj.dpuf
He that loveth father or mother more than me is not worthy of me: and he that loveth son or daughter more than me is not worthy of me. Matt 10:37

AGelbert

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Please Allow 88 Year-Old, Dr. Carrol Frazier Landrum, to keep his Mississippi medical license 

author: Jennifer "Jenny" Speir Wilson, Kathy Speir Martin
target: Mississippi State Board of Medical Licensure


Quote
A. G.,

The state of Mississippi wants to stop one of the few doctors in a poor, rural town from providing care to his patients, simply because he uses his car for an office! Sign my petition to make sure Dr. Landrum can keep caring for the health of his poor patients.

Growing up, my family was always proud of my second cousin, Dr. Carroll Frazier Landrum. As a child, I spent many summers with his family. I vividly recall what a genuinely caring soul he had, and those summers spent with his family are my most fond and cherished memories from my childhood. In the evenings I would see him drive up, go into his house with his briefcase in tow; then further dedicating his life to the care of his elderly mother and family.

One of the only doctors in the rural, poor town of Edwards, MS, Cousin Frazier was doing important work for folks with few healthcare options. When gun violence outside his clinic's front door forced him to lock up for good, his patients had nowhere else to go, and pleaded with him to continue caring for them. So, he started working from his car in order to continue in his dedication of providing health care to his needy patients.

But now the Mississippi State Board of Medical Licensure is trying to stop him! No one has complained about the care they have received, but because of his unconventional practice, the board has requested he surrender his medical license. This World War II veteran who has always sought to serve his country and his fellow man is now being forced to defend his most modest and humble work.

Dr. Landrum will have to appear before a hearing of the Mississippi State Board soon, so I started this petition to show the state what Dr. Landrum means to the community, and how important it is that he be allowed to continue to care for his patients.

Sign my petition and tell Mississippi: Let Dr. Landrum keep providing care for the rural poor in Edwards.
 

http://www.thepetitionsite.com/113/603/550/please-petition-88-year-old-dr-carrol-frazier-landrum-to-keep-his-mississippi-medical-license/

Thank you,

Jennifer "Jenny" Speir Wilson
 Florence, MS
 Care2 member


Agelbert NOTE: I signed with this comment: Dr. Carrol Frazier Landrum understands that health care is a VOCATION, not a business! It's time our greed poisoned country (AND BIOSPHERE POISONED TOO!) realized it as well.

http://www.thepetitionsite.com/420/529/456/demand-liberty-from-fossil-fuels-through-100-renewable-energy-wwii-style-effort/

He that loveth father or mother more than me is not worthy of me: and he that loveth son or daughter more than me is not worthy of me. Matt 10:37

AGelbert

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https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=4QZHHBGFwcs&feature=player_embedded

Documentary Reveals Shocking Extent of Government-Big Business Collusion to Eradicate Freedom of Choice


http://articles.mercola.com/sites/articles/archive/2015/02/21/freedom-from-choice-documentary.aspx


Monsanto Government Revolving Door Corruption
« Last Edit: May 17, 2015, 05:16:47 pm by AGelbert »
He that loveth father or mother more than me is not worthy of me: and he that loveth son or daughter more than me is not worthy of me. Matt 10:37

AGelbert

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Is Scurvy the New Diabetes?



It’s horrible, deadly — and insanely easy to fix. But America’s troubles with food insecurity means millions are closer to the scurvy zone than we admit.[/b]

By Leigh Cowart

Right now, there’s about a cup of orange juice in my gut, sloshing around and mingling with my stomach acid as it delivers all the vitamin C that I require for the day. I’ve got some major bruises on my knees, and so once the essential nutrient hits my body’s internal transport system, the orange juice that I just drank will play an important role in wound healing, preventing future capillaries from bleeding too easily, and with any luck helping me perform enough sweet, sweet collagen synthesis to make it look like I sleep regularly. Vitamin C may be the most important water-soluble antioxidant in human plasma, and is required for all plants and animals. But while most other animals can synthesize their own supply, humans — along with other primates, guinea pigs, capybaras, some fish, and some bats — have to get theirs elsewhere. Hence the orange juice.

The problem is that not everyone gets enough. And when vitamin C goes missing from a diet for long enough, the results can be explicitly unpleasant: scurvy.

We act like scurvy is long left behind, a throwback disease, forgotten and dust-covered and banished to antiquity. But this scourge of sailors is, in fact, not something that humanity has outgrown. It still happens, and probably more than you realize.

Scurvy, the most extreme result of prolonged lack of vitamin C, is, in a word, unpleasant. In three, it’s “fatal if untreated.” The disease kicks off with the universal symptoms of “ugh”: low-grade inflammation, fatigue, bleeding gums, and swollen joints. Vitamin C is absolutely necessary for healthy collagen, which matters greatly because it makes up one fourth to one third of all of the protein that makes up you. It’s in your skin, your tendons, your bones, your gut, and your blood vessels, just to name a few. Your body is forever making more of it, knitting yourself together with a kind of sticky meat yarn. Without enough vitamin C, the collagen is made poorly and is therefore unstable: capillaries burst, wounds remain open, and, since your body is constantly replacing the collagen in scar tissue, old scars can reopen. As the owner of a C-section scar, I find this possibility very distressing.

If you think of your body like a car or a building, collagen is doing a hell of a lot of the upkeep. But no vitamin C means no collagen, means no upkeep, means open, suppurating sores that will never heal, means the kind of sores that do not smell okay. Scurvy can also loosen the teeth, which is a literal nightmare I have at least twice a year.

A diet devoid of vitamin C is always fatal, if left untreated; without it, you basically just fall apart because your body can’t make the collagen that keeps you glued together.

The exact details of scurvy eluded explorers for centuries. It was hard to keep a boat full of sailors alive at sea by feeding them stale carbs, salted meat, and booze, but then again, it was pretty hard to keep a boat full of sailors alive in general. Of course, just because humans didn’t always fully understand the disease doesn’t mean they weren’t on the case. People had their suspicions regarding the correlation between the lack of fresh foods and withering sailors for centuries. By the late 1400s, the healing powers of citrus were known, but it wouldn’t be until the mid-18th century that medicine gave us definitive answers. In what is famously known as the first clinical trial ever (owing to his use of control groups), ship surgeon James Lind formally concluded that scurvy could be cured by citrus fruits, debunking the popular theory that it was caused by a lack of acids. Lind, however, waited to inform the British Navy about his findings because of citrus’s high price; it would be nearly 50 years before lemon juice would become a required ration in the Navy.

Yes, yes, but what does this have to do with me?

It’s true: Scurvy is not something that you will readily encounter in mainstream American life, since death from lack of vitamin C requires poor medical care and consistent and prolonged lack of access to fresh or fortified foods. It also often involves a cofactor such as alcoholism, being an elderly shut-in, or inadequate infant nutrition. But that doesn’t mean you’re off the hook: Like so many diseases with social roots, scurvy doesn’t come on like flipping a switch; it’s not as if one day you’re fine, and the next all your old scars are opening up and your tongue is covered in sores. This kind of malnutritive illness exists on a sliding scale of grays. Vitamin C deficiency is no joke, and acting like we don’t have to worry about historical diseases is arrogant and stupid. Here’s why.




Source: State Indicator Report on Fruits and Vegetables, CDC, 2013


There’s a trap that we fall into in our ostensibly affluent country, a mirage flanked by skyrocketing obesity trends on one hand, and our obsession with image on the other. It tells us that in the land of plenty — one of the wealthiest and fattest countries on this blue, agrarian marble — there is no hunger, no malnutrition. How could anyone see our supermarkets and think that children go hungry on the weekends without school lunch? How could they understand bones softened by rickets, or that scurvy is still making gums bleed? Like keeping a lucky rabbit’s foot with your keys, we delude ourselves into thinking that proximity to medical care and healthy food is enough to keep us all well.


*Percent Daily Values are based on a 2,000-calorie diet.

But hunger and poverty are quiet monsters, the ones content to burden its victims with the job of concealment. As far as society is concerned, it’s easy to miss what you didn’t want to see in the first place. But in 2013, 49.1 million Americans were food insecure — a status defined by the USDA as “a household-level economic and social condition of limited or uncertain access to adequate food” — and homes with children were more likely to struggle. That year, almost one in five homes with children were food insecure; for households run by a single mother, the rate jumped to over 1 in 3.


The last time CDC researchers looked at vitamin C deficiency among the American public, they found that an estimated 8.4 percent of adults aged 20 and older were at risk of developing scurvy. Like scurvy-scurvy, with wound-healing problems and weird rashes and bleeding gums, the whole sick-pirate bit. Prolonged vitamin C levels this low are incredibly dangerous.


But it’s not just scurvy-scurvy, either. There’s also latent scurvy, which happens when vitamin C concentrations are low but not super low. Research suggests it’s associated with fatigue and irritability, as well as vague, dull, aching pains; one study showed 15.7 percent of adults had vitamin C levels in this low range.


There is good news, however. Vitamin C levels are actually going up. In the late 1980s and early ’90s, the overall prevalence of deficiency was much higher — it had halved a decade later, and continued to fall. But the dramatic decrease is not for the reasons you may think. There was, in fact, no uptick in fruit and vegetable intake over that time: Consumption held steady for fruit at 1.6 servings a day on average, while for vegetables it dropped slightly, from 3.4 to 3.2. We’re actually eating just a little bit worse than we used to. But at the same time there was a decrease in smoking, and smoking makes it harder to properly absorb vitamin C.

The rest of the news is, unfortunately, bad.

Perhaps most distressing is the clear influence of socioeconomic status. The study found that the average vitamin C concentrations increase, and prevalence of vitamin C deficiency decrease, with improving socioeconomic circumstances. Of the men in the lowest bracket, 17.4 percent were deficient and in the range for developing scurvy, but on the other end of the spectrum, males with high socioeconomic status clocked in at a mere 7.9 percent. The same trend is apparent in women, whose rate of vitamin C deficiency drops from one in 10 in the lower income bracket to one in 20 in the high.



The way we eat now versus the way we ate then has long inspired dieting fads — just think paleo — but you cannot pin scurvy on the advent of processed food. It’s true that cooking, canning, and other forms of preservation can and do degrade the amount of vitamin C present, but many food manufacturers add it (under the name ascorbic acid) as a preservative. And with the ubiquity of enriched beverages and “immune-boosting supplements,” it’s not as if the nutrient is hard to find.

Even so, with one in three single-mother households dealing with food insecurity, and one in 10 women with diminished socioeconomic status verifiably in the scurvy zone when it comes to vitamin C levels, it’s clear that there is a failure of the system.

Like Type 2 diabetes, scurvy is well-known, diet-related and just as avoidable — even if it may never be as widespread or as omnipresent.



As hard as it may be to believe, a significant proportion of the U.S. population is at risk. Huge swaths of the populace are unknowingly flirting with scurvy — and yet the treatment is incredibly simple: Consuming vitamin C–rich foods like brightly colored fresh fruits and vegetables, oysters, or even (as soldiers in Napoleon’s army discovered) fresh horse meat is enough to treat the disease. But treatment is easy; the solution is hard.

Scurvy isn’t malevolent; it is merely the poster child for a broken social contract.  
   The kind where the wealth gap widens and people are slipping deeper into poverty as the federal government cuts $93 million in spending to Women, Infants and Children — a program offering nutritional support to low-income women and their kids. Combine that with the fact that processed foods are cheap and filling, and suddenly vitamin C levels in the scurvy zone start to make more sense.

We worry so much about the illnesses we pass on to each other: Measles, ebola, all the rest. But what do we do when sickness isn’t spread by germy fingers, but by apathy?

Agebert NOTE: There is a bit more than APATHY at work here (see MENS REA).


Surly,
Great article on scurvy! Captain Cook would force his crew to eat raw seal and tried to get fresh plants whenever he could. As your article points out about those days, it was a struggle.

I believe the main problem is processed foods ADDICTION caused by flavonoids in the crap that passes for foods. The normal biochemistry that unconsciously tells us to eat this or that has been blunted, shunted and fooled by said flavonoids to make the person think everything is hunky dory.

The fist step requires a detox from processed foods. I went an internet tirade a month ago against some vegetarians carrying on about how "meat eaters" are hurting the environment. The Paul McCartney article recommended "meatless mondays". Here's my comment thread. It is the solution to Vitamin C deficiency and many other daily nutritional vitamin and mineral deficiencies. Our Corporate overlords just do not want to hear it because they MADE MONEY CREATING these non-food foods that are addictive CRAP. They don't want their profit over people parade interrupted by CFS.

a month ago  

Quote
When you are poor, "meatless" happens a LOT MORE OFTEN that just on Mondays!

I think it is great if you can go Vegan. But for all you Vegans with lots of money and STOCK in fruit and vegetable corporations, I SUGGEST you lower the price of nutritious fruit and vegetables.

The price of fruit is TOO HIGH and the wages paid to those who pick them are TOO LOW. How about walkin' the Vegan Talk for all of us!!? Give us affordable fruit! You can pay your executives a lot less and your pickers a lot more and still reduce fruit and vegetable prices. Don't tell us you can't!

And while you are at it, why don't you GET RID OF THE FOOD DESERTS in poor neighborhoods by putting premium quality fruit and vegetable (discounted for the poor) grocery stores there?
 
Oh, there isn't enough profit in that?

Well then, spare us the Vegan tears about how much meat eating is destroying the planet. YOU are helping by not EATING a LARGE PART of the fruit price profits on behalf of the overwhelming mass of humans that are poor and middle class.

Have a nice day.


Quote
empirical evidence guy > agelbert  • a month ago   

The US govt subsidizes meat, but not fruits and veggies. Probably should be the inverse. But then again, someone that eats too much meat and other processed foods {along with couch potato lifestyle} is more unhealthy and visits a doctor more often. Medical costs + potentially unnecessary drug costs ($$ & side effects, etc.) make citizens more likely to refrain from active participation in our democracy.

Conspiracy? perhaps

Quote

agelbert > empirical evidence guy  • 24 days ago   


Conspiracy? Of course! The collusion of business interests in the USA to keep average IQ down among the middle and lower class is well documented. Besides being a dumping ground for processed food, every sort of air, soil and liquid pollution from industrialization and automobiles is far more prevalent in poor and middle class communities. Just research where coal, fossil fuel and nuclear power plants have been sited since electrification began in this country in the 1930's.

It was PLANNED that way. But the planetary sewers are backing up now so the "elite" are scrambling to keep their environment and food "safe". They think they KNOW where to run to and hide.

The biosphere has a message for them:




Quote
Don-Flyboy  • a month ago 

I agree with agelbert....alternative eating habits are expensive to design to eliminate meat from the diet, and get the required nutrition elsewhere. Now, I agree with a couple days a week without meat. I love salad, but a really good salad with Romain lettuce and several vegetables is expensive and short lived in the refrigerator. But I am "wealthy" enough (moderately poor) to be able to afford to eat well. Many people are not so fortunate (not as strongly motivated for education, to become a professional and have the benefit of a good paying job). Now I also eat fish...and I know some vegans who eat "sea food" why is that different than eating animals? Air breathing sea creatures such a dolphins (Mahi-Mahi) are "animals" by definition. But shrimp, fish, crab and even shell creatures are "alive" & so are plants!!

So....
I believe in moderation....So I eat meat....mankind really is a omnivore....but not every day....some days I have mixed fruit salad for breakfast, some days cereal or oatmeal with fruit, or turkey bacon & eggs, or pancakes or Belgian waffles (a personal favorite)...but for lunch I usually have soup & sandwiches... tuna or turkey...never beef.... if I have lunch....and for dinner I vary my diet a lot. Very rarely eat large meat portions....usually my plate has very large vegetable portions, when I eat potatoes its almost always sweet potatoes or yams...they have more flavor and a wider range of nutrients....and I frequently include things like applesauce or other fruit....like raspberries & raisin cranberries in a dinner salad. And I eat really good substitutes like eggplant & portobello mushrooms. So I follow a frequent meatless meal philosophy. But my vegan friends disapprove. Oh well. As I wrote above...I believe humans are omnivores by nature. Do we disrespect the dog, cat, wolf or lion because they are carnivores? I do not. And I openly confront animal cruelty and "Factory Farms" mentality and practice. We need MORE organized resistance and grass roots initiated legislation to give animals a decent life and humane death for consumption. That part of the vegan philosophy I agree with totally. I often buy uncaged eggs from free range chickens.
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AGelbert

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Altered Genes, Twisted TruthHow GMOs Took Over the Food Supply, Part 2 Druker


March 15, 2015 | 239,764 views

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=LqfAXOcmezY&feature=player_embedded

SNIPPET from the article following the video:

Quote
Misrepresentations by Molecular Biologists Led to the Creation of One of the Biggest Frauds in History

Ultimately, the blame for this fraud has to be put at the feet of the molecular biology establishment—the main scientific establishment in the life sciences—which Steven discussed in Part 1 of this interview. His book goes into this part of history in great detail, demonstrating how the aggregate misleading statements about the science behind GMOs and their purported safety were born back in the early 1970s when genetic engineering was first established. Within the context of the history of science, the fraud related to GE foods is one of the biggest and most pernicious ever committed by scientists, and it began with molecular biologists who wanted to protect the budding science of genetic engineering by whitewashing potential concerns.

In the 12th chapter of Steven’s book, “Unfounded Foundational Presumptions,” he shows that even when the evidence goes against the genetic engineers of today, they always fall back on some of those initial presumptions made by the molecular biology establishment—presumptions that support the notion genetic engineering is a safe enterprise—and they never really acknowledge that those presumptions have been solidly refuted.


"One of the key ones of those, which I think is important to bring out, is that somehow, no matter how unruly and unpredictable somebody can demonstrate genetic engineering to be, they will always say, 'Well, conventional breeding is worse. Nature is far more random, unruly, and risky.' That is a very important point to bring out, because there are so many Americans who probably, just as a matter of course, believe what they're being told about this.

They don't understand that that is actually a foundational assumption—that you can't actually trust food that's been here for a long, long time; that nature is somehow being slandered and disparaged as being far more unruly, unpredictable, and dangerous. Every act of pollination is somehow supposed to be at least as risky, if not riskier, and more unpredictable than these radical insertions of foreign genetic material into soybeans, corn, and zucchinis. That I found to be gross slander against nature. I think more and more people need to understand that." 

http://articles.mercola.com/sites/articles/archive/2015/03/15/altered-genes-twisted-truth-gmo-part-2.aspx



 
He that loveth father or mother more than me is not worthy of me: and he that loveth son or daughter more than me is not worthy of me. Matt 10:37

AGelbert

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Agelbert NOTE: The following comment on a story about a scientist chasing funding is better than the story  ;D.

The (scientifically well referenced ) comment sheds much needed light on how  scientists have become corrupt, money chasing and mendacious, thanks to the corporate destruction of good science in the service of profit over patient (AND PLANET TOO!).


Quote
This story leaves out some important context about its protagonist, David Sinclair.

Sinclair was the chief person behind the series of high-profile papers in the 2000s linking red wine, resveratrol, sirtuins and aging. During this period, Sinclair's work was repeatedly featured in the New York Times and he became a minor scientific celebrity. He founded a company, Sirtris, with the goal of making sirtuin activators to treat aging related diseases, and Sirtris was purchased by GSK in 2007 for the staggering sum of $720 million. This was despite the fact that the company had never shown that any of its compounds had activity in humans.

Shortly after the Sirtris sale, it began to emerge that the whole red wine/resveratrol/aging story was not true.

It turned out that resveratrol and the compounds discovered by Sirtris were not sirtuin activators, as claimed by Sinclair in a series of Nature papers. Rather, the activity of the compounds was an artifact resulting from a poorly controlled biochemical essay. 

Likewise, evidence emerged that sirtuins were not nearly as important for aging as Sinclair and others had claimed, and that several of the key biological results making this link, published by Sinclair and others in Science and Nature, were again not reproducible due to sloppy experimental design.

Recently, Sirtris was shut down by GSK, and the consensus in the pharmaceutical industry is that their $720M Sirtris investment led to nothing of value. I have copied below a series of papers and other links that go into greater detail regarding this story.

This information provides a different context for the funding saga of David Sinclair recounted above. It is possible that Sinclair found it difficult to obtain NIH funding because his much-hyped work had been thoroughly discredited, such that NIH study sections decided (rightly) that it would be a mistake to give him any more money.

In this context, the fact that Sinclair has nonetheless been able to find private backers so that he can again maintain a 22 person lab is remarkable.

It suggests that there is a profound failure in the mechanisms by which we ensure accountability in academic science.
By writing a story that fails to mention any of this, and in fact portrays Sinclair as the hero, the author Bob Grant is contributing to the problem.

http://www.nature.com/nature/journal/v477/n7365/full/nature10296.html

http://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pubmed/19843076

http://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pubmed/20061378

http://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pubmed/21428798

http://pipeline.corante.com/archives/2013/03/12/sirtis_gets_shut_down_in_cambridge.php

http://pipeline.corante.com/archives/2010/01/12/the_sirtris_compounds_worthless_really.php

http://pipeline.corante.com/archives/2009/11/05/what_exactly_does_resveratrol_do.php



http://www.the-scientist.com//?articles.view/articleNo/42799/title/Follow-the-Funding/

As you can see, GREED is destroying the scientific method along with the environment.

Quote

"The core responsibility assigned to governments in democracies is the public welfare, protecting the human birthright to basic needs: clean air, water, land, and a place to live, under equitable rules of access to all common property resources.

It is astonishing to discover that major political efforts in democracies can be turned to undermining the core purpose of government, destroying the factual basis for fair and effective protection of essential common property resources of all to feed the financial interests of a few. These efforts, limiting scientific research on environment, denying the validity of settled facts and natural laws, are a shameful dance, far below acceptable or reputable political behavior.

It can be treated not as a reasoned alternative, but scorned for what it is – simple thievery." —George M. Woodwell, Woods Hole Research Center founder
He that loveth father or mother more than me is not worthy of me: and he that loveth son or daughter more than me is not worthy of me. Matt 10:37

AGelbert

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https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=s9-33PrPdoQ&feature=player_embedded
MEDICAL FRAUD for CORPORATE PROFIT 

SNIPPET:
Quote
Many Times They Just Make Stuff Up  :o

While it’s hard to comprehend, some health recommendations are completely fabricated and are not based in any science. Dr. Kendrick wrote about this in a recent article for The Independent:1

“If you are a man, it has virtually become gospel that drinking more than 21 units of alcohol a week is damaging to your health. But where did the evidence to support this well-known ‘fact’ come from?

The answer may surprise you. According to Richard Smith, a former editor of the British Medical Journal, the level for safe drinking was ‘plucked out of the air.’

He was on a Royal College of Physicians team that helped produce the guidelines in 1987. He told The Times newspaper that the committee's epidemiologist had conceded that there was no data about safe limits available and that ‘it's impossible to say what's safe and what isn't.’

Smith said the drinking limits were ‘not based on any firm evidence at all,’ but were an ‘intelligent guess.’ In time, the intelligent guess becomes an undisputed fact.”

According to Dr. Kendrick, the linear model for blood pressure—which states the higher your blood pressure is, in a linear fashion, the greater your risk of dying—was also made up.

Ditto for recommended cholesterol levels, and healthy versus unhealthy obesity levels. Believe it or not, none of these are based on real data. The recommendation to eat five portions of fruit and vegetables is equally made up, yet recommendations such as these become set in stone.


People believe it must be based on solid evidence and therefore true. One of the most impressive comments he made in the interview is: “Don’t believe it. They just made it up.”

http://articles.mercola.com/sites/articles/archive/2015/05/24/medical-fraud-doctoring-data.aspx
He that loveth father or mother more than me is not worthy of me: and he that loveth son or daughter more than me is not worthy of me. Matt 10:37

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Shocking Report from Medical Insiders  :o  :o  >:(

Posted by talesfromtheconspiratum on June 20, 2015

Posted in: Big Pharma, Corruption, Medicine, Science, Scientism. Tagged: Medical journals, pharmaceutical companies, The Lancet.

F. William Engdahl

June 18, 2015

A shocking admission by the editor of the world’s most respected medical journal, The Lancet, has been virtually ignored by the mainstream media.  >:(. Dr. Richard Horton, Editor-in-chief of the Lancet recently published a statement declaring that a shocking amount of published research is unreliable at best, if not completely false, as in, fraudulent.



Horton declared,
Quote
“Much of the scientific literature, perhaps half, may simply be untrue. Afflicted by studies with small sample sizes, tiny effects, invalid exploratory analyses, and flagrant conflicts of interest, together with an obsession for pursuing fashionable trends of dubious importance, science has taken a turn towards darkness.”

To state the point in other words, Horton states bluntly that major pharmaceutical companies falsify or manipulate tests on the health, safety and effectiveness of their various drugs by taking samples too small to be statistically meaningful or hiring test labs or scientists where the lab or scientist has blatant conflicts of interest such as pleasing the drug company to get further grants. At least half of all such tests are worthless or worse he claims. As the drugs have a major effect on the health of millions of consumers, the manipulation amounts to criminal dereliction and malfeasance.

The drug industry-sponsored studies Horton refers to develop commercial drugs or vaccines to supposedly help people, used to train medical staff, to educate medical students and more.

Horton wrote his shocking comments after attending a symposium on the reproducibility and reliability of biomedical research at the Wellcome Trust in London. He noted the confidentiality or “Chatham House” rules where attendees are forbidden to name names: “’A lot of what is published is incorrect.’ I’m not allowed to say who made this remark because we were asked to observe Chatham House rules. We were also asked not to take photographs of slides.”

Other voices

Dr. Marcia Angell is a physician and was longtime Editor-in-Chief of the New England Medical Journal (NEMJ), considered to be another one of the most prestigious peer-reviewed medical journals in the world. Angell stated,

Quote
“It is simply no longer possible to believe much of the clinical research that is published, or to rely on the judgment of trusted physicians or authoritative medical guidelines. I take no pleasure in this conclusion, which I reached slowly and reluctantly over my two decades as an editor of the New England Journal of Medicine.”

Harvey Marcovitch, who has studied and written about the corruption of medical tests and publication in medical journals, writes, “studies showing positive outcomes for a drug or device under consideration are more likely to be published than ‘negative’ studies; editors are partly to blame for this but so are commercial sponsors, whose methodologically well-conducted studies with unfavorable results tended not to see the light of day…”

At the University of British Columbia’s Neural Dynamics Research Group in the Department of Ophthalmology and Visual Sciences, Dr Lucija Tomljenovic obtained documents that showed that, “vaccine manufacturers, pharmaceutical companies, and health authorities have known about multiple dangers associated with vaccines but chose to withhold them from the public. This is scientific fraud, and their complicity suggests that this practice continues to this day.”

Lancet’s Dr. Horton concludes, “Those who have the power to act seem to think somebody else should act first. And every positive action (eg, funding well-powered replications) has a counter-argument (science will become less creative). The good news is that science is beginning to take some of its worst failings very seriously. The bad news is that nobody is ready to take the first step to clean up the system.

Corruption of the medical industry worldwide is a huge issue, perhaps more dangerous than the threat of all wars combined. Do we have such hypnosis and blind faith in our doctors simply because of their white coats that we believe they are infallible? And, in turn, do they have such blind faith in the medical journals recommending a given new wonder medicine or vaccine that they rush to give the drugs or vaccines without considering these deeper issues?

F. William Engdahl is strategic risk consultant and lecturer, he holds a degree in politics from Princeton University and is a best-selling author on oil and geopolitics, exclusively for the online magazine “New Eastern Outlook”.

https://talesfromthelou.wordpress.com/2015/06/20/shocking-report-from-medical-insiders/
He that loveth father or mother more than me is not worthy of me: and he that loveth son or daughter more than me is not worthy of me. Matt 10:37

AGelbert

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A shocking admission by the editor of the world’s most respected medical journal, The Lancet, has been virtually ignored by the mainstream media >:(. Dr. Richard Horton, Editor-in-chief of the Lancet recently published a statement declaring that a shocking amount of published research is unreliable at best, if not completely false, as in, fraudulent.

This is one deeply sobering article, that brings into focus and confirms what many have feared.

Yep. It scared me. It reinforces the requirement for all of us who, like me, must deal regularly with the medical establishment, to research every drug or vaccine a doctor tries to push on to us six ways from Sunday. Due diligence is definitely not optional when dealing with doctors.
He that loveth father or mother more than me is not worthy of me: and he that loveth son or daughter more than me is not worthy of me. Matt 10:37

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Cancer Doctors Offer Way to Compare Medicines, Including by Cost


By ANDREW POLLACK JUNE 22, 2015
 
Alarmed by the rapid escalation in the price of cancer drugs, the nation’s leading oncology society unveiled on Monday a new way for doctors and patients to evaluate different treatments — one that pointedly includes a medicine’s cost as well as its effectiveness and side effects.

The release by the American Society of Clinical Oncology of what it calls its “value framework,” is part of a change in thinking among doctors, who once largely chose drugs based on their medical attributes alone. The major cardiology societies, for instance, are also now starting to factor cost into their evaluation of drugs.

“The reality is that many patients don’t get this information from their doctors and many doctors don’t have the information they need to talk with their patients about costs,” Dr. Richard Schilsky, chief medical officer of the oncology society, said in a news conference on Monday.

He said the price of new cancer drugs now averaged about $10,000 a month, and some cost $30,000 a month, which can mean prohibitive co-payments even for some patients with good insurance. “Many cancer patients are facing severe financial strain, even bankruptcy in some cases,” he said.

The value framework envisions considering two costs: the out-of-pocket costs for the patient and the overall cost of a drug to the health system.

Evaluating the latter cost would put doctors in the role of being stewards of societal resources. That is somewhat of a controversial role for doctors, since it might conflict with their duty to the patient in front of them. But the oncology society said it did not see those roles as being in conflict.

Some of the sample valuations presented by the society were far from flattering for the drugs involved.

Quote
Roche’s Avastin, when added to chemotherapy, had a net health benefit of 16 out of 130 possible points when used as an initial treatment for advanced lung cancer. Its monthly cost was $11,907.87, compared to $182.09 for the chemotherapy alone.  :o  >:(
Quote
Eli Lilly’s Alimta for that same use had a net heath benefit of zero with a cost exceeding $9,000 a month  >:( compared to about $800 a month  for the drugs it was compared to in the clinical trial.

A spokeswoman for Lilly said the trial analyzed by the oncology society understated Alimta’s effectiveness because it covered a broad population, whereas Alimta is approved for only one type of lung cancer. A spokeswoman for Roche said Avastin was the first drug to help lung cancer patients live longer than a year, and that the choice of treatments for life-threatening diseases was complex and personal.

The framework, published online Monday by The Journal of Clinical Oncology is more a proposed methodology that will now be open for public comment. It will take time to input the data on the effectiveness, side effects and costs of each drug, and convert it to a system that can be used on computers and mobile phones.

There is no requirement that doctors use the framework and it remains to be seen if they will.    But the authors of the document say it is a start.

Agelbert NOTE: Considering the HEAT doctors are going to get from the pharmaceutical crooks that pay doctors to push this, that and the other drug because it supposedly "works" (according to a RIGGED clinical study, ALWAYS DONE BY THE PHARMACEUTICAL CROOKS themselves, while the AMA and FDA claims it's all very "scientific"  ),
with your doctor's advice, use Caveat Emptor ON STERIODS! 

And, OF COURSE, the insurance CROOKS will claim THEY are being ripped off by doctors. This will give those crooks ANOTHER totally unsubstantiated excuse (considering they have raised rates at over 500% of published inflation EVERY YEAR for over 20 YEARS!) to jack up their rates AND delay cancer therapy.

Quote
“It allows the patient and the doctor to at least talk through the issues,” said Dr. Lee N. Newcomer, senior vice president for oncology at UnitedHealthcare, the big insurance company, and a member of the task force that developed the framework. “Before, the information wasn’t there.”

UnitedHealthcare is mounting a similar effort of its own, Dr. Newcomer said. Starting this month, it is requiring oncologists to get prior approval from the insurance company for every cancer drug they administer. The company will then track what happens to patients and eventually provide information to doctors about how well each drug works.

Concern about cancer drug prices has been rising for years and doctors have been becoming increasingly vocal. At its annual meeting late last month, the oncology society included a talk sharply criticizing the prices of cancer drugs as part of its plenary session.

Randy Burkholder, vice president for policy and research at the Pharmaceutical Research and Manufacturers of America, the drug industry trade group, said that drugs represented only 20 percent of cancer treatment costs. He also said that the big clinical trials that the oncology society used to make its value calculations might not be as relevant as treatment becomes increasingly personalized based on genetic analysis of a patient’s tumor.

Some experts say that ideally, the price of a drug should reflect its value, but that does not seem to be the case with cancer drugs  ;). A recent study by researchers from the National Cancer Institute, published in JAMA Oncology, surveyed cancer drugs approved from 2009 through 2013. It found that prices did not correlate very well with how novel a drug was or whether it prolonged life versus just shrinking tumors.

Agelbert NOTE
: IOW, "They are dying from cancer, they are desperate, they are a captive market!   - FLEECE them for all they are worth!" SEE "free market" CELEBRATION of  Empathy Deficit Disorder in the medical and pharmaceutical industry.

The framework computes a score — called the net health benefit — based on clinical trial data.

Drugs for advanced cancer are given a score from 0 to 130. Up to 80 of the points are based on a drug’s effectiveness in prolonging lives, delaying the worsening of cancer or shrinking tumors. Then up to 20 points can be added or subtracted based on side effects. And up to 30 bonus points can be granted if the drug relieves cancer symptoms or allows a patient to go without treatment for a period of time.

The costs of the drug are listed separately, rather than incorporated into the final score for a drug. That is a step short of what is done in some evaluations, such as those by the National Institute for Health and Care Excellence in Britain, in which drugs are rated by the cost per extra year of life they provide, adjusted by side effects and symptoms.

Researchers at Memorial Sloan Kettering Cancer Center recently announced a tool that allows people to evaluate the cost-effectiveness of cancer drugs.

These other institutions “take the next step to say ‘What do we think about this amount of benefit at this cost?’” said Dr. Steven D. Pearson, president of the Institute for Clinical and Economic Review, a nonprofit organization that evaluates the clinical and cost effectiveness of treatments.

Dr. Lowell E. Schnipper, chairman of the task force that developed the oncology society’s framework, said that patients wanted to know how medically effective a drug is. Adding the cost into an overall rating would obscure that information, he said.

Each drug is evaluated based on how it did in clinical trials compared to a control group, and the control groups can be different. That makes it difficult to compare one drug to another.

“This is not a way of ranking drugs,” said Dr. Schnipper, who is clinical director of the cancer center at Beth Israel Deaconess Medical Center in Boston. “This is simply a way of understanding the outcome of a clinical trial.”

http://www.nytimes.com/2015/06/23/business/cancer-doctors-offer-way-to-compare-medicines-including-by-cost.html
He that loveth father or mother more than me is not worthy of me: and he that loveth son or daughter more than me is not worthy of me. Matt 10:37

AGelbert

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Vermont's version of Nurse Rached!


Psychiatric nurse disciplined for abusive treatment of patient

Morgan True Jul. 1 2015, 2:50 pm

Agelbert NOTE:
The article is honest in reporting the facts uncovered but the reporter refuses to question some of those "facts" like the "positive work history" of this Vermont Nurse Rached. The comments, however, tell the REAL story.


A veteran nurse at the Vermont Psychiatric Care Hospital in Berlin was disciplined for abusive treatment of a patient in January, a Division of Licensing and Protection survey report shows.

The nurse, acting as shift lead, directed staff to conduct “planned ignoring” of a patient with severe obsessive compulsive disorder in an attempt to manage the patient’s “maladaptive” behaviors, according to the report.

Planned ignoring is a strategy sometimes used to reduce attention seeking behavior, the report states, but it was not part of this patient’s treatment plan. The treating psychiatrist later said planned ignoring is not recommended for patients with OCD and the nurse had no authority to instruct staff to implement it.

The nurse carried it further than just ignoring the patient, according to witnesses, by “taunting” the patient who became “visibly upset” and cried throughout the evening while begging for assistance.
The episode left the patient so anxious that the person reported having thoughts of taking his or her own life, the report said.

A month later the patient and nurse went at it again, the report says. After the patient slammed a door, the nurse reopened the door 5 to 7 times while smiling and laughing. That left the patient “angry yelling and hysterical.” The nurse later told investigators they were creating a distraction to “deescalate” the situation.
 

Officials at VPCH reported the incident to the Division of Licensing and Protection, which performed an unannounced site visit on behalf the federal government. The inspection concluded that the abuse resulted from poor job performance “rather than from systemic processes and factors that require correction.”  ;)

At the same time, Adult Protective Services and the Department of Human Resources conducted their own investigations. APS, which investigates abuse or neglect of vulnerable adults, substantiated the alleged abuse in March, and the nurse was immediately placed on administrative leave. The finding was also reported to the Vermont State Board of Nursing.

The nurse in question was allowed to continue working at the hospital while those investigations unfolded because of “a positive work history with no record of having mistreated a patient.” The nurse has worked in state psychiatric facilities for nine years, a tenure dating back to the former Vermont State Hospital in Waterbury.

As of May 15, when Licensing and Protection approved the hospital’s corrective action plan for issues uncovered during the inspection, the nurse remained on administrative leave, according to Vermont Public Radio which first reported the incident.

The inspection also found VPCH was not properly documenting its use of restraint and seclusion, but not that restraint or seclusion was being used inappropriately.

The inspection report highlights the difficulty of cases that nurses at VPCH regularly confront. The combination of trying circumstances, low pay and lack of qualified nurses driving turnover and understaffing at VPCH — an issue at the hospital since it was opened last summer.

VPCH CEO Jeff Rothenberg told VPR that an Agency of Human Services working group is expected to deliver a report on state nursing salaries later this summer, and he was optimistic that could lead to higher pay.[/color]


COMMENTS: 


Quote
Tom Pelham 

July 1, 2015 at 5:31 pm


Morgan…a little over a year ago you wrote the story below which profiled the cost per patient per day of the new Vermont Psychiatric Care Hospital (VPCH) at $2,247 per day or $820,000 per patient bed per year.

http://vtdigger.org/2014/05/28/new-state-psychiatric-hospital-brings-care-21st-century/

Though I have looked, I can’t find any acute care level 1 psychiatric hospital with this high level of operating costs. Plus, at over $1.1 million construction cost per bed unit, the hospital must be at the frontier of best practices design for a psychiatric hospital servicing the needs of patients requiring such a high level of care.

By any measure, for both construction and operations, a lot of money is invested in this facility, leaving one to wonder how it’s is now being managed with a result that yields only “trying circumstances, low pay and lack of qualified nurses driving turnover and understaffing at VPCH”.

The Vermont State Hospital use to have a distinct budget appropriation in the state budget where one could track such expenditures. Now, the VPCH budget is blended into the Department of Mental Health’s overall budget of $217.1 million for fiscal 2016, making tracking VPCH budgeted expenditures impossible. It might be helpful to readers as this story moves forward to provide some context of the cost of this new facility, both construction and operations, with similar facilities in other states.


Curtis Sinclair 

July 1, 2015 at 10:32 pm

Notice that this is a veteran nurse. That means this is the kind of thing she has been doing for years. This kind of behavior was common by staff at the old Vermont State Hospital because staff think that’s what they are supposed to do – provoke patients so they have an excuse to drug them. That’s the whole program at institutions like this – force drugging people. And the staff and doctors use any means they can, including lying at court hearings. I know because I saw it personally. A good way to stop such abuses would be to end involuntary ‘treatment’. When patients didn’t like their treatment they would check out and that would empty out places like VSH and the Vermont Psychiatric Care ‘Hospital’.

How many incidents will it take before CMS begins questioning this ‘hospital’s’ certification? I predicted that when this new facility was planned because the state would be transferring the same old problems into a new facility. I even pointed out another state where the same thing happened – Arizona. They built a new $80 million facility to replace the old one and within a few years it was already in trouble with federal inspectors.

All the money wasted on this ‘hospital’ could have gone to voluntary community treatment programs that would have really helped people.

http://vtdigger.org/2015/07/01/psychiatric-nurse-disciplined-for-abusive-treatment-of-patient/
He that loveth father or mother more than me is not worthy of me: and he that loveth son or daughter more than me is not worthy of me. Matt 10:37

 

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