Is this covered?

As the free for all and chaos ensues regarding the Affordable Care Act and will he or won’t he support reform, little changes with regards to the Medical Industrial Complex. I recall an Attorney once reprimanding me for using that term and I laughed and said I can’t take credit for it but thanks. Lawyers dumber than Doctors.

When I read the headline I thought Angelina Jolie has changed her mind or one of the Real Housewives went too far this time. But no this was an accident. Alright then.

And no this is not the first time nor will it be the last.   Think the Criminal Justice system is a hot mess well this is the same industry that shares a lab space. Think about that and what it means when technicians can find you guilty or innocent and in turn destroy your life.  These people are not geniuses who are exempt from stupidity.

Think of all the great Scientists and other minds that are being assembled in the White House that will place your health and life at risk as they choose to believe their science.  That is akin to the statement “my truth” which means what exactly?

The real issue here is that we are sure that Doctors and Scientists are infallible and bad news they aren’t and neither is the Pope.  This comment says quite a bit about how people feel regarding Physicians. 

My collegue’s pregnant wife was told she had a 4-inch ovarian cyst and required surgery. They were Kaiser patients, so the second and third opinions came from within Kaiser. I said to my collegue that I was sorry for his wife and her severe pain, and now facing a surgery while pregnant. He said she had no pain. I was immediately alarmed. How can she have a huge cyst with no pain? He proceeded to tell me about the fancy, expensive schools where these three doctors had gotten their medical training. He said there was an ultrasound that showed the cyst. I said it could be the baby, not a cyst. They put the wife under, cut her open, and there was NO CYST. My collegue recounted their surprise after the surgery. I said, so you are telling me none of these doctors bothered to FEEL this supposed cyst that somehow caused no pain with their hands before cutting her? He said, “I guess not, but they ARE the best.” This couple didn’t even report these dangerous doctors to the medical board. I’m sure they and their fancy parchment are out there endangering people daily. I don’t care if they went to Stanford and Harvard. These guys are idiots

And when Angelina Jolie went all nuts, well further nuts, and wrote about her bizarre need to have a double Mastectomy and Hysterectomy I knew that it was going to be a gold mine for Surgeons – both Oncology and Plastic – as women would run amok getting tested. If you have never watched the Real Housewives of Orange County I suggest you do as I get all my mental health and cancer knowledge via these crazy bitches.  I miss the lunatic star fucker Terry Dubrow who never saw a boob he could not fix.  This is the great mind behind The Swan where debasing and degrading women is a sport in Hollywood just ask anyone!  

But as you can read below it doesn’t work out that well and whoops! I hope she met her deductible. 

Damaged for the rest of my life’: Woman says surgeons mistakenly removed her breasts and uterus

The Washington Post
By Lindsey Bever October 24 2017

Elisha Cooke-Moore had been told she had cancer-causing genes.

The 36-year-old mother said an obstetrician-gynecologist noted that the results of her genetic testing showed she had a 50 percent chance of getting breast cancer and up to an 80 percent chance of getting uterine cancer, so she underwent a recommended double mastectomy and hysterectomy to try to beat the odds.

But Cooke-Moore, 36, from Gold Beach, Ore., said that months after she had the surgeries, she learned that her medical team was wrong — the test results were negative. Now she is suing Curry County Health District and members of her medical team for $1.8 million.

“I am damaged for the rest of my life,” she told The Washington Post in a phone interview Tuesday afternoon, her voice cracking.

The lawsuit states that Cooke-Moore had a total hysterectomy in August 2016 and, not two months later, a prophylactic bilateral nipple-sparing mastectomy along with breast implants.

During an annual exam in 2015, Cooke-Moore received genetic testing to determine her risk of breast and other cancers. Cooke-Moore said she had expressed concerns to her doctor regarding a family history of cancer, so it was agreed she would be tested for a BRCA 1 and BRCA 2 gene mutation. Although the results were negative, her nurse practitioner misinterpreted them — and Cooke-Moore was told she had the MLH1 gene mutation and Lynch syndrome, according to the medical malpractice lawsuit.

The National Institutes of Health states that Lynch syndrome increases the risks of many types of cancer, particularly those in the colon and rectum, but also ovarian, uterine and other cancers.

Cooke-Moore said her nurse practitioner, who seemingly misread the results, referred her to specialists within the Curry Health Network — gynecologist William Fitts, who performed her hysterectomy and then recommended surgeon Jessica Carlson to handled her double mastectomy and reconstruction. But Cooke-Moore said neither of the doctors independently confirmed the results.

The lawsuit claims that Cooke-Moore’s medical team “continued to negligently rely upon the misinterpreted genetic testing results.”

Cooke-Moore said a doctor even wrote a letter to her children, who do not live with her, urging them to get tested for the mutation.

“I’m dumbfounded. We’re all dumbfounded,” said Cooke-Moore’s attorney, Christopher Cauble. “They all should have caught this.”

Cauble said that in addition to needless operations, his client’s replacement implants were placed during the double mastectomy surgery, prompting at least 10 corrective surgeries to manage complications.

Representatives for the Curry Health Network and an attorney for the hospital and Fitts did not respond to requests for comment. An attorney for Carlson said she could not comment on pending litigation.

Cooke-Moore said she discovered the mistake earlier this year while reading through her test results and noticed that it read “negative.”

“Devastated,” she said, remembering how she felt at the time. “I’m just not sure how you can mistake a negative for a positive.”

If she had it to do over, Cooke-Moore said that she would probably get a second opinion before she agreed to have the surgeries.

More and more, medical experts are encouraging second opinions — not out of distrust, but to ensure that the doctor and patient are making the best decisions.

“Every patient has a right to a second opinion,” Joseph Fins, chief of medical ethics at New York-Presbyterian and Weill Cornell Medicine, told Columnist Steven Petrow, “and it would worry me if a physician was opposed.”

Major hospital systems, including the Cleveland Clinic and Johns Hopkins, even have remote second-opinion services so that patients across the country can more easily seek peace of mind.

Petrow recently wrote an op-ed for The Post titled: “I heard what my doctor thinks; now I want a second opinion. How do I get one?” In it, he bullet-pointed how patients should handle second opinions:

•Don’t be talked out of seeking another opinion by your current doctor or anyone else; this is your decision.

•Be upfront but respectful with your doctor. You are partners in this, and having your doctor on your side makes it easier to transfer your medical records and coordinate care.

•Don’t shop for a specialist who will tell you what you want to hear. You need the unvarnished truth.

•Provide the second doctor with all relevant information in your medical record. Fins warns about the “discontinuity of care if all the facts don’t follow you.”

Cooke-Moore said she was too trusting.

“I trusted my community,” Cooke-Moore said, adding that she has since been diagnosed with PTSD. “I guess shame on me. Maybe I shouldn’t have, but I did.”

Grade C for Care

A couple of weeks ago I read about Stem Cell treatments that are doing more harm than good but as we have no regulation nor ability to actually ensure that half the shit the quack professional class are pedaling, we must make ultimately life saving or debilitating decisions on our own.

Then the past few days the New York Times did a series on immunotherapy treatments with regards to cancer and who knew that actually using the bodies own defense mechanisms were more beneficial that the toxic shit that western medicine loves to use to treat cancer. That said, the minute drug companies and other members of the medical industrial complex get on board you know the train trip is going to get way more expensive and take way longer than it should

Again, whatever you need, want and more importantly can afford then have at it. I want to say my skepticism about western medicine is in response to the abusive and negligent treatment by the abusive providers at Harborview Medical Center, but no it was way earlier than that. I think the first exposure to Quacks was the Doctor who broke a needle in my arm doing a blood draw, then we have the other quacks treating my Mother for her high blood pressure, the varying Dentists that have been unbelievably amazing or unbelievably incompetent;  the therapists and other assorted individuals I have seen over the years to try to reconcile my pain and anger over the years for whatever ailed me. Yes I have tried to actually understand and seek professional help of all kinds for varying injuries or ailments but over time the bad simply outweighed the good so my respect and more importantly trust of the medical industrial complex is slim to none.

And so I go out of my way to understand and validate that by finding information so that others don’t have to and in turn make educated and more importantly informed decisions about their care. And here is just another example.

Why ‘Useless’ Surgery Is Still Popular

Gina Kolata
THE NEW YORK TIMES
AUG. 3, 2016

Before a drug can be marketed, it has to go through rigorous testing to show it is safe and effective. Surgery, though, is different. The Food and Drug Administration does not regulate surgical procedures. So what happens when an operation is subjected to and fails the ultimate test — a clinical trial in which patients are randomly assigned to have it or not?

The expectation is that medical practice will change if an operation turns out not to help.

If only.

It looks as if the onus is on patients to ask what evidence, if any, shows that surgery is better than other options.

Take what happened with spinal fusion, an operation that welds together adjacent vertebrae to relieve back pain from worn-out discs. Unlike most operations, it actually was tested in four clinical trials. The conclusion: Surgery was no better than alternative nonsurgical treatments, like supervised exercise and therapy to help patients deal with their fear of back pain. In both groups, the pain usually diminished or went away.

The studies were completed by the early 2000s and should have been enough to greatly limit or stop the surgery, says Dr. Richard Deyo, professor of evidence-based medicine at the Oregon Health and Sciences University. But that did not happen, according to a recent report. Instead, spinal fusion rates increased — the clinical trials had little effect.

Spinal fusion rates continued to soar in the United States until 2012, shortly after Blue Cross of North Carolina said it would no longer pay and some other insurers followed suit.

“It may be that financial disincentives accomplished something that scientific evidence alone didn’t,” Dr. Deyo said.

Other operations continue to be reimbursed, despite clinical trials that cast doubt on their effectiveness.

In 2009, the prestigious New England Journal of Medicine published results of separate clinical trials on a popular back operation, vertebroplasty, comparing it to a sham procedure. They found that there was no benefit — pain relief was the same in both groups. Yet it and a similar operation, Kyphoplasty, in which doctors inject a sort of cement into the spine to shore it up, continue to be performed.

Dr. David Kallmes of the Mayo Clinic, an author of the vertebroplasty paper, said he thought doctors continued to do the operations because insurers pay and because doctors remember their own patients who seemed better afterward.

“When you read a study, you reflect on whether it is representative of your patient population,” Dr. Kallmes said. “It is easy to conclude that the answer is ‘no.’ The mean age in the study is different or ‘I do it differently.’”

“I think there is a placebo effect not only on patients but on doctors,” Dr. Kallmes adds. “The successful patient is burned into their memories and the not-so-successful patient is not. Doctors can have a selective memory that leads them to conclude that, ‘Darn it, it works pretty well.’”

The latest controversy — and the operation that arguably has been studied the most in randomized clinical trials — is surgery for a torn meniscus, a sliver of cartilage that acts as a shock absorber in the knee. It’s a condition that often afflicts middle-aged and older people, simply as a consequence of degeneration that can occur with age and often accompanying osteoarthritis. The result can be a painful, swollen knee. Sometimes the knee can feel as if it catches or locks. So why not do an operation to trim or repair the torn tissue?

About 400,000 middle-aged and older Americans a year have meniscus surgery. And here is where it gets interesting. Orthopedists wondered if the operation made sense because they realized there was not even a clear relationship between knee pain and meniscus tears. When they did M.R.I. scans on knees of middle-aged people, they often saw meniscus tears in people who had no pain. And those who said their knee hurt tended to have osteoarthritis, which could be the real reason for their pain.

Added to that complication, said Dr. Jeffrey N. Katz, a professor of medicine and orthopedic surgery at Harvard Medical School, is the fact that not everyone improves after the surgery. “It is not regarded as a slam-dunk,” he said. As a result, he said, many doctors have been genuinely uncertain about which is better — exercise and physical therapy or surgery. That, in fact, was what led Dr. Katz and his colleagues to conduct a clinical trial comparing surgery with physical therapy in middle-aged people with a torn meniscus and knee pain.

The result: The surgery offered little to most who had it. Other studies came to the same conclusion, and so did a meta-analysis published last year of nine clinical trials testing the surgery. Patients tended to report less pain — but patients reported less pain no matter what the treatment, even fake surgery.

Then came yet another study, published on July 20 in The British Medical Journal. It compared the operation to exercise in patients who did not have osteoarthritis but had knee pain and meniscus tears. Once again, the surgery offered no additional benefit.

An accompanying editorial came to a scathing conclusion: The surgery is “a highly questionable practice without supporting evidence of even moderate quality,” adding, “Good evidence has been widely ignored.”

So what should patients be told? Should they even be offered the surgery?

Patients should be told that physical therapy is a good first-line therapy for pain relief, Dr. Katz said, but that surgery also relieves pain. Pain relief can take longer with physical therapy, he says. With surgery, he said, patients have to recover from the operation but are likely to be back at work within two weeks.

“At the end of the day,” he said, “patients ought to choose.”

Of course, how they choose might depend on how the choice is presented.

Here’s how Dr. Gordon H. Guyatt, a professor of medicine and epidemiology at McMaster University in Hamilton, Ontario, who wrote the editorial in The British Medical Journal, would deal with the clinical trial data:

“I personally think the operation should not be mentioned,” he says, adding that in his opinion the studies indicate the pain relief after surgery is a placebo effect. But if a doctor says anything, Dr. Guyatt suggests saying this: “We have randomized clinical trials that produce the highest quality of evidence. They strongly suggest that the procedure is next to useless. If there is any benefit, it is very small and there are downsides, expense and potential complications.”

Hearing that, he says, “I cannot imagine that anybody would say, ‘Go ahead. I will go for it.’”

The Medical Files

I read this op ed in the NY Times and thought well the public love it but the medical care industry does not.

A Health Care Safety Net the Public Loves

By THE EDITORIAL BOARD
The New York Times
AUG. 3, 2015

Recent public surveys show that Americans strongly support Medicare and Medicaid, the twin pillars of the health care safety net, and that approval of the Affordable Care Act, President Obama’s health care reform law, is steadily rising. The popularity of these three government programs is a stiff warning to critics, mostly Republicans, who seek to radically change or demolish them.

Last month, the Kaiser Family Foundation reported that a majority of the public and the vast majority of beneficiaries support Medicare, the federal program for elderly and disabled Americans, and Medicaid, the federal-state program for the poor. Majorities of Democrats, independents and Republicans all favor keeping Medicare as it is rather than converting it, as many Republican politicians have urged, to a program in which each enrollee would be given a fixed dollar contribution to buy health insurance.

There are legitimate concerns that the financial condition of Medicare could deteriorate as the baby boomers age and as health care costs continue to rise faster than normal inflation. Polls analyzed by Harvard researchers in the New England Journal of Medicine in 2013 showed the public strongly in favor of reducing Medicare spending to improve the long-term financial outlook of the program, but strongly opposed if the cuts would be used to reduce the deficit or pay for tax cuts.

As for Medicaid, the Kaiser survey found that more than 60 percent of the public opposes converting it from an entitlement, in which the federal and state governments split the cost for everyone who qualifies, to a block grant, in which the federal government would provide a fixed amount of money. Under that approach, the states would be struggling to keep all costs within that amount, which might well require reducing benefits.

The Affordable Care Act is also gaining support. The latest Gallup poll, published in July, showed that Americans’ approval of the law rose to 47 percent, the highest level since 2012. (About 83 percent of Democrats supported the law compared with 14 percent of Republicans.) Other surveys in June and July have also shown a closely split verdict, which is an improvement over earlier polls showing greater public opposition.

The growing approval of the act is likely to get stronger as more people gain coverage and benefit from it. These voters need to throw their political weight behind candidates for Congress and the White House in 2016 who will work to improve the law, not repeal or weaken it.

As the move to consolidate the insurance providers down to three behemoths with the most recent merger of Cigna and Anthem the price of health care will not be getting cheaper and competition to find affordable policies less so. To the point that the Obama Administration has asked States to look into the price increases requested by the insurers due to the demands of those who signed up as mandated under the Affordable Care Act.

Obama Administration Urges States to Cut Health Insurers’ Requests for Big Rate Increases

By ROBERT PEAR
The New York Times
AUG. 3, 2015

WASHINGTON — Hoping to avoid another political uproar over the Affordable Care Act, the Obama administration is trying to persuade states to cut back big rate increases requested by many health insurance companies for 2016.

In calling for aggressive regulation of rates, federal officials are setting up a potential clash with insurers. Some carriers said they paid out more in claims than they collected in premiums last year, so they lost money on policies sold in the new public marketplaces. After finding that new customers were sicker than expected, some health plans have sought increases of 10 percent to 40 percent or more.

Administration officials have political and financial reasons for wanting to hold down premiums. Big rate increases could undermine public support for the health care law, provide ammunition to Republican critics of the measure and increase costs for some consumers and the federal government.

Kevin J. Counihan, the chief executive of the federal insurance marketplace, is urging states to consider a range of factors before making their decisions.

“Recent claims data show healthier consumers,” Mr. Counihan said in a letter to state insurance commissioners. The federal tax penalty for going without insurance will increase in 2016, he said, and this “should motivate a new segment of uninsured who may not have a high need for health care to enroll for coverage.”

In addition, federal officials said, much of the pent-up demand for health care has been met because consumers who enrolled last year have received treatments they could not obtain when they were uninsured.

Federal officials have also told state regulators that medical inflation will be less than what many insurers assumed in calculating their rates for 2016.

But Scott Keefer, a vice president of Blue Cross and Blue Shield of Minnesota, which requested rate increases averaging about 50 percent for 2016, said his company had not seen an improvement in the health status of new customers.

“Our claims experience has not slowed at all,” Mr. Keefer said. “The trend has gotten a little worse than we expected.”

Like other insurers, Blue Cross and Blue Shield of Minnesota reported a surge in prescription drug expenses. Two high-cost specialty drugs for rheumatoid arthritis, Enbrel and Humira, account for one-fourth of prescription drug costs in the company’s individual health plans, Mr. Keefer said. Other insurers reported high costs for hepatitis C medications.

State officials said their agencies had been reviewing insurance rates for decades and generally knew local market conditions better than federal officials.

Monica J. Lindeen, a Democrat who is the Montana insurance commissioner and the president of the National Association of Insurance Commissioners, said the letter from Mr. Counihan was interesting, but “did not point to any new information that would impact how state insurance departments regulate their health insurance markets.”

State officials said they had to worry about the solvency of some insurers as well as the affordability of insurance for consumers. In February, the Iowa insurance commissioner moved to shut down a nonprofit co-op insurer, and a state court found the company insolvent because of “adverse claims experience.” Another carrier, the Louisiana Health Cooperative, said it would voluntarily halt operations at the end of this year because it was “not growing enough.”

But administration officials said their arguments had already prevailed in several states, and President Obama, on a recent trip to Tennessee, said the final rates for 2016 would “come in significantly lower than what’s being requested.”

Moreover, consumers can avoid large rate increases by switching to lower-cost health plans next year, administration officials said. In any event, they said, the federal government pays most of the premium for most people who buy insurance on the exchanges, so consumers will be largely shielded from higher premiums.

California, one of the few states that actively negotiate prices, said health insurance rates would rise next year by an average of just 4 percent.

In New York, on average, insurers requested a 10.4 percent rate increase in the individual market, and state officials said they had reduced the average increase to 7.1 percent. “We closely analyzed each insurer’s request and cut rates that were excessive or unreasonable,” said Anthony J. Albanese, the acting superintendent of financial services in New York.

But the New York Health Plan Association, a trade group for insurers, criticized the state’s actions.

“The approved rates do not, in many cases, accurately reflect the financial status of plans as indicated in their rate submissions,” said Paul F. Macielak, president of the New York association. “Health plans have suffered financial losses the last two years when the state significantly reduced premium requests. Plans cannot be expected to continue losing money year after year and remain viable.”

The Affordable Care Act established a rate review process that requires insurers to disclose and justify large proposed increases. State officials have the primary responsibility for reviewing rates, except in five states that the Obama administration says do not have “effective rate review programs.”

In those states — Alabama, Missouri, Oklahoma, Texas and Wyoming — federal officials review rates. Several insurers said they had been flooded with questions from officials asking for more data on their claims experience and challenging their forecasts for 2016.

The federal government has urged states to hold public hearings on rate requests, and a consumer group in Missouri is urging the Obama administration to hold a hearing on increases requested by Coventry Health Care, a unit of Aetna. Coventry is seeking increases that average 19 percent in Missouri.

Rohan Hutchings, a spokesman for Aetna, said the proposed rates reflected the cost of care. “For 2016,” he said, “we expect that medical costs will grow by 8 percent to 10 percent in the individual market.” In addition, he said, the federal government is scaling back a transitional program that helps insurers pay certain very large claims.

Jay Angoff, a lawyer for the consumer group, the Consumers Council of Missouri, who is a former director of the state’s Insurance Department, said, “The federal government does not have authority to disapprove rates, but does have authority to deem them unreasonable,” and should do so. Coventry, he said, ignored the fact that “the least healthy people signed up first, in 2014, leaving a healthier group of people to sign up in 2016.”

And lastly the truth is medical care is a crapshoot. The cover of the Times today also had an article that many women with cervical cancer were not treated with an effecctive treatment program highly recommended from as far back as 2006 when the National Cancer Institute took the rare step of issuing a “clinical announcement.” A major study had just proved that pumping chemotherapy directly into the abdomen, along with the usual intravenous method, could add 16 months or more to women’s lives. Cancer experts agreed that medical practice should change — immediately. And nearly a decade later – crickets.

The article is here and what stood out was this:

Some may also see it as a drain on their income, because it is time-consuming and uses generic drugs on which oncologists make little money.

Dr. Markman said that when a treatment involves a new drug or a new device, manufacturers eagerly offer doctors advice and instructions on its use. But this treatment involves no new drugs or devices, so no one is clamoring to educate doctors about it. They are on their own to learn, and to train their nurses, a commitment that will take time and money.

This year, 21,290 new cases of ovarian cancer are expected in the United States, and 14,180 deaths. Dr. Markman said that for now, a patient’s best option is to ask whether her doctor offers the treatment, and if the answer is no, to find a doctor who does.

What about Susan G. Komen and their histrionics about Planned Parenthood a few years ago,  this would seem to be a better to way to channel energy as it is still cancer and cancer in women. But no. Walk on by.

The reality is that as the article concludes: But to bring about change, patients will have to speak up, she said, adding: “I think it’s going to have to be the advocate community, since they’re the ones who have the most skin in the game, and can put the money where the mouth is, and say, ‘If you can’t give me the best treatment I’ll go someplace else.’ ”

Being ill with a terminal illness facing the challenges that in and of itself alone is not enough, actually having to go out and find those willing to take you, take your insurance and in turn get the care you need to survive is something you will have to do on your own. Good luck with that.

Three Deadly Words

“You have cancer.” And apparently not. I was at the gym today and my normal treadmill reading (or Dentist office reading) is US People. The cover blurb on the story was surreal and further made me step on the step master. So I came home to research this Dr. “Death.”

Apparently this Dr. Death was recently sentenced to 50 years in Prison for fraud. He had was finally discovered after a whistleblower turned him in for his bullshit treatments of patients for cancer they did not have.

How Whistle-Blower Helped Expose Michigan Cancer Doctor Who Mistreated Patients
Jul 10, 2015,
By LAUREN EFFRON
ABC News»

Convicted Cancer Doctor Case Whistleblower, Victims Speak Out

An office manager for Dr. Farid Fata, the Michigan oncologist convicted of misdiagnosing hundreds of patients to defraud insurance companies, revealed details of how staffers helped expose the doctor’s crimes.

George Karadsheh, who worked for Dr. Farid Fata’s Crittenton Cancer Center in Rochester Hills, Michigan, said he started asking questions after staffers kept leaving the practice. When Karadsheh learned that a different oncologist in the practice was quitting, he said the doctor told him it was because Fata was administering chemotherapy to patients who didn’t need it.

“[This doctor] explained that Dr. Fata was actually administering chemotherapy to patients without need,” Karadsheh told ABC News “Nightline.” “He was also explaining that patients who were on hospice were taken off hospice and put on chemotherapy, put back on chemotherapy. He also pointed out that patients who were receiving chemotherapy without disease were receiving it to the very last day of life. So at that point I discovered that there may be some issues there.”

What is neglected in the this piece journalism vs the People version is that Dr. Fata had a staff member blow the whistle on him before for his bizarre practices early on and like all state run boards of quality assurance (here is WA state it is called MQAC or MQuack as its called) “investigated” and found nothing illegal or improper. I am guessing the investigation is calling the Doctor and going “are these allegations true?” and the Doctor emphatically going no.

Again much of this was to bilk Medicare. I am still waiting to hear of the scandalous gang of oldsters who have faked illnesses to get millions in free treatment. Well I did find this about 7 people who allegedly faked having cancer. They all had to pay restitution and serve some time. This Doctor however can be back in business in no time, no check the box for him apparently. Interesting that a Evangelical Minister and Doctor who did the same as that asshole, oh wait that term is for attorneys, this quack did to his “patients, was sentenced to a 150 years. Funny I thought they believed prayer can heal you. Maybe it was the whole tax fraud that did it.

There are dozens more articles and information about varying other Doctors who use junk science and pseudo science to misdiagnose and mistreat patients all int he name of money but they are largely ignored as was Dr. Death here in the beginning while opening up strip mall clinics to further fleece and abuse patients. God help us Tiny Tim.

The Association of Certified Fraud Examiners (yes there is a group that does this who knew) concludes that: Essentially, fraud in health care is just like in any other industry: Fraudsters with the means and opportunity take full advantage to unjustly profit. Health care crooks inside and outside the industry include patients, payers, employers, vendors and suppliers, and providers, including pharmacists. (Organized crime rings and computer hackers also play roles in committing health care fraud.)

The difference between the health care realm and many other industries is its huge, alluring, easy pile of cash. According to the Centers for Medicare & Medicaid Services (CMS), national health expenditures in the U.S. reached $2.6 trillion in 2010 — 17.9 percent of GDP. The CMS projects U.S. health spending to rise to 7.4 percent in 2014 as a result of the major coverage expansions from the U.S. Affordable Care Act (ACA) — an estimated 22 million people will be insured. Over the period of 2015-2021, health spending is projected to grow at an average rate of 6.2 percent annually.

And these are the most common:

TEN COMMON HEALTH CARE PROVIDER FRAUD SCHEMES

Billing for services not rendered.
Billing for a non-covered service as a covered service.
Misrepresenting dates of service.
Misrepresenting locations of service.
Misrepresenting provider of service.
Waiving of deductibles and/or co-payments.
Incorrect reporting of diagnoses or procedures (includes unbundling).
Overutilization of services.
Corruption (kickbacks and bribery).
False or unnecessary issuance of prescription drugs.

But there you go. A “legitimate” Doctor who had been turned in to the State medical board already by a whistleblower whom they ignored went on and damaged more lives gets 45 years in prison and could have been stopped sooner but hey let’s not question Doctors they are infallible, like the Pope and they too wear white.

Funny that it was People who did the most comprehensive story on this quack as I had not heard of it. This is just another example of how the medical industrial complex plays, dirty and dangerous. And at high costs in every sense of the word.

Money Maker

I am not sure who these Doctors are blaming – Obamacare, Big Pharma, Insurance companies, the Government as in Medicare/Medicaid, Patients or all of the above.  But what is clear is that Patient care is linked to Doctor’s compensation.  Less compensation means less care. Shocking, I know.

When the Doctors control the drugs, set the pricing this might explain why their is a lack of continuity with regards to pricing and in turn to care giving. More ways to show that income inequity is not just about work. It is about health care and once again the Affordable Care Act does nothing to prevent drug hoarding, price fixing or the increasing move to consolidate medical practices and in turn more ways to price jack.

Drug wars? Well they should add this to the list.

Private Oncologists Being Forced Out, leaving Patients to Face Higher Bills

GINA KOLATA
NOV. 23, 2014

When Dr. Jeffery Ward, a cancer specialist, and his partners sold their private practice to the Swedish Medical Center in Seattle, the hospital built them a new office suite 50 yards from the old place. The practice was bigger, but Dr. Ward saw the same patients and provided chemotherapy just like before. On the surface, nothing had changed but the setting

But there was one big difference. Treatments suddenly cost more, with higher co-payments for patients and higher bills for insurers. Because of quirks in the payment system, patients and their insurers pay hospitals and their doctors about twice what they pay independent oncologists for administering cancer treatments.

There also was a hidden difference — the money made from the drugs themselves. Cancer patients and their insurers buy chemotherapy drugs from their medical providers. Swedish Medical Center, like many other others, participates in a federal program that lets it purchase these drugs for about half what private practice doctors pay, greatly increasing profits

Oncologists like Dr. Ward say the reason they are being forced to sell or close their practices is because insurers have severely reduced payments to them and because the drugs they buy and sell to patients are now so expensive. Payments had gotten so low, Dr. Ward said, that they only way he and his partners could have stayed independent was to work for free. When he sold his practice, Dr. Ward said, “The hospital was a refuge, not the culprit

When a doctor is affiliated with a hospital, though, patients end up paying, out of pocket, an average $134 more per dose for the most commonly used cancer drugs, according to a report by IMS Health, a health care information company. And, the report notes, many cancer patients receive multiple drugs

“Say there was a Costco that had very good things at reasonable prices,” said Dr. Barry Brooks, a Dallas oncologist in private practice. “Then a Neiman Marcus comes in and changes the sign on the door and starts billing twice as much for the same things.” That, he said, is what is happening in oncology

A Quirk in Drug Pricing
Insurers pay hospitals and doctors affiliated with hospitals more to administer chemotherapy drugs than they pay independent doctors.

The situation is part of the unusual world of cancer medicine, where payment systems are unique and drive not just the price of care but what drugs patients may get and where they are treated. It raises questions about whether independent doctors, squeezed by finances, might be swayed to use drugs that give them greater profits or treat poorer patients differently than those who are better insured. But one thing is clear: The private practice oncologist is becoming a vanishing breed, driven away by the changing economics of cancer medicine.

Practices are making the move across the nation. Reporting on the nation’s 1,447 independent oncology practices, the Community Oncology Alliance, an advocacy group for independent practices, said that since 2008, 544 were purchased by or entered contractual relationships with hospitals, another 313 closed and 395 reported they were in tough financial straits. In western Washington, just one independent oncology group is left

Christian Downs, executive director of the Association of Community Cancer Centers, said that although there are no good data yet, he expected the Affordable Care Act was accelerating the trend. Many people bought inadequate insurance for the expensive cancer care they require. Community doctors have to buy the drugs ahead of time, placing a burden on them when patients cannot pay. The act also requires documentation of efficiencies in medical care which can be expensive for doctors in private practice to provide. And it encourages the consolidation of medical practices

The American Hospital Association cites advantages for patients being treated by hospital doctors.

“The hassle factor is reduced,” said Erik Rasmussen, the association’s vice president of legislative affairs. Patients can have scans, like CT and M.R.I., use a pharmacy and get lab tests all in one place instead of going from facility to facility, he said

And, he added, there is a reason hospitals get higher fees for their services — it compensates them for staying open 24 hours and caring for uninsured and underinsured patients

For doctors in private practice, providing chemotherapy to uninsured and Medicaid patients is a money loser. As a result, many, including Dr. Ward before he sold his practice, end up sending those patients to nearby hospitals for chemotherapy while keeping them as patients for office visits

“We hate doing it, I can’t tell you how much we hate doing it,” said Dr. Brooks, the Texas oncologist. “But I tell them, ‘It will cost me $200 to give you this medication in my office, so I am going to ask you to go to the hospital as an outpatient for infusions.’&nbsp

Dr. Peter Eisenberg, in private practice in Marin County in Northern California, said: “The disgrace is that we have to treat people differently depending on how much money they’ve got. That we do diminishes me

Society of Clinical Oncology. Many private practice oncology offices, he said, “Run on time, they are efficient, you get in, you get out, as opposed to academic medical centers where they may be an hour and a half behind

Dr. Ward and others in private practice said they tried for years to make a go of it but were finally defeated by what he described as “a series of cuts in oncology reimbursement under the guise of reform to which private practice is most vulnerable

Lower reimbursements have two effects. One is on overhead. Unlike other doctors, oncologists stock their own drugs, maintaining a sort of mini-pharmacy. If a patient gets too sick to receive a drug or dies, the doctor takes the loss. That used to be acceptable because insurers paid doctors at least twice the wholesale price of drugs. Now doctors are reimbursed for the average cost of the drug plus 4.3 percent, there are more and more drugs to stock, and drugs cost more

“The overhead is enormous,” Dr. Schilsky said. “This is one of the reasons why many oncologists are becoming hospital-based

The second — and bigger — effect is less profit from selling drugs to patients. For years, chemotherapy drugs provided a comfortable income. Those days are gone, doctors say

The finances are very different in hospitals, with their higher reimbursement rates for administering drugs, discounts for buying large quantities, and a special federal program that about 30 percent of hospitals qualify for. The program, to compensate research hospitals and hospitals serving poor people, lets hospitals buy chemotherapy drugs for all outpatients at about a 50 percent discount

In addition, Dr. Schilsky notes, cancer patients at hospitals use other services, like radiation therapy, imaging and surgery“A cancer patient is going to generate a lot of revenue for a hospital,” Dr. Schilsky said

Health care economists say they have little data on how the costs and profits from selling chemotherapy drugs are affecting patient care. Doctors are constantly reminded, though, of how much they can make if they buy more of a company’s drug

Celgene, for example, in a recent email about its drug Abraxane, told one doctor who had bought 50 vials that he could get a rebate of $647.51 by buying 68 vials. If he bought 175 vials he’d get $1,831.

This hidden profit possibility troubles Dr. Peter B. Bach, director of the Center for Health Policy and Outcomes at Memorial Sloan Kettering Cancer Center

“When you walk into a doctor’s office you don’t know that in most cancer scenarios there are a range of therapeutic choices,” Dr. Bach said. “Unless the doctor presents options, you assume there aren’t any

While individual oncologists deny choosing treatments that provide them with the greatest profit, Dr. Kanti Rai, a cancer specialist at North Shore-Long Island Jewish Cancer Center, said it would be foolish to believe financial considerations never influence doctors’ choices of drugs

“Sometimes hidden in such choices — and many times not so hidden — are considerations of what also might be financially more profitable,” he said.

Free Means Free

This is another profound disconnect between what is free under the Affordable Care Act and what that means with regards to treatment and more importantly diagnosis

The editorial below does the job for you. There are some aspects of free that mystify me. One is that birth control is free but of course that is under debate and then the whole abortion issue is another.

I don’t have a problem with birth control and that it should be affordable and accessible. Frankly a small fee or charge for whatever kind of birth control one chooses should be just that a choice. By making any and all free those costs will be passed on to those who neither need, want or choose birth control. Is Viagra free? God forbid.

What is the problem is that the second you sign up for one there is the other. Bait and switch is essential in the medical industrial complex. So take that free colon screening and yep that positive means positively more money to be fully sure that positive was not cancer.

We have already had the debate over Mammograms and now the new pap screen seems a way to circumvent what worked and in turn costs less in the long run. Bet this new one will have a lot of “positives” to require further testing. Oh wait you said paps were free under the screening law. Well pick the old one. Like many drugs, treatments and options the old seems to have worked fine until they didn’t. And that didn’t mean they weren’t working, they just werent’ making enough money for big pharma.

The Problem With Free Health Care
By H. GILBERT WELCH
APRIL 30, 2014

HANOVER, N.H. — NOW that it’s clear that Obamacare is here to stay, its supporters should focus on making the program better. Fixes are not a sign of weakness. They are a sign of responsiveness and of good management. And the Affordable Care Act does have its flaws. Here’s a big one: It favors screening over diagnosis.

While the distinction may seem arcane, it has real-world implications. Screening is what we offer to the well; it’s the effort to find abnormalities in those who do not have signs or symptoms of disease. Because screening is considered part of preventive care under the Affordable Care Act, it is provided at no charge.

Diagnosis is what we offer to those who do have signs or symptoms of disease. Because diagnosis is not preventive care, it is subject to deductibles and co-payments.

In other words: A woman over 40 can have a free screening mammogram. But if she notices a breast lump and goes to her doctor to have it evaluated, she’ll pay for a diagnostic mammogram. That could cost $300. So the woman at lower risk for cancer — the one with no signs or symptoms of the disease — has an incentive to be tested, while the woman at higher risk — the one with the lump — faces a disincentive.

Does that make any sense? No. But it could encourage women with breast lumps not to report their symptoms.
Just how crazy this is became apparent to me when a friend enrolled on the New Hampshire exchange. Melissa is a 50-something self-employed author. She chose to be screened for colon cancer using the test doctors are most certain lowers colon cancer mortality — annual fecal occult blood testing.

Melissa’s screening test was free under the Affordable Care Act. It was also positive — she had blood in her stool, meaning she was at higher risk to actually have colon cancer. Everyone agreed about the next step: a diagnostic colonoscopy, to figure out where the blood was coming from. That’s not free; it’s real money, thousands of dollars. But had she chosen the colonoscopy as her first screening test, it would have been free.

Melissa contacted her insurer, and a representative suggested she ask her gastroenterologist to resubmit the colonoscopy claim as preventive. Pressure on doctors to recode diagnostic tests as screening tests is the inevitable result of this “incentive mismatch” between screening and diagnosis. But it’s also fraud, and Melissa knew it was wrong.

The gastroenterologists already got one fix in the Affordable Care Act. At first, screening colonoscopy was free, but if the test found a polyp, it was correctly reclassified as a diagnostic procedure, and was subject to cost sharing. In February 2013, regulators fixed the problem, saying insurance companies must also make polyp removal during screening free, noting, “polyp removal is an integral part of a colonoscopy.”

It’s true: Subsequent interventions are an integral part of all screening. Were I a mammographer, I’d happily argue that additional mammographic views, ultrasounds, M.R.I.s and breast biopsies are all part of screening.
But if you notice a new breast lump, you pay.

I wish money wasn’t such a powerful incentive in medical care. But the economists are right: Incentives matter. Right now they favor lower risk patients (those being screened) over higher risk ones (those with signs and symptoms).

They also encourage a feeding frenzy among providers to recategorize diagnostic testing as screening. Free screenings were seen as a way to get people through the door and ideally to find and address problems before they become more dangerous and expensive.

But in practice, it may not work this way. Some hospitals offer free screening knowing full well that the costs will be more than made up for by all the subsequent services required. More testing, false alarms and overdiagnosis are all part of screening. And if you make it free, patients are less likely to give proper consideration to these potential harms — not to mention the potential for a lot of out-of-pocket costs down the line.

Here’s the fix: Eliminate the incentive mismatch between screening and diagnosis. Treat them equally. Melissa would share in the cost of her fecal occult blood test. (But at around $10 to $20, it’s still roughly one one-hundredth of the cost of a colonoscopy.)

We need people to consider medical care carefully, and that’s what cost sharing is all about. Patients already share costs on what is arguably the most important preventive service, treatment for really high blood pressure, and for procedures as necessary as setting a broken leg. Why would we treat a much closer call — screening — any different?
But if you think the need for this fix is evidence that the Affordable Care Act should be repealed, think again.

Melissa had a mammogram at age 29 because her doctor thought she felt a lump. It was just fibrous tissue, but as a result, insurance companies put a rider on her policy disqualifying her from coverage for breast cancer. That’s right: Before the Affordable Care Act, if she developed the cancer that leads to the most deaths among nonsmoking women, she would not have been covered. No one wants to go back there.

Got Cancer?

Well no you don’t or maybe you do. But how would you know?  Remember those people you trust to actually help you and give a damn?  Well they don’t.

I literally have run out of words to describe my anger with regards to this.  I don’t take any pleasure anymore exposing the depth of fraud and idiocy demonstrated by the Medical “profession” its becoming too distressing to read another story of heartbreak.

Former Ga. technician falsified mammogram reports

AP Photo: The Macon Telegraph, Beau Cabell

In this April 15, 2014 photo, Rachael Michelle Rapraeger, center, sits with her attorney, Floyd Buford, after Sharon Holmes, left, read her statement to a Houston County Superior Court, in Perry, Ga., during a sentencing hearing.

1 day ago  By KATE BRUMBACK of Associated Press

PERRY, Ga. (AP) — Sharon Holmes found a lump in her left breast quite by accident. At work one day as a high school custodian, her hand brushed up against her chest and she felt a knot sticking out. She was perplexed. After all, just three months earlier, she had been given an all-clear sign from her doctor after a mammogram.

A new mammogram in February 2010 showed she in fact had an aggressive stage 2 breast cancer. The horror of the discovery was compounded by the reason: The earlier test results she had gotten weren’t just read incorrectly. They were falsified.

She wasn’t alone in facing this news. The lead radiological technologist at Perry Hospital in Perry, a small community about 100 miles south of Atlanta, had for about 18 months been signing off on mammograms and spitting out reports showing nearly 1,300 women were clear of any signs of breast cancer or abnormalities.

Except that she was wrong. Holmes and nine other women were later shown to have lumps or cancerous tumors growing inside them.

AP Photo: The Macon Telegraph, Beau Cabell

Sharon Holmes.

Holmes said the discovery was horrific enough. With a son in his 20s and another in high school at the time, she trembled at the thought of leaving them without a mother. “To me, that meant a death sentence,” she said. She underwent successful surgery the month after the cancer was discovered to remove the lump from her breast and followed that with chemotherapy and radiation treatments.

Her breast has been cancer-free for four years and subsequent cancers found elsewhere, in her lymph nodes and thyroid, have been successfully treated. Now she just prays it doesn’t come back.

But to find out later that she had been deceived made it even worse. “I’m thinking I’m doing what I’m supposed to do, getting my tests done, and then I find out someone else isn’t doing their job,” Holmes told The Associated Press.

The tech, Rachael Rapraeger, pleaded guilty earlier this month to 10 misdemeanor charges of reckless conduct and one felony charge of computer forgery. She was sentenced to serve up to six months in a detention center, to serve 10 years on probation during which she can’t work in the health care field and to pay a $12,500 fine.

The reasons she gave were vague. She told police she had personal issues that caused her to stop caring about her job, that she had fallen behind processing the piles of mammogram films that stacked up. So she went into the hospital’s computer system, assumed the identities of physicians, and gave each patient a clear reading, an investigative report says. That allowed her to avoid the time-consuming paperwork required before the films are brought to a reading room for radiologists to examine, her lawyer Floyd Buford told the AP.

Her actions were uncovered in April 2010 after a patient who’d received a negative report had another mammogram three months later at another hospital that revealed she had breast cancer. As hospital staff began to investigate, it was determined that the doctor whose name was on the faulty report had not been at the hospital the day the report was filed. Rapraeger quickly confessed to her supervisor that she was responsible and was fired from her job about a week later, according to an investigator’s report.

Rapraeger told police she knew what she was doing wasn’t right, but that she didn’t consider the consequences until she realized a patient with cancer had been told her scan was clear.

She didn’t return a phone call from The Associated Press seeking comment. Her attorney said she feels great remorse about any pain that she caused.

Cary Martin, CEO of Houston Healthcare, which operates Perry Hospital, released a statement saying he is “pleased this component of Ms. Rapraeger’s unfortunate action is concluded” and declined to comment further.

Sara Bailey also received a false-negative report. By the time it was discovered, her breast cancer progressed to the point that doctors had to remove her entire breast rather than just going in and removing a lump, she said.

The surgery was successful and the cancer hasn’t returned, but Bailey carries a bitterness inside her that surfaces when she talks about her experience.

“I’m not hurting and I don’t think I have cancer, but I’m not a woman anymore,” the 80-year-old said, her eyes welling with tears and her voice catching as she talked about the loss of her breast.

AP Photo: Kate Brumback

Sara Bailey.

The emotional wound was opened again this month when Rapraeger received a sentence that Bailey saw as a slap on the wrist.

“I feel like we were thrown under the bus, and there will be an election day,” Bailey said, explaining that she plans to organize an effort to get Houston Judicial Circuit District Attorney George Hartwig voted out of office.

Hartwig said he understands how Bailey feels and knows some people think Rapraeger got off easy, but he said his office weighed the evidence in the case very carefully and concluded the plea was a fair outcome. Even though Rapraeger did make statements and admissions to police, they were too general to prove specific instances of wrongdoing, he said.

“Given the entirety of the case and the issues that were there, I really feel like we did the best we could do to get a measure of justice for these women,” he said, adding that it would have been even more disappointing if the case had gone to trial and she’d been found not guilty and walked out of there with no penalty.

For her part, Holmes, 49, has tried to move on, and testifying at Rapraeger’s sentencing helped with that.

“I wanted her to know I’m a person, not just a name on a paper,” she said.

But she’s still angry because lingering effects from her chemotherapy and radiation — treatments she said her doctors told her might not have been necessary if the cancer had been caught by the original mammogram — have kept her from returning to work as a high school janitor.

Like Bailey, she thought Rapraeger’s sentence was too light, and she was disappointed that Rapraeger didn’t speak in court, instead letting her attorney read a statement for her.

“If she had gotten up and at least said, ‘I’m sorry for what I did. I’m sorry these women had to go through this,’ that, to me, would have meant that she was truly sorry for what we went through,” Holmes said.

Mary Brown had a mammogram in August 2009. She was contacted by the hospital in May 2010 and told to come back for another. That one came back positive, and she had a mastectomy to remove her right breast. She considers herself lucky that she apparently had a slow-growing cancer and didn’t need to have chemotherapy or radiation.

Brown, a 78-year-old Jehovah’s Witness, credits her strong faith in God with helping her get through the ordeal and with helping her forgive Rapraeger.

“I don’t have any hard feelings about her. Whatever she did, she brought it on herself,” Brown said, though she conceded her relative good fortune might also be coloring her reaction. “Maybe if I had been dying sick from it I would feel different.”

Soft not Hard

And by that I mean your Penis, if you are a man or perhaps even a transgendered one, this could and will happen to you. Aging, it is a BITCH and by bitch I mean women with their needs and demands for sex. Or do they? We can never win with men. Either we want it or we don’t but regardless our libidos are the problem here and as Mike Huckabee said, we don’t need no stinking Government controlling or regulating that with this insurance and abortion nonsense. Of course Insurance has been paying for men’s problems for years as Viagra is covered and birth control not, but I guess that libido is not a problem nor that semen from that hard on.

Has Bill Gates found the perfect condom yet? His foundation was working on that along with the best type of porta potty and I haven’t heard about that yet either. Well food, water and survival are kinda more important and Bill is busy with his school reforms and other business and stuff.

And today I read this charming editorial about well the problem of impotence and the need for men to keep it hard. Apparently it is normal! Who knew that big Pharma would manipulate and find something normal to demonize and of course make an illness in which to prescribe unneeded drugs. Like the ADD crisis or whatever else this week they are peddling to the consumers to cure you of. I still love the Bi Polar Depression drug. That is my favorite. Yes I can see you at home going “shit, I am depressed and bi-polar how did they know? And that voice in my head is in fact NOT a commercial so I am going to tell my Doctor to prescribe me this that I self diagnosed from a commercial.”

Ah we Boomers we are just an ATM machine of disease that the Medical Industrial Complex is tapping into on an ever increasing basis.

But aside from the drugs and the reality that yes Johnny you are not going to be walking into every room with a 6 inch hard on at 74 there are other things that Doctor Liar won’t tell you; that he will then order more unneeded tests and in turn kill you with not kindness, Cancer.

This article discusses the fact that many CT scans are unnecessary and in fact dangerous. Shocking like the electric chair and as fatal.

Your Doctor will see you now and if not now later with secondary effects from the first visit.

Don’t Ask Your Doctor About ‘Low T’
By JOHN LA PUMA
FEB. 3, 2014

SANTA BARBARA, Calif. — A FUNNY thing has happened in the United States over the last few decades. Men’s average testosterone levels have been dropping by at least 1 percent a year, according to a 2006 study in The Journal of Clinical Endocrinology and Metabolism.

Testosterone appears to decline naturally with aging, but internal belly fat depresses the hormone further, especially in obese men. Drugs like steroids and opiates also lower testosterone, and it’s suspected that chemicals like bisphenol A (or BPA, commonly found in plastic food containers) and diseases like Type 2 diabetes play a role as well.

Men feel the loss. Clinical testosterone deficiency, which is variously defined as lower than 220 to 350 nanograms of testosterone per deciliter of blood serum, can cause men to lose sex drive and fertility. Their bone density often declines, and they may feel tired and experience hot flashes and sweats.

But “low T,” as the condition has been labeled, isn’t nearly as common as the drug ads for prescription testosterone would have you believe. Pharmaceutical companies have seized on the decline in testosterone levels as pathological and applicable to every man. They aim to convince men that common effects of aging like slowing down a bit and feeling less sexual actually constitute a new disease, and that they need a prescription to cure it. This is a seductive message for many men, who just want to feel better than they do, and want to give it a shot, literally.
The problem is that prescription testosterone doesn’t just give your T level a boost: it may also increase your risk of heart attack. It can add huge numbers of red blood cells to your bloodstream and shrink your testes. In some men, it increases aggression and irritability. Children who accidentally come in contact with the hormone can develop unwanted pubic hair and genital changes. Last week, a large study published in the journal PLoS ONE found that, within three months, taking the hormone doubled the rate of heart attacks in men 65 and older, as well as in younger men who had heart disease. The Food and Drug Administration has begun an investigation.

The number of testosterone prescriptions given to American men has tripled since 2001. Used clinically since 1937 and approved by the F.D.A. since 1953, testosterone is now administered in at least five forms, including patches, gels and injections. Three million prescriptions were written in 2012 for the market leader AndroGel alone. Sales of all testosterone-boosting drugs are estimated to have been $2 billion in 2012, and are projected to hit $5 billion by 2017.

Too many doctors are now writing testosterone prescriptions without even measuring the patient’s hormone levels, much less re-testing for confirmation and adjusting the dose after prescription. Up to a quarter of these prescriptions are dispensed without a blood test.

From a psychological perspective, this isn’t helping men. From a medical perspective, it’s devastating. In addition to the cardiac risks, prescription T can mean a permanent shut-off in men’s own, albeit diminished, testosterone production. In other words, once you start, you may well be hooked for life.

Instead of heading to the pharmacy to get their fix, men should address the leading cause of the problem. Losing weight is a tried and true way to naturally boost testosterone levels. According to findings presented at the annual meeting of the Endocrine Society in 2012, obese men who lost an average of 17 pounds saw their testosterone levels increase by 15 percent. In general, a man’s waist should be half his height.

Some diet changes may be useful for reasons other than just weight loss. If you drink too much booze, switch to water — alcohol lowers testosterone levels. Eating more cruciferous vegetables like broccoli and collard greens can also help, by blunting the effects of estrogen in a man’s body. At the end of the day, eating more of the right foods and fewer junk foods improves mood and energy — which may be the only fix many men need.
In the 1990s and early 2000s, middle-aged women went through their own hormone trial, taking synthetic prescription estrogen and progesterone to treat the symptoms of menopause, among other reasons. But by 2002 we knew that those hormones raised the risk of stroke, heart disease, life-threatening blood clots and invasive breast cancer in healthy women.

Luckily, we don’t have to wait 12 more years to learn about the risks of testosterone in healthy men. Men have been drugged by overprocessed foods and gender-bending chemicals like BPA. The last thing they need now is a prescription for a risky drug to treat a trumped-up disease.

Year End Extravaganza!

As the hysteria surrounding the Obamageddon comes to a close, there are winners, losers and everyone in between. 

It is clear that Insurance is the big winner here and as they wrote the onerous part of the 1000 page bill it would be only fair.  Of course Big Pharma wins as most medicine consists of well medicine so get those Prescription pads ready Doctors.

And the loser are the medical device makers as they are now taxed for what ostensibly seems to be useless equipment being installed in the lab rats, whoops I mean patients for costs that seem to vary from place to place, town to town, effectiveness and necessity seem consistently crap however so there is at least that constant.  Read this article on knee surgeries as an example.

And lastly the GOP whine brigade that were sure that this largely Republican bill that is nearly identical to the one put in place by their boy, Mitt Romney, when he was Governor of Massachusetts.  But hey he lost so let’s not get in line with some loser now.

The chips are still out with regards to Obamacare, the deadlines that keep moving and the ever increasing confusion but hey eventually it will all work out or not, I mean really as long as the Medical Industrial Complex doesn’t lose too much its all good.  Or is it.  Ask those whose insurance was canceled and seemingly are confused by the process (this includes me).  Hey but the bitch in charge of the plan is retiring.  I wonder on full benefits?

It seems they are racing to make the finish line with the new coding and required electronic medical records as per Medicare and Medicaid is needing to ensure that those fraudulent reimbursements keep coming.  The article about the new medical codes is here.

I say fraudulent because it is already well known that if there is a will there is a way when it comes to Physicians cooking those books like they cook those diagnosis.   And the new confusing and complex coding systems will ensure that if you come in with a bruise you will leave with a hematoma as those cost more.  Group Health here in Seattle currently has in place a coding system that actually prompts the user inputting the diagnosis to upgrade, sort of like when you go in for shoes and they bring you 3 pairs.  This system asks if you are sure that is what you mean or do you mean something more complex and in turn more costly.  Its all win win for the software writers as they have too figured out how to gauge the system to ensure that the insured will always be on the receiving end of bigger bills and less care.

And lastly today there was a cover story about how India is circumventing the patent holds that Big Pharma uses to manipulate drugs, their costs and in turn their availability.  Nothing says winner more than charging more for drugs that could save lives and make people healthy. Then where would the Medical Industrial Complex be if we were all healthy. 

The irony is that much of this patent issue came to fruition under the Clinton Administration. While he was hanging out with Bono to get AIDS drugs to Africa, he made sure that anyone else was not so lucky. Shame another celebrity couldn’t find some other color, say Blue, to help those in need for equally expensive and necessary drugs.  Well the streets have no name when no fame or checks are attached.

There are so many things that Clinton seems to regret I wonder if that is why he wants Hilary to run so he can go on the equivalent of the AA apology tour to make amends?  

And  there is this op ed piece in the Times also today about Breast Cancer screening and that just maybe just maybe it does more harm than good.  Yes shocking, I know.

And finally, yes I have a final point.  There is this article about the ADHD drug obsession and that it too might actually be a lot of smoke, no mirrors and well also doing more harm than good.  Yes, I am shocked again too!   My hair needed some extra body so its all good.

I am exhausted living in a country that has seemingly decided that facts, knowledge seeking and makes decisions by reacting versus acting upon the truth and facts that they should be seeking but simply can’t or won’t.  I am not sure but I am sure that there are those who feel differently and I am grateful that they are here and no Mulder I am not alone although it feels that way.

A Dose of STFU is Needed

I am worn out with the Pitt-Jolie family and need to disclose their personal dramas, illnesses and other provocations that seem to run in them and their ilk – celebrities.  If Pitt-Jolie were anything like Taylor-Burton and their day then I might actually be interested and care but sadly no.

First Angelina Jolie’s “revelation” about her genetic link to breast cancer and her decision to deform herself and then in turn restore  herself.  

This issue has been well discussed, debated and digressed and I have nothing more to lend any of it.  I am mystified why anyone thinks this will help anyone? Did she not realize that the majority of Americans go bankrupt due to large medical bills and that many individuals and families are finding themselves challenged from working due to the debt collections as a result of these bills? Or that many families despite the new Affordable Care Act will still be without Medical Insurance as their States refuse to expand the Medicare program?  Or that despite many families who have insurance the overall cost of care is rising to put it well beyond their reach.  Well no she is busy being the Mia Farrow of this generation and an uninteresting one as well.  Well maybe one of the kids will end up marrying Brad and then I am on board.

Now we have another revelation from Brad Pitt.  Brad may end up actually doing so as now he has some disorder from recognizing faces. Really wasn’t that Chanel ad shameful enough?  The Esquire article alone is hilarious.  Hey it might just be the drugs and damage to the brain there dude.  Clearly the family has enough money for medical help and undoubtedly a Neurologist would be happy to scan him.

Honestly I am beginning to think Jeremy Irons is more sane and he thinks gay marriage will be a sham for fathers to marry their sons for tax purposes.  Have you seen Jeremy’s son?  I would happily marry him in the church of Apple in Ireland for no reason. Well maybe tax reasons, it seems to work there.

We have real problems in this country and the world that should for all intensive purposes take precedent but as long as there are celebrities who care to over share while also demanding privacy I have no doubt we will be on the receiving end. 

I apologize for my rants today on celebrities, real ones or otherwise, but in some way I feel it is further confusing people and causing more harm than good.  We idolize people for money or fame and I wonder if we know even why anymore?  It is as if we have given up on respecting people for their roles and contributions to society and the greater good.