SURVIVING HEALTHCARE

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CHAPTER 2: I WAS WRONG ABOUT HEALTHCARE.

2021-02-2615:03

Chapter 2, Butchered by "Healthcare."For at least half of healthcare, the potential benefit does not outweigh the harm. For a lot of the rest, supporting evidence that it works is lacking. A review of over 5000 articles recommends against many of today’s standard practices. The list below introduces some of the topics in this book, the worst failures of healthcare, in rough order of wasted resources. The opioid disaster, now killing 50,000 people a year in the US, is not even in the top ...

CHAPTER 3: HOW HEALTHCARE WAS RUINED.

2021-02-2620:31

Chapter 3 of Butchered by "Healthcare"Healthcare costs started growing nearly exponentially when social support programs and private insurance fueled it in the 1960s. US costs are now $4 trillion (2020), almost a fifth of our gross domestic product (GDP), and twice what other developed countries are paying per capita. Our medical sector spends more than the total revenues of banking ($477 billion), oil and gas ($181 billion), and military ($600-800 billion). We spend more on healthcare t...

CHAPTER 4: INDUSTRY SEDUCES DOCTORS.

2021-02-2620:31

Chapter 4 of Butchered by "Healthcare."How could physicians have allowed this to happen? No doctor I know started with the idea of money above patients. We all wrote that essay in school about how we wanted to save the world. But we are now pawns of moneyed interests, and we often betray our patients’ trust. The best marketers on the planet are spending billions of dollars trying to get us to channel whatever resources we control towards their companies. We know this, yet we still connec...

CHAPTER 5: BIG PHARMA PROLOGUE.

2021-02-2603:14

Chapter 5 of Butchered by "Healthcare."The US is a nation of pill poppers. According to Bloomberg, nearly half of us take prescription drugs. The Mayo Clinic (2013) puts this figure even higher, a whopping 70%, with 20% of Americans taking five or more (verified by the Centers for Disease Control in 2019). This is absurd and obviously damaging, but doctors do not get it. How could this have happened, and who is responsible?LINKS TO LEARN MORE:Listen to another podcast about my whole book Butc...

CHAPTER 6: DRUGMAKERS GET AWAY WITH ANYTHING.

2021-02-2620:35

Chapter 6 of Butchered by "Healthcare." Pharmaceutical corporations violate more criminal laws than any industry in history, as measured by their criminal settlements. The top 22 drugmaker payoffs since 2004 have their own Wikipedia page of shame.Peter Rost, former Pfizer marketing vice president, compared the drugmakers to mobsters:It’s scary how many similarities there are between this industry and the mob… obscene amounts of money… killings and deaths… [bribing] politicians and other...

CHAPTER 7: “THE FDA PROTECTS THE BIG DRUG COMPANIES.”

2021-02-2615:00

Chapter 7 of Butchered by "Healthcare."Well over half of the FDA revenue is paid directly from the pharmaceutical companies in the form of "user fees". These are incurred during the drug approval process. If drugs aren't approved, the FDA might have to lay off employees. This is only one example of the problems. These and other conflicts of interest make the FDA's supervision of big Pharma unreliable. LINKS TO LEARN MORE:Listen to another podcast about my whole book Butchered by Healthca...

CHAPTER 8: DISEASE-MONGERING & BOGUS CURES

2021-02-2728:53

I want to sell drugs to everyone. I want to sell drugs to healthy people. I want drugs to sell like chewing gum.Henry Gadsden, former CEO of Merck, which developed some of the first medications that patients needed to take indefinitely, including the statin Mevacor (lovastatin) (1976)We expect hucksterism about the benefits of cars, clothes, and beauty treatments. But it surprises us when it comes from the medical industry, which uses identical marketing tricks. They frighten us with diseases...

CHAPTER 9: PHARMA’S MARKETING AND BULLYING

2021-02-2717:17

We overpay the big pharmaceutical corporations for their drugs with tax and insurance funds, and then they use the money to carpet-bomb the Internet and media with marketing. They hijack legitimate advocacy groups and charities into this process with massive donations. They create some of these organizations out of whole cloth to promote sales. Direct-to-consumer ads blanket the media. These are illegal almost everywhere else in the world. The corporations promote virtually any drug that...

CHAPTER 10: DIRTY TRICKS DRIVE SALES

2021-02-2724:27

Healthcare is not a free market. Gaming the licensing and patent system creates monopolies and can raise prices even for older drugs. Artificial shortages of vital medications increase their cost. Stalling in court with imaginative lawsuits lengthen patent monopolies. Litigation is also used to intimidate any individual or corporation that stands in a company’s way. Lawyers’ bills are modest expenses when a drug’s revenues are in the billions. LINKS TO LEARN MORE:Listen to another podcast abo...

CHAPTER 11: OPIOIDS AND “PAIN MANAGEMENT”

2021-02-2726:54

Introduction. By 2019, opioids were killing approximately 50,000 US citizens a year, up from 8,000 in 1999. This is more deaths than firearms (33,000), breast cancer (41,000), HIV (15,000), or motor vehicle accidents (37,000). In 2018-2019, the total fatalities exceeded our combined combat deaths in Iraq, Vietnam, and Afghanistan. Until recently, prescription rather than street opioids caused the most deaths. The per capita fatalities differ in each state, suggesting that local factors such a...

CHAPTER 12: EVERYONE TAKES AMPHETAMINES

2021-02-2729:00

We used to have a name for sufferers of ADHD. We called them boys.AnonymousBackground: For opioids, the deaths, addiction, and social destruction are the drug industry’s fault—there is no controversy. There is now an anemic effort to fine and sometimes imprison a handful of people who were partly responsible for the death of more individuals than most wars. There is no consensus, however, for the closely related situation of amphetamines and similar stimulants, possibly because there are...

CHAPTER 13: GENERICS: GOOD, BAD, OR FAKE?

2021-02-2719:07

We have allowed our patent drugmakers to gouge us so thoroughly that we can no longer afford their products. The result is that ninety percent of America’s medications are now generics. Until recently, I believed that these were practically equivalent to the brand names, but it stunned me to learn I was wrong. Generics are not exact copies of trade-name drugs. The manufacturers do not have the original recipe, and production outside the brand factories tends to be less careful. Overseas,...

CHAPTER 14: PATIENT TIPS: SURVIVAL IN DRUG WORLD

2021-02-2712:55

Drug World is a shocking place. We must face this unpleasant reality if we do not want to surrender our health to corporate marketers. Few doctors understand and fewer admit that our system is nearly anarchy. Inside the Pharma companies, the denial is even deeper. They have hundreds of thousands of nice, well-meaning, and even idealistic people. Peter Rost explains in his book Whistleblower (2006) how group behavior and peer pressure transform these ordinary individuals into a criminal hive, ...

CHAPTER 15: INTRODUCTION: LIVING ON PLANET PSYCH

2021-02-2704:11

Most physicians view psychiatrists as somewhat feral animals. We suspect—with some justification—that many of their ideas are hot air. Unlike any other specialty, psychiatrists take care of people with normal labs and radiologic tests. They keep only patients with purely subjective problems. Psychiatrists pass patients who have “organic” issues such as thyroid disease to others. These are the ones with identifiable physical signs, symptoms, and tests. Likewise, psychiatrists base treatment ou...

CHAPTER 16: “PSYCHIATRY IS IN DEEP CRISIS”

2021-03-3021:48

How modern psychiatry developed: A few decades ago, psychiatrists were losing their status. Then, the fabrication of new diagnoses along with the invention of medications to treat them saved them economically. First the antidepressants, and then the newer antipsychotics came to the rescue. This moved the specialty into the medical mainstream because the psychiatrists were the only ones who purportedly understood it all. The novel diagnoses—some say concoctions—were enshrined in the psych...

Chapter 17: PROZAC AND RELATIVES

2021-03-3015:52

The medical profession is being bought by the pharmaceutical industry, not only in terms of the practice of medicine, but also in terms of teaching and research. The academic institutions of this country are allowing themselves to be the paid agents of the pharmaceutical industry. Arnold Relman, MD, former editor NEJM (2002)I wrote about a thousand Prozac-type SSRI prescriptions over my career, which might have been a half-million dollars in drug sales. I screened my patients, as I was t...

Chapter 37 YOUR PERSONAL HEALTHCARE PHILOSOPHY

2021-04-2907:42

Medicine has become a pseudo-religion; our patients must be gently encouraged into apostasy and renunciation... [We have all] been enslaved by the medical–industrial complex, and it is time we rebelled. Society needs to reach a new accommodation with old age and death.Seamus O’Mahony, Can Medicine Be Cured (2019)Here is the silver lining: when you better understand your fragile life and the limitations of medicine, you will avoid getting sucked into a lot of useless nonsense. ...

chapter 25 THE PROSTATE CANCER MEAT GRINDER

2021-07-2712:00

Every great cause begins as a movement, becomes a business, and eventually degenerates into a racket.Eric HofferUrology’s approach to this disease has undergone an embarrassing outing. The specialty traditionally recommends that the surgeon draw blood for prostate-specific antigen (PSA). The urologists also insert their finger into the patient's rectum to feel for prostate lumps.If the blood test is high, or the surgeon feels nodules, they stick a large needle repeatedly through the rectum in...

WHY COVID IS SO HARD TO UNDERSTAND--YOU JUST CAN’T MAKE THIS STUFF UP

2021-10-1617:48

If you already know a lot and want to cut to the chase, see HERE.Butchered by “Healthcare,” my book about healthcare corruption, took me three years to research and write. Even with this background, it was September 2021 before I understood Covid, the vaccine frauds, and why therapies were being hidden. So I am not critical of people who don’t get it yet. My mission is to explain the scene for those who do not have my training. The following is well understood in hospitals, even by...

LIVING THE DREAM PODCAST: HOW I CAME TO THIS PLACE IN MY LIFE

2021-12-0633:47

I now do about a podcast a day, and this is an example I did in October 2021. This young podcaster did a great job of interviewing me. It is a broad-ranging discussion about hormones, medical corruption, COVID, vaccine frauds, and the therapies that are witheld. Support the Show.

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