Government Subsidized Medicine Bankrupt Hospitals

Hospitals are now government subsidized monopolies. They have little to do with improving the health of patients but have everything to do with dispensing pharmaceutical industry drugs and treatments. The net result is that small and rural hospitals must merge into mega facilities in order to achieve economy of scale or close altogether because fewer Americans can afford health insurance coverage. Federal and State subsidizes are mounting in a futile attempt to pay for the deficits that arise in providing medical costs for an aging population. This formula has only one outcome, BANKRUPTCY.

At the core of the failed medical culture is the reliance on chemical compounds plagued by dire side effect prescriptions and marketed as miracle drugs. Often the only marvel is that a patient does not die quicker. In order to achieve a healthy lifestyle, the food diet and digested requires a fundamental revamping of what is eaten, how it is processed and most important, what to avoid.

This approach conflicts with the incessant drive to create even bigger bureaucracies and more complex regulations and requirements for access to medical services.

Basing this system on an insurance model guarantees insolvency of a private sector delivery system. Government is all too eager to assume (using their flawed general welfare claim) that schemes like Medicare, Medicaid and Obamacare are necessary to pay for and provide medical coverage. The fact that this argument simply does not work should be self-evident.

Hospitals project that their form of treatments are proven. The problem is that their notion of tested practices usually ends up in a body bag. Government funding for Ayurvedic, Homeopath, Massage therapist, Hypnotherapist, Naturopath and Osteopath physicians/practitioner are usually outside the protective cocoon of the administrative boards and foundations connected with medical citadels.

Therapy using alternative methods demand that a sick person or one seeking treatment for some illness mostly pay out of pocket. Around 40 percent of Americans lacked dental insurance at the end of 2012, according to the National Association of Dental Plans. That’s compared to 12.9 percent without health insurance, according to the latest figures from Gallup – May 20, 2015.

If the consumer was actually paying with their own funds for the services and fees administered, the marketplace of costs would be much more responsive to a real or perceived benefit. Hospitals for outpatient care add substantial expense and ridiculous administrative overhead for procedures that have been drive up by the excessive rate amounts approved by government programs.

Medical treatment demands a negotiated agreement between the patient and those who practice the art/science of healing. In this age of the breakdown in rational medical delivery, the unsustainable fiasco of the Patient Protection and Affordable Care Act has destroyed the last refuge of even the appearance of cost-effective medicine.

Only a repudiation of the bloated and unaccountable government oversight administration has even a slight chance to establishing a market based relationship between patient invoicing and effective and reduced costs for services.

Hospitals could rent out physical space, labs, examination rooms and treatment facilities to independent physicians or practitioners who would apply their expertise in consultation with the patient. Charges for such services would be the responsibility of those suffering from an illness. In this manner a balance in the relationship that reflects an agreed to value would have the effect to keep invoicing realistic.

Government subsidies only drive up costs. Mega hospitals by consolidating and closing down their rivals add layers of bureaucratic inefficiency and unaccountability, while diminishing choice for treatment with every closing or liquidation.

If patients added up the cumulative billing for hospital, doctor and prescription drugs, and paid such bills with their own funds; they surely would become educated consumers. Saving from opting out of medical insurance would accumulate over the years and grow for the time when such funds might be needed to satisfy whatever treatment option is sought.

The myth that society has a responsibility to make available whatever treatment procedure to cure, prolong or experiment using government funds has guaranteed that national bankruptcy is the inevitable prognosis. Fostering the conditions that close hospital competition is simply developing the “too big to fail” theory applied to medical treatment.

And where is the doctor outrage in this formula? Lawsuit fights “existential threat” to medical staff independence illustrates the trend to squeeze out the last blood dollar from the artificial and government sponsored hospital model.

“The suits stems from actions taken Jan. 26, 2016, when the Tulare Regional Medical Center (TRMC) board of directors voted to terminate the hospital’s medical staff organization and effectively remove the hospital’s elected medical staff officers, install a slate of appointed officers, and approve new medical staff bylaws and rules drafted without staff input.

Except for the newly appointed officers, the rest of the staff was then terminated, stripped of their rights as active members and then granted “provisional” status as part of the new medical staff which they had not applied or consented to membership with, according to a post-trial brief filed by the TRMC Medical Staff.

The replacement bylaws also contained a provision, since amended, that physicians could achieve and maintain “active” status by proving their economic value to the hospital, according to the brief—which described that provision as “basically, an illegal kickback scheme.”

“If you could imagine hospital medical staff bylaws written by hospital lawyers, this is what they would look like,” Do said. “Doctors shouldn’t be making decisions on patient care based on hospital profitability.”

The net result is to force out the regional, rural or independent facilities and structure the supra corporate hospital into a partnership with government, where other clinics need not apply. This Is not exactly a M*A*S*H, medical emergency unit, but more closely resembles a sanatorium of demented technocrats. Save health services by converting them into alternative medicine facilities. Cancel your health insurance and start saving to pay for a future illness. Get government out of the health care business and return sanity so the sick can decide just what treatment they want.

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The Modern Physician: A Glorified Applied Pharmacologist?

I snapped this picture on the way to the grocery store the other day, and was struck by how perfectly the ‘thousand words’ it spoke matched up with my opinion on what people should do if ever they are tempted to visit a pharmacy for anything other than necessary items, such as a nail file or diapers, namely: STOP!

Why am I so repugnant to the concept of frequenting these dispensary institutions? The fact that they not only sell cigarettes, but feature them at the front counter, forcing those who may actually need a pill or two to hobble all the way to the back to fetch them, figures somewhere into my sentiment.  The fact that they are proliferating like metastatic nodules in any area with a population sufficiently sick and/or over-medicated enough to support one (and sometimes two!) on each and every block, has something to do with the way I feel as well.

But are the pharmacies really to blame? They largely fill orders placed by…

The Modern Day Physician: A Glorified, Applied Pharmacologist

Ok, so we have billions of pounds of synthetic chemicals consumed every year as patented drugs, with an army of degreed, licensed and doctored foot soldiers prescribing them recklessly under the once great banner of “medicine,” in an ongoing war against the body’s virtually infinite capability to generate symptoms, most of which are – ironically – attempts to heal from acute or chronic exposure to synthetic chemicals.

This situation didn’t happen overnight, mind you. Over 250 years ago, Voltaire penned these words, which still ring so true today:

Doctors are men who prescribe medicines of which they know little, to cure diseases of which they know less, in human beings of whom they know nothing. — Francois Marie Arouet Voltaire (1760)

Really, the modern day physician has transmogrified into a technician of the body-as-machine (a 500 year old, dead “Cartesian” concept, mind you), and is practicing what can best be described as a glorified form of applied pharmacology.

While administering xenobiotic chemicals to people is a valid discipline, with life-saving potential in extreme cases where a poison is needed to whack an over-stimulated system back away from the edge of self-destruction (which is why mercury and lead were used as medicines in ancient times, as well), applied pharmacology is not medicine, which is to say a discipline concerned with the healing of the body, or better yet, facilitating bodily self-healing; nor is the doctor any longer an educator, rather, more a well-paid appendage of the global fine chemicals, biologics and pharmaceuticals industries, directing the secretion of their product in such a way as to maximize profit, limit liability, and suppress the patient symptoms without (hopefully) killing them in the process.

So, where does that leave us? The amorphous, unlicensed, non-expert, mass of lay-persons, who by virtue of bodily incarnation will at some point or another need to address and/or resolve a symptom of disease, but who do not have the wherewithal, or even a legal right to make treatment decisions for themselves, (e.g. medical marijuana) or their loved ones (e.g. mandatory vaccines & chemotherapy).

The Physician As The Priest of the Body

Most of us, either from the moment of birth (usually in a hospital, and not the ideal way: at home with a midwife), or from infanthood onward, are enculturated to perceive the medical doctor as the “priest of the body,” solely capable and legally empowered to determine the course of life and death, both in times of health and mortal illness. Indeed, the original meaning of the word doctor comes from “Church father” (medieval French) or “religious teacher” (Latin), and still today, they elicit an unquestioning faith in their authority that defies reason, especially considering how many patients they kill from correctly prescribed medicine each year — 106,000 a year, according to a 1998 meta-analysis published in JAMA.

The modern-day drug-based medical dictatorship and its overarching power structure has a cult-like hold on those who take its two most lauded sacraments: the pharmakeia (Greek word behind pharmaceutical meaning “pill, potion, charm, sorcery, sacrifice, poison”), and ritual vaccinations.

I believe the best way to break the spell is by using the holy grail of the conventional medical model itself, namely: the peer-reviewed, published “scientific evidence,” and particularly those studies which support natural approaches to disease prevention and treatment; and by using that information, both to inform our choices, as well as defend them when they are under intellectual or regulatory assault., we can continue to choose foods, spices, herbs, fresh air, exercise, good company, laughter, etc. as our health care without the specter of scientism or medical monotheism forcing us into its drug- and injection-based model of compulsory treatment.

Utilize The Research You’ve Already Paid For

GreenMedInfo.com exists primarily in order to index, aggregate and disseminate the positive findings on natural – farm-acological – substances that can be found within the ocean of research produced by the biomedical research and publishing industries, whose primary funding sources are Big Pharma, and its handmaiden, world governments, who are increasingly co-opted by billions of dollars of lobbying money, and who are now populated by an army of their former executives, business employees and partners.

World governments, in fact, have even underwritten the risks associated with the countless vaccine-associated injuries that occur every year by virtually eliminating the liabilities of the manufacturers, and those public and private organizations that aggressively promote their use; this, despite the glaring lack of evidence for their purported effectiveness. Private insurers know the epidemic of vaccine-associated injuries is so extensive (e.g. autism) that they stand to lose everything for betting on that horse.

So, considering that YOU have paid for the research, both through government taxation, and the exorbitantly high drug mark-ups (cancer drugs may be as high as 500,000% from cost) that increasingly defraud the public both of their health and their wealth, it is only fitting that you take ownership of it.  In the mad rush to find “lead compounds” from natural sources in order to develop patented, synthetic analogues, Big Pharma has generated – inadvertently – a mountain of evidence supporting the value, if not also the superiority of natural substances vis-à-vis their would-be drug equivalents.

Take our cancer research page, as an example. We have indexed 2600 studies straight from the public domain (NLM’s Medline) on the anti-cancer activity of over 600 natural substances. Remarkably, some of these have potent activity against drug and multi-drug resistant cancers and cancer stem-cells, which are at the root of why modern chemotherapy and radiation treatments not only fail but cause greater malignancy post-treatment.

Were any of these compounds patentable, they would likely have received attention, and some the requisite 800+ million dollars of funding needed to produce the multi-phased human clinical trials the FDA requires before considering drug approval. The fact that the MONEY, and not the intrinsic potential of  a substance to heal, determines whether it will be brought to market, that is, be used to alleviate the suffering of the sick, is a disturbing fact.

Ultimately, it is to our gardens, our spice racks and local markets that we must go to obtain, maintain and sustain our health. We hope that the 19,000 study abstracts on our site, which are available for everyone to view in their entirety, will encourage people to see that farmaceuticals and not (p)harmaceuticals are the future of medicine, if there is to be a future to medicine. Please share the research housed on GreenMedInfo.com with others in need, so our work will not have been performed in vain. Also, if you have not already, please take a look at our turmeric research below for a better understanding of what our project is all about…

© April 1, 2018 GreenMedInfo LLC. This work is reproduced and distributed with the permission of GreenMedInfo LLC. Want to learn more from GreenMedInfo? Sign up for the newsletter here http://www.greenmedinfo.com/greenmed/newsletter.

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True Healing: Beyond “Managing”, “Treating” And “Curing” A Disease

True healing occurs at deep levels. It integrates and makes whole. It is beyond just “managing”, “treating” or “curing” disease, and unless they change their perspective, it will continue to be beyond Big Pharma and Western medicine too.

True healing and true health are deep concepts which by their very definition imply oneness and unity (the word heal is etymologically derived from various words such as the Old English hælan meaning “to make whole”). True healing includes the many levels within you beyond just the physical – the integration of the emotional, sexual, mental, spiritual and other selves or layers. True healing is far beyond just “managing”, “treating” and “curing” disease, which Big Pharma and its lapdog the FDA like to focus so exclusively upon. Western medicine has its place in society as an excellent tool for specialized surgical or other emergency interventions – however it came into being from the Rockefeller-Big Pharma cartel, whose business model thrives on repeat customers who can’t get off the hamster wheel of drug after drug after drug. On a deeper level, is it really any wonder that Western medicine can’t deliver true healing, when its approach is narrow and materialistic, rather than broad and holistic – when it’s fixated on managing, treating and curing, rather than healing?

Big Pharma and Western Medicine: Hooked on “Treating” Disease

Hooked on “treating” disease, but not going any further.

If you’re wondering where the notion of “treating” come from, look no further than the FDA-mandated disclaimer that many natural health and holistic practitioners and companies are forced to use on their products. It states that “this product is not intended to diagnose, treat, cure or prevent any disease” because only a drug can legally make such a claim. And, in a great example of FDA circular logic, if a substance does have an effect on the human body such as preventing or curing a disease – then it must be drug and not a food!

Guess what? The moment something becomes a drug and not a food, it’s regulated differently. If you’re a producer of a food that wants to state its natural effects on the body, now you have to jump through all sorts of expensive hoops just to state the truth. This is despite the fact that scientific studies have shown, for instance, that cherries have a positive effect on gout and arthritis, coconut oil on Alzheimer’s, and turmeric, spirulina, graviola/soursop on cancer. It is an upside-down, outrageous situation where people are being silent about the clear and scientifically provable effects of foods and other natural medicines out of fear of being sued into poverty, taken down or taken out. Ignorant people defend the Big Pharma system by claiming it’s backed by “science”; meanwhile, insiders and experts state categorically that most scientific research is fraudulent, and most science is actually corporate junk science that is paid to produce the results its funders want.

Managing Disease: A Big Pharma Specialty

True healing has nothing to do with disease management, Big Pharma style.

The truth is that managing disease is a Big Pharma specialty. The most profitable customers are those patients who are going to be reliant on prescription drugs – just to exist – for the rest of their lives. In those cases it’s all about managing disease. How interesting that the word itself management is a very corporate word. Another aspect of the managing of disease is all the unnecessary (but very fancy and impressive sounding) testing that is done to people, under the guise of “early detection”. In his revealing book Confessions of a Medical Heretic, Dr. Robert Mendolsohn quotes an article entitled “Cleveland’s Marvelous Medical Factory” which boasted of the Cleveland Clinic’s “accomplishments last year: 2,980 open-heart operations, 1.3 million laboratory tests, 73,320 electrocardiograms, 7,770 full-body x-ray scans, 24,368 surgical procedures.”

Seems wonderful … except for the very obvious point that none of these procedures has been proven to have anything to do with restoring health or true healing. When people get screened for a disease, they are being subjected to dangerous radiation (more money for the Rockefellers) which harms tissue and can end up causing the exact disease it is supposed to be protecting against – as happens daily with the mammogram scam, designed to drum up new breast cancer clients.

Healing vs. Curing

Healing vs curing: there is a difference. Healing takes into account the energetic and holographic nature of our body and reality.

At this stage you may be thinking: well, Big Pharma and Western medicine do a lot of “managing” and “treating”, but aren’t they also in the business of “curing”? Yes – but even in this case, Western medicine is falling short of the ultimate goal of healing. Curing a disease and healing a disease are different things. As this website Healing Through The Arts states:

“Curing is what medical science attempts to do through medication, treatment and external intervention. It usually is the result of a series of treatments that hopefully lead to an event – the absence of disease.

Healing is an internal process you do for yourself. Healing restores the balance and harmony to the body, mind and spirit. It can be done without a cure. Healing activities are essential when the negative influences of illness, loss or life changes encompass your life.”

The website MindBodyGreen states:

“Curing is a restoration of health, an absence of symptoms, and a remedy of disease. Healing, on the other hand, is a restoration of wholeness — not the level of wholeness before the diagnosis, but a restoration of wholeness that is new, different, and comparatively better than before the onset of disease. Healing is not the removal or cessation of symptoms, but rather an integrative process that transcends the physical and includes mental, emotional, and spiritual vitality and wellness.”

Others have defined curing as the “elimination of all evidence of disease” and healing as “becoming whole”. There are many ways to conceive and verbalize the difference between curing and healing, but the overall point is that healing is a deeper concept which includes the understanding that we are not just physical beings. If we want to attain true health, we must address all the levels of our being. Often a “disease” is merely an outer physical manifestation of a psychological, energetic or spiritual blockage which is taking place at a much deeper level.

Big Pharma has (rightly) been accused of making drugs that just mask symptoms without healing the underling cause. In many cases, they transfer the disease or imbalance from one part of the body to another. From a holistic perspective, this is only minorly helpful or not helpful at all, because as long as you have some imbalance, you’ve still got a health problem you have to deal with. So, even if Big Pharma actually cures your disease, rather than just treating it or managing it, you still aren’t really at a place of true healing, or real health and balance. If the cause of your disease is happening on an energetic level, how can drugs, surgery or radiation ever address it?

Towards True Healing

In conclusion, if you want true healing, look at all aspects of your entire life. Are you indulging in negative thought patterns? Are you involved in toxic relationships? Are you getting the right type, frequency and duration of exercise? Are you sleeping well? Is your lifestyle too sedentary? Are you allowing questionable food items into your diet? How are you dealing with stress? Even if you are doing a good job on most of these, being weak in one of these areas may be enough to throw your system off balance and lead to disease. We’re all on a journey of remembering our true selves, and reclaiming our wholeness through true healing is an inseparable part of it.

Sources:

Western Medicine is Rockefeller Medicine – All The Way

http://www.fda.gov/Food/DietarySupplements/QADietarySupplements/ucm191930.htm#FDA_oversight

http://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pubmed/?term=cherry+arthritis

http://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pubmed/?term=coconut+oil+alzheimers

http://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pubmed/?term=turmeric+cancer

http://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pubmed/?term=spirulina+cancer

http://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pubmed/?term=soursop+graviola+cancer

Most Scientific Research of Western Medicine Untrustable & Fraudulent, Say Insiders and Experts

The Top 10 Tricks Used by Corporate Junk Science

http://www.whale.to/vaccines/mendelsohn2.html

http://www.naturalnews.com/027641_mammograms_breast_cancer.html

http://www.htta.org/curing-vs-healing

http://www.mindbodygreen.com/0-7961/whats-the-difference-between-healing-and-curing.html

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Western Medicine Is Rockefeller Medicine – All The Way

Western medicine has some good points, for sure, and is great in an emergency, but it’s high time people realized that today’s mainstream medicine (western medicine or allopathy), with its focus on drugs, radiation and surgery, is at its foundation a Rockefeller creation. The Rockefellers, of course, are one of the most rich and powerful families of the elite black nobility. Behind their spurious façade of philanthropy, they are power-hungry tyrants intent on owning the entire world, and depopulating it through eugenics-based programs like forced sterilization, water fluoridation, abortions and vaccinations. They have either majorly or fully created (and still dominate) the United Nations, the World Health Organization, the Council on Foreign Relations, the Trilateral Commission, Planned Parenthood and many, many other organizations that either rule the world or influence culture to a large extent.

Despite the dominance of western medicine nowadays, even just 100 years ago the situation was very different, so it’s worthwhile casting our minds back to how the we got to this place. How did western medicine and the giant conglomerate of multinational pharmaceutical corporations (“Big Pharma”) become the mainstream medical system in the US and other first world nations? And what alternatives are there?

Petroleum Drugs

Let’s go back in time to the late 1800s. John D. Rockefeller, a man quoted to have said “competition is sin”, is the head of the Rockefeller family and has just become very rich through extracting oil from the ground. Now he is looking for ways to capitalize even further with his oil, and he comes across the idea of using coal tar – a petroleum derivative – to make substances that affect the human mind, body and nervous system. These are called drugs, and they are excellent at masking or stopping symptoms, but overall do not cure the underlying cause of a disease.

Like other elite leaders of the New World Order who fit the description of an “evil genius” – those high on intellect and low on compassion – Rockefeller used his oil money to buy out part of the massive German pharmaceutical cartel, I.G. Farben. This was the very same cartel that would later assist Hitler to implement his eugenics-based vision of a New World Order founded on racial supremacy, by manufacturing chemicals and poisons for war. With the control of drug manufacturing under his wings, Rockefeller then embarked on a decidedly wicked plan – wicked from the point of view of a free and healthy humanity, but brilliant from a business perspective.

Destroying any Competition to Western Medicine

Rockefeller saw that there were many types of doctors and healing modalities in existence at that time, from chiropractry to naturopathy to homeopathy to holistic medicine to herbal medicine and more. He wanted to eliminate the competitors of western medicine (the only modality which would propose drugs and radiation as treatment, thus enriching Rockefeller who owned the means to produce these treatments), so he hired a man called Abraham Flexner to submit a report to Congress in 1910. This report “concluded” that there were too many doctors and medical schools in America, and that all the natural healing modalities which had existed for hundreds or thousands of years were unscientific quackery. It called for the standardization of medical education, whereby only the allopathic-based AMA be allowed to grant medical school licenses in the US.

Sadly, Congress acted upon the conclusions and made them law. Incredibly, allopathy became the standard mainstream modality, even though its 3 main methods of treatment in the 1800s had been blood-letting, surgery and the injection of toxic heavy metals like lead and mercury to supposedly displace disease! It should be noted that hemp was also demonized and criminalized not long after this, not because there is anything dangerous about it, but because it was a huge threat (as both medicine and fuel) to the Rockefeller drug and oil industries, respectively.

The Rockefeller and Carnegie Tax-Exempt Foundations for “Efficient” Philanthropy

The story doesn’t stop there. Rockefeller and another elite leader Carnegie used their tax-exempt Foundations, from 1913 on, to offer huge grants to the best medical schools all over America – on the proviso that only an allopathic-based curriculum be taught, and that some of their agents be allowed to sit on the Board of Directors. They called this “efficient” philanthropy, which, when through the Orwellian translation unit, means they wanted a return on their investment. They systematically dismantled the curricula of these schools by removing any mention of the natural healing power of herbs and plants, or of the importance of diet to health. The result is a system which to this day churns out doctors who are, almost always, utterly clueless about nutrition and disregard the idea that what you eat can actually heal or hurt you.

A couple of decades after this, another law was passed that further entrenched western medicine in America. The Hill-Burton Act of 1946 gave hospitals grants for construction and modernization, on the condition they provide free healthcare to anyone in need, without discrimination of any kind. Although there were good sides to this, the downside was that once people had become dependent on this system for their healthcare needs – especially those on pharmaceutical pills which need to be taken day after day without end – the system switched into a paid system, and the Rockefellers found themselves with new lifelong customers.

The bitter truth is that, in general, when you go to your Western doctor, you are seen as a potential market for the medical factory’s products. For Big Pharma, there is no financial incentive to heal you, because a patient cured is a customer lost. Even if you are not sick, Big Pharma is still targeting you, trying to convince you that you are ill (e.g. with psychiatry’s ridiculous list of fictitious diseases, many of them fake) so that you will try its latest pill. Pregnant women who go to the doctor are treated like this, and peddled intravenous fluid bags, fetal monitors, ultrasound (radiation for a vulnerable baby), a host of drugs, the totally unnecessary episiotomy, and – to top it all off – the Caesarean delivery!

Bio-Piracy: The Business Model of Western Medicine’s Big Pharma Cartel

Remember, all these synthetic drugs are isolates. Many are derived from plant compounds, but because Nature cannot be patented and sold, Big Pharma has no interest in natural cures. What they do instead is engage in bio-piracy – research natural compounds, copy them (or modify them slightly) in a lab, then try to steal and patent them. If they get a patent, they then market their pill as a wonder drug while simultaneously (through fake scientific research) suppress and criticize the original plant as being worthless, so you won’t go to the source of the cure. Ironically, guess what type of medicine John D. Rockefeller used and the British Royal Family still uses? Homeopathy!

Modern western medicine seems to have lost the supposed point of its existence: healing people. In his revealing book “Confessions of a Medical Heretic“, Dr. Robert Mendolsohn quotes an article entitled “Cleveland’s Marvelous Medical Factory” which boasted of the Cleveland Clinic’s “accomplishments last year: 2,980 open-heart operations, 1.3 million laboratory tests, 73,320 electrocardiograms, 7,770 full-body x-ray scans, 24,368 surgical procedures.” Seems fancy, yet none of these procedures has been proven to have anything to do with maintaining or restoring health. When people get screened for a disease, they are being subjected to dangerous radiation (more money for the Rockefellers) which harms tissue and can end up causing the exact disease it is supposed to be protecting against – as happens daily with the mammogram scam, designed to drum up new breast cancer clients.

Rockefeller Philanthropy is Social Control

The Rockefellers and other elites use philanthropy as a tool for control. It’s social engineering with a nice PR sheen. A free lunch is not really free, whether private (Rockefeller-style western medicine) or public/governmental (Obama-style socialized medicine), because even if you get something at no cost, you are required to give up your data and your privacy. They want you dependent on their system – then they’ll raise the rates once you’re trapped.

This is big business – and it’s also a big killer. Dr. Barbara Starfield published a study in the year 2000 that found that there were 225,000 iatrogenic (allopathic doctor caused) deaths in the US every year. However, this was only counting direct deaths; when you factor in all indirect deaths, as Dr. Gary Null did in 2011 in his report Death by Medicine, the figure is closer to 784,000 per year! That’s 7.8 million people dead from western medicine every 10 years!

Null concluded: “It is evident that the American medical system is the leading cause of death and injury in the United States …”

Whenever a lot of people die in a staged false flag attack (like 3000 people on 9/11) or in a staged mind control shooting (like 50 or so people) we hear all about it on the media. Yet between 616 and 2147 Americans are dying every day from Rockefeller Western medicine, and we don’t hear a thing!

Natural Solutions that Surpass Rockefeller-Created Western Medicine

At this point let us turn from the problem to the solutions – and fortunately there are many. The famous ancient Greek physician Hippocrates wrote:

Nature heals. The doctor’s task consists in strengthening the natural healing powers, to direct them, and especially not to interfere with them.

The immune system is your number one defense against any disease – not a vaccine. Most natural medicine is designed to treat the body holistically, not to “cure” one disease only to have it transform and mutate into another ailment. When you take plants and herbs as medicine, you normally take the whole food, not an isolate, because it is based on a holistic understanding. Likewise, Traditional Chinese Medicine defines all disease as stagnation and treats sickness as an imbalance to be brought back into balance. What is the point of transferring an imbalance in one area into an imbalance in another area? None, unless you are trying to profit off disease like Big Pharma. It is not real healing.

There are so many natural cures and remedies out there, if you take the time to look. Two examples among thousands are turmeric which will do more for your blood pressure and diabetes than any drug can, and apricot kernels (rich in laetrile which selectively kills cancer cells and leaves healthy ones intact) which will handle cancer better than chemotherapy. The Gerson Therapy has also healed thousands of “terminal” cancer patients who were told by doctors of western medicine, “there’s nothing more we can do for you.”

Western medicine has its place as a system you may want to use in a critical emergency, but for general conditions, there are so many better alternatives. Time to start exploring them!

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Good Medicine: Do As Much Nothing As Possible

”The delivery of good medical care is to do as much nothing as possible”

~ Samuel Shem, The House of God

Medicine is undergoing an existential crisis today. Its core value proposition – to help and not hurt — is failing to manifest. Patients are suffering. Doctors are suffering. The only exuberant party on the battlefield against disease is the pharmaceutical industry. An industry whose annual causalities far exceed the death total from our two decade long involvement in the Vietnam war.

The entire system is on the precipice of a collapse, if not for economic reasons alone, then certainly for ethical and intellectual ones. The irony is that the system has become so ineffective and dangerous that avoiding medical treatment (excluding perhaps emergency care) has become one of if not the best healthcare strategy you can implement to protect your health and well-being.

Nowhere is this clearer than in the realm of cancer. Over the past few decades, billions have been spent on screening asymptomatic populations to “prevent cancer,” with the result that millions have been assigned with questionable diagnoses (e.g.,”early stage-” or “stage zero-cancers”) and then shepherded into chemo, radiation and surgery treatments as if watchful waiting, or better yet, making significant nutritional and lifestyle modifications, would be a suicidal approach vis-à-vis the inexorability and presumed lethality of genetically-determined cancer.

We needn’t detail the misery this approach has produced, but suffice it to say that despite the industry’s claims of thousands of “lives saved” from the detection of “early cancers,” breast and prostate cancer specific mortality has at best stayed the same, and may have actually increased in some cases. In light of the fact that the financial costs of misapplied treatment in some cases is so high that the uninsured, their families, and society as a whole, face bankruptcy, the situation is dire indeed.

Even after the cat was let out of the bag in 2013, and a National Cancer Institute commissioned expert panel concluded that labeling screening detected lesions known as ductal carcinoma in situ (DCIS) and high-grade intraepithelial neoplastic hyperplasia (HG-PIN) (colloquially labeled as “breast cancer” and “prostate cancer,” respectively) as carcinomas (“cancer”) is no longer justified. Instead they opted for redefining what were previously considered potentially lethal cancers as “benign or indolent lesions of epithelial origin.” Yet, you hear virtually no mention of this change anywhere. Tens of thousands are still being diagnosed with the same “cancers” and being cut, poisoned and burned, without informed consent.

The lack of acknowledgment and discussion about these tremendous diagnostic “errors” is less surprising when you consider that about 1.3 million U.S. women were wrongly treated for breast cancer in the past 30 years, with prostate and lung cancer representing two additional icebergs upon which the Titanic cancer industry is presently running itself aground upon, regardless of whether the medical establishment will accept responsibility. Ignoring the truth that millions suffered needlessly, it would seem, is less painful than admitting wrong, and dealing with the psychological and financial fallout that inevitably follows. But is it possible to stem the tide much longer against the inevitable transformations brewing?

If you check the pubmed.gov statistics, interest in “overtreatment” and “overdiagnosis” has grown exponentially from only a few decades ago, when the terms were rarely mentioned. A new editorial, titled,  “It Is Overtreatment, Not Overdiagnosis,” points out the real issue behind the epidemic of cancer overdiagnoses:

The most widely accepted definition of ”overdiagnosis” is ”diagnosing a person without symptoms with a disease that will (ultimately) never cause symptoms or death during the person’s lifetime” (2). It should not be confused with misdiagnosis or false-positive findings, which are completely different entities and outside the scope of this commentary. As the generally accepted definition encapsulates downstream effects (ie, ”would otherwise not go on to cause symptoms or death”, the real issue lies with ”overtreatment” of these accurate diagnoses rather than overdiagnosis itself.

Overtreament does not happen in a vacuum. The very industries that produce the treatments also create and supports the “awareness campaigns” that not only use fear to corral the population into screening, but also “pinkwash” away their true causes, i.e. breast cancer awareness month talks about needing a cure but not the causes right under our noses (i.e. carcinogens). Therefore, the more diagnoses that are generated, the more treatments will be “recommended,” resulting in greater revenue and profit – an economic growth model that itself can only be described as a malignant process at least as violent, if not more, than the disease it is claiming to treat and manage.

The editorial concluded:

“The effects of treating inconsequential lesions, rather than their diagnosis per se, result in increased morbidity and cost without added benefit. Society as a whole should strive to treat individuals who should be treated and not those who would not benefit. The 13th law of Shem, true in 1978, remains true today.”

Essentially, modern medicine has become our most Orwellian institution, with “detecting cancer early” the biomedical equivalent of the Thought Police detecting crime before it happens. The prognosticating itself,  is a highly toxic process (nocebo: e.g., “You have cancer and 6 months to live.”) that can contribute to evoking cancer-promoting physiological reactions, as well as inflicting real psychospiritual wounds that have been determined to dramatically increase the risk of heart-related deaths and suicides. Medicine has also adopted the metaphorics of another powerful global force: the military industrial complex, with the cancer “prevention” being equated to “striking first,” eerily similar to the Bush doctrine of preemptive war to secure peace. Here, the precautionary principle is co-opted and inverted from its true meaning. Instead of “doing no harm,” unnecessary medical intervention is considered the only non-violent solution even when the collateral damage is so great that the patient often dies from the violence of “treatment” with weapons-of-mass-destruction grade radioisotopes and chemicals and not the condition.

We need to completely rethink medicine’s role in healing. What happens when we return to the fundamentals of an entity – the human, soul and body together — whose self-healing capabilities are so powerful that even the suggestion through sugar pill or kind word of a health practitioner that a disease can attenuate or disappear actually causes significant improvement? What if given the right conditions – clean air, water, food and a healthy environment, physically and emotionally – the conditions for disease were suddenly removed, and replaced with an opposite environs promoting health? If medicine makes it through the birth process of its own existential crises, these principles will invoke an entirely new medical model where the placebo effect is not to be “controlled for,” but liberated and expanded by educating the patient to the fact that they can and do heal themselves, mainly by avoiding medical treatment and doing the right amount of nothing.

© January 30, 2018 GreenMedInfo LLC. This work is reproduced and distributed with the permission of GreenMedInfo LLC. Want to learn more from GreenMedInfo? Sign up for the newsletter here http://www.greenmedinfo.com/greenmed/newsletter.

The post Good Medicine: Do As Much Nothing As Possible appeared first on The Sleuth Journal.

Most Scientific Research Of Western Medicine Untrustable And Fraudulent, Say Insiders And Experts (VIDEO)

The fraudulent scientific research of Big Pharma is rife, and has been acknowledged as untrustable by medical journal editors, professors, doctors, government officials and former Big Pharma insiders.

Fraudulent scientific research is rife throughout the world due to the power of monetary influence wielded by Big Pharma, the giant cartel of multinational pharmaceutical corporations started over 100 years ago by the Rockefellers. This fraudulent scientific research is now so widespread and pervasive it is become an open secret. There is a long list of medical journal editors, doctors and professors on the “outside”, former Big Pharma employees and executives on the “inside”, as well as government officials somewhere in between, who have stepped forward as whistleblowers and acknowledged the fraud. Money buys favorable research. Period. This is not really surprising, given the history of Rockefeller Western medicine and the fact that Big Pharma’s business model is based on “managing” disease, “treating” symptoms and keeping patients on the hamster wheel, rather than actually healing them completely.

Everyone Knows How the “Game” Works

Whistleblower Dr. Peter Rost, former vice president of Pfizer, a giant Big Pharma company, spelled it out. In the video clip embedded above, taken from the documentary One More Girl, he reveals that everyone knows how the “game” works:

“Universities, health organizations, everybody that I have encountered … are out there …. begging for money. (Big Pharma corporations) use that money to basically buy influence … (Big Pharma provides) grants for various kinds of research … make sure they (scientific researchers) became beholden … Everyone obviously knows this is how things work.”

“They (scientific researchers) are not going to continue to get money unless they’re saying what you (i.e. Big Pharma) want them to say. They know it, you know it, and it’s only maybe the public that doesn’t know it.”

In this way, the almost the entire medical scientific community has been compromised and has become thoroughly untrustworthy.

Fraudulent Scientific Research Exposed by Medical Journal Editors and Professors

Look at what numerous key experts are saying about this epidemic of fraudulent scientific research. Dr. Richard Horton is the current editor-in-chief of the British Lancet journal, which is respected as one of the best peer-reviewed medical journals in the world. He came out and stated:

“The case against science is straightforward: 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.”

Then look at what Marcia Angell, former editor-in-chief of the esteemed New England Journal of Medicine (NEJM), had to say about the pervasive fraudulent scientific research:

“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.”

Dr. John P.A. Ioannidis, a professor of disease prevention at Stanford University, published a study in a PLoS One paper entitled Why Most Published Research Findings Are False. He found that research conclusions are less likely to be true when study samples sizes are too small, when effect sizes are even smaller, and when there are major variances in study designs, definitions, outcomes and analytical modes. He highlighted the corrupting influence of Big Pharma and concluded that:

“There is increasing concern that most current published research findings are false … it is more likely for a research claim to be false than true.”

Fraudulent Scientific Research Exposed by other Big Pharma Whistleblowers

The pervasive fraudulent scientific research shows that most “solid medical evidence” may in fact be quackery.

Fraudulent scientific research has also been exposed by former executives and employees of the Big Pharma machine. In addition to Dr. Peter Rost, another Big Pharma whistleblower include Dr. John Virapen, author of Side Effects: Death. Confessions of a Pharma-Insider, who admits in this book that he “bribed a Swedish professor to enhance the registration of Prozac in Sweden.” Virapen worked for 35 years in the pharmaceutical industry internationally (most notably as general manager of Eli Lilly and Company in Sweden) where he was responsible for the marketing of several Big Pharma drugs (all of them with side effects). He exposes how Big Pharma invests more than USD$50,000 per physician per year to entice them to prescribe their products, how more than 75% of leading scientists in the field of medicine are “paid for”, and how illnesses are invented by the pharmaceutical industry to increase profit.

Another Big Pharma whistleblower is Gwen Olsen, a former Big Pharma sales rep who really knew how to push for a hard sell. She reveals the underhanded tactics she was taught by Big Pharma executives to ensure doctors were prescribing their drugs. After her niece killed herself while taking antidepressants, she changed her tune and exposed the tactics. Olsen admits that she used bribery and personal connections to sell Big Pharma meds, because she found it very difficult to sell drugs on their own merit, that the true purpose of pharmaceutical drugs is social control, that Big Pharma buys up real cures to disease, or sues companies not to release genuine cures. She also reveals how drug effects or side effects were often separated to avoid full disclosure, e.g. if the effect was on the CNS (Central Nervous System) then Big Pharma would break it down to say dizziness, fatigue, etc. so effects would look smaller.

Sadly, patients were harmed or killed due to Olsen’s (and other drugs reps like her) intentional sidestepping/misinforming physicians about a drug’s effects. Olsen refers to the “Revolving Door Syndrome”, meaning patients who are hospitalized continue to come back repeatedly, and each time lose more of their bodily functions. The drugs were brain damaging, could induce violence and were slowly killing them. Meanwhile, many drugs are found to be not more efficacious than a sugar pill (placebo).

Fraudulent Scientific Research Exposed by Governmental Whistleblower Too

Lastly, it is also useful to note that fraudulent scientific research has been acknowledged by governmental officials too. Dr. William Thompson of the CDC (the US Center for Disease Control) made headlines last year when he bravely came forth to publicly admit that he had cooked the books and fudged the data regarding vaccines. Here is an excerpt of his public statement from August 27th, 2014:

“My name is William Thompson. I am a Senior Scientist with the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention, where I have worked since 1998.

I regret that my coauthors and I omitted statistically significant information in our 2004 article published in the journal Pediatrics. The omitted data suggested that African American males who received the MMR vaccine before age 36 months were at increased risk for autism. Decisions were made regarding which findings to report after the data were collected, and I believe that the final study protocol was not followed.”

Many people were harmed (or killed) by this instance of fraudulent scientific research, especially young black baby boys under the age of 3. Consequences for Thompson or the CDC for this fraudulent scientific research? Basically none. Obama gave him legal immunity – but that’s not surprising since he also singed the NDAA (claiming the right to imprison any American indefinitely without charge or trial) and initiated his weekly Kill Lists.

Don’t Fall for Appeals to “Scientific” or “Clinical” Research when Fraudulent Scientific Research is So Rife

The lesson in all this is clear: don’t believe it when you are told by anyone involved with the Western Medical Establishment that their products are based on sound, valid, scientific, clinical evidence. Fraudulent scientific research is so widespread you can’t know anything for sure. Maybe you have to use Western Medicine, or maybe you don’t, but don’t go in blindly believing everything you’re told.

Sources:

*https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=TrCizlAOBAo

http://www.thelancet.com/pdfs/journals/lancet/PIIS0140-6736%2815%2960696-1.pdf

http://www.nybooks.com/articles/archives/2004/jul/15/the-truth-about-the-drug-companies/

http://journals.plos.org/plosmedicine/article?id=10.1371/journal.pmed.0020124

*https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=M8ZFUq5hr7E

*https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=ICnKzBMkV9Q

The Big One: CDC whistleblower goes public Now

Obama Admin Grants Immunity To CDC Scientist That Fudged Vaccine Report…Whistleblower Plans To Testify Before Congress

The post Most Scientific Research Of Western Medicine Untrustable And Fraudulent, Say Insiders And Experts (VIDEO) appeared first on The Sleuth Journal.

Most Scientific Research Of Western Medicine Untrustable And Fraudulent, Say Insiders And Experts (VIDEO)

The fraudulent scientific research of Big Pharma is rife, and has been acknowledged as untrustable by medical journal editors, professors, doctors, government officials and former Big Pharma insiders.

Fraudulent scientific research is rife throughout the world due to the power of monetary influence wielded by Big Pharma, the giant cartel of multinational pharmaceutical corporations started over 100 years ago by the Rockefellers. This fraudulent scientific research is now so widespread and pervasive it is become an open secret. There is a long list of medical journal editors, doctors and professors on the “outside”, former Big Pharma employees and executives on the “inside”, as well as government officials somewhere in between, who have stepped forward as whistleblowers and acknowledged the fraud. Money buys favorable research. Period. This is not really surprising, given the history of Rockefeller Western medicine and the fact that Big Pharma’s business model is based on “managing” disease, “treating” symptoms and keeping patients on the hamster wheel, rather than actually healing them completely.

Everyone Knows How the “Game” Works

Whistleblower Dr. Peter Rost, former vice president of Pfizer, a giant Big Pharma company, spelled it out. In the video clip embedded above, taken from the documentary One More Girl, he reveals that everyone knows how the “game” works:

“Universities, health organizations, everybody that I have encountered … are out there …. begging for money. (Big Pharma corporations) use that money to basically buy influence … (Big Pharma provides) grants for various kinds of research … make sure they (scientific researchers) became beholden … Everyone obviously knows this is how things work.”

“They (scientific researchers) are not going to continue to get money unless they’re saying what you (i.e. Big Pharma) want them to say. They know it, you know it, and it’s only maybe the public that doesn’t know it.”

In this way, the almost the entire medical scientific community has been compromised and has become thoroughly untrustworthy.

Fraudulent Scientific Research Exposed by Medical Journal Editors and Professors

Look at what numerous key experts are saying about this epidemic of fraudulent scientific research. Dr. Richard Horton is the current editor-in-chief of the British Lancet journal, which is respected as one of the best peer-reviewed medical journals in the world. He came out and stated:

“The case against science is straightforward: 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.”

Then look at what Marcia Angell, former editor-in-chief of the esteemed New England Journal of Medicine (NEJM), had to say about the pervasive fraudulent scientific research:

“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.”

Dr. John P.A. Ioannidis, a professor of disease prevention at Stanford University, published a study in a PLoS One paper entitled Why Most Published Research Findings Are False. He found that research conclusions are less likely to be true when study samples sizes are too small, when effect sizes are even smaller, and when there are major variances in study designs, definitions, outcomes and analytical modes. He highlighted the corrupting influence of Big Pharma and concluded that:

“There is increasing concern that most current published research findings are false … it is more likely for a research claim to be false than true.”

Fraudulent Scientific Research Exposed by other Big Pharma Whistleblowers

The pervasive fraudulent scientific research shows that most “solid medical evidence” may in fact be quackery.

Fraudulent scientific research has also been exposed by former executives and employees of the Big Pharma machine. In addition to Dr. Peter Rost, another Big Pharma whistleblower include Dr. John Virapen, author of Side Effects: Death. Confessions of a Pharma-Insider, who admits in this book that he “bribed a Swedish professor to enhance the registration of Prozac in Sweden.” Virapen worked for 35 years in the pharmaceutical industry internationally (most notably as general manager of Eli Lilly and Company in Sweden) where he was responsible for the marketing of several Big Pharma drugs (all of them with side effects). He exposes how Big Pharma invests more than USD$50,000 per physician per year to entice them to prescribe their products, how more than 75% of leading scientists in the field of medicine are “paid for”, and how illnesses are invented by the pharmaceutical industry to increase profit.

Another Big Pharma whistleblower is Gwen Olsen, a former Big Pharma sales rep who really knew how to push for a hard sell. She reveals the underhanded tactics she was taught by Big Pharma executives to ensure doctors were prescribing their drugs. After her niece killed herself while taking antidepressants, she changed her tune and exposed the tactics. Olsen admits that she used bribery and personal connections to sell Big Pharma meds, because she found it very difficult to sell drugs on their own merit, that the true purpose of pharmaceutical drugs is social control, that Big Pharma buys up real cures to disease, or sues companies not to release genuine cures. She also reveals how drug effects or side effects were often separated to avoid full disclosure, e.g. if the effect was on the CNS (Central Nervous System) then Big Pharma would break it down to say dizziness, fatigue, etc. so effects would look smaller.

Sadly, patients were harmed or killed due to Olsen’s (and other drugs reps like her) intentional sidestepping/misinforming physicians about a drug’s effects. Olsen refers to the “Revolving Door Syndrome”, meaning patients who are hospitalized continue to come back repeatedly, and each time lose more of their bodily functions. The drugs were brain damaging, could induce violence and were slowly killing them. Meanwhile, many drugs are found to be not more efficacious than a sugar pill (placebo).

Fraudulent Scientific Research Exposed by Governmental Whistleblower Too

Lastly, it is also useful to note that fraudulent scientific research has been acknowledged by governmental officials too. Dr. William Thompson of the CDC (the US Center for Disease Control) made headlines last year when he bravely came forth to publicly admit that he had cooked the books and fudged the data regarding vaccines. Here is an excerpt of his public statement from August 27th, 2014:

“My name is William Thompson. I am a Senior Scientist with the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention, where I have worked since 1998.

I regret that my coauthors and I omitted statistically significant information in our 2004 article published in the journal Pediatrics. The omitted data suggested that African American males who received the MMR vaccine before age 36 months were at increased risk for autism. Decisions were made regarding which findings to report after the data were collected, and I believe that the final study protocol was not followed.”

Many people were harmed (or killed) by this instance of fraudulent scientific research, especially young black baby boys under the age of 3. Consequences for Thompson or the CDC for this fraudulent scientific research? Basically none. Obama gave him legal immunity – but that’s not surprising since he also singed the NDAA (claiming the right to imprison any American indefinitely without charge or trial) and initiated his weekly Kill Lists.

Don’t Fall for Appeals to “Scientific” or “Clinical” Research when Fraudulent Scientific Research is So Rife

The lesson in all this is clear: don’t believe it when you are told by anyone involved with the Western Medical Establishment that their products are based on sound, valid, scientific, clinical evidence. Fraudulent scientific research is so widespread you can’t know anything for sure. Maybe you have to use Western Medicine, or maybe you don’t, but don’t go in blindly believing everything you’re told.

Sources:

*https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=TrCizlAOBAo

http://www.thelancet.com/pdfs/journals/lancet/PIIS0140-6736%2815%2960696-1.pdf

http://www.nybooks.com/articles/archives/2004/jul/15/the-truth-about-the-drug-companies/

http://journals.plos.org/plosmedicine/article?id=10.1371/journal.pmed.0020124

*https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=M8ZFUq5hr7E

*https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=ICnKzBMkV9Q

The Big One: CDC whistleblower goes public Now

Obama Admin Grants Immunity To CDC Scientist That Fudged Vaccine Report…Whistleblower Plans To Testify Before Congress

The post Most Scientific Research Of Western Medicine Untrustable And Fraudulent, Say Insiders And Experts (VIDEO) appeared first on The Sleuth Journal.

Fake Pharma — The Ghosts in a Very Big Machine

Another media outlet has been caught promoting the interests of Big Pharma under the guise of real news. This time, somewhat surprisingly, it was news outlet STAT, which otherwise has a solid reputation in reporting science and health news. The story was titled, “How Pharma Sales Reps Help Me Be a More Up-to-Date Doctor,” written, supposedly, by Dr. Robert Yapundich, an experienced neurologist. You can see where this is going.

The article praised drug reps for providing vital information to doctors. And why wouldn’t it offer such praise? Yapundich has received more than $300,000 from drug companies in recent years, a fact pointed out by numerous Twitter users and readers in the article’s comments section, who suggested the obvious conflict of interest ought to be disclosed.¹ The problem was, it wasn’t, at least not at first.

The article remained untouched for at least four days, during which other commenters pointed out more problems, like the fact that Yapundich said he’d not heard of a drug (Nuplazid) until he had lunch with a drug rep, yet, it turns out, he was previously paid for consulting services regarding the same drug.² Commenters soon started calling on STAT to disclose the ties, fix the seemingly false statement or retract the article. STAT chose the latter.

STAT Retracts Ghost-Written Piece

The controversial article now contains an editor’s note stating that it was retracted because “it did not meet our standards,” continuing:³

“As a matter of policy, we ask all our contributors to disclose payments from industry and other possible conflicts of interest. In this case, the author disclosed no conflicts other than his affiliation with an organization that supports expanding manufacturers’ ability to discuss off-label uses of drugs.

In response to reader questions, we contacted Yapundich and he told us he had received more than $300,000 in recent years from pharmaceutical companies, including one he mentioned in the article.

He also acknowledged that his organization was funded in part by pharmaceutical companies. We disclosed that information at the bottom of the article … We also asked Yapundich to address reader questions about the veracity of the central anecdote in the piece. He said the anecdote was accurate as written.

But Yapundich later told HealthNewsReview that the anecdote was not, in fact, accurate. After that interview was posted … we contacted Yapundich again and he conceded to STAT that the anecdote was inaccurate. We then retracted the article.”

The organizational affiliation that STAT speaks of is the Alliance for Patient Access (AfPA), a group that receives money from close to 30 drug companies; Yapundich sits on the board. Kevin Lomangino, managing editor for HealthNewsReview, reported that, when he spoke with Yapundich, he said the article was AfPA’s idea and was written by a ghostwriter.

Yapundich then made some changes and edits to the article prior to it being published by STAT. Reportedly, when he asked his contact at the AfPA what he needed to do in terms of conflict of interest disclosures, the person wrote, “Hold on financial info. Hopefully only needed for AfPA and not for you individually.”⁴

HealthNewsReview then revealed another layer to the story, which is that Yapundich was working in some capacity with Washington D.C.-based PR firm Keybridge Communications, who says their goal is to “brand thought leaders.” It’s unclear who was paying for their services, as well as who was ultimately responsible for the lack of financial disclosure in the article. “It seems that wherever the op-ed originated,” Lomangino wrote, “it received careful attention from PR messaging pros before it ever reached Yapundich’s desk.”⁵

‘Ghost-Written Puff Pieces From PR Companies’ Passed Off as Op-Eds

“While authors of op-eds may get more latitude than they would in a straight news piece, the boundaries shouldn’t be so wide as to include ghost-written puff pieces from PR companies,” Lomangino wrote. Industrial ghost writers first became popular when tobacco executives hired them to spin positive press about cigarettes and secondhand smoke, published in the name of various scientists, according to New York University journalism professor Charles Seife.

“Since then, ghostwriters employed by parts of the pharmaceutical industry have been busily tobacconizing the scientific literature. Gaze into the depths of PubMed for long enough, and they will materialize before your eyes, promoting Wyeth’s Prempro, Merck’s Vioxx, and Pfizer’s Neurontin, just to name a few,” Seife says.⁶

Even Monsanto has gotten into the mix, with glyphosate articles ghostwritten by Monsanto’s toxicology manager published using names of academic researchers, and the practice is well-known among peer-reviewed journals. For medical journals, ghostwriting usually refers to writers sponsored by a drug or medical device company, who make major but uncredited research or writing contributions.

The pharmaceutical company hires a medical education and communications company, which is a company paid almost exclusively by pharmaceutical companies to write articles, reviews and letters to editors of medical journals in order to cast their products in a favorable light. One cross-sectional survey found that more than 20 percent of articles published in six leading medical journals during 2008 were likely written by honorary and/or ghostwriters.⁷

With the STAT piece, however, we’re now seeing that industrial ghostwriting has come to the mainstream media, allowing corporate interests to spread their propaganda over an even wider audience. Seife continued that many news outlets, including STAT, are aware that some of their opinion pieces are ghostwritten, but when the ghost-writers are being sponsored by powerful people with powerful agendas, that’s where the problems begin:⁸

“Many opinion sections have a grudging acceptance of some degree of ghostwriting in their pages; after all, high officials and A-list celebrities have entire staffs hired to meticulously shape each public utterance.

But even if you accept that kind of ghostwriting, the industrial version of ghosting is an entirely different beast. Instead of putting the words of an unknown in the mouths of the powerful, it does just the opposite — it disseminates the words of the powerful by putting them in the mouth of the unknown.

Indeed, in this case, it used the trusted institution of a friendly doctor to spread the gospel of the pharmaceutical industry. It’s not the sheep in wolf’s clothing that’s to be feared, but the reverse … It may be a losing battle; the wealthy industries using these tactics are adept at harnessing the forces of capitalism to defeat any attempt at transparency. After all, it’s nigh impossible to see who’s really pulling the strings when the invisible hand gets involved.”

Another STAT Blunder: Patient Praising TV Drug Ads Connected to Drug Company

Yapundich’s now-retracted piece wasn’t the first time STAT published an op-ed without disclosing the author’s true affiliations. In 2016, an op-ed titled, “You Can Complain About TV Drug Ads. They May Have Saved My Life,” was featured, written by patient Deborah Clark Dushane. Suffering from chronic hepatitis C, Dushane wrote that drug ads on television prompted her to ask her doctor about new drugs to treat the disease, which “cured” her.

“I strongly believe that if I hadn’t seen TV ads about chronic hepatitis C and new drugs to treat it, I wouldn’t have done anything to protect myself against it. Those commercials raised my awareness of the disease and gave me the courage to try again to beat it. I’m sure I’m not the only person they have helped,” Dushane wrote in the STAT piece.⁹

Again, reporting by HealthNewsReview revealed that the author wasn’t operating totally independently. A PR firm for Gilead, a drug company that manufacturers drugs to treat hepatitis C, contacted Dushane and asked her to write the piece. The positive press was intended to offset another STAT article that had recently been published, outing the “$100 million ad blitz for a $1,100-a-pill drug for hepatitis C.”¹⁰

Dushane wasn’t paid to write the piece, but Gilead flew her to California to learn more about the company and its products, after which she appeared on local TV stations to talk about the drug. Dushane was coached by Gilead’s PR people on what message to relay in the article and on TV.

STAT added an updated disclosure to the article on September 13, 2017, after HealthNewsReview brought the conflict to their attention. Seife, meanwhile, described Dushane’s role as a sock puppet for the industry¹¹ while HealthNewsReview quoted Dr. Carl Elliott, a professor at the University of Minnesota Center for Bioethics and an affiliate faculty member in the School of Journalism and Mass Communications:¹²

“Of course this is wrong, and it’s wrong because it’s deceptive. I think the editors need to explain just what their policy is about corporate influence on the editorials they publish … Do they permit editorials that are completely ghosted by pharma? By a PR company working for pharma? What if the author wrote it himself or herself, but was paid to do it by pharma or a PR company?

What if the author wasn’t paid directly to write the editorial, but was coached what to write and got other benefits from a company? All of these scenarios seem disturbing to me, and I’d like to know if they are disturbing to the STAT editors too.”

Drug Company Faked Cancer Diagnoses in Patients to Sell More Opioids

A federal indictment and congressional investigation by Missouri Sen. Claire McCaskill allege that Insys Therapeutics concocted a fraudulent scheme to sell more of Subsys, an expensive, highly addictive, sprayable form of fentanyl.¹³ Prior authorization was required from insurance companies before the drug could be prescribed by doctors, and a diagnosis of cancer was a requirement for prescription clearance.

Insys wanted to make it easier for patients to get the drug, even if they didn’t have cancer, so they had their own employees to talk to patients’ insurance companies, pretending they were working with their doctors. According to CNN, “The Senate report documented how beginning in 2014, when someone needed to obtain prior approval for a Subsys prescription, it was actually an Insys employee who called the insurer and its affiliates to persuade them.”¹⁴

The insurance companies would ask whether the patients had “breakthrough” pain caused by cancer. CNN reported, “Insys got around this by finding calculated ways for its employees to create the impression on the phone calls that the answer was yes, they did have cancer, without explicitly saying so, according to the report.” ¹⁵

Further, six former Insys executives were charged in 2016 with fraud and racketeering charges, alleging they paid kickbacks to bribe doctors to prescribe Subsys and defraud insurance companies. Another former Insys manager pleaded guilty to charges that she taught salespeople how to entice doctors with money, chocolate or spending time with them, and to look for “money hungry” doctors willing to “play ball.”¹⁶

Drug Reps Target ‘Thought Leaders’

Drug companies have long tried to influence doctors’ prescribing habits by giving them gifts, vacations, fancy dinners and the like. This practice has since become frowned upon, but paying them for research activities, speaking and other “consulting” gigs continues. In fact, it’s interesting that PR firm Keybridge Communications used the phrase “branding thought leaders,” because drug reps use this tactic too.

Speaking to NPR, pharmaceutical rep Mathew Webb said asking doctors to become speakers was a surefire way to get them to write more prescriptions. In particular, calling them “thought leaders” apparently has “incredible psychological power,” he said, continuing, “When you do say ‘thought leader’ I think it’s a huge ego boost for the physicians. It’s like a feather in their cap. They get a lot from it.”¹⁷

While doctors may think they’re being recruited because of their qualifications or know-how, former drug rep turned whistle-blower Angie Maher told NPR, “I think nowadays a thought leader is defined as a physician with a large patient population who can write a lot of pharmaceutical drugs. Period.”

Webb said that after paying a high-prescribing doctor $1,500 to speak, he might write an additional $100,000 to $200,000 worth of prescriptions for the company’s drugs. They know because they purchase data about each physician’s prescribing habits from companies like IMS Health, ensuring they get a good return on their investment.¹⁸

Is Your Doctor Being Bribed by Drug Companies?

What can you take away from the knowledge that Big Pharma’s ties run deep, perhaps to your local newspaper’s opinion pieces or even to your own doctor? It’s important to take what you read with a grain of salt, and do your own research if an “independent” source reeks of conflict of interest. This applies not only to what you read in the media but also what you hear from your doctor.

Drug companies have long tried to influence doctors’ prescribing habits, however it hasn’t always been possible to find out what gifts your own doctor might be accepting. The Physician Payments Sunshine Act, which is part of the Affordable Care Act, went into effect in 2013.

For the first time, the Act required drug and medical device makers to collect and disclose any payments of more than $10 made to physicians and teaching hospitals. The Centers for Medicare & Medicaid Services (CMS) is in charge of implementing the Sunshine Act, which it has done via its Open Payments Program.¹⁹ You can easily search the site OpenPaymentsData.CMS.gov to find out what (if any) payments your doctor has received, along with the nature of the payments.

ProPublica’s Dollars for Docs website is another great tool you can use to search for general payments (excluding research and ownership interests) made to doctors from August 2013 to December 2015.²⁰ If you don’t like what you see, you can take the steps necessary to put your health care in the hands of someone with your best interests — not Big Pharma’s — at heart.