Tag: health care

Harvard-Trained MD Says ‘Coercive’ Vaccine Push Shattered Trust and Has Harris Voters Questioning the Experts

During an exclusive interview with The Western Journal this week, Dr. Monique Yohanan said Americans have a right to question the country’s vaccine schedule and must learn to advocate for themselves in medical settings.

Yohanan, who is director of the Center for Better Health at Independent Women, has an impeccable academic resume.

She received her medical degree from the Dartmouth/Brown Program and a Master of Public Health from Johns Hopkins. She did her residency in internal medicine at Harvard and a fellowship in geriatrics at Stanford.

In addition, Yohanan has held faculty appointments while maintaining active licensure and board certification in internal medicine.

Her CV, however, clashes with mainstream media narratives regarding vaccine skepticism. Those who pose questions about vaccinations are typically tagged as uneducated, misinformed, and are told to “trust the science.”

So why would someone with over 20 years of experience in clinical medicine, technology, and health policy speak out like this? Because she believes vaccination has become so politicized and deified that it’s harming patients.

“I feel like there’s a lot of dismissal of MAHA [Make America Healthy Again],” she said. “There’s a lot of dismissal of people who have questions about vaccines. There are people, historically, who framed the vaccine schedule as ‘You’re pro vaccine if you agree to every single vaccine, and that’s that.’ If you get all 27 shots and you shut your mouth and don’t say a word, then you’re a good person.’”

“And God forbid, you might say, ‘Well, I’m OK with my kid getting the shot for measles or for whooping cough, but do I really need the shot for hepatitis B?’”

Yohanan said that in California, “if you don’t get the shot for hepatitis B, your kid can’t go to public school.” And she’s correct. The state doesn’t even allow for religious or personal belief exemptions.

“That’s not a public health policy. To me, that is very coercive,” she added. “With COVID, what we had is so much, to me, of an overstatement of confidence that people started questioning everything, and so that’s where I come from, is that people are willing to have a more nuanced discussion.”

Yohanan also highlighted how California doctors are financially incentivized by Medicaid to get as many people vaccinated as possible.

Keep reading

Doctors can fraudulently apply billing codes for transgender mutilations

How many years have we been discussing these abominable transgender treatments on children? And how long have doctors insisted on practicing them, in spite of all the evidence condemning them?

A recent report from the medical watchdog group Do No Harm explains the latest abuses in the medical community, revealing how medical codes can be misapplied in order to reap the profits of “transgender care.” Their behavior is especially abhorrent, because they’re administering these treatments to children, who have enough stress in their pre-teen and teen years without “experts” promoting gender dysphoria to them. These procedures are so sufficiently despicable that many states have banned them for children. To date, 27 states have passed policies and imposed penalties on doctors who provide children with “gender-affirming care.”

The report lists the red flags for doctors trying to disguise what they are doing:

The report identifies eight codes that may be the most likely to hide child ‘transition’ interventions from insurers and regulators, including hypopituitarism, other primary ovarian failure, testicular hypofunction, precocious puberty, other specified endocrine disorders, unspecified endocrine disorder, hormone replacement therapy, and hypertrophy of breast.

Activist organizations continue to feed the frenzy by encouraging doctors to pursue these interventions, and provide information on how to manipulate the medical codes. Those offending groups include WPATH, Planned Parenthood of Southeastern Pennsylvania, the Campaign for Southern Equality, and QueerDoc.

Providing “gender-affirming care” (GAC) treatments can be quite lucrative, ranging from $5,000 for facial surgery to $50,000 for a phalloplasty; there can be additional charges for using a facility, pathology reports, and anesthesia. When weighing the financial benefits against the ethical costs, some doctors find the temptation too great.

The federal government tried to put pressure on doctors to discourage them from treating children:

In social media posts Monday, the FBI and its chief spokesperson asked for tips on ‘any hospitals or clinics who break the law and mutilate children under the guise of ‘gender affirming care.’

But experts say the FBI’s new push isn’t backed up by federal law and may only be intended to scare medical practitioners away from offering those services.

Keep reading

Second ‘Detransitioner’ Wins Settlement for Life-Altering Double Mastectomy

In 2020, Camille Kiefel had a double mastectomy, removing her healthy breasts to align with her ‘nonbinary gender identity.” Kiefel says doctors approved the surgery after two Zoom meetings without addressing the underlying mental health issues that she had battled for years.

Kiefel website shares:

A detransitioner, Camille once believed a non-binary double mastectomy would finally provide relief where 20- years of talk therapy with conventional modalities hadn’t; she lives with physical health issues from the surgery. Through improved diet, and directly addressing her physical health imbalances, her mental health resolved. She now brings awareness to the often overlooked, but undeniable link between physical health and mental health.

Camille determined that the discomforts that lead to her gender dysphoria were rooted in the state of her physical health all along—and they had been overlooked by her doctor, two mental health professionals, and a surgeon.

“Gender affirming treatments are experimental, risky and distributed inconsistently. Before we consider invasive surgeries, we must first look at all low-risk alternative treatments that address the physical health of the individual,” she shares.

In 2022, she filed a malpractice lawsuit against her social worker, therapist, and the gender clinics they work for, Brave Space Oregon and Quest Center for Integrative Health, after alleging they failed to properly screen her mental health issues before approving the mastectomy.

In an amended lawsuit, she further alleges that doctors did not discuss the risks involved with the proposed surgery.

Investigative journalist Benjamin Ryan was the first to report that a confidential settlement had been reached, “just days before the trial was slated to begin.”

Keep reading

Canadian Priest Says Hospital Asked Him To Consider Assisted Suicide Twice After Broken Hip

A Catholic priest said that while seeking treatment for a hip injury at a Canadian hospital, medical workers twice offered him the option of assisted suicide, despite knowing that he was religiously and morally opposed to the practice.

Fr. Larry Holland, 79, fractured his hip after falling in his bathroom on Christmas Day 2025 and subsequently went to Vancouver General Hospital to seek treatment for his injury, The B.C. Catholic, the official media outlet of the Roman Catholic Archdiocese of Vancouver, first reported. However, despite the priest’s assertion that his condition is not and never was fatal, he says a doctor had raised the possibility of him taking his own life through Canada’s taxpayer-funded and government-run Medical Assistance in Dying (MAiD) program in the event his injury worsened.

“I think I was very shocked. It is such a sensitive subject,” Holland told The B.C. Catholic about being given the option of MAiD, in an interview published Tuesday. “There are some things you just don’t talk about to some people.”

The priest told the outlet that the doctor said to him that MAiD is “something they have to discuss with someone who’s been given a terminal diagnosis.” Holland had at the time known made his moral opposition to euthanasia — which Catholic doctrine explicitly forbids.

After weeks passed, a nurse would also offer MAiD to Holland, he told The B.C. Catholic, adding that the nurse’s offer appeared to come out of a sense of “false compassion.”

Keep reading

HEALTHY Life Expectancy in the UK Declined by 2 Years in Past Decade

A study from the UK has revealed that people may be living longer on paper, but they’re more likely to spend their final years in poor health. Healthy life expectancy plummeted to roughly 60–61 years despite overall life expectancy hovering around 81. In practical terms, this means that a large portion of the population is now living a decade or more in declining health before even reaching retirement.

This decline in quality of life is being driven by a combination of factors that governments continue to treat as separate problems rather than part of a single systemic breakdown. Obesity alone has reached levels where roughly two-thirds of adults in the UK are now overweight or obese, with about 30% classified as obese, a figure that has steadily risen over decades. This is not just about weight, because obesity directly increases the risk of diabetes, cardiovascular disease, cancer, and even mental health disorders, creating a compounding effect where individuals become progressively sicker over time rather than recovering.

“The UK has the highest levels of obesity in western Europe and there has been a surge in mental ill health, especially among young people,” a data analyst told the BBC, creating “a significant economic cost, with poor health driving people out of the workforce and locking young people out of education, employment and training.”

Mental health is following the same trajectory, particularly among younger generations where roughly one in five adults suffer from common mental health conditions. Rates among those aged 16–24 have climbed sharply over the past decade. The data shows this is not stabilizing but accelerating, with younger people entering adulthood already burdened with anxiety, depression, and other conditions that historically emerged later in life. When you combine this with rising physical health problems, you are looking at a population that is both physically and psychologically weaker than previous generations.

The economic consequences are already becoming evident, as poor health is increasingly removing people from the workforce while preventing younger individuals from entering it in the first place. Reports show growing economic inactivity tied directly to long-term illness, alongside rising numbers of young people not in education, employment, or training. This creates a feedback loop in which a shrinking productive base must support an expanding population that is dealing with chronic health issues, placing further strain on public finances and economic growth.

Keep reading

Medicaid Withholds Additional $91 Million In Funding For Minnesota

In his latest action targeting Minnesota fraud, Dr. Mehmet Oz, administrator for the Centers for Medicare & Medicaid Services, said his agency would delay paying $91 million in Medicaid claims to the state.

“This is about protecting patients and respecting taxpayers,” Oz said in a video posted April 30 on X, announcing the decision.

The money being withheld includes “$76 million tied to 14 service categories highly vulnerable to fraud,” Oz wrote on X. The remaining deferred payments—$14 million—could potentially have been directed “towards illegal immigrants who weren’t supposed to be getting this coverage,” he stated in the video.

The most recent amounts are on top of an initial $259 million the agency halted in February amid the North Star State’s ongoing fraud scandals.

Minnesota sued Oz’s agency and the U.S. Department of Health and Human Services over that decision, but earlier this month a federal court refused to unfreeze the funds as the litigation continues.

Oz said he notified Minnesota Gov. Tim Walz and other state officials before going public with his most recent decision. The Epoch Times sought comment from Walz but received no reply prior to publication.

Minnesota’s fraud scandals drew widespread attention in late 2025. Since then, President Donald Trump has ratcheted up fraud investigations across the nation. Trump appointed Vice President JD Vance to head an anti-fraud task force and the Justice Department formed a National Fraud Enforcement Division.

Oz’s new Minnesota funding freeze comes two days after agents raided 22 Minnesota sites in connection with fraud investigations.

The state’s issues with the defrauding of its public programs follow “a pattern we can’t ignore,” Oz said.

“Minnesota’s Medicaid program has shown serious vulnerabilities to fraud,” Oz wrote. “These are not isolated breakdowns—they point to systemic issues that must be addressed.”

The federal government funds roughly half of Medicaid, he wrote, which gives his agency “the authority and the responsibility to ensure those dollars are spent legally and appropriately.”

Medicaid will refuse to pay “bad bills,” he said, adding that Minnesota is therefore being asked to provide more documentation to justify payment of the requested funds. “When something doesn’t look right, we investigate; it’s our job.”

Oz said his agency is providing “as much support as we can” to help Walz “turn this around.”

Earlier this year, following months of nationwide attention on Minnesota’s fraud-plagued programs, Walz asked state lawmakers to enact what he called “a comprehensive anti-fraud package.”

In an April 17 newsletter, Minnesota Rep. Kristin Robbins, who chairs the state’s anti-fraud legislative committee, said she remains concerned that officials with two key state agencies have continued to testify that “they don’t think anyone who fails to do their job will be fired.”

“Instead, they talked about how they will provide additional training and support,” Robbins said.

Robbins is running as a Republican gubernatorial candidate to replace Walz, who withdrew his reelection bid amid the scandals. She wrote that she supports a few of Walz’s fraud-prevention ideas, including upgrading computer systems that are used to verify eligibility for government benefits. She also agrees with Walz that the time limits for prosecuting fraud crimes should be extended beyond the current six years. Walz proposed a one-year extension, Robbins said, but she proposed a bill calling for an additional four years so that prosecutors could move forward with charges a decade after the alleged offenses.

“The most important element in preventing fraud is creating a no fraud, no excuses culture,” Robbins wrote.

Keep reading

TBI survivors turn to psychedelics for symptom relief

A new study from the University of Victoria (UVic) has identified a segment of traumatic brain injury survivors who are using psychedelics to self-medicate for cognitive, mood and somatic symptoms such as headaches. In a first-of-its-kind study, clinical psychology researchers analyzed more than 6,100 responses collected from the global psychedelic survey. Researchers found that nearly 1,200 respondents reported using psychedelics to treat or manage a physical health condition.

Of these, some 208 participants, or 3.4% of the total sample, reported using psychedelics to manage brain injury-related symptoms.

The paper, Psychedelics for the management of symptoms of traumatic brain injury: Findings from the global psychedelic survey, was published in Progress in Neuropsychopharmacology & Biological Psychiatry, co-authored by UVic clinical psychology professors Jill Robinson and Mauricio Garcia-Barrera.

Some 60 million people worldwide experience traumatic brain injuries (TBI) every year. Garcia-Barrera says there isn’t a one-size-fits-all treatment for TBI survivors, and he says some are looking for alternative support, including from psychedelics.

“Although research into using psychedelics to manage TBI symptoms remains quite limited, the field is gaining momentum as awareness grows around how widespread brain injury is globally and its impact on the quality of life of those who experience a TBI,” Garcia-Barrera says.

Keep reading

UK Biobank Failures Expose the Permanent Cost of Sharing Genetic and Medical Records

The genetic sequences, medical scans, and lifestyle records of half a million British volunteers spent days listed for sale on Alibaba before anyone at UK Biobank noticed.

Three academic institutions, since banned from the platform, had quietly walked the data out through a research system that was supposed to keep it under lock and key.

At least one of the three Alibaba listings appeared to contain the full dataset covering every one of the 500,000 participants who handed over their blood, their DNA, and decades of personal health information on the understanding it would be used for medical research.

The UK government confirmed the breach on Thursday. Technology minister Ian Murray told the House of Commons that Biobank had flagged the incident on Monday, and that the Chinese government and Alibaba had cooperated to pull the listings down before any purchases went through. Murray thanked Beijing directly for its “speed and seriousness” in taking down the data, a sentence that carries some weight given the three research institutions identified as the source are Chinese, though officials have declined to draw conclusions about intent.

Professor Rory Collins, Biobank’s chief executive and principal investigator, issued a statement saying the listings “were swiftly removed before any purchases were made.” He apologized to participants and confirmed that access to the research platform had been suspended while the organization installs file size limits designed to stop researchers from walking off with bulk datasets.

An automated checking system to vet outgoing files is not expected to be ready until late 2026.

The sales listing is not the scandal. The scandal is what the sales listing reveals about how often Biobank’s data has already been exposed and where it now sits.

Prof Luc Rocher of the Oxford Internet Institute has been tracking the problem and maintains a public record of known incidents. By his count, the Alibaba posting is “the 198th known exposure of UK Biobank data since last summer.” Rocher added that the data “is not just available for sale, it also remains available online for anyone to download today.” Researchers have repeatedly uploaded the dataset to code-sharing platforms by accident, and copies have since been replicated across the web. Taking down one Alibaba listing does nothing about the other 197.

Biobank’s response to this pattern has been to emphasize that the data is “de-identified” and that no participant has been knowingly re-identified. The reassurance rests on a technical claim that does not survive contact with the evidence.

Keep reading

UK Biobank health data listed for sale in China, government confirms

Medical information of 500,000 participantsof one of the UK’s landmark scientific programmes, UK Biobank, were offered for sale online in China, the government has confirmed.

Technology minister Ian Murray said information of all members of the database was found listed for sale on the website Alibaba.

Murray told MPs the charity which runs UK Biobank had told the government about the breach on Monday. He said the information did not include names, addresses, contact details or telephone numbers.

However he said it could include gender, age, month and year of birth, socioeconomic status, lifestyle habits, and measures from biological samples.

The Biobank is a collection of health data offered by volunteers which has been used to help improvements in detection and treatment of dementia, some cancers and Parkinson’s.

It has collected intimate details – including whole body scans, DNA sequences and their medical records – from hundreds of thousands of volunteers for over two decades. The project has led to more than 18,000 scientific publications.

Participants were aged from 40 to 69 when they were recruited between 2006 and 2010.

UK Biobank said it was investigating the incident and thanked the UK and Chinese governments, as well as Alibaba, for support and cooperation.

“We understand that the existence of these listings, even temporarily, will be concerning to you,” Chief Executive Professor Sir Rory Collins said in a message to participants.

“We want to reassure you that all the data are de-identified; they do not contain any personally identifying information (such as names, addresses, dates of birth, and NHS numbers).”

Sir Rory told volunteers in his letter the data involved in the incident had been made available to researchers at three institutions.

He added the data was “swiftly” removed by Alibaba, following support from the UK and Chinese government, but the data’s appearance to a “clear breach of the contract signed by these academic institutions”.

“They, along with the individuals involved, have had their access suspended,” Sir Rory added.

Murray told MPs the government has been told no purchases were made from the three listings on the website.

Alibaba has been contacted for comment.

Keep reading

‘Invidious racial discrimination’: AMA color-based scholarships vanish from website after complaint

The American Medical Association Foundation website no longer includes listings for race-based scholarships after a medical watchdog suggested the foundation should lose its tax-exempt status for racial discrimination.

Do No Harm, a watchdog group of doctors, nurses, and other medical professionals, aims to expose racial discrimination, transgender ideology, and other divisive practices in medicine. Do No Harm sent a letter to the IRS earlier this month, noting that multiple AMA Foundation scholarships explicitly state that only students of certain races qualify.

Last week, the scholarships disappeared from the AMA Foundation’s website.

“The AMA Foundation appears to have removed the discriminatory scholarships at the heart of our IRS complaint—a tacit admission that our concerns were warranted,” Dr. Kurt Miceli, a psychiatrist and chief medical officer at Do No Harm, told The Daily Signal.

“However, we believe the government is still obligated to investigate to confirm that these programs have truly been eliminated and not simply rebranded and reconstituted,” Miceli added.

The AMA did not respond to The Daily Signal’s request for comment by publication time.

Keep reading