Tag: health care

Why More Americans Are Turning To Holistic Health Care

A significant shift is underway in American healthcare as more people embrace alternative therapies that focus on identifying and addressing the root causes of health issues. This transition, often referred to as “root cause medicine,” represents a departure from traditional reactive medical practices toward a preventative and holistic approach. A movement that is expected to expand in 2025.

According to a JAMA study, 37% of adults sought alternative treatments such as acupuncture, yoga, and specialized diagnostic testing —a sharp rise from just 19% two decades ago. This movement is also gaining traction among patients of all ages, particularly those over 55, as they seek to age gracefully and optimize their long-term health. Another study published in Gerontology and Geriatric Medicine shows that more Americans 55 and up are seeking a holistic or alternative medicine route and many times are not telling their doctor.

Doctor Mitchell Ghen, a Florida-based holistic health doctor, has noticed this shift over the past few decades but believes that those numbers are not representative of the number of people using alternative medicine. He said, “I am a little bit surprised it’s 1/3 that’s doing it I would’ve thought it would be closer to 50%. Over time, people have that recognition that something’s not right, you can’t fix something unless you address the underlying issue and the underlying biochemistry that’s awry in the first place.”

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‘Grave Concern’: Chronic Diseases Are Killing Kids — and Exposure to Chemicals Is Driving the Epidemic

Chronic diseases are the main cause of illness and death for children in the U.S. and Europe, and exposure to chemicals is driving the epidemic, according to a paper published today in the New England Journal of Medicine.

The authors — 25 scientists, economists and legal scholars representing 17 U.S. and European Union (EU) institutions — called for new laws and regulations governing chemicals that, according to their data analyses, are largely responsible for the chronic disease epidemic in children.

“An estimated 350,000 manufactured chemicals, chemical mixtures, and plastics” listed in global inventories are “subject to few legal or policy constraints,” the paper stated.

Less than 20% of these chemicals were tested for toxicity, particularly in infants and children.

Production of these chemicals has increased 50-fold since 1950 and is projected to triple from current levels by 2050, according to the authors, who published their collective work under the Consortium for Children’s Environmental Health.

According to the paper:

“Unlike pharmaceuticals, synthetic chemicals are brought to market with little prior assessment of their health impacts and almost no post-marketing surveillance for longer-term adverse health effects. …

“A large body of evidence links multiple pediatric NCDs [non-communicable diseases] to synthetic chemicals …

“Two key lessons emerged from these cases: toxic chemicals can cross the placenta, and children are far more vulnerable to toxic chemicals than adults.”

Non-communicable diseases are the principal causes of illness and death in children today and their incidence and prevalence are on the rise, the paper stated.

The paper cited data indicating that in the last 50 years, there have been significant increases in cancer rates, autism diagnoses and neurodevelopmental disorders, reproductive defects, obesity, asthma and other health conditions in children.

Associations between widely used chemicals and disease in children “continue to be discovered with distressing frequency,’ and it is likely that there are “additional, still unknown” links, the paper said.

“Children’s Health Defense (CHD) has worked to end the childhood chronic disease epidemic for nearly two decades,” said CHD CEO Mary Holland. “Kudos to this team of scientists for documenting the connection between chemicals and childhood disease and for joining the call to protect children from toxic exposures. There is no more important work than protecting today’s and future generations of children.”

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The Monster of American “Healthcare”

I was raised by much older, chronically sick parents. I saw far too much of hospitals as a youngster. My father was a hospital patient as often as he was at home with his family. For instance, as a seven year old rock and roll fanatic, I had to watch the Beatles on The Ed Sullivan Show on a television in the hospital lobby.

Every time my father underwent his latest surgery, he came out the worse for the wear. They never made him better. They never healed him. But they made a lot of money off of him. My mother was hospitalized several times during my youth as well. Again, while she was never as sickly as my father, they never improved her health, either. The same kind of hospital that has killed so many almost killed my sister at age thirty. They gave her the Last Rites of the Catholic Church, and she almost left six small children behind. Miraculously, she pulled through, only to be abused by them repeatedly decades later. She is in constant pain, and has never really recovered from a broken hip eight years ago. The doctors just shrug in their patented manner. What do you want us to do? Heal you or something? Healing is apparently for faith healers and witch doctors. I’m not sure that witch doctors aren’t superior to allopathic medicine.

I could share stories that you wouldn’t believe, just from my own personal experience. How they almost killed my father once when he underwent an incredibly simple surgery for a deviated septum. How they put the metal pin in wrong when he broke his hip, causing him excruciating pain and another unnecessary surgery. How the nurses took so long to bring my niece Denise, who has Down Syndrome, a bedpan that she fell and reinjured her broken hip. And, of course, you all know about how they killed my brother Ricky with their hospital COVID protocol. Is it any wonder that I have done everything I could to avoid doctors and the medical profession in general? Just give me another vitamin, please. I hear others talk glowingly about the treatment they received, or the wondrous accomplishments of their doctors, and I simply cannot believe it. I have seen nothing but the worst in them my entire life.

When I worked in a hospital, and interacted with nurses regularly, I heard patients screaming from their rooms for help, in vain. One nurse said, with a smile on her face, that she wished a particular patient would hurry up and die. A pediatric nurse joked to an orderly bringing a child to surgery, “Tell them not to try too hard. We are already full as it is.” I saw security called on an elderly mother who was so understandably grieved over her daughter’s death that she wasn’t leaving promptly enough. Her daughter’s dead body was visible in the ICU bed. The woman tried to explain that she had no one to pick her up. The nurses didn’t care. Security didn’t care. The system doesn’t care. You’re a piece of meat to them, to be carved into and exploited for all the money you have. I still feel guilty that I didn’t have the courage to chew out those nurses for treating that poor woman like that. I was too afraid of losing my job.

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Medical intervention is the LEADING CAUSE of DEATH in the USA  

  • Hospitals in America are deemed as dangerous as third world countries due to medical intervention being a leading cause of death, surpassing cancer and heart disease.
  • Most medical doctors in the USA are viewed as drug jugglers with limited scientific training, leading to harmful practices that result in approximately one million deaths annually.
  • Pharmaceutical prescriptions often contain venom peptides from poisonous animals, contributing to dangerous side effects and adverse events that can be deadly.
  • The outdated medical system heavily relies on toxic drugs, causing more harm than good to patients and resulting in significant mortality rates from medical intervention.
  • The utilization of snake venom in pharmaceutical research, as exemplified by companies like Venomtech, highlights the concerning practices in drug discovery and the potential dangers associated with venom-based molecules in medicine.

Got a head cold, the flu, or Covid? You might want to avoid the hospital like the plague, because here in America, the hospitals are as dangerous as a third world country. Don’t be fooled by all the bright lights, diagnostic machines, and nurses camped out on their smart devices everywhere. What do you think the leading cause of death in America is right now? Do you think it’s cancer, heart disease, Covid-19, diabetes, obesity, or dementia? Wrong on all accounts. This is not a multiple-choice question.

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‘Over 800 Biases Uncovered’ As Pentagon Ends AI Chatbot Pilot Program For Military Medicine

The US Department of Defense’s Chief Digital and Artificial Intelligence Office (CDAO) has concluded a pilot program focused on using AI chatbots in military medical services.  

In a Jan. 2 announcement, the DoD said the Crowdsourced AI Red-Teaming (CAIRT) Assurance Program pilot focused on using large-language models (LLM) for clinical note summarization and as medical advisers in the military.

It comes as more AI firms have begun offering their products to the US military and defense contractors to investigate their usefulness in military applications.

CoinTelegraph’s Stephen Katte reports that, according to the DoD, the pilot was a red-teaming effort conducted by technology nonprofit Humane Intelligence.

It attracted over 200 independent external participants, including clinical providers and healthcare analysts, who compared three prominent chatbot models.

Analysts from the Defense Health Agency and the Uniformed Services University of the Health Sciences also collaborated with the other participants, testing for potential system weaknesses and flaws while the chatbots were used.

According to the DoD, the pilot discovered a few hundred possible issues when using chatbots in military medical applications.

“The exercise uncovered over 800 findings of potential vulnerabilities and biases related to employing these capabilities in these prospective use cases.”

“This exercise will result in repeatable and scalable output via the development of benchmark data sets, which can be used to evaluate future vendors and tools for alignment with performance expectations,” the DoD said.

The Chief Digital and Artificial Intelligence Office’s lead for the initiative, Matthew Johnson, said the results will also be used to shape future DoD research and development of Generative AI (GenAI) systems that may be deployed in the future.

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Hospitals ration IV fluids as shortage extends into 2025

The US healthcare system continues to grapple with a critical IV fluid shortage caused by Hurricane Helene, which brought catastrophic flooding to North Carolina and heavily damaged Baxter’s North Cove manufacturing facility. Responsible for 60% of the nation’s IV fluid supply, the facility has been steadily working to restore operations, but full recovery is anticipated during the first quarter of 2025.

Baxter has restarted 85% of its manufacturing capacity, according to a December 19 update. Eight of the facility’s 10 manufacturing lines are back online, with some operating near pre-hurricane levels. The company anticipates reaching full pre-hurricane production levels early this year, which would allow distribution channels to normalize shortly after.

Previously, in a December 5 update, Baxter announced the resumption of its 3-liter irrigation manufacturing lines and peritoneal dialysis solutions manufacturing lines. The company also detailed that its IV solutions manufacturing lines had restarted, producing much of the site’s pre-hurricane capacity of 1-liter IV solutions—the size most commonly used in hospitals and clinics.

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“I Thought He Was Helping Me”: Patient Endured 9 Years of Chemotherapy for Cancer He Never Had

Anthony Olson wanted a career, children, a partner with whom he could hike Montana’s trails. Despite the diabetes diagnosis at age 4, the anemia, the kidney transplant that failed at age 29, the dialysis, he clung to those dreams. He attended community college and later moved from his parents’ house in Helena to study accounting at Montana Tech in Butte. He thought he might live a nearly normal life.

All of that was taken away in early 2011 when an oncologist at St. Peter’s, Helena’s only hospital, diagnosed him with myelodysplastic syndrome, a blood disorder that’s often described as pre-leukemia. The life expectancy of MDS patients is short. “He told me that without treatment, I’d be dead before the end of the year,” Olson said. He was 33.

“That diagnosis changed the direction of my life,” Olson, now 47, told me.

Olson couldn’t have known that he was one of many patients who, according to court records, may have received inappropriate, harmful or unnecessary treatments from Dr. Thomas C. Weiner. As I reported earlier this month, administrators at St. Peter’s suspected Weiner, who directed the hospital’s cancer center, was hurting patients for years. Yet hospital administrators allowed him to keep treating people until late 2020, when they suspended and then fired him. Weiner has denied all the allegations.

“I trusted that he was doing what was best for me,” Olson said of Weiner. “I never really questioned that until someone else told me that there was reason to.”

I discovered Olson’s story in a cache of records related to an ongoing legal dispute between Weiner and St. Peter’s. I was struck by how similar his case was to that of another Weiner patient, Scot Warwick. Weiner had diagnosed Warwick with Stage 4 lung cancer and treated him with chemo and other therapies for 11 years, court records show; after Warwick died in 2020, his family learned, from both a biopsy and an autopsy, that he never had cancer. Weiner insisted that Warwick had cancer all those years and that other doctors “missed” the disease.

Olson’s diagnosis was similarly flimsy, and he had been treated over nearly the same period of time. But there was a key difference between the two men: Olson lived to tell his story.

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UN Expert Urges Medical World to Cut Ties With Israel Amid Attacks on Gaza Hospitals

As Israeli forces stand accused of war crimes during attacks on multiple Gaza hospitals in recent days, Francesca Albanese – the United Nations special rapporteur on the occupied Palestinian territories – on Monday implored the global medical community to respond by cutting ties with Israel.

“I urge medical professionals worldwide to pursue the severance of all ties with Israel as a concrete way to forcefully denounce Israel’s full destruction of the Palestinian healthcare system in Gaza, a critical tool of its ongoing genocide,” Albanese wrote on X, the social media platform formerly known as Twitter.

Albanese amplified a post by Dr. Rupa Marya – one of the most vocal defenders of Palestinian human rights in the U.S. medical community – calling on Israeli forces to release Dr. Hussam Abu Safiya, director of Kamal Adwan Hospital in Beit Lahia.

Abu Safiya, who documented Israel’s siege and attack on Kamal Adwan and who reported last week that nearly 50 people including five hospital staff members were killed by an Israel Defense Forces airstrike on a nearby apartment tower, was among dozens of other medical staffers abducted by IDF troops on Saturday.

After besieging and attacking the hospital for weeks, Israeli forces raided the facility and rounded up 240 people, according to the Gaza Health Ministry. Israel claimed without evidence that Kamal Adwan was being used as a Hamas command center. With the facility shut down and badly damaged, critical patients and their caregivers were forced to evacuate to the nearby Indonesian Hospital.

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Euthanasia and the Failure of Canada’s Health Care System: A Human Tragedy

The rise of euthanasia in Canada, under the guise of progress, exposes an alarming truth: the abandonment of the fundamental values ​​that should guide any society.

Instead of investing in a health care system that cares for the most vulnerable, the country has opted for a quick and tragic solution: facilitating assisted dying as a response to the deficiencies of its health care system.

The case of Samia Saikali, a 67-year-old grandmother who chose euthanasia after a 10-week wait to be seen by an oncologist, calls into question the moral and ethical direction that Canada has decided to take.

Samia Saikali began experiencing health problems after a trip in December 2022. Finally, in March 2023, she was diagnosed with inoperable gastric cancer. According to her doctor, with chemotherapy she could have extended her life by at least a year, enough time to enjoy one last summer with her family.

However, the Canadian health system, renowned for its endless waiting times, failed miserably. Ten weeks after her diagnosis, Saikali finally got a consultation with an oncologist, but it was too late. Her health had deteriorated so much that treatment was no longer a viable option. Desperate and with no real alternatives, she opted for euthanasia.

This tragic outcome is not an isolated case. It represents the failure of a health system that prioritizes bureaucracy and inefficiency over human life.

According to the Fraser Institute, in 2022 Canadians waited an average of 25.6 weeks to access a specialist, the longest wait time ever recorded in the country.

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Concerns over the Security of Electronic Personal Health Information Intensifies

On Friday, an attorney for Ascension Health, a major U.S. hospital operator, wrote to Maine’s attorney general to tell him the electronic personal health information (e-PHI) of Ascension patients and employees were compromised during the ransomware attack that occurred in May that affected nearly 5.6 million people.

The attack significantly disrupted Ascension’s operations across its extensive network, encompassing 134,000 associates, 35,000 affiliated providers, and 140 hospitals in 19 states and the District of Columbia. Immediate consequences included the diversion of ambulances, closure of pharmacies, and a reversion to manual record-keeping methods as critical IT systems had to be taken offline.

Ascension attorney Sunil Shenoi said in his December 19 letter to the Maine Attorney General’s Consumer Protection Division that the company “will begin notifying applicable Maine residents of the security incident” through the U.S. Postal Service.

Despite the growing scale of cyber threats against the healthcare industry, a Congressional Research Service (CRS) report earlier this month emphasized that “there is no comprehensive digital data protection law in the United States.” Variable state data privacy and security laws compound this problem. Furthermore, while many data protection guidance documents are available, they are voluntary.

The attack on Ascension is the latest cyber-attack targeting the healthcare sector, which is particularly vulnerable due to the sensitive nature of patient data and the critical importance of uninterrupted medical services. Earlier this year there was a similar ransomware attack on Change Healthcare, a subsidiary of UnitedHealth Group that affected the personal health information of 100 million people, underscoring once again the escalating cybersecurity challenges healthcare providers face.

The February ransomware attack on Change Healthcare – attributed to the BlackCat cybercrime group – disrupted electronic payments and medical claims processing affecting healthcare providers and patients nationwide.

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