Tag: health care

“I Was Offered Assisted Dying Over Cancer Treatment”: Broken Canadian Healthcare System Is Killing Patients

Two years ago, over the Thanksgiving holiday, Allison Ducluzeau started to feel pain in her stomach. At first, she assumed she had eaten too much turkey, but the pain persisted. A couple of weeks later, she saw her family doctor who requested CT scans, although none were sorted. Soon after, as the agony worsened, her partner insisted she went to the emergency unit at their local hospital on Vancouver Island. Finally, doctors confirmed the couple’s worst fears: she was almost certainly suffering from advanced abdominal cancer.

Allison, then 56, later learned that she had stage 4 peritoneal carcinomatosis, an aggressive condition. By the time she saw a specialist early last year, he warned that she might only live a few months longer: chemotherapy tended to be ineffective for her cancer, buying a bit more time at best, and she was inoperable. Instead, she was told to go home, sort out her papers, and decide if she wanted medical assistance in dying.

Unsurprisingly, Allison was devastated. “I could barely breathe — I went in there hoping to come out with a treatment plan but was just told to get my will in order.” That night was the worst of her life as she broke the shattering news to her son and daughter at her home in Victoria. “I told them I might only live for another two months,” she recalled. “If I’d not had my children, I might have accepted MAID [medical assistance in dying] — but when I saw the effect on them, having just been through the deaths of my own parents, it made me dig really deep.”

So, determined to find help, she researched her condition, spoke to doctors as far away as Taiwan, flew to California for scans and eventually travelled to Baltimore for treatment. She had discovered that patients could be given debulking surgery to reduce their cancer, followed by targeted use of heated chemotherapy — yet back in Canada, she could not get even an initial telephone chat with a surgeon who performed such operations for two months. Aided by her tight circle of friends and relatives, she raised almost half the $200,000 cost for the operation by crowdfunding. By the time she managed to see an oncologist in her home province of British Columbia, she was already on the road to recovery.

Today, Allison is in remission. She lifts weights daily, and goes running and cycling. She recently married her partner on a beach in Hawaii in front of her children. But she remains infuriated that Canadian doctors offered to kill rather than treat her. “The way it was presented was shocking,” she told me. “I was disgusted to be offered MAID twice. Once I was even on the phone, when I was on my own having just come back from Baltimore. It left me sobbing.”

As the debate over assisted dying heats up in Britain, with Keir Starmer promising a free vote on the matter if he wins the general election, and with politicians in Jersey approving plans for its use only last week, we should take notice of Allison’s case. For she does not share the ethical or religious concerns held by many opponents of euthanasia. Nor does she oppose Canada’s 2016 MAID reform; she agreed with her father five years later that it was an “appropriate” option for his intensifying pain after many years of prostate cancer.

But she has deep worries about assisted dying being offered by doctors in a health system that is floundering — especially with inadequate and overwhelmed oncology services when cancer patients comprise almost two-thirds of the soaring numbers of citizens opting for MAID. “We do not have a good standard of care here, especially for cancer — and that is why it is so dangerous to have MAID, especially when it can be used to take a bit of pressure off physicians and the government.” She knows of three other cancer patients whose families fear they died needlessly — including the person whose home she bought after downsizing to pay her medical bills in the US.

Allison’s very existence challenges those who argue that Britain — with its flailing health and social care systems, shamefully long waiting lists and historically poor cancer survival rates — should rush headlong into legalisation of assisted death. So, what would she tell those advocating for the reform? “I would tell Britain to only accept assisted dying when the health service is fixed — otherwise it is a very dangerous step to take. We deserve decent and timely care rather than offers of faster death.”

“I would tell Britain to only accept assisted dying when the health service is fixed.”

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Biden’s Inflation Reduction Act Screws Seniors with the Biggest Medicare Premium Increase Ever

One of the classic strategies in the Obama/Biden playbook is policy that sounds good in the short-term, but whose long-term consequences won’t be felt until after an election. That way if Democrats win, they’re insulated from voters holding them accountable; but if they lose, they can blame Republicans when things go south.

This was undoubtedly one of the plays the Biden administration had in mind for the gallingly misnamed Inflation Reduction Act (IRA). But this disastrous legislation hasn’t just sabotaged Americans’ wallets, it’s sabotaged their health as well.

Snuck into the IRA was a poorly drafted provision that attempted to lower out-of-pocket expenses on prescription drugs. The IRA lowers the out-of-pocket maximum for seniors from about $3,300 to $2,000 by shifting the responsibility for the $1,300 difference to insurance companies. To no one’s surprise, the insurance companies pass that cost to consumers in the form of higher premiums and restricted access to prescription drugs.

This year, premiums for Medicare Part D are up more than 20 percent for the more than 50 million Americans enrolled. In 2025, they could increase again by more than 50 percent! We hope people are paying close enough attention during open enrollment in October to compare this price spike as President Biden campaigns on how he “fought Big Pharma to lower drug costs!”

The brilliant design of the Medicare Part D program 20 years ago was harnessing competition. Deploying the free-market principle that competition leads to lower prices, Part D allowed private insurance plans to compete for Medicare dollars to keep costs low and save seniors money.

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Chemotherapy kills cancer patients faster than no treatment at all

Wishful thinking simply won’t deter from the fact that the cancer industry is just that: an industry. Doctors, drug companies, hospitals and other key stakeholders profit heavily each time a cancer patient submits to the conventional treatment model, which typically involves injecting chemotherapy poisons into the body, blasting it with ionizing radiation or cutting off body parts — or some barbaric combination of all three.

It might rub some people the wrong way to state this, especially those who’ve had to watch a loved one die from conventional cancer treatment, but each of these supposed treatments don’t actually work, in many cases. Little-known science, which the medical-industrial complex has made it a practice to ignore or cover up, reveals that, despite what the medical industry often claims, chemotherapy in particular just isn’t an effective cancer treatment.

Dr. Hardin B. Jones, a former professor of medical physics and physiology at the University of California, Berkeley, had been studying the lifespans of cancer patients for more than 25 years when he came to the conclusion that, despite popular belief, chemotherapy doesn’t work. He witnessed a multitude of cancer patients treated with the poison die horrific deaths, many of them meeting their fate much earlier than other patients who chose no treatment at all.

After investigating this further, Dr. Jones found that cancer patients who underwent chemotherapy actually died more quickly, in most cases, than those who followed their doctors’ recommendations by getting the treatment. A few number-crunching efforts later and Dr. Jones exposed a fact that the conventional cancer industry doesn’t want the world to know about its multi-billion-dollar cash cow.

“People who refused treatment lived for an average of 12 and a half years,” stated Dr. Jones about his study’s findings, which were published in the journal Transactions of the New York Academy of Sciences. “Those who accepted other kinds of treatment lived on an average of only 3 years.”

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Atlanta Could Add Psilocybin And Ketamine To City Workers’ Healthcare Plans Under Pending Resolution

A new proposal from an Atlanta City Council member would direct municipal officials to explore the pros and cons of adding coverage for psilocybin and ketamine as mental health treatments to the city’s healthcare plan for firefighters, police and other government workers.

“Traditional treatments for mental illnesses such as depression, anxiety, PTSD, and others have shown limited effectiveness for some individuals, leading to a need for exploring alternative therapeutic options,” the legislation, which is currently being sponsored by 11 of the Council’s 16 members, states. “Recent research has demonstrated the potential efficacy of alternative therapies such as ketamine-assisted therapy and psilocybin-assisted therapy in treating various mental health conditions, offering promising results where other treatments have failed.”

The resolution’s lead sponsor, Councilmember Liliana Bakhtiari, has said city workers deserve access to a broad range of mental health services.

“We should be offering our employees—and especially our first responders, who are expected to be superhuman—the same amount of grace and providing them with a tool set to essentially overcome this issue,” The lawmaker recently told Axios.

Bakhtiari said the impetus for including the drugs on public employees’ health plans was meeting a West Virginia police officer who witnessed a fellow officer die of suicide and later used ketamine to treat his PTSD. The lawmaker said they’re not aware of any other city governments that have looked into covering psilocybin or ketamine treatment.

The resolution from Bakhtiari would request the Atlanta’s human resources department to “explore the feasibility of adding coverage for ketamine therapy, psilocybin therapy, and other alternative therapies for mental illness in the City’s employee benefits contract during its next round of negotiations.”

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‘A Failed Medical School’: How Racial Preferences, Supposedly Outlawed in California, Have Persisted at UCLA

Long considered one of the best medical schools in the world, the University of California, Los Angeles’s David Geffen School of Medicine receives as many as 14,000 applications a year. Of those, it accepted just 173 students in the 2023 admissions cycle, a record-low acceptance rate of 1.3 percent. The median matriculant took difficult science courses in college, earned a 3.8 GPA, and scored in the 88th percentile on the Medical College Admissions Test (MCAT).

Without those stellar stats, some doctors at the school say, students can struggle to keep pace with the demanding curriculum.

So when it came time for the admissions committee to consider one such student in November 2021—a black applicant with grades and test scores far below the UCLA average—some members of the committee felt that this particular candidate, based on the available evidence, was not the best fit for the top-tier medical school, according to two people present for the committee’s meeting.

Their reservations were not well-received.

When an admissions officer voiced concern about the candidate, the two people said, the dean of admissions, Jennifer Lucero, exploded in anger.

“Did you not know African-American women are dying at a higher rate than everybody else?” Lucero asked the admissions officer, these people said. The candidate’s scores shouldn’t matter, she continued,  because “we need people like this in the medical school.”

Even before the Supreme Court’s landmark affirmative action ban last year, public schools in California were barred by state law from considering race in admissions. The outburst from Lucero, who discussed race explicitly despite that ban, unsettled some admissions officers, one of whom reached out to other committee members in the wake of the incident. “We are not consistent in the way we apply the metrics to these applicants,” the official wrote in an email obtained by the Washington Free Beacon. “This is troubling.”

“I wondered,” the official added, “if this applicant had been [a] white male, or [an] Asian female for that matter, [whether] we would have had that much discussion.”

Since Lucero took over medical school admissions in June 2020, several of her colleagues have asked the same question. In interviews with the Free Beacon and complaints to UCLA officials, including investigators in the university’s Discrimination Prevention Office, faculty members with firsthand knowledge of the admissions process say it has prioritized diversity over merit, resulting in progressively less qualified classes that are now struggling to succeed.

Race-based admissions have turned UCLA into a “failed medical school,” said one former member of the admissions staff. “We want racial diversity so badly, we’re willing to cut corners to get it.”

This story is based on written correspondence between UCLA officials, internal data on student performance, and interviews with eight professors at the medical school—six of whom have worked with or under Lucero on medical student and residency admissions.

Together, they provide an unprecedented account of how racial preferences, outlawed in California since 1996, have nonetheless continued, upending academic standards at one of the top medical schools in the country. The school has consequently taken a hit in the rankings and seen a sharp rise in the number of students failing basic standardized tests, raising concerns about their clinical competence.

“I have students on their rotation who don’t know anything,” a member of the admissions committee told the Free Beacon. “People get in and they struggle.”

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Childhood Vaccine Schedule Led to ‘Greatest Decline in Public Health in Human History’

A U.S. Senate roundtable discussion, hosted by Sen. Ron Johnson, tackled a taboo topic — why public health agencies have not studied the health outcomes of vaccinated versus unvaccinated children — and have refused to make data on the topic available to the public.1

“They do not publish the results [or] let any independent scientist in to look at that information,” Brian Hooker, chief scientific officer for Children’s Health Defense, said. “They refuse to publish the results and they really know why. It’s because the bloated vaccination schedule is responsible and is, I would say, in part responsible for the epidemic of chronic disorders that we see in children in the U.S.”2

In 1962, children received just five vaccine doses. As of 2023, children up to age 18 receive 73 doses of 16 different vaccines. The cumulative effects of this childhood vaccine schedule have never been tested.

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The Dam Is Breaking on Medical Trafficking Evidence – The Blood Was Contaminated

For the last four years, global citizens have been forced, coerced, defrauded and lied to about the COVID-19 vascular, neurological and severe cardio injuries, but this month, the damn has broken further about the endless greed associated with medical corruption about who knew what when it comes to medical trafficking and known medical corruption for decades. 

It should be a massive wake-up call for those who are in denial that governments, the medical industry, and PHARMA are incapable of lying to the public and citizens should just believe in the medical divinity of those in white coats. 

This week in the UK a cataclysmic story broke when the UK Inquiry on Blood Contamination released its findings. It is a stunning story about people in the know keeping their mouths shut and going about their jobs selling, profiting and administering blood transfusions since the 1970s to innocent human beings in dire need that resulted in Hep C to HIV and other diseases, and resulted in horrific deaths that affected loved ones and family caretakers. 

The 2,000-plus page report was released on Monday. The summary alone is devastating blow to humanity and has brought shame upon the UK bureaucrats elected to protect their citizens via regulatory agencies and the medical industry’s lack of ethical standards. 

In the 1970s, the UK was in need of blood and imported it – some from the U.S. The blood was sold and known to be contaminated by some in the know, who chose to remain silent. 

By the mid-1970s, there were repeated warnings that imported US Factor VIII carried greater risk of infection and the UK’s NHS continued to use foreign supplies. For a summary of the findings, as reported by Sky News watch this short report. 

Sir Brian Langstaff, a former High Court Judge, led the inquiry since 2017 across the U.K. He stated that thousands of patients were admitted to hospitals and ended up with “life shattering” medical complications. 

His announcement of the findings publicly can be watched here.

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Many countries have reached the point of over-medication

The fact that hospital waiting lists are increasing all the time, that the amount of sick leave taken by working men and women seems to rise each year, that mental illnesses are getting commoner every time statistics are brought up to date, that the incidence of heart disease seems to be on the increase, that there is a massive increase in the amount of pollutant-inspired illness, that 80 per cent of modern cancers are thought to be caused by chemicals of one sort or another, and that the number of health professionals needed to cope with all the sickness is increasing rapidly, seem to suggest that medical research has had relatively little effect on the morbidity rates or upon the quality of life at any time in the last century.

In addition, there is evidence that medical research has actually detracted from the quality of life, causing ethical problems and using funds which could be better used on projects more likely to contribute to good health.

Indeed, there is not only evidence for the uselessness of much medical research: there are also sound indications that many developed countries have reached a point of over-medication which is harmful to health. As Dr. Vernon Coleman pointed out in his book ‘Coleman’s Laws’, if a patient has two conditions – two diseases – there is a very good chance that one of those diseases was caused by the treatment for the other.

Writing in the Journal of Human Resources, an American researcher, Charles T. Stewart, has shown that life expectation is approximately the same in countries with between 4 and 16 doctors per 10,000 people. It is a certain fact that while the number of patients treated by doctors is increasing in numerical terms, the number saved as a percentage of those who could be saved is falling dramatically.

There is a savage irony in the fact that we have now reached the point where, on balance, well-meaning doctors in general practice, and highly trained, well-equipped specialists working in hospitals, may do more harm than good. The epidemic of iatrogenic disease which has always scarred medical practice has been steadily getting worse and today most of us would, most of the time, be better off without a medical profession.

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More than 30 Babies Mistakenly Vaccinated with Pfizer or GSK’s RSV Shots

At least 34 babies were mistakenly given the respiratory syncytial virus (RSV) vaccine and one of those babies was hospitalized according to a study published today in Pediatrics.

Researchers from the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention (CDC) analyzed data from the Vaccine Adverse Event Reporting System (VAERS) for the RSV vaccines, which are not approved for children.

The researchers found 27 reports of the Pfizer RSV vaccine (Abrysvo) and seven reports of the GSK RSV vaccine (Arexvy) mistakenly administered to children under 2 between Aug. 21, 2023, and March 18, 2024.

“While rare, vaccine administration errors are known to occur and may increase after a new vaccine or product is introduced,” Dr. Pedro Moro, lead author of the study, told MedPage Today.

Both vaccines were first approved in May 2023 for people ages 60 and older. Pfizer’s Abrysvo was approved in August 2023 for pregnant mothers during part of their third trimester, targeting RSV prevention in babies.

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Biden HHS Redefines ‘Lawfully Present’ To Give ‘Free’ Health Care To Illegal Immigrants

So much for a border crisis. The Biden administration recently finalized regulations that will provide taxpayer-funded benefits to individuals who came into this country lacking authorization, by defining them as “lawfully present.”

The final rule follows regulations proposed last spring. It will have the same major effects as the initial proposal by expanding access to taxpayer health benefits for specified populations, but seems craftily drafted in a way to avoid, or at least minimize, legal challenges.

Medicaid Expansion Not Finalized

The prime controversy in both last year’s proposed rule and this year’s final version is over health coverage for individuals participating in the Deferred Action for Childhood Arrivals (DACA) program. Both regulations would revise the definition of “lawfully present” to include DACA participants for purposes of participation in health programs under Obamacare.

One major difference lies in the applicability of the regulatory changes. Whereas last year’s proposed rule changed the definition of “lawfully present” for both the insurance exchanges and Medicaid, the final regulation only applied the change to the exchanges, at least for the moment.

As a practical matter, not finalizing the Medicaid change will have little impact on DACA participants. Unlike most other populations, DACA participants will not need to earn income equal to the poverty level ($15,060 for a single person in 2024) to qualify for exchange subsidies. And because Biden-era enhanced subsidies remain in effect next year, the lowest-income recipients can qualify for subsidies that require no out-of-pocket premium for a benchmark health plan.

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