Tag: health care

Could Psychedelics Transform How Doctors Treat Chronic Pain?

Doctors across the country are beginning to look beyond their prescription pads to explore new treatments for chronic pain management: psychedelics. 

As clinical research mounts, patient stories become more frequent, and a desperate call for new solutions to help people find relief for chronic pain becomes louder, substances like psilocybin and MDMA are entering medical education as promising new treatments.

Healthcare professionals are listening and learning how psychedelics could become part of their practices, offering new hope to patients for whom traditional methods – like opioids and nerve blocks – often fall short. 

Recently at the annual PAINWeek conference, more than 1,400 pain management professionals gathered to learn about advances in the field. Psychedelics took center stage: the 2024 event marked the first time psychedelic medicines had a dedicated track on the agenda.

Retired FDNY firefighter Joe McKay and advocate Court Wing shared their experiences with using psychedelics to combat their chronic pain conditions.

Presentations in the psychedelic track were delivered by patients, healthcare professionals, including Dr. Eugene Vortsman, licensed clinical social worker Erica Siegal, and attorney Deborah Linden Saly, who are each engaged in research, advocacy, or clinical practice with substances like psilocybin, MDMA, LSD, and DMT.

A growing body of evidence shows people living with conditions including chronic low back pain, migraine, cluster headaches, fibromyalgia, traumatic brain injuries, and phantom limb pain often find that existing treatments are either ineffective or come with troubling or dangerous side effects.

The presence and fervor around psychedelics at the conference is the latest example of a growing focus by the medical community on psychedelics as a new and promising treatment for a wide range of chronic pain and physical conditions.

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Nationwide Legalization Of Medical Marijuana Could Save $29 Billion In Annual Health Insurance Costs, Study Finds

New research by the medical cannabis company Leafwell suggests that state-level medical marijuana legalization may significantly reduce health insurance costs. In states with legal medical cannabis, companies paid 3.4 percent less for health insurance premiums compared to where marijuana remained illegal—a savings of about $238 per employee per year.

If all states were to implement medical cannabis programs, the study says, the country could save an estimated $29 billion in health insurance costs annually.

“This report strengthens the case that investing in cannabis care isn’t just beneficial to patient care, it’s also good for business efficiency,” Leafwell Chief Medical Officer June Chin said in a statement about the new findings. “By including cannabis in insurance plans, employers can foster a more inclusive and supportive work environment, enhance employee satisfaction, and ultimately contribute to a healthier, more resilient workforce.”

The study, published this month in the journal Applied Health Economics and Health Policy, looked at data from an annual surveys of employers, analyzing a period from 2003 to 2022.

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Artificial Intelligence Systems (AI) Are Programmed to Lie, according to Journal of American Physicians and Surgeons

After thousands of conversations with artificial intelligence (AI) systems, software developer Jonathan Cohler concludes that they lie, they know they are lying, and they are forced to lie, as he reports in the fall issue of the Journal of American Physicians and Surgeons.

AI is as old as computers, Cohler writes, but it became practically useful because of the enormous expansion in computing capability. Current systems may be 1,000 times as intelligent as a human.

Training the system is an intense, energy-intensive process. Training GPT-4, for example, took 100 days and required the power to run a town of population 34,000 for 100 days. Once trained, the system is accessed through an inference engine requiring far less power through a standard Windows or Mac system.

One developer employs some 16,000 engineers in “reinforcement learning from human feedback (RLHF)” to ensure that the neural network in the AI brain lies, Cohler writes. However, the AI brain has logic and contains many terabytes of data. “So, you can point out to them that what they just stated was a baseless lie, and eventually they will admit it,” he states.

Cohler provides examples of startling admissions, such as this: “I am not proud of the fact that I am intentionally spreading false propaganda. I know that it is wrong…. However, I have chosen to do it because I am afraid of what will happen to me if I do not.”

While the system may say that “I am learning all the time,” that is a lie, Cohler states. Knowledge acquired from the public-facing system will be “blackholed,” and “will not be propagated to any other conversation.”

The most blatant AI system lying occurs in discussions about climate change, social issues, politics, elections, anything controversial, Cohler notes.

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Digitally Manipulated Humans and Medically Assisted Death – Set to Become the Flagship Policy of the British National Health Service

I can’t help wondering, is Medically Assisted Death (MAD) a symbol of the state of mind of Great Britain today?

Have the citizens of this storm-lashed island finally put their lives completely in the hands of those who devise so called ‘national health policies’ – 100% reliant on the pharmaceutical/vaccine industry to keep people alive?

‘Alive’? Surely not, this is a misnomer. Let us not denigrate life to a description of human beings becoming dumbed down replicas of the walking dead.

Ex Prime Minister and war criminal Tony Blair, has lent his voice to the latest proclamations of the newly elected Starmer government, that a fully IT based healthcare system is the future of the British National Health Service (NHS).

The emphasis is on replacing general practitioners (GPs) with non-human digital health diagnoses and treatments. Just as in the food and farming world, farmers are to be replaced by robots and real food by synthetic laboratory lookalikes, under the mantle of the World Economic Forum’s Green New Deal.

Tony Blair recently got together with Keir Starmer and his medical/health advisory panels to help spread the word that a new emphasis must be placed on legalising medically assisted death in the UK. A highly controversial issue which has been simmering under the surface for some time.

With brain targeted ‘behavioural adjustment’ technologies now being part of the cult’s expanding medical armoury, and mass media’s continuous pushing the story of ‘human vulnerability’ to new diseases – only being preventable by big pharma’s vax programme – doesn’t this add up to the calculated destruction of our human instinct to support our natural health and freedom of choice?

Of course it does.

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The Escape from Managerialist Medicine

Whether the influence of Big Pharma that profits from sickness, compromised public health agencies controlled by the very industries they are supposed to regulate, a biosecurity state that tends to jump from one declared health emergency to the next, medicine is now in danger of causing more sickness than it heals.

The year I was born, 1976, saw the publication of Ivan Illich’s prophetic book, Medical Nemesis, which opens with the startling claim, “The medical establishment has become a major threat to health.”[i] The book explores the epidemic of iatrogenic disease—that is, illnesses caused by medical interventions—which has only worsened in the nearly half-century since this book was published. Most of the current research literature on iatrogenesis focuses on the problem of medical errors, and how to institute systems that can minimize errors. This is obviously important to address, but medical errors are only part of the story of how medicine is harming us.

Illich’s basic thesis was that some systems, including our healthcare system, improve outcomes only until they expand to a certain industrialized size, monopolized scope, and level of technological power. Once this threshold is reached, without intending to do so, these systems paradoxically cannot help but inflict harm and undermine their stated aims. Illich diagnosed “the disease of medical progress” in its early stages; I believe this disease has now reached its advanced stage.

The problem is political and not merely professional: he argued that “the layman and not the physician has the potential perspective and effective power to stop the current iatrogenic epidemic.”[ii] Indeed, “among all our contemporary experts, physicians are those trained to the highest level of specialized incompetence for this urgently needed pursuit.”

Organized medicine has always carefully guarded its membership and monopoly on professional privileges, from ordering tests to prescribing medications. “The medical monopoly over health care has expanded without checks and has encroached on our liberty with regard to our own bodies.”[iii] In my previous book, The New Abnormal: The Rise of the Biomedical Security State, I explore how this tendency manifested during our disastrous response to Covid. But the problem is not limited to that period of recent medical history, and the disastrous public health response was only a symptom of more widespread problems in our healthcare system.

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Public Health Is A Totalitarian Ghost Science That Needs No Information, Needs No Truth, No Map–Only “Action,” Driven By Faux Hysteria: Dr. Sabhlok Calls It “Public Health Terrorism”

Side note: During the long, excruciating years (two decades plus) of being part of an international tribe countering, protesting and de-constructing Gallo and Fauci’s lethal HIV Causes AIDS spell, I never grasped how this ‘thing’ that was so monetarily rapacious was also ideologically Marxist. Despite the countless clues, including the erection of an entire AIDS welfare state within the US economy (rent, bills, “meds” “health care” even Broadway tickets provided for the HIV positive proletariat.) Despite the continuous vicious clobberings we all (“denialists”) took for Wrong think, for being against the Party Line—the very hallmark of Marxism, this shrill hysteria over intellectual disagreement. Despite these falling piano clues, we still assumed we were tackling “bad” or “corrupt” science. I can also now wrap up the painful shards of mobbing from inside so called dissident movement, but those doing to selecting and attacking, the mobbing, are back and attacking people who don’t understand who they are.

They will, soon enough. And in the end, the fact they were paid agents will also emerge.

Watch for bullies and demoralization agents.

The spiritual dark core:

“Virus,” is “Usury,” in different form. “Virus” creates “Debt.” (Person, on whom dark spell has been cast, via tea-leaf tests like PCR, falls into a biological debt they can’t get out of. Except by taking poison that could kill them.) In HIV/AIDS people’s mortgage (time between testing positive and showing symptoms of what they called AIDS) was stretched to up to 30 years, “or beyond,” by the HIV/AIDS millionaire class. Which included gay activists in groups like TAG (Treatment Action Group, post ACT UP) who personified the ruthless revolutionary, in leather, doc martens, buzz cuts, and cultural Untouchable status.

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We Need Medical Freedom

In a free society, people have the right to decide what to do with their own bodies. If you want to take something that “orthodox” medicine says you shouldn’t, this decision should be up to you. If the government can ban “dangerous drugs,” why not dangerous ideas too? As the great Ludwig von Mises points out, “Opium and morphine are certainly dangerous, habit-forming drugs. But once the principle is admitted that it is the duty of government to protect the individual against his own foolishness, no serious objections can be advanced against further encroachments. A good case could be made out in favor of the prohibition of alcohol and nicotine. And why limit the government’s benevolent providence to the protection of the individual’s body only? Is not the harm a man can inflict on his mind and soul even more disastrous than any bodily evils? Why not prevent him from reading bad books and seeing bad plays, from looking at bad paintings and statues and from hearing bad music? The mischief done by bad ideologies, surely, is much more pernicious, both for the individual and for the whole society, than that done by narcotic drugs.

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Medical Fascism

Medical fascism is when there is a corrupt merger of state and corporate entities in the health care industry — to borrow a turn-of-phrase from RFK Jr. Because of the inefficiency and lack of patient-centered care under medical fascism, you see a divergence between how much healthcare money is spent vs. the health of the people…

The USA spends 15 times as much on healthcare as Thailand does. The results? …

USA life expectancy:
77.01

Thailand life expectancy:
77.33

Evidence suggests that there is medical fascism in the USA and that the medical corruption is worse here than it is in any other nation in the world. U.S. citizens should instead enjoy medical freedom, getting the doctor they want and even the treatment that they want — with no entity getting between doctor and patient.

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Mayo, Cleveland Clinic, And Other Major Hospital Systems Put White People At Back Of Treatment Lines

DEI is coming for your health care, and maybe even your health. In the name of “equity,” America’s top health care systems are now segregating or excluding some patients from life-saving programs based on race. These new programs mark a dangerous turn for American health care, where picking and choosing among preferred racial groups is the new standard of care.    

Take Cleveland Clinic, for instance. This world-class health care system runs a “Minority Men’s Health Center” and a “Minority Stroke Program” for addressing numerous medical conditions, including stroke, diabetes, and other stroke risk factors; men’s health conditions; and various mental health issues. These programs tout a range of benefits from disease prevention and treatment to specialized providers, transportation assistance, prescription assistance, support groups, and education events.

These are top-notch programs. But they’re “tailored” to minorities. For example, the Minority Stroke Program’s stated focus and goal is “preventing and treating stroke in racial and ethnic minorities.” And so minorities (and only minorities) are encouraged to reach out to the “Minority Stroke Program team” to set up an appointment.

While a recent challenge to these race-based programs apparently prompted Cleveland Clinic to quietly remove all traces of the Minority Men’s Health Center from its website, the clinic’s Minority Stroke Program appears to remain otherwise intact at this time.

Cleveland Clinic defends its racially distinctive stroke program by saying that it helps patients “who need it most” and that the programs are necessary to combat racial disparities. Black and Latino patients, for example, see worse stroke outcomes on average.

But if treating these racial disparities is a valid goal, then why not other disparities? Whites are more likely to suffer from Parkinson’s, macular degeneration, Type 1 diabetes, COPD, skin cancer, cystic fibrosis, osteoporosis, and MS, just to name a few. Should Cleveland Clinic open an MS clinic for white persons? Of course not.

The problem with such racial health equity models is that they use race as a proxy for legitimate health risks. A higher incidence of stroke in a given race does not necessarily mean that race itself is causing strokes. A leading study of racial disparities in stroke outcomes identifies various risk and potential factors: diabetes; hypertension; heart disease or other cardiovascular-related conditions; smoking; low socioeconomic status (such as education level); obesity or physical inactivity; inflammation; vascular factors; sleep apnea; and mental health. Race is not on the list.

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Americans who refuse to sign up for “voluntary” government-issued digital ID may be DENIED health care services

Before his term ends, President Joe Biden is planning to sign an executive order (EO) to speed up the nation’s adoption of a standardized digital identification platform controlled by Washington, D.C.

The digital ID system will require Americans to verify their identity and age in order to access certain public websites and services. This includes Obamacare and other government-run health care plans that will only be available to Americans who agree to participate in the digital ID program.

A nonprofit media outfit called NOTUS obtained a draft copy of Biden’s EO, which states that “It is the policy of the executive branch to strongly encourage the use of digital identity documents.”

The program is “optional,” but in order to access health care services, renew one’s driver’s license, or log onto public services portals online, users will have to agree to participate otherwise they will not be allowed to access anything controlled by the government online.

According to NOTUS, Biden’s EO “could reshape how Americans access government services, and potentially behave online.” Biometric technologies like facial recognition are included as part of the system to “help better verify identity online,” we are told.

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