Tag: health care

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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Largest Review On Transgender-Youth Medicine Finds Insufficient Evidence For Medicalization

England may be the third country to withdraw from a “gender-affirming” treatment pathway due to recommendations from a long-awaited report.

In April, the country published the Cass Review, “most comprehensive summary on transgender-youth medicine,” psychologist Erica Anderson, who identifies as transgender and has a doctorate in clinical psychology, told The Epoch Times.

The review, chaired by Dr. Hilary Cass, British honorary physician, consultant in pediatric disability, and former president of the Royal College of Paediatrics and Child Health, stated that there is insufficient evidence to demonstrate the long-term benefits of medicalizing children who want to identify as a different gender. Instead, the review recommends focusing on psychotherapy.

For some clinicians and researchers, this recommendation was a long time coming. Others are concerned that it potentially threatens medicalization—currently the primary treatment—for gender-incongruent youths.

The National Health Service (NHS) England, which commissioned the report in 2020, stated it would be committed to following through on the recommendations.

“[The Cass Review] final report will not just shape the future of healthcare in this country for children and young people experiencing gender distress but will be of major international importance and significance,” the statement read.

Eight days after the Cass Review’s release, Scotland’s health boards announced a pause on new prescriptions for puberty blockers and cross-sex hormones as they gather evidence to support the safety and clinical effectiveness of these medications.

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Historic Drug Shortage Exacerbated by EPA Overreach

Concerning new reports reveal that the drug shortage in the U.S. has reached its highest level since the American Society of Health-System Pharmacists began tracking data. In total, 323 medicines are now in short supply.

However, the problem is about to get worse because of government regulations on an entirely different issue. Counterintuitive measures from the Environmental Protection Agency (EPA) are set to effectively ban the domestic production of chemicals that are used in the process of manufacturing vital prescription drugs and vaccines.

Shortly after Congress amended the Toxic Substances Control Act (TSCA) in 2016, the EPA began the rulemaking process on 10 chemicals currently in use in the United States using a broad and overreaching definition of “unreasonable risk.” Now, the EPA is expected to release a final rule on methylene chloride under TSCA.

Methylene chloride has several applications, including in the process of manufacturing hundreds of medicines and vaccines like those that treat Hepatitis B and HIV infections, mental illnesses and epilepsy, heart failure and high blood pressure, and high cholesterol.

If this rule goes into effect, it will exacerbate the drug shortage by bringing domestic manufacturing to a halt while making our supply chains more reliant on foreign nations like China for pharmaceuticals. This runs in direct contradiction to the Biden administration’s “Investing in America” agenda, which aims to onshore supply chains critical to our economy and security.

For example, methylene chloride is used to make hollow fiber cartridges which are used in the manufacture of monoclonal antibodies and vaccines, including the COVID-19, HPV, Hepatitis B, and flu vaccines, as well as therapies for arthritis, migraines, osteoporosis, and autoimmune diseases. In a letter to the EPA, the company that produces these cartridges wrote their product is used in at least 190 human therapeutics and vaccines. Their supply is so essential that the U.S. Department of Health and Human Services and the Defense Department awarded the company funding to expand its manufacturing capacity here in the U.S.

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UN Official Condemns Health “Misinformation,” Advocates for “Digital Integrity Code”

The United Nations continues with an attempt to advance the agenda to get what the organization calls its Code of Conduct for Information Integrity on Digital Platforms implemented.

This code is based on a previous policy brief that recommends censorship of whatever is deemed to be “disinformation, misinformation, hate” but that is only the big picture of the policy UN Under-Secretary-General for Global Communications Melissa Fleming is staunchly promoting.

In early April, Fleming gave a talk at Boston University, and here the focus was on AI, whose usefulness in various censorship ventures makes it seen as a tool that advances “resilience in global communication.”

A piece on the Boston University Center on Emerging Infectious Diseases site first asserts that AI had a “major role” in helping spread misinformation and conspiracy theories “in the post-pandemic era,” while the UN is described as one of the institutions that have been undermined by all this, while “working to dispel these narratives.”

(The article also – helpfully, in terms of understanding where its authors are coming from – cites the World Economic Forum (WEF) as the “authority” which has proclaimed that “the threat from misinformation and disinformation as the most severe short-term threat facing the world today”).

You will hardly hear Fleming disagreeing with any of this, but the UN’s approach is to “harness” that power to serve its own agendas. The UN official’s talk was about AI can be used to feed the public the desired narratives around issues like vaccines, climate change, and the “well-being” of women and girls.

However, she also went long into all the aspects of AI that she perceives as negative, throwing pretty much every talking point already well established among the “AI fear-mongering genre” in there:

“One of our biggest worries is the ease with which new technologies can help spread misinformation easier and cheaper, and that this content can be produced at scale and far more easily personalized and targeted,” she said.

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Win For Reality: UK’s National Health Service Constitution to Declare ‘Sex is Biological’

In a marked rejection of transgender ideology and a win for women’s rights activists, the constitution of Britain’s National Health Service will publicly declare that sex is a biological reality that must inform how patients are treated.

Following the move by the National Health Service to prohibit the prescription of life-altering puberty blockers to children, another major pillar of wokist medicinal thought, that sex is a fluid concept, looks to be dismantled as the NHS’ constitution will state: “We are defining sex as biological sex.”

In practice, the update to the governing document of the socialised healthcare system will mean that so-called transgender women will be barred from female-only hospital wards, The Telegraph reports.

At present, there is no recognition of sex as a biological fact when determining where patients were placed, resulting in some female patients being forced to share a room with biological males who claim to be transgender women.

The new constitution will state that NHS patients will “not have to share sleeping accommodation with patients of the opposite biological sex”. Previously, the document said that patients would be placed in the ward of the sex they identified as.

In response to objections raised by female patients over being seen by a transgender nurse or doctor, the constitution will also allow patients to request to be cared for by a healthcare professional of the same sex.

The changes have come at the direction of government ministers, who are tasked with updating the NHS constitution at least once every ten years. The document was last updated in 2015. However, in addition to the input from ministers, a two-month public consultation will be conducted to allow members of the public and from the healthcare industry to submit further suggestions for changes to the constitution.

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A Compound Discovered On Easter Island Extends Life, Combats Alzheimer’s

Scientists are still uncovering the secrets of a compound discovered 50 years ago on Easter Island. Produced by bacteria there, rapamycin appears to be a powerful life-extender and may be a transformative treatment for age-related diseases.

In 2009, the National Institute on Aging Interventions Testing Program (ITP) published a groundbreaking study indicating that rapamycin extended the lifespan of mice by 9 percent to 14 percent. Experiments conducted by various research institutions worldwide have further corroborated these findings or have found the compound to have significantly greater life-extending effects.

The drug also exhibits rejuvenating effects. For example, it can stimulate hair regrowth and prevent hair loss in a short period. It reduces proteins related to aging in the skin and increases collagen. The drug has even shown positive effects in treating age-related diseases such as Alzheimer’s disease, as well as diabetes and heart and muscle conditions.

While the drug label for rapamycin currently does not claim to “extend human life,” some people with a strong desire for longevity have already sought this medication from their doctors and take it regularly in small doses.

A study published in 2023 in GeroScience employed a questionnaire to survey 333 adults taking rapamycin off-label, most under the supervision of a physician. The vast majority (95 percent) reported taking rapamycin for “healthy longevity/anti-aging” reasons, almost 19 percent for preventing dementia, and a few for “cardiovascular disease” or “cancer.” However, no one reported taking the drug for its original approved use: prevention of organ transplant rejection.

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Doctors do more harm than good

We now spend more on health care than ever before, and the medical profession is apparently more scientific and better equipped than ever before, so 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 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.

Most developed countries now spend around 8% of their gross national products on health care (the Americans spend considerably more – around 12-14%) but through a mixture of ignorance, incompetence, prejudice, dishonesty, laziness, paternalism and misplaced trust doctors are killing more people than they are saving and they are causing more illness and more discomfort than they are alleviating.

Most developed countries now spend around 1% of their annual income on prescription drugs and doctors have more knowledge and greater access to powerful treatments than ever before, but there has probably never been another time in history when doctors have done more harm than they do today.

It is true, of course, that doctors save thousands of lives by, for example, prescribing life-saving drugs or by performing essential life-saving surgery on accident victims.

But when the medical profession, together with the pharmaceutical industry, claims that it is the advances in medicine which are responsible for the fact that life expectancy figures have risen in the last one hundred years or so they are wrong. It is, for example, commonly claimed that modern scientific medicine has led to improvements in life expectancy in most developed countries from around 55 at the start of the century to over 70 today.

The evidence, however, does not support this claim.

Any (small) improvement in life expectancy which has occurred in the last hundred years is not related to developments in the medical profession or to the growth of the international drug industry. However, the increase in iatrogenesis is related to both these factors.

Whichever facts you look they at seem to support my contention that although doctors may do a limited amount of good, they do a great deal more harm.

If doctors really did help people stay alive then you might expect to find that the countries which had the most doctors would have the best life expectation figures. But that isn’t the case at all.

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UCLA Med School Launches Review Of ‘Health Equity’ Course But Warns That Whistleblowers Could Be Disciplined

The University of California, Los Angeles medical school is launching a probe of its controversial “health equity” class—and warning whistleblowers they could be punished if any more information leaks about it.

The dean of the medical school, Steven Dubinett, announced Friday that his office had formed a task force to review all first-year courses, including “Structural Racism and Health Equity,” after the Washington Free Beacon published materials from the mandatory class. But the school isn’t happy about having its hand forced.

In an email to students and faculty, Dubinett implied that the leaks were an “attempt to intimidate” the medical school and hinted that future leakers could face discipline—especially if they record lectures. 

“Recording class sessions is not permitted without express consent from the instructor and class participants,” Dubinett wrote. That warning appears to be a reference to an earlier incident in which a guest lecturer, Lisa Gray Garcia, led the required course in chants of “Free, Free Palestine” as well as a prayer to “Mamma Earth,” part of which was caught on tape and thrust the course into the national spotlight.  

“Doxxing or publishing, posting or identifying private information of faculty, staff, trainees or students in any public forum, including social media, is contrary to UCLA policy and our core values of mutual respect and inclusion,” Dubinett continued. “Guidelines for overseeing invited guest speakers are being developed that will address adherence to our policies.”

The veiled threats come days after the full syllabus for the course went viral online and sparked outrage from prominent doctors—including former Harvard Medical School dean Jeffrey Flier—who said it was filled with unscientific claptrap and called for an investigation. Leaked readings claimed that weight loss is a “hopeless endeavor,” described “anti-capitalist politics” as a tenet of “disability justice,” and advocated for abolishing the police. 

The syllabus was designed with input from Shamsher Samra, a professor of emergency medicine who has endorsed “Palestinians’ right to return” and published research on the “health of border abolition.” Though the course initially included an exercise that separated students by race, that lesson was canceled in January after it became the subject of a local civil rights complaint.

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