Category Archives: Healthcare

Medicine…Money…Economics…Ethics

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Health or WealthWhich of the above is more important to you? Are great economics with poor health your desire. Is it okay for the most elite scholars to avoid ethics so that they and the institution they work for have a better opportunity for wealth? We, as Americans, have paid for the research on vitamins and minerals and food (VMF). Yet, the value of VMF is hidden from us for the sake of a robust economy.

All the above are inexorably intertwined. There cannot be a large medical economy without a large sick population. Many have coined the word “sick care” for the present state of healthcare in the US. Drugs and cutting are the typical treatments for chronic disease. Disease that could be treated with VMF. If you had proper VMF before you age, then most likely, you would never reach the state of chronic disease. You would simply age and then with a few months of illness, you would pass. Please read Looking Good, Feeling Better for a better understanding.

Many researchers have not published the benefits of VMF in the hopes of being able to make an analog (prescription drug with side effects because it is not natural to the body) of the VMF for profit. We cannot point our finger at any one institution and say that they are at fault. We are all at fault. Government for allowing institutions to profit from illness while cures in VMF exist. Americans for allowing our government to get away with it in a democratic republic. In our Declaration of independence are the words— “life, liberty, and happiness.” Where is the happiness when you are in so much pain from chronic disease that life is miserable? Are you really going to turn to opiates for relief?

We hold doctors up as being the final decision makers for health. This is not the case. Let me state that again. Doctors are not responsible for the interpretation of the science of medicine. They must follow the medical guidelines as set up by the Agency for Healthcare Research and Quality. AHRQ takes its lead from the Secretary of Health and Human Services and ultimately the President and Congress. Do you think that HHS has your best interest in mind for life, liberty, and happiness? They operate by the principle of “markets before mandates” as clearly stated by Secretary Michael Leavitt in 2008. Note that to value life is the very last. The economy is more important than your health and consequently your happiness.

The archived site that stated these principles has been taken down. Here are government’s nine principles for taking care of your health:

  1. National standards, neighborhood solutions
    2.      Collaborations, not polarization
    3.      Solutions transcend political boundaries
    4.      Markets before mandates
    5.      Protect privacy
    6.      Science for facts, processes for priorities
    7.      Reward result not programs
    8.      Change a heart, change a nation
    9.      Value life

Do you need to have a robust economy for happiness? The government believes so. Is this where the institution of government is more important than the individual it serves. Isn’t this the very definition of evil? M. Scott Peck in his book, “People of the Lie,” uses the Me Li massacre in Vietnam to explain this very point. The squad was given the command that it must survive at all cost because of the importance of the mission that lay ahead. They went into a village with this understanding and proceeded to kill anyone that posed a treat including defenseless women and children.

Instead of bullets that kill you instantly, the institutions that profit use a disinformation playbook that has been around for years or least since WWII when the government sued seventeen multinationals for conspiracy for manipulation of vitamin D pricing and amounts in over the counter supplements. Dr. William B. Grant has published his version of it at Orthomolecular.org.

(OMNS Oct 1, 2018) A “Disinformation Playbook” has been used for decades by corporations to delay government action on matters of public interest that would adversely affect their income and profit. Some well-known examples include the big tobacco companies, the coal and oil industries, the sugar industry, and the National Football League. The Union of Concerned Scientists has outlined five “pillars” of the Playbook [Disinformation Playbook], [Alvord 2017]. Big Pharma may be using the Playbook to slow the adoption of strong support for vitamin D. This article is the product of my further analysis.

The Disinformation Playbook
1. The Fake
Conduct counterfeit science and try to pass it off as legitimate research.
2. The Blitz
Harass scientists who speak out with results or views inconvenient for industry.
3. The Diversion
Manufacture uncertainty about science where little or none exists.
4. The Screen
Buy credibility through alliances with academia or professional societies.
5. The Fix
Manipulate government officials or processes to influence policy inappropriately.

William B. Grant published a paper in 2009 called “In Defense of the Sun.” In the paper he shows that by just raising the level of serum vitamin D (25OHD) to 45 ng/ml, 400,000/yr. premature deaths could be stopped in the US. That is just vitamin D. What about the rest of the vitamins and minerals that we are deficient—vitamin C, magnesium, iodine, organic sulfate, zinc, vitamin B12, folate (not folic acid), and omega 3 fats. That is just the beginning of health. When is science going to admit that the placebo effect or the mind/body connection is just as powerful as most drugs that are on the market? Living longer and feeling better should be our goal. Otherwise, a strong economy is just that and cannot bring happiness because of illness. –Mark Pegram

Vitamin D3 Obfuscation

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GraphicAs I have not written in many months, I would like to apologize for my absence. I had an injury in the spring that has taken many months to recover. I am now nine weeks since surgery and three weeks into rehab. In any case, I have recovered from my incapacitation enough to write. I would like to say that the American medical institutions have the best diagnostic capability in the world.

The attack on vitamins and minerals continues. The mere suggestion that a vitamin or mineral might help with a chronic disease will bring outrage from the “medical community.” Typically, it is not from your doctor, although he may have fallen into the allure of medical propaganda. Also, your doc must follow medical guidelines as defined by AHRQ. Obfuscation is more likely from research that is less than adequate­—manipulated—or from a news outlet that gets a large portion of its advertising from the medical industry.

Just recently there was an article in the New York Times suggesting that people are unnecessarily taking more vitamin D. Dr. JoAnn E. Manson is quoted in the article as saying, “A lot of clinicians are acting like there is a pandemic” of vitamin D deficiency. There is a pandemic, as in the US alone, Dr. William Grant has shown there are 400 thousand premature deaths just from cancer, diabetes, and heart disease that could be eliminated if serum vitamin D was raised to 45 ng/ml. Grant has done similar studies for other countries with similar results. The article goes on to say that it is about the money that the vitamin D promoters are getting. Wow, I haven’t received any money for writing this blog. The amount that I have received does not even cover the cost of the domain.

This leads us to many studies done to show that vitamin D has no effect in the treatment of the same diseases stated above. It should be interesting to note that in these studies, they always talk about dose and not what the serum vitamin D is. One study suggested that “large doses” of vitamin D had no effect on cancer. It turns out that their large dose was 100,000 IU (2.5 mg) given once per month. This works out to an average 3,300 IU per day. The body operates better with a daily dose instead of one large dose in a month. This amount is not near enough to get the population to a serum level above 40 ng/ml. It would take a daily dose of well over 10,000 IU per day to get ninety-five percent of the population above 40 ng/ml. Also, taken one time a month instead of once per day is not the same affect. Here is a story of one cancer survivor.

So, what does go on about vitamin D and other minerals for that matter? It is about the money. The money that the medical industry makes from a chronically ill population. Researchers have hidden the benefits of vitamin D so that they could make vitamin D analogs for large incomes from the sale of these drugs. At the 2010 Food and Nutrition Board on vitamin D and calcium, there was a consultant and a member of the board that owned patents on vitamin D analogs and were promoting the manufacture of such drugs. (Links from this post are now broken as that was eight years ago.) This conflict of interest is in strict violation of the National Academy of Science policy for ethics.

The holding out of benefits, of vitamins and minerals in adequate amounts, by the medical industry is a slap to the face of the Americans that have paid for the research. One of my pet peeves are biologic drugs or biosimilar drugs. Biologics are made by taking a known cell line, adding large amounts of vitamins and minerals in a reactor, and extracting the desired protein or amino acid. This then becomes a patented drug that is sold for large amounts of money. The drug my have serious side effects. Why not just give the patient the vitamins and minerals and let the body make its own repair compounds? “it’s the economy stupid.” –Pandemic Survivor

Terror at the VA

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VA HealthThirty months at war in Vietnam. Twenty-three years in the military. The horror of war imprinted in your brain to be replayed at any time. Triggered by almost any incidence, it comes at you like the ballistics at the end of a twelve-inch gun. Emotional trauma so strong the only place you can cope is in the structure of the military. How would you expect to be treated after decades of service protecting your country? You would like to think that our veterans are treated with great dignity and the respect they deserve.

We often hear horror tales of how our veterans are treated by VA Hospitals and healthcare in general. It usually involves waiting times. Recently there was the story of the nurse who was so occupied with a game she let a heart patient die on her watch. I have passed this off as local occasional incidents no different than our accepted medical treatment, but the problem is much more widespread. I got permission from my brother to tell his story of malpractice the VA. He gave me permission if I stick to the facts. I have waited three years to relay this story as he does not want to be bothered with legal action against a country that he fought to protect. Unfortunately, this is not a made-up Halloween story to just horrify you.

It was getting late at night and the pain continued to grow in Brother’s abdomen and radiating to his back. What has happened now? Bad food that has turned his gut up-side-down? Brother decided to return to Fayetteville, NC to make a life for himself after his service. He was never married as he did not want to burden another with emotional trauma delivered by military life. Only supported by a few friends and family members that did not forget him after three decades intermittent contact, he considered Fayetteville a safe-haven because of its military nature. Brother’s temperature had continued to increase over the last hour from 101 to 103. He called his friend Buddy to take him to VAMC emergency department.

After medical personnel had examined him at the emergency room, Brother was told that the pain was coming from a hip that was damaged from combat and military life. He was told to go home, take two aspirin for his temperature, and he would be just fine. Brother knew this was wrong. When you are deathly sick, signals alarm in your body that cannot be ignored. He pleaded with the medical personnel that something was deadly wrong, but they passed him off like a fly had lit on their ham sandwich.

Brother instructed Buddy to take him to Womack Army Medical Center (WAMC) on the Fort Bragg military complex. After emergency medical personnel examined him, he was immediately catharized. He had kidney stones blocking his bladder. The pain in his abdomen was from a swollen bladder that was about to rupture. His temperature spike was determined to be coming from a kidney and urinary infection. After further examination, it was determined that he had pyelonephritis. This deadly disease can kill you within hours or days as the bacteria spreads into your blood stream. He was put on IV antibiotic and kept in the hospital for over a week. Later x-rays showed that he had multiple kidney stones that needed to be removed from his kidney.

If Brother had complied with VAMC emergency, I would now be visiting his grave. Are directions coming from the top that former soldiers are to be managed in a way that fits a budget? Managed in a way that soldiers nearing late-life increases in benefits should be allowed to die to control cost? Is the VA in Fayetteville over-burdened with too many returning soldiers? Are government unions protecting employees to the point that incompetence has become a way of life? Whatever happened to duty, honor, country—General MacArthur is shuddering in disgust. President Donald J. Trump, clean up this cesspool! 

(In research for this article, I found this notice from September 2014 or the period when Brother’s emergency occurred. Get with it Elizabeth Goolsby, Medical Center Director, you’ve got to be better than this. If you are a veteran living in Fayetteville, do not use the VAMC.) –Mark Pegram contact: vitamindmark at gmail 

Failure of the US to Protect Citizen’s Health

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Ill

It was March 2010 and I had just come home to have lunch.  I flipped on the TV and there was Sander Levin, acting Chair of the US Ways and Means Committee after Charles Rangel had stepped aside during his entanglement with the House Ethics Committee. President Obama was in the process of signing the Affordable Health Care.  Obama had asked the Ways and Means Committee to once again to review the economics of the bill.  A reporter stuck his microphone into the face of Levin, “Have you considered universal healthcare?”  Without pause, Levin responded, “I don’t think that the US Economy could handle the loss of five million jobs.” He snapped around, in military fashion, and marched away.

The loss of jobs comment startled me.  What jobs was he referring to? That is when I started to research how health payments were made in the US.  Most Americans don’t have a clue about the economics of healthcare and I certainly didn’t.  It turns out that he was referring to health insurance jobs.  Here is Trump’s dilemma in trying to appeal Obamacare.  The loss of jobs versus providing a health plan for Americans that they can afford and that will not crash the economy. Consider that healthcare accounts for almost twenty percent of the US economy.

Nancy Pelosi’s comment about eighty-five percent of insurance payments going toward health treatment is just a big fat lie.  No insurance company or any other business for that matter could stay afloat if it had to pay out eighty-five percent of its income for external cost.  The real number for the percentage of payment for treatment and pharmaceutical cost is close to fifty-five according to a Yale social economist. In other words, for every dollar that you give to an insurance company, only fifty-five cents is paid to providers and pharmaceuticals.

The health insurance business then falls into the category of a protection racket. The mob comes into your place of business and asks for twenty percent of your sales so that you will not have any break-ins. Compare:  Give me twenty percent of your GDP and I’ll assure that you get health treatment.  All of this with the protection of the US Congress.  How many of you would like to have Congress tell your clients that they must buy your product?  How many of you would like to have a monopoly in a state for your product?  Only health insurance and Major League Baseball have monopolies.

Health insurance allows you to be “ill at ease.”

How did we get into this mess? It is a long and boring story of government treating its citizens like cows to be harvested for income.  Consider that a cow has its greatest value when it reaches its maximum weight.  Just like cows, we have our largest value to insurance companies when we reach end-of-life health cost at our maturity. Most people think that health cost is bad for insurance companies.  It is just the opposite.  The larger cost of healthcare means a larger amount of sales for insurance companies. I had the opportunity to play golf with a CEO of a large health insurance company.  I said to him, “I had about eighty thousand dollars in health insurance payments for treatment of my back pain over the last decade.  Does that mean you had about one hundred sixty thousand in sales to cover that cost?”  He replied in the affirmative. My research numbers were confirmed.

Manufacturing jobs build wealth.  Insurance jobs are not service jobs and do not build wealth.  It only takes away from the wellbeing of the population long term, just like other protection rackets.  Government has sent our manufacturing jobs elsewhere while replacing them with insurance jobs.  If we do go to universal healthcare quickly, we would plunge the economy into recession, if not economic depression. This is the present dilemma for Congress as they try to determine what to do with the failed Obamacare.  How would you replace five to eight million health insurance jobs (The number of health insurance jobs have grown under Obamacare which was the intention of the bill)?  Other economically similar countries all have universal healthcare that was started in the 1960s when Lyndon Johnson threw us into an economic storm with his “Great Society.”  Universal healthcare is why countries like Canada have healthcare cost that are almost half of what it is in the US—no health insurance jobs.

“Bernie Sanders, firmly for universal health coverage, goes into a bar at a large hotel that is filled with insurance agents there for a convention.  Hoping to create as many problems as possible he yells; insurance agents are all crooks.  If you have a problem, just come up here right now.  A man came up and stuck a finger in Sanders’ face and told him to take it back.  Sanders asked him if he was an insurance agent.  The man replied, no I’m a crook.”

I am firmly a capitalist, but there are some things that I don’t think the large invisible hand of Adam Smith should be allowed to control.  That is anything that does not build wealth or health.  Health insurance and other protection rackets fall into this category.  We have had our freedom of life and pursuit of happiness taken away from us for our Government’s version of security.  We have neither. Sustaining institutions at the cost of the individuals they serve is evil (M. Scott Peck, “People of the Lie”).  Maintenance and growth of a large market is necessary for continued business growth.  With health insurance, the sicker the population, the better for business.  Government has colluded with health insurance companies through campaign contributions to pass laws and manipulate agencies under HHS to assure this happens.  HHS’s moto is “Markets before Mandates.”  Just consider now that we know through science that there would be one thousand less deaths a day the US through the elimination of vitamin D deficiency. This is to say nothing about the significant reduction in chronic disease.  Government has not acted because a reduction in this significant portion of GDP would send us into recession.

There is a way out, but media outlets must start telling the truth. The reason that they do not is because advertising is how they maintain income.  If they embarrass their health sector advertisers, business would be bad.  Our free press is necessary for our version of government to work.  The first thing that should happen is to set term limits for congressmen. If congressman acted for the people they represent instead of maintaining institutions, a lot of the ethics and moral issues would be resolved.  As congressmen vote for the people, then news stories would have to explain why, regardless of what their advertisers thought.

A survey was just recently published that put US life expectancy (an indicator of health) at 34th.  This is a result of manipulating science and economic forces to sustain the US economy at the cost of the health of its citizens.  In addition, there is moral decay because of all the pain citizens are suffering.  If we pay twice as much for health as any other country, why do we not have the best health in the world?  Evil . . . —Pandemic Survivor

A Specialist in General Wellness?

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Where have all the generalist gone, long time passing.  When will they ever learn?  There are over two hundred specialties in the AMA master list of medical professionals. The question becomes, how can a specialist function with a chaotic physiology?  When the worldview of the medical specialist suggests that just one thing will heal a disease, has he considered the side effects of his remedy?  It does not matter if there is a drug, a vitamin, a mineral, or a medical procedure; they all must interact with human physiology in complex ways. 

This idea of promoting one thing for health or even just one thing for repairing a malady of the body is less than desirable. The vitamin D community that is promoting health through just one purposeful necessity is a huge error.  This has been the mistake in the understanding of vitamins and minerals for healing of disease. Think of the confusion brought about by Linus Pauling in promoting vitamin C, or the legal battles fought over magnesium deficiency. Now, we have the Vitamin D Revolution.  All are needed, none should be left out.  The interactions of vitamins and minerals is very important to wellness.

Don’t get me wrong. vitamin D3 is a master prohormone that is necessary for a healthy life. This necessity has developed through our relationship with the sun.  As we have moved indoors out of the sunshine, the argument has become not that we need vitamin D3, but how much and from what source.  If we raise the level of vitamin D in our body, the need for other vitamins and minerals will show itself in other side effects.  For example, if you don’t have an adequate amount of magnesium with increased vitamin D, you may have heart arrhythmias.  This problem becomes even worse when applying drugs to a disease.  In particular for drugs that are analogs of what the body expects.  Think about how many times the physician prescribes one drug and then many others for the side effects. The problem then becomes do we apply drugs or nutrition first for chronic disease?  The body normally is deficient in nutrition and not deficient in drugs.  The money–is in medical procedures, drugs, and medical insurance.

There is some hope as we have moved in the direction of nutrition for the treatment of chronic disease.  Consider the number of facilities that now offer integrative medicine. Integrative medicine is where conventional Western medicine is combined with nutrition, exercise, and other medical arts.  You cannot define the human body with one illness, thus separating its wholeness.  This reminds me of the movie where Jack Palance tells Billy Crystal that the secret of life is just one thing.  Jack then tells Billy he will need to figure it out.  Does Billy need to find a specialist? We have spent inexpressible amounts of money and effort to find this one thing for one disease.  It does not exist unless you point toward God, or whatever reality you wish to define in our superhuman existence.

It’s time for the world of medicine to accept the fact that complexity cannot be resolved through specialty.   It takes both specialist and generalist to reach healthy solutions for healing disease.  There should be more generalist than specialist.  M. Scott Peck wrote about how specialties lead to evil.  Think of an institution where the individuals it serves are not given any empathy and only the survival of the institution is the important thing.  Peck’s “People of the Lie” is an important read in understanding of how evil presents itself through specialization. 

hammerJust in the last two weeks, I’ve had three different people tell me how much better they have felt by replacing drugs with nutrition and exercise.  One lady who was taking twelve different drugs has replaced all but one. Now, she is looking for what is missing in her life experience to eliminate the last drug.  Why does an individual have to spend the effort of doing their own research when solutions could be delivered by the medical profession?  What has happened to the consultant who suggest a drug for a short term solution and nutrition required for a long term solution? We seem to have the drugs and surgery worked out.  A man with a hammer will always look for nails.  When will they ever learn?  –Pandemic Survivor 

Nutrition First and Correct Medical Insurance!

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“In the councils of government, we must guard against the acquisition of unwarranted influence, whether sought or unsought, by the militaryindustrial medical insurance complex. The potential for the disastrous rise of misplaced power exists and will persist.”  –Dwight D. Eisenhower

Spending on Security: US Military Spending 3.5% of GDP, US Health Insurance Spending 7.9% GDP (with approximately 11% of Americans still uninsured), Medical Providers and Pharmacy 9.6% GDP

There are thirty countries in the world that have a longer life expectancy than the US.  Most of these countries practice nutrition first.  Our food pyramid is upside down. Here and here.  Medical practice uses drugs and surgery as the first line of defense against disease.  This works very well for acute maladies, but for chronic disease, it is a terrible practice.  Symptoms of chronic disease are treated without the root cause being remedied.

How have we come to an understanding that is not science, but government policy?  “It’s the economy, stupid,” says James Carville.  This desire for a healthy economy has driven us to a population that is ill with chronic disease and obesity.  This is great for the medical economy and health insurance economy, but very bad for the health of the individual.  Government has made policies that support the economy and not the health of the individual.

Who is the primary driver at fault in this car wreck that is crushing our health and economy?  It is the medical insurance industry.  Now, that sounds like a jump, but this institution is wrecking us and government is going along so as not to crash the economy.  The medical economy has led us to a huge national debt and the insurance companies are the primary driver. Why the insurance companies?

In 1928 my mother and father were having their first child.  The doctor rushed to our home as is typical in a country environment; babies were birth at home.  There was no insurance.  My father paid the doctor directly for his services.  He gave the doctor two hams, a twenty-five-pound bag of flour, and twenty dollars.  This translates into about five hundred and forty dollars in today’s currency.  Now we pay the insurance companies and the insurance company pays the bill.  Of course, minus deductibles and co-pays which we still have to pay directly. We do have better healthcare for birthing with prenatal care, postpartum care, and neonatal care.  Adding up all the medical cost surrounding a new baby gives us a cost of about $8,800 today.

Medical Cost 2

My research has found that up to half of medical expenses are administrative fees.  Most of that belongs to the insurance companies. Best approximation is that of every dollar you give to the insurance companies only fifty-five cents comes back to medical providers and pharmacy.  Without the insurance companies’ involvement, the cost of a new baby should be about $5,000 or about ten times the cost of 1928. This is approximately what medical providers actually get. The rest of the money goes to insurance for “health security.” The operation of medical insurance agrees with most business’ theory, that a company has forty percent internal cost, forty percent external cost, and twenty percent gross margin.  After general, selling, and administrative, there is about a five to seven percent profit margin with the government getting as large portion that in taxes.

As with any company, the growth of market size is critical to the health of the company.  As the disease state of Americans goes up, the medical spending increases and the cost of insurance increases proportionately.  Now hospitals are struggling as insurance companies drive up the cost of insurance to employees and play games with reimbursements for managed care. As the prices of pharmaceuticals and managed care increase, so does the cost of insurance.  This never ending loop of increases is rushing us forward into economic doom where we will no longer be able to support our national debt.  Hospitals have merged so as to have better leverage on the insurance companies, and this has only led to less competition in the market place.  This is to say nothing of the Affordable Care Act (ACA) which does not fully kick in until 2017.  Now we see many insurance companies already opting out of the ACA. It is not our fault scream the medical insurance companies.  In effect, it truly is the problem of government policy corruption. 

I remember well March 2010 when President Obama was in the process of signing the ACA.   I had gone home for lunch and flipped on the TV not knowing that it would cause me indigestion.  There on CSPAN was a reporter that stuck the microphone into the face of the new Chairman of the Ways and Means Committee.  Charles Rangel had just stepped down after being charged with corruption and Sander Levin was the acting chair.

“Has the committee consider single payer healthcare insurance?” the reporter asked.  There wasn’t even a pause.

“I don’t think the country could stand the loss of five million jobs in the present economy,” Levin responded.  He snapped around in a military square and marched off before any follow-up questions could be asked. This began my research into medical cost that arrived at the above conclusions. I quickly imagined the median salary for medical insurance employees at about $70.000/yr.   The annual loss of $350 billion dollars in jobs to the economy would be hard road to follow.  If you used the same method as was used in accounting for the ACA, that would be a ten-year loss of 3.5 trillion to the economy.  After all, the industrial segment of the economy had been decimated, the housing market was a disaster, and we had just bailed out the banks. We certainly would not want to damage the economy with a change in medical insurance.

Government policy in the healthcare market segment has driven us to disastrous results. Don’t get me wrong.  I am a capitalist and don’t believe in the government taking over general business. However, when you combine giving the medical insurance companies state monopolies, when government practices poor policy for food, when you guarantee increased market size with the ACA, and when the HHS practices markets before mandates (your health suffers so that the economy can be sustained), you end up with a large ill-health market that the general population cannot afford.   Now that the Supreme Court has declared penalties for not having insurance as a tax, it is not too great a leap to declare all medical insurance as a tax.  That would make our taxes-well-just stupidly high.

I now believe that the ACA was a mechanism to ward off the insurance companies lobby in the hopes that medical insurance would collapse into single payer like the rest of economically similar countries.  We currently have one of the highest tax rates in the world.  If we look at Canada where healthcare is taken from their taxes, why is our healthcare cost almost double that of Canada.  When you add in health insurance as a tax, it truly is an unappealing number with a tax rate that is about double the rest of the world.  Whatever happened to common sense?

And then there is the suffering of chronic disease that is extremely high in the US.  Consider heart disease in Japan and Greece that is five times less than the rest of the world.  You know our scientist are smart enough to figure out why (sulfur deficiency and vitamin D).  Japan, Greece, and Iceland all have very low heart disease rates believed to be from the abundance of sulfur in the soil as each sits on volcanic riffs.

Markets before mandates is killing us both physically and from an economic perspective.  If we don’t start practicing nutrition first and correct medical insurance, the US is doomed. What happened to the days when you paid the doctor directly with a couple of hams, a bag of flour, and a few bucks?  Bring on medical insurance that is national and not a state monopoly, and give the population medical bank accounts that pass through from generation to generation without taxes.  Expand Medicaid for the less fortunate as it already has under the ACA. Medicare should not be handled by a third party (more government corruption), the insurance companies.  Of most importance is to get the science right for chronic disease in the practice of medicine.  It might be a short term correction for the medical industry, but let the markets decide without government interference. Certainly I would not have suffered for three decades with pain from chronic disease. Decades of pain brought on by bad government policy and greedy insurers that require me to give up health freedom for security or else. Collectively, we have arrived at Ben Franklin and Dwight Eisenhower’s warnings.  –Pandemic Survivor

“Those who would give up essential Liberty, to purchase a little temporary Safety, deserve neither Liberty nor Safety.”  –Benjamin Franklin

The State of Health in the US

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SMMIt has become apparent to me over the last several decades that manipulation of health and life expectancy for economic purposes is real. I have thought for most of the last ten years that it was just incompetence on the part of doctors, failure by our government to properly manage their role, and lack of education on the part of the populace. Yes it is still some of all of these combined, however, it has become apparent that there is a real conspiracy happening. It is being carried out simply for the gain of politicians and their ilk as lifelong employees of government who believe by controlling your life; they are giving you a better America. We come together as a people to form government to help protect the interests of the population as a whole, not for the few. If government believes they are presently protecting it for the many, then we have a serious problem on our hands as thousands suffer needlessly and die at the wish of our politicians.

We live in the greatest country in the world and I love America. I am not discussing here the heart-felt efforts of the many physicians who have worked sacrificially to save lives from many forms of disease or the tireless work of researchers to develop treatments. I am speaking primarily to the people at the top of decision making of our institutions who have intentionally allowed death and suffering through their policies. Health and Human Services was even brave enough to state this policy as part of their nine principles of operation in the 2000s. Of the nine principles, markets before mandates, was number four, and to value life was number nine, the last.

Politicians and large institutions, (health insurers are the worst of the worst as they profit from your suffering and the more you suffer the better their sales, and only fifty cents of every dollar you give them comes back as payment to providers–but, believe the politicians, that they are growing our economy through manipulation of health insurance) are using the complexity of life and medicine to simply manipulate outcomes. The main tool of this obfuscation is to promote the use of patent medicine over the use of nutrition to allow the body to heal. Patent medicines are used simply to treat symptoms with the hope that the body will heal on its own. The only real exceptions to this are antibiotics and some vaccines. But now, even the vaccine market is being manipulated for higher sales. We use screening to find cancer earlier in its state of development and chemo and cutting for treatment to make the claim that we are giving increased life when our death rate from cancer has not declined at all. It is plain to see that the ones benefitting from this misdirection are not the patients and the payers of expensive research and treatments — you. Of course, if you are receiving income from the health sector, as one in five of every American, then you too are benefitting from this treachery.

The importance of economics over life started in the nineteenth century and became magnified in the twentieth century as patent medicines were held up as more important than nutrition for healing. This is certainly true for emergency medicine, but very damaging for treating chronic disease and the hope of a long life. Now, you will see many ads state that nutrients are not for treatment, diagnosis, or cure of any disease to stay within the confines of our politician’s laws. I suspect if medical practice was changed to use patent medicine for emergencies and nutrition for chronic disease, life expectancy would increase to over ninety years old. A good life to a ripe old age, your period of suffering would be very brief.

If a visit to the doctor for a chronic concern started with tests and diagnosis evolved around which nutrients your were most deficient, there would not be the need of almost any patent medicines. “Well let’s see Mr. Patient, it looks like you are not getting enough protein and balance of protein and fats so that you will heal. Also, you need more greens for folate to help generate stem cells and you need to spend more time in the sun for vitamin D. Also I have found several mineral deficiencies which can be corrected by changing your eating habits to allow for more variety. If you don’t want to change your eating habits, then I can simply write you a script for this combination of vitamins and minerals based on my testing to improve your health.” Sound weird? It is only because your mindset has been manipulated toward patent drugs.

The state of medicine, interwoven with economics, is now so complex and complicated; it will take an extreme effort to make the change.   Currently the most egregious actions are the hiding of research outcomes for vaccines that increase the rate of autism (the CDC admitted to this over eighteen months ago) and the serious error that was made for vitamin D RDI by the National Academy of Medicine (formerly the Institute of Medicine) in 2010. Just these two things are causing significant suffering, causing thousands of deaths each day, and significantly impacting healthcare cost. And yet, no action has been taken. The press is conflicted over the loss of revenue if they report on the errors. What are you going to do about? – Pandemic Survivor

US Institutions Have Lost Their Moral Compass

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They called it a near miss, but I called it immoral. The FBI agent laid down her gun to prevent the terrorist from shooting the hostage. The problem is truly one of ethics and morals. She had violated the number one rule of the FBI – Do not surrender your weapon. The terrorist escaped to continue on his mission of releasing a deadly virus in multiple locations. (From an episode of “Blacklist”)

The issue with all government decisions is whether to have empathy for each individual that it serves, or for the masses. It now appears that the government has lost its moral compass in trying to maintain its institutions. M. Scott Peck in his book “People of the Lie” (better known for “The Road Less Traveled”), describes two poles of evil. We all recognize individual evil as narcissism. That is to have no empathy for others. The second pole of evil is institutional evil. This is when the institution maintains its position without empathy for those it serves.

We have now entered an era when institutions remain whole for safety without empathy for the individual. The Patriot Act was legislated to keep us safe. Is it worth the loss of freedom? Many would say yes, including you for your own personal desire of safety.

However, what about healthcare? We have now legislated rules and agencies that exist for the sole purpose of maintaining the healthcare economy without empathy for the individual. With healthcare as the largest segment of the economy, one in five people derive their livelihood from this sector. Is your health worth sustaining your income? Maintaining and sustaining the largest segment of the economy from the illness of the population is immoral.

Would a head shoot have been the right thing to do to prevent more acts of terrorism? Would you have had empathy for the hostage? How about your health, is it worth your income?

Daunting questions. Your take away is that your health is your responsibility and you should not give it to institutional sustainability. – Pandemic Survivor

Lay Off the Mega-Doses of Vitamin D?

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“Lay off the megadoses of Vitamin D,” screamed Lenny Bernstein, Washington Post, from the pages of the Life section of Sunday’s Greensboro News & Record.  How odd, I thought.  It was like a command being screamed at a school of swimmers floating lazily down the Niagara River on a bright Sunday afternoon.

Since Niels Finsen was awarded the Nobel Prize in 1903 for discovering UV light would treat a form of skin TB, the value of vitamin D and our relationship to the sun has been highly valued.  The discoverer of the mechanism for how UV light worked to produce vitamin D in our skin, Harry Steenbock, UW-Madison, was offered a million dollars for his patent of vitamin D in the late 1920s by Quaker Oats.  Moving forward, during World War II, the US government sued seventeen multinational companies and organizations for conspiracy (they were not afraid of mincing their words when the government still cared about its people) of price manipulation of vitamin D. It seems they had got to together and were only putting 50IU (an ineffective amount) in tablets that were being sold over the counter to treat rickets.  This forced parents to buy the prescription form to prevent and treat rickets. The lawsuit was resolved by allowing the vitamin D3 patent to go into the public domain.

The headline today was eerily familiar to a headline in Baltimore, November 25, 1964: “Excess of Vitamin D Linked to Retardation.”   This was Dr. Robert E. Cooke, a John Hopkins pediatrician, making a non-scientific statement based on his expertise. As this was at the height of the thalidomide scare, everyone was warned to not take cod liver oil, a rich source of vitamin D, as it might cause genetic defects. Dr. Cooke was good friends with Sargent and Eunice Kennedy Shriver.  Through this political influence, the newspapers pick it up and ran (like a scalded dog) with it as absolute fact.

Over fifty health conditions or diseases have been shown to be from vitamin D deficiency by clinical control trials.  There are hundreds more in the medical literature shown as a relationship between vitamin D deficiency and the ability of genes to be expressed properly. Is the weight of the evidence and the general publics’ knowledge starting to put fear into the hearts of those who wish to sustain and grow the largest segment of the economy? What is meant by the principles of operation for our institution that is to protect our health, Health and Human Services, that “markets before mandates” is number four and “value life” is number nine out of nine?  It would seem that government has adopted the position that the economy is more important than the health of the individual.  This is all to sustain and grow the largest segment of the economy, the pharmaceutical/health insurance/medical industrial complex.  At almost twenty percent of GDP, one out of every five jobs is sustained through the illness of the population. How immoral our leaders have become.

What an odd headline to see in “Life” when just recently in Canada, News Medical reported that a professor, Dr. Paul Veuglars, at the University of Alberta has found the IOM statistical analysis was wrong (I will not bore you with the multiple conflicts of interest of that IOM Food and Nutrition Board.)  He showed, when using the same data as the IOM, that the correct amount for 97.5 percent of the population was over 8,000IU of vitamin D3 per day.  This has been confirmed by a group of vitamin D scientist in the US, Grassroots Health.  Through testing of thousands of participants, they have found that the average person needs over 7,000 IU of vitamin D3 per day.  The lead in for the article was: “Increasing vitamin D intake could prevent 37,000 deaths annually.”  Extrapolating for the population of North America, this would mean that there are over 300,000 premature deaths annually.  I should add here that this megadose, 7,000 IU, represents about ten minutes in the midday summer sun with sixty percent of your skin exposed.  Who are you going to believe, the government or nature?  No colds in the summer? Why?

Last night, at a church concert with orchestra and choir and over seven hundred in attendance, there was not a single cough to be heard during the long pauses between movements.  Has the public finally caught on and taking “megadoses” of vitamin D to boost immunity?  How could it be on a cold March evening during a long-cold-wet spell that no one seemed to have a cold or congestion?  Will our News & Record and Washington Post staff be able to sleep at night with the shame of knowing that they have assisted in over 300,000 premature deaths annually?  It will be interesting to see how many are saved by the security of a health insurance barrel, otherwise known as Obamacare, when Niagara Falls looms large. – Pandemic Survivor
References:
News Medical: http://www.news-medical.net/news/20141127/Canadas-current-vitamin-D-intake-recommendations-need-to-be-re-evaluated-Study.aspx
Fifty-two health problems treated or prevented by vitamin D with list of control trials: http://www.vitamindwiki.com/Proof+that+Vitamin+D+Works
Spokane Daily Chronicle  November 1964: http://news.google.com/newspapers?id=8ltYAAAAIBAJ&sjid=lvcDAAAAIBAJ&pg=3428,6604726&dq=vitamin+d&hl=en   and https://pandemicsurvivor.com/2012/07/31/excess-vitamin-d-linked-to-retardation-november-25-1964/
Vitamin D- A Conflict of Science  https://pandemicsurvivor.com/2015/01/31/vitamin-d-a-conflict-of-science/
Vitamin D for Profit 1923-1946:  https://pandemicsurvivor.com/2010/12/09/vitamin-d-for-profits-1923-to-1946/
IOM Got it Wrong, Grassroots Health, January 2015:  http://archive.constantcontact.com/fs187/1102722411090/archive/1119836531780.html
Secretary Michael Leavitt, Principles HHS: http://archive.hhs.gov/secretary/
Conflict of Interest at National Academy of Science, December 2010: https://pandemicsurvivor.com/2010/12/08/conflict-of-interest-at-national-academy-of-science/
Nobel Prize: http://www.nobelprize.org/nobel_prizes/medicine/laureates/1903/finsen-bio.html

Your Money or Your Health?

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– By Mark Pegram userprofiletile

“The problem with vitamin D is it’s cheap and not patentable.”  Dr. Robert Heaney in a recent interview with Dr. Joseph Mercola

Dr. Robert Heaney has delivered a half truth. The real truth: the problem is not how inexpensive vitamin D; it is about the population getting well and the healthcare economy collapsing. Vitamin D is the number one most important nutritional item for health and wellness as science has shown since the 1930s. The government now has funded the largest segment of the US economy from the economics of illness without empathy for the pain and suffering. You can call this what you like, but the proper terms are immorality and corruption. Our leaders have given themselves over to the payments by the health insurance/education/pharmacy/provider complex to maintain their positions in government and lavish life styles.

The proponents of vitamin D are now frustrated with their efforts over the last fifteen years. The frustration comes from all the medical evidence and science based medicine that is not being put into medical practice. Again, the reason is economics. It is not how inexpensive vitamin D; it is about all of the money flowing from less than science based treatments. Think about what was declared as settled science on nutrition and wellness in the 1970’s versus what we are now being told is healthy. Stay out of the sun – now sun is beneficial because of vitamin D and also what happens when we are exposed to full spectrum light; don’t eat saturated fats – now saturated fats are much better for us. I remember the study well, published by two time Nobel Prize winner, Linus Pauling, which said sugar drove cholesterol and not saturated fat (the study was done on prisoners for complete control, published in the early 70’s). So what are we to believe? An advancement in science or the lying cheating b*&t#$ are using our illness to fund their lavish life styles. I do get really excited when I think about this because I almost died in 2004. If not for my faith and my ability to reason through the medical science, sleep apnea and heart disease would have been my end.

This delusion has worked so well in the healthcare industry that the new idea was to move it to atmospheric science. The sky is falling and the polar bears are dying because there is global warming. What will happen when the real catastrophe shows up? All the false concern about polar bears is just unbelievable when thousands of people are needless suffering and dying because of the money. The climate was not cooperating with the lies of Gore and his likes so bring on Obama and the Patient Protection and Affordable Care Act. Patient protection and affordable – you’ve got to be kidding! Have we again given up freedom for security? When this insurance bubble collapses because health has returned, the economy will go down the toilet in a grand Coriolis swirl. I hear “da Boss Man” calling us to continue to live in a state of health slavery. There we are, caught in the scope of Kyle’s riffle as the enemy. Pickin’ it dup here boss!

Yes, healthcare is complex and our leaders have used this to “pull the wool over the eyes” of the ill. I remember the words of Congressman Howard Coble well when I went to meet him ten years ago. “You can’t just be accusing us of killing people because of our policies.” Yes, I am accusing you of killing people because of government policies to protect the economy. I am sure it is a tough decision to make, economy versus health. The tyranny of government to use the collections of the population to fund science and then to bury the findings in obfuscation is evil. So, says the politician, it does keep the economy going. Aren’t we grand? I think I am hearing the sounds of the Beatles singing Little Piggies from their White Album.

In their styes with all their backing
They don’t care what goes on around
In their eyes there’s something lacking
What they need’s a damn good whacking

Everywhere there’s lots of piggies
Living piggy lives
You can see them out for dinner
With their piggy wives
Clutching forks and knives to eat their bacon

(one more time…)