After witnessing the expensive torturous healthcare treatment received by my Medicare mother, Zoe, I decided that Knowledge is the best help to avoid being drawn up into the maze of profit-oriented healthcare. Below are articles, which may help you deal with disease responsibly. At the least, they will equip you with questions to help you deal with the medical system, you will face. Remember, the drugs, you are taking may be the cause of your ailment! Under the current system, doctors do not make money on healthy patients. Unfortunately, corruption and lack of ethics is rampant! Lack of knowledge can cost you your life and health!
Carol Stronstorff, Bradenton, Florida, March 1, 2004
Over 65, CHECK if your Medication type is on the BEER'S LIST listed by Type not Brand !
[Ask your MD and if he does not know, maybe find a new doctor!]
COMMENTS ON HEALTH IN GENERAL
Orthomolecular medicine : the practice of preventing and treating disease by providing the body with optimal amounts of substances which are natural to the body.
COMMENTS ON DOCTORS
IS YOUR DOCTOR AS GOOD AS A COMPUTER? Dr. Weed: "What computers do is take away the authority from the doctor and make the patient a potentially equal participant in the medical process and that's dangerous to the Establishment."
"It is very important for patients to understand that not all doctors have intellects. One should not assume that an MD degree automatically indicates that there is a profound level of intelligence - or compassion - brewing in the brain. Some doctors are brilliant. Some doctors are modestly endowed with intellect. Some doctors are just plain stupid. One can say the same about plumbers or journalists. The sooner that the culture begin to recognize this and begins to acknowledge this spectrum of intellect, the better it will be for all of us. Medicine and doctors must always be questioned. Your life depends on it. "Dr. Tuna says on N. Regush's www.redflags.com site 4/6/04
GENERAL COMMENTS ON DRUGS
GERMAN STUDY REVEALS THAT 94 PERCENT OF DRUG ADVERTISING MATERIAL IS NOT SUPPORTED BY EVIDENCE
HRT Failure to protect Women for profit or irresponsability site dedicated to PREMARIN Scandal
RITALIN Father of dead son warns of Attention Deficit Hyperactivity Disorder treatment -1000s die
DOCTORS' COMMENTS
MEDICAL MYTHS evidence based info from Dr. Flaherty of Montana State University
Dr. John Dewhurst: "So you see the problem I have with evidence based medicine. The evidence is not understood. Perhaps my problem is not so much with evidence based medicine as with its users, who find in it a useful but sometimes dangerous rock of certainty in an uncertain world. I'm sorry, colleagues, but you've still got to observe, and you've still got to think." {British Medical Journal 2004;328:963 (17 April)}
Dr. Mercola has one of the best site's for information on alternative treatment and healthy life style. It is easy to use.Type in disease or topic for valuable information. "... God has given us such wonderful bodies that if [we] even come close to following an optimal diet, exercise and rest, we will have a high likelihood of immunity from illness."
Dr. Andrew Saul {excellent site with marvelous selection of health quotes - a must read}.
DISEASES
CANCER
Cforyourself This site promotes the sale of books related to the use of Vitamin C in Cancer..
TheThe Gerson Therapy Prince Charles : "I know of one patient who turned to Gerson Therapy, having been told that she was suffering from terminal cancer and would not survive another course of chemotherapy."
Ovarian Cancer - death by treatment side effects- Husband G. Pawelski's observaton and studies
DIABETES
Nutritionist Mike Adams Type 2 diabetes is just a metabolic side effect of a lifetime of bad food and no exercise.
HEART DISEASE
Statin Warning - cholesterol not danger, but drugs are - VITAMIN C better
MEDICAL DISCLAIMER:
No individual should make any medical decisions or change their health behavior based on information provided here. Although the information provided is helpful, it is not intended to be a substitute for professional medical advice, diagnosis or treatment. It should be used as information to take with you to your doctor.
In no event shall the author and contributions to this site, be liable to you or anyone else for any decision made.
FAIR USE NOTICE:
This site may contain copyrighted (© ) material the use of which has not always been specifically authorized by the copyright owner. Such material is made available to advance understanding of ecological, political, human rights, economic, democracy, scientific, moral, ethical, and social justice issues, etc. It is believed that this constitutes a 'fair use' of any such copyrighted material as provided for in section 107 of the US Copyright Law. In accordance with Title 17 U.S.C. Section 107, this material is distributed without profit to those who have expressed a prior general interest in receiving similar information for research and educational purposes. For more information go to: http://www.law.cornell.edu/uscode/17/107.shtml If you wish to use copyrighted material for purposes of your own that go beyond 'fair use', you must obtain permission from the copyright owner.
_________________________
This page is being developed by Carol Stronstorff, VP SPCP - The Society for Prevention of Cruelty to Patients is a non-profit patients' rights organization. We are here to aid you in aiding your health and to assist in reducing your health care problems.
Founded on a deadly experience with no recourse, we strive to prevent further occurrences of such medical abuse in the interest of profits.
Migraines Researchers in the US and the UK have found that people with chronic headaches or migraines who had acupuncture, used less medication and had fewer days off work, making it a useful, cost-effective treatment. (Mar-16-04) "People using acupuncture had fewer headaches, less severe headaches and they used less health resources over the course of the following year," said one of the authors Dr Andrew Vickers, of Memorial Sloan-Kettering Cancer Center in New York. [published in the British Medical Journal]
http://www.guardian.co.uk/medicine/story/0,11381,1219002,00.html
'We all kill a few patients as we learn'
Everybody makes mistakes at work but what if you're a doctor and you ruin a patient's life - or even end it? Doctor-turned-writer Jed Mercurio recalls a catalogue of errors from his years as a medical student
Jed Mercurio Tuesday May 18, 2004 The Guardian
I made a mistake at work today. We all do it. But what if I said that I was a doctor? When a plumber gets it badly wrong, he leaves you with a flooded kitchen; when a doctor gets it badly wrong, he leaves you dead or crippled for life. One in every 10 hospital patients is harmed by a medical error. As many as 70,000 people die every year as a result of doctors' mistakes.
While I was a medical student, I saw a young guy with a bad knee. After the patient left, the consultant explained that the surgeon who had carried out the operation had got it badly wrong, and this was the cause of the patient's disability. He would never walk properly again. I asked the consultant why no one had informed the patient. He answered that you don't blow the whistle on colleagues and they don't on you. I thought that he was wrong, that the patient had a right to know the truth so he could fight for compensation and that the doctor should be held accountable for his negligence.
When I qualified, I soon learned that there would be times when I would be called upon to conduct procedures I had never seen, let alone practised. Airline pilots learn to fly the plane before they have to carry passengers. Due to limited training opportunities, doctors gain experience by treating patients. We are carrying passengers before we know how to fly the plane. Even newly qualified consultants are under-trained: an average of 8,000 hours' experience, in contrast to the previous generation who gained 30,000. We all kill a few patients while we're learning.
I was responsible for a few cock-ups in my early days as a new houseman - a tardy diagnosis, a wrong infusion, some patients with bruised arms from clumsy attempts to take blood or insert an IV line - but they were mended by a sincere apology to the patient and an ad hoc tutorial from a senior colleague. It was a month before one of us made a contribution to the hospital's mortality rate. A close friend had been instructed by his consultant to monitor a particular patient's potassium level, but my friend's shift got wildly busy and he put it off. The patient suffered a cardiac arrest and died.
He confessed the truth to a couple of us that night, but to his consultant he claimed that he had carried out a potassium test but that the result had got lost in the system. He felt awful about the patient's death but he could see no way of being open about his mistake without his consultant deciding that he was irredeemably incompetent.
He trusted his fellow housemen with the truth, but he didn't know his consultant well enough to be sure he wouldn't blow the whistle. I think this was the moment I realised that not every doctor who makes a mistake is a bad doctor. I knew my friend was good at his job. He had made an appalling but uncharacteristic error of judgment. Two years earlier, I had been the moralistic medical student in an orthopaedics clinic outraged by the covering-up of a young man's botched knee surgery, and now I was a doctor who understood how many critical decisions cram the working day and how easy it is for a tragedy to unfold from a momentary lapse in concentration.
On closer examination, the cases I have cited from first-hand experience don't reflect the errors of a single individual. The surgeon wasn't the only person involved in the care of the young man with the wrecked knee; my mate wasn't the only person looking after the potassium patient. Nearly all medical accidents result from a chain of errors involving the misjudgments of a series of practitioners.
The systemic failures with respect to training, supervision, communication and cross-checking are more far-reaching than the malpractice of an individual. However, many people find it less disturbing to believe that medical accidents are due to the negligence of a lone gunman - the individual acting alone and counter both to his training and to the expectations of his colleagues. Furthermore, the people harmed by medical accidents are eager - if they aren't, their lawyers are - to prove negligence, because if they don't, they don't secure any damages. There are other factors, but I believe these two are the highest-octane fuel for the blame culture.
The punishments for getting it wrong are only getting harsher. Recently, the courts levelled a charge of manslaughter against a doctor who injected a drug wrongly. The same mistake had occurred at least a dozen times before in other hospitals and by other doctors, all precipitated by administrative blunders and a lack of safeguards. The system lay at fault, not just the individual. Yet, for one momentary lapse of judgement while carrying out his normal duties, a respected professional who has dedicated his life to treating the sick can find himself facing the same legal proceedings as a knowingly drunk driver who mows down a pedestrian or a construction manager who with calculation flouts safety rules to maximise his profits.
Yet when things go wrong, many doctors still feel compelled to admit their failings. You hope a sincere disclosure will serve as an apology to the patient and also stop other doctors making the same mistake in future.
I was part of a chain of errors that led to the death of a patient. I believed my error was the most harmful one - more harmful than the nurses saying the patient was faking her symptoms, more harmful than the senior doctor who saw the patient the next day and agreed that we shouldn't do an x-ray or blood tests - and I confessed it to my consultant.
I was overcome with remorse. I wanted to apologise to the relatives and stand up at the inquest and say it was all my fault and I deserved to be struck off. He counselled me to brazen it out. Another colleague helped me buff the notes (to "buff the notes" is to make entries in the patient's records which don't actually lie but contain only the helpful elements of the truth). I still feel huge remorse both for the mistake and for never apologising to the relatives, but, instead of my career faltering before it had really begun, I learned from it, became a better doctor because of it, passed on what I had learned about it to many other colleagues, and I was only able to do those things because my fellow doctors covered for me.
A couple of years on, I was called to a surgical patient with an abnormal heart rhythm. A cursory examination of his notes revealed an ECG which showed that he had suffered a heart attack, but the houseman who had admitted him had missed the diagnosis. After we had stabilised the patient, I showed the ECG to the admitting houseman's registrar. The registrar was a mate; he was one of us; I could trust him. We agreed that he would pretend he had come across the ECG himself when reviewing the case. He would talk his junior through the lessons to be learned from the incident. The houseman would never know anyone else was aware of his error. Not for a moment did I have second thoughts about this course of action. The system had protected me and I owed a fellow doctor the same obligation.
Some doctors feel compelled to blow the whistle on their colleagues' shortcomings. The medical profession invariably ostracises those who broadcast their concerns to outsiders, on the grounds that outsiders don't know enough about the job to fairly judge a doctor's performance. In my writing, I have chosen to concentrate on the darker side of hospital life. You might argue that I have acted like a sort of whistle-blower, but I feel that I have endeavoured to acquaint the lay person with the factors that contribute to medical error and, hopefully, the actions of doctors who close and cover will appear more understandable.
Turning a blind eye and closing ranks serves well all of us who made the isolated human error and learned from it and became good doctors. I believe that is how it served me and my friend who didn't monitor his patient's potassium. But I have to confess I don't know what kind of doctor the houseman who missed the heart attack became. It is only then that you realise the system that covered for you is the same system that wrongly protected GP Harold Shipman and gynaecologist Rodney Ledward for so many years at so tragic a cost to so many patients. But, because of the blame culture, many doctors remain persuaded that closing ranks and covering up are in their interests, because they still fear that they can be as much victims of medical accidents as their patients.
· Jed Mercurio was a hospital doctor for four years before becoming a full-time writer. He wrote the successful TV series Cardiac Arrest and his new drama, Bodies, starts on Sunday at 9pm on BBC3. It will be screened on BBC2 later this year. His novel, on which it is based, is published by Vintage.
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