Posted April 29, 2014: by Bill Sardi
Modern medicine has no impetus to be affordable. Pharmaceutical companies are cooking up expensive cures that are in no way cost effective and then telling Medicare, Medicaid and insurance plans they had better come up with the money. Patient clamor for the cure, and insurance companies just increase the premiums. But in the case of public-funded health insurance pools, there is limited money. Medicare is already trillions of dollars underfunded.
Strikingly, there is no requirement that patients utilize less expensive approaches to deal with hepatitis C than the ($1000/day – $80,000 pharmaceutical cure (Sovaldi). Patients will demand the expensive cure. Now what? Well, the pharma companies know what it costs for a lifetime of Hep-C treatment, so they gauge that determine the top price they can garner.
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Posted April 28, 2014: by Bill Sardi
This is a topic I have written about before, but newly published science calls for it to be revisited.
The misdirection started in the 1960s with Ancel Keys’ mistaken claim that saturated fat rather than refined sugar spawns heart disease. Fat phobia reigned and many brands of health foods bragged they were entirely fat free. It took till 2010 for studies to reveal there is no significant evidence to conclude that dietary saturated fat is associated with an increased risk of coronary heart disease. Bottom line, fat-phobia was indelibly inculcated into the public psyche.
Posted in Modern Medicine ; No Comments »
Posted April 27, 2014: by Bill Sardi
New and controversial guidelines for heart health have been issued and commercial interests have prevailed in expanding the number of Americans who should be on statin cholesterol-lowering drugs by millions. Some doctors agree with the new guidelines, others don’t. Where does that leave you?
The New England Journal of Medicine (NEJM) recently dealt with this issue in an article entitled The Guidelines Battle On Starting Statins [New England Journal Medicine Vol. 370: page 1652, April 24, 2014]
The NEJM article posed a hypothetical case of a 52-year old jogger who smokes tobacco, has a family history of blindness (father) due to diabetes, often works under stress as a busy tax accountant, has a total cholesterol of 180 and low HDL “good” cholesterol of 35 and blood pressure of 130/85.
This man has three risk factors for heart disease: smoking, being male and low HDL cholesterol. His 10-year risk for a heart attack is 10.9%. The new guidelines suggest he start taking a statin drug. Under old guidelines statin drugs would not be recommended.
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Posted April 26, 2014: by Bill Sardi
It’s the era of injectable drugs.
A new experimental drug that can protect against the AIDS virus for months at a time has just been successfully tested in animals. The drug would eliminate the need to take pills every single day and improve effectiveness since patients often forget to take their pills. [NBC News, March 4, 2014]
Two new experimental drugs, one delivered intravenously and the other by injection, are posed to help prevent migraine headache attacks for prolonged periods of time. After 5-8 weeks the intravenous drug was shown to reduce migraine attacks by 66% compared to 52% when patients were given an inactive placebo pill. [WebMD, April 22, 2014] The effect was not dramatically better than no treatment, but it did eliminate the need for daily use of medications.
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Posted April 17, 2014: by Bill Sardi
The incidence of herpes zoster (the shingles) has risen by 39% over the past decade and a leading medical authority with the Centers for Disease Control (CDC) says they don’t know why. [Medscape April 14, 2014] The varicella zoster virus is acquired during childhood and emanates as chicken pox and the virus is harbored in nerve sheaths where it erupts much later in life as a painful skin rash.
The Centers for Disease control is a public health agency that serves as a shill for the pharmaceutical industry. So it is no surprise to hear CDC representatives advise adults over age 60 to receive zoster vaccine. However, the vaccine is a little bit of the disease itself and the virus may spread to other family members of the vaccinated.
Posted in Dietary Supplements, Modern Medicine ; No Comments »
Posted April 15, 2014: by Bill Sardi
Arrows indicate multiple patchy calcified sites on the descending aorta and bilateral femoral arteries.
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Posted March 25, 2014: by Bill Sardi
Vitamin D was discovered to cure rickets in 1922. A short time later ergocalciferol, synthetic vitamin D, was developed and is still today the only FDA-approved prescription form of vitamin D despite it being inferior to natural form cholecalciferol – vitamin D3.
Over 90 years have passed since that discovery. The 1920 and 1930s was the era of vitamin discovery. During that time the practice of medicine gravitated away from use of crude medicines such as quinine, opium, cocaine, digitalis and nitroglycerin to synthetic molecules like procaine and barbital that garnered patent protection for pharmaceutical companies. Atabrine was among the first patentable drugs approved for many uses and is related to melfoquine used today to treat malaria.
Posted in Modern Medicine, Vitamins ; No Comments »
Posted March 11, 2014: by Bill Sardi
The world pays a steep price when its doctors turn a blind eye at nutritional medicine.
Imagine what eradication of polio would be like if it were treated nutritionally.
In 1988 the world set out to inoculate all the billions of people on the planet against the stomach virus known as polio. There were an estimated 350,000 new annual cases of paralyzing polio then which has now been reduced to just a couple hundred cases with a much larger world population. There are an estimated 10 million people walking today that would be crippled from polio if a polio vaccination program hadn’t been started. [World Health Organization] The indigenous wild-strain of the virus was mostly eradicated in 1999 [American Journal Epidemiology 2010] leaving the vaccine derived strain as the predominant form of the virus in circulation!
Despite such progress, total eradication of polio eludes modern medicine because it ignores nutritional medicine.
How did modern medicine almost totally eradicate polio but at the same time doom any possibility of abolishing it?
Posted in Modern Medicine, Vitamins ; No Comments »
Posted February 25, 2014: by Bill Sardi
Public health officials in California report a polio-like paralysis among as many as 25 children that has doctors perplexed. This nerve-paralyzing malady strikes after a brief illness and kids lose their ability to move their arms or legs.
Health officials say it definitely isn’t polio and they suspect it is caused by an enterovirus (stomach virus). Beyond that, doctors appear to be clueless. This story is making headlines worldwide.
So what could it be? Could it be a vaccine like the Swine Flu vaccine that caused a nerve paralyzing disorder called Guillain-Barre syndrome in 1976? But Guillain-Barre produces a whole different set of symptoms.
Could it be something in foods that only attacks kids’ vulnerable immune systems? So far it’s not linked to any food common among those affected.
The very idea of a virus paralyzing kids by an unknown virus for which there is no known effective treatment is certainly scary.
Posted in Modern Medicine ; No Comments »
Posted February 15, 2014: by Bill Sardi
Examples of price gouging in medicine are growing.
There is now the $1000-a-day pill for Hepatitis-C that is curative if taken over a 9-month course ($270,000 cure) while natural remedies go ignored.
There is the $18,000-$35,000 surgical procedure (gastric bypass) to cure diabetes that can be accomplished by simple blood donation to reduce iron stores.
There is the revelation that sudden-death heart attacks are caused by a calcium plaque that suddenly ruptures inside a coronary artery, not as the result of cholesterol buildup, a falsehood that is used to sell billions of dollars of cholesterol-lowering drugs. Modern medicine hides evidence that economical vitamin C prevents that type of mortal plaque in heart arteries.
Posted in Health Care System, Modern Medicine ; No Comments »
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