Eat Bad, Have a Procedure, and Take a Pill

The Privatized, Corporatized, Medicalized and Deregulated Way of Life in The United States

In my book, “Thinking and Eating for Two,” I described the evolutionary diet of eating whole plant foods that feed both self, and our symbionts (the beneficial microorganisms on us and in us). Man evolved to eat plants, and this has been the diet of humans until modern times. Even the Roman Gladiators feasted on a plant-based diet. If you want to live longer and healthier, eat plants. This will lower your insulin levels, and in turn control the transcription of proteins in your body such that proteins are made with little error. Proteinopathies, i.e., proteins that are misformed and improperly folded, underly many diseases. Plants provide all of the nutrients we need, doing so in a healthy manner without excesses in fat and protein, both of which are harmful when too much is consumed in keto diets, for instance. Studying over 370,000 people in an epidemiological study, garnering real-world data, Dr. Yimin Zhao, Ph.D. has concluded, “We recommend that people should limit fat intake, even if they are trying to only consume healthy fat. The results from our study suggest that both fat quantity and quality are important determinants of health effects in middle-aged and older people.” Dr. Zhao further recommends, ““Following a healthy low-fat diet with minimal intake of saturated fat.” These high fat diets will have profound, negative consequences to the metabolic programming in the offspring of those who eat these fatty diets. Keto and Paleo diets cause heart disease, and about 75% of stents placed in US hospitals from 2015-2017 were for stable heart disease, where stenting is useless, but where changing from a keto diet to a plant-based diet would reverse the disease. Thus, physicians are performing useless, costly, and potentially damaging stent procedures on heart disease patients when a simple diet change would reverse the disease. Hospitals and physicians performing these unnecessary procedures may be found liable. But this is the way corporations run our medical system, where nearly 7 in 10 of all physicians are either employed by a hospital or a corporation, according to a recent analysis from the Physicians Advocacy Institute. And for the sake of money, more and more physicians are selling-out to private equity. Prices go up, quality goes down, but the physician makes more money, as do the corporations and private equity groups. As the report, led by Dr. Richard M. Scheffler, Ph.D., a Distinguished Professor of Health Economics and Public Policy in the Graduate Schools of Public Health and Goldman School of Public Policy at UC Berkeley, says, private equity’s focus on short-term profits “leads to pressure to prioritize revenue over quality of care, to overburden health-care companies with debt, strip their assets, and put them at risk of long-term failure, and to engage in anticompetitive and unethical billing practices.” Insurance company corporations are buying up physician practices. Under Medicare Advantage (which is neither Medicare nor an Advantage, but is privatized, corporate healthcare), physicians often share profits with insurers if the physicians assume the financial risk of a patient’s care, earning more if they can save on treatment. Instead of receiving a few hundred dollars for an office visit, primary care physicians can be paid as much as $14,000 a year to manage a single patient. In these corporate arrangements with physicians, the parent company has the authority to dictate what is done to the patient, including from the first office visit to extended hospital stays. Once the sale has been made to enroll in Medicare Advantage, these new customers can be steered toward chains of related businesses, like a CVS drugstore or Amazon’s online pharmacy. The corporations control every aspect of the customer’s medical treatment. According to the NY Times, one lawsuit against these corporate medical practices detailed concerns that physicians were inflating the payments from the federal government by overstating how sick their patients were. Physicians making out that people are sick when they’re not. Part of the beauty of the US medical treatment system that you want to avoid.

And if you land in the hospital because of physician incompetence, prepare for more incompetence at the highest level. In May 2022, 117 cases of C. auris were identified in 16 health care facilities in Nevada, including three pediatric cases. Infections, even common infections, especially when the infection occurs in adults, may predispose one for impaired cognitive performance and likely dementia, including Alzheimer’s Disease later in life. Your chances of acquiring an infection at a hospital are quite high, and if the infection doesn’t kill you, the high rate of medical errors may. Acquiring viral infections at a medical facility, or anywhere else, can increase your odds of acquiring an autoimmune condition leading to neurodegenerative diseases, such as MS. Physicians are also selling Vitamin D prescriptions to those who don’t need it., causing harm. Considering medical procedures in general, Dr. Jacob Stegenga, Ph.D. professor in the Department of History and Philosophy of Science at the University of Cambridge, writes “if we consider the ubiquity of small effect sizes in medicine, the extent of misleading evidence in medical research, the thin theoretical basis of many interventions, and the malleability of empirical methods, and if we employ our best inductive framework, then our confidence in medical interventions ought to be low.” Thus relying on medical procedures and drugs in a money-making system for better health instead of our ancestral diet, whole plant foods, leads to a very ill society with little public health. Pharmaceutical companies, physicians, hospitals, non-profit medical groups, and health insurance companies are “merchants of magic bullets and keen to keep the concept alive. It’s also very attractive to the public, which can fantasise that a pill will fix their problems. Stegenga advocates placing less emphasis on magic bullets and more on developing other kinds of interventions for improving health.” If you’re healthy, don’t go in for an annual check-up by your physician. According to medical journals, they “don’t work,” and can lead to unnecessary and unhealthy testing and procedures. Over the last 200 years, public health has been the greatest driver of healthspan and lifespan, with lifespan doubling during that period. Public health includes better food, clean drinking water, garbage collection, clean air, and sewage systems. Part of the progress of public health is now the realization of the need for a plant-forward diet, i.e. a diet of largely whole plant foods. With these keys in place, the greatest predictors of healthspan and lifespan are to be socially and mentally engaged, and to maintain close personal relationships. “Those who kept warm relationships got to live longer and happier,” say Dr. Robert Waldinger, M.D., who is a psychiatrist at Harvard Medical School. Dr. Waldinger has been involved in Harvard’s 80 year study of human development, and found that, “embracing community helps us live longer, and be happier.” So having purpose in life, and maintaining good relationships with individuals and the community, along with diet are critical to good health. Thus, a government, such as that in Japan, supporting public health and institutions that promote social values and community, lead to better health and longevity. Having lived and worked in Japan, I can personally attest to how their social democracy allows people to prosper, live long, healthy and happy. This is instead of a libertarian-leaning, every man for himself, weak democracy, and a money above all attitude as we tend to see in the US, especially in Florida and Texas. Those in Texas and Florida have the freedom to be stupid, and they exercise that freedom often. In Florida, for example, they elect Rick Scott, the fraudster who bilked taxpayers by making fraudulent claims to Medicare as CEO of the healthcare company, HCA. But Florida is the leading state for fraud and money laundering, continuously, the city of Miami being number one, so expecting Florida to vote for upstanding individuals is unrealistic. Florida is full of grifters and their dirty money, and a large Russian Mafia resides in the Miami Beach Area. “There is a huge amount of dirty money flowing into Miami that’s disguised as investment,” Jack Blum, a Washington attorney specializing in money-laundering cases, told the Nation. “The local business community sees any threat to that as a threat to the city’s lifeblood. Fraud, including medical fraud, is key to the Florida economy.” Physicians using fraudulent healthcare schemes to bilk taxpayers includes, Bill Frist, M.D., who cofounded HCA with his father, and became a billionaire because of the company’s fraud. HCA, a Tennessee-based company, continues its fraudulent activities. Florida has the oldest population in the country, many of whom are dependent on Medicare, yet they elect Rick Scott governor and senator, the very huckster who bilked that population and now wants to eliminate Medicare. Then they elect Ron DeSantis, who wants to do the same. Desantis’ many poor decisions that adversely affect the people in his state, such as deriding people wearing life-saving masks (yes, scientists at UCLA, Prof. Dr. Anne Rimoin, Ph.D, M.P.H., have found they work) and promoting laws that are harmful to women, have been made in consultation with fellow malevolent Jacksonville (another dangerous city in Flordia) residents such as Kent Stermon, who committed suicide after having been exposed as a child molester. In our pro-business, deregulated environment that Republican’s have ushered in, businesses defraud the government for billions, are caught, pay a few million in fines, then, thanks to the Reaganesque laws and regulations, go back to market with the same or similar fraud schemes. Go figure. Another physician fraudster in Florida is Philip Frost, M.D. He is, among other problems, one who commits fraudulent pump-and-dump schemes with his pharma companies. Meanwhile in Texas, the illegal kickbacks from drug, testing, and device companies to physicians continue at high rates. This time it was 15 physicians in Texas. Drop the fatty Bar-b-que brisket with the sugary and salty Bar-b-que sauce on a white bun loaded with ultra processed garbage (white flour, salt, rancid oils, toxic ethoxylated emulsifiers) and opt for some whole plants, and you’ll avoid the physician hucksters.

I’ll point out that many drugs are useful, and have been on the market for many years where real-world, Phase 4 studies of the safety and efficacy of the drugs have been studied. Phase 4, real world studies means the drugs have been followed for years in the broader population as opposed to the constrained population used in a clinical trial. It is the Phase 4 study where many approved drugs will later be recalled from the market, or new prescription procedures and warnings are assigned to the drug. Looking at the current right-wing nonsense where a Texas judge has concluded that mifepristone, a prescription drug used for multiple purposes, including for abortion, the drug has been on the market since 1987, first approved in France, is to be removed from the market. In this case, the pharmaceutical industry is reaping what it has sown. Spending millions of dollars every year to elect right-wing Republicans who nominate and vote for judges such as the Texas guy who took the abortion drug off the market, is just what the pharma industry should expect when they buy right wing politicians. They spend 81% of their donations on Republicans. Despite another Texan, George Bush, lobbying to not have the drug approved in the US, in the year 2000 the FDA approved the drug. For over 20 years we’ve been able to follow the drug, and it has a good safety profile, having a 0.4% risk of major complication. Despite the safety profile, and a need for many women to have a safe and inexpensive means to terminate an unwanted pregnancy, Texans such as Greg Abbott fight hard to have old fashioned religious dogma rule the lives of women. Texas has long history of anti-abortion political tactics, and now Texas is trying to limit access to abortion pills by disrupting internet service providers and credit card processing companies. While firearms are the number one killer of children in the US, guys like Abbott of Texas and DeSantis of Florida focus on allowing open carry of guns in their states with no background checks. The shootings continue in their states, Florida and Texas (the leading state for shootings). Even babies are being shot to death in Florida and Texas because of Republican idiocy. Yet, they focus on banning life-saving drugs such as mifepristone, instead of banning life-stopping assault rifles. Thanks to emotional morons, functional decorticates, such as Abbott of Texas and DeSantis of Florida, there is a mass shooting every day of the week in the US.

Eating meat, as an example of one component in our unhealthy contemporary diet, taste horrible unless you do something drastic to it, such as cure it with gobs of unhealthy salt, fry it or barbecue it so that it is loaded with inflammatory molecules known as advanced glycation end products and cancer causing nitrosamines, or as Donald Trump does, smear it with salty and sugary ketchup. And now we know that fatty and sweet foods create an addiction for these unhealthy foods by modifying brain function. That meat being consumed in copious quantities in the US is also causing urinary tract infections, which are becoming harder to treat because of antibiotic resistance. Eating meat and other animal products may also be causing Multiple Sclerosis (MS). This happens because meat contains a bacterium, Clostridium perfringens, that produces a toxin, bacterial epsilon toxin, and targets cells (CNS endothelial cells) in the blood brain barrier (BBB). Once the BBB is damaged by epsilon, toxins can flood the nervous system and and cause neural dysfunction. These bacteria are resistant to heat, so cooked animal products may contain the bacterium and transfer it to the meat-eater. Scientists have found that the prevalence of PCOS (polycystic ovarian syndrome) has increased by nearly 65% over the past decade in China as it becomes more industrialized and adopts Western dietary habits. In the US, the disease may afflict up to 5 million women. That’s not a hereditary or genetic disease, it’s lifestyle. The hormonal effects of PCOS that have been environmentally induced and increase the probability of obesity and diabetes can be passed on to both female and male offspring., and then likely passed on to their offspring through transgenerational epigenetic (not changes in DNA sequence) mechanisms. This is a new multi-billion dollar market for drug sales.

Taking care of ourselves, especially through diet, is the primary means to a long and healthy life. “Medicine is not health care, food is health care. Medicine is sick care,” mostly treatment. “The Medicalization of America,” describes the so-called healthcare system in the US that was not designed to, and does not, keep one healthy. The privatized, for-profit healthcare system has cannibalized public health, which emphasizes prevention. Instead of prevention, we have treatment for profit that is neither about health or care. Physicians have described modern medicine as a threat to public health. So diminished is public health in the US, that hospitals are key to spreading infectious diseases in society, and one of the top 10 leading causes of death in the USA. Rather, the current system is about treatment and profits for the corporations and physicians who control US healthcare, and benefit from the system they created that accounts directly for over 18% of the GDP. As Dr. Elisabeth Rosenthal, M.D. has written, “the American medical system has stopped focusing on health or even science. Instead it attends more or less single-mindedly to its own profits.” I’ve got news for you Dr. Rosenthal, the US medical system never did focus on health and science. A physician’s ice pick in the eye socket to scramble the brains of thousands of victims, of which about 500 died, over several decades until 1967, is one example. Physicians conducted the Tuskegee Syphilis Study of 1932 in which physicians from the U.S. public Health Service surreptitiously facilitated the infection of hundreds of healthy African-American men with syphilis under the guise of receiving free healthcare from the U.S. government. The study of their victims lasted 40 years. In the 1940s physicians immediately put premature babies on oxygen creating an epidemic of retrolental fibroplasia – blindness (this is what blinded Stevie Wonder, born 1950). Physicians doled out thalidomide in the 1950s, leading to birth defects, including “flipper arms.” The first Merck Manual was published in 1899, and is one of the most widely used medical references. Treatments in the first manual included bloodletting for acute bronchitis and arsenic for impotence. Physicians, who not only run the FDA and comprise the decision makers for approving drugs, but also are responsible (Principal Investigators, PI) for the clinical studies (which are often corrupt, and sometimes the physician PI goes to jail) used to approve the drugs, gave us such disastrous drugs as Diethylstilbestrol from the 1930s until 1971, Bextra removed from the market in 2005, Fen-Phen pulled in 1997, Vioxx in 2004, and more. One physician named Robert Fiddes, M.D., was the PI on over 170 clinical trials – he was the darling of drug companies, because he gave them what they wanted. What they wanted was approved drugs, and Mr. Fiddes faked the data to have the drugs approved. Eventually this fraudulent physican went to jail for his fakery. The drugs stayed on the market. A physician, Greg Semenza, who won a Nobel Prize, has had seven research papers retracted because of fraudulent data. Or, considering procedures, as Carolyn Barber, M.D. says about spinal fusion, “It’s a $40 billion annual industry, the most popular elective surgery in the U.S. It also seldom works.” Further, about 75% of stents in patients with stable heart conditions are unnecessary, yet this procedure continues at high rate in the US. And once these quack physicians make money giving you a stent, they have you for life. Now you’re a patient who will live under their continued money-making schemes by having to take drugs such as statins. The statins may cause Type 2 diabetes. Treating Type 2 diabetes is the holy grail for money making by physicians and drug companies. If the money-making physicians are lucky, the stent will cause a heart attack in the patient-victim and lead to more money-making procedures. This is big business, worth about $219 billion annually, and the cardiac surgeon makes about $500,000 yearly. That’s damn good for the GDP, the physician being paid $500K annually as a drug company or medical device sales rep to make people sick by putting stuff in their body that they don’t need. Screenings for prostate cancer in older men continue, despite the screenings having no value. If screened, there is a significant chance of a false-positive in testing. This means the physician is told that you have prostate cancer when you really don’t. Wham, the physician has a patient for life and will likely administer cancer-causing treatments, such as irradiation. This is big bucks for the physician, and now those monthly payments for the Maserati and big house can be met. It’s good for the GDP too. One of the procedures that is now being hyped is CoolSculpting. In theory, the procedure is used on fat people to freeze fat to kill the fat cells and make the person thinner. Unfortunately the medical procedure not only produces lipid peroxidation markers, malondialdehyde and myeloperoxidase, toxic chemicals that can cause DNA mutations, but it frequently causes fat cells to grow and leaves disfiguration of the physician’s client. Such medical devices are poorly regulated, a problem that continues because physicians and hospitals fail to tell the Food and Drug Administration about adverse events (AEs).

During the last decade, at least 540 physicians and healthcare practitioners collectively paid the US government hundreds of millions of dollars to negotiate their way out of trouble via civil settlements, then continued to practice medicine without restrictions on their licenses despite allegations that included fraud and patient harm. More than 2,200 hospitals and healthcare companies likewise negotiated civil deals to sidestep prosecution for alleged offenses that included paying bribes, falsifying patients records and billing the government for unnecessary patient care, the Reuters analysis shows. In many of those cases, the physicians, staffers and top brass who purportedly committed those misdeeds were not named publicly by prosecutors or forced to pay settlements themselves. Federal enforcers said they sometimes withhold names of individuals in these situations because of ongoing or planned investigations. The U.S. government collected more than $26.8 billion in healthcare-related civil settlements and judgments from 2013 to 2022. These are the few adverse events that have been reported.

Of the many cases where AEs have not been reported by physicians, cancer being spread inside women’s bodies by a surgical tool used to operate on the uterus was one egregious example. Seriously, our deregulated, capitalistic medical system with physicians doing as many things (things they don’t understand) to people as possible for the sake of money is killing and maiming us. In Virginia, one physician, Kirsten Van Steenberg Ball, M.D., was caught distributing huge amounts of oxycodone, including prescribing patients as many as 360 oxycodone 30-mg tablets per month. Physicians are told by drug and device companies to do things, and not being able to properly judge the safety and efficacy of drugs and devices, physicians simply do as they are told to do by the drug and device companies. Remember, physicians are given money by the drug and device companies to put their names on fake studies, of which the physician has no knowledge of the content, for the sake of money and ego. And physicians on FDA approval panels are given money by the drug and device companies to approve their products at the FDA. And the new scheme used by physicians on the FDA review panels is to accept bribes from drug companies where they declare no conflict of interest from the drug company making the drug, having not taken any payments before the approval. However, once the physician approves the company’s drug, then the physician extends his greedy paw to the drug company for payment. In other words, to avoid a violation of the rules, the physician is paid after the approval, not before the approval. In this manner, the physicians avoid conflict of interest rules. Clever physicians, always finding the best schemes to line their pockets in their ever increasing funding from drug companies.

I could go on, and on, but these serve as examples. Remember, physicians are not scientists. They are neither trained to do science, nor to analyze science. They are, rather, technical salespeople who stole the name doctor from scientists, along with scientist’s white lab coat, so that they would appear more scientific (ever notice the stupidity of some physicians who wear their white lab coat to public gatherings, even outdoors, where the coat is collecting pathogens, allergens, and toxins that they can then pass onto their client). So loving of money are these medics that they afflict people with unnecessary test and procedures for profit. There are too many physicians trained annually in medical schools, creating an overabundance of practicing physicians in the US, most of whom are looking for things to do to make money. To make money, they do things, such as test, prescribing drugs, and doing procedures, to their clients that aren’t needed and only cause harm. Sadly, even if the things they do to their clients were necessary, most drugs and procedures don’t work- they only cause harm. Example, only 17 of 93 approved cancer drugs increased patient survival.  As for procedures, in 2002, “The New England Journal of Medicine published a study demonstrating that a common knee operation, performed on millions of Americans who have osteoarthritis — an operation in which the surgeon removes damaged cartilage or bone (“arthroscopic debridement”) and then washes out any debris (“arthroscopic lavage”) — worked no better at relieving pain or improving function than a sham procedure. Those operations can go for $5,000 a shot.” Really, our medical system is just pathetic bullshit. And the bullshit is very costly, money wise and health wise.

Yet physicians control the science, or lack thereof, of the medical industrial complex and perpetuate a myth that they are scientists, holding back what could be a healthcare system based on science. Physicians control the National Institutes of Health, and continue to waste huge amounts of taxpayer dollars on garbage research. Few people understand that, “Historically speaking, the title doctor was invented in the Middle Ages to describe eminent scholars. These doctorates date back to the 1300s. Such people were accorded a lot of respect and prestige. The PhD, or Doctor of Philosophy, is the highest graduate degree awarded by our universities. Health professionals receive undergraduate degrees in medicine. These are professional degrees, and not really doctorates. The MD degree is not a part of graduate faculties at North American universities.” In other words, doctor does not mean physician, and physician does not mean doctor. Physicians usurped the term doctor from scientists to lend authority and the appearance of science to their trade to better foist upon the people their money-making medical schemes. While a number of medicines work well, such as antibiotics, first made in 1910 by Dr. Alfred Bertheim, Ph.D., a chemist working in Germany, physicians employing what scientists have created, namely in this instance, antibiotics, are now doing more harm than good by overprescribing antibiotics. Depression and psychosis, Crohn’s disease, weight gain, dysbiosis related diseases, and diabetes are among the diseases that may be caused by antibiotics, along with the development of life-threatening “superbugs”.

Those profits in the medical system include those of drug companies, such as McKesson, a drug distributor in Texas, who kept shipping opioids to two pharmacies six years after learning that they had been filling prescriptions from physicians who were likely engaging in crimes. As of 2019, the number of criminal cases against physicians charged with opioid-related offenses reported in the US news media was 372. These are just the guys who were caught and in which enough data was available to charge, a small subset of those who are overprescribing and selling opioids. The shipments of life-destroying opioids from McKesson to physicians stopped many years later, after the physicians were indicted. McKesson was rewarded for it’s bad behavior by Texas, which spent millions of dollars to have McKesson move its HQ to the state. Texas is a state that will protect corporations and physicians for the sake of money, even when they are killing people. Yes, McKesson knew that their salespeople, physicians, were killing people by over prescribing opioids, but continued supplying their salespeople for the sake of profit. Purdue Pharmaceuticals, the manufacturer of Oxycontin is another example of a corporate player in the opioid crisis. Purdue was managed by two physicians, the brothers Raymond and Mortimer Sackler, Oxycontin was approved by the FDA in 1995. Despite a lack of increased efficacy in treating pain compared to older drugs, Purdue mounted an aggressive marketing campaign that brought a warning from the FDA in 2003 over misleading advertisements. But sales continued. At about the same time as Oxycontin’s approval, the American Pain Society, run by physicians, introduced the “pain as the 5th vital sign” campaign. The American Pain Society received almost $1 million from opioid companies, and it also dissolved in 2019 after facing lawsuits for its role in exacerbating the opioid crisis. “Purdue promoted among primary care physicians a more liberal use of opioids,” and being good drug salespeople, the physicians did as instructed by the drug companies. The corporate influence in medicine is everywhere. In 2016, months after the National Academies received a $10 million Sackler family donation, the F.D.A. tapped the institution to form a committee to issue new recommendations on opioids. The physician grifts continue. The Department of Justice (DOJ) just announced criminal charges against 18 individuals working in healthcare, including physicians and nurses, for stealing a total of $490 million in funds from federal health and COVID-related programs.

Opioids aren’t the only drugs prescribed by physicians that are causing addiction. A new study by The Center for Drug Safety and Effectiveness at Johns Hopkins University looked into prescription drug use of multiple concurrent central nervous system (CNS)-active drugs. The scientists found widespread combination prescribing of drugs classified as Schedule II controlled substances with a high potential for psychological or physical dependence. The study identified 276,223 individuals (3.0%) using Schedule II stimulants in 2020 in the US. Here again, we have physician incompetence harming their patient-victims and another opioid-like addiction crisis that, as the authors state, may be so bad that “discontinuation may be challenging.”

The drug companies and their salespeople, physicians, want your money, even if it means robbing you of your health. While adding nutrients through a plant dominant diet is critical to health, not taking a bunch of drugs and removing these toxins in your diet is equally important. PFAS are a group of such chemicals. A number of PFAS have been linked to serious health problems, including cancer, fertility issues, high cholesterol, hormone disruption, liver damage, thyroid disease, and obesity. Yes, PFAS, along with plastics, both of which are in our drugs and in our water supply, can help to induce obesity. Instead of drugs, try a healthy diet. And using a proper water filter can largely eliminate these dangerous chemicals from your diet. There are a number of filters available. I use the Clearly Filtered. Eating a good diet will be beneficial to all aspects of health, including colonic health. Avoiding duodenoscopy and colonoscopies where pieces of the single-use device lodge in your colon or duodenum and cause harm, or poorly cleaned colonoscopes infect you, can be avoided by good diet, and if needed later in life, a stool sample test that is as effective as a colonoscopy but without the side effects is easily and inexpensively done. The big drawback is that physicians don’t make money, about $2,000.

Thinking about the GDP and obesity, we can read this from STAT, a newsletter about drugs: “The condition has long been framed as a result of poor lifestyle decisions and a failure of willpower — eating too much and exercising too little. But a new generation of highly effective obesity medications, and the overt and subtle messaging from the pharmaceutical companies making them, are starting to change the narrative.” Further, ““This is really changing the conversation, changing the understanding of the fact that this is an actual disease and not something that’s just a matter of a moral failing on the individual patient’s part,” and “This is really changing the conversation, changing the understanding of the fact that this is an actual disease and not something that’s just a matter of a moral failing on the individual patient’s part,” said Fatima Cody Stanford, an obesity medicine physician at Massachusetts General Hospital who also consults for companies making the new medicines, an obesity medicine physician at Massachusetts General Hospital who also consults for companies making the new drugs.” In other words, physicians who work for drug companies are changing the narrative on obesity from one of lifestyle modification, to one of taking drugs instead. As stated in the article, “For drug companies, this represents one of the biggest financial opportunities ever.” The same is true for physicians. In this way of thinking, health will diminish given this focus on pills, with direct effects due to the drugs, but also because of the continued negative effects of a poor diet, on which we loose focus as attention is turned toward the drugs. As Brittany Burgunder, a certified professional life coach and eating disorder specialist, has said in reference to eating disorders, “Drugs like this clearly do not treat the root cause of eating disorders, instead, it places a temporary bandage on internal woes until it no longer works, resulting in a recipe for relapse.” And, yes, GDP will go up thanks to more medicalization and continued consumption of excess food. As Dr. Arnold Relman, M.D. called it in the New England Journal of Medicine back in 1980, The Medical-Industrial Complex, prospers as health suffers.

The US has the most expensive healthcare system in the world, with the worst outcomes. So lucrative is the business of medicine that Private Equity (this a new term used to avoid the name of the same old scheme called “leveraged buyouts” in the 1980s) has stepped in to take advantage of privatized healthcare. Here’s one example of how private equity guts healthcare in the US, making the rich even richer and doing so at the expense of the middle class. From the NY Tines, “Consider the case of the Carlyle Group and the nursing home chain HCR ManorCare. In 2007, Carlyle — a private equity firm now with $373 billion in assets under management — bought HCR ManorCare for a little over $6 billion, most of which was borrowed money that ManorCare, not Carlyle, would have to pay back. As the new owner, Carlyle sold nearly all of ManorCare’s real estate and quickly recovered its initial investment. This meant, however, that ManorCare was forced to pay nearly half a billion dollars a year in rent to occupy buildings it once owned. Carlyle also extracted over $80 million in transaction and advisory fees from the company it had just bought, draining ManorCare of money.

ManorCare soon instituted various cost-cutting programs and laid off hundreds of workers. Health code violations spiked. People suffered. The daughter of one resident told The Washington Post that “my mom would call us every day crying when she was in there” and that “it was dirty — like a run-down motel. Roaches and ants all over the place.” In 2018, ManorCare filed for bankruptcy, with over $7 billion in debt. But that was, in a sense, immaterial to Carlyle, which had already recovered the money it invested and made millions more in fees. (In statements to The Washington Post, ManorCare denied that the quality of its care had declined, while Carlyle claimed that changes in how Medicare paid nursing homes, not its own actions, caused the chain’s bankruptcy.) Carlyle managed to avoid any legal liability for its actions. How it did so explains why this industry often has such poor outcomes for the businesses it buys.” Sadly, physicians are part of these private equity schemes – they make lots of money colluding with the libertarian bean-counters at the private equity group.

Writing in 2023 about medicine’s Salve Lucrum in the Journal of the American Medical Association, Dr. Donald Berwick, M.D. writes, “Unchecked greed is not the only driver of that failure, but it is a major one.” Another problem is incompetence. “The problem is that physicians don’t know what they’re doing, and they’re overpaid to perform what they don’t know” David Eddy, M.D, Ph.D., Member of Institute Of Medicine. One in four patients who have been hospitalized will be harmed at the hospital. Women who have had both ovaries surgically removed for a benign condition such as endometriosis have an increased risk of developing Parkinson’s disease or parkinsonism. Physicians make money, patient develops tremor. Then other physicians have the money-making opportunity to treat the surgical-Parkinson’s. Women in the US also tend to suffer during menopause, unlike women in Japan. Women in Japan eat a more plant-forward diet with much more soy consumed than do women in the US, and many in the US go through hormone replacement treatment (HRT). From a recent study, “In the setting of high neocortical AB (approximately ≥20 Centiloids), levels of tau were associated with a self-report younger age at menopause and a history of menopausal HT [hormone treatment].” This means a subset of women who underwent HRT had a higher incidence of a biomarker, AB, that is associated with Alzheimer’s Disease, a severe form of dementia. So, instead of a good diet to protect against the ills of menopause, many women in the US are being given drugs (HRT) that are potentially harmful, including blood clots and stroke, and as mentioned before, dementia.

Medics like Ashok Jain in Houston, TX, who has a 5 year undergraduate medical degree from India, which has highly corrupt medical schools, will unnecessarily create magnetic fields in your brain for money. Mona Gosh, another medic trained in India with one of those 5 year undergraduate degrees and (mal)practicing in Illinois, will unnecessarily remove part of your uterus for profit. Another non-doctor physician, Sudipt Deshmukh, who trained in India, will carelessly addict you with opioids. And the eponymous Anil Potti, another Indian with an undergraduate physician degree, had to put 11 of his medical publications in the toilet because of fake data. Clinical trials based on those data had to be terminated. This was a big waste of research dollars and potentially put people in harm by having them taking drugs that had faked data supporting their use. The US medical system allows these people to slap the term “M.D.” behind their names once they’ve passed their medical board tests, even though they didn’t earn an M.D. degree. This also allows them to be called “doctor” even though they are just physicians without a doctorate. Parade them around in a white coat, and their newly found authority figure status can sell the gullible just about anything, including an unneeded procedure. When they ask you, “Where does it hurt,” be very careful how you reply. In our system, so called opinion leaders, such as the physician David Agus, M.D., a prominent medical school professor at USC, will write, or put his name on (called ghostwritten) books that highly plagarize other people’s work. All of his books contain plagarism, and apparently all were written by another person. This medic just sticks his name and a big smiley photo of himself on the book cover and pretends he had something to do with what’s inside the book. Another physician, Howard Maibach, M.D., has attached his name to over 3,000 research publications, some of which were unethical. Seriously Howard, have you any idea what’s contained in half of those research papers? Other physicians, such as John Darsee, M.D., will have about 100 medical papers retracted because of fraud. William Summerlin, M.D. painted his mice a different color to pretend that he had successfully transplanted skin from one animal to another without immunosuppressives. Unprofessional behavior, a form of sophistry, such as this is a predictor of poor performance in the physician’s practice. And ghostwriting is a huge problem in the medical field. Ghostwriting, to be clear, is: “Some of the authors who appear prominently on the articles have neither worked on them nor are they often aware of the details of the study.” Further, 55% of all meta-analysis publications in the medical field had conclusions altered by publications with falsified data, and 41% of all the analyses had a considerable change in the outcome of the treatment. Former BMJ editor, Richard Smith says the “prevalence of fraudulent studies has reached a point where one can now assume health research is fraudulent until proven otherwise.” Do you really want to take drugs that are sold by physicians that were approved by drug company-paid physicians based on fraudulent data? Physicians, such as Steven Haffner, M.D., at Baylor College of Medicine in Texas who have put their names on papers written by pharma companies, continue to practice. “Universities kick students out for putting their names on papers they didn’t write. But, doctors [sic] are often financially rewarded for it.” The Lancet’s chief editor Richard Horton lamented that “journals have devolved into information laundering operations for the pharmaceutical industry.” And “physician whores,” as they’re called in the pharma industry, do the laundering. When I consulted to the drug industry, I heard this term repeatedly. Altruistic physicians use the term too. Again, ghostwriting and like behavior among physicians is a predictor of the poor treatment you will receive from the medical industry. Bad behavior by physicians, includes psychiatrists. Mark Schiller, M.D., president of the American Association of Physicians and Surgeons, admitted: “I have frequently seen psychiatrists diagnose patients with a range of psychiatric diagnoses that aren’t justified, to obtain [insurance] reimbursements.” This often means prescribing drugs that only do harm. Physician whore means corruption other than ghostwriting too. Sadly, many physicians are on the take from pharma companies. Drug companies make a big return on their investments with physicians. More than $2 billion a year was paid by pharma companies to physicians, “fueling an increase in prescriptions, according to a new report published in the Annals of Internal Medicine.” All of this is so that the physicians sell more drugs, both legal and illegal. While pharma spent $20 billion advertising directly to their sales people, physicians, pharma companies also spent $6 billion on TV drug ads in 2016 to the physician’s consumers. Corruption, high paid salespeople in white coats, and gobs of advertising in our capitalistic healthcare system leads to the most expensive in the world, and the worst outcomes and declining life expectancy. It’s the food, stupid. Along with all those ads on TV for drugs, are the ads for fast food. Ads for foods that are brown from deep frying with nothing green on the plate are the norm. One group of ads promotes the food to make you sick, then the other group of ads promote pills to treat the symptoms, which often cause additional disease, such as Lupus, called drug-induced Lupus. In the US, 42% of adults are obese. “The average American diet consists of excess salt, saturated fat, refined grains, calories from solid fats and added sugars.” Only 6.8% of adults have optimal cardiometabolic health, meaning 93.2% of US citizens are unhealthy. If you think these data reflect poor health conditions among the poor, and that wealthy US citizens are doing just fine- think again. Wealthy US citizens have poor health compared to the wealthy in other countries. Across lifespan, and across every demographic group, US citizens die at younger ages than their counterparts in other wealthy nations. Instead of relying on drug companies and their physician salespeople who are peddling too many pills, read the book by Dr. Colin Campbell, Ph.D., “Whole,” to learn how to bring about health and reduce your chances of cancer, diabetes, heart disease, stroke, dementia and many other ailments. The Medical Industrial Complex won’t promote the books by Dr. Campbell, because it greatly reduces their customer base – sick people who have been erroneously taught their health is beyond their own control and that they must rely on physicians and the drugs that they peddle to regain their health.

As Robert Whitaker writes: “In my book Anatomy of an Epidemic, I investigated this storytelling process [the psychiatric narrative on the value of drugs]. In the first sections of the book, I reported on a number of studies funded by the National Institute of Mental Health, the World Health Organization, and other governmental agencies that told of unmedicated psychiatric patients doing better over the long-term than those who stayed on the drugs. In the latter part of the book, I investigated whether these studies were ever written about in psychiatric texts. Here’s what I found: None of the studies was discussed at any length, and in the few instances when one of the studies was mentioned in a textbook, the authors spun the results to protect the image of the drugs.” Some of the psychiatric patients develop serotonin syndrome, a “potentially life-threatening” disease. Instead, the narrative should be about diet and exercise for psychological problems, not the deadly drugs brought to the market by a fraudulent medical scheme. If you think the better answer is the latest and greatest new drug, think again. “New prescription drugs have a 1 in 5 chance of causing serious reactions after they have been approved. That is why expert physicians recommend not taking new drugs for at least five years [after initial marketing of the drug] unless patients have first tried better-established options, and have the need to do so.” And as we hasten the approval of drugs, the drugs become less effective and less safe. Accelerated approval of drugs has been brought about by intense lobbying of the pharma industry, and now we have drugs on the market with no evidence that they work. As Dr. Steven-Huy Han, M.D., a UCLA liver specialist, has said about these drugs, “I have no idea if the drug will make them better.” But it is good for the medical and drug business, where FDA-regulated products account for about a fifth of every dollar spent by U.S. consumers. In our current business model of medicine and drugs, Janet Woodcook, M.D.,  then (2016) director of the FDA’s Center for Drug Evaluation and Research, would approve a drug because if she didn’t, the company making the drug, “would see its stock price crash and probably go out of business.” In other words, the FDA was acting to promote a drug company and its drug, not doing its job to protect US citizens from ineffective and dangerous drugs. Physicians sell more than 4 billion prescription drugs per year in the US. Many of these drugs don’t work, and when they do, often it’s because of the placebo effect.  For example, published in the British Medical Journal (BMJ), “less than five per cent of patients receiving long-term treatment with statins are likely to obtain any benefit whatsoever.” Cheap “sugar pills” sold by someone in white jacket would often yield better results without the adverse side-effects. What works better than drugs to lower cholesterol and prevent heart disease? A plant forward diet.

In our capitalist healthcare system, billionaires, such as Mark Cuban of Dallas, Texas, create companies with hype, stating that they’ll lower the cost of prescription drugs. In reality, in many cases, the price quotes that patients see on the Cuban’s website are higher than they’d get at their local pharmacy, and the only drugs they sell are the cheaper generic drugs. And many of the drugs in the US have been manufactured overseas, particularly India and China, where quality control is lacking. Many pharmaceutical companies, such as Eli Lilly, GlaxoSmithKline, Merck, and Pfizer, often use contract manufacturers. This means the company distributing the medication is not the one that manufactured it. Drug companies purposely make it difficult to know where their drugs are made, but it is possible to find out. Although I don’t use any drugs (none, no aspirin, no Ibuprofen, no acetaminophen, nothing), I always encourage family and friends to check the country of origin for the drugs they consume. BTW, acetaminophen toxicity is the second most common cause of liver transplantation worldwide and the most common cause of liver transplantation in the US. And Cox-2 inhibitors, such as Celebrex, frequently prescribed for treating inflammatory conditions such as arthritis, have been linked to heart failure, doubling the risk of heart failure hospitalizations in one study of a post-myocardial infarction population. If the country of origin for your drug is India, I suggest they look for an alternative drug. If you’re using eye drops, for example, you may want to know where the product was manufactured. Vision loss from eye drops manufactured in India is yet another example of profits over health. People are dying, others are having their eyes surgically removed because of these eye drops. Further, as written in the NY Times, “A highly drug-resistant bacteria that was linked to eyedrops imported from India and that spread from person to person in a Connecticut long-term care center has prompted concerns that the strain could gain a foothold in U.S. health care settings.” While the eye drops made in India may blind you, the cough syrup from India may kill you. With a lack of proper manufacturing processes and regulatory oversight, India can manufacture drugs cheaply and enable higher profits for US drug companies. Part of the Reagan Revolution, the medical industrial complex uses the trickle down business model where manufacturing is done overseas using child labor, cheap wages, and deregulation to keep costs low and profits high. In this business model no one wins other than the wealthy. The US middle class is gutted, and poor people overseas are exploited, and those taking these drugs are often diseased from the drug itself. , termed an iatrogenic disorder in the medical business. In one example of iatrogenic disease, “about 7% of people with parkinsonism have developed their symptoms following treatment with particular medications. This form of Parkinsonism is called ‘drug-induced Parkinsonism’.” And if you land in the hospital after being harmed by a prescription drug, watch out for the rapidly spreading Candida auris, a drug resistant fungus spreading in hospitals that may be killing between 30-60% of those infected. My point here is not to scare you, rather to bring about a realization that lifestyle factors, including diet and exercise, can prevent these deadly scenarios involving drugs, physicians, and hospitals. Prevention is key, and diseases such as colorectal cancer, the incidence of which is rising quickly in the US among young people, and is obviously due to lifestyle factors, such as binge drinking and the consumption of sugary drinks and processed foods, can likely be brought under control by diet.

And now, thanks to the privatization of Medicare, insurance companies are using artificial intelligence to deny healthcare to their customers. Medicare Advantage plans, which are neither Medicare nor an advantage, are another means by which industry uses tax dollars to rip-off people. The privatization of Medicare through the Advantage plans is driving up the cost of Medicare, a winner for big corporations and a loser for tax payers. The Medicare Payment Advisory Panel estimates that Medicare Advantage plans have collected $124 billion in overpayments from 2008 to 2023. The corporations running these plans collected an estimated $44 billion in overpayments in 2022 and 2023 alone, according to MedPAC. To keep money in the pockets of physicians and corporations who benefit from these Medical Advantage plans, The Better Medicare Alliance (BMA), a group that includes 3 physicians Board members and is funded by multiple major insurance companies, ran Super Bowl ads warning that the White House was planning to cut Medicare. BMA blanketed the airwaves in the nation’s capital and Arizona and Nevada, where Democrats will defend key Senate seats. The American Action Network, a House-GOP aligned lobbying group that previously received millions of dollars from health care interests, including Aetna, a Medicare Advantage provider, launched $2 million in ads last month putting pressure on swing-district Democrats to oppose Biden’s plan. The ads accused Biden of “proposing massive Medicare Advantage cuts to seniors,” citing a “study” by their buddies at the physician-front group, the BMA. These physician and corporate lobby groups work hard to fool the people so that the people’s money can continue to fund the lavish lifestyles of physicians and the executives at their conspiring corporations. There are many, many examples of physicians greed. The U.S health system is estimated to lose $58.5–83.9 billion USD annually to fraud and abuse. All of this points out to how corrupt is the medical system in the US, and how you must learn to take control of your health.

Corporations selling you Medicare Advantage programs are using artificial intelligence (AI) to determine whether to fund drugs and procedures. And guess what, the bean counters (aka Libertarians) who wrote the algorithms for the AI programs biased them to cut care for seniors. After the corporate AI rejects the insurance claim, a physician working for the corporation signs the reject document without ever having analyzed the patient or their medical data. This is another type of “physician whore.” Just as Medicare Advantage is neither Medicare nor an advantage, in this case, AI is neither Artificial nor intelligent. Rather, it is real and it is stupidly robbing people of healthcare that they paid for in their social security taxes. Further, thanks to corporatized search algorithms, if you Google the term Medicare Advantage, about 90% of what you see extolls the virtues of enrolling in an Advantage plan. And, private equity is moving into to healthcare to profit by hurting your health. Noble Health, a private equity group in Utah, was also among the 2022 winners of the Shkreli Awards (Shkreli is a corrupt jailbird). It bought two rural hospitals in Missouri, leading to shortages of drugs and supplies, and stopped paying employees’ health insurance despite deducting money for that purpose from their pay. Dentistry is no different. One drill-and-filler was purposely breaking his patient’s teeth so that he could then fix them for profit. Another has been accused of child abuse for performing seven root canals on a 3 year old who didn’t require the procedures. Has your dentist ever told you about using toothpaste with hydroxyapatite to prevent cavities and re-mineralize the enamel of your teeth? Probably not, because prevention of dental caries does not fit the privatized dental business model and means no more drill-and-fill for profit. Like physicians, the more procedures done by a dentist, means a higher price will be paid for their practice when they sell their practices to private equity firms. This is big business. As the  Journal of Insurance Fraud in America has said, “Medicaid fraud is the most lucrative business model in U.S. dentistry today.” However, if you find the right dentist, such as Dr. Peter Rechmann, DMD, Ph.D, at UCSF, health can be restored such as in this case: “Rechmann forewent an easily billable procedure [crowns] and instead, advised his patient to use a high-concentration fluoride toothpaste, anti-bacterial rinse, and xylitol chewing gum. When she returned a few months later, her teeth enamel had remineralized so much that she was no longer a candidate for crowns.”

Did you know that eating soy and walnuts that contain D-serine, can prevent aging of the hypothalamus and help maintain our cognitive abilities? It’s important to point out that there is much misinformation about soy and the estrogen-like compounds found in soy. These compounds are called isoflavones and even though they are structurally similar to estrogen, they don’t have the negative effects associated with estrogen replacement treatment. Soy isoflavones bind to different receptors (ER-Beta) than estrogen and reduces the risk of breast and other types of cancer. Soy is safe and does not cause cancer, but actually prevents it, and doesn’t cause early onset of puberty in girls, it doesn’t cause fibroids or thyroid disease and it does not affect male hormones. Soy and soy products such as Tofu are excellent sources of protein, fiber and many other healthful nutrients. But, as Dr. Eric Reinhart, M.D., Ph.D. says, “The American medical profession has been part of a cartel, more or less. It’s been a trade union that has sought to protect its own economic interest, very often at the cost of patient well-being.” Healthy diets are a loser for physician income, but drugs make money. As I’ve written in The Medicalization of America, the AMA is largely responsible for our greedy and dangerous healthcare system. Dr. Reinhart goes on to say, “From the 1930s onwards, doctors [physicians] have been part of political organizing to prevent what was regarded a little bit later as socialized medicine — the idea that medical care might become a matter of rights rather than something governed by a revenue interest. The AMA [American Medical Association] was largely formed to do this, to advocate for doctor’s [physician’s] interests, their financial interests, and also their desire for autonomy to not have any kind of interference from government.” When the US government brought about Medicare and Medicaid, the AMA helped to setup the programs realizing that government funding, the people’s tax dollars, could be used to fund their privatized medical treatment system. This meant more income for procedures and drugs that more frequently than not, don’t work. Their mantra was and is, “let practicing physicians decide what works for their patients.” Who cares if most medical procedures don’t work, so long as I make money. In other words, good food is for health so we’re mum on that and actually promulgate bad information on diet, such as the keto diet, medical treatment is about money.

Thinking about nature and all of the miraculous molecules that plants provide us, I’m often asked, if natural ingredients work so well, why aren’t drug companies using natural ingredients to develop their therapeutics? The simple answer: natural ingredients cannot be patented. Here’s why this matters to drug companies, and to physicians. Only ingredients that are man made, not natural, can be patented. Once a patent is attained for a novel ingredient, then that ingredient can be sold by only the patent holder for about the next 20 years. Drug development is hugely expensive, so no company will develop a drug unless a big return on investment can be realized with great certainty, and the patent affords that high level of certainty. If a drug company were to develop a natural ingredient as a drug, no significant patents could be attained, and other companies could quickly copy the success of the original drug developer, leading to little or no return on the big investment to bring that product through the drug development process. As for physicians, their business model is to sell prescription drugs – that is, drugs that can only be attained if a physician prescribes it. Physicians therefore are the salespeople for the drug company’s patented drugs. If physicians were to emphasize prevention, and the use of natural ingredients, then the current business model for medics would cause them to lose income because natural ingredients can be easily purchased and at low cost. Both groups, physicians and drug companies, make much money using this business model of treatment with prescription drugs. Only they can sell these products. And sell drugs, they do. In copious quantities. In a description of one physician arrested and sentenced for overprescribing opioids, the DOJ said, the physician “practiced as a drug dealer, not a doctor.” In Florida, physicians can overprescribe opioids, make lots of money, be caught overprescribing, then use the money they made overprescribing to pay a small fine, and continue to practice. Another physician in Miami Beach, who attained a truncated medical degree in Mexico, will give you cocaine and then rape you. As my mother says, “they have a license to steal.” Physicians go to great lengths to make money. For an example of their continuing activity, “a regional hospital system based in the Saginaw, Michigan area, paid $69 million to resolve allegations under the False Claims Act of improper financial relationships with eight referring physicians and a physician-owned investment group, resulting in the submission of false claims to the Medicare, Medicaid, TRICARE, and FECA programs.  Two of these physicians, neurosurgeon Dr. Mark Adams and electrophysiologist Dr. Asim Yunus will pay the United States $406,551.15 and $345,987.54, respectively, to resolve allegations related to their relationships with Covenant.” The business model of physicians and drug companies is therefore treatment, and nowhere is the incentive for prevention. Even vaccines, which can sometimes prevent disease or the severity of a disease, are money-making treatments. As I’ve published in peer-reviewed PubMed listed scientific journals, some of the vaccines don’t work well and are repeatedly given at yearly intervals as a means to maintain revenue, but could be better made to better prevent the disease. And some poorly made vaccines continue to cause disease, such as polio. This happens when the polio virus used for vaccination is poorly processed and not fully inactivated. When this happens, the polio vaccine can actually cause polio in the vaccine victim. In January 2023, a peer-reviewed study was published in a medical journal, finding that a significant number of people have been injured, and some killed, by Covid-19 vaccinations. That paper is being retracted by the journal editors. The author of the paper is a scientist, trained in experimental design and statistics, and has no financial conflicts of interest in publishing his findings. While other papers in medical journals, written (or often ghost written) by physicians with no scientific training, no courses in experimental design, no graduate courses in statistics, offering flimsy data in support of drugs, including vaccines, remain published and are not retracted, good science that conflicts with the sales of vaccines must not be seen in the marketplace. It’s bad for the medical and drug businesses. This is a continuing American tragedy. If we continue believing in those drugs that are harmful based on flawed data, profit pressures, emotions, and political leanings, then these drugs will not be better made to yield more efficacy and fewer adverse events. Without having to spend time and money to make better drugs, keeping flawed drugs on the market, profits increase. As physicians report, “there is suspicion that anti-SARS-CoV-2 vaccines may cause intracranial hemorrhage, but this has not been officially recognized as a side effect of tozinameran [Pfizer mRNA Covid-19 vaccine] by any authorities. Nevertheless, fatal and non-fatal cases have been reported in the literature.” We’ve known about this problem for years. How many people have been maimed or killed? We don’t know, and those profiting from the drug don’t want to know.

One of the latest Covid-19 vaccines, the so-called bivalent booster, begins to loose its efficacy for preventing bad outcomes (it doesn’t prevent transmission) in about 2 months following dosing. Transient vaccines are big money-makers. Although “vaccines are holding up against admission to hospital and mortality,” says Dr. Linda Bauld, Ph.D., professor of public health at the University of Edinburgh, “but not so much against transmission,” I have to ask, what is the point of a Covid-19 vaccine mandate? If the vaccine is not preventing or significantly reducing transmission, allow people to choose whether to vaccinate or not. But mandates make money for corporations and physicians (they have many schemes, many, many thanks to privatization of healthcare, and you’re paying billions of dollars for physicians and their conspirators to do little or nothing to improve health). On the other hand, a vaccine that is safe (I’ve discussed the safety issues of mRNA vaccines) and works well, keeping people out of the clinic, and that doesn’t have to be dosed on a yearly basis, is a money loser for physicians and drug companies alike. In contradistinction to many of our current vaccines, a mask mandate does make sense because masks reduce the probability of transmission, and if infected, reduce the viral load and may therefore reduce the severity of the symptoms. Masks are also easy to use, inexpensive, and have no adverse side effects. But they don’t make money for drug companies or physicians, and therefore were not recommended by Fauci early-on in the pandemic. A physician named Tom Jefferson who had the paper he put his name on ghostwritten, claims that masks don’t work, when the data in that paper show that masks do work. Either he’s a dolt, or paid-off, or both. I detail in my book, The Medicalization of America, how Fauci’s public health policies allowed the virus to spread because his mentality is vaccine-focused. Part of Fauci’s vaccine-focus was to fund gain-of-function experiments in coronaviruses, performed in China and with one goal to better develop coronavirus vaccines, something that may have led to the Covid-19 pandemic. We still don’t know with certainty whether the pandemic started through a lab leak or a natural (if we define natural as animals held in captivity in close quarters where they continuously share their urine, feces, and sputum) spillover from animals because health care officials in the US and China have covered-up relevant data, including Fauci and Collins at the NIH. I want to emphasize, that we still don’t have the proper data (as of April, 2023) to make a high probability determination of how the virus spread to humans. If Covid-19 was lab created, then this one heck of a medical business model- have tax payers fund the very studies that created the disease (thank you Fauci), and then have tax payers pay for development of poor vaccines that don’t stop the spread of the disease so that the money keeps rolling into the drug companies, the NIH, and to Fauci himself. Privatization of healthcare sure is great. Under Francis Collins, even the NIH would become privatized, with drug and soda companies funding disastrous “NIH” studies, as well as funding other national health organizations. As part of the Reagan Revolution, with the NIH funded by corporations and about half of the FDA budget funded by companies (funding 75% of its drug division), physicians on the review panels of the FDA paid by drug companies, little wonder is required to understand why we live in the treatment paradigm of healthcare in the US. Regardless, given a more than $32 billion public money investment in these mRNA vaccines for Covid-19, and while the CEO of Moderna, who manufactured one of the mRNA vaccines, made (I won’t say earned) $398 million in 2022, the public should demand better vaccines and reduced compensation for those who made these sub-par vaccines. But with the world’s largest lobby controlling the narrative, few know how inadequate is our current business model of medicine and healthcare. I’ll point out to my fellow liberal Democrats, that Fauci and Collins are Reaganesque Republicans who believe in and have implemented authoritarian and privatized schemes to the NIH, hindering the advancement of science and medicine. They have committed fraud and cover-ups to advance their careers. Just because Trump made Fauci an enemy, doesn’t mean liberals should embrace Fauci. The enemy of your enemy is not necessarily your friend.

If you want to drastically limit your chances of having heart disease, diabetes, dementia, autoimmune disease, osteoporosis, cancer, and so many more illnesses, you need to take control of your diet. The healthcare system won’t do it for you. It’s up to you. Not eating well, for example, can lead to the use of laxatives and the consequences of an increased risk of dementia. If you’ve heard these health conditions are hereditary, sometimes confused with genetics (genetics is only one factor in heredity), you’ve been led astray. For example, transgenerational epigenetic inheritance, something that doesn’t involve changes in the DNA sequence, has profound effects on heredity. Rather, chemical changes to the same DNA sequence can turn on or off DNA expression, and those chemical changes can sometimes be passed on to one’s progeny. This means some of the unhealthy behaviors in which you indulge, such as eating processed foods, may be passed on to your children, biasing the child to act unhealthy. Epigenetic changes, such as DNA methylation, can have major consequences to health. DNA methylation is an important marker of aging and health status, and is profoundly affected by our exposome and social conditions. In other words, genetics doesn’t matter much for most diseases, but what you are exposed to in life matters to your health, and likely to your children’s health. This is true for diseases such as amyotrophic lateral sclerosis (ALS). As I’ve written in a peer-reviewed, PubMed listed study, ALS is largely a disease due to toxic exposure, not genetics. Yet our focus is on drugs to treat the disease, instead of regulations to prevent toxic exposure and subsequent disease causation. Treatment trumps prevention, again. I’ve also published studies laying out additional means, a new approach to therapeutic development using systems therapeutics, to better prevent and treat neurodegenerative diseases such as ALS using non-toxic supplements. Some of the mechanisms of action (MOA) of my technology was published by the Physiological Society in the UK, and I was interviewed in a Physiological Society podcast with Dr. Thomas Kleyman, M.D., explaining this new concept. Because my therapeutic methods utilize natural ingredients, my patent portfolio is relatively weak, and therefore investors and partners avoid such methods in preference to money-making, patented, toxic drugs that can be sold by physicians. Brain diseases, such as dementia, are also linked to low levels of chronic air pollution. And as Dr. Kimberly Paul, PhD, a lead author and assistant professor of neurology at UCLA, has taught us, Parkinson’s Disease can likely be caused by, among other environmental factors, 10 pesticides that were directly toxic to dopaminergic neurons, which are critical in voluntary movement and whose death is a feature of Parkinson’s. So eating well, cooking your food a non-polluting convection stove so that the air in your kitchen and the rest of your dwelling is clean, and filtering your water increases your odds of living a long and healthy life.

The absurdity of the genetics fashionistas has led to every gene that has been sequenced to be categorized as linked to cancer. Yes, absurdly, every gene in the body has been claimed to be linked to cancer. This genomics fashionistism was brought forth by a physician, Francis Collins, the former head of the National Institutes of Health, who believed all diseases could be understood by knowing a person’s full genetic sequence. A religious man, genetics was one of his religions. Collins was so devoted to his preconceived notion of genetics as the cause of all disease that he was caught authoring five fraudulent scientific papers on genetics. Disseminating misinformation on behalf of his inane genomics revolution included fraudulent studies. Blaming the problem on a junior worker in his lab, Mr. Collins obviously had little to do with the papers if indeed the blame was with his junior partner. If we are to believe the blame lies elsewhere, did Collins even read the papers to which his name is attached? Someone else read the papers, and found the fraud. All one had to do was read the papers. Apparently, Collins had not. Yet, this man, Collins, who appears not to even read the genomics papers to which he attaches his name, ushered in the ridiculous notion that all disease can be understood be genomic sequences, a huge and expensive failure. His was profoundly superficial thought. Even Type 1 Diabetes, often said to be a genetic disease, is on the rise and is thought to be caused by a number of factors, including environmental risks. Our genetics haven’t changed much over time, but our environment, including diet, has. Healthcare, and specifically genomics is a big business, and many people will do almost anything for money and deliver bad healthcare. The global genomics market was about $23 billion in 2020. If physicians can convince you that all diseases are genetic, then that means there’s nothing you can do about your disease, other than go to see the physician for overprescribed drugs and overprescribed procedures, including surgery. Physician hubris and greed is nothing new. George Bernard Shaw, besides bringing us Pygmalion and My Fair Lady, described some of the problems in a play he wrote in 1906 called The Doctor’s Dilemma. The genius of Shaw was made into a movie in the 1950s and an updated version is sorely (literally) needed.

And most of the drugs don’t work, as is the case for medical procedures too. Here’s the latest discovery of unneeded medical procedures: surgery or radiotherapy for prostate cancer when doing nothing yields an equivalent life expectancy. Doing unneeded medical procedures for profit not only does no good for the patient, but causes harm, including increasing the patient’s risk of developing cancer. The healthcare lobby, composed of physicians and physician groups, drug companies, health insurance companies, and hospital/clinic organizations is the largest lobby in the world. Larger than the defense lobby. Physicians are a big part of this lobbying effort. They’re all in together to drive home the false narrative that there is little you can do to better your health other than to take prescription drugs and have procedures. “Rampant surgical overuse” is part of their greed. This is nothing new. In the 1950s, Paul Hawley, M.D., the Director of the American College of Surgeons, stated that “the public would be shocked if it knew the amount of unnecessary surgery performed.” Similarly, radiation treatment, something that increases your chances of cancer, is overused and keeps radiation oncologists as one of the highest paid physician categories at $544,000 annually. Unnecessary medical care, sometimes violent, in the US has been described as an epidemic by a prominent physician. Violence can be insidious, such as “A healthy adult is sent for a ‘regular medical check-up’, considered a business venture in medical circles, and walks out a depressed, harried patient.” On the other hand, Dr. Death, a surgeon in Texas, was infamous and his story was made into a miniseries. But most cases go unreported, as do most medical errors – about 90 percent of all hospital mistakes go unreported, and medical errors are the third leading cause of death in the US. Sadly, when medical errors occur, the medical institution and their physicians entrench into a defensive mode, such as happened to a young woman when part of her lung was mistakenly removed at the Cleveland Clinic. Cover-ups such as this perpetuate the problems and tend to prevent corrective actions.

However, violent behavior by physicians in their practice does sometimes lead to a revocation of their license to practice by the state medical board, such as happened to John Sanderson, a physician who trained in Canada, receiving a Bachelor’s Degree in Medicine (a five year undergraduate degree, MBBS, not an MD) and then practiced in California. Having lost his license for sexual misconduct, incompetence, and repeated incompetence, he would then go on to start a cosmetic company named AnteAge, a company using technology (bone marrow mesenchymal stem cell cytokines) that is potentially harmful, including oncogenic, i.e. cancer causing, to consumers. Scientific studies have repeatedly found that the technology AnteAge uses promotes tumor growth. Sanderson’s scientific advisor, Jonathan Lakey, another Canadian, would leave his country in disgrace after he was fired from his university in Canada for fraud, as well as at a Canadian non-profit, and would later be charged with conspiracy and racketeering in a company where he was the director. They would recruit other physicians to use these harmful ingredients and procedures, using their authority figure stature to potentially harm unwitting clients. I’ve reviewed in the peer-reviewed journal, Journal of the Royal Society of Medicine, why bone marrow mesenchymal stem cells can be dangerous, inducing cancer in recipients of bone marrow transplants, and why physicians must be careful in using these cells or the molecules they produce in therapeutic and consumer products.

The use of medical products and personal care products with harmful chemicals is widespread in the US, and is especially problematic in children who are highly vulnerable to these chemicals in their developmental stage of life. Why does this happen? Short answer, money: “A panel appointed by the national Cancer Advisory Board, USA, has found that highly reputed scientists could deviate from accepted standards of integrity when tempted to bolster their theorems and prejudices with huge sums of the public’s money, and an American scientist has advised other scientists: ‘Stay out of cancer research because it’s full of money and just about out of science.'” And when other countries, such as the UK, emulate the privatized healthcare system of the US, what happens? As a cardiologist in the UK has said, physicians who “treat patients privately [the private healthcare system, not the socialized medicine system in the UK] are like the ‘greedy preying on the needy.'” A commonly used chemical, trichloroethylene, may cause Parkinson’s Disease and has been found in many consumer products (used to decaffeinate coffee, degrease metal, and dry clean clothes) and, more to the point, medical products, including in the past (banned in 1977) as an anesthetic. Endocrine disrupting chemicals (EDC) are commonly found in medical devices and equipment, along with the prescribed drugs. As stated by endocrinologists, “Providing ethically competent care requires an open acknowledgment of endocrine risks imposed by the medical community that have heretofore been ignored.” The pathogenesis of various reproductive, neuropsychiatric, and metabolic disorders are linked to EDCs, and exposures occurring during sensitive developmental period early in life are now thought to confer long-term disease risk.

Most diseases are a result of our exposome, especially the medical environment, not genetics. This means diseases are under the control of what you do, all of that to which you are exposed, including all the various factors in your diet. Want sarcopenia? Then eat lots of protein, “Load up on eggs, tofu, Greek yoghurt, fish and lean meat,” just as your physician recommended. Scientists have found that eating higher amounts of protein are associated with sarcopenia, muscle degeneration. One physician has said, “Most cancers are, essentially, bad luck.” Never mind how diet is critical to cancer development, or that the gas stove you use to cook is emitting cancer-causing chemicals such as benzene, something the hydrocarbon industry doesn’t want you to know about. Don’t worry, be happy. Currently there is a plastic recycling plant on fire in Indiana, spewing chemicals in to the air, including dioxins. Dioxins are called persistent organic pollutants (POPs), meaning they take a long time to break down once they are in the environment. Dioxins are highly toxic and can cause cancer, reproductive and developmental problems, damage to the immune system, and can interfere with hormones. Air quality in the US is worsening, thanks to Ronald Reagan and his acoyltes in the Republican party. And when what you do in life causes your cancer, you’ll have a chance for physicians to irradiate you to kill the cancer cells, but to also induce more cancer due to the radiation treatment. All of these X-ray procedures that physicians and dentists do for added income may also induce heart disease. “Physicians generally underestimate the magnitude of radiation doses and their associated effects, and thus underestimate the risk to patients undergoing medical imaging procedures.” Heart disease can also be caused by breathing high levels of oxygen during medical procedures, including hyperbaric oxygen, leading to protein damage that decreases mitochondrial function, and results in pulmonary dysfunction. This means the use of antioxidants, which can mitigate reactive oxygen species to some degree, is unlikely to be sufficient to prevent oxygen toxicity. As an example, this knucklehead physician will even use protein- and mitochondrial-destroying hyperbaric oxygen as an antiaging treatment. He’s an emergency room physician who is crating emergencies. Great for his business: first he creates the disease with his hyperbaric treatment, and then he later treats it at the ER.

Want obesity and heart disease? Then eat the Atkins diet with lots of meat, butter, and processed oils that a medic made famous. Reduced exercise and a high-calorie diet lead to an increase in the fat mass and obesity-associated (FTO) protein, which has numerous deleterious consequences, including an increased chance of vision loss. When a physician recommends a calorie-dense, high fat diet, expect poor health, and possible death due to cardiac arrest as happened to one of the most famous medics promoting this nonsense, Robert Atkins. Newer fad diets from physicians that build on the stupidity of the Atkins diet include the South Beach Diet and the Keto Diet, which may, among other problems, induce dysbiosis, cancer, and poor cardiovascular health. Instead, educate and inspire yourself by reading The Blue Zones Kitchen and take part in a way of life that the longest lived, most healthy people on the planet practice. This will keep you out of the hospital or clinic, where you have a significant probability of becoming ill from diseases such as Covid-19 and Legionella.

As I wrote in my book, Thinking and Eating for Two, many people in the modern world are overfed, but undernourished, leading to much disease. With many people relying on their physicians for medical advice, disturbingly most US medical schools (86/121, 71%) fail to provide the recommended minimum 25 hours of nutrition education to medical students. Given that most diseases are result of our exposome, and the most critical aspect of our exposome is diet, physicians profoundly lack any understanding of the root cause of most diseases. It’s even worse than this. At the Texas A&M University, poor studies paid for by the meat industry and published in scientific journals without disclosure of the funding, sell beef under the disguise of science. The money paid to scientists and physicians to publish advocacy studies is laundered through industry-funded non-profits, such as the International Life Sciences Institute. Fortunately, a number of scientists and physicians have educated themselves about nutrition and are not beholden to the corporate food industry.

My early foray into nutrition began in high school as QB of my football team, and a tall, skinny kid with mild asthma. I wanted to improve my game through better health, and found Adele Davis’ book, Let’s Get Well, in our local health food store. She was a graduate of UC Berkeley’s nutrition program, the first in the US, had a master’s in biochemistry from USC in Los Angeles, and was an advocate for improved health through better nutrition. She wrote an early nutrition textbook in 1942, followed by four best-selling books for consumers which praised the value of natural foods and criticized the diet of the average American. Based on the evidence of the time, she believed that most Americans inflicted harm on themselves with their typical diets, which was excessively high in salt, refined sugars, pesticides, growth hormones, preservatives and other additives, and thereby “devitalized” of its essential nutrients by the excessive processing. Another UC Berkeley trained scientist, a giant in the field of nutrition, Dr. Ancel Keys, Ph.D., influenced me with his 1960s book, The Benevolent Bean, researched and written with his wife, Margaret, who was a chemist. Ancel died at 100 years old, and Margaret at 97 – they practiced what they preached! Yes, despite the blithering nonsense of a surgeon, Steven Gundry, who claims beans are bad for health in a poorly researched and written book, other scientists and physicians who have educated themselves on nutrition, and now educate others through the popular media include, Dr. T. Colin Campbell, Ph.D. of Cornell University; Dr. Joel Fuhrman, M.D.; Dr. John McDougall, M.D.; and Dr. Michael Greger, M.D.

Further to diet, exposure to a mixture of synthetic chemicals found widely in the environment alters and upsets many critical biological processes, including the metabolism of fats and amino acids. The disruption of these biological processes is connected to an increased risk of many diseases, including developmental disorders, cardiovascular disease, metabolic disease and many types of cancer. Two massive train derailments in Ohio in one month, spewing toxic chemicals throughout the region will likely be causative or partially causative for many people’s afflictions. Thanks to the deregulation mentality of the US, “Cuts in manpower and inspections, combined with reductions in regulations via waivers and changes have resulted in the deterioration of rail safety in the industry.” One problem is that trains are now too long, sometimes 2-3 miles long. Some Republicans and most Democrats have tried through legislation to correct these issues, but Libertarian Republicans in charge of the Republican party have not allowed these legislative bills to come to vote. Toxic, disease-causing pollution continues to spew across our country as a result of their inaction. Deregulated states such as Florida and Texas are becoming havens for industrial polluters. Examining water quality across the U.S. shows Florida ranking first for the highest total acres of lakes too polluted for swimming or healthy aquatic life. That means water can have high levels of fecal matter and other bacteria that can sicken people. As for Texas, a new report by Environment America, a Denver-based nonprofit, Texas ranks first among U.S. states for toxic discharges into streams, rivers and lakes, a title held by Indiana since the organization began analyzing nationwide water pollution in 2009. “Texas has a pretty lax regulatory environment where it’s very easy to permit new polluting facilities and very difficult to get fined for violations,” said Luke Metzger, director of Environment Texas, the local affiliate of Environment America. “They know they’ll likely get away with it.” Again, rising rates of disease are not due to changes in our genetics, which hasn’t changed much in modern times, but is due to our exposome, something that includes all of the pollutants to which we are exposed, and some of which are growing exponentially. In Texas, laws may be passed to thwart the adoption of electric vehicles, continuing the pollution of our air by petroleum fueled vehicles. Among the many other diseases linked to tailpipe emissions, now eczema, also called atopic dermatitis, has been linked to isocyanates from gasoline engines. Isocyanates have been found in the lesions of those with eczema. Rates of eczema are growing steadily from year to year.

Let’s have a quick look at the effects of pollution on developing cancer. Pollution has been thought to cause genetic mutations, which then lead to cancer. However much research over the years has provided data to suggest otherwise. First, recent evidence suggest, “The major mechanism by which air pollution causes cancer is not due to the induction of new mutations,” says Prof. Dr. Allan Balmain, Ph.D., a cancer researcher at the University of California, San Francisco. “It’s that sustained inflammation that becomes chronic that is essential to get these mutated cells to grow into tumours.” Dr. Balmain suggests that simple dietary interventions that combat inflammation might be able to reduce the risk of some cancers. “It is worth revisiting those questions and trying to identify the best dietary factors that you could take that could be helpful in preventing malignant disease,” he says. “Many of them may well do that — we don’t know because we haven’t done the right tests.” And for decades, Prof. Dr. Mina Bissell, Ph.D. at the University of California, Berkeley, has many studies finding that mutated cells don’t cause cancer unless those cells are in an abnormal microenvironment, such as an inflammatory microenvironment. Further, she and her team found that a cancer cell, if returned to a normal microenvironment, would revert back to a normal, non-cancerous cell. Dr. Bissell has won many awards for her work. The bottom line here is that a poor exposome, including a poor diet, induces inflammation which then sets up a inflammatory microenvironment and degradation of the matrix surrounding cells, a trigger for cancer. The solution is an anti-inflammatory diet of whole, plant foods.

Artificial sweeteners are another exposome problem. For example, increased chances of heart attack can follow the consumption of erythritol given that platelet reactivity and thrombosis is enhanced by this chemical. If you’re addicted to meat, which is bad for the heart, eat mycoprotein (fungi stems of the mushrooms you’re accustomed to) instead. Mycoprotein is meaty, and has sufficient protein and much fiber to help keep one healthy, helping to create a healthy microbiome and increase short chain fatty acids (important for immune regulation and reducing inflammation). Fermentation of mycoprotein by bacteria in the human gut yields lower concentrations of ammonia, and the many negative effects it produces. Studies have found cardiometabolic benefits when replacing meat with mycoprotein that is partly attributable to its fiber composition. Companies such as Better Meat Co. in Sacramento, CA, are developing meaty products based on mycoprotein. For myself, grilling or roasting oyster (or similar) mushrooms, there are many varieties and many producers in CA, yields a tasty, meaty dish. Eating a whole food plant-based diet that include fruits and vegetables and mycoprotein will help to prevent and remediate many diseases.

You are not a victim of the hereditary factors with which you were born. A simple example is how eating added sodium induces inflammation throughout the body by modifying the immune system such that immune cells (T-cells) no longer properly regulate themselves. In such states of the immune system, autoimmunity results. Autoimmunity, such as eosinophilic esophagitis, can be effectively treated simply by eliminating dairy. The same for some types of MS. For myself, following a whole food plant-based diet with little or no added sodium, sugar, or processed foods, I haven’t taken a drug in over 5 years. No aspirin, no ibuprofen, nothing. I’m over 60 years old and have never felt better. You can too. Eat well, predominantly plants, exercise (walking an hour a day does wonders), and stay socially and mentally active. Healthspan and lifespan will benefit greatly. Let’s bring new meaning to a saying, which I’ll call here, “Wholier than thou.” Eat whole foods, not processed plants and not animal products, and lead a whole and healthy life.