9
0

Doctors WILL kill you if it's profitable for them


 invite response                
2022 Nov 2, 9:32am   13,532 views  143 comments

by Patrick   ➕follow (61)   💰tip   ignore  

https://sukwan.substack.com/p/covid-quarantine-care-in-thailand


I found this first hand account from BangkokTruthSeeker compelling. How are the hospitals now in Thailand or elsewhere? I’m curious about everyone’s experiences.

“MY TALE OF FLEEING VIETNAM TO AVOID BEING VACCINATED,

AND CATCHING AND RECOVERING FROM COVID IN THAILAND

First a bit of background: I lived in Bangkok from 1995-2015. In 2015, I moved to Vietnam for a wonderful job opportunity – the best job of my life – by far. I was enjoying my life in Vietnam – until late in the second year of COVID. At one point in late 2021, the lockdowns there were so strict that we were not even allowed to go out to buy food. That was manageable for the Vietnamese, who were able to get food through their personal connections. But for me as a foreigner, it was a traumatic experience that I hope I never have to go through again.

One day during the total lockdown, in a conversation with my boss, he mentioned to me that he was not satisfied with the performance of one of my junior colleagues. I told my boss that I would go to the office when the lockdown ended and train this colleague myself. My boss replied that “Unless you have been vaccinated since we last spoke, you’re going to have to find another solution, as you won’t be allowed to enter the office building without being vaccinated.” (I realized very early in the “pandemic” that the people pushing these “vaccines” had ulterior motives – motives that had nothing to do with public health – so I refuse(d) to get “vaccinated” for COVID, and to this day I remain unvaccinated. Surprisingly though, I was the only person in my company of around 200 employees who refused to get “vaccinated”.)

When my boss told me that I could not go to the office again without being vaccinated, I realized that I had no choice but to leave Vietnam. The obvious destination for me was Thailand, which was not far away, and where I knew my way around based on having lived there for 20 years prior to relocating to Vietnam. But there were many obstacles to getting myself back to Thailand. For one, I am a citizen of a country that does not have visa-free entry to Thailand, so I needed a visa to enter the country. But the Thai consulate in Ho Chi Minh City, where I was living, was closed – for weeks – without any indication of when it would open again. So there was no way for me to get a visa. I was feeling really trapped.

Eventually I retained the services of an “agent” – who was able to get me a Thai tourist visa (and arrange my Thailand Pass), despite the consulate being closed. It was the best $200 I ever spent.

After essentially abandoning all my life’s possessions that I could not carry with me on the plane, I flew to Thailand on 1 December 2021. (My employer had paid to ship all my belongings to Vietnam when I moved there from Bangkok, but they would not pay to ship my things back to Thailand – since it was my decision to leave Vietnam.) And when somebody else is paying to ship your things, it makes sense to ship EVERYTHING – whether it makes economic sense or not. But when you have to pay for the shipping yourself, you have to ask yourself if it makes sense to pay $5,000 to ship $3,000 worth of stuff. Obviously, it doesn’t. So I made some of my dear Vietnamese friends and colleagues happy by leaving many of my things with them. I also lost the $1,600 deposit on my apartment due to breaking my 3-year lease after 2½ years.

Two days before flying, I did a PCR test, which was negative, and upon arrival in Bangkok I did another PCR test, which was also negative. I was looking forward to spending the next 10 nights in my lovely quarantine hotel. (At the time, as you might recall, unvaccinated people were required to quarantine for 10 nights, at an approved quarantine hotel, paid for in full in advance.) On the fifth night of my quarantine, I developed a fever right before going to bed. I was at first reluctant to think that I might have COVID because of all the testing I had already done, not to mention the wrench that it would throw into my plans. I also couldn’t imagine how I could have caught COVID in a place where everyone was supposed to be COVID-free. I sweated and froze all that night, but by morning I was feeling a little better. At first, I wasn’t going to say anything to the hotel about this, but then I realized that if I had COVID, it would be better to deal with it as soon as possible, so I took the self-test that I had brought with me from Ho Chi Minh City. It was VERY positive.

At this point I started my self-treatment regimen with the arsenal of medicines that I had brought with me from Vietnam, all of which are available over the counter for very cheap. (Ivermectin, fluvoxamine, vitamins D and C, zinc, colchicine, aspirin, etc.) I notified the hotel of my situation and the next day they arranged another PCR test for me. That test was also positive. Within two hours of getting that positive test result, I was whisked away in an ambulance to the hotel’s partner hospital. They threw me out of the hotel as if I were a leper, but not without keeping the remaining $300 of my payment for services not rendered. (There were no refunds from quarantine hotels if you test positive during your stay.) And as if that wasn’t bad enough, they even charged me $1.25 extra for some bread I had eaten one day beyond my normal daily allotment - and despite the fact that they kept $300 of my paid-for-but-not-used services. (I suggested to them that they could deduct that $1.25 from the $300 of my money they had kept, but they said that that was a different department. Ha.) I thought that was very small minded of them.

One very good thing about the quarantine hotel was that the other long-stayers there, like me, were all anti-vaxxers, by definition. And I met some very interesting people who are on the same page as I am on all of this, one in particular, a lovely, decent and brilliant 72-year-old American guy. People like that gave me the strength to stick to what I knew was the truth about the “vaccines”.

In the end I spent a total of 12 nights (and $14,000 – all covered by my wonderful company insurance, thankfully), in the hospital recovering. Strangely, I never had any actual symptoms: none of the usual coughing, difficulty breathing, etc. All of my issues were detectable only by (mostly expensive) testing: COVID pneumonia, blood clotting and low blood oxygen level.

During my first few days in the hospital, my condition was going downhill pretty fast (at least according to the tests – again, I never felt ANYTHING). I eventually realized what was going on when I asked the doctor what the solution to my deterioration was: “REMDESIVIR”, she said! I thought that everybody in the world knew by then that Remdesivir is a poison, and my greatest fear was being forced to take it. So you can imagine my shock when this was the FIRST AND ONLY “solution” that my doctor proposed!

Here is a good video describing the lethality of Remdesivir:


original link


I spent the next three days fending off their attempts to “save” me with Remdesivir – while they neglected all other treatments! It was really my low point, as I felt that they were quite willing to kill me – for the additional income Remdesivir would generate for the hospital. But I knew enough about it to refuse it. Every day the nurses would come into my room and tell me, “Just take the Remdesivir. It will help you. We give it to all the farangs.” And one of the only two times the doctor actually visited me in person in my hospital room was to try to convince me to take Remdesivir. I showed her an article by even the corrupt WHO, sent to me by a friend, which said that Remdesivir is NOT a helpful treatment for COVID:

https://www.who.int/news-room/feature-stories/detail/who-recommends-against-the-use-of-remdesivir-in-covid-19-patients

The doctor replied, “The reason the WHO does not recommend Remdesivir is not because it doesn’t work. They don’t recommend it because it doesn’t reduce mortality.” Can you believe she said that? Actually, not only does Remdesivir not REDUCE mortality, it practically GUARANTEES it!

On her final attempt to convince me to accept this poison, I mentioned to the nurse that in addition to not working and being dangerous, it’s also expensive. She replied, “Don’t worry. Your insurance will cover the cost.” Aha, so the hospital had already checked! I knew that my insurance would cover it, but they had checked on it – because it’s so lucrative for hospitals to use it. (I have since learned that in the US, the government adds a 20% bonus to the TOTAL bill of COVID patients who are “treated” with Remdesivir instead of ivermectin, etc.) Now what could be the point of that – other than to steer “treatment” in a certain (fatal) direction – to make COVID appear to be more deadly than it really was?

Anyway, after three days of my steadfast refusal to take Remdesivir, they finally more or less gave up on trying to force it on me. But not before they made me sign a form saying that I refused the "proper" treatment and that they could therefore not take responsibility for the outcome of my stay in the hospital. Is that any way to treat a patient? To try to kill him with a known poison – and then to tell him that if he doesn’t take the poison, the hospital will not be responsible for his survival? What a scary thing for a patient to have to go through!

So, after all that, when they saw that I would not accept the Remdesivir, they FINALLY started treating me with an acceptable anti-viral – favipiravir – and steroids (dexamethasone). This seemed to stabilize my condition a bit, if not improve it. This continued for about three days – with constant monitoring of my blood clotting and blood oxygen level – with no discernible improvement.

Then a miracle happened: I got my daily health newsletter by email from Dr. Mercola, in which he conducted an interview with Dr. Robert Malone. In this interview, Dr. Malone had mentioned some trials using a cheap, over-the-counter heartburn medication that seemed to work very well in the treatment of COVID: Famotidine. By sheer coincidence, I had briefly read about this medicine while I was still in Vietnam, so I bought a box of it before coming to Thailand. (I am a bit of a prepper, and I would rather have ten medicines that I don’t need than not have the one that I do need. I also had a few other medicines that I never used, but I had them just in case - because they were so cheap - and readily available over the counter in Vietnam.)

Anyway, I tried to convince the doctor to let me at least try this medicine Famotidine, as I didn’t see much downside in it. Actually, the medicine is meant to be taken with another medicine, but the doctor talked me out of taking that other medicine with it because I was already on blood thinners for my blood clots. In the end I think that was the right call by the doctor, and I think it was the ONLY useful thing she did for me. During my discussions with the doctor, she told me that this study by Dr. Malone was just a small one and it was not peer reviewed. But actually, that was the point of the article by Dr. Mercola: Dr. Malone’s paper about his study had passed peer review THREE TIMES, but the medical journals STILL refused to publish it, as they didn’t want to spread any information about cheap treatments that might reduce the willingness of people to take the killer vaccines.

Perhaps you can guess what happened next: Just TWO HOURS after my very first dose of this Famotidine, my condition started improving. My blood oxygen level finally started rising a bit – for the first time. And within 48 hours, my blood clotting had largely resolved itself, as did my COVID pneumonia. (A CAT scan was done the next day, and there was already no longer any sign of blood clotting.) Of course, the doctors assumed that it was their “treatment” that helped/saved me, but I know what I experienced – and this Famotidone is what saved me. And fast! From that point my condition improved so rapidly that I was able to be released from the hospital just a couple of days after starting that medication. Make of that what you will.

I left that hospital shortly before Christmas of 2021. It took another month or so for my health to return to normal. I have no long-term effects from COVID. This I attribute to my vitamin D level having been very high (I tested it just before I caught COVID and it was 91ng/ml, a VERY healthy level), as well as all of the good medications that I treated myself with while in the hospital, as well as the fact that I managed to avoid the Remdesivir.

This experience has caused me to lose all trust in not only the Thai but the worldwide medical system. I would have never imagined that a hospital would be so willing to risk my life for a few thousand extra dollars. (At one point I thought of offering the doctor the $3,000 cash that I happened to have with me to start my new life in Thailand – if she would cure me without Remdesivir. But that would have made my knowledge of her plan too obvious to her.)

I don’t want to say that my quarantine hotel somehow deliberately infected me with COVID (although I don’t know how I was able to catch it while in quarantine), and I don’t want to say that the hospital that I was forced into just tried to extract as much money from me as possible while not caring about my health. But I will say that both the hotel and the hospital benefited greatly from my misfortune.

Anyway, I am happy to have this ordeal behind me – and I am happy to be living in Thailand, where I have at least some freedom – as much as exists anywhere in the world these days, I suppose. Meanwhile, sad to say, tens, if not hundreds, of thousands of people have already died from these “vaccines” – and many more will die from them in the coming years. I just hope that the criminals who foisted these vaccines on the world will someday be held to account.

Finally, I would be very interested to know if anybody else managed to catch COVID during their stay in a quarantine hotel in Thailand. As I said, the quarantine hotels and the hospitals had every incentive to see to it that their guests/patients caught COVID during their forced quarantine.

Thanks for reading, and stay un”vaccinated”!”

« First        Comments 123 - 143 of 143        Search these comments

124   Patrick   2024 Jun 9, 7:05pm  

https://eccentrik.substack.com/p/millions-for-murder-inside-the-lucrative


Ever heard of blood money? Well, this here is blood clot money.

By now, you’ve probably heard of the many financial disbursements and ‘perks’ that drove the COVID Era, turning better actors against their goodwill (and Hippocratic Oaths) in servitude to the Almighty Dollar.

From hospital payments to doctor incentives, the depth and breadth of the Money Machine knew no bounds. Add in the highly inflated PCR thresholds, and COVID cases were undoubtedly appearing everywhere, intertwined with misleading and outright false medical coding. ...

And with this mass ‘vaccination’ effort came the turning of minds. The pitting of lifelong friends against each other. The creation of divisions. The unpersoning of normal, law-abiding citizens. Derision and rancor, hatred and hysteria.

Seemingly rational thinkers became crazed, indoctrinated, histrionic perversions of themselves.

And the Global PSYOP used to orchestrate this worldwide push for mRNA subservience?

As much psychological as it was financial. Especially among those individuals, professionals, revered for helping Humanity the most…

This is NOTHING new. It doesn’t just apply to COVID jabs - these types of financial schemes, bribery, and sleazy, immoral practices undergird much of the “vaccination schedule” we see today.

And it’s been going on for years.

So is it any surprise that the number of forced jabs has gone up substantially?

One man who knows a thing or two about the pharmaceutical scheme to essentially bribe doctors into continued vaccination is Dr. Paul Thomas, a respected pediatrician who once ran a general pediatrics practice serving 15,000 patients and staffing 33 employees.

According to Dr. Thomas, most pediatric practices couldn’t survive without pushing jabs. In fact, he’s outlined three critical ways that practices make money off of continued injections:

“So there's three main ways you make money off of vaccines in pediatrics. The number one is the admin fee. And you get about, it depends on the insurance company, every contract's different, but I would average it out to say about $40 for the first antigen and $20 for each subsequent antigen. So let's just say a two month well baby visit. There’s a DPT. That's three shots, three antigens. Hib, Prevnar, HepB, Polio, Rotavirus, six shots, eight antigens, about $240. Thank you for giving those shots. Multiply that by the fact that I was getting 30 to 40 newborns per month. They're coming in repeatedly at two months, four months, six months, nine months, twelve months, fifteen, eighteen months, and age two. So we looked at the admin fee loss and from my practice that was billing at that time, about 3 million gross, we were losing a million dollars, over a million dollars, in vaccines that were refused…

[Another] is the markup. They don't allow a lot of profit on vaccines as far as markups. But they do this thing called incentives or bonuses. And it's called a “Quality Bonus.” Well in pediatrics, one of the main quality measures is how well you vaccinate. Isn't that interesting? It has nothing to do with how healthy your kids are. Like when I studied my vaxed vs unvaxed patients, the unvaxed were so incredibly healthy. They rarely got sick. They rarely would end up in an emergency room or in a hospital or with any chronic condition…
126   stereotomy   2024 Jun 12, 1:36pm  

I found out recently that in NYS, all doctors received a letter from the state back in 2020/2021 threatening them with firing, loss of their medical licenses, and possible prosecution if they said or did anything contrary to "the narrative."

Holy fuck . . .
127   GNL   2024 Jun 12, 5:46pm  

stereotomy says

I found out recently that in NYS, all doctors received a letter from the state back in 2020/2021 threatening them with firing, loss of their medical licenses, and possible prosecution if they said or did anything contrary to "the narrative."

Holy fuck . . .

(N)ew (Y)ork (S)chools?
128   HeadSet   2024 Jun 12, 6:38pm  

GNL says

(N)ew (Y)ork (S)chools?

New York State.
129   GNL   2024 Jun 12, 8:16pm  

That's embarrissing enough to make me want to delete my comment but, I'll leave it.
130   Patrick   2024 Aug 11, 3:49pm  

https://nicholascreed.substack.com/p/true-crime-up-close-and-personal


When May visited her dying grandfather, Taweesilp, in a special Bangkok hospital ward, it was filled with terminally ill and hospice patients.

In rooms equipped with two-way microphones, dying patients and their families communicated through Plexiglas. The nurses begrudgingly permitted the family members of patients to see their loved ones and share final words of comfort in this intensely personal yet depersonalized fashion.

The cycle of life and death is inevitable for all who walk this earth. Yet never before has it been managed with such stone-cold military precision, devoid of empathy and compassion.

As May scanned the ward, she noticed a young boy no more than 6 years old weeping uncontrollably, his arms outstretched flailing around against the prison partition Plexiglas safety screen.

The boy was calling out to this sickly mother. Silently screaming and yearning to hold her offspring, she could only gesture and raise a weak smile behind bloodshot tear-streamed eyes, choking out whatever words of reassurance and comfort she could muster up through the microphone. The prison-guard nurse facilitated their communication.

Choking back tears herself from witnessing this firsthand, May realized that her own goodbyes to her Grandfather, along with her other immediate family members, would mirror that of the little boy and his mother.

The nurses took the details and identification from May and her family, then casually enquired for affirmation that they were all fully vaccinated. Upon being told that May was in fact vaccine-free, she was denied access to enter the two-way visitation room to say farewell to her grandfather. ...

In the abstract, the lockdowns are inhumane on their face. But up close and personal, when a young father-of-three's life hangs in the balance – the inhumanity becomes unforgivable.



"DJ Ferguson, 31, is in dire need of a new heart, but Brigham and Women's Hospital in Boston took him off their list, said his father, David.

He said the Covid vaccine goes against his son's 'basic principles, he doesn't believe in it'.

The hospital said it was “following policy."

"Just following orders" didn't work for the culpable Nazis – no matter how low their rank – in the Nuremberg trials. Now is the time for Nuremberg Part Deux – no quarter, no leniency:

"Violating the Nuremberg Code on a mass scale against a captive civilian population is a war crime."


Hangings for these crimes against humanity are absolutely necessary, starting with Fauci.
131   Patrick   2024 Aug 15, 11:36am  

https://blissandblisters.substack.com/p/hospital-murders


Hospital Murders

Don't Leave Anyone You Love Alone in a Hospital...

This is a Doctor explaining what happens when you leave a patient in a hospital with no advocate or supervision. Short version: they can legally kill them. ...

A hospital in Las Vegas murdered my brother with remdesivir and a cocktail of sedatives and a ventilator. They administered these things against his family’s expressed wishes. It’s been almost 3 years since it happened. (He died August 20, 2021.) They also gave us attitude because he was not vaccinated and neither are we.

Besides all that, they withheld water and nutrition and refused to give him Ivermectin or vitamin therapy or monoclonal antibodies, all of which we asked for. They also sedated him harder when he woke up and tried to fight off the ventilator. It’s all in their hospital notes, of which I have more than 3,000 pages.

Funny, but they put in the notes about how upset they were that his family was fighting for his life, calling us “difficult” for questioning their malpractice and insisting on visiting him. No patient advocacy allowed here! We are the wardens of this jail hospital.

It was nothing if not abject cruelty and murder. And it’s the story of millions during the great Covid hoax. I could say so much more about this!

But what the Hell! Hospitals were incentivized to murder their Covid patients, who were housed in separate areas of the hospitals and many times those sections were staffed by FEMA nurses and doctors, not the regular hospital staff. Why? This was the case at the hospital where my brother died. And I doubt we will ever get answers.

The “patient coordinator” had this to say after they made sure he would never wake up (by administering remdesivir and a coctail of sedatives and a ventilator) and wanted us to pull the plug. “You say he’s a great man. So Heaven will welcome him and you should let him go.”

Of course this was after their “standard of care” protocols were documented so they could get their payoffs incentive payments. Time to free up a bed for their next victim.

We did not pull the plug. His blood is on their hands, not ours.

These hospital murders were a big part of the world wide Covid hoax Plandemic PsyOp .

Unfortunately, I don’t think it’s just during Covid. I think it’s dangerous to leave anyone who can’t fend for themself in one of these institutions. They don’t seem to be really set up for healing. Treatment yes, but not healing. ...

For just one example, my Mother was in a coma so out of curiosity while I was visiting her, I started reading her chart and noting all the drugs they were giving her. To my surprise I saw that they were giving her massive doses of Xanax. She was extremely sensitive to Xanax so I knew immediately this was why she was in a coma and phoned her primary doctor.

Sure enough, after withdrawing the Xanax, she woke up the next day. Imagine what would have happened if I had not read that chart! I’m sure it happens every day. They call it medical error. It’s more like medical neglect and malpractice.

So my advice is to have a medical advocate for yourself if you ever need to be hospitalized. And don’t let your loved one be left alone at their mercy! And read their chart. Note all the drugs. Take action if necessary. You could save their life.

As a precaution, if you don’t want to be injected with vaccines, be sure you don’t sign the form that says they can give you biologics. They love to hide their nefarious deeds under latin names.

And remember: There are no “side” effects. All effects are effects. Dose accordingly...


Same thing happened to my mother in a nursing home. She was in a coma and I was told she was going to die, but when I made them reduce the morphine dose, she woke up and lived another month or two.
133   beershrine   2024 Aug 18, 3:42pm  

Doctors are in the protected class category. Use the emergency room if you have to otherwise stay the hell far away from that system. Give them as little money as possible as it's the worlds largest inefficient industry.
135   Patrick   2024 Aug 22, 1:10pm  

https://tobyrogers.substack.com/p/the-1980-bayh-dole-act-the-1986-ncvia


What have we learned about American science and medicine over the last several years?

1. American science does not do much actual science. They do marketing, regulatory capture, and mass poisonings but not much actual “science” as that word is usually understood.

2. American medicine creates sickness rather than healing. I know, I know, #notalldoctors. But the profession is deeply sick. #physicianhealthyself

3. American science and medicine abuse their unique epistemic position to increase their own power and wealth at the expense of the well-being of humanity.

4. The proper way to understand American science and medicine today is to see them as criminal cartels. They aren’t making mistakes, these aren’t innocent misunderstandings, the white coat class is engaged in organized crime. Every time you step into a doctor’s office, clinic, or hospital you are likely dealing with an agent of a criminal syndicate.

5. American science and medicine have merged with the state, Big Finance, the pharmaceutical industry, the military, and the intelligence agencies to create a new form of fascism.

6. For decades the business model of American science and medicine was to take vulnerable people (the sick and injured, infants, pregnant women, and seniors) and make them dependent on the medical industrial complex for life via toxic pills, injections, implants, surgeries, and therapies. Apparently there were still too many healthy people remaining (‘money left on the table’). So American science and medicine now create and release weaponized viruses together with billions of dollars in propaganda to generate fear that drives people into cattle chutes of toxic treatments and deadly vaccines.

7. The CDC Child and Adolescent Vaccine Schedule, the CDC Adult Vaccine Schedule, and the Covid response are acts of genocide.

8. From everything we can see, American science and medicine are incapable of reforming themselves.

9. American science and medicine as currently constituted pose an existential threat to the future of the United States, the world, and humanity.

10. Big Food, the pesticide industry, the mobile phone industry, other polluters, and bad personal decisions also contribute to making people sick. All of the industries that I named are owned by the same wealth management funds that are investing our own retirement money into our profitable enslavement and genocide.

We all wish that this wasn’t true. But we can either stare reality in the face and do something about it or perish as a result of normalcy bias.
136   GNL   2024 Aug 22, 8:20pm  

beershrine says

Doctors are in the protected class category. Use the emergency room if you have to otherwise stay the hell far away from that system. Give them as little money as possible as it's the worlds largest inefficient industry.

This is my plan for the rest of my life.
139   stereotomy   2024 Sep 23, 2:25pm  

"Proper hamburgers" = 100% grass fed beef. That shit does wonders. It is among the few foods that provide 100% nutrition to anyone who eats thereof.

Fuck that feedlot grain-finished shit.
141   Patrick   2024 Oct 17, 9:03am  

https://brownstone.org/articles/prostate-cancer-over-testing-and-over-treatment/


The excessive medical response to the Covid pandemic made one thing abundantly clear: Medical consumers really ought to do their own research into the health issues that impact them. Furthermore, it is no longer enough simply to seek out a “second opinion” or even a “third opinion” from doctors. They may well all be misinformed or biased. Furthermore, this problem appears to predate the Covid phenomenon.

A striking example of that can be found in the recent history of prostate cancer testing and treatment, which, for personal reasons, has become a subject of interest to me. In many ways, it strongly resembles the Covid calamity, where misuse of the PCR test resulted in harming the supposedly Covid-infected with destructive treatments. ...

Mandatory yearly PSA testing at many institutions opened up a gold mine for urologists, who were able to perform lucrative biopsies and prostatectomies on patients who had PSA test numbers above a certain level. However, Ablin has insisted that “routine PSA screening does far more harm to men than good.” Moreover, he maintains that the medical people involved in prostate screening and treatment represent “a self-perpetuating industry that has maimed millions of American men.”

Even during approval hearings for the PSA test, the FDA was well aware of the problems and dangers. For one thing, the test has a 78% false positive rate. An elevated PSA level can be caused by various factors besides cancer, so it is not really a test for prostate cancer. Moreover, a PSA test score can spur frightened men into getting unnecessary biopsies and harmful surgical procedures. ...

Nevertheless, the PSA test became celebrated as the route to salvation from prostate cancer. The Postal Service even circulated a stamp promoting yearly PSA tests in 1999. Quite a few people became wealthy and well-known at the Hybritech company, thanks to the Tandem-R PSA test, their most lucrative product.

In those days, the corrupting influence of the pharmaceutical companies on the medical device and drug approval process was already apparent. In an editorial for the Journal of the American Medical Association (quoted in Albin and Piana’s book), Dr. Marcia Angell wrote, “The pharmaceutical industry has gained unprecedented control over the evaluation of its products…there’s mounting evidence that they skew the research they sponsor to make their drugs look better and safer.” She also authored the book The Truth About the Drug Companies: How They Deceive Us and What to Do About It.

A cancer diagnosis often causes great anxiety, but in actuality, prostate cancer develops very slowly compared to other cancers and does not often pose an imminent threat to life. A chart featured in Scholz and Blum’s book compares the average length of life of people whose cancer returns after surgery. In the case of colon cancer, they live on average two more years, but prostate cancer patients live another 18.5 years.

In the overwhelming majority of cases, prostate cancer patients do not die from it but rather from something else, whether they are treated for it or not. In a 2023 article about this issue titled “To Treat or Not to Treat,” the author reports the results of a 15-year study of prostate cancer patients in the New England Journal of Medicine. Only 3% of the men in the study died of prostate cancer, and getting radiation or surgery for it did not seem to offer much statistical benefit over “active surveillance.”

Dr. Scholz confirms this, writing that “studies indicate that these treatments [radiation and surgery] reduce mortality in men with Low and Intermediate-Risk disease by only 1% to 2% and by less than 10% in men with High-Risk disease.” ...

Weighing against prostate surgery are various risks, including death and long-term impairment, since it is a very difficult procedure, even with newer robotic technology. According to Dr. Scholz, about 1 in 600 prostate surgeries result in the death of the patient. Much higher percentages suffer from incontinence (15% to 20%) and impotence after surgery. The psychological impact of these side effects is not a minor problem for many men.

In light of the significant risks and little proven benefit of treatment, Dr. Scholz censures “the urology world’s persistent overtreatment mindset.” Clearly, excessive PSA screening led to inflicting unnecessary suffering on many men. More recently, the Covid phenomenon has been an even more dramatic case of medical overkill.

« First        Comments 123 - 143 of 143        Search these comments

Please register to comment:

api   best comments   contact   latest images   memes   one year ago   random   suggestions   gaiste