Recreational drugs FAR less likely to kill than prescribed drugs!

[dalebert]

Yeah, I don't know if Rasputin can be objective about health care. Didn't he get poisoned and stabbed and a bunch of other shit and wouldn't die?

[kola]

mercola???

that quack???

oh cmon people ..

wheres the tinfoil?

wheres the research???

JAMA? thats flawed!!

Show me another piece!!

oh wait..

is it innocent before proven guilty?

or guilty before proven innocent

and who decides what is "accepted"?

Gee I am confused...

clarification is needed and requested as I am trying to follow "The Jraxi Method"

Kola

[mackler]

I don't expect to change your opinion.  But I know what I know.  I know challenging others' religious beliefs will win me scorn and ridicule from the true believers, but if I can save one reader of this thread from becoming a victim of the disease merchants, it will be worth it to me.  I'm not here to win a popularity contest.  I'm here to save someone from what I went through and what you're still going through.

I had my own multi-decade experience with the drug&surgery peddlers.  They gave me the exact same line:

1) You're defective
2) There is no cure
3) But if you take our drugs for the rest of your life you can live with it.

It's the same story they give all their victims.  It's how they run their business.  This holy medicine can't even cure the common cold, yet they'll show you a machine with numbers on it to prove they can see into the future.

As soon as I stopped buying into their BS I started to get healthy, and now i live drug free, which according to every medical "experts" I ever saw was an impossibility.

Let me ask you this: what caused your supposed defective condition?  Defective genes would have been weeded out of your genepool years ago.   So what was the cause?

And to answer your question: if I got into a terrible car accident, yes I would want some doctors to sew me back together.  That's about the only instance where I would volunteer for surgery, and I would try to get it from an osteopath rather than an allopath.  In my experience they are less corrupt that MDs.

Other than that, you are correct.   Herbs, accupuncture, homeopathy, nutrition, meditation.  I would try whatever might work.  But letting some sicko cut my head open?  No thanks.

Those drugs you're taking will catch up with you.  They have side effects.  Your expert will deny any connection but you can only poison yourself for so long.

I was born with severe congenital heart defects, with deformities to the structure of my heart valves and my descending aorta that rendered them very inefficient. This is not about fast food and exercise, in fact vigorous exercise was dangerous and could have resulted in a brain aneurysm due to the increased BP in my head, a result of deformities to my aorta. I started having surgeries at 19, and fortunately, my heart's strength and my general health actually contributed to my quick recovery. But, by the time of my last surgery, I had an enlarged heart over 33% larger than it should have been, with an aorta that was wide open in either direction. I DO know that if I had not had the surgery, I would be dead. My heart was barely functioning, and it's efficiency was near zero. I could not walk up a flight of stairs without total exhaustion, heavy breathing and seeing stars. Sure, I could have avoided them, if dying at 30 seems like an appropriate result. You have NO FUCKING IDEA what I went through, yet you think you can diagnose me from over there? You're ridiculous! I can look at past case histories and see that without surgery, the average life-span for people with my conditions who never have surgery is 30 years. My heart has returned to normal size and function since the surgery, anyone can see it on a ultrasound monitor. I also know that before I started taking the blood pressure meds I'm on, my BP was dangerously high, and threatened the integrity of the repairs made to my heart valves and my descending aorta. It's objective fact, not some feeling that I get from the reassurance they offer me. I can look at the numbers on the monitor. After I started taking them, my BP was down, I felt better and my new heart valves functioned perfectly. Didn't take an expert to figure that out. Do you imagine that some mix of plants would serve me better? Do you realize that's what pharmaceuticals are? Chemicals is chemicals, no matter where they come from. Medicine and surgery saved my life, and I hope that you never wind up facing the kind of issues I had to, and I really, really hope that your kids, should you have any, don't either, since they'd wind up victimized by your ideology. If you get in a terrible car accident or develop a brain tumor, what are you going to do? Walk it off? Take an herbal pill? Shit all over modern medicine all you want, but when you need it to save your life, your tune will change, or you'll just die. Either way, you'll be proven wrong. You're absurd. And the first person on my ignore list on this forum.

[NJLiberty]

Dylboz your case is a different story as far as I can see and I am not going to speak to that.

I think what Mackler is trying to get at, and correct me if I am wrong Mackler, is that the pharmaceutical companies generally create drugs that deal with symptoms, and do not create drugs that cure the actual problem. The doctors receive all manner of compensation for prescribing a particular drug over another from the drug companies, and I suspect from the insurance companies as well. It is a very corrupt system that can only feed itself by keeping its patients coming back for more.

When I was working at the pharmaceutical company I used to talk to the research scientists from time to time because I was curious about what they were working on. Everything they described to me was a maintenance type drug. I asked several of them if they ever worked on things that cured the actual disease and their opinion was that most diseases could have no cure, all you could do was treat the symptoms. They were pretty honest folks so I have no reason to think that they didn't believe what they were saying.

My father for instance takes a long list of drugs every day that he supposedly has to take to stay on the green side of the grass. He takes pills to correct his cholesterol, his blood pressure, thin his blood, eliminate "excess" water from his system, etc. Yet every time I go with him to the doctors office his stats are normal. I have asked my father and his doctor why they don't try eliminating these drugs, even temporarily to see what his body is actually doing, but, no, no, no, we can't do that, he might die if we take him off these pills. And thus my father is scared into continuing these medications. And there are millions like my father.

I on the other hand have been to the doctor once in the last 20 years, and that was because I had developed a pneumonia in my right lung and it wasn't going away by other means. My daughter, who is six years old, spent the first month of her life in an ICU because she was born prematurely and couldn't breathe on her own. Aside from a single check up after she came home to make sure everything was now fine, she hasn't been to the doctors since. She hasn't been immunized, hasn't had anything more severe than a common cold, and hopefully will not in the future. My nieces and nephews, just as my sisters and I when we were kids, were immunized, have been to the doctor's office frequently, have ingested God knows how many drugs and antibiotics, and always seem to be sick every time I talk to them. I can't speak for everyone obviously, but I haven't been sick aside from colds since I stopped going to the doctor's office.

I am not willing to repudiate the entire medical profession. I think it serves a purpose in extreme cases, but I think the way it is used by most patients is absurd. I think if more people took care of themselves, and took care of the common everyday diseases themselves, there would be much less incentive for abuse in the system.

George

[dalebert]

I have anecdotal experience that goes both way with doctors. I've had doctors that seemed to just want to treat me continuously and milk my insurance. I've had doctors that showed incredible incompetence followed by other doctors catching the mistake and addressing my problem in one visit. I remember going to my general physician because I had to pee every 15 mins and when the test came back that I didn't have a bladder infection, he prescribed me something to tre 8)at the symptoms that I would presumably have to take forever. I stopped ejaculating. I mean, I could have sex and have an orgasm, but then ... nothing. I went to a urologist a week or two later and his eyes got really big and he said "Stop taking that RIGHT NOW! That's for old men with chronically enlarged prostates." Then he did an examination that took less than five minutes, said my bladder wasn't infected but was inflamed. He prescribed pills to take for two weeks and said avoid caffeine and alcohol during that time. He also advised that taking an antihistamine orally every day might bring the problem back and suggested I switch to something topical with less body-wide side effects like a nasal spray. I was so used to peeing constantly and after his instructions cured (not treated) the problem, I felt like I had some kind of super bladder. I was going half the day without needing to pee. Was so wonderful. He never suggested a follow-up unless it didn't work.

Another thing I asked him about during the same visit turned out to not be a big deal but led to him testing my sperm count to be on the safe side. Turns out it's like four or five times the average healthy count, which probably means it's a good thing I've never have casual unprotected sex with a woman. He joked that I shouldn't even take my pants off in the same room with a woman unless I want to be a father. 

Yes, once again, T.M.I. are my middle initials.

[John Edward Mercier]

Modern insurance systems have different economic models. HMOs pay doctors a monthly stipend by the number of patients under their care. So a doctor with hundreds of healthy patients they never see, can do better than a doctor with a few dozen that need continuous attention.
The problem comes in the patient-doctor relationship where a patient presumes that some form of medical treatment is necessary to achieve a solution.

[dalebert]

I hate HMOs so wasn't under one at the time. I hated going to this particular doctor because he was so far away but specialized in something I wanted to addressed. Unfortunately, he obsessed over my asthma and kept wanting to treat that and see me regularly for it, and not very well either if you ask me. I ultimately just gave up on seeing him and quite taking the medicine he prescribed against the advisement of some friends who said I mustn't do that. I felt like it was making me worse.

[John Edward Mercier]

To be fair... problem with the specific doctor.
Some doctor's perceive their patients as wards under their care, rather than customers of their service.
It takes a while for them to accept the newer formats.

[Raineyrocks]

Drugs are bad unless they come from Big Pharma.
I always loved the "don't do drugs" posters in school yet all kinds of kids were on Riddilin. (Spelling?)

  If you ever go to a mental health center there are signs and pamphlets everywhere about how drugs are bad for you yet my sister sat in at a meeting with the psychiatrists there and they were discussing there case loads and 9 our of 10 involved people's kids being medicated with Ritalin, anti-psychosis drugs, anti depression drugs.  What irony, right before people's faces!

[Raineyrocks]

Dylboz your case is a different story as far as I can see and I am not going to speak to that.

I think what Mackler is trying to get at, and correct me if I am wrong Mackler, is that the pharmaceutical companies generally create drugs that deal with symptoms, and do not create drugs that cure the actual problem. The doctors receive all manner of compensation for prescribing a particular drug over another from the drug companies, and I suspect from the insurance companies as well. It is a very corrupt system that can only feed itself by keeping its patients coming back for more.

When I was working at the pharmaceutical company I used to talk to the research scientists from time to time because I was curious about what they were working on. Everything they described to me was a maintenance type drug. I asked several of them if they ever worked on things that cured the actual disease and their opinion was that most diseases could have no cure, all you could do was treat the symptoms. They were pretty honest folks so I have no reason to think that they didn't believe what they were saying.

My father for instance takes a long list of drugs every day that he supposedly has to take to stay on the green side of the grass. He takes pills to correct his cholesterol, his blood pressure, thin his blood, eliminate "excess" water from his system, etc. Yet every time I go with him to the doctors office his stats are normal. I have asked my father and his doctor why they don't try eliminating these drugs, even temporarily to see what his body is actually doing, but, no, no, no, we can't do that, he might die if we take him off these pills. And thus my father is scared into continuing these medications. And there are millions like my father.

I on the other hand have been to the doctor once in the last 20 years, and that was because I had developed a pneumonia in my right lung and it wasn't going away by other means. My daughter, who is six years old, spent the first month of her life in an ICU because she was born prematurely and couldn't breathe on her own. Aside from a single check up after she came home to make sure everything was now fine, she hasn't been to the doctors since. She hasn't been immunized, hasn't had anything more severe than a common cold, and hopefully will not in the future. My nieces and nephews, just as my sisters and I when we were kids, were immunized, have been to the doctor's office frequently, have ingested God knows how many drugs and antibiotics, and always seem to be sick every time I talk to them. I can't speak for everyone obviously, but I haven't been sick aside from colds since I stopped going to the doctor's office.

I am not willing to repudiate the entire medical profession. I think it serves a purpose in extreme cases, but I think the way it is used by most patients is absurd. I think if more people took care of themselves, and took care of the common everyday diseases themselves, there would be much less incentive for abuse in the system.

George

So far I've read about 4 or 5 of your posts and I feel like telling you that I think you are a very fair, respectful, open minded person!

[Free libertarian]

 The drug we should be concerned about is power, it's killed the most people. It's also the most addictive and abused.

   

[dalebert]

Let me ask you this: what caused your supposed defective condition?  Defective genes would have been weeded out of your genepool years ago.   So what was the cause?

There are quite a lot of congenital effects that haven't been weeded out like hemophilia. There are recessive traits that can survive and come together and such like that. Without being a geneticist, I know that these things exist. It's quite ridiculous to claim they don't. In time they might get weeded out or they may not due to effective treatments.

[Dylboz]

Let me ask you this: what caused your supposed defective condition?  Defective genes would have been weeded out of your genepool years ago.   So what was the cause?

You are an idiot. That really pissed me off. Read something about genetics. You seem interested in real cures, well, education is the cure for ignorance. It's unbelievable that you have such a militant opinion about something you are utterly ignorant of. The cause is GENETIC. Even if it was because my mom smoked crack (which, I assure you, she did not) that induced a mutation, would it make the situation any less real, any less serious, would it negate the need for surgical intervention to correct? NO.

My "supposed" defective condition is something you could clearly see in ultrasound and MRI, malformed and incomplete aortic valve leaflets, two instead of the normal three, and my descending aorta looked like a tight hourglass, too much blood stayed in my head and arms, not enough got to my legs, hence I have skinny ostrich legs from 20 years of deficient blood flow below my torso, even though I'm 6'2" and 200 lbs. I had severe and debilitating migraines until my aorta was straightened and my leaky heart valve was replaced, now I almost NEVER get them, and when I do they are nowhere near the severity I used to experience. I was recently part of a study that helped define the relationship between circulatory abnormalities and migraine, leading to new treatments and diagnostic protocols that include cardiovascular examinations, and will likely lead to millions of new surgical CURES for the underlying physiological causes of migraine, not dependence on pain pills.

Recombinant DNA is a gamble every time, but it the way our species, and almost all life on earth, evolved to take advantage of mutation and selective pressure from the environment. It is not a perfect system of successive generational superiority, in fact, bad genes can enter the gene pool any time, via mutation. Recessive traits can be expressed even when they have not cropped up in a population for generations, due to the rarity of the recessive combination, sometime requiring multiple recessive couplings in order to garner the phenotypic expression of some unfortunate trait. Some recessive traits that are otherwise crippling actually confer advantage in certain situations, like sickle-cell anemia vis-a-vie malaria. When two recessive genes couple, this disease is life-threatening, but when only one is expressed, resistance to malaria is conferred without the negative health consequences. I would never have responded to you if Dalebert hadn't quoted you, but you are seriously in need of some Wiki time. Start with "genetics."

I'm an artist, but my brother in law is a pediatric oncologist who has worked with the human genome project at the highest levels, and he was educated at Duke and Ohio State Medical school. I can tell you all he is interested in is finding a cure for cancer in kids, he is currently working with the world leading expert in a specific but common type of childhood brain tumor, and has dedicated his life to figuring out a way to stop it, not treat it chronically with some expensive drug he can send my niece to Harvard on the profits from. His father was the head of pediatric cardiology at Ohio State, and also the doctor who gave me the life-saving diagnosis that changed my life, from across the table at dinner no less. My previous doctor was only half right, and had me on BP meds but hadn't recommended surgery yet. Do I think he was malicious, and under the sway of the pharmaceutical company that produced those pills? No. He was just out of his element, and that was because he was an adult cardiologist, experienced with cardiovascular disease, not congenital heart defects, and he was provided me by my stupid HMO, due to regulatory pressures resulting from legislation.

I was lucky to get the treatment I did, and I got it by being proactive and demanding care from my insurance company. My sister was an advocate for me too, and she is one of the leading OB/GYN's in Houston, she spent years fresh out of med school on fellowship treating low income, at risk young women in the city's worst neighborhoods, curing their common STD's and counseling them on preventative measures, birth control, condom use and how to identify obvious symptoms of infection in their partners, in hopes of avoiding the need for further treatment. Again, not pushing meds or trying to hook them on some kind of permanent treatment that costs a lot of money. They wouldn't even have it, since most of them didn't have insurance and the clinic was subsidized by charity and the government (yeah, I know, but at least it wasn't a half ton bomb being dropped on Iraqis or a police car out looking for pot smokers). Doctors, in my experience, are looking to either help people out, or they are seeking status and wealth. You have to look for the former and avoid the latter, and HMO's make it difficult by limiting your options and access, and that's because of state intervention at the behest of the insurance industry.

Lastly, I'll say that my heart surgeon, Dr. Teodori is fantastic. He is genuinely concerned about his patient's well being. In the past, surgeons I've dealt with have distanced themselves from their patients in order to handle the emotional trauma they risk in cutting someone up, so they left the patient interaction to their staff. Teodori was not the same, he actually called me and my family up several times before and after the surgery to check up on me and see how everyone was doing. He came to my bedside everyday of my ICU recovery, and once, he introduced me to this woman and her son from Africa, who his hospital (a private, charitable institution, known as Phoenix Children's, easily the coolest hospital I've ever seen, even for an adult, though aimed at little kids and their parents, it had a HUGE Lionel train setup!) had flown over because her son was suffering from congenital defects very similar tomine. I spoke to them through a translator and reassured them they were in excellent hands, and I thanked them for letting me speak to the boy. I felt good about that, and I would trust anyone, even my own children to that hospital, and Teodori in particular.

I am about to turn 32. I had my last operation, what is known as a Ross procedure, in 2004. Every day since 2006, when I turned 30, is bonus time for me, and I thank all the doctors, nurses and even the pharmaceutical researchers who discovered the various medicines that help maintain my continued good health for these years. This is the promise of capitalism, and the free market. This is what it can do for everyone, and it could be faster, cheaper, and include far more treatment options and natural remedies too (I'm not at all against that stuff, I have benefited greatly form chiropractic care and I am into herbal and nutritional therapies, I eat a lot of garlic and leafy greens for their cardiovascular benefits). The main hurdle is to get the current oppressive regulatory regime off the backs of the doctors who want to cure people, and to pry the reigns from the bureaucrats and corporate types who care only about the bottom line and not patient care. You can see little efforts and positive changes being made, with in-store LPN and Nurse Practitioner clinics in Walgreens and Wal-Mart, cash-for-service providers who keep costs down by rejecting the health insurance paradigm, and websites that offer extensive information on diagnosis and treatment of common ailments that can be treated at home with OTC medicine or lifestyle changes, and even online access to low cost pharmacies and natural remedies through electronic mail order. Now, more than ever, patients are empowered to take charge of and manage their own health, but they would be cutting off their nose to spite their face by rejecting all doctors. The idea is NOT to go to the doctor every time you feel ill, but to know when it is actually necessary, and do so only then. Using the ER as a primary care option is another factor in pushing up costs, and so is the way that generous health insurance encourages benefit abuse by hiding the costs from patients in the form of co-pays. Like any thing in the marketplace, price is a function of supply and demand, and intelligent usage will reduce demand helping keep prices down, while removing artificial limits on supply in the form of regulation can help meet demand, which will push prices down.

[Dylboz]

The drug we should be concerned about is power, it's killed the most people. It's also the most addictive and abused.

   

I owe you applause! I got all excited and accidentally smited you... oops! 

As for my post above... 

[Caleb]

you can correct your smite within the hour. You just applaud him. Since you can only do one karma action per hour, it will remove the smite you gave him and apply it as positive karma