The Medical Freedom Channel

I’m still finding filling this space weekly a challenge. So I’ll continue my new plan, those Editor’s Notes I keep trying to shoehorn into a few words in each daily posting. A bit less brief, and it keeps this space moving along; a win-win situation.

THURSDAY:

News

1. Two more girls die after Gardasil - Natural News

One more case of trying to turn a questionable “remedy” for a disease some will never even encounter … into a childhood “inoculation” that is turning out to have almost as many side effects and dangers as the rare disease it claims to prevent! Anyone else surprised?

http://www.naturalnews.com/023419.html

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2. Obesity: Higher bills, despite shortened lives - USA TODAY

One more in the DUH category? If you let your body go to hell, it costs more to keep it functioning … even if you only get to function for a little while, the last days are ka-ching!

http://tinyurl.com/5mkgj2

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1. The overmedicating of America
Health News Digest - Allan Sosin, M.D.

This is almost redundant in this space, but great to see in HND, a fairly mainstream health site most of the time … The key part is the opening:

“Americans take so many drugs that 100,000 of us die every year because of those drugs. It is not illness that causes those 100,000 deaths, but the damaging effects of drugs taken for illness. Beyond these deaths there are millions of adverse drug reactions every year, resulting in hospitalizations, lost days from work, lost income, and sometimes chronic disability. … Higher doses of drugs, and combinations of drugs, increase the risks.”

http://tinyurl.com/68ew8g

2. Hay belly nation: The FDA & the o-word
CounterPunch - Deborah Rich

That is “o” for “organic” foods, of course. And the continued foot-dragging by the FDA & the DOA (and other Big Pharma & Big Food servants) in admitting that at least some of these foodstuffs not created in laboratories and factory farms ARE actually both better for you AND natural healers of many ailments we have been conditioned to think only respond to pills!

http://www.counterpunch.org/rich06112008.html

3. Social anxiety … or just shyness?
Boston Globe - Christopher Lane

Christopher Lane, as the tagline notes, is “a professor of English at Northwestern University [and] author of Shyness: How Normal Behavior Became a Sickness.” So you mean to say this SAD “ailment” (pun intended) is metastatizing all over the place … just like ADHD, PTSD and similar recently spawned “industries”? Na-a-ah, you must be delusional, and we’ve got a pill for that!

http://tinyurl.com/66zw4z

4. Drug addiction is easy to cure
News With Views - Dr. James Howenstine, MD.

“When a health condition persists despite the availability of a simple safe solution for the condition, one needs to be suspicious that powerful entrenched interests are at work preserving their turf. This seems to be the situation with drug addiction …”

This should be common knowledge … that it is not tells you how many people owe their livelihood to “helping addicts cope” — instead of supporting them in either curing or maintaining their level of “addiction” … Having been “addicted” (according to commonly held current definitions) at various times in my life to … lessee: tobacco, alcohol, cannabis, cocaine, sugar, caffeine, sex (that’s good for starters) … I know whereof I speak. (Some of those things I no longer touch; others are occasional indulgences … addiction has not been an issue for years.)

And now we find out orange juice, or its main citrus component, is the secret? Sheesh!

http://www.newswithviews.com/Howenstine/james66.htm

WEDNESDAY:

News:

1. Working out may help prevent substance abuse - MSNBC

Well, cool! Yet another good reason to promote physical fitness!

http://www.msnbc.msn.com/id/25063203/

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2. Anti-psychotic drugs “useless” for learning-disabled - Natural News

And another strike against the Ritalin industry? About time!

http://www.naturalnews.com/023407.html

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3. Report: Health insurance falling short - Christian Science Monitor

This is yet another “unbiased”report from Commonwealth Fund, previously responsible for distorting “uninsured” figures, as well as worldwide healthcare rankings of nations (based almost entirely on how much socialism they feature!). Meanwhile (as the lead commentary in today’s issue notes), their “stats” this time are just as horribly skewed, and the MSM has slurped up their “findings” as the plain truth, and one more point for the “universal, single-payer” drones. Bleh!

http://www.csmonitor.com/2008/0611/p01s16-usgn.html

===== COMMENTARY

1. Commonwealth Fund’s “Underinsured”: Lifting the carpet
Pacific Research Institute - John R. Graham

As so clearly laid out in this piece, “the scholars at the Commonwealth Fund have scared the bejayzus out of the mainstream media with their latest reckoning that over 25 million Americans are ‘underinsured.’” PRI notes the use of the same discredited tabulations and claims, while revealing the CF’s definition of “underinsured” with the usual diffusion of truth. The only sad part is how widespread this crap gets, and how many mediaites (along with how many politicians) will cite this nonsense throughout the “healthcare debates” …

http://tinyurl.com/4taj6g

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2. The big picture behind abortion (part 1 of 2)
Fox News - John R. Lott, Jr.

This one’s posted mostly to raise the question I posed a couple days ago, regarding the segment of the anti-abortion (dammit, I’M pro-life … as well as pro-choice for the vast majority of situations!) crowd that seems more concerned with preventing CONTRACEPTION than with “protecting the unborn” (including apparently the zygote, embryo and other pre-cognitive stages of that organism), let alone challenging physical harm and pain being inflicted on the late-term entity (that may very well possess at least the potential for cognition, and thus be deserving of “human rights”?)

In addition, however, there are a few comments later on in the piece worthy of note (click the link for the whole thing to see it in context). Lott draws parallels between several other social trends, each of which has increased since Roe v. Wade:

“• A sharp increase in pre-marital sex. • A sharp rise in out-of-wedlock births. • A drop in the number of children placed for adoption. • A decline in marriages that occur after the woman is pregnant.”

Lott declares these trends to be linked to legalized abortion, rather than admitting how other factors in society might be just as causative. He does admit that abortions were already “legal” under some conditions, even in states where public opinion polls have always opposed the procedure, and that even with an overturn of Roe he expects a zone of legality to be maintained. He attributes the social trends cited as “unintended consequences” of the SCOTUS decision.

http://www.foxnews.com/story/0,2933,365322,00.html

3. Tips for exercising safely in the heat
Health News Digest - National Athletic Trainers’ Association

In light of the above news-item about working out and addictions, this seems a perfect match — a caveat about overdoing it, especially in the h0t summer sun!

http://www.healthnewsdigest.com/news/Exercise_480/Tips_for_Exercising_Safely_in_the_Heat.shtml

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4. Nurses say single-payer universal care is best solution
Tennessean - Malindaa Markowitz, R.N. & Beth Perkins, R.N.

Perhaps true for these nurses; probably not for all who work that thankless job! The tendency to run right to the easy answers (which have their own, ummm, “unintended” consequences) must be squelched and squashed like a bug. Fixing this healthcare mess will not be a matter of finding a Sugar Daddy (government) to make it better (as any nurse who works at the VA or any other federal “healing” fiasco knows too well?); it’s going to take some common sense and a change of parameters on what “health costs” really means.

http://tinyurl.com/4l4mzf

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TUESDAY: No postings

MONDAY News:

1. Bird flu search finds none yet coming to N. America - Reuters

Fascinating! So after all the hype (and all the profits for Rummy’s former employer, makers of that Scamiflu serum that made folks sick mostly), we are finding out that the bug won’t spread without direct contact with the birds themselves … and relatively few birds are even susceptible to it even as carriers … Meanwhile, we get another panic for the pols to exploit, and another layer of public fear to overcome. Gee thanks!

http://www.reuters.com/article/healthNews/idUSN0533842720080606

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2. How to treat chronic pain? Jury still out - Health News Digest

And the overprescribing of “pain meds” has led to … less effective pain-relief, a denigration of alternate healing paths … and another excuse for the DEA to stick its nose into doctor/patient relationships. What fun!

http://tinyurl.com/6jprym

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Commentaries:

1. Goodman on drugs
John Goodman’s Health Blog - John Goodman

The “two causes” Goodman attributes all these ills to are: (a) “the fundamental way we pay for drugs and/or …” (b) “the way we pay doctors. That is, we buy drugs in a way that is different from the way we buy other products and we compensate physicians in ways that are different from the way we pay for other professional services. Those differences create problems in the medical marketplace that do not arise in other markets.”

I would take it one step further: both of these “causes” are actually the result of treating “healthcare” as a mere commoditie on the market (and then separating them from all actual “market forces” so that the external pressures of competition and price flexibility are overwhelmed by public policy “controls” — instead of promoting prevention and self-responsibility, so that “being insured” becomes less imp9rtant than “staying well” …

the link: http://www.john-goodman-blog.com/goodman-on-drugs/
the chapter: http://www.ncpa.org/pub/special/20051205-special.html

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2. The fight to stop contraception
Capitol Times [WI] - Cristina Page

This is perhaps the most disturbing aspect of the “right to life” movement — the portions of it that seem far more concerned with linking sexuality to procreation, and denigrating the pleasure-factor of shared intimacy. The result of such policy is to all reduce women to the status of breed-cattle, and to make sex a dirty thing only valued as a means of carrying on the species.

Every time these tight-sphinctered troglodytes raise their disgusting heads, they make the very real concerns of their alleged allies against legal abortion look far more pathetic than they really are. As has been noted in this space and elsewhere many times, if there was even a tenth as much research and activist energy going toward perfecting a range of safe, fully effective, convenient and (in cases of intervention in a person’s body) easily and surely reversible procedures, to assure that conception is indeed a CHOICE, not an accidental by-product of shared emotional/spiritual pleasure … as there has been and continues to be around picketing clinics and blocking everything from Plan B to (now, apparently) pre-coition contraception …

Let’s let these bozos hang themselves, and close this one with a quote from one of those anti-contraception loony groups (cited in the article as “the nation’s largest pro-life educational organization”): “The American Life League denies the moral acceptability of artificial birth control and encourages each individual to trust in God, to surrender to his will, and to be predisposed to welcoming children.”

http://www.madison.com/tct/opinion/column/290012

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3. One more look at thimerosal
Health News Digest - Michael D. Shaw

I will give this fellow some leeway, since he is quite good at doing the research before putting fingertips to keyboard to record his impressions. My own take is that thimerosal is still a potentially harmful substance, and that its removal from vaccine inoculations is a good thing.

http://tinyurl.com/584akl

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4. Review: The People’s Guide to Health, Happiness & Longevity
Natural News - Mike Adams

This just looks like a pretty cool book; I may have to get a copy and review it myself …

http://www.naturalnews.com/023376.html

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5. Could the probiotic bacteria in yogurt actually be dangerous?
Boston Globe - Judy Foreman

The question is raised, and the fear is mostly diffused. Foreman does note some concerns about some of the HSO (”homeostatic soil orgsanism”) derived probiotics, but these are not the same as the ones found in yogurt. As noted in a previous editorial, this editor once had some serious problems developing in his digestive system, and was about to cop to “having GERD” and needing prescription drugs (or at very least a regimen of daily Prilosec?) to combat it. However, after a combination of taking a daily probiotic capsule for a time, and then just including a little more yogurt in my diet (on my morning cereal instead of milk, yummy!), I managed to drop the pH in my mouth and beyond well into the basic end of the spectrum. I have had only an occasional stomach upset since then, and even those could be attributed to a spicy food and beer dinner too late in the evening, without sufficient water and other food to balance it!

http://tinyurl.com/6o6ner

All for today …