Medicine

Future Doctors Rising Up For ‘Medicare For All’

September 26, 2015 Vanessa Van Doren, www.commondreams.org Resist! Medicare, Medicine, Public Health

By Vanessa Van Doren in Common Dreams - For most of us in medicine, helping people live healthy, happy lives is at the heart of why we chose this career. We expound upon this in application essays, talk about it during interviews, and start medical school with this “calling” fresh in our minds. Very early in our medical careers – on the wards and in the classroom – we learn that inequality, preventable illness, and death are an inherent part of our current private, for-profit-oriented health insurance system. We see patients receive preventable amputations due to untreated diabetes. We see people permanently disabled by stroke because they were unable to afford their medications. College funds emptied out to pay for $100,000-a-year cancer treatments. Families bankrupted and lives destroyed. We learn that, although the United States is one of the wealthiest countries on earth, we are also the only developed nation that does not provide health care to all of its citizens.

Obamacare? Wall St. Suddenly Scrambles To Buy Doctors

July 29, 2015 Wolf Ritcher, www.wolfstreet.com Educate! ACA, Capitalism, Insurance, Medicine, Obamacare, Public Health

By Wolf Ritcher in Wolf Street - For PE firms, the fracking boom was nirvana. An eternal-growth industry. A big part of the money they poured into the scrappy oil & gas companies is now going up in smoke. Other industries are mired in a no-growth or shrinking environment. Chaos keeps breaking out in the international markets, most recently over Greece and China. So, healthcare, which accounts for nearly one-fifth of US GDP, “is really the growth opportunity,” Tom Banning, CEO of the Texas Academy of Family Physicians, told The Texas Tribune: “The forces are aligned to force consolidation, and frankly, how those independent doctors are able to compete against well-heeled, deep-pocketed systems or networks is going to be a problem,” Banning said. “

100+ Doctors Tell Big Pharma To Not Make Cancer Drugs So Expensive

July 28, 2015 Tara Culp-Ressler, www.thinkprogress.org Educate! Cancer, Inequality, Medicine, Public Health

By Tara Culp-Ressler in Think Progress - The pressure is mounting on pharmaceutical companies to lower their prices for lifesaving drugs, as a group of more than 100 prominent oncologists is calling for grassroots solutions to the skyrocketing cost of cancer treatment. In an editorial published on Thursday in the journal Mayo Clinic Proceedings, 118 doctors from top hospitals around the country argue that up to 20 percent of cancer patients don’t follow their recommended treatment regimen because they’re being priced out of the drugs they need. The oncologists say this financial burden puts sick Americans in an untenable situation as they’re fighting for their lives. “It’s time for patients and their physicians to call for change,” Dr. Ayalew Tefferi, a doctor at the Mayo Clinic and the lead author of the paper, concluded.

Blood & Fog: The Military’s Germ Warfare Tests In SF

July 13, 2015 Rebecca Kreston, www.blogs.discovermagazine.com Educate! Criminal Justice, History, Medicine, Public Health

By Rebecca Kreston in Discover Magazine - Over a period of six days in September 1950, members of the US Navy sprayed clouds of Serratia from giant hoses aboard a Navy minesweeper drifting two miles along the San Francisco coastline, a bacterial fog quickly enveloped and disguised by the region’s own mist. By monitoring the air at 43 scattered sites throughout the region, the Navy found Serratia bacteria blown throughout San Francisco and extending to the adjacent communities of Albany, Berkeley, Daly City, Colma, Oakland, San Leandro, and Sausalito (3). In this regard, the experiment was a success: the San Francisco Bay was identified as a highly susceptible site for a germ warfare attack and a quantifiable range for the airborne dispersal of microbes was established.

US Torture Doctors Could Face Charges After Report Allegations

July 11, 2015 Spencer Ackerman, www.theguardian.com Resist! FBI, Medicine, Psychology, Torture, Wars and Militarism

By Spencer Ackerman in The Guardian - The largest association of psychologists in the United States is on the brink of a crisis, the Guardian has learned, after an independent review revealed that medical professionals lied and covered up their extensive involvement in post-9/11 torture. The revelation, puncturing years of denials, has already led to at least one leadership firing and creates the potential for loss of licenses and even prosecutions. For more than a decade, the American Psychological Association (APA) has maintained that a strict code of ethics prohibits its more than 130,000 members to aid in the torture of detainees while simultaneously permitting involvement in military and intelligence interrogations.

Ten One Medicare For All National Day Of Action

July 11, 2015 Vanessa Doren, www.student.pnhp.org Organize! Medicine, Public Health, Student Activism

By Vanessa Doren in Student PNHP - For most of us in medicine, helping people live healthy, happy lives is at the heart of why we chose this career. We expound upon this in application essays, talk about it during interviews, and start medical school with this “calling” fresh in our minds. Very early in our medical careers – on the wards and in the classroom – we learn that inequality, preventable illness, and death are an inherent part of our current private, for-profit-oriented health insurance system. We see patients receive preventable amputations due to untreated diabetes. We see people permanently disabled by stroke because they were unable to afford their medications. College funds emptied out to pay for $100,000-a-year cancer treatments. Families bankrupted and lives destroyed.

Amazon Tribe Creates 500-Page Traditional Medicine Encyclopedia

July 2, 2015 Jeremy Hance, www.news.mongabay.com Create! Brazil, Indigenous Peoples, Medicine, Peru

By Jeremy Hance in Mongabay News - The Matsés have only printed their encyclopedia in their native language to ensure that the medicinal knowledge is not stolen by corporations or researchers as has happened in the past. Instead, the encyclopedia is meant as a guide for training new, young shamans in the tradition and recording the living shamans' knowledge before they pass. "One of the most renowned elder Matsés healers died before his knowledge could be passed on so the time was now. Acaté and the Matsés leadership decided to prioritize the Encyclopedia before more of the elders were lost and their ancestral knowledge taken with them," said Herndon. Acaté has also started a program connecting the remaining Matsés shamans with young students.

Editor-In-Chief Of Renowned Medical Journal: 1/2 Of Literature Is False

May 25, 2015 Arjun Walia, www.globalresearch.ca Educate! health, Media, Medicine, Science

In the past few years more professionals have come forward to share a truth that, for many people, proves difficult to swallow. One such authority is Dr. Richard Horton, the current editor-in-chief of the Lancet – considered to be one of the most well respected peer-reviewed medical journals in the world. Dr. Horton recently published a statement declaring that a lot of published research is in fact unreliable at best, if not completely false. “The case against science is straightforward: much of the scientific literature, perhaps half, may simply be untrue. Afflicted by studies with small sample sizes, tiny effects, invalid exploratory analyses, and flagrant conflicts of interest, together with an obsession for pursuing fashionable trends of dubious importance, science has taken a turn towards darkness.”

An Effective Prescription For Our Failing Health-Care System

April 11, 2015 Samuel Metz, www.truth-out.org Educate! Health Care, Medicine, System Change

The Affordable Care Act is a sitting duck. Working with private insurance companies, hospital chains and Big Pharma, Congress superimposed arcane regulations on an already Byzantine system of financing health care. Dr. John Geyman cannot resist this target. His new book, How Obamacare is Unsustainable, confirms that the Affordable Care Act (ACA) is not the pathway to a better health-care system. It is one of the biggest impediments. The structure of this critique reflects Geyman's organized mind. The first of three parts reviews the unhappy history of American health-care reform. The second assesses our health-care landscape five years into the ACA. The last presents a solution: a national single-payer health plan.

Guatemalans Deliberately Infected With STDs Sue Johns Hopkins For $1bn

April 7, 2015 Oliver Laughland, www.theguardian.com Resist! Guatemala, Imperialism, Medicine, Murder, usa

Nearly 800 plaintiffs have launched a billion-dollar lawsuit against Johns Hopkins University over its alleged role in the deliberate infection of hundreds of vulnerable Guatemalans with sexually transmitted diseases, including syphilis and gonorrhoea, during a medical experiment programme in the 1940s and 1950s. The lawsuit, which also names the philanthropic Rockefeller Foundation, alleges that both institutions helped “design, support, encourage and finance” the experiments by employing scientists and physicians involved in the tests, which were designed to ascertain if penicillin could prevent the diseases.

How ACA Fuels Corporatization Of American Health Care

November 25, 2014 Philip Caper, M.D., www.pnhp.org Educate! Corporatism, Health Care, Medicine

A new Harvard study has found that Americans’ trust in the medical profession has dropped dramatically in recent years and lags behind that in many other wealthy countries. At the same time, doctors are becoming increasingly unhappy with our profession. In his new memoir, “ Doctored,” Dr. Sandeep Jauhar eloquently explains why: More and more doctors are coming to view our profession as just another job. We now have a situation where patients are losing confidence in their doctors, while doctors are losing confidence in our ability to do the right thing for our patients.

How The Soda Industry Is Influencing Medical Organizations

October 22, 2014 Richard Bruno and Kevin Burns, www.ucsusa.org Organize! Coca Cola, Corporatism, Medicine

With increasing scrutiny over the dire health consequences of sugar-sweetened beverages, soda manufacturers have turned to obscuring the science, confusing the consumer, and sponsoring medical organizations whose recommendations influence both providers and patients. Unfortunately these corporate partnerships are conflicts of interest that undermine the credibility of the organizations and stymie reform. Most notably, the American Academy of Family Physicians (AAFP) has had acorporate partnership with The Coca-Cola Company (TCCC) since 2009, which has resulted in educational materials and underwriting of their patient information website FamilyDoctor.org.

Doctors March For Climate Change: A Public Health Crisis

October 11, 2014 James Besante, www.commondreams.com Resist! Climate Change, Health Care, Medicine

Climate change does much more than exacerbate environmental health risks already familiar to clinicians—it plays a central role in the emergence and spread of infectious diseases, like malaria and most recently the Ebola virus. These outbreaks occur through many mechanisms, including shifts in the migration patterns of animals that carry disease. With changing environmental temperatures affecting ecosystems worldwide, and the encroachment of humans deeper into forests, with deforestation, mining, and conflict, it is a set up for more outbreaks. The JAMA article concludes with an appeal to healthcare providers and organized medicine to take their knowledge of the health effects of climate change to the public. This article does not represent ‘new science’ but 20 years of widely accepted facts that have already established humanity’s role in climate change and its current and future impact on population health.

Why Are CA Doctors Breaking Their Hippocratic Oath?

October 10, 2014 Paul Y. Song, MD, www.huffingtonpost.com Educate! Health Care, Medicine

Like generations of doctors before us, when each of us graduated from medical school, we were asked to raise our hand and recite the Hippocratic Oath. This was a defining moment in many of our lives. Reciting the words carried great weight and purpose: "I will apply all measures for the benefit of the sick according to my ability and judgment; I will keep them from harm and injustice." It is through the prism of these words that I watch you appearing in advertisements against Proposition 45 and react in horror. Dr. Amy Nguyen Howell, Dr. Marshall Morgan, and Dr. John Maa, I believe you are betraying your Hippocratic Oaths, and Registered Nurse Candace Campbell, I believe you are betraying the Nightingale Pledge. In fact, in your roles advocating against Prop 45, you are spreading lies designed to mislead and scare the public -- our patients -- in order to protect the insurance industry. It is unconscionable.

How One Hospital Is Using Organic Produce To Help Heal Patients

September 5, 2014 Coach Mark Smallwood, www.ecowatch.com Create! Food and Agriculture, health, Medicine, Organic

In 431 B.C. Hippocrates said, “Let food be thy medicine and medicine be thy food” More than 2500 years later, we are inundated with advertisements boasting the latest, greatest cure-all super drug. From a young age, we learn that it doesn’t matter how or what we eat, there is a quick fix around the corner for whatever ails us—whether we’re obese, have high blood pressure or bad cholesterol—just to name a few of the issues plaguing our society. It now seems almost revolutionary to think that we can change our health by changing the food we eat. But, one hospital in Pennsylvania thought just that. In 2014, Rodale Institute, in partnership with St. Luke’s University Health Network, launched a true farm to hospital food program. The Anderson Campus at St. Luke’s has more than 300 acres of farmland, much of which had historically been farmed conventionally with crops like corn and soy. The hospital administration recognized the impact that providing fresh, local organic produce could have on patient health and approached Rodale Institute to transition the land to organic and farm vegetables to be used in patient meals as well as in the cafeteria.

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