ARE YOU RECEIVING TOO MUCH MEDICAL CARE? A RECENT CONFERENCE SUGGESTS IT’S LIKELY
My hero @garyschwitzer at Too Much Medicine Conference. His @HealthNewsRevu exposes how crap media hype fails to report:
1)Costs
2)Harms
3)Scope of benefits
4)Quality of evidence
5)Alternate options
Media PR has contributed to overtreatment. Only media truth can cure it. #TMM
A recent tweet from Dr. Allen Frances, Professor and Chairman Emeritus of the Department of Psychiatry and Behavioral Sciences at Duke University School of Medicine
If you’re not sick, you just haven’t had enough tests yet. Robert Rango, MD
A couple weeks ago I wrote a post on this topic titled WESTERN MEDICAL CARE: THE WOLF IN SHEEP’S CLOTHING. Michael Joyce of Health News Review wrote an article about the recent (last week) TMM Conference (Too Much Medicine) held in Helsinki, Finland. The conference’s theme is a topic I’ve covered on numerous occasions — something widely known within the medical community as OVERDIAGNOSIS & OVERTREATMENT (giving patients too much medical care).
Because medical care (particularly too much medical care) is arguably the number one leading cause of death in America (HERE), it would behoove us all to hear what the medical experts who led this conference had to say.
Joyce kicked things off with this statement, “The TMM conference, wrapping up Friday in Helsinki, gets just a whisper of coverage even though — less obviously and much harder to fathom — it also affects millions of people and involves grave outcomes.”
In other words, this is not a sexy topic that will receive any significant media attention simply because they love the hype surrounding PRESS RELEASES for the latest “wonder drug” or “miracle cure”. Nor is too much medical care a topic that the medical profession itself generally enjoys talking about (I showed you that HERE in response to a post I wrote on the fact that ROUTINE PHYSICAL EXAMINATIONS have been known to be a worthless waste of time and expense for over three decades). Allow me to present to you some of the Conference’s many sub-themes.
For starters, the speakers discussed the various ways that the medical community is creating patients from thin air by making up “pre-diseases”. In other words, there has been a shift in healthcare from focusing on sick people to focusing on those who are not sick yet but will probably someday be if they can be convinced — a blatant example of purposefully and intentionally creating a system based on too much medical care.
Unfortunately, the medical profession’s idea of ‘wellness’ doesn’t usually involve improving patient’s PHYSIOLOGY via educating them about diet, exercise, and lifestyle, but instead revolves around targeting potential patients and using Jedi mind and marketing tricks to turn them into patients — lifetime patients, forever reliant on whatever drugs, devices, or procedures, that insurance happens to be paying the most for. Sort of the ‘disease du jour‘ if you will.
One of the problems mentioned was LOW TESTOSTERONE, which Joyce described thusly. “This is a very classic example of the ready, shoot, aim approach to medicine we take in the US; implementing widespread use of a therapy that has not been adequately tested for benefits and harms.” What’s more, I’ve shown you what is by far the number one reason this problem is occurring in epidemic fashion in Western culture (SUGAR IS TURNING MEN INTO WOMEN AND WOMEN INTO MEN).
In this section, the Conference’s presenters also discussed pre-diseases such as PRE-OSTEOPOROSIS, PRE-DIABETES, and PRE-ALZHEIMER’S (or HERE). What’s fascinating is that when you get down to it, sugar and junk carbs are the foundational component of these “conditions” as well (click the links), all of which are based on and considered to be “INFLAMMATORY“.
Also mentioned was the fact that Big Pharma has been genius at creating diseases from thin air; something that is almost always accomplished by targeting one of my favorite topics — MEDICAL GUIDELINES. For instance I’ve shown you repeatedly how continually lowering what’s considered “normal” CHOLESTEROL means that doctors will be writing millions more prescriptions (another great example of too much medical care).
Discussed as well was the study from the mega corrupt AHA & ACC titled SPRINT (Systolic Blood Pressure Intervention Trial), which recommended lowering what’s considered HIGH BLOOD PRESSURE all the way down to 130/80 — barely above “normal”. As Joyce said, millions of new patients were created from thin air, overnite.
Another topic touched on was using testing, screening, and quizzes to turn healthy folk into sick folk, and then into patients. If you want to understand the myth of early diagnosis as a lifesaver, and numerous examples of how testing turns people into lifetime consumers of massive amounts of healthcare (care that’s always paid for by someone else), be sure to read my article on the subject titled EVIDENCE-BASED MEDICINE: WHO DECIDES WHAT’S BEST EVIDENCE? It’s another ridiculous example of this phenomenon of Western societies receiving entirely too much medical care.
What did Joyce say about this hot-button topic? Listen carefully. “The very notion that screening may NOT save lives, and may do more harm than good is counter-intuitive for many people. Challenging this thinking calls for nothing short of a paradigm shift. The ideal place for this to occur would be the doctor-patient relationship.” Unfortunately, all too often not only is this not happening, doctors are the very ones promoting testing, screening, and those stupid quizzes.
You know, “are you sometimes tired?” “Have you ever had a headache?” If you answered yes to either of these critically important questions, be sure to ask your doctor about PROGENITORIVOX!
This section also contained one of the funniest (and sadly, the truest) memes I’ve seen in awhile. The scene is from an old Wonder Woman comic book, circa 1940’s. Wonder Woman is hooked up to all sorts of antique electronic medical testing gizmos that were probably futuristic for the time but are extremely campy now. She has a doctor hovering over her saying, “She looks healthy to me.” We see another person leaning in (probably a scientist of some sort) and asking, “but have you tested her serum rhubarb levels yet?”
Unfortunately, America is a society that could be sold on the virtues of testing serum rhubarb levels. We tend to collectively believe that if a little is good then more must be better. I see this every single day in my clinic with patients telling me about the testing they’ve been through. But as you’ll see if you read the “Who Decides….?” link above, it’s simply not true. More testing is rarely better.
In the final section of his article on too much medical care, Joyce showed us who is to blame for this fiasco by first asking a simple question. “How can we expect the public to differentiate too much health care vs. too little health care if their sources of information are incomplete or misleading or toxic.” Who did the conference’s speakers specifically blame? As is always the case, simply follow the money. “Governments, universities, medical journals, industry (pharma and device companies), patient advocacy groups, and medical meetings,” the latter being run by the persons creating the tainted guidelines and recommendations discussed earlier.
I was thrilled to see Joyce mention medical journals because of the fact that half (that would be one in two) of all medical studies are either INVISIBLE OR ABANDONED. This is more evidence of the FALLACY OF EVIDENCE-BASED MEDICINE, and proof that everything that comes from medical acedemia (which is almost always financed by BIG PHARMA) must be taken with a grain of salt, including studies on salt itself (HERE). Interestingly enough, TMM’s presenters singled out TAMIFLU (or HERE) as their example-of-choice.
As my brother (an MD himself) showed you last year, how can you include Tamiflu and not discuss the FLU VACCINE SCAM ITSELF? And for those of you who were not aware, we now have a massively-hyped alternative to Tamiflu called XOFLUZA that testing has shown to be equally as ineffective.
Bottom line, “wellness” is not something the medical profession can do for you, it’s something you’ll actually have to do for yourself. It’s why such a huge part of my site is dedicated to you helping yourself solve your health-related issues. Just take a look at “THE POST” I routinely give out to patients on my digital handout form (HERE).
I have seen numerous people (both patients and non-patients alike) work this plan, not only losing as much as 100 lbs in half a year (HERE), but getting off their meds and the medical merry-go-round in the process. If you appreciate the free information on our site, give us some love on FACEBOOK as it also happens to be one of the easiest ways to reach the individuals in your life you love and care about most.
