Saturday, July 14, 2012

drugs and their rationale

"...To check healthy people’s blood to find deviations from normal is the freeway to unnecessary medication."  (Uffe Ravnskov, MD PhD)

Does anybody but me think that it's weird to be constantly visiting doctors and testing things, when there is no feeling of illness prompting it?  At what point were we brainwashed into thinking the "annual checkup" was for OUR benefit rather than for doctors' financial well-being?  Could it have been around the time that the rich-office-practitioner golf-playing paradigm took over from the hard-working house-calling-country-doctor stereotype?

And do all the obsessive crossfitters, constantly reporting their lab values of this, that and the other thing REALLY go in for that many blood tests?

Honestly, the constant testing does tend to puzzle me.  Maybe it's one of the few things they CAN do to add that little razzle-dazzle to the office procedure.  "Ordering tests" sounds so important....  Besides weighing one, taking the blood-pressure, making one sit around barely covered for quarters of hours reading the fine print on framed documents to pass time, poking various tender portions of anatomy -- hmm, what can we do that will seem significant and will be simultaneously painful and expensive?  I KNOW!  We'll install a very fat needle under your skin and wiggle it in/out/side-to-side occasionally.  At least it's not as humiliating as lying there with one's feet in aerial stirrups....

And to what end?  So that some BigPharm-educated pusher can write yet another scrip and earn his kickback.  Prescribing statins for women.  Viagra for 80-somethings.  What a joke.

It's amazing -- since i took charge of my own health a few years ago, i've NEVER been healthier.  I don't get colds or flu worth mentioning -- maybe once or twice lightly in the last half-dozen years (and then, only when i've been around sick grandchildren).  Worst i've ever felt since i went low-carb is when i've fallen off the wagon.

Remember the reputed quote from a retired Merck CEO -- that it was his dream to sell drugs to healthy people so that he might expand his market....  I for one am not going to cooperate with this travesty of "health care."  Not going to give the pill-pushers a MODICUM of respect, because they've forfeited any claim to our good opinion.

6 comments:

  1. Health screening is a terrible idea. It throws up so many false positives. Also we have an epidemic of "pre" diseases like prediabetes and osteopoenia. Bad for the "patient", great for profit.

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  2. yep! i completely missed that point. i hear all kinds of stories about mammogram false-positives causing stress and unnecessary surgeries.... grrrr!

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  3. Did you see the current magazine cover that said, "10 Medical Tests Every Woman Needs"? (I spent my money on a massage instead.)

    Speaking of false positives, you might like a book by Gerd Gigerenzer called Calculated Risks--false positive mammograms is one of the points the book covers in detail.

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  4. i think your money was well spent! ;-) it was the Weston Price site that confirmed my prejudice against the whole farce. i wonder how many women have suffered with breast cancer only BECAUSE the procedure took a not-dangerous "lump" and exacerbated it?

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  5. Who needs doctors, drugs, or tests, when our bodies usually do just fine with natural unprocessed foods, and no artificial chemicals?

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  6. yeah! ...so how did we get turned into such hypochondriacs!?

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