We Are All Paying for SSkepticism’s Obviation of the Judicious Employment of Complimentary and Alternative Medicine.

Preventative health and its practitioners, constitute the number one threat to the Healthcare/Pharma Industry power and money.  In response, these oligarchy interests enlist the aid of their partner SSkeptic Cabal bullies.  Bullies who pose as health and value chain experts, in ensuring that preventative health is considered superfluous pseudoscience, and can never undermine the profitable industry of managed disease.

A Broken System

I just hung up from a phone call where my pharmacy indicated that a daily prescription renewal has been denied by my physician.  I just visited him for this prescription update on October 21st.  But he still denied my refill because I have not visited him since that appointment 4 months ago, nor paid the requisite $400 per visit to justify his time in prescribing this common 8 cent per day medicine, which I must take for the rest of my life. I am out of the medicine again, an absence of which damages my health, yet the physician’s office must schedule me long out because it is ‘busy busy busy.’ No, they won’t accept a street lab test because of “concerns over standards and quackery.”  The voice attendant recordings all make it clear.  Such exemplifies the current state of the disastrous healthcare system crafted, advised and defended by the SSkepticism Cabal.

A word about bias: Everyone is biased – that is life. The key is this: Who is assisting in producing vast scales of suffering with their bias? This is what is used to differentiate ethics.  Not perceptions of bias. Anyone can claim such. It is no special insight. I am not married to CAM medicine as it exists today, I am simply proposing that an entity of this type should exist. Not everything SBM contends is wrong. I am simply pointing out that the balance of oppression and suffering has swung erroneously into their court – and they are blind to the problems it creates.

Certitude Exploitation

/philosophy : argument : fallacy/ : a contention (such as ‘he is biased’) which is made about a person, for which evidence has a certitude of easily being found – however which also applies to everyone, or easily explains everything or nothing about that person, in reality. In similar principle to explanitude: A theory which explains everything or bears no risk in falsification, likely explains nothing.

Celebrity SSkeptic Steven Novella, in a predictable blog article last year, twisted and stuffed his square peg version of Complimentary and Alternative Medicine (CAM) into its SSkeptically one-liner crafted round hole of universal condemnation. (http://www.skepticblog.org/2013/03/04/cam-practitioners-as-primary-care-doctors/#more-21356)  As is typical for his Cabal, Steven does not appear to invest, in my opinion, enough research in the article to understand nor articulate what it is that CAM-style practitioners actually do, nor define the detrimental impact of the current failing healthcare system on real American families. In the blog conclusion, quoted below, he purposely conflates the role of health advisement with that of corrective medicine; and of CAM practitioners for preventive and first consult health questions with the role of a primary care physician (PCP).  First consult does not equal primary care.  But who cares? Steven has expressed a public agenda here, targeting specific groups.  Steven prefers the equivocation artifice in my perception and opinion, as it is useful in his argument in support of certain institutional crony driven organizations.  Money can be made by keeping possession of the First Care/Maintenance/Preventative touch point with patients.  Big Healthcare, Big Pharma, and Steven Novella know this and are threatened by the presence of any alternative which removes this control of the money supply.

The shrill voices screaming about ‘quacks’ constitute a borderline libelous ruse, screened and protected by the word “science” and “skeptic” in organizational titles, which only serves to keeps Americans in the dark about their health.

Muscle mass and nutrition have been objectively linked to longer life in a new study lead by Dr. Preethi Srikanthan, an assistant clinical professor in the endocrinology division at University of California, Los Angeles School of Medicine, and recently published in the American Journal of Medicine. The higher your muscle mass, apparently the less likely you are to die from natural causes.  Your PCP is not allowed to help you with this. A CAM practitioner can. Perhaps we should rename the practitioner category Preventative and Health Maintenance Care (PHMC).  But the SSkeptic campaigners would simply shift tactics accordingly, so this would be moot. Well, call it what you may, but the current employment of the primary care physician which Mr. Novella is extolling  under “Science Based Medicine,” is FAILING its constituency miserably, to the tune of $23,000 per healthy family, per year (see graphic below).  All this stands as a much more damaging impact than the minor and addressable quackery his cronies decry. 85% of what we face medically as Americans could be managed by less formal, and much lower cost alternatives; wherein aside from acute care cases, actual health contributors can be addressed with the patient. Places where a simple annual blood test would cost $25, where I had control of my dosage and mode, pharmacy records were automatically updated, and I could purchase a 3 month supply so I can safely conduct my overseas presence business. But this will not happen because Science Based Medicine and its malicious crowd of Big Healthcare lobbyists and false authority academics block such alternatives from reaching the legislative desks of our own representatives. These false skeptics persist in pretending to represent the opinion of science, and the best interests/will of us as citizens. They consider us too stupid to merit an input into the process. “Science Based Medicine” failed me again today, to the tune of $400 and a 3 week loss of a vital daily prescription.  All because I had the audacity to exhibit an, all-to-common in the last 20 years, minor daily prescription need.  A treatment which I understand and can manage daily, much more effectively, expertly and at lower cost than does my PCP.

I consult a CAM practitioner FIRST on my nutrition, preventative medicine and health maintenance before I have to take any corrective approaches. I do this because she will spend time with me, is better informed on these issues than is my PCP, she will discuss the causative issues behind various facets of my health and sees ME as the manager of my health; all unlike my PCP.  Subversive ideas to the Steven Novella camp of enforcers.  All this in stark contrast with my primary care physician, who will not address anything health related with me – rather only focus on how to best take advantage of my minor prescription needs, to earn $1,816 in annual revenue, above and beyond the other $20,000 I currently pay for really nothing.  The money is all my PCP is allowed to care about under the current elite-only oligopoly Health Care approaches supported by Dr. Novella and his Cabal.  My PCP is only there to correct problems which many times, I have found originate from a lack of advisement/accountability on the core impacts of nutrition, diet, environmental toxins and health maintenance to begin with.  Things which a CAM practitioner can address.

This process could be managed at much lower expenditure through a complimentary tier of health professionals who advise and assist patients in managing simply addressed preventative and maintenance issues (such as my lifelong prescription) – without the patient having to invest thousands of dollars into a broken system which falsely and ineffectively attempts to monopolize all facets of healthcare. 

If nutraceuticals/supplements are placed under this current corrupt system, a legislative action which SSkeptics are advocating now before Congress, the state of American health and economic viability will suffer even more catastrophically than it has already.

The Incumbent Cost of Elitism and False Correctness

The current Scam Based Entitled Medicine system promoted by Science Based Medicine, as shown to the right¹, is upside down, grossly over inflated, is not working – and most importantly – is not economically sustainable.  The Steven Novella’s of the world, in my opinion are not only are the noisy and unqualified health value chain experts, moreover they consistently demonstrate that they are so verticalized and blind in their understanding of what the average American family faces in terms of Healthcare burdens, that they have erred in their rhetoric through scientific pretense, blatant ignorance and lack of sensitivity to the victims of our current state of healthcare. Oh my gawd, my CAM practitioner advised me to reduce my exposure to corn, wheat and alfalfa based on my allergy response tests, and to increase my intake of magnesium – how horrid the dangers!  I shudder at the enormity of the pseudoscience.  Thank you for protecting me Dr. Novella.

My CAM practitioner acts as my partner in keeping my body healthy.  My doctor simply fixes things when this process is not enough, which is rare for me. I am extraordinarily healthy, thanks to me and my CAM adviser, and no thanks to my primary care physician.  I have only two health maladies 1. Rosacea, and 2. Hypothyroidism.  Now set aside the fact that enormously destructive Science Entitled Medicine SSkeptics would not even acknowledge that such a thing as Rosacea even existed until about 7-10 years ago, or contended that it was caused by stress, alcohol and chocolate; and the fact that they would rather tell Hashimoto Antibody patients that science says ‘stop eating so much’ and ‘you don’t really need this T4/T3 hormone anyway cuz’ it’s a ‘vestige of evolution.’ That is my favorite bullshit line of all the ones I have ever heard. Rather, let’s focus on the real cost of this current ongoing scam which they support.  My total annual bill for just these two minor conditions, caused by environmental toxin exposure which slipped by Science Entitled Medicine’s “food science” in the first place, in his blessed version of PCP-only directed medicine?  As you can see in the chart below, is $ 1,813 a year.

Eighteen hundred dollars a year to manage my two very minor prescriptive needs. Extraordinary.  So that I can take two little pills each day which cost about 8 cents to produce in total, through Chinese pharma sourcing agencies.  The markup on these medicines is on the order of 3700% – as compared to a Chinese sourced consumer goods markup of typically 200 to 300%.  The reason the end consumer costs are so inflated?  Because our corrective health system is a social scam.  A perpetration of fraud on a large scale, defended by allies before our legislative bodies by SSkeptics lead by people in Dr. Steven Novella’s loose social club.

My total annual household cost of Scam Based Entitled Medicine?  $22,800 *

*from my household Quickbooks summary on medical expenses for a healthy family (graphic below)

It takes me a full $ 33,500 in income to recoup this expense – each year. It does not matter if my employer offsets this cost, I still have to provide that equivalent value – or I become part of the problem or as well as an unemployment statistic.  This is the instance where my family has no corrective health issues to begin with. God forbid what will happen when this unsustainable system collapses and my family DOES face corrective health issues. This is WITH health insurance. Most families will not be so lucky inside the clutches of this “we are the science” rice bowl of greed.

The ultimate outcome of Scam Based Entitled Medicine will be theft of American Baby Boomer and later generations’ retirement wealth – followed by the resulting economic depression

But by gosh, at least we were skeptical, and we stopped those evil CAM advisers.  I will not be able to retire and carry this cost, and neither will any of my friends except for the most wealthy of them.  And no, I do not have a large university to bear this cost on my behalf, nor tenure me a juicy retirement medical/convalescence plan, in exchange for saying the correct one-liner propaganda for 40 years.   So, without further ado, from the cited blog penned by celebrity skeptic Dr. Steven Novella himself:

“Making pseudo-scientific practitioners primary care doctors would be disastrous, and would be a massive disservice to the public. Politicians owe it to the people they serve to have a transparent debate about such proposals before instituting them, and such debates should be evidence-based as much as possible. They should be informed by high quality science.  Science, of course, is kryptonite to CAM practitioners. CAM is a category that exists solely to create a double standard in medicine – one that is insulated from having to justify itself with science and evidence. This is not good medicine, primary care or otherwise.”

So, there you have it, in Dr. Novella’s own so well rationalized Conclusions to the blog:

• all CAM ideas are pseudoscience
  
• the current state of $23,000 expenditure annually per HEALTHY family – under Scam Based Medicine – is not disastrous, nor a disservice to the public
• ‘Science Based Medicine’ should be appointed to act as the primary input to the legislative process on our behalf, effectively silencing the voice of its victims
• CAM approaches never employ science or evidence
• CAM approaches, as first health advisement are an extraneous, dangerous and inessential facet of medicine
  
• Being labelled ‘science based’ affords an organization the privilege of action without external or constituent accountability
• Primary Care now equates to First Advisement on health (even though PCP’s will not advise on health)

Very poorly vetted pseudo-intellectual contentions – bereft of real life experience and genuine critical thinking.  Perpetuating the problem in the name of agenda-based politics, power and pseudoscience.

¹ The Economist, “Experimental Medicine” September 20, 2014,