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Post by Master Kim on Apr 4, 2015 18:31:24 GMT -5
The United Nations Admits Chemtrails Are Real - yournewswire.com/the-united-nations-admits-chemtrails-are-real/The following video is of Rosalind Peterson, President of Agriculture Defence Coalition, who addresses the UN on chemtrails, geoengineering, and weather modification. The acknowledgement by the UN that our skies are being polluted with aluminium, barium, lead, arsenic, chromium, cadmium, selenium, and silver should give weight to the claims that Chemtrails cause a whole host of health problems in the general population, including: Neurological effects, heart damage, eyesight issues, reproduction failures, immune system damage, gastrointestinal disorders, damaged kidney, damaged liver, hormonal problems, and more. The truth is the government is spraying deadly chemtrails in hopes of population reduction. Furthermore they have been known to use chemtrails as biological testing agents on the populace; all while claiming they are nothing more than mere vapor. We’ll now we have 100% undeniable evidence that chemtrails exist. The video below is of Rosalind Peterson, the president of Agriculture Defence Coalition. In it she address the United Nations on chemtrails, geoengineering, and weather modification (HAARP). If you were a skeptic before, I can assure you, that you will not be after hearing what she (the video below) has to say to the people in power.
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Post by Master Kim on Apr 6, 2015 16:17:38 GMT -5
How Much Money Does Big Pharma Pay Doctors to Peddle Prescription Meds? - theantimedia.org/big-pharma-pay-doctors-to-peddle-prescription-meds/Jake Anderson March 30, 2015 (ANTIMEDIA) In 2013, drug and medical device corporations paid out a minimum of $3.5 billion in substantial payments to various doctors and hospitals. It’s money that large pharmaceutical companies deem necessary to get new medical devices and prescriptions into the hands of customers. Records of these ongoing payments were sent to the CMS (Centers for Medicare and Medicaid Services). A Sunshine Act provision regarding the Affordable Care Act authorized that those said companies disclose the documentation of the payments to try and make the device and drug industry’s somewhat guarded relationship with medical experts a bit more transparent overall. When you consider the reasons why drug and device companies offer gifts and consulting payments to physicians, the primary goal is to obviously influence their prescribing methods. The interest of those corporations is to enhance their bottom line rather than focus on what’s best for the overall health of their patients. The key information is now available to the public using this searchable database. Between Aug. 1st and Dec. 31st, 2013, more than 1,300 hospitals and over 500,000 doctors received financial compensation from drug and device manufacturers. Companies classified those payments in a variety of categories including entertainment, meals, travel, research grants, and consulting services. What most people probably don’t realize is that these kinds of payments are widespread throughout the industry. The questionable price for the payouts stirred up the fury of consumer advocacy groups and critics who claim these payments serve as incentives for hospitals and doctors to use or prescribe specific products and thus may potentially compromise the overall quality of patient care. Many advocates claim that it’s the only reason that these gifts are ever given. Orthopedics Top PayoutsSeveral of the highest financial awards were given to orthopedic surgeons who consulted various medical device makers. Today, many of these companies are now facing lawsuits that were subsequently filed by patients who were injured unnecessarily by their products. The government was cracking down on big drug and device manufacturers for controversial payments even before the Sunshine Act. The federal government forced large pharmaceutical corporations’ top players like GlaxoSmithKline, Pfizer, and Eli Lily to report every gift they received to health care providers following their investigation for inappropriate marketing methods. Many Physicians are Critical of the DatabaseWhile advocates claim that the database will strive to hold companies and doctors accountable along with providing helpful information to their patients, not everyone is on the same page that it’s 100 percent helpful. Forcing these payments to be out in the open puts physicians in the hot seat. Thus, many people are worried that patients will start to get the wrong idea overall. The AMA (American Medical Association) claims that the information lacks perspective and therefore appealed to the feds to postpone making the data available to the public to allow doctors more time to fully review the reports. Want to find out if your physician is getting kick backs from medical companies? Search the database here at openpaymentsdata.cms.gov/.
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Post by Master Kim on Apr 9, 2015 17:36:13 GMT -5
French researchers reveal the shocking truth about GM corn - hsionline.com/2014/07/14/hidden-poison/It’s like an evil monster that was let loose. And no one can get it back into its cage. The “Dr. Frankenstein” that created this genetically modified monster, Monsanto, is doing everything it can to keep you from finding out how dangerous it is. But this news is so important it just can’t be kept quiet. So when scientists in France were recently able to republish a shocking study they had done — one the industry tried to suppress — it was a big victory. A victory for the researchers and for us. Because the truth is that Monsanto’s GM corn is slowly but surely killing us. I smell a rat Two years ago French scientists published an alarming study. They discovered that rats eating Monsanto’s GM corn, the kind made to survive after being sprayed with its Roundup pesticide, suffered serious health effects. Things like severe organ damage and deadly tumors. And guess where they got the idea to do the study in the first place? Right out of Monsanto’s own research! Monsanto’s very own studies had found signs of toxicity in rats when they ate GM corn. But those studies were stopped after just 90 days! Unbelievably that’s all the testing that Monsanto did. The French team got hold of Monsanto’s data. They decided to repeat the studies, only now for two years. They wanted to see if those signs of toxicity developed into something more serious. And they sure did — big time. The rats died. And they died from giant cancerous tumors and damage to their livers and kidneys. The French researchers said that “serious diseases like organ damage and tumors take time to develop and become obvious.” Just testing the rats for 90 days was “too short” a time. But here’s where things started to smell like a rat — a great big genetically modified Monsanto rat. Last year, the journal where this study was published formally retracted it. This is unheard of in a scientific publication unless plagiarism or fraud is involved. But those French researchers just finally got that study republished in an open-source online journal. Now everyone will be able to learn just how dangerous this corn is. You see, you get a tiny dose of Roundup every time you eat GM corn. And corn is in a whole lot of food products. It’s used as a filler in processed food, in oils and even in soda — think high fructose corn syrup. Once you start looking at ingredients you’ll be shocked at how much corn you’re actually eating and drinking. Now, you’re only getting a tiny bit of Roundup residue, but a little bit goes a long way. That’s because Roundup can disrupt your hormones. And as Laura Vandenberg, a professor of environmental health sciences at the University of Maryland explains, it only takes the slightest change in our hormones to cause permanent damage. “Hormones act in the parts-per-billion” or trillion level, she said. “That’s like a drop of water in an Olympic-sized swimming pool.” The Roundup gets inside, and stays inside, of GM crops because it’s a “systemic” pesticide. And that’s exactly how it’s meant to work. The good news is that organic corn is still real — and not sprayed with Roundup. And lately, more and more companies, even big ones like General Mills, Kellogg’s and even Walmart have been hopping on the organic bandwagon with more and more products. And an easy way to avoid not just corn, but other GM foods as well, is with the non-GMO shopping guide put out by The Institute for Responsible Technology. Buying GMO-free foods is a way to tell Monsanto that you’re not a lab rat. And you won’t be part of its big experiment to see how many trillions it can make before everyone realizes what a big mistake it was to let its mad scientists take control of our food supply. You can download the shopping guide here. Sources: “Roundup herbicide linked to tumors, organ damage” Leah Zerbe, June 23, 2014, Rodale News, rodalenews.com “French scientists revive assault on pesticide, GM corn” Richard Ingham and Celine Serrat, June 24, 2014, Yahoo news, news.yahoo.com “New study: GMO sweet corn rare in U.S. supermarkets” Press release, Friends of the Earth, November 14, 2013, enewspf.com
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Post by Master Kim on May 13, 2015 21:06:09 GMT -5
Doctors cover up vaccine damage after killing infant with 8 simultaneous vaccinations - www.naturalnews.com/049668_vaccine_damage_SIDS_medical_abuse.html(NaturalNews) It must have been shame that drove doctors at a California hospital to hide the body of an infant who had suddenly died after receiving eight simultaneous vaccinations. The parents were never allowed to see the body of their son before he was cremated. Even after a year and four months had gone by, the official autopsy had not been revealed. Their son, Matthew, had been given DTaP, IPV, Hib, PCV, Hep B and Hep A in three shots, one in the right arm and two in the left leg, just a day before his sudden death. According to mother Crystal Downing, Mathew became grumpy and cried a lot the day after receiving the eight inoculations. She thought this was normal behavior following vaccination. She wrote, "I thought I would give it another day to see if he was still grumpy but we didn't get to the next day. Matthew was gone by then. He was found lifeless. He went to bed that Tuesday night and my husband found him Wednesday morning." The parents then tried to revive Mathew. They called 9-1-1 and rushed him to Colorado River Medical Center in Needles, CA, where he was swiftly pronounced dead. As most cases of vaccine-associated infant death go, the cause of death was ruled sudden infant death syndrome. No investigations were conducted on the cause of death. Parents are often told to just accept a baby's death as a random even, even after their infant was injected with multiple toxic substances. When the parents returned home, they waited for updates on the autopsy. For days, they waited with no reply. They made numerous phone calls. After weeks went by, they finally received word that their son was going to be cremated. They were told that they could not see Mathew because of the condition his body was in. They were not allowed to say their goodbyes. All they ever got was their son's ashes. Now, after a year and four months of waiting, the family still awaits their son's autopsy. They now know that their son had been given a vaccine not approved for his age and an extra dose of a hepatitis B vaccine. Mother of deceased infant now urges parents to do their own research on vaccines Now the mother, Crystal Downing, urges parents to research vaccines before offering their children up to whatever a doctor says. Vaccine violence and abuse such as this continues to show the importance of a parent's right to choose what's best for their child. Doctors who are hell-bent on the philosophy of vaccination should be questioned. The use of multiple vaccines at once should be questioned, especially since there are no clinical trials showing the safety of multiple injections. Stimulating an adaptive immune response for multiple viruses with aluminum adjuvants should be questioned. Doctors should be teachers first and allow patients to give informed consent of the dangers of vaccines. Sadly, many doctors fail to give informed consent, because they believe in vaccine science as if it's a religion. It's rare to find an MD who has investigated how the ingredients in vaccines cause negative reactions that result in brain damage or death. Medical professionals continuously just write off infant death after vaccination as "sudden infant death syndrome." About her family's horrible tragedy, Crystal Downing wrote, "I want to tell other parents, they say vaccinations are safe, but in reality, they aren't. "Ask questions and know which vaccines they plan to give to your baby. Know the risks associated with all of the vaccines they plan to give during the checkup. And remember, it's your choice. It's your child. And whatever you do, don't let them mix the vaccines into one needle or give them so many at once because if you don't think this won't harm your child, then look at the child I lost. It is possible." "My son was injected with 8 vaccines, if you don't know what is in them, learn! When I did, I was shocked and mad at myself for not questioning this before. Matthew is the reason I opened my eyes, to see what vaccines can really do to a baby, let alone anyone. I'm not the only one who believes vaccines are not what they claim they are. I really hope this opens parent's eyes who do vaccinate their children." Source: vactruth.comtruthwiki.org/Vaccine_Fanaticism
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Post by Master Kim on May 13, 2015 21:15:31 GMT -5
U.S. dairy industry petitions FDA to approve aspartame as hidden, unlabeled additive in milk, yogurt, eggnog and cream - worldtruth.tv/u-s-dairy-industry-petitions-fda-to-approve-aspartame-as-hidden-unlabeled-additive-in-milk-yogurt-eggnog-and-cream/You probably already know that the FDA has declared war on raw milk and even helped fund and coordinate armed government raids against raw milk farmers and distributors. Yes, it’s insane. This brand of tyranny is unique to the USA and isn’t even conducted in China, North Kora or Cuba. Only in the USA are raw milk farmers treated like terrorists. But now the situation is getting even more insane than you could have imagined: the International Dairy Foods Association (IDFA) and the National Milk Producers Federation (NMPF) have filed a petition with the FDA asking the FDA to alter the definition of “milk” to secretly include chemical sweeteners such as aspartame and sucralose. Importantly, none of these additives need to be listed on the label. They will simply be swept under the definition of “milk,” so that when a company lists “milk” on the label, it automatically includes aspartame or sucralose. And if you’re trying to avoid aspartame, you’ll have no way of doing so because it won’t be listed on the label. This isn’t only for milk, either: It’s also for yogurt, cream, sour cream, eggnog, whipping cream and a total of 17 products, all of which are listed in the petition at FDA.gov. As the petition states: IDFA and NMPF request their proposed amendments to the milk standard of identity to allow optional characterizing flavoring ingredients used in milk (e.g., chocolate flavoring added to milk) to be sweetened with any safe and suitable sweetener — including non-nutritive sweeteners such as aspartame. This is all being done to “save the children,” we’re told, because the use of aspartame in milk products would reduce calories. Milk industry specifically asks to HIDE aspartame from consumers Astonishingly, the dairy industry is engaged in extreme doublespeak logic and actually arguing that aspartame should be hidden from consumers by not listing it on the label. Here’s what the petition says: IDFA and NMPF argue that nutrient content claims such as “reduced calorie” are not attractive to children, and maintain that consumers can more easily identify the overall nutritional value of milk products that are flavored with non-nutritive sweeteners if the labels do not include such claims. Further, the petitioners assert that consumers do not recognize milk — including flavored milk — as necessarily containing sugar. Accordingly, the petitioners state that milk flavored with non-nutritive sweeteners should be labeled as milk without further claims so that consumers can “more easily identify its overall nutritional value.” In other words, hiding aspartame from consumers by not including it on the label actually helps consumers, according to the IDFA and NMPF! Yep, consumers are best served by keeping them ignorant. If this logic smacks of the same kind of twisted deception practiced by Monsanto, that’s because it’s identical: the less consumers know, the more they are helped, according to industry. And it’s for the children, too, because children are also best served by keeping them poisoned with aspartame. Consumers have always been kept in the dark about pink slime, meat glue, rBGH and GMOs in their food. And now, if the IDFA gets its way, you’ll be able to drink hormone-contaminated milk from an antibiotics-inundated cow fed genetically modified crops and producing milk containing hidden aspartame. And you won’t have the right to know about any of this! The FDA confirms this “secret” status of aspartame, stating, “If the standard of identity for milk is amended as requested by petitioners, milk manufacturers could use non-nutritive sweeteners in flavored milk without a nutrient content claim in its labeling.” FDA requests comments The FDA is requesting comments on this petition. You have until May 21st, 2013 to submit your comments. Click here for instructions. This is a clue to stop drinking processed milk and milk products altogether There’s a bigger story here than just the industry hoping to get FDA approval to secretly put aspartame in milk products while not listing aspartame on the label. The bigger question is this: If an industry is pushing to hide aspartame in its products, what else is it already hiding? How about the pus content of its dairy products? How about its inhumane treatment of animals who are subjected to torture conditions and pumped full of genetically engineered hormones? How about the fact that homogenization and pasteurization turn a whole food into a dietary nightmare that promotes obesity, autoimmune disorders and cardiovascular disease? There are lots of dirty little secrets in the dairy industry of course, and that doesn’t even get into the secret closed-door conversations to encourage the FDA to destroy the competition of raw milk. The only rational answer to all this is to stop buying and consuming processed dairy products, period! I gave up ALL milk products many years ago and have never looked back. I drink almond milk, not pus-filled pasteurized cow’s milk. I don’t eat yogurt. If I want probiotics, I get them from tasty chewable probiotics supplements such as Sunbiotics. I parted ways with processed dairy products many years ago, and as a result, my cardiovascular health, skin health, digestive health and stamina have all remained in outstanding shape. There’s also a philosophical issue here: Don’t buy products from an industry that habitually LIES about everything. The dairy industry is like a mafia. They actively seek to destroy the competition, keep consumers ignorant and monopolize the market. They run highly deceptive ads with ridiculous claims like, “drinking milk helps you lose weight” and other nonsense. The U.S. dairy industry is steeped in deception at every level, and now they want you and your children to unknowingly drink aspartame that’s secretly blended into the product. The dairy industry is to food as Lance Armstrong is to sports. It’s all a big lie, laced with secret chemicals and false claims. Stop drinking milk. Stop financially supporting the food mafia. Sources for this article: www.naturalnews.comThis petition was originally brought to our attention by a reader who says it was covered on Activist Post. I haven’t yet read that article but may update this article with a link to that article once I identify the URL. FDA petition page: www.federalregister.gov
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Post by Master Kim on Jun 17, 2015 17:19:14 GMT -5
Why Most People Do Not Have to Pay Their Medical Bills - www.earth-heal.com/news/news/36-memes/2225-not-pay-medical-bills.htmlf you want to understand why medical care expenses are so expensive today and want to be able to explain it to others, read this post. If you know someone faced with huge medical bills they cannot afford, read this post. I am in favor of paying bills. I am in favor of paying medical bills - REASONABLE medical bills. Most medical bills today are NOT reasonable. The prices charged are far too high (as compared with a free market system), and they are (most of them) what are known as "adhesion contracts." I'll explain what that is, but first some history. The reason medical care costs today are so expensive is because the government has become more and more involved in the industry, and this has raised the cost for everyone. Before WWII and for all of American history before that, people could pay their own medical bills with no problem. There was no "crisis." There will always be poor people in society, especially when "poor" is defined as the bottom X% of the population. By that definition, there will always be poor people, and they can and should turn to charity for help. Back then, there was no such thing as health insurance. People could pay their doctor bills. Health insurance came about as a way for people NOT to pay their doctor bills but to recover LOST WAGES during times they were sick. Lost time from work was a bigger financial problem than the bills themselves. Originally, "health insurance" was more like what today would be called disability insurance. During WWII, the federal government instituted price and wage controls. This meant that employers could not increase salaries. So, employers started offering "fringe benefits" as a way to attract the best people. This is when employers started paying for health insurance for employees. In the 1950's, the tax code was changed so that employers could deduct health care insurance paid on behalf of employees. Tax deductions are good, but it should have been at the individual level. Since so many employers were now paying these costs (because of the previous government meddling), this was very popular. In 1965, Medicare was passed, making the federal government a huge "payor" of health care costs. In 1973, Congress passed the HMO Act, requiring larger employers to provide HMO's for employees. Since then, there have been numerous other ways the federal government has pushed its way in (unconstitutionally) to the health care industry. Today, even before Odumbacare, the federal government is by far the largest payor of health care expenses, and HMO's are next largest. Together, they dominate the terms of what they will pay for health care expenses. Since the individual usually does not pay for their medical expenses, doctors make more money doing multiple tests. They get paid more for that, too. But the government and HMO's often refuse to pay the full price. So, doctors get paid less than they expected on the procedures they do, and so they look to everybody else to make up the slack. The slack is paid for by individuals with their own health insurance and those who pay cash. Since doctors are so used to doing every test and procedure they can think of (because they benefit from that by charging more to the government and HMO's), they do this with individuals, too. It is estimated that people paying cash pay 3 times the amount that the federal government does for the same things. This is why health care costs are so high. But, if you get a doctor or hospital bill, you usually do NOT have to pay it. That's because almost all such bills are adhesion contracts. An adhesion contract is a "take it or leave it" contract. One side dictates the terms, and the other side must take it or leave it. But the terms are not known up front. So, the person taking it has no idea what they are taking. In fact, most such bills are not contracts at all. A contract requires a "meeting of the minds." If a doctor does not tell a patient (a) what will be done or (b) how much it will cost, then there is no meeting of the minds. Further, even if it is a contract, it is an adhesion contract. Adhesion contracts are VOIDABLE by the party who did not create the contract. So, a person with a huge medical bill can REFUSE to pay it by declaring it VOID. Having said that, I do not recommend actually voiding it. Better is to notify the doctor or hospital that you MIGHT declare it void and instead work out a reasonable fee that you will pay in a reasonable amount of time. Today, there are more and more clinics actually publishing their rates. A person could use those prices as a good faith method of determining a fair price to pay (and doing business with such doctors are NOT adhesion contracts because the amounts are known up front, unlike 99% of the industry). One doctor running such a clinic stated that he originally thought his costs would be 1/2 of what other doctors were charging. He really had no idea because he never had control over costs. What he found was that his costs are actually 1/6 to 1/8 of the costs of doctors who get paid by traditional means. So, the health care industry is costing 6-8 times what would be the case in a free market. So, the government has created this mess with more and more intrusion into the health care industry over several decades. The solution, of course, is to REPEAL such laws (including the prohibition of selling insurance across state lines). Let the FREE MARKET return to the health care industry and the problems will be solved. In the meantime, any large medical bills can be NEGOTIATED down to a reasonable amount and, if necessary, declared VOID...
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Post by Master Kim on Jun 17, 2015 17:26:26 GMT -5
TSH Wars: The Unreliable Thyroid Lab Test - hypothyroidmom.com/tsh-wars-the-unreliable-thyroid-lab-test/TSH (thyroid stimulating hormone) is the gold standard for measuring thyroid function in mainstream medicine. Unfortunately this one thyroid lab test does not provide a complete picture. Many doctors don’t run a full thyroid blood panel which should include at minimum Free T4, Free T3, Reverse T3, and thyroid antibodies. I was fortunate to find a great thyroid doctor who treats “me” the person and not strictly my lab numbers. I personally take a natural desiccated thyroid called Nature-throid plus a time-release T3 medication created by a compounding pharmacy. My TSH is suppressed below the “normal” reference range. I feel great without symptoms of over-medication. My doctor focuses on my symptoms and testing that includes Free T4, Free T3, and Reverse T3 at every blood testing. If I was being treated by a doctor who focused solely on TSH and T4-only Levothyroxine drugs, I would be a very ill woman today. I invited thyroid expert Dr. Jeffrey Dach to share his clinical experience with the TSH lab test. Written by Jeffrey Dach MD, Founder of TrueMedMD in Davie, Florida The Low Thyroid Condition – Case Report Mary is a 57 year old female with chronic fatigue, dry, brittle hair, dry skin, muscle aches and pains, and depression, all obvious symptoms of a low thyroid condition. Mary has been to a number of endocrinologists, primary care doctors and even sought advice from her hair stylist. Her latest doctor prescribed a thyroid pill called Levothyroxine (50 mcg) which has done little to relieve her symptoms. In addition, she has depression, and her psychiatrist prescribed an SSRI antidepressant, called Zuloft. She also takes Xanax for bouts of anxiety and insomnia. Mary came into the office frustrated with her conventional medical treatment which was not helping her. Routine Thyroid Panel Our routine evaluation includes a full medical history, physical examination and lab panel. Mary’s baseline lab panel showed a TSH of 5.2, a Free T3 of 260 and a Free T4 of 1.4. TPO antibodies were very elevated (1,100) indicating Hashimoto’s Thyroiditis. Her spot urinary Iodine level was 47 mg/dl indicating iodine deficiency (based on World Health Organization Guidelines).(1) Switching from Levothyroxine to Natural Thyroid Mary was switched from Levothyroxine to Nature-throid and within a week reported improvement in clinical symptoms. Six weeks, after Mary’s Naturethroid dosage was gradually increased to Two and a Half Tablets every day (Using one grain tablets of 65 mg each) . Mary reports improvement. She has tapered off her antidepressants, as she no longer needs them. Going to the OB/GYN Ten weeks later, Mary goes to see her OB/GYN doctor for her annual Pap smear and pelvic exam which included a TSH blood test, with a low result (0.1 which is below the TSH reference range). Her OB/GYN doctor looks at the TSH test result and tells Mary she is taking too much thyroid medicine and needs to cut back. Mary then calls me at my office to relay this information. Two doctors are telling her different things and Mary doesn’t know who to believe. This scenario plays out in my office with a different patient each week. The reality is that Mary is on the proper dosage of thyroid medication, and we expect to see a low or suppressed TSH result when this occurs. My article Why Natural Thyroid is Better than Synthetic explains how treatment of the low thyroid condition with natural thyroid is superior to Levothyroxine (a T4 only medication). In our office we use Nature-throid from RLC labs. (Disclosure: NONE, I have no financial relationship with RLC labs, the manufacturer of Nature-Throid NDT – natural dessicated thyroid pills). Natural Thyroid which contains both T3 and T4 is a more robust and safer thyroid medication when compared to T4 only medications such as levothyroxine and Synthroid. This is my assessment, based on 10 years of clinical experience prescribing Nature-throid. In addition, we have found that patients who have converted from Synthroid to Natural Thyroid are much happier with their treatment program. The mainstream medical literature is also in agreement. The TSH test is not a reliable indicator of adequacy of treatment.(2) When the patient is taking the proper dosage of natural thyroid medication with complete relief of symptoms, the TSH will typically fall below the lab reference range, also called a suppressed TSH. In other words, the TSH will be quite low, and this will disturb the mainstream clinician who mistakenly believes the patient is taking too much thyroid medication. The issue can be settled simply by running a Free T3 test which will show that the Free T3 is in the normal range, thus excluding any possibility of a “hyperthyroid state”. Unfortunately, most conventional docs do not have the knowledge to order a free T3 test, and have limited understanding of the thyroid patient. Suppressive Dose Needed – The TSH Test is Not a Reliable Monitor Many patients do quite well on Synthroid. However about 20% (one fifth) of patients on T4 only medications like Synthroid do not do well, and have continued symptoms of a low thyroid condition.(3) Why is that? A miniscule amount of T4 medication such as 50-88 mcg of Levothyroxine may be sufficient to drive down the TSH, and the endocrinologist will then consider treatment dosage adequate. It is not adequate. This is explained by Dr D.S. Oreilly in his articles (4-5), and by Dr. Henry Lindner in his detailed article highlighting why TSH suppression below the lab reference range is needed for adequate treatment for the low thyroid condition.(6) Japan in Agreement In agreement is another article, this time from the Center for Excellence in Thyroid Care, Kuma Hospital, Japan in which the authors state that: “TSH-suppressive doses of levothyroxine are required to achieve preoperative native serum triiodothyronine levels in patients who have undergone total thyroidectomy “(9) Again, knowledgeable physicians are finding that TSH suppression below the lab reference range is required for adequate treatment of the low thyroid condition. In this Kuma Hospital study, they found that TSH-suppressive doses of Synthroid were needed in post thyroidectomy patients to achieve the same normal Serum T3 levels which were present on pre-op labs. Natural Thyroid When Natural thyroid medication is used, and the dosage gradually adjusted upwards from 1/2 tab daily to the maintainance dose of two to three of the One Grain (65mg) Tabs daily (usually done over 6 weeks), the lab panel at this time will typically show a TSH which is below the normal reference range, and a free T3 which is in the upper end of the normal range 350-420. The low TSH is to be expected, is not disturbing, and is not indicative of a hyperthyroid state. Why Has Endocrinology Mismanaged the Low Thyroid Condition for Fifty Years? The answer is obvious. Follow the money trail. Synthroid is the fourth most prescribed drug in America with 70 million prescriptions. Abbot labs, the makers of Synthroid, uses the massive profits to finance and fund Endocrinology Groups and Societies, their meetings, and clinical research grants. They also fund the key opinion leaders to give lectures at meetings in support of Synthroid and the TSH test. This is all done in spite of the obvious clinical inferiority of T4 only medications such as levothyroxine, and the unreliability of the TSH test to monitor adequacy of treatment. For many decades now, mainstream endocrinology has been completely corrupted by huge cash infusions from Big Pharma. About Jeffrey Dach MD Dr. Jeffrey Dach is the founder and Medical Director of a clinic in Davie, Florida specializing in bioidentical hormones, natural thyroid, and natural medicine called TrueMedMD. His website Jeffrey Dach MD offers articles on bioidentical hormones and natural thyroid. Dr. Dach is Specialty Board Certified in Diagnostic and Interventional Radiology. Dr. Dach is a member of the American Academy of Anti-Aging Medicine, as well as the American Academy for the Advancement of Medicine. Dr. Dach and thirteen other healthcare providers co-authored a new book on hypothyroidism with thyroid advocate Janie Bowthorpe entitled Stop the Thyroid Madness II: How Thyroid Experts Are Challenging Ineffective Treatments and Improving the Lives of Patients just released the fall of 2014.
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Post by Master Kim on Jul 10, 2015 20:07:19 GMT -5
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Post by Master Kim on Jul 11, 2015 17:48:58 GMT -5
Conspiracy Documentary 2015 GeoEngineering (This is a must watch)
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Post by Master Kim on Jul 12, 2015 18:23:03 GMT -5
These Kill Over 100,000 a Year! Are You Taking Them?
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Post by Master Kim on Jul 13, 2015 9:36:37 GMT -5
Dr. Michael Farley (Forensic Pathology Consultant, N.D.) shares a story about an cancer director at a major hospital that he worked with. You won't believe the doctors response to what Dr. Farley tried to help him with. Watch and learn for yourself what so many doctors aren't!
He Nails A Problem With Many Traditional Oncologists at 2:28 of This Video!
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Post by Master Kim on Jul 15, 2015 15:25:57 GMT -5
Merck Created Hit List to "Destroy," "Neutralize" or "Discredit" Dissenting Doctors - www.cbsnews.com/news/merck-created-hit-list-to-destroy-neutralize-or-discredit-dissenting-doctors/Last Updated May 6, 2009 7:38 PM EDT by CBS Money Watch Merck made a "hit list" of doctors who criticized Vioxx, according to testimony in a Vioxx class action case in Australia. The list, emailed between Merck employees, contained doctors' names with the labels "neutralise," "neutralised" or "discredit" next to them. According to The Australian, Merck emails from 1999 showed company execs complaining about doctors who disliked using Vioxx. One email said: We may need to seek them out and destroy them where they live ... The plaintiffs' lawyer gave this assessment: It gives you the dark side of the use of key opinion leaders and thought leaders ... if (they) say things you don't like to hear, you have to neutralise them ... It does suggest a certain culture within the organisation about how to deal with your opponents and those who disagree with you. The Australian: The court was told that James Fries, professor of medicine at Stanford University, wrote to the then Merck head Ray Gilmartin in October 2000 to complain about the treatment of some of his researchers who had criticised the drug. "Even worse were allegations of Merck damage control by intimidation," he wrote, ... "This has happened to at least eight (clinical) investigators ... I suppose I was mildly threatened myself but I never have spoken or written on these issues." The allegations come on the heels of revelations that Merck created a fake medical journal -- the Australasian Journal of Bone and Joint Medicine -- in which to publish studies about Vioxx; had pop songs commissioned about Vioxx to inspire its staff, and paid ghostwriters to draft articles about the drug
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Post by Master Kim on Jul 23, 2015 19:23:59 GMT -5
FDA-approved drug turns ordinary people into obedient zombies... saps all free will... allows people to be programmed by the media or government... sold as transdermal patch - www.naturalnews.com/050459_Dragons_Breath_scopolamine_mind_control_drug.htmlSunday, July 19, 2015 (NaturalNews) When I lived in Ecuador, I was warned about the pollen from the flower of a beautiful tree. The pollen is called "Devil's Breath," and when a tiny amount is blown into the face of an intended victim, it immediately saps that person's free will, turning them into a compliance zombie who will do anything they're commanded to do: Empty their bank account, engage in sexual acts or even donate a kidney. This isn't some urban legend, either. The Devil's Breath pollen is rich in scopolamine, a potent drug that saps free will and turns people into zombies. Scopolamine can "can wipe the memory of its victims," reports the Daily Mail: Scopolamine can be blown in the face of a passer-by on the street, and within minutes, that person is under the drug's effect - scopolamine is odourless and tasteless. 'You can guide them wherever you want,' he explained. 'It's like they're a child.' ...The drug, he said, turns people into complete zombies and blocks memories from forming. So even after the drug wears off, victims have no recollection as to what happened. (Shhhhh! Please don't tell Bill Cosby!) FDA-approved drug that literally saps human will and turns people into obedient zombiesIf all this sounds exactly like what we're all witnessing in American society today, that's because drug companies have turned scopolamine into an FDA-approved prescription drug. Sold today as a transdermal patch, the scopolamine drug is offered under the name "Transderm Scop" and it's designed to be placed right behind the ear, allowing the scopolamine drug to be absorbed into the bloodstream. When the scopolamine chemical enters the bloodstream, it immediately affects the brain, turning a normal human being into an auto-suggestion hypnosis subject who believes and obeys anything they hear. If that person happens to be watching MSNBC while absorbing this drug, they might mindlessly come to believe that they're supposed to vote for Hillary Clinton because she's so smart, honest and awesome! Combine this drug with the effects of mass fluoridation and widespread antidepressant drug use and you get a toxic cocktail of mind-numbing drugs that sap free will and turn humans into walking zombies. "The drug... turns people into complete zombies and blocks memories from forming. So even after the drug wears off, victims have no recollection as to what happened," reports the Daily Mail. It kind of sounds like exactly what we're seeing today with all the people who voted for President Obama in the 2008 and 2012 elections. They have no recollection what they voted for, and they can't seem to realize that all of Obama's campaign promises were outright lies. They voted out of obedience, not rational thinking, and now as so many of the very people who voted for Obama find themselves jobless, laid off or with their work hours cut, they're starting to come to their senses and ask, "What have I done?" Now, mindless obedience is available as an FDA-approved pharmaceutical. It's a Brave New World, after all, and you can't have let people have the freedom to think, can ya? Watch the VICE documentary here:
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Post by Master Kim on Aug 1, 2015 15:58:56 GMT -5
Big Pharma criminality no longer a conspiracy theory: Bribery, fraud, price fixing now a matter of public record - www.naturalnews.com/036417_Glaxo_Merck_fraud.htmlMonday, July 09, 2012 by Mike Adams, the Health Ranger Editor of NaturalNews.com (NaturalNews) Those of us who have long been describing the pharmaceutical industry as a "criminal racket" over the last few years have been wholly vindicated by recent news. Drug and vaccine manufacturer Merck was caught red-handed by two of its own scientists faking vaccine efficacy data by spiking blood samples with animal antibodies. GlaxoSmithKline has just been fined a whopping $3 billion for bribing doctors, lying to the FDA, hiding clinical trial data and fraudulent marketing. Pfizer, meanwhile has been sued by the nation's pharmacy retailers for what is alleged as an "overarching anticompetitive scheme" to keep generic cholesterol drugs off the market and thereby boost its own profits. The picture that's emerging is one of a criminal drug industry that has turned to mafia tactics in the absence of any real science that would prove their products to be safe or effective. The emergence of this extraordinary evidence of bribery, scientific fraud, lying to regulators and monopolistic practices that harm consumers is also making all those doctors and "skeptics" who defended Big Pharma and vaccines eat their words. To defend Big Pharma today is to defend a cabal of criminal corporations that have proven they will do anything -- absolutely anything -- to keep their profits rolling in. It makes no difference who they have to bribe, what studies they have to falsify, or who has to be threatened into silence. They will stop at nothing to expand their profit base, even if it means harming (or killing) countless innocents. Let's take a look at recent revelations: GlaxoSmithKline pleads guilty to bribery, fraud and other crimesIt what is now the largest criminal fraud settlement ever to come out of the pharmaceutical industry, GlaxoSmithKline has pleaded guilty and agreed to pay $1 billion in criminal fines and $2 billion in civil fines following a nine-year federal investigation into its activities. According to U.S. federal investigators, GlaxoSmithKline ( www.naturalnews.com/036416_GlaxoSmith...): • Routinely bribed doctors with luxury vacations and paid speaking gigs • Fabricated drug safety data and lied to the FDA • Defrauded Medicare and Medicaid out of billions • Deceived regulators about the effectiveness of its drugs • Relied on its deceptive practices to earn billions of dollars selling potentially dangerous drugs to unsuspecting consumers and medical patients And this is just the part they got caught doing. GSK doesn't even deny any of this. The company simply paid the $3 billion fine, apologized to its customers, and continued conducting business as usual. By the way, in addition to bribing physicians, GSK has plenty of money to spread around bribing celebrities and others who pimps its products. The company reportedly paid $275,000 to the celebrity doctor known as "Dr. Drew," who promoted Glaxo's mind-altering antidepressant drug Wellbutrin (http://naturalsociety.com/top-radio-doctor-p...). As the Wall Street Journal reports: In June 1999, popular radio personality Dr. Drew Pinsky used the airwaves to extol the virtues of GlaxoSmithKline PLC's antidepressant Wellbutrin, telling listeners he prescribes it and other medications to depressed patients because it "may enhance or at least not suppress sexual arousal" as much as other antidepressants do. But one thing listeners didn't know was that, two months before the program aired, Dr. Pinsky -- who gained fame as "Dr. Drew" during years co-hosting a popular radio sex-advice show "Loveline" -- received the second of two payments from Glaxo totaling $275,000 for "services for Wellbutrin." ( online.wsj.com/article/SB100014240527...) As the Wall Street Journal reports: In June 1999, popular radio personality Dr. Drew Pinsky used the airwaves to extol the virtues of GlaxoSmithKline PLC's antidepressant Wellbutrin, telling listeners he prescribes it and other medications to depressed patients because it "may enhance or at least not suppress sexual arousal" as much as other antidepressants do. But one thing listeners didn't know was that, two months before the program aired, Dr. Pinsky -- who gained fame as "Dr. Drew" during years co-hosting a popular radio sex-advice show "Loveline" -- received the second of two payments from Glaxo totaling $275,000 for "services for Wellbutrin." ( online.wsj.com/article/SB100014240527...) Merck falsified vaccine data, spiked blood samples and more, say former employeesAccording to former Merck virologists Stephen Krahling and Joan Wlochowski, the company: ( www.naturalnews.com/036328_Merck_mump...) • "Falsified test data to fabricate a vaccine efficacy rate of 95 percent or higher." • Spiked the blood test with animal antibodies in order to artificially inflate the appearance of immune system antibodies. • Pressured the two virologists to "participate in the fraud and subsequent cover-up." • Used the falsified trial results to swindle the U.S. government out of "hundreds of millions of dollars for a vaccine that does not provide adequate immunization." • Intimidated the scientists, threatening them with going to jail unless they stayed silent. This is all documented in a 2010 False Claims Act which NaturalNews has acquired and posted here: www.naturalnews.com/gallery/documents... Millions of children put at risk by MerckIn that document the two virologists say they, "witnessed firsthand the improper testing and data falsification in which Merck engaged to artificially inflate the vaccine's efficacy findings." They also claim that because of the faked vaccine results, "the United States has over the last decade paid Merck hundreds of millions of dollars for a vaccine that does not provide adequate immunization... The United States is by far the largest financial victim of Merck's fraud." They go on to point out that children are the real victims, however: "But the ultimate victims here are the millions of children who every year are being injected with a mumps vaccine that is not providing them with an adequate level of protection. ...The failure in Merck's vaccine has allowed this disease to linger with significant outbreaks continuing to occur." Merck's mumps viral strain is 45 years old!According to the complaint, Merck has been using the same mumps strain -- weakened from generations of being "passaged" -- for the last 45 years! The complaint reads: "For more than thirty years, Merck has had an exclusive license from the FDA to manufacture and sell a mumps vaccine in the U.S. The FDA first approved the vaccine in 1967. It was developed by Dr. Maurice Hilleman, at Merck's West Point research facility, from the mumps virus that infected his five year-old daughter Jeryl Lynn. Merck continues to use this 'Jeryl Lynn' strain of the virus for its vaccine today." Merck Big Pharma criminality no longer a conspiracy theory: Bribery, fraud, price fixing now a matter of public record Monday, July 09, 2012 by Mike Adams, the Health Ranger Editor of NaturalNews.com (See all articles...) Tags: Glaxo, Merck, fraud eTrust Pro Certified Most Viewed Articles Today | Week | Month | Year CDC held meeting of vaccine scientists to deliberately destroy evidence linking vaccines to autism REVEALED: Cancer industry profits 'locked in' by nagalase molecule injected into humans via vaccines... spurs tumor growth... explains aggressive vaccine push INVESTIGATION: Three days before Dr. Bradstreet was found dead in a river, U.S. govt. agents raided his research facility to seize a breakthrough cancer treatment called GcMAF Death-loving dentist kills Cecil the Lion after luring national icon from conservation area - sign the petition to extradite Dr. Palmer to Zimbabwe! Cultivate sexual energy to increase health and longevity The hidden weed killer in your BREAD: Commercial wheat doused with cancer-causing glyphosate herbicide right before harvest... and you're eating it! MSNBC host says newborn infants don't count as 'alive' unless parents decide they do; infanticide is the new abortion 100 years of patents reveal secret history of U.S. weather control programs Trophy-hunting American dentist murders beloved lion Cecil with a crossbow; internet goes ballistic... Health Ranger calls for LIFETIME boycott of Dr. Walter Palmer's dentistry practice in Minneapolis U.S. government begins human trials of genetically modified Ebola vaccine 'Glyphosate is definitely genotoxic,' declares WHO scientist who authored Roundup cancer study California legislators who passed SB 277 to force vaccines on children now want to do the same for adults with SB 792 Natural News calls for criminal investigation into Planned Parenthood's for-profit organ-harvesting operation Google's propaganda search engine distorts perceptions to control people's thoughts - try Good Gopher instead, a propaganda-free search portal Brussels sprouts: A powerful food with cancer-fighting potential Top 10 foods for improving blood pressure New 'superchilling' technique allows organic food to be preserved naturally for long-term storage Five powerful green foods to boost your metabolic health Popular on Facebook 109K BACK INTO THE CLOSET: Why U.S. reporters are not allowed to write about rainbow events in nations where being gay is still condemned 76K Depopulation test run? 75% of children who received vaccines in Mexican town now dead or hospitalized 70K A family destroyed: Six-month-old dies after clinic injects baby with 13 vaccines at once without mother's informed consent 66K Biologist explains how marijuana causes tumor cells to commit suicide 60K Companies begin planting microchips under employees' skin 60K INVESTIGATION: Three days before Dr. Bradstreet was found dead in a river, U.S. govt. agents raided his research facility to seize a breakthrough cancer treatment called GcMAF 59K BAM! Chipotle goes 100% non-GMO; flatly rejecting the biotech industry and its toxic food ingredients 57K ECONOMIC SLAVERY FOR ALL: While we were distracted with the Confederate flag flap, Congress quietly forfeited our entire economic future via fast-track trade authority 49K NJ cops bust teenagers shoveling snow without a permit 45K Chemotherapy kills cancer patients faster than no treatment at all 45K McDonald's in global profit free fall as people everywhere increasingly reject chemically-altered toxic fast food 44K March Against Monsanto explodes globally... World citizens stage massive protests across 38 countries, 428 cities... mainstream media pretends it never happened 37K Italian court rules mercury and aluminum in vaccines cause autism: US media continues total blackout of medical truth 34K The 21 curious questions we're never allowed to ask about vaccines 34K SCOTUS same-sex marriage decision may have just legalized the concealed carry of loaded firearms across all 50 states, nullifying gun laws everywhere 33K Orthorexia Nervosa - New mental disorder aimed at people who insist on eating a clean diet 32K Vicious attack on Dr. Oz actually waged by biotech mafia; plot to destroy Oz launched after episode on glyphosate toxicity went viral 30K Nearly every mass shooting in the last 20 years shares one surprising thing? and it's not guns 12K Delicious 89 (NaturalNews) Those of us who have long been describing the pharmaceutical industry as a "criminal racket" over the last few years have been wholly vindicated by recent news. Drug and vaccine manufacturer Merck was caught red-handed by two of its own scientists faking vaccine efficacy data by spiking blood samples with animal antibodies. GlaxoSmithKline has just been fined a whopping $3 billion for bribing doctors, lying to the FDA, hiding clinical trial data and fraudulent marketing. Pfizer, meanwhile has been sued by the nation's pharmacy retailers for what is alleged as an "overarching anticompetitive scheme" to keep generic cholesterol drugs off the market and thereby boost its own profits. The picture that's emerging is one of a criminal drug industry that has turned to mafia tactics in the absence of any real science that would prove their products to be safe or effective. The emergence of this extraordinary evidence of bribery, scientific fraud, lying to regulators and monopolistic practices that harm consumers is also making all those doctors and "skeptics" who defended Big Pharma and vaccines eat their words. To defend Big Pharma today is to defend a cabal of criminal corporations that have proven they will do anything -- absolutely anything -- to keep their profits rolling in. It makes no difference who they have to bribe, what studies they have to falsify, or who has to be threatened into silence. They will stop at nothing to expand their profit base, even if it means harming (or killing) countless innocents. Let's take a look at recent revelations: GlaxoSmithKline pleads guilty to bribery, fraud and other crimes It what is now the largest criminal fraud settlement ever to come out of the pharmaceutical industry, GlaxoSmithKline has pleaded guilty and agreed to pay $1 billion in criminal fines and $2 billion in civil fines following a nine-year federal investigation into its activities. According to U.S. federal investigators, GlaxoSmithKline (http://www.naturalnews.com/036416_GlaxoSmith...): • Routinely bribed doctors with luxury vacations and paid speaking gigs • Fabricated drug safety data and lied to the FDA • Defrauded Medicare and Medicaid out of billions • Deceived regulators about the effectiveness of its drugs • Relied on its deceptive practices to earn billions of dollars selling potentially dangerous drugs to unsuspecting consumers and medical patients And this is just the part they got caught doing. GSK doesn't even deny any of this. The company simply paid the $3 billion fine, apologized to its customers, and continued conducting business as usual. By the way, in addition to bribing physicians, GSK has plenty of money to spread around bribing celebrities and others who pimps its products. The company reportedly paid $275,000 to the celebrity doctor known as "Dr. Drew," who promoted Glaxo's mind-altering antidepressant drug Wellbutrin (http://naturalsociety.com/top-radio-doctor-p...). As the Wall Street Journal reports: In June 1999, popular radio personality Dr. Drew Pinsky used the airwaves to extol the virtues of GlaxoSmithKline PLC's antidepressant Wellbutrin, telling listeners he prescribes it and other medications to depressed patients because it "may enhance or at least not suppress sexual arousal" as much as other antidepressants do. But one thing listeners didn't know was that, two months before the program aired, Dr. Pinsky -- who gained fame as "Dr. Drew" during years co-hosting a popular radio sex-advice show "Loveline" -- received the second of two payments from Glaxo totaling $275,000 for "services for Wellbutrin." (http://online.wsj.com/article/SB100014240527...) Merck falsified vaccine data, spiked blood samples and more, say former employees According to former Merck virologists Stephen Krahling and Joan Wlochowski, the company: (http://www.naturalnews.com/036328_Merck_mump...) • "Falsified test data to fabricate a vaccine efficacy rate of 95 percent or higher." • Spiked the blood test with animal antibodies in order to artificially inflate the appearance of immune system antibodies. • Pressured the two virologists to "participate in the fraud and subsequent cover-up." • Used the falsified trial results to swindle the U.S. government out of "hundreds of millions of dollars for a vaccine that does not provide adequate immunization." • Intimidated the scientists, threatening them with going to jail unless they stayed silent. This is all documented in a 2010 False Claims Act which NaturalNews has acquired and posted here: www.naturalnews.com/gallery/documents... Millions of children put at risk by Merck In that document the two virologists say they, "witnessed firsthand the improper testing and data falsification in which Merck engaged to artificially inflate the vaccine's efficacy findings." They also claim that because of the faked vaccine results, "the United States has over the last decade paid Merck hundreds of millions of dollars for a vaccine that does not provide adequate immunization... The United States is by far the largest financial victim of Merck's fraud." They go on to point out that children are the real victims, however: "But the ultimate victims here are the millions of children who every year are being injected with a mumps vaccine that is not providing them with an adequate level of protection. ...The failure in Merck's vaccine has allowed this disease to linger with significant outbreaks continuing to occur." Merck's mumps viral strain is 45 years old! According to the complaint, Merck has been using the same mumps strain -- weakened from generations of being "passaged" -- for the last 45 years! The complaint reads: "For more than thirty years, Merck has had an exclusive license from the FDA to manufacture and sell a mumps vaccine in the U.S. The FDA first approved the vaccine in 1967. It was developed by Dr. Maurice Hilleman, at Merck's West Point research facility, from the mumps virus that infected his five year-old daughter Jeryl Lynn. Merck continues to use this 'Jeryl Lynn' strain of the virus for its vaccine today." A complete medical farceThis information appears to show Merck's mumps vaccine to be a complete medical farce. Those who blindly backed Merck's vaccines -- the science bloggers, "skeptics," doctors, CDC and even the FDA -- have been shown to be utter fools who have now destroyed their reputations by siding with an industry now known to be dominated by scientific fraud and unbounded criminality. That's the really hilarious part in all this: After decades of doctors, scientists and government authorities blindly and brainlessly repeating the mantra of "95% effectiveness," it all turns out to be total quackery hogwash. Utterly fabricated. Quackety-quack quack. And all those hundreds of millions of Americans who lined up to be injected with MMR vaccines were all repeatedly and utterly conned into potentially harming themselves while receiving no medical benefit. Intelligent, informed NaturalNews readers, home school parents, and "awakened" people who said "No!" to vaccines are now emerging as the victors in all this. By refusing to be injected with Merck's vaccines, they avoided being assaulted with a fraudulent cocktail of adjuvant chemicals and all-but-useless mumps strains over four decades old. They protected their time, money and health. Those who refuse to be physically violated by vaccines are, once again, turning out to be the smartest people in society. No wonder they also tend to be healthier than the clueless fools who line up to get vaccinated every year. Merck fraudulently misrepresented the efficacy of its vaccine and contributed to the spread of infectious disease, says lawsuit The faked vaccine efficacy numbers aren't the only troubles Merck is now facing. Shortly after the above False Claims Act was made public, Chatom Primary Care filed suit against Merck. That document is available from NaturalNews at: www.naturalnews.com/gallery/documents... It alleges that: • [Merck engaged in] ...a decade-long scheme to falsify and misrepresent the true efficacy of its vaccine. • Merck fraudulently represented and continues to falsely represent in its labeling and elsewhere that its Mumps Vaccine has an efficacy rate of 95 percent of higher. • Merck knows and has taken affirmative steps to conceal -- by using improper testing techniques and falsifying test data -- that its Mumps Vaccine is, and has been since at least 1999, far less than 95 percent effective. • Merck designed a testing methodology that evaluated its vaccine against a less virulent strain of the mumps virus. After the results failed to yield Merck's desired efficacy, Merck abandoned the methodology and concealed the study's findings. • Merck also engaged in "incorporating the use of animal antibodies to artificially inflate the results... destroying evidence of the falsified data and then lying to an FDA investigator... threatened a virologist in Merck's vaccine division with jail if he reported the fraud to the FDA." • "Merck designed a testing methodology that evaluated its vaccine against a less virulent strain of the mumps virus. After the results failed to yield Merck's desired efficacy, Merck abandoned the methodology and concealed the study's findings. [Then] Merck designed even more scientifically flawed methodology, this time incorporating the use of animal antibodies to artificially inflate the results, but it too failed to achieve Merck's fabricated efficacy rate. Confronted with two failed methodologies, Merck then falsified the test data to guarantee the results it desired. Having achieved the desired, albeit falsified, efficacy threshold, Merck submitted these fraudulent results to the FDA and European Medicines Agency." • "Merck took steps to cover up the tracks of its fraudulent testing by destroying evidence of the falsified data and then lying to an FDA investigator... Merck also attempted to buy the silence and cooperation of its staff by offering them financial incentives to follow the direction of Merck personnel overseeing the fraudulent testing process. Merck also threatened... Stephen Krahling, a virologist in Merck's vaccine division from 1999 to 2001, with jail if he reported fraud to the FDA." • "Merck continued to conceal what it knew about the diminished efficacy of its Mumps Vaccine even after significant mumps outbreaks in 2006 and 2009." Obama administration has zero interest in actual justiceAnother interesting note in all this is that under President Obama, the U.S. Dept. of Justice showed no interest whatsoever in investigating Merck over the False Claims Act filed by two of its former virologists. Despite the convincing evidence of fraud described in detail by insider whistleblowers, the Obama Department of Justice, led by gun-running Attorney General Eric Holder who is already facing serious questions over Operation Fast and Furious, simply chose to ignore the False Claims Act complaint. When evidence of criminal fraud was brought before the U.S. Department of Justice, in other words, the DoJ looked the other way with a wink and a nod to the medical crimes taking place right under their noses. Who cares if tens of millions of children are being injected year after year with a fraudulent mumps vaccine? There's money to be made, after all, and exploiting the bodies of little children for profit is just business as usual in a fascist nation dominated by corporate interests. Pfizer sued by retailers over anticompetitive schemeAdding to all this, Pfizer has now been sued by five U.S. retailers (pharmacies) who accuse the company of monopolistic market practices. According to the lawsuit, Pfizer conspired to prevent generic versions of its blockbuster cholesterol drug Lipitor from entering the market. This was done to protect billions in profits while making sure patients did not have access to more affordable cholesterol drugs. Pfizer sells nearly $10 billion worth of Lipitor each year. According to the Reuters report on this lawsuit, Pfizer is being accused of ( www.reuters.com/article/2012/07/05/us...): • Obtaining a fraudulent patent • Engaging in sham litigation • Entering a price-fixing agreement to delay cheaper generics • Entering arrangements with pharmacy benefit managers to force retailers to buy more Lipitor (chemical name is atorvastatin calcium) No arrests or prosecution of Big Pharma executivesOne of the most astonishing realizations in all this is that given all the criminal fraud, bribery, misrepresentation, lying to the FDA, price fixing and other crimes that are going on in the pharmaceutical industry, you'd think somebody somewhere might be arrested and charged with a crime, right? Nope. To date, not a single pharmaceutical CEO, marketing employee or drug rep has been charged with anything related to all this fraud. In America, drug company employees are "above the law" just like top mafia bosses of a bygone era. How insane is this, exactly? Consider this: Imagine if YOU, an individual, went around town bribing doctors, falsifying data, selling a fraudulent product to the government, lying to regulators, engaging in anti-trade price-fixing and threatening your employees into silence. What would happen to you? You'd probably wind up rotting in prison, the subject of an FBI investigation and a DoJ prosecution. So why is it okay for a multi-billion-dollar corporation to carry out these same crimes and get away with it? Why are the CEOs of top drug companies given a free pass to commit felony crimes and endless fraud? I'll tell you why, and you're not gonna like the answer: Because America has become a nation run by crooks for the benefit of crooks. It's one big country club, and as comedian George Carlin used to say, "YOU ain't in it!" If Big Pharma would falsify data on vaccines, what else would the industry do?I hope you're getting the bigger picture in all this, friends. If these drug companies routinely bribe doctors, falsify data, defraud the government and commit felony crimes without remorse, what else would they be willing to do for profit? Would they: • Falsify efficacy data on other prescription drugs? • Exploit children for deadly vaccine trials? • Invent fictitious diseases to sell more drugs? • Unleash bioweapons to cause a profitable pandemic? • Conspire with the CDC to spread fear to promote vaccinations? • Silence whistleblowers who try to go public with the truth? • Give people cancer via stealth viruses in vaccines? • Destroy the careers of medical scientists who question Big Pharma? • Force a medical monopoly on the entire U.S. population via socialist health care legislation? But of course they would. In fact, the industry is doing all those things right now. And if you don't believe me, just remember that five years ago, no one believed me when I said drug companies were engaged in criminal conspiracies to defraud the nation -- something that has now been proven over a nine-year investigation. About the author: Mike Adams (aka the "Health Ranger") is the founding editor of NaturalNews.com, the internet's No. 1 natural health news website, now reaching 7 million unique readers a month. In late 2013, Adams launched the Natural News Forensic Food Lab, where he conducts atomic spectroscopy research into food contaminants using high-end ICP-MS instrumentation. With this research, Adams has made numerous food safety breakthroughs such as revealing rice protein products imported from Asia to be contaminated with toxic heavy metals like lead, cadmium and tungsten. Adams was the first food science researcher to document high levels of tungsten in superfoods. He also discovered over 11 ppm lead in imported mangosteen powder, and led an industry-wide voluntary agreement to limit heavy metals in rice protein products to low levels by July 1, 2015. In addition to his lab work, Adams is also the (non-paid) executive director of the non-profit Consumer Wellness Center (CWC), an organization that redirects 100% of its donations receipts to grant programs that teach children and women how to grow their own food or vastly improve their nutrition. Click here to see some of the CWC success stories. With a background in science and software technology, Adams is the original founder of the email newsletter technology company known as Arial Software. Using his technical experience combined with his love for natural health, Adams developed and deployed the content management system currently driving NaturalNews.com. He also engineered the high-level statistical algorithms that power SCIENCE.naturalnews.com, a massive research resource now featuring over 10 million scientific studies. Adams is well known for his incredibly popular consumer activism video blowing the lid on fake blueberries used throughout the food supply. He has also exposed "strange fibers" found in Chicken McNuggets, fake academic credentials of so-called health "gurus," dangerous "detox" products imported as battery acid and sold for oral consumption, fake acai berry scams, the California raw milk raids, the vaccine research fraud revealed by industry whistleblowers and many other topics. Adams has also helped defend the rights of home gardeners and protect the medical freedom rights of parents. Adams is widely recognized to have made a remarkable global impact on issues like GMOs, vaccines, nutrition therapies, human consciousness. In addition to his activism, Adams is an accomplished musician who has released ten popular songs covering a variety of activism topics.
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Post by Master Kim on Aug 12, 2015 23:26:54 GMT -5
Depopulation test run? 75% of children who received vaccines in Mexican town now dead or hospitalized - www.naturalnews.com/049669_vaccine_injury_depopulation_agenda_deadly_side_effects.htmlMonday, May 11, 2015 by Mike Adams, the Health Ranger (NaturalNews) Despite the insidious attempts of the corporate-controlled U.S. media to censor the stories about the deadly side effects of vaccines, the truth keeps surfacing. The latest vaccine tragedy to strike has killed two babies in La Pimienta, Mexico and sent 37 more to the hospital with serious reactions to toxic vaccine additives. "...14 children are in serious condition, 22 are stable and one is in critical condition," the Chiapas Health Secretariat said in a statement via Latino.FoxNews.com. What's especially alarming is that only 52 children were vaccinated in all, meaning that 75% of those receiving the vaccines are now either dead or hospitalized. The vaccines were administered by the Mexican Social Security Institute, known as IMSS. The IMSS confirmed the deadly reactions occurred after children received injections of vaccines for tuberculosis, rotavirus and hepatitis B -- the same viral strains targeted by vaccines routinely administered to children in the United States. IMSS suspends vaccination pending further investigationAccording to Fox News Latino, the IMSS has suspended the vaccines pending the outcome of an investigation into why so many children have been killed and hospitalized. According to the entire mainstream media in the United States -- which is 100% controlled by corporate interests -- vaccines never harm anyone and are perfectly safe to inject into children in unlimited quantities. This dangerous, inhumane "Vaccine Injury Denialism" is rampant across the corporate-controlled media, which contributes to the deaths of innocent babies and children by refusing to acknowledge the truth that vaccines kill and injure children on a regular basis. Just recently, in fact, the UK government agreed to pay $90 million to victims of the swine flu vaccine. That vaccine caused permanent brain damage to over 800 children across Europe. The truth is that vaccines regularly harm and even kill innocent children, most likely because of the toxic chemical adjuvants and preservatives they still contain. As the CDC openly admits, vaccines are still intentionally formulated with mercury, aluminum, MSG and formaldehyde. Some vaccines even use ingredients derived from aborted human fetal tissue. Last year, a CDC scientist blew the whistle on the CDC committing scientific fraud to cover up links between vaccines and autism in young African-American males. Test run for depopulation via vaccines?As globalists now fully realize, vaccines are by far the best way to cull the human population because most people can be tricked into lining up and asking for them. Thus, there's no need to resort to all the difficulties used by the Nazis to commit genocide in World War II, involving complex logistics of railroad cars, gas chambers, construction of mass graves, prisoner tracking via IBM computing technology, and so on. (Yes, Nazi genocide and prisoner tracking was powered by early IBM computers. See IBM and the Holocaust, the strategic alliance between Nazi Germany and America's most powerful corporation...)As the vaccine industry has now come to realize, it's so much easier to kill people when they voluntarily comply with the injections. Hence the aggressive media propaganda push to achieve absolute blind obedience to vaccines so that no one will ask questions when sterilization or euthanasia chemicals are used. That's no doubt why vaccines have been routinely tested for depopulation programs via two primary methods: # 1) Achieve covert sterilizations of targeted populations by combining sterilization chemicals with vaccines. (The "slow kill.") # 2) Directly kill vaccine recipients by intentionally lacing vaccines with euthanasia chemicals that cause death. (The "fast kill.") Method #1 has been repeatedly used throughout Africa, Mexico and South America to inflict sterilization upon targeted groups via immunization and vaccination programs. Just last year, in fact, I reported on the discovery of a covert depopulation vaccine program being run in Kenya: Tetanus vaccines given to millions of young women in Kenya have been confirmed by laboratories to contain a sterilization chemical that causes miscarriages, reports the Kenya Catholic Doctors Association, a pro-vaccine organization. A whopping 2.3 million young girls and women are in the process of being given the vaccine, pushed by UNICEF and the World Health Organization. "We sent six samples from around Kenya to laboratories in South Africa. They tested positive for the HCG antigen," Dr. Muhame Ngare of the Mercy Medical Centre in Nairobi told LifeSiteNews. "They were all laced with HCG." Method #2 now appears to be under way in Mexico as 75% of those children injected with vaccines are now either dead or hospitalized. Vaccine-induced depopulation was attempted in Mexico in 1974As Truth Stream Media exhaustively documented, a depopulation exercise was run in Mexico in 1974, using vaccines as the cover story. The scheme was dreamed up after the release of the National Security Study Memorandum 200 which highlighted the global population problem and urged governments to find ways to reduce the global population. As TruthStreamMedia.com explains: Concentration on this "problem" of how to reduce the population was planned for 13 key countries, including India, Bangladesh, Pakistan, Nigeria, Mexico, Indonesia, Brazil, the Philippines, Thailand, Egypt, Turkey, Ethiopia and Colombia. Of those, the document singled out Mexico as having one of the highest (and therefore, most worrisome) growth rates of all. The document read, "Perhaps the most significant population trend from the viewpoint of the United States is the prospect that Mexico’s population will increase from 50 million in 1970 to over 130 million by the year 2000." To combat this problem, "medical spooks" -- who were almost certainly U.S.-funded depopulation vaccine crews -- began injecting women all across Mexico with anti-fertility drugs disguised as vaccines. If you doubt this, read your history. The U.S. government's National Institutes of Health was caught red-handed running human medical experiments on prisoners in Guatemala. President Obama was even forced to publicly apologize in 2011 after the cover-up collapsed! There is nothing the Nazis did in the 1930s and 40s that the pharmaceutical industry wouldn't be willing to repeat today under the label of "science." But getting back to Mexico, as the covert depopulation vaccination program spread across Mexico City in 1974, locals began to catch on to the deception, and public resistance grew. As these newspaper clippings reveal, parents began hiding their children in their own homes to avoid them being injected with sterilization chemicals at the public schools. (California, by the way, also targets children at schools in order to avoid parents having the opportunity to say "No!") Mexico City - Associated Press - Rumors that persons disguised as inoculation teams were giving school children shots that sterilized them forced health authorities to suspend all vaccination drives today and to post police outside Mexico City schools. Thousands of parents stormed various schools in the Mexico City area Tuesday and took their children home. It's also important to note that these sterilization vaccines were being administered essentially at gunpoint, as police were accompanying the vaccine crews: Callers told newspapers and TV stations that the sterilization crews were protected by police escorts and that they included white-robed men and women "who looked like foreigners." This same scenario is now about to be replicated in California, by the way, where SB 277 would criminalize parents of children who are not vaccinated, essentially at gunpoint. What's even more interesting is that the exact same arguments we hear today about vaccine skeptics -- they're punitively labeled "anti-vaxxers" or "anti-science" -- were also being used in Mexico in 1974. As the following newspaper clipping shows: The Mexican Medical Association issued statements denying that any kind of inoculation could cause sterility... Officials said superstition and ignorance of preventive health [i.e. "anti-science"] were responsible for the widespread belief that the rumors were true. In other words, even though sterilization teams were running around Mexico, injecting people with chemicals as part of a depopulation agenda, any person who pointed this out was immediately labeled "anti-science" and derided as "ignorant." Very little has changed in four decades, it seems: the same tactic is still used today, even while children are being killed or injured every single day due to the toxic ingredients used in vaccines. CDC's intelligence operatives caught running disinfo campaignsThe "science bullying" behind vaccines also allows governments of the world to run sterilization and depopulation programs disguised as public health. Once the population is bullied into accepting vaccines without question -- blind obedience is now demanded almost everywhere -- governments can add any chemicals they want to those vaccines, including chemicals that cause permanent sterilization or even death. The fact that all vaccine injuries are systematically denied to exist also means that any person harmed or killed by vaccines is immediately wiped from the national memory. Like a criminal mafia, the vaccine industry works hard to hide the bodies and thereby maintain its monopolistic racket on the utterly false premise that vaccines are 100% safe. To further drive home this extraordinary medical propaganda, the CDC uses intelligence operatives like Nurse Hickox who spread disinfo through the mainstream media, which is always happy to comply with the destructive agendas of the vaccine industry. As Natural News uncovered during the Ebola scare of 2014: Nurse Kaci Hickox, who has made headlines over the last few days by refusing to quarantine herself after returning from the Ebola front lines in Africa, turns out to have been trained as an "intelligence officer" under a two-year CDC program modeled after the U.S. military. As you can see from the document below, Hickox graduated from a two-year CDC intelligence officer training program in 2012. This is the same nurse whose LinkedIn page was recently scrubbed to hide her ties to the CDC... The official intelligence designation granted to Nurse Hickox by the CDC was "Epidemic Intelligence Service Officer," and she is a graduate of the 2012 EIS program according to this CDC document (PDF). (See page 138 - 139 for her name and photo, or view photo below.) That same year, the CDC graduated 81 such "intelligence officers" whose names and photos are also listed in the public document. Bottom line? Don't trust the vaccine industryWhat's the takeaway realization from all this? Vaccines have been and will continue to be used as a cover for forced depopulation programs involving sterilization or euthanasia chemicals. Obedience to vaccines allows depopulation teams accompanied by armed police to intimidate people into accepting any liquid they want to put in a syringe. That liquid might be a vaccine, or it might be a sterilization chemical or even a euthanasia chemical. Any population that is indoctrinated into trusting the vaccine industry -- an industry steeped in repeated criminal activity combined with a total disregard for human life -- is ripe for being targeted for depopulation. (See Nigeria Issues Arrest Warrants for Top Pfizer Officials After Drug Experiments Conducted on Children.) After all, why go through the trouble of building gas chambers and rounding people up for mass extermination when you can achieve the same result without any resistance at all if you simply label the chemicals "vaccines"? ( Click here for hi-res version of the graphic below.) Sources for this article at www.naturalnews.com/049669_vaccine_injury_depopulation_agenda_deadly_side_effects.html
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Post by Master Kim on Aug 18, 2015 19:37:25 GMT -5
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Post by Master Kim on Aug 22, 2015 21:29:58 GMT -5
Full Sicko 2007 Movie 1:58:27
Sicko (2007) A documentary comparing the highly profitable American health care industry to other nations, and HMO horror stories including shotgun deaths.
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Post by Master Kim on Aug 23, 2015 16:51:58 GMT -5
Peter Gotzsche, founder of the Cochrane Collaboration, visits Australia to talk about dangers of prescription drugs - www.smh.com.au/national/health/peter-gotzsche-founder-of-the-cochrane-collaboration-visits-australia-to-talk-about-dangers-of-prescription-drugs-20150204-136nqc.htmlFebruary 7, 2015 Amy Corderoy, Health editor Peter Gotzsche, from the Nordic Cochrane Centre in Denmark. Photo: Supplied Many of our most commonly used drugs, from painkillers to antidepressants, are dangerous and are killing us off in large numbers, says a leading researcher visiting Australia next week. Peter Gotzsche, a co-founder of the Cochrane Collaboration, the world's foremost body in assessing medical evidence, arrives in Australia on Monday for a whirlwind speaking tour warning Australians about their use of prescription medications. He estimates that 100,000 people in the United States alone die each year from the side-effects of correctly used drugs. Similar figures are not available in Australia, although the Australian Bureau of Statistics estimates that 3000 people died after complications with medical and surgical care in 2012. "It's remarkable that nobody raises an eyebrow when we kill so many of our own citizens with drugs," Professor Gotzsche, who heads the Nordic Cochrane Centre, told Fairfax Media ahead of his visit. Two of Professor Gotzsche's biggest targets are antidepressants and the painkillers described as " non-steroidal anti-inflammatories such as ibuprofen, diclofenac and celecoxib. Another, sold under the brand name Vioxx, was withdrawn after it emerged it had caused up to 140,000 cases of serious heart disease in the US alone in the five years it was on the market - during which time its manufacturer, Merck was withholding information about its risks. About half the cases were thought to be fatal. Professor Gotzsche says those deaths are only the tip of the iceberg and are representative of a system of drug regulation that simply does not protect patients. Even the name for these drugs, "anti-inflammatory", is not supported by evidence, he says. He has conducted a clinical trial and review of the evidence that has found there is no proof they reduce inflammation. "These terms for our drugs are invented by the drug industry," he said. "They had a huge financial interest in calling these things anti-inflammatory. It lured doctors into believing that these drugs somehow also had an effect on the disease process and reduced the joint damage." In a paper last year in the Lancet Psychiatry journal, Professor Gotzsche argued our use of antidepressants is causing more harm than good. He said as the evidence against drugs such as Valium and Xanax emerged, they have been replaced with antidepressants that are equally as addictive and their side-effects just as dangerous. Furthermore, he says research that showed small benefits over placebos was biased, as it did not properly hide whether patients were in the active or placebo group. Professor Gotzsche said the biggest victims of over-prescription are the elderly. For every 28 elderly people treated for a year with an antidepressant, one will die who would have lived otherwise, from causes including heart attacks, stroke and falls. "Those who use arthritis drugs are mostly the elderly who are most at risk of dying of a heart attack caused by the drug or a bleeding ulcer," he said. "We have a high use of psychiatric drugs by the elderly and we kill an enormous amount of them." Freedom-of-information requests lodged by Fairfax Media have shown more than 4 million antidepressant prescriptions a year are recorded for people aged over 67 - twice the rate for young Australians. "These people get shoved in a nursing home and they get aggravated, so they're knocked out with an antipsychotic drug - it's very inhumane," Professor Gotzsche said. Professor Gotzsche has been criticised for his stance that people should consider slowly going off their antidepressants if they are supported by their doctors in doing so. He believes many doctors mistake withdrawal symptoms for depression, immediately returning patients to their normal medication dose if they experience symptoms, despite the fact antidepressant medications are supposed to take some time to begin working. "If you get depressed by lowering the dose and then immediately increase it to the normal dose, you will usually be well in a couple of hours," he said. "But if you get better straight away it is withdrawal, not depression." But Peter McGeorge, the director of the St Vincent's mental health service, said the hospital will host Professor Gotzsche on Thursday "in the spirit of open inquiry". "I have seen people respond dramatically to the use of antidepressants so I'm certainly not opposed to the use of medicine," he said. "But I do think we have to be careful - and I'm talking more generally now - about just seeing medicine as the answer and prescribing it on the smallest indication it might be successful". He said many hospitals, including the mental health service at St Vincent's, now did not accept drug company representatives, and there was increasing interest in other forms of psychological therapies to help people with mental illness. Professor Gotzsche's list of what to avoid- Antidepressants for all, as they very likely don't even work for severe cases of depression
- All brain-active drugs in children
- Anti-psychotics and other brain-active drugs for the elderly. Psychotropic drugs should be used as little as possible and mostly in very acute situations, as they are very harmful when used long term Anti-dementia drugs, as they very likely don't work
- Non-steroidal anti-inflammatory drugs used for arthritis, muscle pain and headaches, including over-the-counter, low-dose ibuprofen. These drugs should be used as little as possible.
- Mammography screening, as it doesn't prolong life whereas it makes many healthy women ill through overdiagnosis and leads to the premature death for some because radiotherapy and chemotherapy increases mortality when used for harmless cancers detected at screening
- Drugs for urinary incontinence, as they very likely don't work
Professor Gotzsche will appear at a number of events, including the University of Adelaide Club, South Australia on Tuesday the 10th, the State Library of Victoria on Wednesday the 11th, the Garvan Lecture Theatre next to St Vincent's Hospital in Sydney on Thursday the 12th (free), the University of Sydney Law School on Saturday the 14th, and the Adina Apartment Hotel, in Brisbane on Wednesday the 18th. Booking details are available here.
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Post by Master Kim on Aug 29, 2015 22:37:36 GMT -5
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Post by Master Kim on Sept 5, 2015 21:18:26 GMT -5
Thalidomide scandal: 60-year timeline - www.theguardian.com/society/2012/sep/01/thalidomide-scandal-timelineThalidomide was used in the late 1950s and early 1960s to combat morning sickness, but led to children being born without limbs. Now its German inventor has issued an apology. Capsules of Celgene-brand thalidomide. Celgene was granted approval in the US in 1998 to market the drug with severe restrictions for use against leprosy. Photograph: Mike Derer/AP 1953 The anti-morning sickness drug thalidomide is created in Germany by the Grünenthal Group. 1958 Thalidomide is first licensed for use in the UK. 1961 An Australian doctor, William McBride, writes to the Lancet medical journal after noticing an increase in the number of deformed babies born at his hospital, all to mothers who had taken thalidomide. The drug is withdrawn later the same year. 1968 The UK manufacturer Distillers Biochemicals Ltd (now Diageo) reaches a compensation settlement after a legal battle with the families of those affected. 1972 The Sunday Times publishes a front-page lead under the banner "Our thalidomide children, a cause for national shame", part of a long-running campaign for further compensation. Eventually, a total of £28m is paid out by Diageo during the 1970s. 2004 Thalidomide is made available on a named patient basis, meaning doctors can give it to patients only on a case-by-case basis and at their own discretion, under strict controls. 2005 A Kenyan boy with no arms or legs is granted a visa to travel to the UK to receive medical treatment after a campaign by the charity Thalidomide UK. It is not known what caused 14-month-old Freddie Musean Mtile's disabilities, but the charity says the drug is still used in the treatment of leprosy and Aids in developing countries. Mtile dies from a fungal infection the following year. Separately, Diageo agrees to more than double its compensation payouts to thalidomide victims from £2.8m a year to about £6.5m. 2007 A study shows that thalidomide can significantly improve the survival chances of bone-marrow cancer patients. Researchers say adding thalidomide to standard treatment extended the lives of elderly patients with multiple myeloma by an average of 18 months. 2008 The drug is approved for the treatment of multiple myeloma by the European Medicines Agency. 2009 Scientists at the University of Aberdeen claim they have solved a "50-year puzzle" after discovering how thalidomide causes limb defects. They found that a component of the drug prevented the growth of new blood vessels in developing embryos, stunting limb growth. The government agrees to pay a £20m grant to the Thalidomide Trust over three years, after another campaign by the Sunday Times. 2010 The health minister Mike O'Brien makes a formal apology to thalidomide victims, expressing "sincere regret and deep sympathy" on behalf of the government. The apology gets a mixed response from victims, with some describing it as too little, too late. Eighteen Northern Irish thalidomide survivors receive a formal apology and £1m compensation from the devolved assembly. 2012 The inventor of thalidomide, the Grünenthal Group, releases a statement saying it regrets the consequences of the drug.
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Post by Master Kim on Sept 12, 2015 16:49:07 GMT -5
Big Pharma’s placebo problem - www.salon.com/2013/08/03/big_pharmas_placebo_problem/Rebranding drugs is a lucrative tactic for pharma companies. The author suggests it's "corporate deception" - James Davies (Credit: Tish1 via Shutterstock/Salon) Excerpted from "Cracked" In May 1993, a mental disorder that had been in DSM-III was repackaged, renamed, and given new life in DSM-IV. It was called Premenstrual Dysphoric Disorder and was listed in the DSM as a mental disorder.49 Up to 8 percent of women were said to suffer from the condition. And the condition was apparently nasty. Its main symptoms occurred two weeks before menstruation and included feelings of fatigue, anxiety, emotional instability, disinterest in daily activities, and difficulty in concentrating. In short, Premenstrual Dysphoric Disorder was first presented as if it were an exaggerated form of PMT—premenstrual tension. By the early 2000s, the number of women in the United States being diagnosed with PMDD was rising exponentially. And there are some obvious reasons for this. The first was that in 1998 the FDA in the United States recognized the condition as an official mental disorder. This freed up doctors to start diagnosing PMDD when previously they had no disorder category to which they could match premenstrual experiences. Second, the pharmaceutical industry now had the green light to market the disorder and its cure. Eli Lilly was the first to step up to the plate by spending $30 million on advertising its chemical cure. The following advert by the company is illustrative of the type of commercial with which it flooded the airwaves once FDA approval was granted. It shows a woman who has lost her keys growing increasingly frustrated. The voiceover breaks through: Think it’s PMS? It could be PMDD—premenstrual dysphoric disorder. You know, those intense moods and physical symptoms the week before your period. Sound familiar? Call to get free information about PMDD and a treatment your doctor has to relieve its symptoms. Why put up with this another month? Alongside such direct-to-consumer pharmaceutical adverting, Eli Lilly launched a marketing campaign targeting psychiatrists, gynecologists, and mental health providers, who were soon all receiving promotional materials: flyers, free samples, invitations to Lilly talks, and unsolicited visits from pharma reps. As the word spread in the medical community, diagnoses of PMDD quickly soared, and so did the prescriptions. In the mid-2000s when I met a psychotherapist called John, I was therefore unsurprised to hear he had just recently treated a patient diagnosed with the condition. The patient, Sarah, was an attractive 25-year-old with deep auburn hair and strong, dark brown eyes. She entered his consulting room, lowered herself gently into a chair, and began telling him her story. “I really am not myself at the moment. I feel so anxious and confused all the time. I just feel, well, different. It started about six months ago. I began to get these god-awful cramps before my period. It was like my guts were digesting acid. I also got these piercing headaches and I’d feel emotionally all over the place. I went to my local doctor and he sent me to a gynecologist. The gynecologist said he couldn’t find anything physically wrong with me and said I was probably suffering from a psychological disorder I’d never heard of before—Premenstrual Dysphoric Disorder—and he said he could help.” Sarah then said she had been prescribed a new drug called Sarafem. John asked her what she knew about the drug. “Not much, really.” She shrugged nonchalantly. “Apparently it helps with mood swings and other stuff. I take it every day, and I think it helps with the headaches. I don’t know much more than that.” Let me fill the gaps in Sarah’s knowledge. The pharmaceutical giant Eli Lilly makes Sarafem. Its name is a rework of “seraphim,” a Hebrew word meaning “angel,” a word with obvious female overtones. Its packaging also conjures up stereotypical female associations. The pill is encased in a pretty pink-and-lavender shell, and is heralded by Lilly as a wonder cure for this distinctly female premenstrual disorder. So far so good. Now here comes the interesting bit. What Eli Lilly initially concealed from the millions of women taking the pill is that the pill is actually Prozac. Chemically, Sarafem and Prozac are exactly the same. The only difference between them is that their names and packaging are different. Sarah, like thousands of other women up and down the country, was taking Prozac and didn’t know it. *** There are a lot of possible interpretations for why Eli Lilly engaged in what you or I may be tempted to see as corporate deception. The first is that it obviously saved the company a great deal of money. It is cheaper to repackage existing pills than it is to develop new ones. In addition, Eli Lilly’s patent protections on Prozac were running out a year after Sarafem would be released, so marketing Prozac under the new trade name would effectively extend patent protections for many more years. Money matters. But surface appearances also matter. Women, like Sarah, are more likely to feel comfortable consuming pink pills than they are blue pills, because of the associations attached to the different colors. As an article on drug marketing in the Boston Globe said at the time, “Drug designers propose colors for a particular medicine and help make sure there are no symbolic mistakes.” An example of a symbolic mistake would be making a pink Viagra, or a menstruation pill that is dark red. Symbolic mistakes occur when the color, shape, or name of a pill does not resonate with its particular consumer. There has to be a positive correspondence between consumer and product to maximize the sales effect—or so the rationale goes. A final interpretation for Prozac’s rebranding was because Prozac is associated primarily with depression, and women labeled with PMDD are not depressed, just as the patient Sarah wasn’t. So a new name was required to effectively strip from Prozac associations that were potentially undesirable to this new consumer group. Laura Miller, a marketing associate for Eli Lilly, put it this way: [Women] wanted a treatment with its own identity. Women do not look at their symptoms as a depression, and PMDD is not depression but a separate clinical entity. Prozac is one of the more famous pharmaceutical trademarks and is closely associated with depression. By rebranding Prozac as Sarafem, Eli Lilly divided the one chemical into two separate pills for two different disorders. One pill continued to be marketed as an antidepressant. The other they marketed as a so-called premenstrual corrective. A new pill was born not because a new chemical had been found, but because a popular brand had been changed. “Eli Lilly is not alone in rebranding pills,” Nathan Greenslit, a young and dynamic professor at MIT’s prestigious Science, Technology, and Society Program, told me. As we exchanged messages about Sarafem online from our respective offices in London and Boston, Greenslit, who has spent years studying the pharmaceutical industry, revealed that in 1997 the FDA approved GlaxoSmith-Kline’s antidepressant Wellbutrin as a smoking cessation pill. But, again, because Wellbutrin was too well known as an antidepressant to be publically accepted as an antismoking pill, Wellbutrin was rebranded as Zyban. GlaxoSmithKline marketed them as separate drugs that targeted separate and discrete disorders: Wellbutrin targeted depression, and Zyban nicotine addiction. The website for Zyban puts it this way: “Zyban is a nicotine-free pill. Not a patch. Not a gum.” Under the heading “Zyban: Helping Smokers Quit Neurochemically,” the site claims that “while it is unclear exactly how Zyban works, it is thought to act on the part of your brain that is addicted to the ingredients in cigarettes.” “As was the case with Sarafem and Prozac,” Greenslit wrote in an article, “the patient-directed information does not admit that Wellbutrin and Zyban are the same drug.” By giving the old drugs a makeover, they could treat complaints other than those they were designed to treat originally. What is interesting about these interpretations as to why the rebranding of Prozac occurred is that each is so entirely plausible that it is tempting for you and me to look no further for explanations. The name was changed for reasons of marketing and money—simple as that. But what if it isn’t that simple? What if something else is going on here, something far trickier to understand, but something essential to understand to complete the picture? Hold that question in mind. * * * How can it be that a sugar pill with no active chemical properties can lighten your mood or decrease your anxiety? The time has come to resolve that mystery. In the 1980s, the National Institute of Mental Health sponsored a fascinating experiment. It set out to evaluate the effectiveness of antidepressants and psychotherapy in the treatment of depression. The experiment was actually very simple. It asked each patient before treatment began the following question: “What is likely to happen as a result of your treatment?” After the researchers calculated the results, a startling conclusion emerged: the answer the patient gave to this question predicted his or her therapeutic outcome. In other words, those who expected to feel better improved the most, while those who expected little or no improvement received the least benefit from treatment. Furthermore, this result was the same regardless of whether the patient had been treated with antidepressant medication, psychotherapy, or a placebo. In short, whatever the therapy patients were given, the patients with positive expectations improved most. The conclusion: expectations matter. But if expectations matter, is there anything that can be done to increase a patient’s expectation of recovery and, in turn, his or her therapeutic outcome? The simple answer is yes. To understand what can be done, imagine yourself in the following scenario: You are sitting in a lecture room listening to a presentation. But you are finding it difficult to concentrate because you have a throbbing headache. Now imagine that the man sitting next to you notices that you are in pain and offers you a small, white pill, quietly telling you the pill will help you feel better. After some deliberation you decide to take the pill (perhaps unwisely) and see what happens. And after a while you notice, disappointingly, that nothing happens at all. So you turn to the man at the end and ask what he gave you. He replies he gave you a sugar pill. Surely we now have an explanation for why the pill did not work—it was made of sugar. That would be the obvious answer. But the trouble with obvious answers is that they tend to lead us astray. For example, we know from placebo studies that the probable reason the pill did not work will have less to do with its being a sugar pill than with where it was given to you and by whom. You see, the man next to you was not a medical doctor, and the lecture room is not a hospital, and these contextual factors are significant enough to affect whether the pill will work. For example, if you were to meet the same man in a hospital and believe him to be a doctor, a curious thing will happen if he gives you the same pill: its effectiveness may increase by up to 40 percent. It is the same man and the same sugar pill, but the effects are now dramatically different. And they are different because the contextual meanings have changed. You are in a hospital and you believe this person to be a doctor, and so you now expect the pill to work. And because you expect the pill to work, it is more likely to do so. The point of the above illustration is to show that cultural meanings matter. They have the power to increase or decrease, almost subliminally, our expectations for recovery and therefore the extent to which we actually improve. But how does this insight help us deepen our understanding of why Eli Lilly repackaged Prozac? How could this research be used to explain to Sarah why the pills she was taking were simply a glammed-up version of Prozac? Just recall for a moment that key to the repackaging process was altering the color of the pill. There’s our clue. Prozac is green and white, while Sarafem is pink and lavender. So maybe there is something about the color of a pill that impinges not only upon its attractiveness but also upon its effectiveness? Could the very color of a pill help it work? An early experiment published in the Lancet explored this very question. What the group of researchers did was gather up 56 medical students and hand each of them a package containing red and blue pills. All the students were told was that one color represented a tranquilizer and the other a stimulant. After taking the pills, the students were then asked which set of pills were the stimulants and which the tranquilizers. The majority concluded that the blue pills were the tranquilizers and the red pills the stimulants. They reached this conclusion because when taking the blue pills they felt far less alert and much drowsier than when taking the red pills. The researchers then told the students that, chemically, the blue and red pills were exactly the same—both sets of pills were made entirely of sugar. But how could dummy pills yield such different effects? The answer is once again found in recognizing the power of cultural meanings. For the medical students, the colors red and blue each held very different meanings: red means “hot,” “up,” and “danger” (meanings fitting stimulated behavior), while blue means “down,” “calm,” “cool,” and “quiet” (meanings fitting tranquilized behavior). The meanings attached to the different colored pills affected the drug’s perceived action and effectiveness. Scientists like Dr. Alan Branthwaite are not surprised by the power of placebo effects. I spoke to Dr. Branthwaite on a Tuesday morning in early February 2012. His manner was scholarly and cautious, but as soon as I raised the topic of placebo effects he became animated. “These effects are staggering when you first encounter them, and they still stagger me today,” he said. “The human body is so fundamentally linked to the mind that if you can spark the right mental associations, then the body responds, sometimes in dramatic and unexpected ways.” Branthwaite won the medical community’s acclaim when he published a paper in the British Medical Journal on placebo effects. What his study set out to discover was whether the presence or absence of a trusted brand name on a pill can affect recovery. “So we devised a neat experiment,” he said enthusiastically. “We gathered up about 835 women who regularly use painkillers for headaches and then randomly assigned them to one of four groups. And we gave each group a different pill. The first group had aspirin labeled with a popular brand name; the second group had the same aspirin but with no brand name; the third group had a sugar pill marked with the popular brand name; and the fourth group had an unmarked sugar pill. The question was which group would improve most?” What Branthwaite and his team were expecting to find was a small increase in the effectiveness of the branded pills. “But what shocked us entirely,” he continued, “was the extent of that difference. The group given the branded placebos improved almost 20 percent more than those with the unbranded placebos, while branded aspirins also worked significantly better than unbranded ones. So here we had striking evidence that the presence of a trusted brand name can dramatically improve a pill’s efficacy, even if that pill is completely inert.” Taking these two studies together shows how surface things that may seem inconsequential to you and me (the color or brand name of a pill) are crucially important to the healing process. Subliminally they play with our expectations for recovery, and expectations, in fear of repeating myself, can dramatically affect outcomes. * * * To try to get to the bottom of how these meaning effects work, I spoke to Daniel Moerman, distinguished professor of anthropology at the University of Michigan. Moerman has dedicated much of his professional life to investigating how cultural meanings affect bodily functioning, and is widely known in academia as a world leader in placebo research. I suggested to Moerman how odd it is that the meanings we ascribe to a pill can sometimes be more powerful than its active substance, especially in the realm of psychopharmacology. “Well, James, you’re an anthropologist, right? You know the power of meaning! Every culture has its symbols and objects of veneration and it is no different with us. Once, for us, we revered crosses and statues of the Virgin Mary, but now pills and stethoscopes capture our worship. So even an inert pill can affect us because it has shape and form and a context, and it has language attached. It comes in a blue box or a pink box, it’s taken in a pharmacy, doctor’s room, or hospital with all the panoply of a thousand years of medical tradition behind it to give it overwhelming symbolic weight.” One of Moerman’s recent studies shows how the power of medical sanction should not be underestimated. Medical approval is crucial to all of us, even the most critical among us. What Moerman did was gather up 117 studies of ulcer drugs published between 1976 and 1994 to discover what drugs worked best. As the results came in, he realized something astonishing. In 1975 a new ulcer drug called Cimetidine was released. It enjoyed excellent clinical success, eradicating, on average, 80 percent of ulcers. As time passed, however, the drug’s efficacy strangely became lower and lower, until today Cimetidine can only claim to eradicate 50 percent of ulcers. So what had happened to the pill? Moerman explains the deterioration by pointing out that five years after Cimetidine’s release, a new drug called Ranitidine arrived. This competing drug was considered superior to Cimetidine, and as the new drug’s popularity grew, the old drug’s effectiveness declined. The correlation was staggering. Of course, there are different interpretations of this (questions of changes in methods, etc.), but the most compelling, and to Moerman the most plausible, is that Cimetidine lost its power because as new and supposedly superior drugs arrived, Cimetidine ceased to be thought of as a superior drug. Belief in Cimetidine had waned, and with it so did its clinical effectiveness. “So it’s clear,” said Moerman animatedly, “meaning matters!” * * * Let’s now return to our original question. We know that Sarah was unaware that the drug she was taking was Prozac. She thought that Sarafem was a specific pill developed for her specific “problem.” Sarah was wrong. What Sarah also did not know was that Prozac was rebranded as Sarafem more for financial than scientific reasons. But the question still remains about whether Prozac was rebranded for other reasons too. Was it rebranded because the company knew that Prozac would provoke only a small placebo effect in women suffering from so-called PMDD? Did Lilly turn Prozac into a distinctly female pill to achieve a higher placebo effect in this new patient group? In order to answer this question, we first have to answer a broader one: Does Big Pharma more generally make use of placebo studies to manipulate higher placebo effects in patients? I put this question to Moerman. “In my experience, people in the pharmaceutical industry are either incredibly good actors or are remarkably dense. They are good actors if they make use of these studies but pretend not to, and they are dense if they don’t make use of them at all.” So, to use Moerman’s words, is the pharmaceutical industry led by actors or dunces? I decided to cut to the chase and find out for myself. I contacted Eli Lilly’s headquarters in the UK and asked whether placebo studies are consciously used to create higher placebo effects in their consumers. The head of corporate affairs reluctantly responded after some prompting: “I forwarded your enquiry to colleagues in our Global HQ, as only they would be in a position to answer. Due to competing priorities, they are unable to provide a response.” Competing priorities? What did that mean? I politely wrote back asking Eli Lilly for some clarification. They wrote back curtly: “There is no Lilly response. Your questions are very specific and the person or people who might be able to answer them have chosen to decline on this occasion.” So now you understand the problem. Questions like mine are rarely answered by the industry because there are just some things companies don’t want you or me to know. Pharmaceutical companies are notoriously secretive. They have a history of not only concealing how pills are developed and marketed but of concealing negative trials that show their drugs in a bad light . So in the absence of corporate transparency, all we can rely on is indirect evidence to answer the actor/dunce question. Let’s look at some of that evidence now. We know that companies regularly pay academics to discuss their work with company employees and executives. We also know these companies have conducted their own in-house studies and data mining, and have in recent years funded the work of leading placebo scientists like Ted Kaptchuk and Fabrizio Benedetti (even Branthwaite’s study of brand names I spoke of earlier was pharmaceutically funded). Furthermore, American journalist Steve Silberman recently exposed how a massive study of placebo effects (undertaken by the Foundation for the National Institute of Health) is being funded by companies including Merck, Eli Lilly, Pfizer, AstraZeneca, and GlaxoSmithKline. “In typically secretive industry fashion,” Silberman told me during our interview, “the existence of the project itself is being kept under wraps. FNIH staffers are willing to talk about it only anonymously, concerned about offending the companies paying for it.” During our conversation, Silberman also mentioned that a few years ago when the Public Library of Science hosted a debate about whether the pharmaceutical industry should be allowed to continue advertising antidepressants to the general public, Randall S. Stafford, a senior consultant with Merck, GlaxoSmithKline, Bayer, and Procter & Gamble, argued that banning the ads might result in an abrupt reduction of drug effectiveness by reducing the placebo effect en masse. “This was an astonishing and very rare admission,” Silberman said to me, “because the pharmaceutical industry won’t publically acknowledge that the placebo response is giving a boost to the drugs they make. But here we had a major consultant openly declaring that the adverts are all about generating the expectations that help increase placebo effects, and that if you cut back on the marketing, the pills’ effectiveness will dramatically decrease.” Furthermore, again and again we find striking correspondences between what placebo research tells us and how actual pills are being developed. These correspondences strongly suggest that companies are taking account of placebo research when developing and marketing their pills. For instance, recall for a moment the study I quoted earlier that showed that blue sugar pills create sedating effects and red sugar pills create stimulating effects, even when both pills are made of sugar. A team in the Netherlands has recently researched the actual colors of the pills that you and I take. And it turns out that nearly 80 percent of all sedative pills were green, purple, blue, or white (green, purple, and blue are sedating colors) while of all the antidepressants (uppers) only 5 percent fell into the green, purple, or blue category, 40 percent into the white category, and all the rest were colored in “stimulating colors.” Is it just coincidence that companies are manufacturing pills that largely match the placebo research? Without being allowed to observe these companies at work directly (trust me, I and many colleagues have requested access countless times, but the doors remain closed), the question of whether companies are manipulating placebo research must continue to hang in the air. Of course the indirect evidence strongly suggests that placebo research is now regularly manipulated, that pills like Prozac are not just altered for reasons of marketing and money but because the features of Prozac, its color, its name, and its associations, would not successfully evoke the placebo response in women labeled with PMDD. Did these companies believe that women required a different pill, with different hopes and expectations attached, to get the result they wanted? I know what I think, but given the absence of direct evidence, I’ll just have to leave you to reach your own conclusion. * * * “Sarah, I have a question for you,” John says carefully. “Did you know that the drug you are taking is actually Prozac?” Sarah’s head tilts sharply to one side. “Excuse me?” “What I mean is, did you know that Sarafem and Prozac are chemically exactly the same?” Sarah sits back for a moment, looking at John skeptically. Then a sudden wave of anxiety flashes across her face. She sits forward sharply. “You’re kidding me, aren’t you?” “I’m afraid I am not, Sarah.” “But . . . but that’s wrong, isn’t it?” said Sarah, looking distressed. “Why would they do that?” “Well, Sarah, that requires a complicated answer.” “But isn’t Prozac for depression? I don’t have depression.” “No, you don’t, or at least you didn’t. The important thing is that since taking the pills you feel different. Perhaps we could spend a little time now thinking about precisely how you feel different. So before we do anything, I want to explore the role that the pills you are taking have played in how you feel now.” “What, you mean that Sarafem may be responsible for why I feel different?” “I don’t know,” John responded. “It’s possible. Even so, it is important for us to find out.” “Jesus, I didn’t know.” “The sad truth, Sarah, is that most people don’t . . .” Reprinted from “ Cracked: The Unhappy Truth About Psychiatry” by James Davies, with permission from Pegasus Books. Copyright © 2013
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Post by Master Kim on Sept 16, 2015 15:04:22 GMT -5
NASA gives thumbs up to use of colloidal silver as antibiotic in space; FDA has no jurisdiction in high orbit - www.naturalnews.com/051148_silver_clean_water_nasa.htmlSaturday, September 12, 2015 by: Ethan A. Huff, staff writer (NaturalNews) In the day-to-day happenings of world politics, the United States and Russia are presented on the global stage as arch-enemies. Up in space, however, it's a completely different story. Enter the International Space Station (ISS), which for years has housed astronauts from both countries along with life-support systems unique to each country's needs. The two sides have long remained separate from one another until recently. For years, the U.S. side of the ISS utilized iodine as its water cleansing agent of choice, while the Russian side took advantage of antibacterial silver for water purification purposes. Both sides coexisted peacefully in their respective methods, with the U.S. picking up whatever extra water the Russian side had leftover. Russia's water purification process has always been much more efficient than that of the U.S. It seemed that the two opposing nations would never find a common bond in adopting a single, standardized water purification method that served the interests of everyone. However, the National Aeronautics and Space Administration (NASA) recently made the decision to adopt Russia's method of purifying its water after coming to the realization that adding ionized silver to water is easier, more effective, and much more efficient than adding iodine. "Unlike iodine, silver doesn't have to be filtered out of the water," explains a report by Bloomberg, noting that iodine has to be filtered out of the U.S. water after use. "Epsom salts (magnesium) are added to improve its taste." NASA says silver is an effective purifying agent, despite what the FDA claimsIsn't the U.S. Food and Drug Administration (FDA) adamantly opposed to people using silver as a safe bactericide? The agency has repeatedly targeted companies trying to help people with antibacterial silver, including during the recent Ebola epidemic when it threatened organizations like the Natural Solutions Foundation for attempting to help Ebola victims by providing them with silver water. What about the FDA's persecution of Texas-based Utopia Silver Supplements, which has been fighting the agency for more than five years to defend its sale and distribution of colloidal silver supplements? The FDA continues to stonewall all attempts to conduct honest research into silver's bacteria-destroying properties, and they have even threatened to shut down companies that sell it for personal and/or medical use. The FDA apparently has no jurisdiction up in space, as both U.S. and Russian astronauts will now be taking advantage of silver as a water purifier. Clean water is understandably hard to come by on a space shuttle, and any method of obtaining it is open game. The fact that silver is now the primary method of keeping astronauts alive says a lot about its therapeutic potential. The U.S. side of the ISS will continue to produce drinking water using iodine as a backup. As ISS subsystems manager Layne Carter puts it, they plan "to have dissimilar redundancies in the space station in case one of the systems has problems." Nevertheless, the purifying method of choice will now be silver. "Due to widespread growth in the use of colloidal silver as a biocidal agent, development of a simple and cost efficient method of silver testing is valuable," admits NASA on its website. "On station, silver is used as a biocidal agent based on its antimicrobial properties in the potable water system." Too much silver may be toxic to humans, so NASA is supporting research into a simple technique that it says will allow ISS crew members to test silver levels in water in less than two minutes. Sources for this article include: Bloomberg.comNaturalNews.comNaturalNews.comNaturalNews.com
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Post by Master Kim on Oct 14, 2015 11:39:42 GMT -5
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Post by Master Kim on Oct 16, 2015 14:21:50 GMT -5
The Stink of Pink: Why Mammograms Are Vastly Oversold - articles.mercola.com/sites/articles/archive/2015/10/14/mammography-promotion.aspx?e_cid=20151014Z1_DNL_10OFF_art_1&utm_source=dnl&utm_medium=email&utm_content=art1&utm_campaign=20151014Z1_DNL_10OFF&et_cid=DM89809&et_rid=1168506431October 14, 2015 By Dr. Mercola Visit the Mercola Video LibraryEarly detection through mammography is the annual clarion call of pink-ribboned Breast Cancer Awareness campaigns. October 21 is National Mammography Day — a day during which women are barraged with reminders that getting a mammogram could save their life. However, little effort has been made to educate women about the crucial differences between non-malignant lesions and invasive or non-invasive cancers detected through this technology. Instead, the general idea that breast cancer is something you either have or don't have is perpetuated, without any distinctions of its relative risk for harm. Fortunately, there are rays of hope, as both researchers and journalists are starting to speak out against the overuse and risks of mammography. Ionizing Radiation Is a Cancer RISK — Why Is It Promoted as a Primary 'Prevention' Tool? First of all, it's important to realize that the ionizing radiation used to discern breast tumors is a risk factor for the development of breast cancer. Additionally, if you do have a malignant tumor, the crushing compression of your breast could potentially cause it to spread. Yet you won't see any information about these risks during these pinkwashing campaigns. Nor will you hear that these risks may be magnified if you are genetically predisposed to breast cancer. In fact, women with BRCA mutation are typically advised to get mammograms every six months or so, which is clearly a recommendation that will increase malignant transformation due to ionizing radiation exposure. Secondly, the identification of the word "prevention" with "early detection," is a disingenuous way of saying that "all we can do to prevent breast cancer is to detect its inevitable presence sooner than would be possible without this technology." This is absolute deceptive hogwash as nothing could be further from the truth. Detection is NOT prevention, and really should not be advertised as such. Pink-Washing Away Preventable Causes of Breast Cancer The Susan G. Komen Foundation has done a great deal of harm to women by obfuscating the authentic preventative measures available to combat breast cancer; downplaying the preventive role of a healthy diet rich in fruits and vegetables for example, while heavily promoting mammography. Another atrocious example of this conspiracy against identifying the obvious causes and cures for breast cancer is the National Breast Cancer Foundation's website. Type in "carcinogen" in their site wide search box and you will be rewarded with ZERO results. Not a single page addresses the role of carcinogenic chemicals in the development of breast cancer. On Susan G. Komen's website, the search term "carcinogen" yields just one study on an antidepressant ingredient. The word is not even listed in the breast cancer glossary. Meanwhile, researchers have identified a number of pervasive chemicals that increase your risk of breast cancer. Avoiding toxic exposures is one of the rational approaches to successful breast cancer prevention, along with healthy lifestyle strategies such as eating real food, exercising, and optimizing your vitamin D levels. By hiding the role that your lifestyle and exposure to carcinogenic chemicals play in the development of cancer, these massive organizations can continue to collect billions of dollars of donations every year in the name of "finding a cure." The Pink Ribbon ScamAs noted by Karuna Jaggar, executive director of Breast Cancer Action, in a Huffington Post article published last year: Breast Cancer Awareness Month Has Produced 'Reckless Misinformation' on Breast CancerAstraZeneca was in fact a by-product of one of the world's largest chemical (and carcinogen) producers, Imperial Chemical Industries (ICI). Before being acquired by AkzoNobel in 2008, ICI produced millions of pounds annually of known mammary carcinogens such as vinyl chloride. In 1993, ICI demerged its pharmaceutical bioscience businesses to form Zeneca Group, which later merged with Astra AB to form AstraZeneca in 1999. Over the years, a number of experts and organizations have pointed out this glaring conflict of interest: False Positives Create Pseudo-Survivors of 'Breast Cancer' Mammography can detect invasive breast cancer in women. This is not in dispute. What IS in dispute is whether or not routine mammograms are really the right tool to reduce breast cancer rates, and whether it might harm more women than it helps in the process. A growing body of evidence suggests that it does in fact, on the whole, do more harm than good by generating high rates of false positives. A woman receiving a false positive diagnosis undergoes the same emotional trauma as those with an accurate diagnosis, and this trauma cannot (and should not) be trivialized. According to a Swedish study, women who received a false positive before later being found to be cancer-free: 88 percent felt dejected, sad, or "unable to cope" 83 percent suffered anxiety 67 percent experienced behavioral changes, such as trouble dealing with work or spare time 53 percent had trouble sleeping Those who opt for aggressive treatment such as a mastectomy, radiation, and/or chemotherapy after a false positive diagnosis also undergo physical pain and suffering "for nothing." Yet women who believe their lives were saved by mammography are hard-pressed to buy into the idea that routine mammograms are more harmful than helpful. But as recently addressed by Forbes magazine in an article7 titled, "Has Mammography Created An Epidemic Of Pseudo-Survivorship?" many women who believe they're breast cancer survivors may not have had a life-threatening tumor at all... They're not survivors of breast cancer; they're survivors of breast cancer treatment. Ductal Carcinoma in Situ — Is it Actually Cancer? Forbes specifically addresses the issue of stage zero cancer known as ductal carcinoma in situ (DCIS), which refers to the abnormal growth of cells forming a lesion that is typically between 1 to 1.5 cm in diameter. About 25 percent (approximately 60,000 cases each year) of all new breast cancer diagnoses obtained through mammography fall in this category. Some experts have argued DCIS should be reclassified as a non-cancerous condition, yet proponents of mammography claim they're "saving lives" through the "early detection" and treatment of DCIS. They view DCIS as "pre-cancerous" and argue that, because it could eventually cause harm if left untreated it should be treated in the same aggressive manner as invasive cancer. The problem with this approach is that the weight of evidence indicates less than half of DCIS cases ever progress to invasive cancer, and in many cases, taking no action beyond "watchful waiting" is the best course of action. As reported by Time Magazine,10 a study published in August found that "no matter how a woman is treated for DCIS, the mortality risk is 3 percent – similar to the average for the general population. " The article also points out the problem with referring to non-invasive lesions like DCIS as "cancer:" Mammography Fuels Fear by Falsely Inflating Breast Cancer Rates One study found that at the 40-year follow-up period, 40 percent of DCIS lesions still had no signs of invasiveness. Adding even more uncertainty, another study showed that coexisting DCIS independently predicts lower tumor aggressiveness in node-positive luminal breast cancer, suggesting it may have a protective role. The irony is that while participation in X-ray mammography is considered a form of breast cancer prevention, it has become a very effective way of manufacturing false breast cancer diagnoses and justifying completely unnecessary treatment. As noted by Forbes,11 in which the harrowing story of a woman treated for DCIS is detailed: New Tools and Studies That May Improve Treatment Decisions New tools have emerged that may help in making treatment decisions following a diagnosis of breast cancer. These include genetic tests, such as: Oncotype DX, which may help determine how well your tumor might respond to chemotherapy Oncotype DX DCIS, which offers an indication of your risk for recurrence of DCIS, and whether radiation therapy following a lumpectomy might be beneficial A DCIS registry is also being created at five University of California medical centers. Women diagnosed with DCIS at these facilities will be given the option of active surveillance, and will be tracked over time to evaluate the outcomes of various treatment options for DCIS. Researchers have also launched a study aimed at learning more about screening. The WISDOM study, led by breast cancer surgeon Dr. Laura J. Esserman — an outspoken opponent of overdiagnosis and overtreatment — will randomly assign women with DCIS to receive either annual mammography screening or a personalized screening approach. As reported by The New York Times, which recently profiled Dr. Esserman's more cautious approach to breast cancer treatment: Adding Computer Analysis to Mammograms Doesn't Improve AccuracyEvery time we write a disparaging article on mammograms many women comment that they believe in them because they saved their life. While I am delighted they were able to avoid dying from breast cancer, that view fails to consider the broader picture that more and more studies confirm, which is that overall mammograms cause far more damage than good. Even newer mammogram revisions are proving to be poor at detecting cancer and improving outcomes. For example, computer-aided detection (CAD) for mammography, which is used in 90 percent of US mammograms at a cost of $400 million a year, does nothing to improve the accuracy of the test, according to a recent study. The study looked at more than 625,000 mammograms from nearly 324,000 women to determine whether CAD actually improves a radiologist's interpretation of a mammogram or not. As it turns out, CAD had no beneficial impact on mammography interpretation, leading the authors to conclude that: "These results suggest that insurers pay more for CAD with no established benefit to women." In fact, radiologists were more prone to miss cancer when using CAD compared to when not using it. Overall, radiologists correctly identified cancer 90 percent of the time when CAD was not used, and only 83 percent of the time when they used CAD. Two New Studies Refute the Value of Mammograms Last but certainly not least, I want to bring attention to two new studies that refute the validity of mammography as a primary tool against breast cancer. The first, published in JAMA Internal Medicine on July 6, 2015, confirmed previous findings showing mammography screenings lead to unnecessary treatments while having virtually no impact on the number of deaths from breast cancer. Previous research has shown that for every life saved by mammography screening, three women will be overdiagnosed and treated with surgery, radiation, or chemotherapy for a cancer that might never have given them trouble in their lifetimes. In the new JAMA study, a positive correlation between breast cancer screening and breast cancer incidence was again found, but there was no positive correlation with mortality. The second study published in the Journal of the Royal Society of Medicine declares its conclusion right in the title, which reads: "Mammography screening is harmful and should be abandoned." In short, decades of routine breast cancer screening using mammograms has done nothing to decrease deaths from breast cancer, while causing more than half (52 percent) of all women undergoing the test to be overdiagnosed and overtreated. According to lead author Peter C Gøtzsche, had mammograms been a drug, "it would have been withdrawn from the market long ago." Cancer Prevention Begins With Your Lifestyle ChoicesMammograms are portrayed as the best form of "prevention" a woman can get. But early diagnosis is not the same as prevention. And cancer screening that does more harm than good can hardly qualify as the best you can hope for... I believe the vast majority of all cancers could be prevented by strictly applying basic, common-sense, and healthy lifestyle strategies, such as the ones below: - Eat real food; avoid processed foods and sugars, especially processed fructose. All forms of sugar are detrimental to health in general and promote cancer. Fructose, however, is clearly one of the most harmful and should be avoided as much as possible.
- Stop eating AT LEAST three hours before going to bed. There is quite compelling evidence showing that when you supply fuel to the mitochondria in your cells at a time when they don't need it, they will leak a large number of electrons that will liberate reactive oxygen species (free radicals), which damage mitochondrial and eventually nuclear DNA. There is also evidence to indicate that cancer cells uniformly have damaged mitochondria, so the last thing you want to do is eat before you go to bed. Personally, I strive for six hours of fasting before bedtime.
- Optimize your vitamin D. Vitamin D influences virtually every cell in your body and is one of nature's most potent cancer fighters. Vitamin D is actually able to enter cancer cells and trigger apoptosis (cell death). If you have cancer, your vitamin D level should be between 70 and 100 ng/ml. Vitamin D works synergistically with every cancer treatment I'm aware of, with no adverse effects. I suggest you try watching my one-hour free lecture on vitamin D to learn more.
- Limit your protein. Newer research has emphasized the importance of the mTOR pathways. When these are active, cancer growth is accelerated. To quiet this pathway, I believe it may be wise to limit your protein to one gram of protein per kilogram of lean body mass, or roughly a bit less than half a gram of protein per every pound of lean body weight.
- Avoid unfermented soy products. Unfermented soy is high in plant estrogens, or phytoestrogens, also known as isoflavones. In some studies, soy appears to work in concert with human estrogen to increase breast cell proliferation, which increases the chances for mutations and cancerous cells.
- Improve your insulin and leptin receptor sensitivity. The best way to do this is by avoiding sugar and grains and restricting carbs to mostly fiber vegetables. Also making sure you are exercising, especially with high-intensity interval training.
- Exercise regularly. One of the primary reasons exercise works to lower your cancer risk is because it drives your insulin levels down, and controlling your insulin levels is one of the most powerful ways to reduce your cancer risks. It's also been suggested that apoptosis (programmed cell death) is triggered by exercise, causing cancer cells to die. Studies have also found that the number of tumors decrease along with body fat, which may be an additional factor. This is because exercise helps lower your estrogen levels, which explains why exercise appears to be particularly potent against breast cancer.
- Maintain a healthy body weight. This will come naturally when you begin eating right for your nutritional type and exercising. It's important to lose excess body fat because fat produces estrogen.
- Drink a pint to a quart of organic green vegetable juice daily. Please review my juicing instructions for more detailed information.
- Get plenty of high quality animal-based omega-3 fats, such as krill oil. Omega-3 deficiency is a common underlying factor for cancer.
- Use curcumin. This is the active ingredient in turmeric and in high concentrations can be very useful adjunct in the treatment of cancer. For example, it has demonstrated major therapeutic potential in preventing breast cancer metastasis. It's important to know that curcumin is generally not absorbed that well, so I've provided several absorption tips here.
- Avoid drinking alcohol, or at least limit your alcoholic drinks to one per day.
- Avoid electromagnetic fields as much as possible. Even electric blankets can increase your cancer risk.
- Avoid synthetic hormone replacement therapy, especially if you have risk factors for breast cancer. Breast cancer is an estrogen-related cancer, and according to a study published in the Journal of the National Cancer Institute, breast cancer rates for women dropped in tandem with decreased use of hormone replacement therapy. (There are similar risks for younger women who use oral contraceptives. Birth control pills, which are also comprised of synthetic hormones, have been linked to cervical and breast cancers.)
If you are experiencing excessive menopausal symptoms, you may want to consider bioidentical hormone replacement therapy instead, which uses hormones that are molecularly identical to the ones your body produces and do not wreak havoc on your system. This is a much safer alternative. - Avoid BPA, phthalates, and other xenoestrogens. These are estrogen-like compounds that have been linked to increased breast cancer risk
- Make sure you're not iodine deficient, as there's compelling evidence linking iodine deficiency with certain forms of cancer. Dr. David Brownstein, author of the book Iodine: Why You Need it, Why You Can't Live Without it, is a proponent of iodine for breast cancer. It actually has potent anticancer properties and has been shown to cause cell death in breast and thyroid cancer cells.
For more information, I recommend reading Dr. Brownstein's book. I have been researching iodine for some time ever since I interviewed Dr. Brownstein as I do believe that the bulk of what he states is spot on. However, I am not at all convinced that his dosage recommendations are correct. I believe they are too high. - Avoid charring your meats. Charcoal or flame broiled meat is linked with increased breast cancer risk. Acrylamide — a carcinogen created when starchy foods are baked, roasted, or fried — has been found to increase cancer risk as well.
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Post by Master Kim on Nov 10, 2015 22:13:19 GMT -5
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Post by Master Kim on Nov 16, 2015 16:46:04 GMT -5
Blue Cross Blue Shield reports $265M net surplus and CEO bonus - archive.freep.com/article/20140303/BUSINESS06/303030107/Blue-Cross-Blue-Shield-Net-Profit-2013-CEO-bonus5:36 PM, March 3, 2014, By JC Reindl, Detroit Free Press Business Writer Daniel Loepp is president and CEO of Blue Cross Blue Shield of Michigan. / Blue Cross Blue Shield Blue Cross Blue Shield of Michigan reported a $265-million net surplus last year on $21.3 billion of revenue as the insurer’s investment returns compensated for an underwriting loss. “It is gratifying to see Blue Cross continue to perform strongly — growing membership, maintaining the financial strength our members rely upon, and maximizing income from investments to take as much pressure as possible off our health insurance members,” CEO Dan Loepp said in a statement. In its annual report released Monday, Blue Cross also reported that Loepp, who arrived in 2005, saw his total yearly compensation jump to $6.6 million from $3.8 million with the payment of a long-term performance bonus. Loepp got a $1.4 million base salary, a $1.8 million yearly bonus and about $828,000 in other compensation, including personal insurance and a vehicle allowance. He also received a $2.5-million long-term performance bonus that he wasn’t yet eligible for in 2012. Blues officials compared Loepp’s long-term performance bonus to that of stock options that corporate CEOs routinely receive. The insurance company’s net surplus was $68 million less than in 2012. It had $417 million in investment income last year that more than made up for a $117-million underwriting loss. As a nonprofit, the Blues’ surplus goes into reserve funds for paying out policyholder claims. The insurer said it spent $18.8 billion on benefit claims last year. Paul Mozak, vice president of finance, said Blue Cross will now publicly report its yearly performance using generally accepted accounting principles, known as GAAP. Under GAAP, the insurer’s previously reported net loss of $2.5 million in 2012 would actually be a $333-million net surplus. The Blues remained the largest health insurer in the state last year with 4.4 million Michigan policyholders, or 3,283 more than in 2012. That was about 45% of the total Michigan population of 9.9 million.
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Post by Master Kim on Nov 27, 2015 11:11:25 GMT -5
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Post by Master Kim on Dec 1, 2015 19:26:54 GMT -5
Uncovering the Cover-Up: Scientific Analysis of the Vaccine-Autism Connection, Deeply Flawed US Vaccine Policies - www.globalresearch.ca/uncovering-the-cover-up-scientific-analysis-of-the-vaccine-autism-connection-deeply-flawed-vaccine-policies/5491987By Dr. Gary Null - Global Research, November 28, 2015 Each year, tens of millions of American children are vaccinated according to the vaccination schedule set forth by the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention (CDC). The current CDC schedule recommends over 25 vaccines by the time a child reaches two years of age. The majority of the parents of these children follow the advice of their physicians and the CDC, which state that vaccines are both safe and effective and that, in order to protect hundreds of millions of individuals against disease, we must follow their recommendations. Our medical authorities assure us that they would never allow our children to be exposed to something unproven or known to be dangerous. They claim that vaccines, even when multiple injections are given on a single day, are safe and do “not cause any chronic health problems.” Further, they claim that the ingredients contained in vaccines are either harmless or found in such miniscule quantities that they pose no health risks. The medical establishment also states unequivocally that there is no connection between vaccination and the rising incidence of autism spectrum disorder. Anyone who questions the safety of vaccination is immediately labeled as irresponsible or a quack who subscribes to pseudoscience. Given that vaccines are mandatory for most children in public schools, it makes sense that they should be scientifically proven to be safe. However, in a careful analysis of thousands of articles in the peer-reviewed literature on toxicology and immunology, nowhere can we find evidence for these claims on vaccine safety are based upon a gold standard of clinical research: long-term, double-blind, placebo-controlled studies. What is glaringly absent is research examining the cumulative toxicological impact of the CDC vaccine schedule over a long period of time. Never has a concise epidemiological study been published that compares the long-term health outcomes of a group of infants and children given the recommended CDC immunization schedule and a cohort of unvaccinated children. Since such research has never been carried out, our medical officials are relying on inconclusive research that is not science-based in order to create public health policy. American parents, meanwhile, are conditioned by our medical officials to bring their children in for regular vaccinations, confusing pure propaganda with scientific proof. All humans possess a unique biochemistry that makes them more or less susceptible to various types of toxins. Whereas one child may be left with a compromised immune system after exposure to an environmental toxin, another child may experience learning problems or mild brain defects. Vaccine safety is not proved by stating the obvious – that not every child who receives the standard CDC vaccine schedule has autism. As we witness a rapidly increasing number of vaccinated children being afflicted by conditions such as autism, food allergies, encephalitis, type 1 diabetes, and Crohn’s disease, it’s critical that we investigate further the role played by environmental toxins to better understand their pathology. And when we look into the independent science on the safety of vaccines, it’s readily apparent that many of the ingredients found in vaccines are toxic, even in small amounts, and may contribute to a range of illnesses, including autism. Here we will also take an uncompromising look at the institutions and individuals claiming that vaccines are safe for our children. We’ll find that just a brief review of our medical establishment reveals evidence of a corrupt network riddled with conflicts of interest and scandal, making it clear that we simply cannot trust our health officials on the issue of vaccine safety. The Toxic Ingredients in VaccinesWhat follows is an incomplete listing of scientific studies showing the dangers of common ingredients in vaccines. I am only citing a handful of examples from the scientific literature. Additional studies appear at the end of this document under “Supplementary Studies”. ThimerosalThimerosal is an ethyl mercury-containing compound that was, up until recently, widely used in vaccines as a preservative. More than 165 studies have found Thimerosal to be harmful to human health. Mercury exposure has been associated with nerve cell degeneration, adverse behavioral effects, and impaired brain development. It also has been linked to degenerative chronic conditions such as Alzheimer’s disease. The developing fetal nervous system is the most sensitive to its toxic effects, and prenatal exposure to high doses of mercury has been shown to cause mental retardation and cerebral palsy. Despite a preponderance of evidence showing Thimerosal’s toxicity, the CDC maintains its position that Thimerosal is generally safe in small doses, citing a handful of CDC-sponsored epidemiological studies. One study found evidence of significant “methodological issues and “malfeasance” in their reporting. Even though vaccine manufacturers have phased out the use of Thimerosal in most vaccines, some vaccines on the market today, including influenza, DTaP and DTaP-Hib, still contain Thimerosal. In a 2010 study published in the journal Acta Neurobiologiae Experimentalis, researchers at the University of Northern Iowa evaluated dozens of studies that claimed to refute the relationship between autism and exposure to toxic metals such as mercury, found in vaccines. The analysis uncovered that several of these studies used erroneous statistics and faulty methodologies to derive their conclusions and that in fact, evidence suggests that the vaccine-autism link should not be dismissed by the scientific community. A 2004 study conducted by Northwestern University Pharmacy professor Richard Deth and researchers from the University of Nebraska, Tufts and Johns Hopkins University found that Thimerosal and other toxins contained in vaccines disrupt the biochemical process of methylation in the human body. Methylation plays a significant role in normal DNA function and neurological growth in infants and children. The group’s findings suggest that toxicants introduced through vaccinations contribute to conditions such as autism and attention deficit hyperactivity disorder. The Thimerosal-autism connection is bolstered by the research of Dr. Boyd Haley, who served as the chairman of the University of Kentucky’s Department of Chemistry and spent three years as a NIH post-doctoral scholar at Yale University Medical School’s Department of Physiology. Haley’s research has identified mercury, even in minute amounts, to be a dangerous immunosuppressant that damages neurological function and is a major contributor to autism spectrum disorder. Dr. Haley’s scientific inquiries have provided strong evidence documenting how ethylmercury inhibits the process of phagocytosis (a critically important biological process of the human immune system), impairs the function of dendritic neurons in the brain and hinders the production of methyl B12. Each of these processes are significant factors in the onset of neurological illness. In a study published in the Journal of Toxicology and Environmental Health in July 2011, Australian authors David Austin and Kerrie Shandley surveyed a group of adults who were survivors of Pink Disease or Infantile Acrodynia, an ailment historically caused by exposure to mercury found in teething powder, diaper rinses and other materials. Since the survivors of Pink Disease were proven to be sensitive to mercury, the study set out to determine whether or not higher rates of autism were present among the survivors’ grandchildren. Austin and Shandley demonstrated that 1 in 25 of the survivors’ grandchildren had some form of autism spectrum disorder. The frequency of autism among children in the general population of Australia in the same age group as those surveyed is 1 in 160. The results unequivocally suggest that children with a family history of susceptibility to mercury poisoning are far more likely to develop autism. AluminumAluminum is an adjuvant, a chemical booster added to vaccines to induce an immune response. Most vaccines in the CDC schedule contain an aluminum compound. Furthermore, there is a large body of scientific research to support a connection between aluminum and neurotoxicity. The alarming health consequences of aluminum were reported in a 2011 study published in the Journal of Inorganic Biochemistry led by Dr. Lucija Tomljenovic at the University of British Columbia. The study revealed that rates of autism spectrum disorder among children are greater in countries where children are exposed to the highest amounts of aluminum in vaccines. The authors also noted “the increase in exposure to Al [aluminum] adjuvants significantly correlates with the increase in ASD [autism spectrum disorder] prevalence in the United States observed over the last two decades”. An additional article by Dr. Tomljenovic, and published in a 2014 issue of the journal Immunotherapy, discussed the neurotoxic effects of aluminum on the central nervous system. The article mentions the role played by the metal in triggering autoimmune and inflammatory responses, altering genetic expression and contributing to neurodevelopmental disorders. These findings are further supported by MIT researcher Dr. Stephanie Seneff. Seneff’s scientific investigation into the pathology of autism has turned up evidence that the neurotoxicity of aluminum is greatly increased when combined with glyphosate, Monsanto’s very widely used pesticide which is sprayed on crops around the world. Seneff posits that not only do these two agents combine to promote neurodevelopmental conditions but can also disrupt the gut’s microbiome, potentially leading to leaky gut syndrome, kidney failure, and other serious complications. It is worth noting that the federal health agencies have admitted to the many dangers posed by aluminum exposure, such as the 357 page document titled “Toxicological Profile for Aluminum” released in 2008 by the Department of Health and Human Services’ Agency for Toxic Substances and Disease Registry. The document, which was thoroughly vetted by CDC scientists, states: There is a rather extensive database on the oral toxicity of aluminum in animals. These studies clearly identify the nervous system as the most sensitive target of aluminum toxicity and most of the animal studies have focused on neurotoxicity and neurodevelopmental toxicity. Despite the government’s tacit recognition of aluminum’s health risks, the CDC and other federal agencies have made no effort to further investigate the cumulative toxicological impact of the current vaccine schedule. FormaldehydeFormaldehyde is a naturally occurring metabolite commonly added to bacterial and viral vaccines. According to the FDA “It is used to inactivate viruses so that they don’t cause disease (e.g., polio virus used to make polio vaccine) and to detoxify bacterial toxins, such as the toxin used to make diphtheria vaccine.” Though formaldehyde may neutralize potentially harmful pathogens in vaccines, the World Health Organization lists it as a “known human carcinogen.” According to a report by the US’s Occupational Safety and Health Administration (OSHA), ingesting “formaldehyde can be fatal, and long-term exposure to low levels in the air or on the skin can cause asthma-like respiratory problems and skin irritation such as dermatitis and itching.” The report also cites formaldehyde as “a cancer hazard”. More evidence suggests formaldehyde exhibits neurotoxic properties as well. The response from our health officials is that formaldehyde is contained in such small doses in vaccines that it doesn’t threaten human health. However, there is a conspicuous lack of research into the effects of formaldehyde exposure through multiple vaccines in pediatric populations. Given that infants and small children possess a much greater sensitivity to toxins compared to adults and that formaldehyde is introduced to children through immunizations containing a host of other toxic ingredients, it is crucial that we reevaluate its use in vaccines. Monosodium Glutamate (MSG)Monosodium glutamate, also known as MSG, has been used as a food additive for over a century, imparting a savory flavor that appeals to many people. It has also made its way into vaccines. Dr. Russell Blaylock notes that MSG is classified as an excitotoxin, or a compound which over stimulates cell receptors to such an extent that the cell ceases to function normally, resulting in damage to nerve cells and contributing to seizures. Animal and Human DNAAnimal and even human tissues are used as a culture medium to grow the targeted virus or bacteria used in vaccines. Today, vaccine viruses are cultured in chicken fibroblast cells and embryos, chick retinal and kidney cells, monkey and dog kidney cells, aborted human fetal lung fibroblast cells and mouse brain tissue, to name a few. In 2013, the FDA approved the use of insect cells instead of chicken eggs for the influenza vaccine. Unfortunately, viral filtration of the substrate that will be used in the vaccine is a primitive manufacturing process. A significant amount of foreign DNA and genetic debris from the culture finds its way into the vaccine that is eventually administered to children. DNA fragments can recombine with our body’s host cells thereby triggering undesirable autoimmune reactions. Considering the exponential increase in autoimmune diseases over the past 25 years, it is reasonable to suspect that the large amount of foreign genetic debris injected into our bodies is wreaking havoc with natural immune functions. There are also instances of certain vaccines causing a specific autoimmune response, such as a Haemophilus influenza B vaccine and type 1 diabetes association, and a Hepatitis B-Multiple Sclerosis relationship, which were observed after widespread administration of these vaccines. Polysorbate 80Polysorbate 80 is a chemical agent used as an emulsifier in vaccines. Research suggests that exposure to polysorbate 80 can “cause severe nonimmunologic anaphylactoid reactions.” Another study found a connection between this substance and Crohn’s disease. Triton X-100A type of detergent used in some flu vaccines, Triton X-100 has been found to promote cell death and cause intestinal damage in animal studies. PhenolPhenol is a type of preservative commonly used in vaccines. A study looking into the viability of preservatives in vaccines noted that phenol, like Thimerosal, is neurotoxic. The authors suggested that “(f)uture formulations of US-licensed vaccines/biologics should be produced in aseptic manufacturing plants as single dose preparations, eliminating the need for preservatives and an unnecessary risk to patients.” 2-PhenoxyethoanolThe compound known as 2-Phenoxyethoanol is commonly used as an antibacterial agent in vaccines. Among its known . Reports link this chemical to kidney, liver, and neurological toxicity. Real Science Indicting Vaccines and How it Has Been SuppressedIf good quality science exists that could discredit the pro-vaccine argument that there is no connection to autism, it is completely understandable that the media and the government and industry and scientists for hire continue their unrelenting attack on independent scientists, physicians, and most importantly, upon the victims themselves. To acknowledge that the entire vaccine program is unsupported by gold standard science would mean massive lawsuits, congressional investigations and discrediting the CDC, the FDA, US public health services and pharmaceutical companies. In effect, this could be the largest public health scandal in American history, and the public would be very unforgiving. Let’s now take a look at more damning evidence linking vaccines with autism and neurodevelopmental disease and the systemic suppression of this evidence. Vaccine-Autism Research1. Scientists at the University of Pittsburgh investigated the effects of vaccination on the neurodevelopment of baby macaque monkeys. The monkeys were given a course of vaccinations typical of the 1990s vaccine schedule. In comparison with the control group, vaccinated monkeys displayed abnormal patterns of brain growth and dysfunction of the amygdala – both strong indicators of autism when they appear in children. 2. In 2002, the Journal of Biomedical Science published research carried out by scientists at Utah State University’s Department of Biology analyzing the effects of the MMR vaccine on the central nervous system. In their evaluation, the group discovered that autistic children who receive the MMR possess a higher titer of certain antibody related to measles. These antibodies trigger an abnormal autoimmune response that effectively damages the brain’s myelin sheath. Evidence suggests that such damage to the myelin sheath may impair normal brain activities and cause autism. 3. The University of California San Diego and San Diego State University published a study showing a higher incidence of autism among children who were given the MMR vaccine and subsequently took acetaminophen or Tylenol. Their findings were published in the medical journal Autism. 4. Through the National Vaccine Injury Compensation Program (VICP), a federal program charged with the responsibility of financially compensating families of individuals injured or killed by vaccines, the US government has all but admitted to the connection between vaccines, neurological disorders and autism. A detailed research study appearing in the Pace Environmental Law Review in March 2011 revealed that the VICP has been quietly compensating 83 families for cases of vaccine-induced encephalopathy and residual seizure disorder associated with autism. In 21 of these cases, the word “autism” is actually used in court documents to describe the injuries that resulted from vaccination. The obvious conclusion is that, in paying these claims, the government has implicitly acknowledged a link between vaccination and autism. 5. A recent report from the Department of Justice showed that within a three month period from November 2014- February 2015, 117 vaccine-induced injuries and deaths were compensated by VICP. The majority of the injuries listed in the report were caused by the flu vaccine and the most common injury linked to the flu vaccine was Guillain-Barré Syndrome, an uncommon illness in which the immune system attacks and damages the body’s neurons, sometimes resulting in permanent nerve damage or even death. Why Our Health Officials Can’t Be TrustedResearch indicates that conflicts of interest abound in the vaccine industry, making it difficult to have faith in our health authorities. Worse still, evidence points to pervasive corruption among high profile individuals and institutions in the medical-industrial complex. Here we will look at some of the most alarming examples. SimpsonwoodIn June 2000, a group of top federal scientists, health officials, the CDC, the FDA, the British Health ministry and representatives from the pharmaceutical industry gathered for a secret meeting convened by the CDC at the Simpsonwood retreat center in Norcross, Georgia. Officially titled the Scientific Review of Vaccine Safety Datalink Information, the Simpsonwood conference reviewed the findings of a large epidemiological study evaluating any relationship between Thimerosal and autism. The meeting was not open to the public and was subject to a complete news embargo. Thanks to a Freedom of Information Act request filed by Robert F. Kennedy Jr., a transcript of the meeting became available. The transcript revealed how health officials engaged in a cold-blooded cover-up of scientific evidence linking Thimerosal use in vaccine with a large spike in autism rates and other neurological illnesses. The director of the Datalink study, CDC epidemiologist Dr. Tom Verstraeten, was quoted as saying, “I was actually stunned by what I saw,” citing the staggering number of earlier studies that indicate a link between Thimerosal and speech delays, attention deficit disorder, hyperactivity and autism. According to the transcript, Dr. John Clements, then the vaccines advisor at the World Health Organization, stated in the that “perhaps this study should not have been done at all.” RFK Jr. recounted in an article the lengths to which our medical establishment went prevent the scientific findings from reaching the public sphere: The CDC paid the Institute of Medicine to conduct a new study to whitewash the risks of thimerosal, ordering researchers to “rule out” the chemical’s link to autism. It withheld Verstraeten’s findings, even though they had been slated for immediate publication, and told other scientists that his original data had been “lost” and could not be replicated. And to thwart the Freedom of Information Act, it handed its giant database of vaccine records over to a private company, declaring it off-limits to researchers. By the time Verstraeten finally published his study in 2003, he had gone to work for GlaxoSmithKline and reworked his data to bury the link between thimerosal and autism. Gerberding: The Vaccine InsiderThere is a revolving door between the vaccine manufacturers and those in government who are responsible for overseeing these manufacturers. A prime example is former CDC director Dr. Julie Gerberding, who left the agency in 2010 to take a position with pharmaceutical giant Merck as the President of the company’s vaccine division. Gerberding stated in an interview that she is “very bullish on vaccines”. Her admission is especially disconcerting given her long history of siding with vaccine makers. While in her position at the CDC, the organization was found to be massively exaggerating the threat of the H1N1 swine flu, and pushing largely unproven vaccines on the American public with dangerous side effects. Despite her clear alliance with Big Pharma, Dr. Julie Gerberding strongly implied a vaccine-autism link during a 2008 interview with CNN’s Sanjay Gupta while serving as the CDC’s director. Gerberding stated: Well, you know, I don’t have all the facts because I still haven’t been able to review the case files myself. But my understanding is that the child has a — what we think is a rare mitochondrial disorder. And children that have this disease, anything that stresses them creates a situation where their cells just can’t make enough energy to keep their brains functioning normally. Now, we all know that vaccines can occasionally cause fevers in kids. So if a child was immunized, got a fever, had other complications from the vaccines. And if you’re predisposed with the mitochondrial disorder, it can certainly set off some damage. Some of the symptoms can be symptoms that have characteristics of autism. Thorsen: A Case of CorruptionA prime example of the corruption within the CDC around vaccine safety is the case of Dr. Poul Thorsen, a Danish researcher who coauthored 36 CDC studies, two of which are widely cited studies claiming to disprove an autism-vaccine link. From 2004 to 2010 Thorsen allegedly laundered more than $1 million in grant money allocated for research and used the funds to make personal purchases, including a home in Atlanta. Thorsen is currently in Denmark awaiting extradition to the United States. In a recent editorial, Robert F. Kennedy called into question the slow nature of US authorities in apprehending Thorsen stating that: The fact that he is roaming free and is easy to find, despite the US Federal indictment, does not imply Thorsen’s innocence… Rather it suggests a lack of enthusiasm by HHS and CDC to press for his capture and extradition. The agency undoubtedly fears that a public trial would expose the pervasive corruption throughout CDC’s vaccine division and the fragility of the science supporting CDC’s claims about Thimerosal safety. The two autism-vaccine studies undertaken by Thorsen and his team have been decried by critics as scientific fraud. According to leaked CDC documents, the data from one of the studies, which monitored rates of autism in Denmark after a country-wide phase out of Thimerosal, were heavily manipulated to make it appear that autism rates increased its removal from vaccines, when in fact rates decreased. The research’s methodology was so unscientific that journals such as The Lancet and The Journal of the American Medical Association rejected publishing the study, and it wasn’t until a CDC director wrote a strongly-worded letter to staff at the journal Pediatrics, that the research was actually published. The other autism-vaccine study coauthored by Thorsen, which seemingly debunked an autism link to the MMR vaccine was published in 2002. In his aforementioned editorial, Robert Kennedy Jr. wrote about the study’s questionable methodology: That study employed CDC’s trademark ruse of including many children who were too young to receive the autism diagnosis, which at that point usually occurred at age four. CDC epidemiologists have consistently used this ploy in their phony autism studies to dampen the autism signal and exonerate the vaccine.The 2002 Madsen et al. MMR study also included a substantial number of unvaccinated children and employed a suite of other statistical gimmicks to mask the association with the MMR vaccine. The Thompson RevelationIn 2014, a senior scientist at the CDC, Dr. William Thompson, went public with claims that he and his colleagues willfully omitted data from a study that supported a link between vaccines and autism. After discovering a connection between the MMR vaccine and an increased risk of autism among African American males under 36 months of age, Thompson claims that he and his fellow authors chose to exclude these data and effectively perpetrated scientific fraud by publishing research which contradicted their actual research conclusions. Commenting on how he and his colleagues misrepresented their findings, Thompson stated that: …we decided to exclude reporting any race effects, the co-authors scheduled a meeting to destroy documents related to the study. The remaining four co-authors all met and brought a big garbage can into the meeting room and reviewed and went through all the hard copy documents that we had thought we should discard and put them in a huge garbage can. However, because I assumed it was illegal and would violate both FOIA and DOJ requests, I kept hard copies of all documents in my office and I retained all associated computer files. I believe we intentionally withheld controversial findings from the final draft of the Pediatrics paper. In 2015, Representative Bill Posey entered a statement by Thompson about the cover-up into the Congressional record. In an interview last year, Congressman Posey commented on the “intentionally evasive” behavior of CDC spokesperson on vaccines and autism, Dr. Colleen Boyle while he questioned saying: I asked her a very direct question. ‘Have you done a study comparing autism rates in vaccinated vs. unvaccinated children?…’ She started telling us about everything she’s done …After she wasted three minutes, I cut her off and I demanded that she answer the question. And then, only then, did she admit that the federal government has never done that very simple, fundamental, basic study. In light of the growing evidence of corruption and fraud within the CDC, Representative Bill Posey has called for an investigation of the CDC on the issue of vaccine science. Reevaluating the Vaccine Safety ParadigmEven a cursory review of the independent scientific literature on the safety of vaccines and their ingredients demonstrates clearly that our national policies on immunization are deeply flawed. No amount of propaganda can change the fact that vaccines introduce a toxic load to the human body that can cause a wide range of harmful side effects including neurological disease. The failure of our health authorities to undertake independent, gold standard research examining the long-term effects of the CDC vaccine schedule demonstrates the extent to which our medical halls of power are plagued by depraved special interests. We must refuse to participate in this risky game which forces toxic vaccines on our children and we must demand an end to the medical fascism behind it.
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Post by Master Kim on Dec 4, 2015 15:23:10 GMT -5
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Post by Master Kim on Dec 6, 2015 22:50:00 GMT -5
How Healthcare Is Dooming the U.S. Economy (In Just 3 Charts) -http://www.zerohedge.com/news/2015-05-28/how-healthcare-dooming-us-economy-just-3-chartsSubmitted by Tyler Durden on 05/28/2015 11:45 -0400 As it stands now, U.S. healthcare will bankrupt the nation and doom it to permanent stagnation and recession. That healthcare alone is dooming the U.S. economy is not news to Of Two Minds readers, as I have been covering the catastrophic consequences of our runaway healthcare system for the past decade. Three charts crystallize the healthcare dynamics that are dooming the U.S. economy. The first depicts the runaway growth of healthcare costs--a rapid expansion that is a permanent feature of U.S. healthcare, regardless of which party is in office or what reforms are instituted. This expansion of costs has many drivers, most of which result from the system's perverse incentives for fraud, overbilling, marginal treatments and defensive medicine.Technological and medical advances offer more options for treatment, and can push costs up--but advances can just as readily push costs down, too. The primary drivers of rapidly increasing costs are: 1. The cartel/crony-capitalist structure of U.S. healthcare 2. Defensive medicine to stave off litigation 3. Profiteering from needless or ineffective tests, procedures and medications 4. Fraud and overbilling 5. The concentration of expenditures in a small sector of the population 6. America's inability and/or unwillingness to have an adult discussion over end-of-life care for the elderly. Here is a chart of the rising cost of U.S. healthcare, which is far outstripping the growth of GDP, which is another way of saying healthcare costs are outstripping our ability to pay for healthcare. Other advanced nations pay for universal healthcare with 8%-9% of their GDP, where the U.S. spends 18% of GDP on less-than-universal healthcare. How do other advanced countries provide healthcare for all for less than half of what America spends per person (per capita)? Other advanced nations do not spend gargantuan sums on the elderly and end-of-life care. Please look carefully at this chart. No one with any knowledge of life in Sweden or Germany would declare their care of the elderly barbarous, yet somehow Sweden's cost of care actually declines as the elderly approach the end of their lives, while the cost of care for the elderly skyrockets in the U.S. Is medical care that different technologically in the U.S. and Sweden, or is it the difference between a system that is rational and one that is based on extracting the maximum profit from delivering whatever the government will pay for? Now that the 60+ million Baby Boom generation is entering Medicare, the soaring cost of caring for the elderly American-style is about to explode higher. Anyone who holds the magical-thinking hope that America's stagnant economy and job market can support healthcare costs that consume 25+% of GDP should study this article and the chart below: The Concentration of Health Care Spending (via B.C.) Tt is clear that per-person spending among the highest users is substantial and represents a natural starting point when thinking about how to curb health care spending. For instance, the average expenditure for each of the approximately 3 million people comprising the top 1 percent of spenders was more than $90,000 in 2009 (Figure 2). The top 5 percent of spenders were responsible for $623 billion in expenditures or nearly $41,000 per patient. In contrast, mean annual spending for the bottom half of distribution was just $236 per person, totaling only $36 billion for the entire group of more than 150 million people. The concentration of healthcare expenditures in a thin slice of the populace is astonishing: 20% of the costs are spent on 1% of the populace, typically elderly people with multiple chronic lifestyle-related diseases. 50% of the total costs are spent on the top 5% of high-use individuals. One direct result of rising healthcare expenditures is recession, as this chart from frequent contributor B.C. illustrates. As healthcare expenditures rise, real sales stagnate and the economy cascades into recession. The majority of U.S. healthcare spending is not productive; it is a drag on productivity. Subtract the fraud, overbilling, defensive medicine, marginal/ineffective overtreatments and tests and the extreme concentration of costs in 5% of the populace, and we'd have a system that we could afford, i.e. one that cost less than 10% of GDP, in line with our advanced-economy competitors. As it stands now, U.S. healthcare will bankrupt the nation and doom it to permanent stagnation and recession. It's our choice: live with a bankrupt system built almost entirely of perverse incentives, or begin an adult discussion about a system that delivers responsible care to the elderly in line with other advanced nations, but at a fraction of the current cost. * * * But it gets worse. Obamacare is set to add more than a quarter-of-a-trillion—that's trillion—dollars in extra insurance administrative costs to the U.S. health-care system, according to a new report out Wednesday. * * * But apart from that - it's fair, right?
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