This is a very insightful documentary about environmental toxins and how they affect our boys and men.

In what may be among the longest-running and widest-ranging cases of academic fraud, one of the most prolific researchers in anesthesiology fabricated much of the data underlying his research, said a spokeswoman for the hospital where he works.

The researcher, Dr. Scott S. Reuben, an anesthesiologist in Springfield, Mass., who practiced at Baystate Medical Center, fabricated data in some or all of the 21 journal articles dating from at least 1996, said Jane Albert, a spokeswoman for Baystate Health.

The reliability of dozens more articles he wrote is uncertain, and the common practice — supported by his studies — of giving patients aspirinlike drugs and neuropathic pain medicines after surgery instead of narcotics is now being questioned.

Paul Cirel, a lawyer for Dr. Reuben, said that he could not discuss the case because Baystate had investigated it as part of a confidential peer-review process. Baystate officials “were aware of extenuating circumstances,” Mr. Cirel said.

The drug giant Pfizer underwrote much of Dr. Reuben’s research from 2002 to 2007. Many of his trials found that Celebrex and Lyrica, Pfizer drugs, were effective against postoperative pain.

“Independent clinical research advances disease treatments and improves the lives of patients,” said Raymond F. Kerins Jr., a Pfizer spokesman. “As part of such research, we count on independent researchers to be truthful and motivated by a desire to advance care for patients. It is very disappointing to learn about Dr. Scott Reuben’s alleged actions.”

Drug companies routinely hire community physicians to conduct studies of already-approved medicines. In some cases, prosecutors have charged companies with underwriting studies of little scientific merit in hopes of persuading doctors to prescribe the medicines more often…read here…

by Mike Adams, the Health Ranger, December 24, 2008
Key concepts: Liposuction, Biodiesel and Body fat

It sounds like a great idea, actually: Take the excess body fat from liposuction patients and use it to power your car. That’s what a Beverly Hills doctor figured, and he even bragged about it on his website LipoDiesel.com (now shut down). It even sounds like a California trend: Get thin and reduce America’s dependence on foreign oil all at the same time!

But sometimes the “cutting edge” of green goes too far, and California’s state medical authorities were not amused to learn of Dr. Bittner’s eco-friendly body fat recycling program. It is apparently illegal in the United States to use human body parts (even the parts people are throwing away) as fuel to power automobiles. I’d like to see somebody quote me any law that actually says that, by the way. Personally, I don’t believe such a law exists.

So now Dr. Alan Bittner’s clinic is closed, and liposuction patients have to get their fat sucked out somewhere else. So where, exactly, does all that excess body fat go from liposuction clinics? If you saw Fight Club, you might recall the main characters rendering the body fat into high explosives. I like the Lipodiesel idea better, because it puts the excess body fuel towards a more productive use.

Instead of shutting down this operation, the state of California should embrace it. Why not do a joint venture with McDonalds? “Eat a Big Mac. You’ll get a smile, and your car goes another mile!”……read  more here….

Bush Broadens Rule on Refusal of Health Services for Moral Reasons
By Daniel J. DeNoon
WebMD Health News
Reviewed by Louise Chang, MD

Dec. 19, 2008 — An 11th-hour ruling from the Bush administration gives health care workers, hospitals, and insurers more leeway to refuse health services for moral or religious reasons.

The rule, issued today, becomes effective in 30 days. Its main provisions widen the number of health workers and institutions that may refuse, based on “sincere religious belief or moral conviction,” to provide care or referrals to patients.

“This rule protects the right of medical providers to care for their patients in accord with their conscience,” says Health and Human Services Secretary Michael O. Leavitt in a statement.

Previous rules allow health care workers to refuse to provide abortion or sterilization services to which they are morally opposed. The new rulings give individuals and institutions much greater leeway in refusing to provide services to which they are morally opposed.

The ruling, issued by the Department of Health and Human Services, covers an estimated 571,947 “entities” including doctors’ offices, pharmacies, hospitals, insurers, medical and nursing schools, diagnostic labs, nursing homes, and state governments..…read more here..

5 Myths About Our Ailing Health-Care System

By Shannon Brownlee and Ezekiel Emanuel
Sunday, November 23, 2008; B03

With Congress ready to spend $700 billion to prop up the U.S. economy, enacting health-care reform may seem about as likely as the Dow hitting 10,000 again before the end of the year. But it may be more doable than you think, provided we dispel a few myths about how health care works and how much reform Americans are willing to stomach.

1. America has the best health care in the world.

Let’s bury this one once and for all. The United States is No. 1 in only one sense: the amount we shell out for health care. We have the most expensive system in the world per capita, but we lag behind many developed countries on virtually every health statistic you can name. Life expectancy at birth? We rank near the bottom of countries in the Organization for Economic Cooperation and Development, just ahead of Cuba and way behind Japan, France, Italy, Sweden and Canada, countries whose governments (gasp!) pay for the lion’s share of health care. Infant mortality in the United States is 6.8 per 1,000 births, more than twice as high as in Japan, Norway and Sweden and worse than in Poland and Hungary. We’re doing a better job than most on reducing smoking rates, but our obesity epidemic is out of control, our death rate from prostate cancer is only slightly lower than the United Kingdom’s, and in at least one study, American heart attack patients did no better than Swedish patients, even though the Americans got twice as many high-tech treatments.

Moreover, the quality of health care is different in different parts of the country. The Centers for Medicare and Medicaid Services have issued a list of 26 measures of quality, such as making sure that heart-attack patients being discharged from the hospital get a prescription for a beta blocker or aspirin to help reduce the risk of a second attack. It turns out that quality is all over the map, and it isn’t necessarily better in the places we might expect, such as academic medical centers. Worse still, according to the Congressional Budget Office (CBO), there appears to be no connection between how much Medicare and other payers spend on patients in different parts of the country and the quality of the care the patients receive. You are no more likely to get that beta blocker or aspirin in Los Angeles than in Portland, even though Medicare spends twice as much per beneficiary in Los Angeles.

2. Somebody else is paying for your health insurance.

Nope. Even when your employer offers coverage, he isn’t reaching into his own pocket to cover you and your fellow employees; he’s reaching into your pocket, paying you lower wages than he would if he didn’t have to pay for your health insurance.

Rising health-care costs are partly to blame for stagnant wages. Over the past five years, health insurance premiums have risen 5.5 times faster on average than inflation, 2.3 times faster than business income and four times faster than workers’ earnings. Four times. That’s why wages have been nearly flat since the 1980s, even as U.S. productivity has been going up. In effect, about half the money you should be earning for being more productive is being sucked up by ever more expensive health-insurance premiums.

If you pay taxes, you’re also paying for the health care provided through state and federal programs such as Medicare, Medicaid, the Veterans Administration and the military. All told, the average family of four is coughing up $29,000 a year for health care through taxes, lower wages and out-of-pocket medical expenses.

3. We would save a lot if we could cut the administrative waste of private insurance.

The idea that we could wring billions of dollars in savings this way is seductive, but it wouldn’t really accomplish that much. For one thing, some administrative costs are not only necessary but beneficial. Following heart-attack or cancer patients to see which interventions work best is an administrative cost, but it’s also invaluable if you want to improve care. Tracking the rate of heart attacks from drugs such as Avandia is key to ensuring safe pharmaceuticals.

Let’s just say that we could wave a magic wand and cut private insurers’ overhead by half, to what the Canadian government spends on administering its health-care system — 15 percent. How much would we save? Not as much as you may think. Private insurers pay a little more than a third of what we spend on health care, which means that we’d cut a little more than 5 percent from our total budget, or about $124 billion. That’s not peanuts, but it’s not even enough to cover everybody who’s currently uninsured.

More to the point, we only get to save it once. That’s because administrative waste isn’t what’s driving health-care costs up faster than inflation. Most of the relentless rise can be attributed to the expansion of hospitals and other health-care sectors and the rapid adoption of expensive new technologies — new drugs, devices, tests and procedures. Unfortunately, only a fraction of all that new stuff offers dramatically better outcomes. If we’re worried about costs, we have to ask whether a $55,000 drug that prolongs the lives of lung cancer patients for an average of a few weeks is really worth it. Unless we find a cure for our addiction to the new but not necessarily improved, our national medical bill will continue to skyrocket, regardless of how efficient insurance companies become.

4. Health-care reform is going to cost a bundle.

Only if you think that covering the uninsured is our only priority. Yes, making health care available to all citizens is the right thing to do. But it isn’t the only thing to do. We also have to fix the spectacularly wasteful and expensive way doctors and hospitals deliver care.

Our physicians are working within a truly dysfunctional, often chaotic system that prevents them from caring for us properly. Between 50,000 and 100,000 patients die each year from preventable medical errors. According to the Centers for Disease Control, 1.7 million Americans acquire an infection while in the hospital and nearly 100,000 of them die from it. Laboratory imaging tests are routinely repeated because the originals can’t be found. Patients with such chronic illnesses as heart failure and diabetes land in the hospital because their physicians fail to monitor their condition. When patients have multiple doctors, there’s often nobody keeping track of the different medications, tests and treatments each one prescribes.

Our doctors and hospitals are failing to provide us with care we need while delivering a staggering amount that we don’t need. Current estimates suggest that as much as 20 to 30 percent of what we spend, or about $500 billion, goes toward useless, potentially harmful care.

There are two bright spots. One: We can improve the quality of care and cut costs without rationing. There are models out there for how to do it right — the Mayo Clinic, the Geisinger Clinic in Pennsylvania, the Cleveland Clinic and California’s Kaiser Permanente are just a few of the organized group practices that are doing a better job for less. Their doctors are better than average at using the best medical evidence available. They’re more likely to be using electronic medical records, which can help keep track of patients who have multiple physicians and need complex care. And they’re less likely to provide unnecessary care.

Two: Even moderate reform of the delivery system would improve care and save money. The Lewin Group’s analysis shows that a bill proposed by Sen. Ron Wyden, an Oregon Democrat, calling for a more comprehensive overhaul of the health-care system than either McCain’s plan or Obama’s could actually insure everyone and save $1.4 trillion over 10 years. More reform is cheaper.

5. Americans aren’t ready for a major overhaul of the health-care system.

We may be readier than you think. A recent study published in the New England Journal of Medicine found that only 7 percent of Americans rate our health-care system excellent. Nearly 40 percent consider it poor. A whopping 70 percent believe it needs major changes, if not a complete overhaul.

Now is not the time to think small, to cover a few million Americans and leave the bigger job of controlling costs and improving quality for another day. We can’t afford not to reform the delivery system as soon as possible. At 17 percent of gross domestic product, health care is the biggest single sector of the economy, and it’s consuming a larger and larger proportion every year. According to CBO projections, health care will account for 25 percent of GDP by 2025 and 49 percent by 2082. That’s simply unsustainable. Any plan that reforms health care has to do more than simply cover the uninsured. The nation’s health and wealth depend on it.

brownlee@newamerica.net

Shannon Brownlee, a visiting scholar at the National Institutes of Health Clinical Center, is the author of “Overtreated.” Ezekiel Emanuel, an oncologist and author of “Healthcare, Guaranteed,” is chairman of the center’s Department of Bioethics. The views expressed here are the authors’ own.

Massive Brazilian Vaccination Raises Suspicions of Covert Sterilization Program

By Matthew Cullinan Hoffman

August 14, 2008 (LifeSiteNews.com) – The commencement of a massive, mandatory vaccination program in Brazil has raised suspicions among international pro-life activists, who note that the program is similar to others in recent years that have included a hidden sterilizing agent in the vaccines.

The campaign, which was begun last week by Brazil’s pro-abortion Health Minister, Jose Gomes Temporao, claims that its goal is to annihilate rubella in the South American nation.

Temporao, who has expended considerable energy to legalize abortion, claims he is concerned about the fact that 17 Brazilian children each year suffer birth defects from the disease, in a nation of more than 180 million people.  Rubella is normally little more than a nuisance for those who contract it, with symptoms that pass in a matter of days or weeks.

Although the number of children affected by Congenital Rubella Syndrome (CRS) is less per capita than that of both the United Kingdom and Australia in the 1990s, Temporao is heading a mandatory program to vaccinate 70 million Brazilians, which would make it the largest vaccination in history. ….read more here..

WASHINGTON (AP) — If there ever is another anthrax attack, a letter carrier may deliver antibiotics to those who might be infected.

Federal health officials are beginning a project in Minneapolis-St. Paul to let letter carriers stockpile personal supplies of emergency antibiotics so they are protected and ready to deliver aid to the rest of the city.

The project seeks to overcome a big hurdle of emergency planning. The government has many drugs stockpiled in case of bioterrorism but few ways to get them quickly to people who need them.

Carriers could provide “a front-end quick strike,” said William Raub, senior science counselor to Michael O. Leavitt, health and human services secretary.

Test projects in Seattle, Philadelphia and Boston over the past two years paired carriers with police officers on holidays. Carriers volunteered to do double routes, delivering empty pill bottles along with fliers explaining what was happening. In Philadelphia, 50 carriers reached about 53,000 households in eight hours, Mr. Raub said…...read rest of story……

Drug addiction is a common problem that affects thousands of people worldwide. Legal drug prescription is also a serious problem and no matter  what social economic status one comes from, they are vulnerable. Betty Ford  helped bring awareness to people about alcoholism.  Perhaps Cindy McCain can bring to the forefront  the problems millions have with vicodin and percocet addiction. She could help millions and help save many families from both emotional and  financial destruction that usually comes with narcotic addiction.  

salon.com > News Oct. 18, 1999
URL: http://www.salon.com/news/feature/1999/10/18/drugs

How Cindy McCain was outed for drug addiction

When an attempt to get tough with a whistleblower backfired in 1994, the McCain spin machine went into overdrive, and the candidate’s wife confessed to problems the media was already poised to reveal.

- – - – - – - – - – - -
By Amy Silverman

GOP presidential candidate John McCain’swife Cindy took to the airwaves last week, recounting for Jane Pauley (on “Dateline”) and Diane Sawyer (on “Good Morning America”) the tale of her onetime addiction to Percocet and Vicodin, and the fact that she stole the drugs from her own nonprofit medical relief organization.

It was a brave and obviously painful thing to do.

It was also vintage McCain media manipulation.

I had d�j� vu watching Cindy McCain on television, perky in a purple suit with tinted pearls to match. It was so reminiscent of the summer day in 1994 when suddenly, years after she’d claimed to have kicked her habit, McCain decided to come clean to the world about her addiction to prescription painkillers.

I believe she wore red that day. She granted semi-exclusive interviews to one TV station and three daily newspaper reporters in Arizona, tearfully recalling her addiction, which came about after painful back and knee problems and was exacerbated by the stress of the Keating Five banking scandal that had ensnared her husband. To make matters worse, McCain admitted, she had stolen the drugs from the American Voluntary Medical Team, her own charity, and had been investigated by the Drug Enforcement Administration.

The local press cooed over her hard-luck story. One of the four journalists spoon-fed the story — Doug McEachern, then a reporter for Tribune Newspapers, now a columnist with the Arizona Republic (and, it must be added, normally much more acerbic) — wrote this rather typical lead:

“She was blonde and beautiful. A rich man’s daughter who became a politically powerful man’s wife. She had it all, including an insidious addiction to drugs that sapped the beauty from her life like a spider on a butterfly.”

What McEachern and the others didn’t know was that, far from being a simple, honest admission designed to clear her conscience and help other addicts, Cindy McCain’s storytelling had been orchestrated by Jay Smith, then John McCain’s Washington campaign media advisor. And it was intended to divert attention from a different story, a story that was getting quite messy.

I know, because I had been working on that story for months at Phoenix New Times. I had finally tracked down the public records that confirmed Cindy McCain’s addiction and much more, and the McCains knew I was about to get them. Cindy’s tale was released on the day the records were made public.

But the story I was pursuing was not so much about Cindy McCain’s unfortunate addiction. It was much more about her efforts to keep that story from coming to light, and the possible manipulation of the criminal justice system by her husband and his cohorts. The irony is that Cindy’s secret would have stayed secret if John McCain’s heavy-hitting lawyer, John Dowd (of D.C.’s Akin, Gump, Strauss, Hauer & Feld; his most recent claim to fame was serving as co-counsel for fellow partner Vernon Jordan during impeachment) hadn’t heavy-handedly pulled out all the stops to protect the McCain family.

Dowd tried to get back at the man on Cindy McCain’s staff, Tom Gosinski, who had blown the whistle on her drug pilfering to the DEA. But in the course of trying to get local law enforcement officials to investigate Gosinski — Dowd and the McCains considered him an extortionist; others might call him a whistleblower — Dowd set in motion a process that would eventually bring the whole sordid story to light. When that maneuver backfired, the McCain media machine went into overdrive to spin the story.

It’s a story of unintended consequences. It’s also a story of power politics and media manipulation that’s very un-McCain-like — if you believe his national media hagiography.

But both of Cindy McCain’s staged, teary drug-addiction confessions have been vintage John McCain. His MO is this: Get the story out — even if it’s a negative story. Get it out first, with the spin you want, with the details you want and without the details you don’t want.

McCain did it with the Keating Five, and with the story of the failure of his first marriage (Cindy is his second wife).  Read here about why he and his first wife divorced.

So what you recall after the humble, honest interview, is not that McCain did favors for savings and loan failure Charlie Keating, or that he cheated on his wife, but instead what an upfront, righteous guy he is.

Candor is the McCain trademark, but what the journalists who slobber over the senator fail to realize is that the candor is premeditated and polished. John McCain shoots from the hip — but only after carefully rehearsing the battle plan, to be sure he won’t get shot himself.

This is the story of a time that strategy backfired, and yet the McCain machine still managed to contain the damage.

In the early 1990s, Tom Gosinski was the director of government and international affairs for the American Voluntary Medical Team, which did relief and medical volunteer work in third world countries.

Hired by Cindy McCain in 1991, Gosinski enjoyed his job, but he began to notice McCain’s erratic behavior in the summer of 1992. In his journal, he wrote that he and others suspected the boss was addicted to painkillers and might have been stealing them from the organization.

From Gosinski’s journal, July 27, 1992:

I have always wondered why John McCain has done nothing to fix the problem. He must either not see that a problem exists or … not choose to do anything about it. It would seem that it would be in everyone’s best interest to come to terms with the situation. And do whatever is necessary to fix it. There is so much at risk: The welfare of the children; John’s political career; the integrity of Hensley & Company [Cindy's parents' business]; the welfare of Jim and Smitty Hensley [Cindy's parents]; and the health and happiness of Cindy McCain. The aforementioned matters are of great concern to those directly involved but my main concern is the ability of AVMT to survive a major shake-up. If the DEA were to ever conduct an audit of AVMT’s inventory, I am afraid of what the results might be … It is because of [Cindy McCain's] willingness to jeopardize the credibility of those who work for her that I truly worry.

During my short tenure at AVMT I have been surrounded by what on the surface appears to be the ultimate all-American family. In reality, I am working for a very sad, lonely woman whose marriage of convenience to a U.S. Senator has driven her to: distance herself from friends; cover feelings of despair with drugs; and replace lonely moments with self-indulgences.

In his journal-writing over the next few months, Gosinski would alternately complain about Cindy McCain and express concern for her well-being.

In January 1993, McCain fired Gosinski. She told him that AVMT was having financial problems and couldn’t afford him.

Gosinski had already come to suspect that Cindy McCain had gotten volunteer doctors with AVMT to sign prescriptions for her, and had used employees’ names to fill them. Worried his own name had been used (he would eventually learn that it had), Gosinski approached DEA agents in the spring of 1993 to report McCain’s suspicious behavior. The DEA launched an investigation.

Almost a year later, with the statute of limitations about to run out, Gosinski hired a labor attorney and sued Cindy McCain for wrongful termination. He intended to claim that she fired him because she suspected he knew about her addiction, but the lawsuit never got that far. Instead, Gosinski’s attorney wrote to the McCains, asking for a settlement of $250,000.

Rumors about the untold details of the lawsuit hit the cocktail-party circuit that spring, but the story was locked up tight. As a federal criminal investigation, the DEA probe was completely secret; none of it was public record.

The entire story would likely have gone unreported if attorney John Dowd hadn’t entered the picture. He wrote to Maricopa County attorney Richard Romley, a political ally of McCain, and asked him to investigate Gosinski for extortion.

“We believe that Mr. Gosinski is aware that in the past Cindy had an addiction to prescription painkillers … Given Cindy’s public position, exposure of this sensitive matter would harm her reputation, career, the operation of AVMT, and subject her to contempt and ridicule,” Dowd wrote on April 28, 1994.

Thus began the inadvertent outing of Cindy McCain. Although the federal investigative materials were not public, the county investigative materials were. Romley launched an investigation, and one of the first things his people did, naturally, was ask the feds to turn over their investigative materials.

New Times finally got hold of the county investigative materials and we did our own story. So did the Arizona Republic, which was uncharacteristically aggressive, perhaps because the McCain machine had left the paper out of the loop on the story of Cindy’s addiction.

Among the questions asked: Did Cindy McCain get preferential treatment by the feds? True, Cindy was a first-time offender, which partially explains the fact that she did no prison time; instead, she entered a diversion program. But at the time, defense lawyers told New Times that if Cindy McCain had been a poor minority and not married to a U.S. senator, she likely would have been locked up.

Did Gosinski intend to blackmail Cindy McCain? He told New Times he didn’t. Other AVMT employees told county investigators that he did. But the time line makes extortion hard to believe, since Gosinski had already gone to the DEA before he brought his lawsuit against the McCains.

In any case, Tom Gosinski didn’t out Cindy McCain. John Dowd did, and then Jay Smith was called in for the clean-up.

A few postscripts: Tom Gosinski left town shortly after Cindy McCain’s story broke. By that time, his lawsuit had died, ignored. The county did not pursue the extortion investigation against him.

John Max Johnson, the doctor who had written the prescriptions for Cindy McCain, surrendered his medical license.

Cindy McCain still does relief work and raises the McCains’ four children.

John McCain, of course, is running for president.

And only a handful of people remember the details of Cindy McCain’s 1994 “outing” for drug addiction and drug pilfering, and the work of the McCain machine to protect her.
salon.com | Oct. 18, 1999

This story is about 1 year old so the figure is likely a lot more…

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Sarah Palin’s 17-year-old , unmarried daughter is five months pregnant, the campaign has announced. Hoping to quell internet rumors about about her youngest son, Palin released the news about her daughter Bristol earlier today.

A statement released by the campaign said that Bristol Palin will keep her baby and marry the child’s father. Bristol Palin is five months pregnant, and the baby is due in late December.

“Our beautiful daughter Bristol came to us with news that as parents we knew would make her grow up faster than we had ever planned. We’re proud of Bristol’s decision to have her baby and even prouder to become grandparents,” Sarah and Todd Palin said in the brief statement.

“Bristol and the young man she will marry are going to realize very quickly the difficulties of raising a child, which is why they will have the love and support of our entire family,” they added….read more