Healthcare is the place where scientific expertise meets lived experience most intimately. The problems have no easy answers, but we can all see for ourselves how badly the system is failing.
Count me as someone whose perspective has completely changed on this issue post Covid. Sure, did I know that healthcare was absurdly expensive and that price transparency was a fool’s errand? Of course. But I had no assumption that anything but the very outer fringes of healthcare was for anything but the benefit of humanity. How wrong I was. The majority of the industry seems equivalent to the “military industrial complex” Eisenhower so famously warned about. But now it’s the medical-government-insurance complex that has no compunction to do anything except enrich its elite, wherever that elite may be.
Let’s not forget the Food Industrial Complex that has tens of millions of Americans addicted to sugar in the garbage ultraprocessed foods they foist on us. 42 percent of Americans are obese!!! So we have Big Pharma feeding off of Big Food. Puns intended.
Well said- but when do you ever go for a physical and they talk about nutrition? It’s all about giving out more and more pills to fix lifestyle problems . So in reality- big pharma then causes more issues.
i never go for a physical. any optional engagement with the medical industrial complex is a trap and you're best to avoid them unless it's not possible. obviously if you're hit by a bus or break a bone, you probably need a doctor. otherwise, don't go looking for trouble.
i was born in 1953 so i only had 3 vaccines. i don't take flu shots (my cousin's wife spent a year in a wheelchair after the swine flu vaccine in 1976), have never had a mammogram or any other cancer diagnostic test.
we buy all our meat and eggs from regenerative farmers, grow vegetables in the back yard and i cook all our meals. i get sun, keep my vitamin D levels high and get my hands dirty when i garden. i only go to doctors who don't take insurance. i am on medicare which does cover occasional blood work and the surgery when i was hit by a car (a texting driver!). other than that i pay for things out of pocket- like whenever i feel the need for a high dose vitamin IV, i call my holistic doctor and pay for it. i was fired from my job of 40 years because i refused the covid shot. i did get covid, a two day minor flu, not really worth upending the Constitution.
Same with me. I don't get yearly flu shots and no covid shot for me or my wife. Yep, I had to quit work or get fired. I quit and am very happy I did. We both eventually got covid but it was at worst a very mild flu. The unrelenting government/pharmaceutical terror campaign that was waged through the obliging media was too overwhelming for many people to handle. I absolutely agree that our medical system is broke is so many ways. However, the terror campaign that the US government inflicted on Americans was beyond anything I could have imagined in my nearly 7 decades of living here.
Carolyn, right on. Me too on all counts. I never schedule regular physicals...it's a trap. I stay as far away from the medical industrial complex as possible. It's a fear based system and I don't engage unless I need emergency medical help. I'm not yet on Medicare, but will happily pay my acupuncturist, chiropractor, herbalist, and others out of pocket. They deliver real healing solutions and never depend on pharmaceutical products to do so. And I've never had a single vaccine. I had a super smart mom who didn't vaccinate her 5 children in the 1960s. I had measles, chicken pox, whooping cough...all those supposed nasty childhood illnesses and recovered just fine, and have a stronger immune system for it. Just like all of my siblings. And no chronic illnesses, either. There has been no cancer, autoimmune diseases, diabetes, obesity, or anything debilitating for me or my siblings, and we range in age from 62 to 72. My, how times have changed for the worse.
Beachgirl-- my six siblings and I were raised in the Fifties and Sixties. We had all the usual childhood diseases. We got the smallpox vaccine and the polio vaccine, but that's all. We were breastfed and got our water from a spring. Never any antibiotics. My parents seemed to have the attitude of "get better or die." I didn't have an antibiotic until I caught the clap at the age of twenty-two.
We're now in our sixties and seventies. One of my sisters has Parkinson's and another died of CPOD, but there has been no obesity or diabetes or autoimmune disease with any of us. No liver or kidney disease. Not one case of CANCER or HEART ATTACK in the seven of us.
There was nothing special about us except that our immune systems had plenty of challenges in our childhood years. As you say, how times have changed for the worse.
So true! The only vaccines I got as a kid were for polio and smallpox. I got the mumps but not measles or chicken pox. I caught chicken pox as an adult from my young sons. It wasn’t a big deal. No flu in over 50 years despite only 1 flu vaccine all that time.
yes! i remember seeing my female employees having some tense days every year while waiting for the results of their latest mammogram. "is this the year that my body turns on me?" your body wasn't made to kill you although the medical industrial complex wants you to believe that you can only achieve "health" by constantly taking their potions
I agree , I was born in 1952, I had a serious reaction to small pox vaccine(large cyst) that they used radiation on me at age 4 to remove, spent years worrying about cancer from that. My child got meningitis from MMR. That was when I stopped vaccinating my children. Her son had a seizure after DTaP, began crying uncontrollably after that. Now all vaccines are declined by most of our family, oddly those of us not vaccinated haven't gotten Covid, just those that have. I haven't been ill with anything in 5 years. We have also learned to always get a second opinion especially regarding surgery, in two instance it wasn't warranted. A Dr. friend once said he welcomes second options as he is human and may make a mistake, those are the Drs. we look for but they are few and far between these days. Also when you have good insurance they push things as they know they will get paid, one Dr. who wanted to do back surgery on our son was livid we sent him elsewhere (we inconvenienced him he said) Well our son didn't need surgery just a neck collar for 3 months.
I firmly believe the mass prescribing of pharmaceuticals which we have no idea what the ingredients are,where they were made and have side effects, are the reason we have shortened our life span and have more serious diseases like Alzheimer's and the uptick of lung cancer in non smokers. Think about it, it never made sense that putting smoke by way of cigarettes was healthy per science prior to the surgeons general's warning and it make no sense to believe these drug aren't effecting our bodies negatively and causing permanent damage.
It is sad that we almost have to do our own research to verify if the DR. has your best interests at heart.
Whoever fired you from your job (after 40 years of faithful service!!!) for not getting a Covid vaccine belongs in prison. It takes a totally despicable human being to do something like that.
thank you. i agree. i was the Costume Director for the Spoleto Arts Festival in Charleston, SC. it was the pivotal experience of my life. i realized after my first 2 seasons that i could never have a regular job and leave for 6 weeks every year; i opened my own NYC costume shop so that i could close it down every year while i was away. once i became the head, the job for me became more like 6 months off and on- meeting with designers, measuring performers, choosing fabrics, making costumes, hiring my crew. the 6 weeks were intense. i would work around the clock, doing whatever it took to get the productions looking just right by curtain.
costume design professors would send their best and brightest students to intern with me.
no one ever asked me if i was coming and for years i never signed a contract; it was just assumed. i might get a call in october to come for a meeting and by january, i'd start getting emails with casting information.
eventually my shop in NY gained a reputation and i had a trusted crew so that i didn't have to close the shop when i was away.
i met my life partner there (he was the original production supervisor) and bought 4 houses when houses were cheap. every year, i would start to get impatient for may when i could leave NY for 6 glorious weeks in charleston. i kept my bike there. i was frequently interviewed for the local newspaper and appeared often on local television. they housed me for 10 seasons in the kitchen house of Stephen Colbert's in laws. i had a kind of celebrity status in the town.
the festival was the thing i looked most forward to every year. when i left NYC, it was the first time the Festival was spared the expense of flying me down and housing me. the Festival was the reason we moved here.
at some point, the festival started getting more bureaucratic and outsourced the payroll. on the first payday when i didn't get a check (even though i was paid for all my pre-production work in NY), they told me that the payroll company needed a signed contract in order to cut a check. i had been there for so long without a contract that they had forgotten to give me one, which i pointed out to them!
when i saw the boilerplate requirement for a tetanus shot, i sent it back and told them i wouldn't sign until all language about medical requirements was removed, which they did. so i'm not sure why anyone was surprised when i didn't jump on board the covid vaccine train.
anyway, they did not technically fire me. the poor guy tasked with telling me actually said "we never officially hired you so we don't have to fire you. you were always just temporary" even though in the programs i was listed as "permanent staff." i was (and still am) the longest serving person to ever work for the Festival in it's history.
the great irony is that if i had died, they would have held a memorial service for me, written something nice in the program and dedicated a few performances to my memory. if i had retired, they would have thrown me a party, given me a lovely gift and i'd have lifetime comp tickets to any events i chose to attend. since i left under a cloud of disobedience, not a single person ever bothered to call me to see how i was doing after having the very meaning of who i am ripped from me.
now, when the festival is in season, we get out of town. i don't go to any area where i might bump into anyone i know. seeing a poster or a headline in the paper is painful. it's hard to believe that i could hate something so completely that i once loved so much that i built my life for it.
the worst part is the betrayal by all the arts, which you would think is where the rebels, iconoclasts and disrupters hang out. but no, the Festival, while insisting that art should be for everyone, demanded 2 vaccines plus a booster after 5 months, a well fitting mask AND a photo ID for admission to a concert, something that in california you can't ask to see for a presidential election!
i hear that the Festival has gotten all woke and does a bunch of stuff that only interests the smallest fringe minority (does anyone really want to see the gay or lesbian version of the ballet romeo and julliet? apparently not). 10 board members quit at the end of the 2024 season and they'll never get someone on staff who hangs around as long as i did. on the day that it goes bankrupt and ceases to exist, i'll rejoice.
Carolyn, I am glad you told us this. I am so sorry that you were subjected to this cruelty. And shame on the fellow employees that never contacted you to see how you were doing.
Carolyn, I, too am so sorry that you were treated so poorly! You were blessed with amazing talent and have a sterling work ethic. You have not had the meaning of who you are ripped from your life : You are a beloved child of God and still have much to contribute. Please give much thought and choose to direct your gift and talent in another positive direction!
It is really great to hear what you have said Carolyn K!! Exactly my thoughts and how I’ve lived my life! I cycle, hike and with my German Shepherd and enjoy every healthy minute of my life!!
And yet now obesity is now looked at a disease instead of as a behavior problem and, YES!, we have a drug for that - which you’ll be on for the rest of your life.
I have commented before: school kid obesity was rare when I was one ( 60s & 70s ) - today, well, go see for yourself or walk on any college campus. 😔
But it’s not just USofA: over ¼ of India’s adults are diabetic (type II ) and half of ChaiNah’s adults are obese - two nations that were food insecure when I was a youth.
In USofA, maybe privatize health/disease insurance and allow those companies to charge more for behavioral impacts to health.
Maybe toss all the DIE programs in school and bring back PE - get the kiddos off to a healthy start.
try to watch the wonderful 2017 documentary The Motivation Factor, about JFK's physical fitness programs in high schools. not a chubby kid in the class
Don’t have to watch, I am of that era - until our move up to DC we had the annual ( more often? ) fitness tests: my sister had the school record for the arm hang for a spell and up through my time in the Corps always scored 100% on PFTs. Youngest sis&bro never got to partake in that - guess it lost its cachet by then.
you really should watch it. it's almost military training that these kids were put through! you know, i can remember the one chubby kid in my 3rd grade class because he was so rare. i remember his name, how he dressed and everything. now if i was in school, i'd probably only remember the one non-obese kid who stood out!
That’s because the vast majority of patients simply want a pill, and complain to the corporation employing the doctor when they don’t get it. Primary care sucks, which is why most doctors are fleeing it.
Exactly! The health care system has to deal with unhealthy people! Look at obesity, like my comment above about Jaws. Also look at PFAS, microplastics (and ultra processed foods as you say). Medicine can help, but it can't perform mircles. Prices should be transparent and more free market, less regulation.
I'd also add that regarding the statement that "younger on average than people in other advanced countries" one should look at the waste lines of people. For example, look at the beach scene in Jaws from 1975 compared to now and see the huge difference in weight.
Very well done. Your frustration is clear. When I first graduated from college in the late 70s I worked for a small, local insurance company and I paid group health claims. I know how to read a hospital bill. And Dr's bills. These bills are totally incomprehensible today. And Obama care is a disaster. My husband and I are on Medicare now but for 3 years we paid $20k annually in premiums for which we each received a free flu shot each year, period. Our deductible was so high we also paid all our medical expenses out of pocket. We were fortunate we could afford that (barely) but many people cannot. I recently broke my shoulder. We didn't pay anything for it but the total billing for it was $120k. I basically had 6 x-rays and about 10 doctor visits. No surgery, no procedures. This is ridiculous!
Carrying “major medical insurance “ out of fear of “what could happen” is the same propaganda driven behavior as Covid mask/shot/social distancing. It is not necessary for everyone. Take that money and invest it in 1) preventative and wellness care so you don’t get sick. Invest the rest like you do for any savings. It is a cartel of sorts that you are funding. It’s also artificially driving medical prices up. Other insurance products exist for accidents and surgery. I have a chronic injury for 20 years, live in some sort of pain daily, am middle aged and I get excellent primary care for under 1500 total a year with a membership fee practice that meets all my needs. I also take insurance professionally and I have to reserve my most effective treatments for non insurance clients, with limited exceptions, because they don’t fit the standard 45 minute model of symptom management that insurance covers. Its a sick industry so it will produce sick results. Get out from under it!
before i aged into medicare, i had the top of the line Liberty cost sharing plan. i loved it. not that i ever used it- i never cracked my deductible- but it kept me in compliance with the obama care requirements and i was so happy to be out of the fraudulent medical criminal cartel.
RFK, Jr. isn't the only one who is not convinced that HIV causes AIDs, and I am not talking about myself. I am personally agnostic on the issue. But my understanding is that no definitive causative link has been established, it is merely consensus that it does. I.e., it is "the Science." In this way it is similar to the consensus that CO2 causes climate change, or that oil is decomposed dinosaurs.
If you are aware of a paper that demonstrates that HIV causes AIDs, not just occurs concurrently with AIDs, I'm sure everyone would like to see it.
What I do know is that loads of money gets shoveled into the idea that HIV causes AIDs, just like loads of money gets shoveled into the idea that CO2 causes climate change.
Yeah I don’t know how Berenson calls that a conspiracy theory. Even Luc Montagnier, the virologist who won the Nobel prize for discovering HIV eventually expressed doubt that HIV causes AIDS.
I see two problems in both the AIDs and climate change fields. First, statistics have supplanted science as the main way researchers try to understand phenomena. It is much easier to just crunch numbers and show an apparent correlation that it is to go through the exercise of demonstrating causation. The old saw is that correlation is not proof of causation. Second is the money that gets thrown around on 'the Science." Researchers rely on grants for funding. Popular ideas get funded, regardless of how dodgy they may be. Unpopular ideas get no funding. Furthermore, the guys with the popular ideas do everything they can to shut down competing ideas. Hence the invention of the term "denier" as an insult to anyone who threatens funding of the popular ideas.
You & Alex should read "Inventing the AIDS Virus" by Peter Duesberg, the world's pre-eminent retrovirologist at the time. The seminal tome on the subject.
Agree on this. I enjoy Alex's Substack hugely and have a paid subscription, but I hate, hate! when Alex shames people (like me) who have read enough to know that the AIDS "science" issue is full of holes...and calls it a conspiracy theory. It's the laziest solution to call something you don't either know a lot about, or think you know about via the acceptable narrative, a conspiracy theory. People questioning the AIDS/HIV "science" are no different than Alex's questioning of various Covid narratives. It's snarky when Alex does this and I don't appreciate it. And it's a shaming term, just like calling those of us who question vaccine safety "anti vaxxers." Alex, please stop this. You don't need to prove anything with this shame language, especially in this group. Aren't we all here because we question?
There is no study nor paper that proves HIV causes AIDS. The origin was a press conference. After that, the lie was repeated over and over until it became The Science. And the HIV test sounds about as reliable as the PCR test. Follow the money. All roads lead back to Fauci and Gates.
From a veterinary standpoint. I am often AMAZED at how utterly stupid human medicine is.
We don't have insurance to fall back on usually and good luck getting gov to pay for your dog's surgery.
We do a lot of the same things as human doctors do....often using the exact same drugs and tools.....and manage to do things for hundreds of dollars vs thousands.
Health insurance is one of the biggest scams of all time.
I own a vet clinic....I know EXACTLY how much this stuff costs.
Most people could afford to pay out of pocket for everything if they would price it honestly....and they would STILL make a profit.
insurance separates the actual price of services from the consumer. it is a license to steal. if your doctor had to look you in the eye and tell you that the test he was ordering was going to cost $4000, you would walk out and prices would drop. instead you get the test, deal with the co-pay and have no idea what the damn thing cost.
the same thing happened with college tuition. once student loans became a thing, the price of college became uncoupled from the quality of the education and the value of the degree
I think you nailed one of the most important and least talked about aspects of this issue. I'm 70 now, on Medicare, and it has helped me to afford some things we might have otherwise had difficulty with. But I have essentially made your argument for years. People are generally either ignorant or don't want to hear a word. How many politicians have survived who tried to even tweak Medicare? Why were Republicans unable to deliver on repealing Obama-care? Combine this with the $ at stake (Big Pharma spends more on lobbying than the next 3 industries combined) and I think we're stuck with this convoluted mess until the entire economy goes belly up. Funny, but the entire time I was growing up I don't ever once recall my parents discussing health insurance. I was in my 50's before I started seeing a physician regularly under an insurance plan. I was flabbergasted and furious at insurance being mandated with the "Affordable" Care Act. A real marketplace would enable patients to opt-out and doctors to treat patients the way they feel is best.
Forgive my pessimism and selfishness, but I hope I'm pushing up daisies when this God-awful mess crashes and burns. The system is already insane. We might as well have an inmate running asylum!
i'm 71. i clearly remember when i aged out of my parents' family plan. my mother informed me that if i didn't get my own medical insurance, i would have to move out of the house. her parents almost lost their house during the Great Depression and she was always a bit paranoid about anything that might threaten it. i said "wow, you don't love me anymore." she said "cut the crap." insurance is a criminal enterprise. my parents' premiums didn't go down once i was off their plan.
the "affordable" care act mandate cracked me up. how, i wondered, would the Supreme Court resolve this? it's clearly unconstitutional. what's to stop a TV company from mandating that every household must have a TV in every room? a car company insisting that every person in a family have their own car, even the pre-schoolers?
i understand your cynicism. i have high hopes for RFKjr. he doesn't have to do much to change the world: 1) ending drug commercials on TV 2) over turning the 1986 childhood vaccine act 3) flip the emphasis from viruses to chronic disease. he says he has 100 things he wants to do on day 1. i want to see him do it. call your senators and tell them you expect them to approve his confirmation
Well, the Supreme Court (mainly John Roberts) certainly was no help regarding Obama Care. I can't believe your parents' making those remarks! The fact that I never heard my parents mention insurance (until they were on Medicare) suggests that we may have been "self-insured." They were on Medicare by the time the healthcare mandate took effect. It wouldn't bother me in the least if we banned drug ads. I was talking with my wife about Alex's piece, and she pointed out we banned tobacco ads, and also (for a time) ads for hard liquor. We'll have to see what unfolds, but I'm not holding my breath.
My college age son recently fell while rollerblading and broke a bone in his wrist. Simple fracture. Got a cast. So far we know it's going to cost at least $5,000 out of pocket... and we have middling health insurance! Yes the system is badly broken.
I know from experience with a TBI suffered by my son; the hospitals look at your insurance policy and suck everything off of it possible. Test were given numerous times (absolutely not an issue) because the policy would pay. What a racket. Pure highway robbery. Another form of money laundering.
Agreed. When you say you’re self pay they miraculously don’t screw you. I had an emergency appendectomy last summer. My initial surgery bill was $4700, reduced to $1245 for self pay; anesthesia bill was $4200, reduced to $2700. My hospital bill (ER services and the room I was in for 6 hours) was only $985. We had an indemnity policy so I submitted everything after we paid and got 90% reimbursed. It would have been 10x that “with insurance”. With insurance, when I had cataract surgery 10 years ago (I was in my 40s), the hospital charged almost $13k for one eye - many times over the national average.
The health care system is run by Big Pharma and their stooges in government, assuring that profits dictate policy rather than health. The food system is run by Big Ag and their stooges in government, assuring a junky food supply that contributes to our chronic bad health that fuels the profits described above. What could go wrong with such a system? RFK is entering a target-rich environment - off with their heads, junior!!!
That overt influence has been entrenched for decades too, and has only become worse over time. Look how they influence most all the alphabet health agencies as we have all come to KNOW during the great PLANdemic.
Alex, Great analysis of some of what’s going on with the medical establishment. I think you just gave us a peek into the corrupt American medical system, but just a peek. Nevertheless, I believe this is one of your boldest and bravest forays into the dark side of our medical system. You will probably get more backlash on this piece than your posts on Twitter that got you banned. You are the Thomas Paine of our times, so keep pursuing the truth. Love your insights and courage!
Drive thru any city of relative modest size, and almost always there is a CRANE or 3 around medical facilities building more and more. Has been this way for as long as I can remember. Making $$$ hand over fist
Brogan raises an interesting topic. Two nearby hospitals were planning expansions. Per a comment from a neighbor who reads the paper routinely, both projects received federal money to enlarge their original plans. Is this routine? I know we're aging, but maybe the feds expect additional demand for hospital space?
ok, not conspiracy but some history. the HIV virus was only found in about half of the men who had AIDS. Peter Duesberg proposed "his hypothesis that AIDS is caused by long-term consumption of recreational drugs or antiretroviral drugs, and that the retrovirus known as 'HIV' is a harmless passenger virus." Fauci and Robert Gallo were uninterested in any other narrative. Duesberg was banished from the NIH. interestingly, Luc Montagnier, who was awarded the Nobel Prize for his discovery of the HIV virus, argued in 2020, "that SARS-CoV-2 was man-made in a laboratory and that it might have been the result of an attempt to create a vaccine for HIV/AIDS." he also started to openly speculate that Duesberg may have been right about HIV. obviously, that didn't go over well.
i think the point is that Fauci was the high priest of an orthodoxy and anyone who had any other ideas, no matter how plausable, was de-funded, discredited, de-licensed, you name it.
look at Dr. Battacharya and his 2 GBD collaborators being written off as "fringe." look at Pierre Kory and Paul Marik being stripped of their medical accreditations. actually, look no further than the mirror. you know how you've been treated for daring to doubt the official narrative.
Awesome article. This subject is something I'm quite passionate about. I was medic for more than a decade and everything I thought I knew about healthcare turned out to be wrong. The system is beyond flawed, with big insurance dictating everything. Big pharma is bad, insurance is worse. CMS reimbursement rates wouldn't pay for costs, even if they were billed honestly.
Healthcare is broken. It’s over regulated with reimbursements that are different per payer. Medicaid reimbursements won’t cover the cost of keeping the lights on. So it’s devolved into how much you can pay therefore the same procedure can have multiple reimbursement rates.
…Robert F. Kennedy - who isn’t even convinced that HIV causes AIDS³ - “spare me,” says Alex
Do you make comments like this because you are thoroughly versed in the dissenting view or are you just knee-JERKing on the topic?
I read Celia Farber’s book, did you? Her against-the-grain investigative journalism reminded me of someone else, oh yeah, Alex Berenson.
I haven’t read the comment thread yet, but I assume someone has mentioned that Luc Montagnier — you know who that is, right? — so this early dissenting voice on COVID’s supposed “natural origins” ALSO had some serious doubts about his own “Nobel Prize discovery” about HIV.
Alex has some surprising orthodoxies of his own, like IVM. i've had friends who were deathly ill with covid and i talked them into taking a dose of IVM, actually the horse paste version (she lived on a hobby farm) and she was better the next day
Our experience too. We are in our 70's with diabetes and asthma respectively. Took ivermectin and what do you know... better in a few days. We haven't had another case of covid despite traveling like sardines in a can flying all over the US during the "pandemic". In marked contrast, our vaxxed 20-30 yo nephews were sick for 2 weeks with the same event exposure, continue to be more sickly, and have suffered covid numerous times these past few years.
i also have asthma, the result of a formaldehyde exposure. i've used many things to treat it, the most successful of which was peptide injections from a lab in france (they are illegal in the USA). i've lost access to that practitioner and the peptide doctors where i live now have told me that the government has regulated against all the most useful ones. i hope RFKjr can change that.
when i had covid, i learned that i could nebulize reduced glutathione. when i lived in NYC, i nebulized glutathione but it came from a compounding pharmacy, was really $$$ and had to be kept in the fridge and had an expiration date.
now i buy these capsules and empty the contents of one into my nebulizer cup. i add a teaspoon of filtered water and then nebulize it. since i've started doing this, i've cut my use of ADVAIR from one puff every other day to one puff every 10 days. the more i do it, the stronger my lungs get.
once i recovered from covid (2 days), my boyfriend came down with it (3 days). he had the worst sore throat ever but no fever so i knew it wasn't strep throat. he called his medical place and they said "come over and we'll give you paxlovid." well, that wasn't happening!
i remembered that Dr Jockers had instructions for nebulizing an H2O2 saline solution so i tried that. of course the BF balked at the thought of having to do something once an hour and condemned it as "woo woo" and "communism" (which is what he calls all alternative health things). but i insisted.
he felt immediate relief after his first session, which barely took 5 minutes anyway. so then, he wanted to do it, which made it much easier on me!
but it's when i was reading the instructions to nurse my BF that i came across the part about nebulizing glutathione and got very excited. i ordered 2 bottles immediately!
with regular use, i noticed that i wasn't feeling the need for a puff of advair for 3 days and then 4. i keep a chart whenever i take a puff so i could see that the time between puffs was stretching out. now i'm at 10 (and sometimes a bit more) days.
the greatest thing about cutting yourself off from optional medical engagement is that you get back in tune with your body. you start to feel things like "i'm craving some magnesium" or "i feel like i need more vitamin C" rather than just taking the same vitamins everyday by habit. the same thing happens when you eat real food.
I agree that our costs are wildly out of control. Admin costs are a huge part of the problem. For the last 70 years, the government has intervened to try to make adjustments to pricing/paying/etc and basically without exception every time the government has touched healthcare, costs have gone up. Especially after the ironically named Affordable Care Act.
I am a physician surgeon. On an every single day basis, we have patients that, because of rules, the costs for diagnosing and treating them, are just ridiculous. It’s a shame. It should never be a question that I ask, but I always have to ask my patients if they have insurance. If they do not have insurance, the surgeries and procedures I provide will bankrupt them
I’m disgusted by the costs.
And relatively speaking, we make less than physicians did in the 70s and 80s. The physicians in the 70s became millionaires. I personally came out of residency with about $430,000 in debt in 2015. I am on the verge of paying it off this year.
When my patients get itemized bills, I am often one of the cheapest parts of the bill
Count me as someone whose perspective has completely changed on this issue post Covid. Sure, did I know that healthcare was absurdly expensive and that price transparency was a fool’s errand? Of course. But I had no assumption that anything but the very outer fringes of healthcare was for anything but the benefit of humanity. How wrong I was. The majority of the industry seems equivalent to the “military industrial complex” Eisenhower so famously warned about. But now it’s the medical-government-insurance complex that has no compunction to do anything except enrich its elite, wherever that elite may be.
Let’s not forget the Food Industrial Complex that has tens of millions of Americans addicted to sugar in the garbage ultraprocessed foods they foist on us. 42 percent of Americans are obese!!! So we have Big Pharma feeding off of Big Food. Puns intended.
Well said- but when do you ever go for a physical and they talk about nutrition? It’s all about giving out more and more pills to fix lifestyle problems . So in reality- big pharma then causes more issues.
i never go for a physical. any optional engagement with the medical industrial complex is a trap and you're best to avoid them unless it's not possible. obviously if you're hit by a bus or break a bone, you probably need a doctor. otherwise, don't go looking for trouble.
i was born in 1953 so i only had 3 vaccines. i don't take flu shots (my cousin's wife spent a year in a wheelchair after the swine flu vaccine in 1976), have never had a mammogram or any other cancer diagnostic test.
we buy all our meat and eggs from regenerative farmers, grow vegetables in the back yard and i cook all our meals. i get sun, keep my vitamin D levels high and get my hands dirty when i garden. i only go to doctors who don't take insurance. i am on medicare which does cover occasional blood work and the surgery when i was hit by a car (a texting driver!). other than that i pay for things out of pocket- like whenever i feel the need for a high dose vitamin IV, i call my holistic doctor and pay for it. i was fired from my job of 40 years because i refused the covid shot. i did get covid, a two day minor flu, not really worth upending the Constitution.
i can't wait for RFKjr to disrupt healthcare.
Same with me. I don't get yearly flu shots and no covid shot for me or my wife. Yep, I had to quit work or get fired. I quit and am very happy I did. We both eventually got covid but it was at worst a very mild flu. The unrelenting government/pharmaceutical terror campaign that was waged through the obliging media was too overwhelming for many people to handle. I absolutely agree that our medical system is broke is so many ways. However, the terror campaign that the US government inflicted on Americans was beyond anything I could have imagined in my nearly 7 decades of living here.
After seeing in what bad faith every level of the supply chain operated, I will never take a vaccine for anything again.
Thank you for telling your story. It needs to be told so people can understand what these tyrants inflicted on us.
Carolyn, right on. Me too on all counts. I never schedule regular physicals...it's a trap. I stay as far away from the medical industrial complex as possible. It's a fear based system and I don't engage unless I need emergency medical help. I'm not yet on Medicare, but will happily pay my acupuncturist, chiropractor, herbalist, and others out of pocket. They deliver real healing solutions and never depend on pharmaceutical products to do so. And I've never had a single vaccine. I had a super smart mom who didn't vaccinate her 5 children in the 1960s. I had measles, chicken pox, whooping cough...all those supposed nasty childhood illnesses and recovered just fine, and have a stronger immune system for it. Just like all of my siblings. And no chronic illnesses, either. There has been no cancer, autoimmune diseases, diabetes, obesity, or anything debilitating for me or my siblings, and we range in age from 62 to 72. My, how times have changed for the worse.
Beachgirl-- my six siblings and I were raised in the Fifties and Sixties. We had all the usual childhood diseases. We got the smallpox vaccine and the polio vaccine, but that's all. We were breastfed and got our water from a spring. Never any antibiotics. My parents seemed to have the attitude of "get better or die." I didn't have an antibiotic until I caught the clap at the age of twenty-two.
We're now in our sixties and seventies. One of my sisters has Parkinson's and another died of CPOD, but there has been no obesity or diabetes or autoimmune disease with any of us. No liver or kidney disease. Not one case of CANCER or HEART ATTACK in the seven of us.
There was nothing special about us except that our immune systems had plenty of challenges in our childhood years. As you say, how times have changed for the worse.
So true! The only vaccines I got as a kid were for polio and smallpox. I got the mumps but not measles or chicken pox. I caught chicken pox as an adult from my young sons. It wasn’t a big deal. No flu in over 50 years despite only 1 flu vaccine all that time.
yes! i remember seeing my female employees having some tense days every year while waiting for the results of their latest mammogram. "is this the year that my body turns on me?" your body wasn't made to kill you although the medical industrial complex wants you to believe that you can only achieve "health" by constantly taking their potions
I agree , I was born in 1952, I had a serious reaction to small pox vaccine(large cyst) that they used radiation on me at age 4 to remove, spent years worrying about cancer from that. My child got meningitis from MMR. That was when I stopped vaccinating my children. Her son had a seizure after DTaP, began crying uncontrollably after that. Now all vaccines are declined by most of our family, oddly those of us not vaccinated haven't gotten Covid, just those that have. I haven't been ill with anything in 5 years. We have also learned to always get a second opinion especially regarding surgery, in two instance it wasn't warranted. A Dr. friend once said he welcomes second options as he is human and may make a mistake, those are the Drs. we look for but they are few and far between these days. Also when you have good insurance they push things as they know they will get paid, one Dr. who wanted to do back surgery on our son was livid we sent him elsewhere (we inconvenienced him he said) Well our son didn't need surgery just a neck collar for 3 months.
I firmly believe the mass prescribing of pharmaceuticals which we have no idea what the ingredients are,where they were made and have side effects, are the reason we have shortened our life span and have more serious diseases like Alzheimer's and the uptick of lung cancer in non smokers. Think about it, it never made sense that putting smoke by way of cigarettes was healthy per science prior to the surgeons general's warning and it make no sense to believe these drug aren't effecting our bodies negatively and causing permanent damage.
It is sad that we almost have to do our own research to verify if the DR. has your best interests at heart.
Whoever fired you from your job (after 40 years of faithful service!!!) for not getting a Covid vaccine belongs in prison. It takes a totally despicable human being to do something like that.
thank you. i agree. i was the Costume Director for the Spoleto Arts Festival in Charleston, SC. it was the pivotal experience of my life. i realized after my first 2 seasons that i could never have a regular job and leave for 6 weeks every year; i opened my own NYC costume shop so that i could close it down every year while i was away. once i became the head, the job for me became more like 6 months off and on- meeting with designers, measuring performers, choosing fabrics, making costumes, hiring my crew. the 6 weeks were intense. i would work around the clock, doing whatever it took to get the productions looking just right by curtain.
costume design professors would send their best and brightest students to intern with me.
no one ever asked me if i was coming and for years i never signed a contract; it was just assumed. i might get a call in october to come for a meeting and by january, i'd start getting emails with casting information.
eventually my shop in NY gained a reputation and i had a trusted crew so that i didn't have to close the shop when i was away.
i met my life partner there (he was the original production supervisor) and bought 4 houses when houses were cheap. every year, i would start to get impatient for may when i could leave NY for 6 glorious weeks in charleston. i kept my bike there. i was frequently interviewed for the local newspaper and appeared often on local television. they housed me for 10 seasons in the kitchen house of Stephen Colbert's in laws. i had a kind of celebrity status in the town.
the festival was the thing i looked most forward to every year. when i left NYC, it was the first time the Festival was spared the expense of flying me down and housing me. the Festival was the reason we moved here.
at some point, the festival started getting more bureaucratic and outsourced the payroll. on the first payday when i didn't get a check (even though i was paid for all my pre-production work in NY), they told me that the payroll company needed a signed contract in order to cut a check. i had been there for so long without a contract that they had forgotten to give me one, which i pointed out to them!
when i saw the boilerplate requirement for a tetanus shot, i sent it back and told them i wouldn't sign until all language about medical requirements was removed, which they did. so i'm not sure why anyone was surprised when i didn't jump on board the covid vaccine train.
anyway, they did not technically fire me. the poor guy tasked with telling me actually said "we never officially hired you so we don't have to fire you. you were always just temporary" even though in the programs i was listed as "permanent staff." i was (and still am) the longest serving person to ever work for the Festival in it's history.
the great irony is that if i had died, they would have held a memorial service for me, written something nice in the program and dedicated a few performances to my memory. if i had retired, they would have thrown me a party, given me a lovely gift and i'd have lifetime comp tickets to any events i chose to attend. since i left under a cloud of disobedience, not a single person ever bothered to call me to see how i was doing after having the very meaning of who i am ripped from me.
now, when the festival is in season, we get out of town. i don't go to any area where i might bump into anyone i know. seeing a poster or a headline in the paper is painful. it's hard to believe that i could hate something so completely that i once loved so much that i built my life for it.
the worst part is the betrayal by all the arts, which you would think is where the rebels, iconoclasts and disrupters hang out. but no, the Festival, while insisting that art should be for everyone, demanded 2 vaccines plus a booster after 5 months, a well fitting mask AND a photo ID for admission to a concert, something that in california you can't ask to see for a presidential election!
i hear that the Festival has gotten all woke and does a bunch of stuff that only interests the smallest fringe minority (does anyone really want to see the gay or lesbian version of the ballet romeo and julliet? apparently not). 10 board members quit at the end of the 2024 season and they'll never get someone on staff who hangs around as long as i did. on the day that it goes bankrupt and ceases to exist, i'll rejoice.
thanks for listening.
Carolyn, I am glad you told us this. I am so sorry that you were subjected to this cruelty. And shame on the fellow employees that never contacted you to see how you were doing.
Carolyn, I, too am so sorry that you were treated so poorly! You were blessed with amazing talent and have a sterling work ethic. You have not had the meaning of who you are ripped from your life : You are a beloved child of God and still have much to contribute. Please give much thought and choose to direct your gift and talent in another positive direction!
It is really great to hear what you have said Carolyn K!! Exactly my thoughts and how I’ve lived my life! I cycle, hike and with my German Shepherd and enjoy every healthy minute of my life!!
And yet now obesity is now looked at a disease instead of as a behavior problem and, YES!, we have a drug for that - which you’ll be on for the rest of your life.
I have commented before: school kid obesity was rare when I was one ( 60s & 70s ) - today, well, go see for yourself or walk on any college campus. 😔
But it’s not just USofA: over ¼ of India’s adults are diabetic (type II ) and half of ChaiNah’s adults are obese - two nations that were food insecure when I was a youth.
In USofA, maybe privatize health/disease insurance and allow those companies to charge more for behavioral impacts to health.
Maybe toss all the DIE programs in school and bring back PE - get the kiddos off to a healthy start.
try to watch the wonderful 2017 documentary The Motivation Factor, about JFK's physical fitness programs in high schools. not a chubby kid in the class
Don’t have to watch, I am of that era - until our move up to DC we had the annual ( more often? ) fitness tests: my sister had the school record for the arm hang for a spell and up through my time in the Corps always scored 100% on PFTs. Youngest sis&bro never got to partake in that - guess it lost its cachet by then.
you really should watch it. it's almost military training that these kids were put through! you know, i can remember the one chubby kid in my 3rd grade class because he was so rare. i remember his name, how he dressed and everything. now if i was in school, i'd probably only remember the one non-obese kid who stood out!
That’s because the vast majority of patients simply want a pill, and complain to the corporation employing the doctor when they don’t get it. Primary care sucks, which is why most doctors are fleeing it.
Exactly! The health care system has to deal with unhealthy people! Look at obesity, like my comment above about Jaws. Also look at PFAS, microplastics (and ultra processed foods as you say). Medicine can help, but it can't perform mircles. Prices should be transparent and more free market, less regulation.
I'd also add that regarding the statement that "younger on average than people in other advanced countries" one should look at the waste lines of people. For example, look at the beach scene in Jaws from 1975 compared to now and see the huge difference in weight.
Very well done. Your frustration is clear. When I first graduated from college in the late 70s I worked for a small, local insurance company and I paid group health claims. I know how to read a hospital bill. And Dr's bills. These bills are totally incomprehensible today. And Obama care is a disaster. My husband and I are on Medicare now but for 3 years we paid $20k annually in premiums for which we each received a free flu shot each year, period. Our deductible was so high we also paid all our medical expenses out of pocket. We were fortunate we could afford that (barely) but many people cannot. I recently broke my shoulder. We didn't pay anything for it but the total billing for it was $120k. I basically had 6 x-rays and about 10 doctor visits. No surgery, no procedures. This is ridiculous!
Carrying “major medical insurance “ out of fear of “what could happen” is the same propaganda driven behavior as Covid mask/shot/social distancing. It is not necessary for everyone. Take that money and invest it in 1) preventative and wellness care so you don’t get sick. Invest the rest like you do for any savings. It is a cartel of sorts that you are funding. It’s also artificially driving medical prices up. Other insurance products exist for accidents and surgery. I have a chronic injury for 20 years, live in some sort of pain daily, am middle aged and I get excellent primary care for under 1500 total a year with a membership fee practice that meets all my needs. I also take insurance professionally and I have to reserve my most effective treatments for non insurance clients, with limited exceptions, because they don’t fit the standard 45 minute model of symptom management that insurance covers. Its a sick industry so it will produce sick results. Get out from under it!
before i aged into medicare, i had the top of the line Liberty cost sharing plan. i loved it. not that i ever used it- i never cracked my deductible- but it kept me in compliance with the obama care requirements and i was so happy to be out of the fraudulent medical criminal cartel.
RFK, Jr. isn't the only one who is not convinced that HIV causes AIDs, and I am not talking about myself. I am personally agnostic on the issue. But my understanding is that no definitive causative link has been established, it is merely consensus that it does. I.e., it is "the Science." In this way it is similar to the consensus that CO2 causes climate change, or that oil is decomposed dinosaurs.
If you are aware of a paper that demonstrates that HIV causes AIDs, not just occurs concurrently with AIDs, I'm sure everyone would like to see it.
What I do know is that loads of money gets shoveled into the idea that HIV causes AIDs, just like loads of money gets shoveled into the idea that CO2 causes climate change.
Yeah I don’t know how Berenson calls that a conspiracy theory. Even Luc Montagnier, the virologist who won the Nobel prize for discovering HIV eventually expressed doubt that HIV causes AIDS.
I see two problems in both the AIDs and climate change fields. First, statistics have supplanted science as the main way researchers try to understand phenomena. It is much easier to just crunch numbers and show an apparent correlation that it is to go through the exercise of demonstrating causation. The old saw is that correlation is not proof of causation. Second is the money that gets thrown around on 'the Science." Researchers rely on grants for funding. Popular ideas get funded, regardless of how dodgy they may be. Unpopular ideas get no funding. Furthermore, the guys with the popular ideas do everything they can to shut down competing ideas. Hence the invention of the term "denier" as an insult to anyone who threatens funding of the popular ideas.
Yes, I'm shocked Alex so easily dismisses this point AFTER LIVING THROUGH THE COVID LIES. Question everything.
Oh, and also wasn't Fauci involved with lots of graft and corruption with the development of an AIDs vaccine?
You & Alex should read "Inventing the AIDS Virus" by Peter Duesberg, the world's pre-eminent retrovirologist at the time. The seminal tome on the subject.
Agree on this. I enjoy Alex's Substack hugely and have a paid subscription, but I hate, hate! when Alex shames people (like me) who have read enough to know that the AIDS "science" issue is full of holes...and calls it a conspiracy theory. It's the laziest solution to call something you don't either know a lot about, or think you know about via the acceptable narrative, a conspiracy theory. People questioning the AIDS/HIV "science" are no different than Alex's questioning of various Covid narratives. It's snarky when Alex does this and I don't appreciate it. And it's a shaming term, just like calling those of us who question vaccine safety "anti vaxxers." Alex, please stop this. You don't need to prove anything with this shame language, especially in this group. Aren't we all here because we question?
fauci built his empire by dangling the promise of a vaccine for HIV before the eyes of gullible appropriation committees.
There is no study nor paper that proves HIV causes AIDS. The origin was a press conference. After that, the lie was repeated over and over until it became The Science. And the HIV test sounds about as reliable as the PCR test. Follow the money. All roads lead back to Fauci and Gates.
From a veterinary standpoint. I am often AMAZED at how utterly stupid human medicine is.
We don't have insurance to fall back on usually and good luck getting gov to pay for your dog's surgery.
We do a lot of the same things as human doctors do....often using the exact same drugs and tools.....and manage to do things for hundreds of dollars vs thousands.
Health insurance is one of the biggest scams of all time.
I own a vet clinic....I know EXACTLY how much this stuff costs.
Most people could afford to pay out of pocket for everything if they would price it honestly....and they would STILL make a profit.
insurance separates the actual price of services from the consumer. it is a license to steal. if your doctor had to look you in the eye and tell you that the test he was ordering was going to cost $4000, you would walk out and prices would drop. instead you get the test, deal with the co-pay and have no idea what the damn thing cost.
the same thing happened with college tuition. once student loans became a thing, the price of college became uncoupled from the quality of the education and the value of the degree
I think you nailed one of the most important and least talked about aspects of this issue. I'm 70 now, on Medicare, and it has helped me to afford some things we might have otherwise had difficulty with. But I have essentially made your argument for years. People are generally either ignorant or don't want to hear a word. How many politicians have survived who tried to even tweak Medicare? Why were Republicans unable to deliver on repealing Obama-care? Combine this with the $ at stake (Big Pharma spends more on lobbying than the next 3 industries combined) and I think we're stuck with this convoluted mess until the entire economy goes belly up. Funny, but the entire time I was growing up I don't ever once recall my parents discussing health insurance. I was in my 50's before I started seeing a physician regularly under an insurance plan. I was flabbergasted and furious at insurance being mandated with the "Affordable" Care Act. A real marketplace would enable patients to opt-out and doctors to treat patients the way they feel is best.
Forgive my pessimism and selfishness, but I hope I'm pushing up daisies when this God-awful mess crashes and burns. The system is already insane. We might as well have an inmate running asylum!
i'm 71. i clearly remember when i aged out of my parents' family plan. my mother informed me that if i didn't get my own medical insurance, i would have to move out of the house. her parents almost lost their house during the Great Depression and she was always a bit paranoid about anything that might threaten it. i said "wow, you don't love me anymore." she said "cut the crap." insurance is a criminal enterprise. my parents' premiums didn't go down once i was off their plan.
the "affordable" care act mandate cracked me up. how, i wondered, would the Supreme Court resolve this? it's clearly unconstitutional. what's to stop a TV company from mandating that every household must have a TV in every room? a car company insisting that every person in a family have their own car, even the pre-schoolers?
i understand your cynicism. i have high hopes for RFKjr. he doesn't have to do much to change the world: 1) ending drug commercials on TV 2) over turning the 1986 childhood vaccine act 3) flip the emphasis from viruses to chronic disease. he says he has 100 things he wants to do on day 1. i want to see him do it. call your senators and tell them you expect them to approve his confirmation
Well, the Supreme Court (mainly John Roberts) certainly was no help regarding Obama Care. I can't believe your parents' making those remarks! The fact that I never heard my parents mention insurance (until they were on Medicare) suggests that we may have been "self-insured." They were on Medicare by the time the healthcare mandate took effect. It wouldn't bother me in the least if we banned drug ads. I was talking with my wife about Alex's piece, and she pointed out we banned tobacco ads, and also (for a time) ads for hard liquor. We'll have to see what unfolds, but I'm not holding my breath.
I am a physician surgeon. I could not agree more.
My college age son recently fell while rollerblading and broke a bone in his wrist. Simple fracture. Got a cast. So far we know it's going to cost at least $5,000 out of pocket... and we have middling health insurance! Yes the system is badly broken.
I know from experience with a TBI suffered by my son; the hospitals look at your insurance policy and suck everything off of it possible. Test were given numerous times (absolutely not an issue) because the policy would pay. What a racket. Pure highway robbery. Another form of money laundering.
Agreed. When you say you’re self pay they miraculously don’t screw you. I had an emergency appendectomy last summer. My initial surgery bill was $4700, reduced to $1245 for self pay; anesthesia bill was $4200, reduced to $2700. My hospital bill (ER services and the room I was in for 6 hours) was only $985. We had an indemnity policy so I submitted everything after we paid and got 90% reimbursed. It would have been 10x that “with insurance”. With insurance, when I had cataract surgery 10 years ago (I was in my 40s), the hospital charged almost $13k for one eye - many times over the national average.
You are exactly right! We discovered these self-pay savings before we were forced on to to Obamacare. This puts the lie to the whole racket.
The health care system is run by Big Pharma and their stooges in government, assuring that profits dictate policy rather than health. The food system is run by Big Ag and their stooges in government, assuring a junky food supply that contributes to our chronic bad health that fuels the profits described above. What could go wrong with such a system? RFK is entering a target-rich environment - off with their heads, junior!!!
That overt influence has been entrenched for decades too, and has only become worse over time. Look how they influence most all the alphabet health agencies as we have all come to KNOW during the great PLANdemic.
Alex, Great analysis of some of what’s going on with the medical establishment. I think you just gave us a peek into the corrupt American medical system, but just a peek. Nevertheless, I believe this is one of your boldest and bravest forays into the dark side of our medical system. You will probably get more backlash on this piece than your posts on Twitter that got you banned. You are the Thomas Paine of our times, so keep pursuing the truth. Love your insights and courage!
Drive thru any city of relative modest size, and almost always there is a CRANE or 3 around medical facilities building more and more. Has been this way for as long as I can remember. Making $$$ hand over fist
🎯
Brogan raises an interesting topic. Two nearby hospitals were planning expansions. Per a comment from a neighbor who reads the paper routinely, both projects received federal money to enlarge their original plans. Is this routine? I know we're aging, but maybe the feds expect additional demand for hospital space?
Step 1. PRICE DISCOVERY. UP FRONT. REGARDLESS OF INSURANCE.
You can't drop your car off for a "funny" noise, and pick it up later with a bill for a 6k new transmission .
ok, not conspiracy but some history. the HIV virus was only found in about half of the men who had AIDS. Peter Duesberg proposed "his hypothesis that AIDS is caused by long-term consumption of recreational drugs or antiretroviral drugs, and that the retrovirus known as 'HIV' is a harmless passenger virus." Fauci and Robert Gallo were uninterested in any other narrative. Duesberg was banished from the NIH. interestingly, Luc Montagnier, who was awarded the Nobel Prize for his discovery of the HIV virus, argued in 2020, "that SARS-CoV-2 was man-made in a laboratory and that it might have been the result of an attempt to create a vaccine for HIV/AIDS." he also started to openly speculate that Duesberg may have been right about HIV. obviously, that didn't go over well.
i think the point is that Fauci was the high priest of an orthodoxy and anyone who had any other ideas, no matter how plausable, was de-funded, discredited, de-licensed, you name it.
look at Dr. Battacharya and his 2 GBD collaborators being written off as "fringe." look at Pierre Kory and Paul Marik being stripped of their medical accreditations. actually, look no further than the mirror. you know how you've been treated for daring to doubt the official narrative.
Awesome article. This subject is something I'm quite passionate about. I was medic for more than a decade and everything I thought I knew about healthcare turned out to be wrong. The system is beyond flawed, with big insurance dictating everything. Big pharma is bad, insurance is worse. CMS reimbursement rates wouldn't pay for costs, even if they were billed honestly.
Healthcare is broken. It’s over regulated with reimbursements that are different per payer. Medicaid reimbursements won’t cover the cost of keeping the lights on. So it’s devolved into how much you can pay therefore the same procedure can have multiple reimbursement rates.
Now do the mental health care "system."
…Robert F. Kennedy - who isn’t even convinced that HIV causes AIDS³ - “spare me,” says Alex
Do you make comments like this because you are thoroughly versed in the dissenting view or are you just knee-JERKing on the topic?
I read Celia Farber’s book, did you? Her against-the-grain investigative journalism reminded me of someone else, oh yeah, Alex Berenson.
I haven’t read the comment thread yet, but I assume someone has mentioned that Luc Montagnier — you know who that is, right? — so this early dissenting voice on COVID’s supposed “natural origins” ALSO had some serious doubts about his own “Nobel Prize discovery” about HIV.
So spare me, if you’d be so kind.
Alex has some surprising orthodoxies of his own, like IVM. i've had friends who were deathly ill with covid and i talked them into taking a dose of IVM, actually the horse paste version (she lived on a hobby farm) and she was better the next day
Our experience too. We are in our 70's with diabetes and asthma respectively. Took ivermectin and what do you know... better in a few days. We haven't had another case of covid despite traveling like sardines in a can flying all over the US during the "pandemic". In marked contrast, our vaxxed 20-30 yo nephews were sick for 2 weeks with the same event exposure, continue to be more sickly, and have suffered covid numerous times these past few years.
i also have asthma, the result of a formaldehyde exposure. i've used many things to treat it, the most successful of which was peptide injections from a lab in france (they are illegal in the USA). i've lost access to that practitioner and the peptide doctors where i live now have told me that the government has regulated against all the most useful ones. i hope RFKjr can change that.
when i had covid, i learned that i could nebulize reduced glutathione. when i lived in NYC, i nebulized glutathione but it came from a compounding pharmacy, was really $$$ and had to be kept in the fridge and had an expiration date.
now i buy these capsules and empty the contents of one into my nebulizer cup. i add a teaspoon of filtered water and then nebulize it. since i've started doing this, i've cut my use of ADVAIR from one puff every other day to one puff every 10 days. the more i do it, the stronger my lungs get.
give it a try.
Can you share a link to the capsules?
https://store.drjockers.com/products/reduced-l-glutathione-plus
once i recovered from covid (2 days), my boyfriend came down with it (3 days). he had the worst sore throat ever but no fever so i knew it wasn't strep throat. he called his medical place and they said "come over and we'll give you paxlovid." well, that wasn't happening!
i remembered that Dr Jockers had instructions for nebulizing an H2O2 saline solution so i tried that. of course the BF balked at the thought of having to do something once an hour and condemned it as "woo woo" and "communism" (which is what he calls all alternative health things). but i insisted.
he felt immediate relief after his first session, which barely took 5 minutes anyway. so then, he wanted to do it, which made it much easier on me!
but it's when i was reading the instructions to nurse my BF that i came across the part about nebulizing glutathione and got very excited. i ordered 2 bottles immediately!
with regular use, i noticed that i wasn't feeling the need for a puff of advair for 3 days and then 4. i keep a chart whenever i take a puff so i could see that the time between puffs was stretching out. now i'm at 10 (and sometimes a bit more) days.
the greatest thing about cutting yourself off from optional medical engagement is that you get back in tune with your body. you start to feel things like "i'm craving some magnesium" or "i feel like i need more vitamin C" rather than just taking the same vitamins everyday by habit. the same thing happens when you eat real food.
That IS a bit cringeworthy on Alex's part. We need to bring him along slowly....
I agree that our costs are wildly out of control. Admin costs are a huge part of the problem. For the last 70 years, the government has intervened to try to make adjustments to pricing/paying/etc and basically without exception every time the government has touched healthcare, costs have gone up. Especially after the ironically named Affordable Care Act.
I am a physician surgeon. On an every single day basis, we have patients that, because of rules, the costs for diagnosing and treating them, are just ridiculous. It’s a shame. It should never be a question that I ask, but I always have to ask my patients if they have insurance. If they do not have insurance, the surgeries and procedures I provide will bankrupt them
I’m disgusted by the costs.
And relatively speaking, we make less than physicians did in the 70s and 80s. The physicians in the 70s became millionaires. I personally came out of residency with about $430,000 in debt in 2015. I am on the verge of paying it off this year.
When my patients get itemized bills, I am often one of the cheapest parts of the bill