Originally Posted by SVE-KRD

Right there is one of the filibusters I've predicted to occur over the next two years. Only this time, if we indeed be 4T, an Obama defeat on health care under such conditions will only ensure another Republican rout in the Senate (and the House) races in 2010, as an outraged public punish the guilty at the polls, while rewarding Obama for at least trying! ...

...to which I just replied:

Originally Posted by jamesdglick

-Probably wishful thinking on your part; most American's don't want socialized medicine; some of the ones who are tempted, generally take a pass once they're reminded of how things work in countries that do have it (i.e. they get their dose of reality)...

...well, the WSJ editorial board must have been on a roll on Friday:

http://online.wsj.com/article/SB124536826475329427.html

"Finance Chairman Max Baucus postponed the health timeline, probably until after Congress's July 4 vacation. His team will try to scale down the middle-class insurance subsidies and make other cuts to hold the sticker shock under $1 trillion. (Oh, is that all?) Mr. Baucus also claims he's committed to a bipartisan consensus, yet most Republicans have been closed out of the negotiations, and industry lobbyists have been pre-emptively warned that even meeting with the GOP will invite retribution..."

----

Originally Posted by haymarket martyr

WARNING: The poster known as jamesdglick has a history of engaging in fraud. He makes things up out of his own head and attempts to use these blatant lies to score points in his arguments. When you call him on it, he will only lie further. He has such a reputation for doing this that many people here are cowed into silence and will not acknowledge it or confront him on it.

Anyone who attempts to engage with glick will discover this and find out you have wasted your time and energy on an intellectual fraud of the worst sort.

-So cry many Boomers (self-professed Lefties, mostly) whenever they fail to explain their hypocritical self-justifications, their double-standards, and their double-think forays into evil. Perhaps their consciences bother them, perhaps not. Who knows.

Originally Posted by The Grey Badger

I don't shop around for a cheaper provider because I'm with a given HMO that tells me what providers I do and do not see.

Exactly, that is their job. Besides, providers usually won't tell you what the cost will be and more importantly, your insurance company will not tell you what is reasonable and customary for a procedure.

Unless I have a good reason not to see one (such as the primary care doc who kept giving me antacids for a condition I finally asked to see a GI specialist about - turned out to be hiatal hernia) - I don't buck a tide as strong as that.

That is prudent.

Originally Posted by independent

Ehh I was on that plan as a kid, didn't help me none. The doctors were more than happy to make prescriptions for expensive "happy pills" designed to manage symptoms. (anti-pain, anti-anxiety, anti-depression - a slew of opium derivatives were the best "professional" suggestions for digestive/auto-immune issues)

There was still no incentive on the industry's part to identify or cure underlying causes. Expanding this to everyone without reform would be incredibly expensive but would probably do little to fix our lagging public health. Its a $100 blood test that fits the WHO standards of universal testing - but why would the insurance co. and docs want to give up their best paying customer?

Heh... kinda reminds me of that old 1973 Wacky Package sticker... "Lavirus", a spoof of the now-defunct Lavoris mouthwash. The tag line was "3 out of 4 dentists recommend Lavirus because it BRINGS patients!".

At any rate, you're talking about a separate yet related concern: what would happen if someone really did develop magic-bullet cures for advanced cancer, AIDS, herpes and other serious, incurable yet treatable diseases that represent windfall profits for the pharmaceutical industry?

I keep hearing these ads on the radio here in Portland about how there are supposedly "natural" cures for many common ailments that the drug companies don't want you to know about, lest their profits be threatened. While the advertisements themselves are for some sort of product and do smack of snake-oil promotion... what if it's true???

Check these stats out, its absolutely depressing. From the University of Chicago:

http://www.celiacdisease.net/assets/...gures%20v3.pdf

"Celiac disease affects 1% of healthy, average Americans. That means at least 3 million people in our country are living with celiac disease—97% of them are undiagnosed."


"Age at diagnosis - Chance of developing autoimmune condition
4 – 12 yrs of age - 16.7%
12 – 20 yrs of age - 27%
Over 20 yrs of age - 34%"


So, 2.91 million Americans on track for early mortality, auto-immune diseases like Lupus, RA, and Type1 Diabetes.. just from a common cereal protein. I promise you these people are good customers for the medical industry, even if there is no pill or shot that can heal them as well as dietary observance. We end up with diagnoses like CFS, IBS, Asperger's, Depression, or eventually something concrete like Diabetes, RA, or Lupus once enough progressive damage has been done. On the "good federal insurance," they were more than happy to prescribe opium derivatives and perform surgeries to remove my immune system one node at a time (tonsils, adenoids, etc..)

The end game there is a short lifetime of immune replacement drugs - extremely expensive cocktails that will lead to loss of insurance coverage, other medical problems, and bankrupting medical bills.

Start to include the other food stuffs with a relatively common minority reaction (soy, corn, milk) and you're probably staring down the cause of 10 million chronically ill patients in the U.S. (Research is needed, funding is strangely not forthcoming)

Where's the incetive to run a $100 blood test or even a $5,000 endoscopic biopsy if this test ensures your great patient will never return seeking pharmaceutical relief? Why do the official books still require the endoscopy for diagnosis if the cheap blood test is available to measure auto-immune response to the protein?

"21% of patients with a positive anti-endomysial antibody test could not receive a biopsy due to the refusal of their physician to perform the procedure or the insurance company to pay for it."

Comorbidity or cause?

• "350,000 people in the United States are living with Down Syndrome; 12% (42,000) of them also have celiac disease."
• Type 1 Diabetes affects 3 million people; 6% (180,000) of those diagnosed also have celiac disease.
• 610,000 women in the US experience unexplained infertility; 6% (36,600) of these women might never learn that celiac disease is the cause.

This is just one specific food chemical causing chronic disease in 3 million Americans. There's no financial incentive to identify and treat it because the treatment is 100% dietary... so 97% remain undiagnosed. These people aren't really "gainfully employed," they're more likely to be on SS disability and/or medicare.

And yes, that means the hacks & snake oil salesmen are jumping on the bandwagon. Thanks to useless spokespeople like Jenny McCarthy, Celiac Disease is often lumped in a group with the anti-vaccine movement and a "scientific" counter-movement is intent on discrediting proponents of Celiac testing for kids with Autism-spectrum and Down syndrome (despite a demonstrated 12x prevelance with Down Syndrome and double-blind studies suggesting 10-20X prevelance in autistic patients)

It doesn't even have to be an active and intentional conspiracy, just individuals resisting change that isn't good for business combined with a level of ignorance among medical professionals and the general population.

I have a friend who has felt a lot better and clearer-headed after getting off the gluten. However, with numbers that high, I am inclined to think the problem is not in the common cereal protein, but in the contaminants from pesticides and other manufactured molecules that are endemic in our industrial age. I have thought that about a good many common non-bacterial and non-viral ailments for years now.

The clear-headed feeling is probably related to the relatively high dosages of exorphins inside wheat gluten. These are plant-based amino acids similar to endorphins, and they're basically the same chemical structure as opiates. A typical American diet would include as much as 10mg of said exorphins daily - maybe equivalent to a small/medium dose of Loritab or Vicoden. Most immune systems would nuetralize 90% of it and leave you with a pleasant "comfort food" feeling.

Celiac was actually discovered accidentally during WW2 when US grain shipments to Europe halted. Chronically disabled patients started getting better and mental wards suddenly started acting sane. After the war, everyone went back to crap and they finally figured out the connection to wheat (they first recreated the curing effect with an all banana diet, this became a stupid fad until they eventually isolated wheat/rye/barley as the culprits and realized no one should just eat bananas.)

The rate of incidence hasn't gone up really, so there's no clear statistics tying in modern agricultural processes. Just 10,000 years of selective breeding has quadrupled the protein yield in wheat, but its probably also done a good job of "weeding" the gluten intolerant out of the genetic population. (There's some fossil evidence of mass extinctions around the time north Europeans became genetically tolerant to milk. With a bad enough few winters, anyone who couldn't get vitamin D from the cows would have died off - evolution in action). Studying similar mass extinctions and immune diseases related to diet could probably go a long way toward fixing the health issues created by globalization - but its going to be a relatively big problem for America's genetically diverse population and its not good for the existing model of the health industry.

Originally Posted by independent

Thanks to useless spokespeople like Jenny McCarthy, Celiac Disease is often lumped in a group with the anti-vaccine movement ...

-HEY!!

Are you insinuating that Jenny McCarthy is not credible?

...but she looked so cute, sitting on Santa's lap (naked)...

Originally Posted by jamesdglick

-HEY!!

Are you insinuating that Jenny McCarthy is not credible?

...but she looked so cute, sitting on Santa's lap (naked)...

I would like Jenny McCarthy to go to Hell.

Originally Posted by jamesdglick

-HEY!!

Are you insinuating that Jenny McCarthy is not credible?

...but she looked so cute, sitting on Santa's lap (naked)...

... with a cigar in her mouth!

Originally Posted by independent

...Thanks to useless spokespeople like Jenny McCarthy, Celiac Disease is often lumped in a group with the anti-vaccine movement...

Originally Posted by jamesdglick

-HEY!!

Are you insinuating that Jenny McCarthy is not credible?

...but she looked so cute, sitting on Santa's lap (naked)...

Originally Posted by Odin

I would like Jenny McCarthy to go to Hell.

Originally Posted by Roadbldr '59

... with a cigar in her mouth!

-Hmm...

Jenny McCarthy, generational & turning theory, and the state of the American medical profession.

Discuss amongst yourselves.

Yeah, its not a good thing when Jenny McCarthy becomes a self-appointed spokesperson, and its especially not good when she mixes a little scientific fact with a whole lot of unsubstantiated gibberish. (What's with the hate on vaccines? Even if they do make a small percent of people sick [which can't be proven] they obviously offset millions of potential cases.)

But there's a puzzle out there of 3 million sick & undiagnosed Americans just needing a free cure. That's out of about 25 million chronically ill - a big chunk of the biggest medicine consumers. The docs & insurers have little to no incentive to fix them beyond symptom management and there's no research in the pipeline to see if other foods create similar conditions.

..And thats just what I happen to know from my own pet medical issue. I wouldn't be surprised if there are other diseases that aren't treated rationally in the current paradigm.

Yeah, so even if the health insurance is free, I won't be using it outside of emergencies or until there's some fundamental reform of how the incentives & payments are structured.

Single-payer is important - mandatory medical insurance is just another lobbyist victory. (What could be better than Congress writing laws to force everyone to buy your crappy product?)

Originally Posted by independent

With a bad enough few winters, anyone who couldn't get vitamin D from the cows would have died off - evolution in action).

Vitamin D isn't in cow's milk naturally. It's added to the milk.

Originally Posted by Mikebert

Vitamin D isn't in cow's milk naturally. It's added to the milk.

Now Vitamin D is in butter; is it added by the churn dashers?

Vitamin D is in double cream; is it added by the separator centrifuge?

Vitamin D is in single cream; is it added by the shallow bowl in which the milk resides?

Perhaps Vitamin D is in the cow's milk after all?


______

Perhaps the Progressive beverage styled "skim milk" is the origin of this notion.

Originally Posted by Mikebert

Vitamin D isn't in cow's milk naturally. It's added to the milk.

???
I'm not sure where you get that particular factoid from. The relative incidence of lactose intolerance among those of African descent as compared to Europeans has been traced to the fact that people of northern climes, receiving insufficient sunlight to consistently generate the optimal amounts of vitamin D, were forced to look elsewhere and adapted to the drinking of cows' milk as a substitute.

Perhaps they "vitamin-D-enrich" some milks, but the raw stuff is a pretty good source of it to begin with...

As a clinical laboratorian and business man, I could, in theory set up a clinical laboratory and offer cheaper medical blood and urine testing to my community. Let's say for example that I could find a way to charge 50% of the going rate for testing. And let's say I set up a really spiffy service with very high quality testing and very high quality service.

How much business would I have? Virtually none.

Why? Because all the clinical laboratory testing of any consequence is already contracted through the insurance companies, largely on a national basis. So, if I can't compete nationally with Quest Diagnostics or LabCorp, then I'm simply not in the game. The alternative, to become a local or regional lab provider is also closed off to me because the local or regional integrated healthcare systems have their own insurance companies who contract with their own internal labs. Price, quality of service, etc. of my company are of no consequence. So much for the "free market."

The entrepreneurial colonoscopists in your example would find similar barriers to entry.

Originally Posted by The Rani

So anyway, we got the puppy shots, and the rabies booster at a year (not worth the risk with rabies.)

Therein lies the key consideration. I don't mind AT ALL having been vaccinated for smallpox and polio; whatever hypothetical damage I may have taken from the vaccines, the risk of those particular diseases is too severe. I drew the line at vaccinating my daughters for chicken pox, though.

Originally Posted by TnT

As a clinical laboratorian and business man, I could, in theory set up a clinical laboratory and offer cheaper medical blood and urine testing to my community. Let's say for example that I could find a way to charge 50% of the going rate for testing. And let's say I set up a really spiffy service with very high quality testing and very high quality service.

How much business would I have? Virtually none.

Why? Because all the clinical laboratory testing of any consequence is already contracted through the insurance companies, largely on a national basis. So, if I can't compete nationally with Quest Diagnostics or LabCorp, then I'm simply not in the game. The alternative, to become a local or regional lab provider is also closed off to me because the local or regional integrated healthcare systems have their own insurance companies who contract with their own internal labs. Price, quality of service, etc. of my company are of no consequence. So much for the "free market."

The entrepreneurial colonoscopists in your example would find similar barriers to entry.

So what we have reduced to the simplest terms, is a series of cartels throughout the various points of the healthcare industry that most likely would violate our antitrust laws if the government ever did take antitrust law seriously.

Originally Posted by The Rani

I didn't get it either, until I got my dog (as a puppy) and had a discussion about vaccines with a friend of mine who is a vet. Her feeling was that puppies need vaccines because of their under-developed immune systems, but that yearly "combo" booster shots (distemper, parvo, and about 5 other ones that I forget now) were unnecessary and contributed to autoimmune diseases because of over-production of antibodies. Of course, she told me this as my friend, not a vet, because no vet is going to tell people not to bring their dog in every year for shots.

So anyway, we got the puppy shots, and the rabies booster at a year (not worth the risk with rabies.) But instead of getting the combo vaccine, I had my friend check titers, which basically means measuring levels of antibodies. My dog, a year after the puppy shots, had antibody leves that were THREE TIMES what was needed for immunity. So I said, whoa, no more shots for a while!

I checked titers a few times after that, and when she was 6-7 years old her immunity levels finally dropped to borderline "non-protective." Which means that yearly shots for her would have meant a huge amount of overvaccination. Now she's nine, and I'm still trying to decide whether or not I'll ever give her the combo vaccine again.

The thing to remember is that vaccination protocols are developed to benefit society, not individuals. Personally, I'm more interested in protecting my dog than everyone else's dog. So I guess when I hear people talk about "those nuts who don't vaccinate their kids," they don't seem so nutty to me at all.

Vets have come to realize that and are now saying certain shots are good for 3 years or even, I believe, 5 in some cases.

Originally Posted by Justin '77

???
I'm not sure where you get that particular factoid from. The relative incidence of lactose intolerance among those of African descent as compared to Europeans has been traced to the fact that people of northern climes, receiving insufficient sunlight to consistently generate the optimal amounts of vitamin D, were forced to look elsewhere and adapted to the drinking of cows' milk as a substitute.

Perhaps they "vitamin-D-enrich" some milks, but the raw stuff is a pretty good source of it to begin with...

I did a quick search. Here's the top link

During 1930s, rickets was a primary health complication in US and it turned out as an epidemic. By that time, a milk fortification program was implemented to fight against rickets. This implementation was a success and it nearly eradicated this complication in the US . Nearly 98-99% milk is fortified with vitamin D supplements in the US . However, milk derivatives such as cheese and ice creams are not fortified as it is with milk. So these products contain only a small amount of vitamin D in it.

Our mother nature is generous in vitamin D natural source. There are wide varieties of natural foods that contain vitamin D in it. These are cod liver oil, salmon, mackerel, tuna fish, sardines, egg, beef liver, and many others. We can easily avail vitamin D from cheese and pudding prepared from fortified milk.

Where did you get the idea that milk was a good source of vitamin D?

Originally Posted by TnT

The alternative, to become a local or regional lab provider is also closed off to me because the local or regional integrated healthcare systems have their own insurance companies who contract with their own internal labs.

Healthcare providers don't have their own insurance companies, it's the other way around. The customer for the assay is not the healthcare system, it's the insurance company.

The entrepreneurial colonoscopists in your example would find similar barriers to entry.

You didn't descibe any barriers. You implied that insurance companies don't want to pay lower prices. Why would they want to pay more for for an assay than they have to?

My insurance recently dropped Quest because they were too expensive.

Originally Posted by Mikebert

Where did you get the idea that milk was a good source of vitamin D?

From all over the place. "Good", of course, being a relative thing; but since the best food sources of vitamin D are fatty saltwater critters, peoples living in northern climes in areas not in close contact with the sea (there's lots of those places in areas you might have heard called "Europe" and "Asia") had to come up with a third-best to make up for the fact that they weren't getting adequate UVB for D3 production, and had no really, really rich option. That's where dairy products come in. Cows can live in a lot more human-accessible places than can cod and herring; and thanks to cheeses, their fatty products can be stored a lot better than can fish or egg yolks.

It's not like people came up with dairy products by accident or randomly as the thing to enrich with D, after all...

Originally Posted by Mikebert

I did a quick search. Here's the top link

Where did you get the idea that milk was a good source of vitamin D?

The daily recommended value is about 100 IU - one glass of non-fortified milk has about 20 IU.

That might be a problem for someone with common lactase levels. Yet there are tribes that evolved with lactase persistance (or milk tolerance) in Scandanavia, Western Africa, and India. In the African dry season or Scandanavian winters, this would have been one of the only food options available.

These genes popped up independently (there are different genetics doing the same things to produce lactase) and anyone in the tribe with low lactase would have died off pretty quickly. This is probably why a few people completely tolerate milk and why most people never adapted to it.

Anyway, this will make good research if your goals are improving general healthcare, but its pretty useless to a profit-based model of medicine.

(While I was looking around, it seems that milk protein causes allergies and intolerances in 2-3% of the population: There's another 3-5 million chronically ill and undiagnosed Americans)

This is a good thread.

My favorite point has to do with the pharmaceutical industry. I have a friend who works for them (he is in a computer firm that models how drugs will work.) I once asked him if in fact drug companies prefer to develop drugs to treat chronic conditions, rather than drugs that would cure people. "Of course!" he said, laughing. "They have stockholders!"

This is is so painfully obvious that it shouldn't be necessary to mention it--the whole Vioxx thing happened because they desperately wanted a new, patentable anti-inflammatory. Vaccines, on the other hand, will END diseases, plus there will always be a few people who react badly to them, resulting in lawsuits. (Of course, VIOXX did too.)

It is my impression that no statistics are kept (in a normal, regular fashion) on the effectiveness of drugs after they are improved. I suspect they would be quite a revelation if they were. Indeed, the right wing is already screaming because the Obama adminstration stuck $1 billion for this purpose into the stimulus.

For more of my thoughts see the lastest post on the blog (below. . .)

Originally Posted by independent

The daily recommended value is about 100 IU - one glass of non-fortified milk has about 20 IU.

Yeah five glass of milk. Milk isn't considered a good source like cod liver oil, which was the supplement people used to take before they added vitamin D to milk. My mom used to tell us about how she had to take cod liver oil as a kid while we kids didn't have to because they put it in the milk nowadays.

Originally Posted by Justin '77

From all over the place.:

I've always assumed that dairy practices began around where cattle were domesticated. My understanding was that cattle were first domesticated in Western Asia. perhaps in India or Northeastern Africa. All are places with adequate winter sun.

I did a quick search and found the earliest dairy practices were in Turkey, the Levant and Southeastern Europe; once again, not in northern climes. That's not to say that they didn't spread north, there were dairy practices in Britain 1-2 thousand years later.

I've never encountered the idea that dairy was begun in the north as a means to obtain vitamin D, until you and independent bought it up. So I ask again where did you get this notion, how about some links?