3-24-06 Less Meat, More Vegetables

I went mostly "vegan" once before, about ten years ago, but this time I'm doing it because my doctor wanted me to either start taking Lipitor immediately, or else call an ambulance. With an LDL level of 242, he seemed to think that I was the kind of patient that he didn't want to have. Part of his sales pitch included the claim that none of his patients go into the hospital, or something along that line.

Let me back up here. In February, I went for my first "check-up" in over a dozen years.

That last check-up was a very disturbing experience. I went into the thing with no complaints. I got the poking and prodding, the blinding light in the eye, and a very draconian prostate check. I mean, the guy had me stand next to that exam table with the flimsy paper on it, and bend over. Then I heard him put on the rubber glove with the kind of "SNAP" that you'd expect to hear from Hildegarde the Nazi Nurse. And he spent an awful long time in there, too...

At one point, he made the comment, "Oh... so you're one of those people who never gets sick..." As if this is cause for him to do his absolute best in finding something wrong.

I really didn't like his attitude.

Then, I got shuttled over to the bloodletting room, where a nurse promptly stuck my arm and collapsed the vein. It made a horrifying slurpy-sucking sound. She then proceeded to collapse the vein in my other arm, too! She pondered her problem for a bit, then decided that she was going to have to use a syringe, instead of the convenient little vaccum sample bottles. After getting someone to find a syringe, which took another half hour or so, she managed to suck out enough blood to make a fine English pudding, and finally sent me on my way.

I never did get any results of the blood tests, but I did start getting bills within a few weeks. This went on over the course of a couple of months, and every time I got one, my wife told me that Blue Cross - Blue Shield would pay them... just ignore them. Our health coverage at the time was the top BC/BS that you can get, by the way.

So, I ignored the bills until a couple of months passed and I started getting dunning phone messages on my machine for these bills. By this time, I had contacted BC/BS a couple of times, and they said that my statements would be coming. So I waited another month, and finally amassed all the various bills together.

Now, the BC/BS coverage should have paid for everything. And the fact is that I went into the check-up with no complaints about ills, pains, aches, or anything else. Further, the results of the check-up turned up nothing that was recommended for me to attend to, no problems. In other words, I went in healthy, and came out healthy, albeit with terrifically sore arms from the collapsed veins, a condition that left huge bruise marks on my arms that lasted for well over a week.

So, essentially, for absolutely NOTHING in the way of "healing", "treatment", or diagnosis of any slightest condition that might need any "treatment" or "healing" on the part of the doctor, I ended up incurring a total debt of ONE THOUSAND DOLLARS out of this experience, over SIX HUNDRED DOLLARS of which BC/BS was simply NOT GOING TO PAY!!!

Imagine that? The premiere healthcare insurance company at that time was not going to cover a check-up that not only had the insured patient going INTO the check-up with no slightest complaints of health problems, but also coming OUT of the check-up with absolutely nothing to treat or attend to AT ALL. This isn't counting the damage done to both of my arms, of course, since there's nothing they can do for that...

But can you imagine how absolutely outraged I was? I mean, this was the ultimate "healthcare" absurdity!

It took a lot of calling around and visiting the hospital where the check-up was done over the course of several weeks, all the time getting these dunning phone calls from a collection agency, before I eventually landed in the office of a middle aged woman in the "patient accounts" department who, as luck would have it, struck me as true kindred spirit. I finally found a willing ear, and I explained this absurd situation to her. She was absolutely wonderful. She took every single one of the "patient has to pay" bills and, through the magic of her long years of experience, got all the fees "waived" for me.

Well, at any rate, that was the experience I had over a dozen years ago, and the reason why I have been completely unwilling to have another "check-up" all these years. I probably would have never had another check-up, or any other contact with doctors, hospitals, or any kind of medical establishment until I was ready to kick the bucket, had it not been for the development of a small cyst that began to get infected last August.

Meanwhile, my wife has been carrying me on her health insurance all these years, and she has chosen various doctors as my "primary physician" on her insurance each time she changed jobs. (We go with her insurance, since she's a nurse.) So, when I needed this infection tended to, I just went to the latest designated "primary care physician" on the insurance.

This turned out to be a doctor that isn't taking on new patients, so when I made the appointment, I was met with a bit of resistance. They did, however, let me come in and see this doctor's associate, a russian lady who, as it turned out, was a great doctor. She took care the infection right there in the office with finesse, hardly any pain, and actually dug out the cyst. When I was leaving the office, the front desk people had me make an appointment for a "check-up". They put it six months out.

As the six month timeline slowly came down towards the appointed deadline, I kept entertaining thoughts of just cancelling it. As luck would have it, though, the phone message "reminder" for the appointment came in when my wife and I were both sitting there within earshot of the message machine. Now, I had no choice. I had to keep the appointment.

And why not? I figured, what the hell, at least I'll have a chance to see what all those hamburgers and all those gallons of cream in my coffee might be doing to my cholesterol level.

Indeed I did. The one thing that I considered might be a matter needing some attention was exactly what came up. The LDL level of 242 was a bit beyond what I had thought it might be.

The bloodletting was painless this time. I told the nurse at the outset what had happened the last time anyone took a blood sample, so she used a smaller needle for the vacuum thingies, and it worked just fine. And the doctor was really a great guy. He was very much the opposite of that last doctor. And the prostate exam was done so quickly and unobtrusively as I lay on my side that I hardly had a chance to think about it before it was over.

Well, anyway, the highlight of this latest check-up was that the doctor did his absolute best to get me to agree to start taking Lipitor immediately. I am, however, quite opposed to caving in and buying some product from the chemical companies and taking it for the rest of my life, however long or short that may be as a consequence.

That was last month. Another bloodletting and visit four weeks later (a week and a half ago) turned up the LDL level being down 14% to 208. This is the result of my diet change.

Essentially, I had been drinking a cup of cream every day, and eating 90% meat and fat for the past decade or so. I mean, one medium Dunkin' Donuts coffee with "cream and four sugars" gives me three ounces of cream. I would typically have two of these a day, so that's 6 ounces of cream. Then, when I got home in the afternoon, I'd usually brew one or two more cups of coffee with "half'n'half", which brings the total amount of cream well within the range of at least one cup for the day. That's a cup of cream every day, now, for about a decade (or about 128 gallons). And then there's the so-called "food" I've been eating all that time, ie- hamburgers, fries, steaks, butter, mayonnaise, cheese, eggs, and so forth.

When I got the intial cholesterol level results last month, I changed immediately and began eating 90% fruits and vegetables, and drinking water, taking vitamins, and doing that "california thing" of standing in the aisle of the supermarket reading the labels on everything I buy.

Y'know, I kinda sorta knew that I shouldn't have been eating the way I was eating, but I did need the kick in the butt from that cholesterol level result to get me to pay attention.

I've been reading up on everything I can get my hands on. The first thing I went after was info on Lipitor. It only took a few minutes of surfing before I found this...

http://www.spacedoc.net/lipitor_thief_of_memory.html

Well, that pretty much led me off into much searching around for any corroborating claims, which is easy enough to find. The consequence of which is that I won't ever consider taking Lipitor, or any other statin drug to lower my cholesterol.

The next thing I began looking for was any cutting edge medical science involved with this whole cholesterol lowering frenzy, and I found this...

http://www.csmc.edu/6189.html

This is all about the so-called "milano gene" and the discovery that there is a completely different paradigm to be considered in the arena of "high cholesterol = heart problems". It just isn't that simple. The basis for the address of cardiac problems and circulatory problems falls back onto the whole healthcare industry's focus, which I consider to be inordinately upon "the magic pill" playground of chemical company profits and public brainwashing.

Here's the basic picture... If you eat foods high in cholesterol, and your body manufactures its own cholesterol, and if the body's basic method of getting rid of too much cholesterol is hampered by highly processed foods that produce chronic levels of constipation, then much of the cholesterol that the body would normally eliminate sits in the intestines far longer than it would otherwise, and is thus re-absorbed. Further, if this situation persists across many years, the body accumulates inordinate amounts of cholesterol that it has to put somewhere, since it can't get rid of it. The result is, among other things, deposits of plaque in the arteries that can produce circulatory problems, and also be a cause of the blockages causing heart attacks and strokes.

Along come the pill doctors, and they find that the heart attack and stroke victims have an overwhelming thing in common, ie- high levels of LDL cholesterol, low levels of HDL, and plaque damage. Eureka! They conclude that they have to get rid of the bad cholesterol, promote the increase of good cholesterol, and so forth, and VOILA! The chemical companies finally come up with statin drugs which magically plunge the LDL cholesterol levels down to a point where they figure they're doing something really fantastic.

There's no argument that they are doing something fantastic. Pfizer, the manufacturer of Lipitor, is absolutely rolling in massive profits from this drug. Unfortunately, the REAL drug trials and testing of the long term effects of statin drugs is being done on a massive scale with an unsuspecting and blindly trusting public as the guinea pigs.

Instead of addressing the real cause, incredibly bad dietary habits, they address the thing that INDICATES incredibly bad dietary habits. This is like having a chemical plant at the head end of river dumping nasty pollutants in, and "solving the problem" by building a multi-billion dollar water treatment plant twenty miles downriver.

Pretty goddam stupid, if you ask me.

But the profits involved with letting the CAUSE of the problem persist, and "treating" the fallout from the problem is endemic to the chemical/healthcare industry.

Now, I wouldn't be so onto this whole thing if it weren't for the fact that I had been given, in effect, a "sales pitch" for Lipitor by the doctor, and by the people who call me with my test results, every time I've been in contact with them. And the doctor changed his sales pitch to Crestor the last time I saw him a little over a week ago, BEFORE we even had the blood test results from the second blood test. I mean, what the guy has been insisting is that "diet, alone, will never work. It's genetic." But then, when they called with my test results a few days later, the nurse was back to recommending Lipitor.

So, he's not even interested in my going this "diet change" route at all. I'm beginning to wonder if he gets a commission from Pfizer for every prescription he writes. Every time I've sat in the waiting room, I have heard the nurses making the lab result phone calls. My LDL was 242, so I should take Lipitor. I listened to the phone calls, and heard, "Your LDL is 132, so the doctor wants you to start taking Lipitor immediately." And then the next one is, "Your LDL level is over 180, so the doctor wants you to start taking Lipitor immediately." The same urgency, the same sales pitch, the same implied threat of an early death from heart attack or stroke, if this drug isn't taken RIGHT NOW.

I'm pretty much resigned to the prospect of having to find a new "primary care physician" within the confines of our current health insurance list, someone who has some level of separation from the medical mainstream of AMA, FDA, big bucks "pill doctor" healthcare systems. My next appointment is April 20. If the bloodletting isn't scheduled to be done BEFORE I see the doctor for this visit, I really can't imagine what the point would be in seeing him...