4-24-06 Ronald McDoctor
The whole idea of being able to make big profits from treating sick people gives me a sense of something being rotten in Denmark. I was brought up in a time when hospitals could still be viewed as beneficent organizations, when the caduceus and the staff of asclepius...
http://drblayney.com/Asclepius.html
...represented a higher purpose behind the practice of medicine. Indeed, the Oath of Hippocrates...
http://www.thedoctorslounge.net/oath.htm
...clearly deals with this higher matter of a doctor's duty versus the lower endeavors of commerce.
Somewhere along the line, however, the practice of medicine has become what it is today, ie- a for profit industry. We use the term "industry" freely now, when referring to the "Healthcare Industry". Before, it was the practice of medicine. Now it's the healthcare industry.
Part of the blame for this change is the activity of the civil judiciary, wherein suing doctors for malpractice, ie- for fun and profit, grew to epidemic proportions. This necessitated the protections afforded by malpractice insurance, the costs of which grew along with the epidemic of shyster lawyers chomping at the bit to sue the doctors. It was a self-feeding mechanism that spiraled into the giddy heights of incredible profits that these bottom feeders (insurers and lawyers) managed to turn it into.
This increased cost of practicing medicine turned otherwise high minded and honest practitioners to ways that could help to foot the bills, and thus we had doctors working not only to help the sick, but also to defend themselves. Defense is better done collectively, and out of this we began seeing doctors' groups, clinics, and medical organizations springing up all over the place. There is more safety in numbers. Consequently, the larger an organization could grow, the safer the individual doctors could be.
Unfortunately, in this era of corporate raiding and "creating wealth" out of absolutely nothing, the existence of a burgeoning array of medical organizations represented a burgeoning array of corporations that were flowing an awful lot of money. This is where the for profit healthcare holding companies started coming into the picture. This also afforded the original investors in these corporations a means of "cashing in".
None of this has any aspect of "evil" to it, in my view. It's simply been a mundane matter of evolution in the world of money-making.
Of course, none of this would have taken place in quite the way it did if it weren't for the chemical companies.
This is the area of endeavor in the practice of medicine that reeks the most. Most of the blame for the change in the activity from "beneficent" to "for profit" falls at their door.
But let me back up just a tad, here. We can't necessarily blame the chemical companies for being what they are. A publicly held corporation is a psychotic "entity". It cannot be run in a manner consistent with any kind of beneficence toward individuals that are not stockholders. If individuals who are not stockholders are harmed in any way, this is dealt with in the cost of doing business. It's very psychotic behavior to exist in a society while doing harm to that society. But we see this behavior in corporations all the time.
See the film, "The Corporation" for a better understanding of what I'm talking about...
http://www.thecorporation.com/
...and, for instance, this article...
http://www.theepochtimes.com/news/6-4-23/40712.html
Most of the twentieth century has had chemical companies doing all sorts of horrific things. The most glaring example, of course, is the history of I.G. Farben, which formed the financial core of Nazi Germany. One of Farben's (at that time) subsidiaries, Bayer, known for the first aspirin product (Bayer Aspirin), supplied massive quantities of aspirin to Nazi doctors for experimentation on concentration camp detainees. Farben was the main supplier of Zyklon B, a chemical used in the gas chambers. It's interesting to learn what happened to this corporate giant after WWII. If you have a few hours to look into it, start here...
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/IG_Farben
The post WWII world was filled with hope and the wonders of science that would be creating all the incredible technology that we enjoy today. No-one can really make a cogent argument that any of the corporate activity of those days was aimed at anything "evil" unless you consider "profit" synonymous with "evil". We were all coming into an age of prosperity, hope for the future, and the American Dream after World War II.
The basic psychotic nature of publicly held corporations, however, skewed the goals of the American Dream, and not by any small amount. But in order to understand the horrific nature of their effects on our culture and on our society, one needs to understand what the term "side effect" has to do with "the cost of doing business". These terms are close cousins to "collateral damage".
A recent example of this kind of collateral damage is involved with the recent Vioxx lawsuit(s) situation...
http://www.arthritisdruglawyers.com/vioxx/
What you have in this kind of thing is an oft repeated product life cycle in the chemical industry, especially when you're talking about drugs. The motive for expensive research into new drugs to handle widely acknowledged human ills is, of course, to make a profit. No-one can hold this up to be "evil" in any way, shape, or form unless we're discussing it from a politically based angle. This post has nothing to do with that angle, however.
Corporate decision-making is predicated upon the highest yield for the stockholders, and any decision-making that holds to any efforts to the contrary will result in the loss of the decision-makers' jobs. So, you can't call the inherent basis of the organization "evil", except in the sense that it results in an overall tendency toward psychotic behavior. In other words, resolving the damaging bases of how corporations work is hardly a matter of changing any one particular corporation. The entire basis of legal corporate interaction with the society at large would have to be changed.
Consequently, the decision to pursue research into any particular new drug product is predicated on its prospects for future profits that will not only pay for the research, but flow some decent level of black ink afterwards. It's a no-brainer.
So, let's take a look at the cholesterol-lowering drug market.
Two of the big winners in this arena are Lipitor, and more recently Crestor. The underlying paradigm behind this highly successful market is a simplicity. This basically says that high levels of LDL cholesterol increase the risk for heart and arterial diseases. It all goes back to the Framingham study...
http://www.framingham.com/heart/
...which was modern medicine's big epiphany, and the birth of "healthcare".
What the study didn't do was to establish the paradigm from any further logical progression into the way the human body works, vis-a-vis cholesterol. All it did was to find the "bad thing" that supposedly "caused" the heart and arterial "diseases". The underlying framework for this is germ theory. You have a disease, it's caused by a germ, so you find a way to kill the germ without killing the patient.
On that basis, the new "germ" was LDL cholesterol and so the big research money was put onto chemicals that would get rid of it. It didn't take a long time for the big winner in this research race to finally come running in at the finish line. About a quarter century ago we started getting the drugs that would really lower LDL cholesterol. Of course, there are some "side effects"...
Twenty years down the line, there's a side effect of Lipitor that most doctors have no familiarity with at all...
http://www.spacedoc.net/lipitor_thief_of_memory.html
...but this is just another chapter in the history of chemical companies and their drug products' "product life" cycle. The product is released, approved by the FDA, people take it for years, then some small percentage who have experienced horrific "side effects" finally accumulate enough victims to entice a lawyer or two to take notice, and they suffer through years of litigation before finally getting the really horrific side effect even acknowledged. Sometimes it results in the drug being taken off the market, sometimes not.
The thing one has to understand about this oft repeated scenario, however, isn't that the horrific side effects were ever intended to be experienced in anyone by the manufacturer, or anyone else. It's all about the product life, the cost of doing business, and the maximizing of profit. On that basis, someday there's going to be in the news the final result of this one particular side effect to Lipitor, the end result of all the inevitable litigation, and this will either result in the side effect of cognitive impairment being added to the "official list" of side effects, so that doctors will know to take anyone OFF that drug if it shows up (at the very least, we would hope!), or maybe Lipitor will be taken off the market. Either way, however, the Pfizer corporation's only decision-making process throughout this unfolding scenario will be aimed at defending itself and its billions of dollars in profit that will continue to be made until that final outcome is reached.
Absolutely nothing, however, will be done at Pfizer by anyone to even acknowledge the possiblity that Lipitor does, indeed, cause any kind of cognitive impairment in anyone at all, until the courts tell them that they have no choice but to acknowledge it. Because of the legal basis of corporate existence, anyone within Pfizer who behaved in any other manner would not only lose their job, they would also be challenged by Pfizer in court for responsibility in the loss of any profits that resulted.
In other words, the corporate "entity" is legally required to behave in this psychotic manner. That's the way it works.
Now I know I've really gone on and on here to put all the pieces together in making this point about the chemical companies being to blame for the way the "healthcare industry" has turned out. And I know that a professional journalist would probably have been able to make this much clearer with a lot less rambling around. But I can only try to do my best here...
At any rate, what we've ended up with here in the present healthcare industry is a propensity for somewhat blurred and skewed causes and effects as regards how to be healthy, how to address various ills. To illustrate that point, I'll stay with the cholesterol lowering paradigm.
Here's where to begin...
http://www.medicalnewstoday.com/medicalnews.php?newsid=33816
This story goes back about 25 years, less than half as far back as the Framingham study. It's all about more recent information, and a somewhat in-depth look into what this all means needs to be done to understand how it fits into the picture I'm attempting to paint here.
The upshot of the research being done at Cedars-Sinai can be understood in terms of where it will "fit in" to the profit picture for any chemical company that might pursue it. On the one hand, there's Lipitor and Crestor, et al, making billions in annual profits, with no end in sight. The patients, who are the chemical companies' end consumers, will be taking this drug for the rest of their lives. Compare that to the prospect of developing ONE INJECTION of genetic material into the patient. From that ONE INJECTION, the patient is then no longer a "drug customer". Consequently, how much will this ONE INJECTION have to cost in order for the manufacturer to not only recoup their research costs, but to make a profit?
So let's just take Pfizer alone. They have millions of customers spending around $50 a month for the rest of their lives. Will it make business sense for them to lose all those customers to a product that is going to be purchased by these same customers ONLY ONCE?
Of course not. This is why it's been twenty five years since this alternate possibility for the resolving of heart and arterial diseases has not gotten much in the way of research funding. It's not anywhere near as "viable" as the current product offering is. Of course, it only took less than a decade for chemical companies to begin offering products to lower cholesterol, following the general consensus of the medical community building up around the results of the Framingham study for the need of such products.
The entire healthcare industry is, consequently, a catch-22. If the money for research into completely eliminating any unwanted condition was spent, it would be an effort to eliminate its own market. It's the same reason that "Merlite Industries" doesn't exist anymore. This was a company that sold lightbulbs with a lifetime guarantee to never burn out. My Dad sold these light bulbs for a short time. The problem was that nobody believed it. But the product is entirely within our technology to make. It simply isn't viable, since it basically eliminates its own market.
So what you have in the present healthcare industry is a whack-o, ass-backwards, closed loop system of making sick people into "customers". You also have people going into this system for "check-ups" feeling perfectly fine, no complaints, no aches, no pains, and then coming out the other end with a "condition" that needs treatment (usually a prescription) to prevent this condition from getting worse.
I'll be the last one to say that there are any people out there, "customers" of this system, who aren't correctly diagnosed with any condition that doesn't merit the treatment strategy their physicians prescibed for them. I'm not saying that at all. What I am saying is that the focus is skewed by the for-profit basis for the whole thing.
This system pumps billions and billions of tons of exotic chemical compounds into the human gene pool every year. The long term effects upon the human population are completely unknown. Anyone who claims that this situation is safe is speaking upon faith, alone.
This is really the only thing that has driven the healthcare industry to its current dizzying heights of profit making, after all. It's the faith in medicine that abounds in our culture. It's the incredibly easy "sales pitch" the doctor can make to the prospective customer, to get them to decide to agree and purchase the products of the chemical companies, and faithfully swallow all those pills every day for the rest of their lives.
What's the sales pitch?
It's the implicit threat of death.
No car salesman ever had it so good.
It won't be long before all the corporate giants will want to jump onto this bandwagon, and hook up to this golden goose. Someday soon we'll see drive-thru McHospitals, with Ronald McDoctor happily waving to the kids as those cash registers go ka-ching!
http://drblayney.com/Asclepius.html
...represented a higher purpose behind the practice of medicine. Indeed, the Oath of Hippocrates...
http://www.thedoctorslounge.net/oath.htm
...clearly deals with this higher matter of a doctor's duty versus the lower endeavors of commerce.
Somewhere along the line, however, the practice of medicine has become what it is today, ie- a for profit industry. We use the term "industry" freely now, when referring to the "Healthcare Industry". Before, it was the practice of medicine. Now it's the healthcare industry.
Part of the blame for this change is the activity of the civil judiciary, wherein suing doctors for malpractice, ie- for fun and profit, grew to epidemic proportions. This necessitated the protections afforded by malpractice insurance, the costs of which grew along with the epidemic of shyster lawyers chomping at the bit to sue the doctors. It was a self-feeding mechanism that spiraled into the giddy heights of incredible profits that these bottom feeders (insurers and lawyers) managed to turn it into.
This increased cost of practicing medicine turned otherwise high minded and honest practitioners to ways that could help to foot the bills, and thus we had doctors working not only to help the sick, but also to defend themselves. Defense is better done collectively, and out of this we began seeing doctors' groups, clinics, and medical organizations springing up all over the place. There is more safety in numbers. Consequently, the larger an organization could grow, the safer the individual doctors could be.
Unfortunately, in this era of corporate raiding and "creating wealth" out of absolutely nothing, the existence of a burgeoning array of medical organizations represented a burgeoning array of corporations that were flowing an awful lot of money. This is where the for profit healthcare holding companies started coming into the picture. This also afforded the original investors in these corporations a means of "cashing in".
None of this has any aspect of "evil" to it, in my view. It's simply been a mundane matter of evolution in the world of money-making.
Of course, none of this would have taken place in quite the way it did if it weren't for the chemical companies.
This is the area of endeavor in the practice of medicine that reeks the most. Most of the blame for the change in the activity from "beneficent" to "for profit" falls at their door.
But let me back up just a tad, here. We can't necessarily blame the chemical companies for being what they are. A publicly held corporation is a psychotic "entity". It cannot be run in a manner consistent with any kind of beneficence toward individuals that are not stockholders. If individuals who are not stockholders are harmed in any way, this is dealt with in the cost of doing business. It's very psychotic behavior to exist in a society while doing harm to that society. But we see this behavior in corporations all the time.
See the film, "The Corporation" for a better understanding of what I'm talking about...
http://www.thecorporation.com/
...and, for instance, this article...
http://www.theepochtimes.com/news/6-4-23/40712.html
Most of the twentieth century has had chemical companies doing all sorts of horrific things. The most glaring example, of course, is the history of I.G. Farben, which formed the financial core of Nazi Germany. One of Farben's (at that time) subsidiaries, Bayer, known for the first aspirin product (Bayer Aspirin), supplied massive quantities of aspirin to Nazi doctors for experimentation on concentration camp detainees. Farben was the main supplier of Zyklon B, a chemical used in the gas chambers. It's interesting to learn what happened to this corporate giant after WWII. If you have a few hours to look into it, start here...
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/IG_Farben
The post WWII world was filled with hope and the wonders of science that would be creating all the incredible technology that we enjoy today. No-one can really make a cogent argument that any of the corporate activity of those days was aimed at anything "evil" unless you consider "profit" synonymous with "evil". We were all coming into an age of prosperity, hope for the future, and the American Dream after World War II.
The basic psychotic nature of publicly held corporations, however, skewed the goals of the American Dream, and not by any small amount. But in order to understand the horrific nature of their effects on our culture and on our society, one needs to understand what the term "side effect" has to do with "the cost of doing business". These terms are close cousins to "collateral damage".
A recent example of this kind of collateral damage is involved with the recent Vioxx lawsuit(s) situation...
http://www.arthritisdruglawyers.com/vioxx/
What you have in this kind of thing is an oft repeated product life cycle in the chemical industry, especially when you're talking about drugs. The motive for expensive research into new drugs to handle widely acknowledged human ills is, of course, to make a profit. No-one can hold this up to be "evil" in any way, shape, or form unless we're discussing it from a politically based angle. This post has nothing to do with that angle, however.
Corporate decision-making is predicated upon the highest yield for the stockholders, and any decision-making that holds to any efforts to the contrary will result in the loss of the decision-makers' jobs. So, you can't call the inherent basis of the organization "evil", except in the sense that it results in an overall tendency toward psychotic behavior. In other words, resolving the damaging bases of how corporations work is hardly a matter of changing any one particular corporation. The entire basis of legal corporate interaction with the society at large would have to be changed.
Consequently, the decision to pursue research into any particular new drug product is predicated on its prospects for future profits that will not only pay for the research, but flow some decent level of black ink afterwards. It's a no-brainer.
So, let's take a look at the cholesterol-lowering drug market.
Two of the big winners in this arena are Lipitor, and more recently Crestor. The underlying paradigm behind this highly successful market is a simplicity. This basically says that high levels of LDL cholesterol increase the risk for heart and arterial diseases. It all goes back to the Framingham study...
http://www.framingham.com/heart/
...which was modern medicine's big epiphany, and the birth of "healthcare".
What the study didn't do was to establish the paradigm from any further logical progression into the way the human body works, vis-a-vis cholesterol. All it did was to find the "bad thing" that supposedly "caused" the heart and arterial "diseases". The underlying framework for this is germ theory. You have a disease, it's caused by a germ, so you find a way to kill the germ without killing the patient.
On that basis, the new "germ" was LDL cholesterol and so the big research money was put onto chemicals that would get rid of it. It didn't take a long time for the big winner in this research race to finally come running in at the finish line. About a quarter century ago we started getting the drugs that would really lower LDL cholesterol. Of course, there are some "side effects"...
Twenty years down the line, there's a side effect of Lipitor that most doctors have no familiarity with at all...
http://www.spacedoc.net/lipitor_thief_of_memory.html
...but this is just another chapter in the history of chemical companies and their drug products' "product life" cycle. The product is released, approved by the FDA, people take it for years, then some small percentage who have experienced horrific "side effects" finally accumulate enough victims to entice a lawyer or two to take notice, and they suffer through years of litigation before finally getting the really horrific side effect even acknowledged. Sometimes it results in the drug being taken off the market, sometimes not.
The thing one has to understand about this oft repeated scenario, however, isn't that the horrific side effects were ever intended to be experienced in anyone by the manufacturer, or anyone else. It's all about the product life, the cost of doing business, and the maximizing of profit. On that basis, someday there's going to be in the news the final result of this one particular side effect to Lipitor, the end result of all the inevitable litigation, and this will either result in the side effect of cognitive impairment being added to the "official list" of side effects, so that doctors will know to take anyone OFF that drug if it shows up (at the very least, we would hope!), or maybe Lipitor will be taken off the market. Either way, however, the Pfizer corporation's only decision-making process throughout this unfolding scenario will be aimed at defending itself and its billions of dollars in profit that will continue to be made until that final outcome is reached.
Absolutely nothing, however, will be done at Pfizer by anyone to even acknowledge the possiblity that Lipitor does, indeed, cause any kind of cognitive impairment in anyone at all, until the courts tell them that they have no choice but to acknowledge it. Because of the legal basis of corporate existence, anyone within Pfizer who behaved in any other manner would not only lose their job, they would also be challenged by Pfizer in court for responsibility in the loss of any profits that resulted.
In other words, the corporate "entity" is legally required to behave in this psychotic manner. That's the way it works.
Now I know I've really gone on and on here to put all the pieces together in making this point about the chemical companies being to blame for the way the "healthcare industry" has turned out. And I know that a professional journalist would probably have been able to make this much clearer with a lot less rambling around. But I can only try to do my best here...
At any rate, what we've ended up with here in the present healthcare industry is a propensity for somewhat blurred and skewed causes and effects as regards how to be healthy, how to address various ills. To illustrate that point, I'll stay with the cholesterol lowering paradigm.
Here's where to begin...
http://www.medicalnewstoday.com/medicalnews.php?newsid=33816
This story goes back about 25 years, less than half as far back as the Framingham study. It's all about more recent information, and a somewhat in-depth look into what this all means needs to be done to understand how it fits into the picture I'm attempting to paint here.
The upshot of the research being done at Cedars-Sinai can be understood in terms of where it will "fit in" to the profit picture for any chemical company that might pursue it. On the one hand, there's Lipitor and Crestor, et al, making billions in annual profits, with no end in sight. The patients, who are the chemical companies' end consumers, will be taking this drug for the rest of their lives. Compare that to the prospect of developing ONE INJECTION of genetic material into the patient. From that ONE INJECTION, the patient is then no longer a "drug customer". Consequently, how much will this ONE INJECTION have to cost in order for the manufacturer to not only recoup their research costs, but to make a profit?
So let's just take Pfizer alone. They have millions of customers spending around $50 a month for the rest of their lives. Will it make business sense for them to lose all those customers to a product that is going to be purchased by these same customers ONLY ONCE?
Of course not. This is why it's been twenty five years since this alternate possibility for the resolving of heart and arterial diseases has not gotten much in the way of research funding. It's not anywhere near as "viable" as the current product offering is. Of course, it only took less than a decade for chemical companies to begin offering products to lower cholesterol, following the general consensus of the medical community building up around the results of the Framingham study for the need of such products.
The entire healthcare industry is, consequently, a catch-22. If the money for research into completely eliminating any unwanted condition was spent, it would be an effort to eliminate its own market. It's the same reason that "Merlite Industries" doesn't exist anymore. This was a company that sold lightbulbs with a lifetime guarantee to never burn out. My Dad sold these light bulbs for a short time. The problem was that nobody believed it. But the product is entirely within our technology to make. It simply isn't viable, since it basically eliminates its own market.
So what you have in the present healthcare industry is a whack-o, ass-backwards, closed loop system of making sick people into "customers". You also have people going into this system for "check-ups" feeling perfectly fine, no complaints, no aches, no pains, and then coming out the other end with a "condition" that needs treatment (usually a prescription) to prevent this condition from getting worse.
I'll be the last one to say that there are any people out there, "customers" of this system, who aren't correctly diagnosed with any condition that doesn't merit the treatment strategy their physicians prescibed for them. I'm not saying that at all. What I am saying is that the focus is skewed by the for-profit basis for the whole thing.
This system pumps billions and billions of tons of exotic chemical compounds into the human gene pool every year. The long term effects upon the human population are completely unknown. Anyone who claims that this situation is safe is speaking upon faith, alone.
This is really the only thing that has driven the healthcare industry to its current dizzying heights of profit making, after all. It's the faith in medicine that abounds in our culture. It's the incredibly easy "sales pitch" the doctor can make to the prospective customer, to get them to decide to agree and purchase the products of the chemical companies, and faithfully swallow all those pills every day for the rest of their lives.
What's the sales pitch?
It's the implicit threat of death.
No car salesman ever had it so good.
It won't be long before all the corporate giants will want to jump onto this bandwagon, and hook up to this golden goose. Someday soon we'll see drive-thru McHospitals, with Ronald McDoctor happily waving to the kids as those cash registers go ka-ching!
posted by Jeff Barnard at 5:38 PM
0 Comments:
Post a Comment
<< Home