Tuesday, February 6, 2018

AMERICAN CONFIDENCE IN MEDICAL PROFESSION IS DOWN, 75% TO 25%

This is a good reminder.
Dr. Mercola summarizes one of his stories today with these intriguing lines:
Trust in the medical profession has dramatically declined in recent decades. In 1966, more than 75 percent of Americans had great confidence in medical professionals; today only 34 percent do
Of course, Medicare and Medicaid made their debuts in 1965. Having thereby begun to nationalize medicine, the Feds tightened their stranglehold on the industry with every passing decade until the apotheosis of Obummercare. Think t; hat could account for today’s huge distrust?
Dr. Mercola adds:
Only 25 percent have confidence in the U.S. health system and a mere 14 percent trust the federal government will do what’s right most of the time
Yeah, I’m surprised the figures are that high, too. But, as P.T. Barnum (probably never) observed, a member of those percentages is born every minute.
So how do you answer this?  What to do, what to do?  Eat fresh fruits and vegetables.  Find ways of incorporating these at every meal.  If you want to stave off all disease, then this is the way to go.  

Tuesday, January 30, 2018

HEARING VOICES IS A SIGN OF A WELL-TUNED BRAIN

If you start to hear voices, don't worry.  That's the sound of a well-organized brain say researchers from Durham, England.  Many folks will hear voices at night as they lie their head down to go to bed.  While others hear voices throughout the day, but these episodes are sporadic and fleeting.  It is not a sign of a mental illness.  In fact, "it’s a clue that a person’s brain is simply well-tuned to many sounds."

DURHAM, England — Hearing voices may not be a sign of mental illness as much as it’s a clue that a person’s brain is simply well-tuned to many sounds. A new study finds that healthy people who hear voices have differently-wired brains that find speech patterns in other sounds.
Researchers from Durham University studied brain-response differences between two groups of people — those who have experienced hearing voices (auditory verbal hallucinations) and those who have never mistaken other sounds for speech. Participants in the study included 17 people with typical responses to sounds and 12 people who have experienced hearing voices, but do not have any mental health problems.
Can hearing voices be a good thing? A new study finds that people who are not mentally ill, but often hear speech in sounds may actually have a special skill that comes from having a differently-wired brain than the rest of us.
Participants underwent an MRI brain scan while listening to hidden speech sounds, known as sine-wave speech. Sine-wave speech to the untrained ear would sound something like birdsong or alien-type noises. Typically, people are able to make out these sounds only after they have been clued in to listen for them or taught to decode the hidden speech sounds. After people are trained, though, they can detect simple sentences within the sounds, such as “The clown had a funny face.”
Researchers found that less than half of those with typical listening skills noticed the hidden speech while 75 percent of the voice-hearers picked it up.
“It suggests that the brains of people who hear voices are particularly tuned to meaning in sounds,” says lead author Dr. Ben Alderson-Day in a university release.
Researchers were surprised that the voice-hearers had such strong neural responses to the sounds with hidden speech. Even before being told to listen for hidden speech, voice-hearers reported hearing the voices in the sounds. They found speech-like sounds faster and more easily than those who have never experienced the phenomenon of hearing voices.
“We did not tell the participants that the ambiguous sounds could contain speech before they were scanned, or ask them to try to understand the sounds. Nonetheless, these participants showed distinct neural responses to sounds containing disguised speech, as compared to sounds that were meaningless,” adds co-author Dr. Cesar Lima.
The authors believe this shows that the brains of voice-hearers are more perceptive to the hidden meanings in sounds. The areas of the brain that control attention were quickly activated in the brains of voice-hearers when they were exposed to hidden speech compared to when they were listening to vague sounds.
“These findings are a demonstration of what we can learn from people who hear voices that are not distressing or problematic,” says Alderson-Day.
Between 5 and 15 percent of the population has occasionally had the experience of hearing voices. Although not everyone who hears voices has a mental health problem, it is commonly associated with schizophrenia or bipolar disorder.
Researchers hope their findings could someday help scientists and clinicians find better ways to help those who are troubled by the voices they hear.

Saturday, January 27, 2018

PATIENTS DYING IN CORRIDORS OF BRITAIN'S SOCIALIZED HEALTH SYSTEM




“Patients dying in hospital corridors.” So went the headline which appeared on the BBC’s website last week, detailing the newest outrages which have emerged from Britain’s crisis-beset healthcare system. This most recent revelation came as a result of an open letter sent to the prime minister by 68 senior doctors, offering details of the inhuman conditions which have become common in the National Health Service’s hospitals.

The letter, which collected statistics from NHS hospitals in England and Wales, found that in December alone over 300,000 patients were
made to wait in emergency rooms for more than four hours before being seen, with thousands more suffering long waits in ambulances before even being allowed into the emergency room. The letter further noted that it had become “routine” for patients to be left on gurneys in corridors for as long as 12 hours before being offered proper beds, with many of them eventually being put into makeshift wards hastily constructed in side-rooms. In addition to this, it was revealed that around 120 patients per day are being attended to in corridors and waiting rooms, with many being made to undergo humiliating treatments in the public areas of hospitals, and some even dying prematurely as a result. One patient reported that, having gone to the emergency room with a gynecological problem which had left her in severe pain and bleeding, a lack of treatment rooms led hospital staff to examine her in a busy corridor, in full view of other patients.

While it’s tempting to believe that these extreme cases must be a rare occurrence, the fact is that such horror stories have become increasingly the norm for a socialised healthcare system that seems to be in a permanent state of crisis. Indeed, as the NHS entered the first week of 2018, over 97% of its trusts in England were reporting levels of overcrowding so severe as to be “unsafe.”

Almost as predictable as the regular emergence of new stories of this kind is the equally unwavering refusal of British commentators to consider that the state-run monopoly structure of the system itself might be to blame. Many, including the prime minister herself, have pointed to the spike in seasonal illnesses such as the flu at this time of year, to distract from the more fundamental flaws of the system. However, officials from Public Health England recently went so far as to openly dismiss this as a major cause of the current healthcare crisis, clarifying that current levels of hospital admissions due to the flu are “certainly not unprecedented.” The aging of the population, and local councils’ failure to provide more non-hospital care have also been blamed.

By far the most commonly suggested remedy, however, is simply to inject more taxpayers’ money into this failing system. Indeed, the belief that Britain’s perpetual healthcare crisis is solely the result of funding cuts by miserly Conservative politicians is so widespread that it is almost never challenged, least of all by the trusted experts within the system itself, many of whom stand to benefit from increased funding.

However, the popular caricature of the NHS as suffering from chronic underfunding is simply a myth. In fact, even when adjusting for inflation, it is clear that government funding to the NHS has been increasing at an extraordinary rate since the turn of the millennium, much more quickly than during the early years which its supporters look back on so fondly.


Indeed, under the Conservative government of 2015–16, almost 30% of Britain’s public services budget was spent on its monopoly healthcare system, compared with around 11% in the NHS’s first decade.

One commonly heard soundbite from supporters of the current system is that the Conservatives have allowed healthcare spending to slump to historically low levels; all it would take to return the NHS to the levels of success it supposedly previously enjoyed would be to increase its funding back to the same level it previously enjoyed, or so they say.  However, to believe such a statement one would have to make two separate misinterpretations of the statistics, both so basic that they would strike shame into even the dullest high school math students: firstly, it is not the absolute amount of spending on the NHS which has fallen under the Conservative-led governments of 2010–18, but merely the rate at which spending is continuing to increase, even when adjusting for inflation. Second, the only reason that the rate of increase seems to have fallen is because of how disproportionately high it had been been under the infamously spendthrift Labour governments of 1997–2010.

Not only is the NHS not underfunded, but it suffers from dismally low efficiency in terms of healthcare bang per buck compared with similarly developed countries. This suggests that no matter how much its funding is increased, the current set-up is prone to chronically waste that money away.

To overcome these problems, reforms to the fundamental nature of the system itself are desperately needed, to increase the economic freedom of healthcare providers in the UK as well as the freedom of choice of consumers. In short, as long as British healthcare is organised as a taxpayer-funded state monopoly it will continue to fail, just as the other nationalised monopolies of the 1970s failed. To get to a point where the British public would even consider reforms of that kind, however, would require the breaking of a taboo that has defined the past 70 years of British politics.

George Pickering is the Almoayyad Fellow in Residence at the Mises Institute this summer, and is a student of economic history at the London School of Economics.

The above originally appeared at Mises.org.


Sunday, January 21, 2018

CANADIAN WAIT TIME TO SEE A NEUROLOGIST: 4.5 YEARS

Saturday, January 20, 2018

STATE LICENSURE: "IF YOU CONTROL WHO PRACTICES THE PROFESSION, YOU CONTROL HOW IT'S PRACTICED"




Wow!  At the 7:10 mark, Anahad O'Connor's NYT's September 12, 2016 article on how the sugar industry shifted the blame on bad health to fat.  They paid off researchers to downplay the link between sugar and heart disease.  According to Greg Glassman, owner of CrossFit, says that the ACSM, American College of Sports Medicine, has influential ties to Coca Cola who has influence on university studies and reports about the "not so bad" effects of sugar or transfer the culprit on heart disease to fat.