Tag Archives: single payer healthcare

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Robust healthful manhood

The photograph of “a healthy man” to go with my Ragtag Daily Prompt conflate post.

I LOVE the caption. “Robust healthful manhood is the source of mental and physical power.” How differently the author portrays health womanhood, as shown in the conflate post. The book is Macfadden’s Encyclopedia of Physical Culture, in three volumes, 1911. Volume I is 500 pages. It is easy to read but it’s a different style from now. Here:

As a rule, if you will simply retain the idea that food should be swallowed at all times without effort, that is, that never, by any means, wash it down with water, milk, tea or any other liquid, that you should masticate it until it seems to disappear without swallowing, you can rest assured that you are masticating sufficiently. p. 97, volume I.

I plan to read the entire set. I think I will find lots of wonderful words for the Ragtag Daily Prompt (hey, I don’t think we’ve used masticate yet!) and material to write about.

Are there still interesting medical ideas out there? Oh, yes. LOTS. Only now they use the internet. I have subscribed to some of the series of videos, telling people how bad and wrong minded allopathic doctors are. Sigh. We do our best. The scam is that they let folks watch one a day for a week, or let them watch one, and then want you to buy the series. “Only $349.99!” Nice scam that is proliferating rapidly. I have now gotten emails saying “Health coaches should make as much or more than physicians and we can teach you how to market and target people and make that money.” Ugh and ick. Really?

I have patients in clinic who present by saying, “I don’t usually go to MD doctors, I go to a naturopath, but I am here because I need an antibiotic.”

I learn to respond gently. “Oh. If you need an antibiotic, maybe you have signs of infection? What are your symptoms?” I have to get past their dislike of allopathic medicine and find out what the symptoms are. Usually if I can diffuse them by getting the story, we can work together. Once in a while it doesn’t work: I have people come in and give me orders. “Do these labs.”

“Uh. Where did this list come from?”

The answer could be a video (by a naturopath, a biochemist, a biologist, whatever. I have watched some of these series. They start by saying that doctors are wrong/stupid/stubborn/misguided/etc.) or a “cash only” doctor or a magazine.

“Why are you coming to me?”

“I want medicare/my insurance to pay for it. I have done my research.”

“Well, medicare does not work that way. I have to list a symptom or diagnosis code for every lab ordered.”

“WHAT?”

I try to be patient. “Every lab has to have an attached appropriate diagnosis code or medicare will not cover it. There is a place in town where you can order your own, but it does not take medicare. You pay for it.”

“Just order it!”

“No. I am a medicare/insurance provider, which means I have a contract with them. It would be fraud and illegal to make up codes. Does your cash only provider use diagnosis codes? Can your bring their clinic note to me?”

One person replies, “My provider doesn’t take notes.” Oh, how nice. That provider does a very expensive panel of labs three times a year that the person is paying for out of pocket. “My provider checks EVERYTHING.” Um, and makes a boatload of money off you too, I think. That patient is very angry that I won’t take her orders and switches clinics. Oddly enough, this does not break my heart.

Some days I hate Dr. Google. There are lots of websites and people on line swearing that they can improve your health. There are scientific looking papers that swear something has been tested, but read the fine print: if the sample is 8 people, how does that stack up against the Women’s Health Initiative, where one arm of the study had 27,000 people? The evidence is weighted. We get multiple articles in medical school and subsequently about how to read a paper, how to weigh the evidence, how to recognize fraud or a poorly designed study.

I do not object to people looking on the internet and I have had people who came in and said, “Is it possible that I have THIS?” and who are correct. However, I see more fraud, always.


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Branded

This photo is really my brand. In 2009 my rural county hospital dismissed me as a physician because I argued against the daily 18 patient quota that they said that Congress had set us. I said, “I will go argue with Congress.” I was not sure how I would get to Congress or when.

Meanwhile, in Oregon, a group called the Mad as Hell Doctors was readying to hit the road. Two weeks before the Mad as Hell Doctors hit the road to go across the country to give talks about single payer healthcare and to listen to citizens talk about their healthcare experiences, a friend called me.

The friend had gone to the Mad as Hell Doctors’ first program, a practice run in Sequim. It was well attended because the community had a controversy over the word “Hell”. The friend said, “It’s a bunch of older white males. They need a woman. You’re off from work: you should go.”

I researched them and called a friend who is a very experienced agitator. He said, “Do it.” I called them and my father drove me to the Bremerton ferry. I got off the ferry in downtown Seattle and was picked up on a street corner to join the Mad as Hell Doctors. I had never met any of them. That evening I was part of the program.

I was and am mad as hell and often sad, frustrated, appalled and incensed by the healthcare industry in the United States, that leaves people without care and dying in spite of costing each and every one of us twice as much as any other country in the world. And all of the CIVILIZED countries have single payer. Am I saying that the United States is uncivilized? Yes, frankly, I am. We are a country run on greed by corporations currently and I am fighting it.

The Mad as Hell Doctors traveled California in 2010 and I was there for a week of that trip. In 2011 they toured Oregon. We continue to work locally, at the state level and at the national level for single payer healthcare, medicare for all. I think that it will happen and hopefully during my career.

We ended the first trip at Congress and the White House. I sent a postcard to my former employer saying “See? I said I would go to Congress.” We haven’t won the health care battle yet but we will.

Here is a ten minute program that I did in Sequim, WA in (2012) at the American Awakening event:  Enjoy. If you want to see WHY we are Mad as Hell, watch “Health, Money and Fear” and the other videos at this site. For more information Physicians for a National Health Care Program is excellent and Health-Care Now! is also excellent.

You can make a difference. Do you know anyone who has lost their house, not gotten care soon enough because they didn’t have insurance or were under insured, or has been harmed or died because they were not able to afford or access care? Gotten sick and lost their job and lost their insurance? You, too, should be Mad as Hell and fight to change this.