Championing Pills and Profit Over People

The Western allopathic treatment model is captured by white-knight syndrome, in which allopaths save the world by selling drugs at a devastating human cost.

For much of my post-college life, I was a leader in a non-profit health insurance company. What I heard in meeting rooms behind closed doors shocked me, and my relationship with Western medicine — once fairly solid despite some hiccups — began to crumble.

A bit of historical context . . .

Just over 100 years ago, a group of wealthy white men, spearheaded by John D. Rockefeller and Dale Carnegie, made a plan to gain even more wealth and power by selling industrial waste products like coal tar, which could be manufactured into pharmaceutical drugs and resold to consumers under the guise of “health care.”

At the turn of the 20th century, John D. Rockefeller owned Standard Oil, then the biggest oil company in the country, and he was filthy rich. But sufficient cash is never enough for the parasitic class, and Rockefeller wanted more money, more cultural influence, more power. So, he worked with some wealthy friends to change the landscape of the American health care system permanently, and not for the better.

Once Rockefeller’s petrol-chemical drugs were ready for market, the group of rich white men used their massive influence to push for licensing laws for medical providers, which resulted in the near elimination of all folklore and natural medicine by design. Rockefeller and gang used their considerable influence to ideologically capture all the medical schools in the country, forcing them all to conform to the new American Medical Association, which the white knights designed with intention to promote allopathic (read: drug) treatments.

Suddenly, remedies that were thousands of years old were classified as “alternative” and shunned. Many alternative health doctors were arrested.

When evidence began to show that Rockefeller’s new drugs were causing cancer, good old Johnny went ahead and founded the American Cancer Society and suppressed the evidence while promoting his own philanthropy.

Suppressing evidence may seem par for the course for the parasitic class, but when I was working in the health insurance industry, I didn’t know any of this troubling historical context. I was, however, led to the research that would uncover the dark history of the Western medical model in America.

Here are some things I heard during my time in the health insurance industry that caused me to do my own research and ultimately turn away from Western medicine and health insurance.

Most drugs are only genetically appropriate for about 30% of the total population.

When you isolate the portion of that 30% of people who actually could benefit from the drug in question, the drug itself becomes immediately unprofitable, which is a huge problem for Big Pharma. To fix this pernicious problem, regulatory bodies require insurance companies to design drug formularies with unintended consequences, in which the spray-and-pray method of drug trialing (aka: step therapy) is promoted.

Step therapy is the reason most folks must often try pill after pill after pill before finding a drug that, they perceive, adequately slows or stops symptoms without causing catastrophic symptoms of another kind. If you’ve ever needed to trial one drug for 30 days before trialing yet another drug, you’ve experienced this problem first hand.

Now, this genetic statistic is not something you’ll find in a Google search. Hell, I have no source for you other than sharing that these words came out of a registered pharmacist’s mouth while discussing a high-cost drug and a profiteering pharmaceutical company trying like hell to sell said drug to more people to recoup its research costs.

What’s more shocking to me is that, despite pharmaceutical companies knowing that their drugs are only suitable for about 30% of the population, those same companies have zero mechanism to identify the genetics responsible for such suitability.

Pharmaceutical companies don’t know which genetic combinations will produce suitable customers for their drugs (which is how Big Pharma views the economics of medicine; they’re not in it for you, they’re in it for themselves).

Additionally, doctors prescribe more drugs when they receive cash from the pharmaceutical company who makes them. As Patrick Radden Keefe wrote in his book, Empire of Pain, “The doctor is feted and courted by drug companies with the ardor of a spring love affair,” one commentator observed. “The [pharmaceutical] industry covets his soul and his prescription pad because he is in a unique economic position; he tells the consumer what to buy.”

I ’member hearing ‘Say No to Drugs’ in the 90s.

The efficacy rate of the annual flu shot is about the same as the efficacy rate of placebo.

When sitting in a meeting room one day in autumn, the conversation flipped to sending out reminders to folks about annual flu shots. The insurance company was regulatorily required to get a certain percentage of the population vaccinated against the flu. What shocked me, though, was that members of leadership knew the vaccine was shit, comparable to placebo, and around the table were jokes of mailing placebos instead of vaccine reminders, which would have cost less and resulted in about the same decrease in severe illness.

Placebos are roughly 35 - 50% effective at treating symptoms depending on the disease being treated. For the past 8 years at least, the efficacy of the flu shot was comparable to placebo. When prescribing a saline shot is as effective as injecting the flu shot and comes without all the potentially nasty side effects and the possibility of severe vaccine injury like Guillain-Barré syndrome, the vaccine is the problem.

I’ve not had a flu shot since 2018 and won’t have another. I’ve also not been vaccinated against COVID-19 or any other disease and don’t bring my daughter in for annual shots or boosters.

I value our lives and health too much to play Russian Roulette with ineffective shots.

The International Classification of Diseases removed all cause-of-death classes associated with vaccines.

In 1979, the International Classification of Diseases (ICD) was updated to remove all cause-of-death code classes that were associated with vaccination. Even with clear evidence that a vaccine caused death, the medical examiner present literally can no longer classify the death as a vaccine death because such classification doesn’t exist.

By the time the National Childhood Vaccine Injury Act was passed in the United States in 1986, vaccine death had been eliminated from mortality statistics by medical coders, not doctors, and this evidence was used to pass the legislation making it impossible for Americans to sue vaccine manufacturers after their loved ones were maimed or killed by their pharmaceutical products.

Now, a number of parents can identify the vaccine given resulting in their infant’s sudden death or severe injury. Though the American medical system works hard to deny the vaccine-SIDS link, an analysis of VAERS data shows direct causation between vaccine administration and SIDS.

Some fast facts from the linked article and corresponding PDF, which I encourage you to read for yourself:

• Fifty-eight percent of all infant deaths reported to VAERS occurred within 3 days post-vaccination;

• 78.3% occurred within 7 days post-vaccination.

• The remaining deaths occurred between 8- and 60-days post-vaccination, an average of 11 per day (564/53 days)

Instead of acknowledging that infants are dying due to vaccination, the medical establishment blames innocent parents for suffocating their infants.

Some clinicians don’t know how to read, interpret, or apply medical evidence standards.

Some of the hardest cases on which I worked involved folks who were being battered by poorly applied or misunderstood medical standards of care. If you’ve never glanced through a medical policy (count your lucky stars), know that those policies are often filled with jargon that most laypersons aren’t equipped to understand. I, myself, had to learn hundred of medical glossary terms to navigate those documents. But what shocked me was discovering that clinicians inside the system in which I worked—both treating doctors and clinical nurses—also sometimes failed to understand correct medical policy application.

One of the duties of my leadership position was to explain complex medical policy criteria to the folks who needed help navigating the allopathic insurance system. But several times, instead of educating the patient seeking care, I educated the clinicians about what the policy language actually said and recommended updates to medical policy language to clarify the guidelines for the medical reviewers making decisions.

Every time I hear someone say, “Trust the experts,” or “Stay in your lane,” when it comes to medicine, I think of these medical policies and the people whose lives would have been unnecessarily ravaged had I trusted the experts and not looked into the problems myself.

Standards of medical care and treatment are largely based on Pareto’s principle (though regulatory agencies and insurance companies won’t tell you that)

There’s a reason health insurance companies employ prior approval processes and appeals before agreeing to pay for many services. Like the problem with identifying the right drug for a specific patient, providers have a hard time identifying the right treatments for a specific problem, which leads to lots of costly overtreatment and patient stress navigating those treatments.

When there is no clear-cut guideline for a service provider or insurance company to identify who can benefit from a treatment within the AMA-controlled standards of medical care, Pareto’s principle is relied upon in this manner, give or take:

• Insurance company receives prior-approval request for service. 80/20 rule shows patient is likely in the 20%. Service is denied. Patient/provider may appeal.

• Insurance company receives first appeal for service. 80/20 rules shows patient is in the 20% of the 20%. Service is denied.

  • Patient/provider may submit second appeal only in specific circumstances by state law. (Pareto’s principle applies at the second appeal, too, so the folks in the bottom 20% will never receive approval for their care, even if said care would save their lives.)

  • For everyone else, patient must either pay cash for service or go without the service.

I remember a few particularly difficult cases on which I worked while in the insurance industry, the kinds of horror stories that kept me up at night, found me weeping by myself in silence, crushed my caregiving soul. My role was to help people navigate the system, but I learned in doing so, that the system hates them, that there’s a reason navigation is so difficult.

There is a deep-seated cultural problem with the provision of medicine in America that meant I couldn’t functionally operate as a patient care advocate. Instead, I was a glorified paper-pusher, helping people get denied for care over and over because they weren’t in the 80%, and there was no box big enough to accomodate their experience and certify their medical need, especially when those same patients were tired of allopathy and wanted to seek alternative health treatments, including ayurveda, folk medicine, and more.

Preventive care leads to over-diagnosis and unnecessary (and costly) treatment

One of my least favorite days in the health insurance industry was a day in which one of my workgroups discussed preventive care specific to the Affordable Care Act’s no-cost preventive care provision. Like vaccines, there were certain regulatory metrics the company had to meet, like reminding folks about annual exams, mammograms, and colorectal cancer screenings, things like that.

There’s an ongoing promotion of the idea that catching disease early and often means eradicating disease before it becomes debilitating and costly: Treat now for a low cost or treat later for a high cost.

The problem with this promotion is that the assumption that preventive care saves lives and money is functionally incorrect.

Really, it’s a bald-faced lie.

• Mammograpy screenings for asymptomatic women lead to overdiagnosis and overtreatment. According to an article in the New England Journal of Medicine, “Women were more likely to have breast cancer that was overdiagnosed than to have earlier detection of a tumor that was destined to become large. The reduction in breast cancer mortality after the implementation of screening mammography was predominantly the result of improved systemic therapy.” The national expense of false-positive mammograms and associated overdiagnoses of breast cancer cost an estimated $4 billion per year. And this doesn’t include the psychological harms the patient must deal with when being told they have cancer.

• Colorectal cancer screenings share a similar problem, in that preventive colorectal cancer screenings lead to overdiagnosis, unnecessary biopsies and surgeries, and psychological distress.

  • To add to this problem, common drugs used to treat acid reflux and gastroesophageal reflux disease increase the probability of getting false positives in colorectal cancer screenings by about 13%. From the article, “‘In the analysis of 89,199 tests, carried out on 46,783 participants, during 2010 and 2016, we obtained a 6% positivity rate and the proportion of false positives was 53%,’ explains Víctor Moreno, coordinator of the research.”

During the workgroup, the ethics of sending reminders to folks was discussed, expressly because of the rate of false-positives, the psychological mind-fuckery that occurs when you’re told you have cancer, and the fact that no real savings are produced even when screenings mess up people’s lives.

In the end, we had to send the reminders because the government said so.

The pernicious inception of cancer

One day, I answered a phone call in which a person asked whether cancer treatment would be covered by insurance, since the cancer was caused by radiation and chemotherapy used to treat a different cancer. Unfortunately, I started hearing that story everywhere, even from new connections on social media.

The inception of cancer looks like:

• Diagnosed with and treated for cancer A; cancer A eliminated/in remission

• Diagnosed with and treated for cancer B caused by cancer A treatment; cancer B eliminated/in remission

• Diagnosed with and treated for cancer C caused by cancer A and B treatments; cancer C eliminated/in remission

• So on and so forth

Of course, the inception of cancer protocols and corresponding treatments often just guarantee a person will experience a treatment-related death, which nobody wants to acknowledge, least of all the pharmaceutical companies getting rich from selling you cancer-causing chemotherapy treatments.

Talk about a death-race to the coffin.

Protect yourself and your family from white-knight allopaths who will kill you before they admit their folly

Medical errors are the third leading cause of adult death in the United States for a reason.

If intuition is telling you something is amiss with your health care and you can’t quite put your finger on it, trust your instinct but know the answers you seek may not be easy to find, assuming you can find any answers at all. Much information has been suppressed or left untested because of the American Medical Association, which controls the provision of medicine via standards of care in the United States.

To pursue real health and wellness, I turned to the terrain theory of disease, which promotes a physiology-first approach to any and all treatments and solidifies the human as a part of the ecological whole. This means I’m now a firm believer and user of folklore medicine, especially since virology has been disproved.

Mother Nature has already given us every bit of medicine we need. The petrol-chemical drug industry is interfering with Mother Nature’s gifts.

Here are some natural swaps I’ve made to eliminate my former reliance on allopathic medicine:

• Traded in my primary care MD for a naturopath, who is always open to discussing plants and natural remedies first. (This is a big first step. If your MD won’t discuss plants, lifestyle medicine, or “alternative remedies,” they’re nothing but a glorified drug peddler. It’s okay to fire them and find a provider who aligns with your values.)

• Traded in my albuterol asthma inhaler for mullein leaf smoke and tea, which I source from my own backyard for $0. I smoke the leaf, which clears lung congestion and mucus fast, and when my daughter needs cough support, she can safely have mullein leaf tea flavored with organic, locally sourced honey for an extra health boost.

• When experiencing pre-menstrual anxiety, I found such anxiety corresponded with chocolate cravings, my body’s way of telling me I needed magnesium. Now I eat more magnesium-rich foods and supplement on the extra rough days to keep anxiety at bay. I sleep better, experience far fewer highs and lows, and have more comfortable menstrual cycles overall.

• Depression and anxiety come directly from an improperly balanced gut microbiome, no matter what anyone tells you. There’s still lots of “it’s a chemical imbalance!” misinformation out there, but the chemical-imbalance theory has been thoroughly debunked. If depressed or anxious, you’re missing critical micronutrients and need to load up fast.

  • Organ meats and supplements, and nutrient-rich animal products like grass-fed beef tallow can repair even severe damage to the gut-microbiome.

  • If you drink alcohol, stop. There is no amount of alcohol that can be safely metabolized without disrupting your gut microbiota.

• When headaches happen, I look inward to determine the source. Often, poor hydration or sleep are the causes. Drinking sea-salted water helps me hydrate quickly, but I can’t always take a nap in the middle of the day (and really, I’m not a napper). When I can’t tackle the headache with salted water, I supplement with turmeric, an anti-inflammatory root, which works better and faster than ibuprofen ever did and doesn’t threaten to destroy my stomach lining.

If you do want a resource for plant medicines you may find in your backyard and how to use them, The Lost Book of Herbal Remedies more than pays for itself.

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I’m sure I’ve missed a few swaps or resources, and I’m sure I’ll have other stories to share about my time in health insurance, but I’m spent.

Now, I’d love to hear from you!

• Why are you interested in natural and alternative medicines?

• Have you found help and healing in alternative medicine?

• Do you have a favorite natural-remedy swap to share?

• Did I share anything that royally pissed you off?

Lay it on me, and always remember: Health is wealth.

Happy healing!

♡ Fal