If Americans without health insurance were a nation, the population would be bigger than Canada — plus Michigan, Montana, New Hampshire and Vermont. Canada, like other industrialized nations besides ours, provides universal health coverage.

Contrary to myth, the United States does not have the world’s best health care. It has the costliest.

In the words of Dr. Christopher Murray of the World Health Organization (WHO), “Basically, you die earlier and spend more time disabled if you’re an American rather than a member of most other advanced countries.”

The United States is just No. 29 in the WHO healthy life expectancy ranking. We lag Canada by nearly three years and Japan by nearly six.

The United States does worse than 36 countries in child mortality under age five — well behind South Korea and Singapore.

The United States is No. 1 in spending. The Organization for Economic Cooperation and Development (OECD) reports the United States spent 15 percent of its Gross Domestic Product on health in 2003 compared to an average 8.6 percent in 30 OECD countries.

The United States has fewer physicians, nurses and hospital beds per person, and fewer MRI and CT scanners than the OECD average. Health Affairs reports that Americans had more difficulty making appointments with physicians quickly than people in Canada, the U.K., Australia and New Zealand, and were more likely to delay or forgo treatment because of cost.

Lack of health insurance is killing many more Americans than terrorism. As the Institute of Medicine documents, uninsured Americans get about half the medical care of those with insurance. They receive too little care, too late, get sicker and die sooner. For example, uninsured women with breast cancer have a 30 percent to 50 percent higher risk of dying than insured women. Uninsured car crash victims receive less care in the hospital and have a 37 percent higher mortality rate than privately insured patients.

Holly Sklar | Common Dreams (read more. . .)

healingarts | August 2, 2005 |

Though generations of dental students have been sold on the dental benefits of fluoride, studies over the last decade in particular have suggested a correlation with cancer. Studies conducted by the National Toxicology Program and the New Jersey Department of Health, have shown higher than normal incidents of cancer in male rats exposed to fluoridated water, for example.

Such studies have helped spawn grassroots opposition to fluoridation, and, since 1999, 70 U.S. communities have rejected fluoridation schemes, according to Fluoride Action Network, a watchdog group.

But fluoridation programs flourished even in the face of questions about health impacts. Kropp says the thrust behind fluoridation “is faceless. Some of the big proponents of fluoridation and some of the original experiments done, and done in faulty ways, aren’t around anymore. But you have new generations of dentists and public health officials who were taught in school that this is fine, so there’s no reason to do to the literature. It just gets passed down that way.”

Nonetheless, more and more scientists are refusing to take fluoride’s safety for granted.

Dr. Hardy Limeback, a leading Canadian expert and head of preventive dentistry at the University of Toronto, said he could not comment for this story because he is involved in a two-year review of fluoride for the National Academy of Sciences.

But Limeback, who once supported but now opposes fluoridation, has written extensively on fluoride’s health risks, and his views are shared by many in the scientific community. He has written that global cavity rates have declined mostly as a result of fluoridated toothpaste and that topical applications rather than widespread applications through community water can prevent tooth decay. Limeback and others also point out that industrial sources of fluoride contain harmful chemicals and have not been tested properly.

“Hydrofluorosilicic acid is recovered from the smokestack scrubbers during the production of phosphate fertilizer and sold to most of the major cities in North America, which use this industrial grade source of fluoride to fluoridate drinking water, rather than the more expensive pharmaceutical grade sodium fluoride salt,” he wrote in a public letter in April 2000. “Fluorosilicates have never been tested for safety in humans. Furthermore, these industrial-grade chemicals are contaminated with trace amounts of heavy metals such as lead, arsenic and radium that accumulate in humans.”

Kelly Hearn | AlterNet (read more. . .)

healingarts | July 21, 2005 |

Kelly Preston | HuffingtonPost

Parents are still largely unaware that these drugs are turning kids into walking time bombs. Eight out of the last 13 school shooters were taking prescribed psychiatric drugs, and only now is the FDA investigating the fact these drugs can cause violence. Legislators are still not waking up to the need for investigation — despite the Jeff Weise tragedy in March when the teen, after being prescribed an antidepressant, shot dead his grandparents and then classmates and school officials.

Now adding to the alarm bell we have the Partnership for a Drug Free America report that teens don’t consider these drugs dangerous because they are prescribed. However, the DEA classifies them in the same category of highly addictive drugs such as cocaine, opium and morphine. At least 10 percent of teens are abusing the stimulants, Ritalin and Adderall. A “troop of drugged-out zombies” is frighteningly real. (Watch for Lawrence Bender’s latest movie, Chumscrubber: Meet Generation Rx — an accurate portrayal of the current epidemic of teen prescription drug abuse.)

The recent controversy over these drugs has also raised another important debate: that parents across America are administering them for conditions they have been led to believe are the result of a “chemical imbalance” in the brain or some sort of brain-based disorder. Yet, the medical doctors in their letter to the FDA make it clear that these “potentially harmful substances” are being prescribed for “disorders that have no neurobiological or physical cause.” Even the president of the APA, Steven Sharfstein, recently admitted that there is no “clean cut lab test” to determine a chemical imbalance can cause “mental illness.” This has prompted concerns about the FDA’s drug approval process and why it approves so many psychiatric drugs for what is essentially behavioral control rather than treatment of medical illness. (read more. . .)

healingarts | July 14, 2005 |

Paul Krugman | NYTimes

The obvious model for those hoping to reverse the fattening of America is the campaign against smoking. Before the surgeon general officially condemned smoking in 1964, rising cigarette consumption seemed an unstoppable trend; since then, consumption per capita has fallen more than 50 percent.

But it may be hard to match that success when it comes to obesity. I’m not talking about the inherent difficulty of the task - getting people to consume fewer calories and/or exercise more may be harder than getting people to stop smoking, but we won’t know until we try. I’m talking, instead, about how the political winds have shifted.

Public health activists were successful in taking on smoking in part because at the time corporations didn’t know how to play the public opinion game. By today’s standards, the political ineptitude of Big Tobacco was awe-inspiring. In a famous 1971 interview on “Face the Nation,” the chairman of the board of Philip Morris, confronted with evidence that smoking by mothers leads to low birth weight, replied, “Some women would prefer having smaller babies.”
(more…)

healingarts | July 8, 2005 |

Lindsey Tanner | Salon

A leading group of pediatricians says teenagers need access to birth control and emergency contraception, not the abstinence-only approach to sex education favored by religious groups and President Bush.

The recommendations are part of the American Academy of Pediatrics’ updated teen pregnancy policy.

“Even though there is great enthusiasm in some circles for abstinence-only interventions, the evidence does not support abstinence-only interventions as the best way to keep young people from unintended pregnancy,” said Dr. Jonathan Klein, chairman of the academy committee that wrote the new recommendations.

Teaching abstinence but not birth control makes it more likely that once teenagers initiate sexual activity they will have unsafe sex and contract sexually transmitted diseases, said Dr. S. Paige Hertweck, a pediatric obstetrician-gynecologist at the University of Louisville who provided advice for the report.
(more…)

healingarts | July 5, 2005 |

Paul Krugman | NYTimes

The Center for Consumer Freedom, an advocacy group financed by Coca-Cola, Wendy’s and Tyson Foods, among others, has a Fourth of July message for you: worrying about the rapid rise in American obesity is unpatriotic.

“Far too few Americans,” declares the center’s Web site, “remember that the Founding Fathers, authors of modern liberty, greatly enjoyed their food and drink. … Now it seems that food liberty - just one of the many important areas of personal choice fought for by the original American patriots - is constantly under attack.”

It sounds like a parody, but don’t laugh. These people are blocking efforts to help America’s children.
(more…)

healingarts | July 4, 2005 |

According to Dr. Geier, “the current epidemic of autism may well be the greatest iatrogenic epidemic in history. The damage already done to our society is already in the trillions of dollars. The damage of the 9/11 terrorist attacks, and that of the AIDS epidemic pale when compared to the current epidemic of autism.”

Or put another way, “To cling to a purely genetic explanation for autism is a desperate attempt to maintain the illusion that one lives in a comfortable and rational world where new chemicals and technologies always mean progress; experts are always objective and thorough; corporations are honest; and authorities can be trusted,” says Harvard’s Martha Herbert, “That human actions, rather than genes, might be responsible for compromising the health of a significant proportion of a whole generation is so painful as to be, for many, unthinkable.”

The vaccine makers, along with their complicit government scientists and policy makers, have a lot to lose. If they don’t find a way to keep the public from finding out that they knowingly allowed an entire generation of children to be damaged, the ensuing litigation will spread through the nation’s court system like wild-fire and push tobacco and asbestos law suits down into small claims court.

The evidence presented in Kirby’s book forces readers to face the unthinkable and leads to one conclusion: a generation of innocent and defenseless children were poisoned for profits by a greedy segment of society mistakenly entrusted to protect the common good of children all over the world.

Evelyn Pringle | Online Journal(read more. . .)

healingarts | June 29, 2005 |

John Hanchette | Niagara Falls Reporter

Even casual readers of newspapers and watchers of TV know the nation’s health care system, if you can call it that, is broken. Americans who get sick know they’ll pay plenty for it, even if they’re lucky enough to have insurance.

Yet, while President George W. Bush and his sycophants dither about trying to “reform” a Social Security system that isn’t half as dilapidated as health care into a windfall gift for Wall Street fat cats, the numbers predict a national disaster if health insurance isn’t looked after soon.

The ranks of the uninsured swell by 100,000 each month. Huge companies that once viewed health insurance for workers as a no-problem benefit are going broke partly because of the premiums; General Motors — which just announced a layoff of 25,000 full-time workers — is an example. Some firms encourage lower-wage workers to sign up for Medicaid, which is drowning in so much red ink that governors in many states, such as New York, offload much of the cost on already-poor counties and already-burdened taxpayers.

In just three years, if current trends hold true, government-sponsored programs such as Medicare and Medicaid will spend more insuring retired Americans than on the already-immense defense budget. Now, that’s going some.
(more…)

healingarts | June 22, 2005 |

Robert F. Kennedy Jr. | Salon

When a study revealed that mercury in childhood vaccines may have caused autism in thousands of kids, the government rushed to conceal the data — and to prevent parents from suing drug companies for their role in the epidemic.

In June 2000, a group of top government scientists and health officials gathered for a meeting at the isolated Simpsonwood conference center in Norcross, Ga. Convened by the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention, the meeting was held at this Methodist retreat center, nestled in wooded farmland next to the Chattahoochee River, to ensure complete secrecy. The agency had issued no public announcement of the session — only private invitations to 52 attendees. There were high-level officials from the CDC and the Food and Drug Administration, the top vaccine specialist from the World Health Organization in Geneva, and representatives of every major vaccine manufacturer, including GlaxoSmithKline, Merck, Wyeth and Aventis Pasteur. All of the scientific data under discussion, CDC officials repeatedly reminded the participants, was strictly “embargoed.” There would be no making photocopies of documents, no taking papers with them when they left.
(more…)

healingarts | June 16, 2005 |

Paul Krugman | NYTimes

Harry Truman tried to create a national health insurance system. Public opinion was initially on his side: Jill Quadagno’s book “One Nation, Uninsured” tells us that in 1945, 75 percent of Americans favored national health insurance. If Truman had succeeded, universal coverage for everyone, not just the elderly, would today be an accepted part of the social contract.

But Truman failed. Special interests, especially the American Medical Association and Southern politicians who feared that national insurance would lead to racially integrated hospitals, triumphed.

Sixty years later, the patchwork system that evolved in the absence of national health insurance is unraveling. The cost of health care is exploding, the number of uninsured is growing, and corporations that still provide employee coverage are groaning under the strain.
(more…)

healingarts | June 13, 2005 |

Sally Satel | NY Times

Relief for medical marijuana patients was snatched away this week. In Gonzales v. Raich, the Supreme Court ruled that such patients will be subject to federal prosecution even if their own state’s laws permit use of marijuana. Now, short of Congress legalizing medical marijuana, the only way that its users can avoid stiff financial penalties or jail is if it is turned into a prescription medicine approved by the Food and Drug Administration. Justice Stephen G. Breyer said as much during oral arguments last November with his comment that “medicine by regulation is better than medicine by referendum.”

Fair enough. The problem is that the very agencies integral to facilitating the research and development of medical marijuana have actually been impeding progress.

The first obstacle is ideological. The Drug Enforcement Administration has fought marijuana’s use as a medicine, maintaining that it has no therapeutic value. (It hasn’t helped that activists have tried to use medical marijuana as a wedge to liberalize drug laws.)

But scientific consensus says otherwise. Surveying a range of findings, a federally commissioned Institute of Medicine report issued in 1999 noted the active ingredients in marijuana, cannabinoids, can relieve chemotherapy-induced nausea, stimulate appetite and suppress pain in patients who have failed to get relief from conventional treatments. Other countries have embraced such findings. Last April, for example, regulators in Canada approved a marijuana extract delivered in an oral spray for relief of symptoms of nerve pain associated with multiple sclerosis.
(more…)

healingarts | June 8, 2005 |

Ann Harrison | AlterNet

Medical marijuana patients say they are bloodied but unbowed by yesterday’s Supreme Court ruling that the federal government can continue to override state laws permitting medical cannabis use.

The U.S. Supreme Court ruled Monday that federal authorities have the power to prosecute medical cannabis patients. Medical cannabis patient Angel Raich says she has no plans to stop using marijuana under California law and will take her fight to Congress.

“Just because the Supreme Court today has ruled against me does not mean that the war on patients should begin,” said Raich at an emotional press conference. “It means that it is time for the federal government to have some compassion and have some heart and please use common sense and not use taxpayer dollars to come in and lock us up.”
(more…)

healingarts | June 7, 2005 |

Betsy Mccaughey | NYTimes

Infections that have been nearly eradicated in some other countries are raging through hospitals here in the United States. The major reason? Poor hygiene. In fact, hygiene is so inadequate in most American hospitals that one out of every 20 patients contracts an infection during a hospital stay. Hospital infections kill an estimated 103,000 people in the United States a year, as many as AIDS, breast cancer and auto accidents combined.

And the danger is worsening as many hospital infections can no longer be cured with common antibiotics. One of the deadliest germs is a staph bacteria called M.R.S.A., short for methicillin-resistant Staphylococcus aureus, which lives harmlessly on the skin but causes havoc when it enters the body. Patients who do survive M.R.S.A. often spend months in the hospital and endure several operations to cut out infected tissue. In 1974, 2 percent of staph infections were from M.R.S.A. By 1995, that number had soared to 22 percent. Today, experts estimate that more than 60 percent of staph infections are M.R.S.A.

Hospitals in Denmark, Finland and the Netherlands once faced similar rates, but brought them down to below 1 percent. How? Through the rigorous enforcement of rules on hand washing, the meticulous cleaning of equipment and hospital rooms, the use of gowns and disposable aprons to prevent doctors and nurses from spreading germs on clothing and the testing of incoming patients to identify and isolate those carrying the germ.
(more…)

healingarts | June 6, 2005 |

Evelyn Pringle | Online Journal

On Feb 9, 2004, the National Autism Association issued a press release that reported on one of the larger studies under review based on the Centers for Disease Control’s Vaccine Safety Datalink. Under independent investigation, the Association reported, of the CDC’s data children were found to be 27 times more likely to develop autism after exposure to three thimerosal-containing vaccines (TCVs), than those who receive thimerosal-free versions.

Let that sink in. Twenty-seven times more likely to develop autism. Then consider that our government regulatory agencies had this information for years and deliberately kept it hidden from the public. This failure to warn the public was not due to negligence or laziness, it was a deliberate cover-up and it continues today.
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healingarts | June 4, 2005 |

Chris Maag | clevescene.com

When secretary Nancy Nusser saw the cop walking down the hall, she thought he was coming to ask for a donation. She smiled and rose from her desk to say hello. Then she saw 11 more cops rushing in behind him.

They walked purposefully, stone-faced, wearing bulletproof vests over their hooded jackets. Two wore black ski masks. In the commotion, she barely noticed the two people rushing in after the cops, dressed in crisp business suits. “They came in a big surge,” Nusser says. “It was overwhelming.”

The officer in charge, Toledo Sergeant Carol Connelly, asked the secretary whether Dan Nuzum was in. For three years, Nuzum had practiced mechanotherapy, a type of massage. His clients, mostly senior citizens, seek his help to stretch and soothe their aching muscles.

Nusser was so surprised, she could barely speak. She managed to tell Connelly that her boss was in.

“He’s under arrest,” the sergeant said.
(more…)

healingarts | June 1, 2005 |

Kelly Hearn | Conscious Choice

It’s everywhere and here’s why limiting your kids’ exposure makes good health sense.

For five decades, fluoride has been pitched as insurance against mottled teeth, a prerequisite for a healthy smile, a trophy for modern preventive medicine. But as the chemical has been added to drinking water and ingested by millions of Americans each day, scientists and activists are warning that both adults — and kids in particular — are getting far too much fluoride, translating to potentially severe health problems.

Mainstream medical associations, corporations and the U.S. government have invested money and reputation trumpeting the benefits of water fluoridation programs, saying community water fluoridation is an equitable, cost-effective way to prevent dental cavities, especially for poor children. Opponents say spiked water supplies combined with a sea of fluoride-containing products like toothpastes, gels and rinses are delivering large and harmful exposures — and kids are getting the brunt of it.
(more…)

healingarts | May 25, 2005 |

Morgan Spurlock, from Don’t Eat This Book: Fast Food and the Supersizing of America

Every waking moment of our lives, we swim in an ocean of advertising, all of it telling us the same thing: consume, consume. And then consume some more. The epidemic of overconsumption begins with the things we put in our mouths. The United States is the fattest nation on earth. Sixty-five per cent of American adults are overweight; 30 per cent are obese. In the decade between 1991 and 2001, obesity figures almost doubled.

But the truly shocking thing is that we’ve taught our kids how to be fat, too. Obesity rates in American children remained stable throughout the 1960s, but they began to climb in the 1970s. In the past 20 years, the rate of obesity has doubled in children and trebled in teenagers. Kids are starting to clock in as obese as early as the age of two. If we find that surprising, we shouldn’t.
(more…)

healingarts | May 23, 2005 |

Teri Mills, NYTimes.com

S0, national nurses’ week has come and gone and what happened? Nothing, despite estimates that by 2020 there will be 400,000 fewer nurses than are needed in this country. Drastic action is required. And here’s the action I suggest: dethrone the surgeon general and appoint a National Nurse.

Here’s why. Prevention is the best way to lower health care costs. If people take care of themselves and don’t get sick…well, you know the rest. And who better to educate Americans on how to take better care of themselves than nurses?

After all, nurses are considered the most honest and ethical professionals, according to a recent Gallup poll. It’s the nurse whom the patient trusts to explain the treatment ordered by a doctor. It is the nurse who teaches new parents how to care for their newborn. It is the nurse who explains to the family how to comfort a dying loved one.

Meanwhile, the surgeon general, the nation’s head doctor, is all but invisible. If you went to a supermarket and asked 10 people the surgeon general’s name or to describe his or her role, it’s unlikely that you would find anyone who could. (It’s Richard H. Carmona, by the way.)
(more…)

healingarts | May 20, 2005 |

Kara Jesella, Nerve.com

Like most children of the ’80s, I had received a reasonable sex education via pop culture by the age of 11. In fourth grade, I asked my mother what Darryl Hall was referring to when he sang “I Want to Play that Game Tonight,” and laughed knowingly when she answered “Monopoly.” I suffered eye strain from repeated late-night viewings of the Spice Channel and was a longtime aficionado of The Joy of Sex. Still, nothing quite prepared me for the copy of Our Bodies, Ourselves (OBOS) I found in my parents’ basement.

It wasn’t the detailed diagrams of the female reproductive system, or the drawings of six different types of hymens that captivated me. Nor was it the righteous, womyn-power assertions such as, “We are learning to live our sexuality on our own terms.” No, it was the book’s explicit, unflinching description of fantasies: real women revealing their most private erotic imaginings about horses (ew) other women (less ew) and men (totally awesome, as I may actually have said in 1986). I read the scenarios over and over in the privacy of my locked bedroom, until I finally left for college, where the logistics of living with a roommate promptly put an end to that.
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healingarts | May 19, 2005 |

Matt Miller, NY Times

The consuming Senate slugfest over judges (vital as they are) proves how Washington remains determined to fiddle while our biggest problem burns: a broken health care system that threatens working families and national competitiveness.

President Bush - who, with 51 percent of the vote, has set 100 percent of the agenda - has taken a pass. And the terms of the debate remain surreal. After all, Margaret Thatcher would have been driven from office if she’d proposed anything as radically conservative as Bill Clinton’s health plan, which would have left millions uncovered and had private doctors deliver the care.

Is there hope? Maybe. But only if America’s chief executives exercise their “nuclear option.”
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healingarts | May 18, 2005 |