Unnecessary Surgery EXPOSED

Unnecessary surgery exposed! Why 60% of all surgeries are medically unjustified and how surgeons exploit patients to generate profits

Friday, October 07, 2005 by: Alexis Black

Every year millions of Americans go under the knife, but many of them are enduring great pain and shelling out thousands of dollars for surgeries they don’t really need. In fact, the only people who seem to really benefit from these unnecessary medical procedures are the medical professionals who stand to make exorbitant amounts of money from performing them.

An estimated 7.5 million unnecessary medical and surgical procedures are performed each year, writes Gary Null, PhD., in Death by Medicine. Rather than reverse the problems they purport to fix, these unwarranted procedures can often lead to greater health problems and even death. A 1995 report by Milliman & Robertson, Inc. concluded that nearly 60 percent of all surgeries performed are medically unnecessary, according to Under The Influence of Modern Medicine by Terry A. Rondberg. Some of the most major and frequently performed unnecessary surgeries include hysterectomies, Cesarean sections and coronary artery bypass surgeries.

 

Coronary bypasses are the most common unnecessary surgeries in America

In a nation plagued by heart disease, it often seems that the knee-jerk reaction of American doctors is to treat heart problems with surgery. However, many of the heart surgeries performed each year are unnecessary procedures that could be putting the patients’ lives at greater risk. “(W)hen faced with heart disease, doctors recommend a bypass. By so doing, we think, they bypass the real problem. Bypasses are the single most commonly performed unnecessary surgery in the country,” write Dr. Mark Hyman and Dr. Mark Liponis in Ultraprevention. In fact, according to Burton Goldberg, author of Heart Disease, most coronary artery bypass surgeries and angioplasties produce no real benefit to the patient and dangerous side effects like stroke or brain damage may result from the operations. “Coronary artery bypass surgery is called an ‘overprescribed and unnecessary surgery’ by many leading authorities,” Goldberg writes. “Complications from such treatments are common and the expense to the health care system is extraordinarily high. In 1994, an estimated 501,000 bypass surgeries at $44,000 each were performed on Americans, 47 percent of which were done on men.”

 

Women are at an especially high risk of unnecessary surgery

Women may be at an especially high risk for unwarranted operations, since hysterectomies and Cesarean sections also top the list of “overprescribed and unnecessary” surgeries. Of the approximately 750,000 hysterectomies performed each year, 90 percent are unnecessary, writes Goldberg in Alternative Medicine, making the removal of a woman’s uterus one of the most commonly performed unnecessary surgeries. And the risk that comes with an unwarranted hysterectomy is high. “Each year 750,000 hysterectomies are performed and 2,500 women die during the operation. These are not sick women, but healthy women who go into the hospital and do not come out,” says Dr. Herbert Goldfarb, a gynecologist and assistant clinical professor at New York University’s School of Medicine, in Null’s Woman’s Encyclopedia Of Natural Healing.

Women are also frequently subjected to Caesarean sections they don’t really need. With an estimated 920,000 Cesarean births performed each year, the Cesarean has become the “most common major surgery in America” and it is four times more likely a woman will give birth via cesarean section today than it was in 1970, according to The Medical Racket by Martin L. Gross. Women are also at special risk for receiving unwarranted surgeries because of the results of a mammogram, since the high rate of false positives in mammography often leads to invasive procedures. Women who do not even have cancer to begin with are treated for breast cancer, Goldberg writes. That’s right: These women’s bodies are carved up and altered and they aren’t even sick. So why does this happen?

 

Needless surgeries mean higher profits for doctors and hospitals

It may seem unfathomable to think a doctor could be so careless as to perform an operation that doesn’t need to be done, but it has been happening for years, from the more minor routinely- performed tonsillectomies of the past to the invasive heart procedures, hysterectomies, back surgeries and more of today. “(T)he reality is that unnecessary surgery, whether performed by doctors who operate out of ignorance, self-delusion, or simple greed has long plagued medicine and today still reaches epidemic proportions.” writes Gross. It may be hard to stomach the idea that doctors are capable of operating out of greed for more money, but some feel that is exactly what is happening. “American physicians are generally way too eager to use the surgeon’s knife to carve up and chop out whatever they think is ailing you, at great expense to you and great profit to them and the hospitals they work for,” write Earl Mindell and Virginia Hopkins in Prescription Alternatives.

When it comes to heart surgeries, Heart Frauds author Dr. Charles T. McGee writes, “As Harvard professor Braunwald predicted, a financial empire has developed around surgical procedures on the heart. With so many powerful vested interests involved, it will be difficult to change how American doctors treat patients with coronary artery disease. No one who is currently gaining from the system has any incentive to try to stop the unnecessary costs and suffering.” In other words, surgery makes money and surgery is what medical professionals are trained to do, so rather than exert the time and energy to try more conservative treatments that could threaten their very careers, medical professionals often turn to surgery as their most immediate and financially logical avenue. “The economic incentive for a physician to operate on you is great. Surgeries make doctors a lot of money. Doctors are human beings and they are not immune to the lure of bigger profits,” according to Prescription Medicines, Side Effects and Natural Alternatives by American Medical Publishing.

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From Natural News, here.

Free Assange Now!

He’s a Hero, So the Elites Hate Him

From the Tom Woods Letter:

The British High Court will soon decide whether to extradite journalist Julian Assange to the United States, where he will assuredly face a long prison sentence.

It is shocking to me that anyone who reads what I write could side with the regime on this.

The University of Chicago’s John Mearsheimer recently summarized the situation, and this is my analysis as well:

Assange is a journalist, and he did not break the law, as it is commonplace for journalists to publish classified information that is passed on to them by government insiders. If journalists in the United States were sent to jail for publishing classified material, the jails would be filled with many of America’s most famous reporters from newspapers like The New York Times, The Washington Post, and The Wall Street Journal.

But of course, that hardly ever happens. Simply put, newspapers publish classified material, and hardly anybody ever goes to jail. Why is this the case? What is the reason for this situation? Governments of every type, and this includes liberal democracies like the United States and Britain, sometimes go to great lengths to hide their actions or their policies from public view, which makes it almost impossible for the public to evaluate and criticize their behavior….

Thus, a rich tradition has developed over time in the United States, where insiders leak information about classified policies to journalists who publicize the information so that the public can evaluate it and push back hard against misguided policies.

The most famous case that illustrates this phenomenon involves the famous Pentagon Papers, which were a multi-volume study of the American decision to enter the war in Vietnam in the 1964-65 period and then escalated in subsequent years.

Daniel Ellsberg, who was an insider and had access to classified material, leaked the papers in 1971 to The New York Times, which subsequently published them. The story in those documents was starkly at odds with what the Johnson administration had been telling the American people about US policy in Vietnam.

By most accounts at the time, and certainly since then, both Ellsberg and The New York Times performed an important public service…. Ellsberg did not go to jail despite leaking classified information, although it did appear at the time that he might be sent to jail. Certainly, nobody at the New York Times went to jail because, again, journalists don’t go to jail for publishing classified information in the United States.

It is very important to remember that in the case of Julian Assange, he is not the equivalent of Ellsberg because he was not an insider who leaked the information. Chelsea Manning was the insider. Assange was the equivalent of the New York Times, and thus he should not be extradited….

Two final points. First, it is important to emphasize that nobody was hurt because of the documents that Assange published. Nobody’s life was put in danger because of what he posted on Wikileaks, and certainly nobody was killed….

Second, Assange has already paid a huge price for his actions. He has effectively been in prison for years. Sending him to the United States, where he is likely to be convicted and sentenced to a long jail term, would be a case of cruel and unusual punishment.

Exactly right. I would add: the regime Assange exposed hates you. If you’re feeling compelled to defend it, don’t. It will only laugh that one of its victims wants to speak in its favor.

I was glad to see that Assange’s brother, Gabriel Shipton (whom I interviewed on the Tom Woods Show not too long ago), accompanied Rep. Thomas Massie as the latter’s guest at last week’s State of the Union.

Massie has made the point that with RFK, Jr. (who supports pardoning Assange) siphoning votes from the two major parties, there’s every political reason for one of the two major-party candidates to declare his own support for pardoning Assange as well. (Interestingly, Donald Trump, Jr., recently noted that he had changed his mind on the subject and now favors the pardon.)

From LRC, here.

How To Be Included on Wikipedia

My name is Amber Berson, and in addition to being a writer, curator, and PhD student, I’m the Canadian ambassador for the Art+Feminism Wikipedia project. I’ve been working with Art+Feminism since 2014 to help train more female-identifying editors, and to generate more and better feminist content on Wikipedia. If you’re an artist or other type of creative professional, you may have wondered what it takes to get your own Wikipedia page. And, if you already have a Wikipedia page, you may have wondered how to change the information on your page to make it more accurate (or more flattering!). The tips in this guide are intended to help you understand Wikipedia’s guidelines and policies, and learn more about how you can approach digital archiving, conflict resolution, adding content to the Commons, etc. Hopefully, with all the information presented here, you’ll be able to have the best Wikipedia page possible.</i>

What is Wikipedia, and who writes it?

Wikipedia is an encyclopedia. More than that, it’s the world’s free online encyclopedia, accessed by nearly 500 million unique visitors each month in more than 250 languages. The English version of Wikipedia hosts more than 4.5 million articles, all of them collaboratively authored and edited by volunteers. If there’s an article about you and your work, it’s because someone took the time to make one.

How Wikipedia works

Wikipedia is a publicly generated resource. Anyone, anywhere can edit (almost) any article at any time. This means that once a page goes live, volunteer editors are able to edit and add to a page forever (although, there are also a small number of protected or locked Wikipedia pages that require special permission to edit, mainly for controversial topics or templates).

Anyone can become an editor on Wikipedia in order to modify existing pages or to create new ones. Editors can also contribute by translating articles (Wikipedia even offers a really cool content-translator tool) and by adding material to Wikimedia Commons—a collection of over 45,184,580 (and growing!) freely usable media files to which anyone can contribute.

To create a new page, all you need to do is create an account on Wikipedia and then add your new article. While only registered and signed-in users can create pages, anyone can modify a page, and the edits are simply attributed to their IP address. In addition to volunteer editors, Wikipedia employs bots to scan edits for plagiarism and carry out other mundane and repetitive tasks such as checking for typos.

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From The Creative Independent, here.