Lab tests, Government control of health care, Theranos Inc., and more

[harpsicon]

I never cease to be appalled when our non-American friends on apoE4.info report on how their single-payer government health systems make it impossible for them to get the labs they would like.

As J11 puts it, it clearly saves these governments money to disallow the labs that we need as “unnecessary” and he suspects that there are incentives to government physicians to avoid these expenses.

What would any of us do without lab numbers? They seem to be the single most important factor in keeping track of our health situations!

Dr. Gundry has now successfully treated thousands of patients without a ton of expensive medicines or procedures, by the simple expedient of keeping track of a lot of different lab numbers, which tells him how to tweak the diets and supplements of his patients.

Of course a benevolent government would be all over Gundry’s results, and would be experimenting and implementing such impressive outcomes on a large scale. But governments are composed of people, like us or worse most likely, who are primarily interested in their own advancement, not the overall good. Big Government seems quite comfortable with Big Pharma, Big Health Care/Hospitals, plus a ton of “alphabet” organizations like the AMA, ADA, etc. imposing their “settled science” on nutrition and health care, whether it’s good for us or not. It’s good for them! Their jobs and revenue streams are working just fine!!

We at apoE4.info are just a few, free-minded and inquisitive folk roaming the edges of what is permitted by highly regulated health care, even in the US.

And as far as the mainstream is concerned, the science is indeed settled! The SAD with its whole grain goodness and fat phobia are behind tens of millions of government meals served daily in schools, hospitals, VA centers and Medicare/Medicaid facilities. As we all know, normal MD’s have not much training in nutrition, and usually parrot the standard line if they have anything to say about it at all.

Under single-payer they will ration medical care, because they will have to, and it will be done politically, starting with where the most money can be saved, on those over 65. Single-payer will provide the mechanism they need to make sure that people like our community are not working miracles around the edges, demonstrating that Big Medicine is not what it should or could be. The Crony Capitalism we currently enjoy in America and the EU is often more about preventing competition with the powers-that-be than about providing superior goods and services, so that the too-big-to-fail entities that dominate our lives can be assured of dominance as far as the eye can see. If promising ideas or companies get destroyed in the process, they care not at all. They even go after Uber and Airbnb.

The demise of Theranos Inc. is thus a very interesting case. On the one hand, the promise of widespread availability of labs, and the leadership of a young, female CEO, attracted a lot of positive spin. On the other, though, such availability, which would empower millions of independent people like us, was clearly a threat to the Cronies and the Alphabet agencies. What would happen if millions of people like us opted out of the System? They proclaim “You can’t prove that” – so we better stick with what we know and fight to prevent real innovation. Since the venture capitalists have fallen in line behind the Left in the US, it is not terribly hard to imagine someone giving the word that Theranos was “not a good investment” and that there was something wrong with their results. Rather than fix this promising idea, they destroyed it – one suspects there is much more here than meets the eye.

Those who think they can somehow retain their freedoms in light of all this should look at what a Harvard Med School professor recently wrote in the Wall Street Journal: “Computer programs and one-size-fits-all rules for medical practice have become central to the care process. Through the EHR [electronic health record], a physician is pushed to start a ‘preferred’ medication, or not to order a test that the computer program deems unnecessary. The system forces doctors to choose from a set of tens of thousands of billable diagnosis codes before making any clinical decision, no matter how nuanced the individual case and circumstances may be.”

And you thought EHR was a positive development…

The wait of several weeks or months under socialized medicine for a specialist appointment after a preliminary diagnosis of cancer has always struck me as an abomination. However, it is true that a lot of people working in such systems seem to take this kind of thing in stride. I am delighted to see in our blogs the realization by some people, who are probably otherwise good liberals/progressives, that it is mainly in the US that free access to labs still exists, and that Gundry, Wahls, Bredesen, and other medical free-thinkers still thrive.

If the Left is elected now, and the push towards some kind of socialized medicine in the US is continued, it would seem unavoidable that in the rather short term the availability of “credit card” labs, outside the official system, will be simply forbidden, or “discouraged”. And will the raft of tests ordered by someone like Gundry be considered “good medicine” by the bureaucrats?

To be sure, the people who railed about possible Death Panels rationing medical care by their own political lights, and preventing people (especially older people) from getting treatments they might need and desire, well – those people were simply mocked and dismissed…… and now we’re already beginning to experience rationing of the European kind here. Medicare no longer pays for PSA test for males over 55 since there are too many expensive false positives. But who else even needs a PSA test if not men over 55?

Ezekiel Emanuel, Rahm’s MD brother who helped invent Obamacare, is loudly on record as saying that personally, he thinks 75 is long enough to live, and that spending good money on care after that age is not advisable when there are so many needy young people, and that he’s personally OK with that. At least for now…

And, Heaven Forfend, Gundry sells things – should this even be allowed?? Private MDs used to do simple labs, saving their patients a trip to Quest or LabCorp, but are no longer allowed to do so, even though these used to be much cheaper and really convenient - not good for patients, but great for Big Medicine. This is where regulated medicine leads, using the excuse that the private physicians had a conflict of interest. How convenient for the Big Labs!

As J11 points out on the Theranos thread, real innovation would help the people as well as creating real jobs – not the hollow Socialist economies he or she describes, where for example a government pension plan just bought out the lab test company.

The key word here is ‘unnecessary” – in other words, what you need or consider necessary, but which they don’t want to pay for (after to be sure putting everybody in the 50% bracket so we can “afford” “universal” medical care).

I would be interested in hearing from members here how we can keep our freedoms with regard to medicine, in particular with regard to lab tests.

[Stavia]

Well firstly I'm not sure if this forum is the correct place for political discussion as it can get nasty and divisive.
Please let's keep the election off the boards and replies to this civil. The mods will delete and warn if there is behaviour outside our code of conduct.

Secondly, as a doctor and user of a public health system I found out that I am able to access more (free to the patient) tests than Terry Wahls thinks necessary and uses in her work even though she could do otherwise and gets great results.
Now that was interesting.

[Julie G]

Harpsicon, you seem to suggest that Theranos failed because it was a threat to the “System.” To my knowledge (could be wrong) it failed because they were unable to reliably replicate their technique.

FWIW, I agree with the gist of your rant. We need control over our own healthcare and availing ourselves of laboratory testing is a big part of achieving that goal. Luckily, it’s still widely available to us in the U.S. via online services, albeit using more blood than Theranos promised. I’m unaware that either US political party is trying to restrict access to that. Perhaps I've missed something on that front?

I love that you're finding adequate surrogate biomarkers to achieve your ends, Stavia. Your patients are very lucky.