Over a Million Patients in the U.K. Addicted to Pain Killers

March 16, 2010

Natural News

By David Gutierrez

Approximately 1.5 million people in the United Kingdom are addicted to prescription or over-the-counter drugs, many of which were legally acquired.

In July, the Department of Health launched a review of the problem, after the House of Commons All-Party Group on Drug Misuse called for greater awareness, better doctor training and more treatment options.

Although medical guidelines discourage doctors from prescribing benzodiazepine tranquilizers such as Valium for more than four weeks at a time, many patients still become addicted.

“There are still lots and lots of patients being put on these drugs and kept on them for a long time,” said Pam Armstrong of the Council for Information on Tranquillizers and Antidepressants. “I have some sympathy with [doctors] — they get a lot of pressure from patients who want these drugs. But the problem has been ignored.”

Other highly addictive drugs include sleeping pills and narcotic painkillers. A recent study found that painkillers containing codeine can be addictive within as little as three days.

The increasing prevalence of Internet pharmacies has made prescription and over-the-counter drug abuse an increasingly popular alternative to the abuse of wholly banned drugs.

Yet not all addicts intended to abuse drugs. The Telegraph cites the case of one man who was placed on an antidepressant and a benzodiazepine in 2001, and remained on them for the next seven years. When increasing fatigue led him to attempt to quit “cold turkey” under hospital supervision, the results were devastating.

“In two days I was a train wreck. I felt I had woken up in a horror film, I couldn’t walk or think and I had lost my memory. It was indescribable torture,” he said.

Nine months later, he is still unable to work.

“I am still terrified of going outside, I can’t think straight or concentrate and I have very bad depression,” he said. “I have seen several doctors since and they cannot believe my doctor kept me on these drugs for seven years.”

Click here for the full report.

Breaking Down Cholesterol

March 16, 2010

Natural News

By Dr. Julian Whitaker

I’d like to shine the spotlight on one of medicine’s sacred cows- the belief that lowering cholesterol with drugs protects against heart attacks and premature death. Our obsession with cholesterol began in the 1950s when studies linked high consumption of animal fat with high rates of heart disease. This opened the door for clinical trials that laid the foundation of a new paradigm: the cholesterol theory of cardiovascular disease.

This theory has had profound ramifications. It changed the way we eat (fats bad, carbohydrates good) and contributed to our problems with obesity and diabetes. It wormed its way into “clinical practice guidelines”- cholesterol management has become a “standard of care” that doctors are expected to follow. It spawned the invasive heart surgery industry, based on the presumption that cholesterol-laden blockages must be bypassed or propped open. And it led to the creation of the best-selling class of medications in history: cholesterol-lowering statin drugs, which generate more than $15 billion in worldwide sales every year.

But it’s all a house of cards. No matter what you’ve been led to believe, a high cholesterol level is not a reliable sign of an impending heart attack. In fact, growing numbers of experts question whether cholesterol matters at all. As for statin drugs, for most of the 40-plus million Americans recommended to take them for the rest of their lives, they’re an ineffective, expensive, side effect- riddled fraud.

Statin-Free Zone
When a patient taking Lipitor, Zocor, or another statin drug comes to Whitaker Wellness, we discontinue it at once. “But my cholesterol level is 240.” “My doctor told me I’ll have a heart attack if I don’t take this drug.”My father died of heart disease, so I have to take it.” I’ve heard all these justifications and more, and I still recommend that my patients get off statins. Here’s why.

First, they’re not very effective. These drugs do lower cholesterol, but so what? We’re not treating lab numbers. We’re treating patients, and the ultimate goal in cholesterol management is to reduce risk of cardiovascular disease. Except for a very limited number of people, there is absolutely no evidence that statins protect against heart attack or premature death.

Are you over age 65? Not a single study suggests you’ll receive any benefits, even if your cholesterol goes down substantially. A woman of any age? Same story. A man younger than 65 who has never had a heart attack? Ditto, no help at all. For middle-aged men who have had a heart attack, statins may lower risk of a repeat heart attack, but that’s the extent of it.

I know this is hard to buy in light of the multiple drug advertisements and glowing endorsements from doctors. But keep in mind that pharmaceutical companies do a superb job of pulling the wool over the eyes of consumers and physicians alike by withholding unfavorable study results and making false, misleading, and often deceptive claims.

A Statistic We Can Understand
That’s why I want to step around confusing statistics and tell you about an easy-to-understand measure that you’ll never hear about in drug ads. It’s called “number needed to treat,” or NNT, and it describes the number of patients who would need to be treated with a medical therapy in order to prevent one bad outcome. Experts consider an NNT over 50 to be “worse than a lottery ticket.”

Lipitor ads claim that it reduces risk of heart attack by 36 percent. Sounds pretty good until you look at the fine print, do the math (which John Carey did in a great article in Business Week), and figure out that the drug’s NNT is 100. This means that 100 people must be treated with Lipitor in order for just one heart attack to be prevented. The other 99 people taking the drug receive no benefit.

To put this into perspective, the NNT of antibiotics for treating H. pylori, the underlying cause of stomach ulcers, is 1.1. These drugs knock out the bacteria in 10 out of 11 people who take it, making them a reliable, cost-effective therapy. At the other end of the spectrum are statins, which as a class have an NNT of 250, 500, or higher depending on the study you look at. What a deal for drugs that can cost more than a thousand bucks a year and are almost guaranteed to cause problems.

Goodbye Drugs, So Long Symptoms
Statins lower cholesterol by suppressing the activity of an enzyme in the liver involved in the production of cholesterol. But this enzyme has multiple functions, including the synthesis of coenzyme Q10. CoQ10 is a key player in the metabolic processes that energize our cells. No wonder statin users often suffer from fatigue, muscle pain and weakness, and even heart failure- the cells are simply running out of juice.

The second most frequent adverse effects of statins are problems with memory, mood, suicidal behavior, and neurological issues. Other common complaints include sexual dysfunction, and liver and digestive problems. Symptoms range from minor (achiness, forgetfulness) to serious (complete but temporary amnesia, permanent memory loss) to lethal (congestive heart failure, rhabdomyolysis or complete muscle breakdown). One statin drug, Baycol, was taken off the market a few years ago after it caused dozens of deaths from rhabdomyolysis. Several studies have also linked statin drugs with an increased risk of cancer.

Because physicians rarely warn of these side effects, few patients suspect their drugs may be the reason they begin feeling bad- and it’s often a revelation when they put two and two together. Simply discontinuing these medications can result in tremendous improvements in health and well-being. Texas cardiologist Peter Langsjoen, MD, published a study showing that when symptomatic patients got off their statins and started taking 240 mg of CoQ10 per day, they had significant decreases in fatigue, myalgias (muscle aches), dyspnea (shortness of breath), memory loss, and/or peripheral neuropathy.

Not a Drug But a Program
As you can see, we need to shift away from this myopic focus on statin drugs and lowering cholesterol, and take a more holistic view. Folks, you don’t need statins- you need a program that addresses all the known risk factors for heart attack, stroke, and other cardiovascular disorders.

Inflammation, not high cholesterol, is the primary cause of heart disease. Harvard researchers have discovered that a high blood level of C-reactive protein, a marker of inflammation, is more predictive of heart disease than cholesterol. To get a handle on inflammation, lose weight- especially if you carry excess fat in the abdominal area. Exercise. Stop smoking. Eat plenty of vegetables and several weekly servings of salmon, sardines, and other omega-3 fatty acids, and avoid sugars and starches.

The beauty of this program is that it targets not only inflammation but other conditions that contribute to cardiovascular disease, including high blood pressure, diabetes, even cholesterol. Best of all, it’s a foundation for overall good health.

Necessary Nutrients
Your program should include a well-rounded nutritional supplement regimen, as well. My number-one suggestion for inflammation in all its guises is fish oil. This supplement also improves blood flow, discourages excess clotting, helps normalize heart rhythm, and saves lives by reducing risk of sudden cardiac death.

Folic acid and other B-complex vitamins are important because they lower levels of homocysteine, a toxic substance that damages the arteries. The mineral magnesium relaxes the arterial walls, which improves blood flow, lowers blood pressure, and helps prevent arrhythmias. And antioxidants, such as vitamins C and E, provide protection against damaging free radicals- another contributor to cardiovascular disease.

Supplements that boost the heart’s energy are recommended as well. One is coenzyme Q10. In addition to serving as a potent antioxidant, CoQ10 also increases the heart muscle’s efficiency and protects against the adverse effects of statin drugs. Another is D-ribose, a natural sugar that is the structural backbone of adenosine triphosphate (ATP), the energy that fuels cellular function.

Click here for the full report.

New Jersey Mom Aspires to be World’s Fattest Woman

March 16, 2010

Fox News

Meet Donna Simpson. She’s going to cost you. A lot.

Simpson, of Old Bridge, N.J., is 42 years old, has two kids and a boyfriend, and she weighs 602 pounds. That’s right … 602 pounds.

She’s on a diet, of course, because she has a goal in mind:

She wants to weigh 1,000 pounds.

That’s right … 1,000 pounds. It’s a nice, extra-round figure — almost as big as what her unhealthy choices will ultimately cost taxpayers.

Simpson claims she is normal and healthy, and she has a right to eat what she wants and weigh what she wants.

“I love eating and people love watching me eat,” she says. “It makes people happy, and I’m not harming anyone.”

But she needs to use a motor scooter when she goes grocery shopping, because she can’t walk more than 20 feet. The human body, after all, is not designed to scarf down 12,000 calories a day in the quest to weigh half a ton.

Simpson is definitely harming someone — herself, says Dr. Carla Wolper, a registered dietitian and research faculty member at the New York Obesity Research Center at St. Luke’s-Roosevelt Hospital in New York.

And you, the taxpayer, could wind up paying for it.

“We don’t know her medical history, but one of the most dangerous health issues she faces is an increased risk of sudden death from having a heart attack due to electrical problems in the heart,” Wolper said.

Other possible causes of death for Simpson include stroke, immobility, breathing problems, congestive heart failure, diabetes, and inflammation of heart tissue. Each year, nearly 300,000 Americans die from heart failure.

Simpson, experts say, is putting herself at risk for all these medical conditions, and those conditions have a hefty pricetag.

“The baseline cost for someone like to go to the emergency room is $993 for one visit,” Daniel Emmer, public relations manager of Horizon Blue Cross Blue Shield, the largest health insurance provider in New Jersey, told FOXNews.com.

Simpson’s main source of income to support herself financially is by appearing on a Web site where men pay to watch videos of her gorging on food and showing off her hundreds of pounds of extra bulge in a bikini.

But it’s anyone’s guess whether her revenue from Web videos will cover the cost of her inevitable health risks.

“Someone with diabetes costs $11,744 more per year to provide health care, which is twice as much as the average person,” Emmer said.

It is unclear what type of insurance Simpson has, if any. But there is no question that whatever her health care position is, it could come at a high cost.

“Obesity causes a minimum $1,429 increase, or 42 percent in medical costs,” Emmer said. “Research shows lifestyle choices and behaviors drive 87.5 percent of the cost for health care claims.”

“When people are very, very overweight, they are at an increased risk for a condition called prolonged QT syndrome,” Wolper told FoxNews.com.

Prolonged QT syndrome is a heart rhythm disorder that can potentially cause fast, chaotic heartbeats, the Mayo Clinic says on its Web site. In some cases, the heart may beat erratically for so long that it can cause sudden death.

“Another problem this woman faces is related to the circulatory system,” Wolper said. “When people are that big, circulation is often impaired in the legs. This can cause blood to pool in the legs leading to formation of blood clots. This leaves morbidly obese people at an increased risk for a pulmonary embolism.”

A pulmonary embolism occurs when one or more arteries in the lungs become blocked. In most cases, pulmonary embolism is caused by blood clots that travel to your lungs from another part of your body — most commonly, your legs, according to the Mayo Clinic. One of the major risk factors is excess weight, which increases the risk of blood clots, especially in women who smoke or have high blood pressure.

“The work of the heart is tremendously increased when someone is that big because there’s so much more blood in the body,” Wolper said. “When this happens, the heart has to pump against the pressure of all that fat that is pressing against the blood vessels, and as a result the heart enlarges, and not in a good way.”

As Simpson’s appetite increases, so will the cost of health care for the severe medical conditions that she is likely to have — conditions that are preventable by healthier lifestyle choices. Whereas her $750-a-week grocery bill is merely gastronomical, her hospital bills will be astronomical — and the taxpayers of New Jersey may well have to pay her tab.

Meanwhile, in her effort to boldly go where no woman has gone before, Simpson says she tries to stay sedentary, so she burns as few calories as necessary.

She consumes five times more than the recommended daily calories for a woman her age.

“My favorite food is sushi. But unlike others I can sit and eat 70 big pieces of sushi in one go,” she told the Daily Mail.

“I do love cakes and sweet things, doughnuts are my favorite.”

The current record for fattest woman is held by a woman also from New Jersey, who weighed an unbelievable 1,800 pounds when she died in 2008. She was 49 years old.

Simpson is proud of the Guinness World Record she holds now for the world’s fattest mother, and her boyfriend is proud of her too.

Philippe, 49, supports her thousand-pound goal, even if that is nearly seven times his own weight of 150 pounds.

“I think he’d like it if I was bigger,” Simpson said. “He’s a real belly man, and completely supports me.”

Someday, the experts say, we all may support her.

Click here for the full report.

Non-Melanoma Skin Cancers On The Rise

March 16, 2010

Businessweek.com

By Jenifer Goodwin

The incidence of non-melanoma skin cancer has steadily increased since the 1990s, making it by far the most common form of cancer, affecting more people than all other cancers combined, two new studies find.

More than 2 million Americans on Medicare were treated for non-melanoma skin cancer in 2006, up from 1.6 million in 1992, according to one study. The other found that one in five 70-year-olds has been treated for non-melanoma skin cancer.

Researchers called non-melanoma skin cancer an “epidemic” that is only going to get worse as all those bathing beauties and sun worshippers from the 1960s, 1970s and 1980s get older, and their cumulative sun exposure racks up.

“We are dealing with a problem that is not going away,” said Dr. Howard Rogers, a dermatologist in Norwich, Conn., and lead author of one of the studies. “The number has kept going up and up at a rate of 4.2 percent every year, on average, from 1992 to 2006,” he said.

The studies are published in the March issue of the Archives of Dermatology.

The two types of non-melanoma skin cancer are basal cell and squamous cell. While basal cell carcinoma is slow-growing and rarely fatal, it can damage the surrounding tissue and bone if it’s not caught early, causing disfigurement when the cancer is removed.

Squamous cell carcinoma is also rarely fatal, though it can metastasize and spread to the lymph nodes and other organs, Rogers said. When caught early, squamous cell carcinomas are also highly treatable.

In the study by Rogers and colleagues, the researchers analyzed data from two Medicare databases and national surveys. They found the total number of procedures to treat skin cancer in the Medicare population increased by nearly 77 percent between 1992 and 2006. Between 2002 and 2006 alone, skin cancer procedures increased by 16 percent.

In the second study, Dr. Robert Stern of Beth Israel Deaconess Medical Center and Harvard Medical School in Boston, developed a mathematical model to estimate the prevalence of non-melanoma skin cancer in the United States.

With about 13 million white non-Hispanic U.S. residents having been treated for at least one non-melanoma skin cancer at the beginning of 2007, that means non-melanoma skin cancers have struck five times as many people as breast or prostate cancer. More people have had non-melanoma skin cancer than all other cancers combined over the last 31 years, according to the study.

Most of those who had a non-melanoma skin cancer had more than one, with the average being 1.6, he noted.

“This is only going to get worse,” said Dr. Suephy Chen, an associate professor of dermatology at Emory University School of Medicine in Atlanta. “Our population is aging. Those people who grew up in the 1970s and 1980s when there was not a big sun-protection message out there are now coming into their 50s and 60s and are starting to develop skin cancers.”

While non-melanoma skin cancers are the most common, melanoma is a serious worry. Though melanoma accounts for less than 5 percent of all skin cancers, it was expected to lead to an estimated 8,650 deaths in 2009, according to the American Cancer Society.

In a third paper in the same journal, researchers from the U.S. National Cancer Institute found survivors of one melanoma are about nine times as likely as the general population to develop a second melanoma.

Of nearly 90,000 patients who survived at least two months after an initial melanoma diagnosis between 1973 and 2006, about 12 percent developed one or more other primary cancers. One-fourth of those were additional melanomas, according to the study. Women with head and neck melanoma and patients younger than 30 had even higher increased risks of developing another melanoma.

As incidence has risen, so has the cost of treating melanoma. In adults 65 and older, melanoma treatment costs about $249 million annually, or about $28,000 per patient lifetime, according to a fourth study in the same journal by Chen and her colleagues at Emory University.

Catching melanoma early is critical for saving lives and controlling costs, Chen said. About 40 percent of the annual cost for melanoma goes to treating stage 4 (advanced) cancers, even though they account for only 3 percent of melanomas.

“It’s a huge difference in the cost of taking care of a stage 1 versus a stage 4 patient,” Chen said. “It makes a lot of sense to invest in early detection and prevention measures such that the economic burden is not so high.”

In an accompanying editorial, researchers from Erasmus University Medical Center in Rotterdam, the Netherlands, called for a “revised health strategy” that treats skin cancer as a chronic disease requiring not just a one-time treatment, but ongoing monitoring of patients, prevention and education.

To lessen your chances of getting skin cancer, dermatologists recommend applying broad-spectrum sunscreen liberally and often; wearing hats and other protective clothing when out in the sun; avoiding sun exposure when the sun’s rays are the strongest — between 10 a.m. and 3 p.m. — and never using tanning beds.

It’s especially important to take these steps with children and teens (to the extent they will listen), Rogers said. Skin cancer is turning up in younger and younger patients. In the past week or so, he removed non-melanoma cancer off the cheek of a 17-year-old boy and removed a melanoma from an 18-year-old girl.

And even if you have memories of basting yourself with baby oil, or you’re a retiree and loathe to miss your weekly tee time, it’s never too late to start decreasing your exposure.

“Think of sun exposure like putting money in a bank that you can’t withdraw,” Rogers said. “You can’t get rid of the damage you have, but continued sun exposure accelerates the rate at which you will develop new skin cancers. Protecting your skin from the sun will help decrease the rate.”

Click here for the full report.

Erectile Dysfunction May Predict Heart Risk

March 16, 2010

Los Angeles Times

By Thomas H. Maugh II

For the first time, researchers have shown that erectile dysfunction is a strong predictor of the likelihood that men will die of heart disease.

Men who suffer from the problem, which some consider more an emotional than a physical issue, are twice as likely to succumb to cardiovascular disease or heart attacks as those who do not have the problem, German researchers reported Monday in Circulation: Journal of the American Heart Assn.

Researchers have known for years that there is a link between erectile dysfunction, commonly abbreviated as ED, and heart disease, said Dr. Sahil Parikh, an interventional cardiologist from University Hospitals Case Medical Center in Cleveland who was not involved in the study. “But now there is pretty clear evidence that there is a substantially increased risk of heart attack and death when patients have erectile dysfunction.”

The results are probably not too surprising, added Dr. Robert Kloner, a cardiologist at USC’s Keck School of Medicine, “because arteries in the penis are smaller, so atherosclerosis shows up there sooner,” perhaps three to four years before the onset of cardiovascular disease.

The take-home message, both experts said, is that when a patient seeks treatment for ED, typically from a general practitioner, he should be given a full physical work-up to look for heart disease and referred to a cardiologist.

“When they are treated aggressively early, we can prevent heart attacks and stroke and they can have many years added to their lives,” Parikh said.

Existing guidelines for treating men with ED from the Princeton Consensus Conference already state that “a man with ED and no cardiac symptoms is a cardiac (or vascular) patient until proven otherwise.” Kloner, a coauthor of those guidelines, said that when the guidelines are updated this year, they will probably carry a stronger recommendation that a patient presenting with ED get a cardiovascular examination.

Dr. Michael Bohm, a cardiologist at Germany’s Saarland University, and his colleagues studied 1,519 men from 13 countries who were involved in a study of two drugs to treat cardiovascular disease. The men were also queried about their ED at the beginning of the study, two years into it and at the end at five years. A full 55% of the men had ED at the beginning of the trial, nearly double the normal incidence of about 30% in the population at large.

The team reported that, in the five years of follow-up, men with ED were 1.9 times as likely to die from heart disease, twice as likely to have a heart attack, 1.2 times as likely to be hospitalized for heart failure and 1.1 times more likely to have a stroke. The risks increased with the severity of the ED.

Disappointingly, the two drugs tested in the study, ramipril and telmisartan, did not improve the course of the ED.

That’s not surprising, said Dr. Peter Pelikan, a cardiologist at Saint John’s Health Center in Santa Monica, “because it takes years and years and years to get any resorption of cholesterol” that would reduce blockage of the penile arteries. “The study was too small and too short to see that.”

Many men with ED see a general practitioner or a urologist to get treatment and are prescribed drugs like Viagra or Cialis, Bohm said in a statement. “The drug works and the patient doesn’t show up any more. These men are being treated for ED, but not the underlying cardiovascular disease. A whole segment of men is being placed at risk.”

Click here for the full report.

Bone-Strengthening Drug Linked to Fractures

March 15, 2010

ABC News

BY CHRISTINE ROMO and LARA SALAHI

Sandy Potter, 59 of Queens, New York, was jumping rope with neighborhood children when she felt her thigh bone snap.

“I went up in the air and I came straight down to the ground,” Potter said. “The pain was excruciating.”

Potter, who was diagnosed with osteoporosis at age 48, had been taking the popular osteoporosis drug Fosamax for eight years before her femur literally snapped in two.

Fosamax, one in a class of drugs called bisphosphonates, is supposed to make bones stronger. But now there’s mounting evidence that for some women, taking Fosamax or its generic alendronate for more than five years could cause spontaneous fractures.

“We are seeing people just walking, walking down the steps, patients who are doing low-energy exercise,” said Dr. Kenneth Egol, professor of orthopedic surgery at NYU Langone Medical Center. “Very unusual, the femur is one of the strongest bones in the body.”

Egol said X-rays of some of his patients look more like an injury endured by a car accident than an otherwise minimal fall.

“Over the last 18 months we are seeing this more frequently,” he said.

Sue Heller, 60, of Castle Rock, Colo., had been on Fosamax for almost 10 years. She broke both of her femur bones.

“I’m sure there are a lot of women who have brittle bones right now that maybe are ready to break, and they’re not aware of it,” said Heller. “And my heart aches for them.”

Sales of the popular drug increased when doctors began prescribing it not only to women showing signs of osteoporosis, but also those who were osteopenic, and thus, at risk for the disease. Now some doctors worry that staying on the drug for more than five years can cause some women’s bones to become more brittle.

This is not the first time that many doctors have reported an opposite effect for many people taking the drug. Fosamax has already been linked to severe musculoskeletal pain, as well as to a serious bone-related jaw disease called osteonecrosis.

“In worldwide post-marketing experience with FOSAMAX/FOSAMAX Plus D, rare reports consistent with osteonecrosis of the jaw have been received. Many of these reports lack sufficient clinical details to make definitive assessments and/or are confounded, particularly since a generally accepted definition of ONJ in the general population is unknown,” responded Merck in a written response to the suggested link. “Rare cases of ONJ have also been reported in patients who do not have osteoporosis and who have not taken any bisphosphonate medicines.”
In 2008, the Food and Drug Administration reached out to the pharmaceutical company Merck about the reports of femur fractures. After 16 months, Merck added patients’ reports of femur fractures to the list of possible side effects reported by patients included in the drug’s package insert.

“It took Merck an entire year to respond,” said ABC News senior health and medical editor, Dr. Richard Besser. “Just six words: ‘low energy femoral shaft and subtrochanteric fractures.’”

The FDA has also never made an effort to inform the public or doctors across the country who prescribe bisphosphonates of the possible side effect, said Besser.

Both the FDA and Merck declined ABC News’ request for an interview. The FDA said they are looking into reports of fractures.

“Nothing is more important to Merck than the safety of its medicines,” according to a written statement by Merck to ABC News. A causal relationship between Fosamax and these fractures has not been established, according to Merck.

“The drug companies have to recognize when there is a problem, they have to be up front with the public. If there’s a concern, they have to voice it and at least give everybody a fair chance to look at this carefully,” said Dr. Joseph Lane, orthopedic trauma surgeon at the Hospital for Special Surgery in New York City.

Click here for the full report

The True Price of Health Care Spending

March 15, 2010

Natural News

By David Gutierrez

The U.S. healthcare system loses between $505 and $850 billion a year to mistakes, inefficiency and fraud, according to a report by Thomson Reuters. This amounts to one-third of all national healthcare spending.

“America’s healthcare system is indeed hemorrhaging billions of dollars,” the report says.

According to the report, unnecessary medical procedures and treatments — including antibiotic overuse and superfluous tests — account for 37 percent of all wasted spending, $200 to $300 billion per year. Fraud — including false Medicare claims and kickbacks for referrals or prescriptions — accounts for another 22 percent, as much as $200 billion a year. Medical errors are responsible for 11 percent of excess spending, or $50 to $100 billion yearly. Preventable health problems, such as diabetes, cost the healthcare system $30 to $50 billion per year.

One of the easiest areas to repair might be administrative inefficiency, which accounts for a full 18 percent of medical overspending.

“The average U.S. hospital spends one-quarter of its budget on billing and administration, nearly twice the average in Canada,” the report says. “American physicians spend nearly eight hours per week on paperwork and employ 1.66 clerical workers per doctor, far more than in Canada.”

Administrative inefficiency can also lead to other wasteful practices.

“It is waste when caregivers duplicate tests because results recorded in a patient’s record with one provider are not available to another or when medical staff provides inappropriate treatment because relevant history of previous treatment cannot be accessed,” the report says.

Although the United States has the highest per capita healthcare spending and spends a higher proportion of its GDP on healthcare than any other nation in the Organization for Economic Co-operation and Development (a group of predominantly high income Western democracies), it has the highest rates of heart disease, obesity, diabetes and neonatal death in the developed world, as well as the unhealthiest population.

Click here for the full report

Diabetes Heart Treatments May Cause Harm

March 15, 2010

The New York Times

By Gina Kolata

Three aggressive treatment strategies doctors had expected would prevent heart attacks among people with Type 2 diabetes and some who are the verge of developing it have proved to be ineffective or even harmful, new studies show.

The results are surprising and disappointing, heart and diabetes experts say. An estimated 21 million Americans have Type 2 diabetes, the kind once known as adult-onset, and they are at enormous risk for heart disease. The only measures proved to reduce their chances — avoiding cigarettes and taking medication to lower bad cholesterol and blood pressure — still leave diabetics with a heart attack risk equivalent to that of a nondiabetic who has already had a heart attack.

So doctors began trying other strategies they hoped would help: getting blood pressure to a normal range; raising levels of good cholesterol and lowering levels of dangerous triglycerides; or modulating sharp upswings in blood sugar after a meal.

It is not known how many doctors have been encouraging patients to take these measures, but medical specialists say it seemed reasonable and tempting to do so.

“Doctors always want to improve the lives of their patients, and that often leads to pressure to treat more and more,” said Dr. Henry N. Ginsberg, director of the Irving Institute for Clinical and Translational Research at Columbia University. The new studies, he says, could save a lot of people from taking drugs that will not help them.

The papers were presented at an American College of Cardiology meeting on Sunday and are being published online by The New England Journal of Medicine.

In Type 2 diabetes, the body is resistant to the hormone insulin, leading to abnormally high blood sugar levels that can cause eye, kidney and nerve disease. But heart disease is what kills most patients. A quarter to a third of heart attack patients have diabetes, even though diabetics constitute just 9 percent of the population. And 25 percent of heart attack patients are on the verge of diabetes, with abnormally high blood sugar levels.

High blood sugar levels themselves increase the risk of heart disease, but researchers found two years ago that rigorously controlling blood sugar did not prevent heart disease or deaths in people with Type 2 diabetes. Researchers said the failure was probably because most of those patients also had other problems that made their odds of heart disease soar, like high levels of LDL cholesterol, low levels of HDL cholesterol, high levels of triglycerides and high blood pressure. And most were older and overweight.

Type 2 diabetes “captures all these risk factors in one patient,” said Dr. David Nathan, director of the diabetes center at Massachusetts General Hospital.

It seemed logical to look at the other risk factors. One large federal study asked if getting high blood pressure down to a level considered normal, a systolic pressure of no more than 120, would help protect diabetics from heart disease and save lives.

This hypothesis was promising because studies that observed populations found that heart disease and stroke risk increase continuously as systolic blood pressure rises from 115 on up, said Dr. William C. Cushman, a study investigator and chief of the preventive medicine section at the Veterans Affairs Medical Center in Memphis.

To put the idea of a normal blood pressure to the test, half of the study’s 4,773 participants took drugs to get their systolic blood pressure to 120 or below. The rest had a blood pressure goal of less than 140.

But lower blood pressure did not prevent heart attacks or cardiovascular deaths, and those with lower blood pressure were more likely to suffer severe side effects from the drugs, like high potassium levels or dangerously low blood pressures. They also took an average of 3.4 drugs to lower blood pressure, compared with an average of 2 drugs for those with the higher pressure.

A second, less rigorous study, involving 6,400 patients with Type 2 diabetes and heart disease, asked whether getting systolic blood pressure lower than 130 was any better than getting it to 130 to 140. It found that patients actually were worse off: those with the lower blood pressure ended up with a 50 percent greater risk of strokes, heart attacks or deaths.

National blood pressure treatment guidelines call for a systolic pressure of 130 or lower. That was based on expert opinion and observational studies, Dr. Cushman said. Now, he said, it is likely to be reconsidered when the group that sets the guidelines prepares a report this year.

People with diabetes also tend to have low levels of HDL cholesterol and high levels of triglycerides, a combination known to increase the risk of heart disease. And in some studies, treating that combination with a type of drug called a fibrate reduced risk in diabetics and nondiabetics who were not taking statins. So it made sense to see if fibrates also helped Type 2 diabetics who were taking statins.

It did not, concluded another arm of the federal study involving 5,518 people with Type 2 diabetes.

“It’s a disappointment,” said Dr. Ginsberg, a lead study investigator. “But it’s very, very important,” because it says most people will not be helped by taking the additional drug.

It means, said Dr. Denise Simons-Morton of the National Heart, Lung and Blood Institute, the project officer for the federal study, that “doctors and patients now know that the inclination to do intensive treatment that people seemed to think would be better for cardiovascular risk reduction wasn’t better.”

A final studyinvestigated the popular hypothesis that rapid rises in blood glucose after a meal were dangerous and could lead to heart disease. Many doctors were giving drugs assuming the hypothesis was correct, Dr. Nathan said.

“Every meeting you go to, some academic is talking about how postprandial hyperglycemia is really bad and that you should aim specifically to get it lower,” Dr. Nathan said. The study, he said, “is a direct test of that.”

The study, which involved 9,300 patients at high risk for diabetes because their blood sugar was high, tested the drug nateglinide, which enhances insulin secretion. It also tested a blood pressure drug. Neither decreased heart disease risk.

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The Kevin Trudeau Show: 3-2-10

Today, Kevin explains how corporations are scamming you and exposes the real person behind that politician. Plus, find out why someone would take a drug that has a common side effect of cancer.

More Proof of Government Corruption
FDA’s Approval of Aspartame under Scrutiny
Obama Yet to Kick Smoking Habit
Stop Smoking Now!
They Will Not Control Us

Plus, author & fitness guru, Jennifer Nicole Lee, stopped by to explain how the Law of Attraction helped her get the perfect body. Click here to purchase her new book, The Mind, Body & Soul Diet.

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