I’m a physician, and every word of what you just wrote resonates with me. I retired about 10 years ago—in my early 40s!—because I just couldn’t take it anymore. Medicine had become something I didn’t recognize (thanks, Obamacare!). Heavy reliance on physician extenders (RNs, NPs, etc.—don’t get me wrong, many are good at what they do, but it’s folly to think their training is equivalent to ours), the push to solve every problem with pharmaceuticals, hospital politics, and the constant wrangling with insurance companies turned a job I enjoyed into a grind that, frankly, wasn’t worth it. So I quit to devote all my time toward something where I could really make a difference: raising my kids. It worked out splendidly—both are happy and thriving, and completely free of psychoactive pharma poison. I’m an empty nester now, but I would never, ever go back into practice. I’m not about to put pronouns on my badge or lecture patients about their privilege.
Decades ago, I was almost tossed out of medical school during my 4th year psychiatry rotation for challenging the narrative around SSRIs. At that time, they were being passed out like candy at Halloween. In clinic, I interviewed patient after patient, none of whom seemed any better over the weeks and months they had spent on the drugs. When I questioned this, ooh boy, did those psychiatrists get mad. I had to defend myself in front of a tribunal at the school for challenging what would now be referred to as “settled science.” So I laughed weeks ago when the news reports of SSRI failure finally came out. The jig is up! But don’t hold your breath—it won’t change anything. SSRIs are here to stay, dug into the fabric of our society like an Alabama tick.
I will say that most docs I know, no matter how reflexively they prescribe pills to others, shun them personally. In my own practice, I tried hard to encourage the simplest, and what I have found for decades myself to be a tried-and-true solution to the blues: go outside. There is something instantly uplifting about being outdoors in nature that makes it harder to stay sad. It might not fix everything, but it’s a helluva better place to start than swallowing a pill.
The tragedy is that this kind of sorting is building a medical system in which the people who feel comfortable staying are the people who don't mind solving every problem with pharmaceuticals after a ten-minute office visit.
This is precisely what’s happening, especially to old people. When I was a resident and pregnant with my son, I moonlighted in a geriatrics practice to make extra dough. You cannot imagine the polypharmacy that is perpetrated on these mostly unsuspecting folks, who often have aches and pains and small complaints that would be easily remedied with just a little hand holding and kind attention. Many old people are lonely and just looking for someone to listen to them for a bit. But more often than not, out comes the prescription pad (well, these days, the tablet keyed into the electronic Rx, but you get the idea). It’s dismissive and, in my view, tragic. We don’t understand the interactions between all of these medications, and often the elderly collect prescriptions that are unnecessary and which linger in their medication regimens for months and years past the onset of the initial problem for which they were prescribed.
Patients have come to expect they’ll leave the office with a prescription, and doctors oblige them. But it’s expensive in more ways than we can count.
I wish I could find a doctor like yourself for my family. Our last pediatrician shamed/threatened my child (8) and I for passing on the flu shot after refusing the other shot. "I hope it's not a bad flu season!" Guess what? We are still alive and well.
Oh, that’s awful! If it’s any consolation, my kids (19 and 21) have never had a flu shot, and I haven’t had one since I quit working in the hospital and it was mandatory, years and years ago. If doctors like your pediatrician are to be believed, it’s a miracle we’re all still above ground! My dad is 87, and he never gets a flu shot. He has had COVID twice and sailed right through it, both times, with nothing more than a couple Tylenol and an extra nap or two. He cracks me up—he can’t see what all the hysteria and fuss is about. “It’s a cold.”
Stick to your principles and love your child. There are plenty of good docs out there who will respect that, I promise. Keep looking.
I got 1 flu shot for the birth of my daughter. I had a sore arm and was sick for 2 weeks. For 5 years of her life and 2 of my son's I foolishly allowed them to get the flu shot because I thought "it was the right thing to do." Well fast forward and now I will never allow them to get another after taking the time to research them.. along with the rest of general medical community. My faith in the them has been destroyed starting with the horror I saw what my mother had to endure with chemo and ending with covid. Truly eye opening.
We desperately need more men like your dad and i say that as a fellow man. Most men have been castrated into being weak and having no opinion or spine on anything other than sports.
Sadly I live in los angeles ca so my hope of finding a rational and logical doctor seems like a mythical journey. God bless you and everyone like yourself in the medical profession. I wish there was a place I could go to find good people...
When I came down with covid in July, it was a horrible first day followed by 3 days of cold/flu stuff. My physician asked me why I didn't ask him for Paxlovid and I said , "because I didn't need it and I don't have asthma or COPD." He then replied that it could help anyway. HUH???
He minimized the rebound effect of this untested drug. I am looking for a new doctor.
I had a pretty similar experience when I caught it in February. Afterward I thought: “wow I forgot what it was like to catch a virus”. I figure I’ll get it again, sometime, but I’m not worrying about it and am not getting another Covid shot (or flu shot for that matter).
Great comment. My prayer and hope for you and other genuine physicians is that you can be part of a new small town ethic where we all return to local living, where doctors for example, make a good living based on subscription services and pay as you go with insurance relegated to catastrophic health issues. I suspect medical care doesnt have to be crushingly expensive if the middlemen, Big Pharma, and admin expenses are cut out.
There is something to be said for the concierge or subscription model of medicine—in fact, it’s what I recommended to my octogenarian father more than a decade ago when he became frustrated with the standard 10-minute clinic visit at his HMO. It has served him well all this time and, if you factor in all of the trips to the urgent care and ER that he avoided because his primary doc knows him and is reachable easily, it’s probably cheaper in the long run. People have become addicted and entitled to the $10 co-pay, and it has degraded the standard of care.
SSRIs messed with a family member's brain in a way that he was an unrecognizable, suicidal, emotionally deadened person. I still shudder to think of those dark days. He stopped taking them ten years ago and has had to repeatedly decline them everytime he has a new psychiatrist. It turns out when he saw a psychiatrist who actually knew a thing or two, it's a complete disaster to prescribe SSRIs to someone with bipolar disorder. He also had to have neurosurgery five years ago to remove a tumor attached to his pineal gland. I have no scientific evidence that there is a link but it certainly seems strange that the tumor was in the exact part of the brain that produces serotonin.
You are a wise woman Julia. I wonder what would happen if we all said “no” to prescription drugs. It is obvious that my Country Living magazine is funded by big pharma. In the slim September issue, a total of thirteen whole pages was paid for by pharmaceutical companies selling their wares. Most of the rest of the ads were for pet products. So we are a society addicted to “there’s a pill for that” and the priority of pets over people. I am awakened and sad.
Bravo. I found the saddest and most surprising part of your comment to be: "most docs I know, no matter how reflexively they prescribe pills to others, shun them personally." Good grief. I thought they really believed in this stuff.
Some do believe—the continued, trenchant support for the COVID vaccine by much of the medical community, in spite of mounting evidence it doesn’t work as advertised, demonstrates that. And, of course, there are lots of docs on prescription meds of all sorts for all sorts of reasons (again, it’s just my personal experience, but I will say it seems like psychiatrists tend to get high on their own supply more than docs in other fields. Don’t come at me, shrinks. It’s a small sample!). Deciding to take any medication is a calculus, and one that, more often than not, I personally decide isn’t worth the risks. My bias when I was practicing was always to see if there was a way to *avoid* a pharmaceutical solution. Sometimes there isn’t, obviously. But many things often improve with time and patience, all on their own. We just aren’t content to wait.
Obamacare was not great in many ways, but it did help quite a few people, especially those like me who were self-employed and were totally priced out of the health insurance market. So Obamacare is not good, but neither is what we had before. We need some kind of paradigm shift in the health industry. May be making it less of an industry…
I totally agree with your comments about medications. My young son was a victim, an experience about which I remain bitter.
What Obamacare did was shift the burden of a too-expensive “healthcare” system from one population to another. Our insurance premium, for years a reasonable $366/month for a family of four, soared to more than $2700/month. My husband and I are both doctors, and our kids have always been super healthy—so healthy that we so rarely took them to the pediatrician after they finished their routine childhood immunizations that his practice manager had filed their charts away in storage and he chastised us for not being “more responsible” parents! I sympathize with your plight as a self-employed person, but there has to be a better way. We discovered a neat trick in the midst of all this which, admittedly, isn’t an option in every circumstance: asking for the cash price for services. You would be amazed at what an X-ray or MRI costs if you pay for it upfront vs. the price billed to insurance. Doctors’ fees are often discounted for cash-paying patients, too. It never hurts to ask, and it can save you a bundle.
Sorry to hear about your son. Overprescription of medications, particularly psychoactive ones, in kids and young adults is an epidemic, and too often they struggle to quit them. Dependence, whether physical or psychological, is a real thing. I often counsel friends and relatives to ask their physicians, whenever there’s a new Rx being discussed, “what’s the endpoint, and how will we know when we’re there?” This is a good question, even if the answer is “there isn’t one” (as may be the case for meds for hypertension or diabetes, for instance). If they can’t give you a clear, cogent answer, run.
In many places the cash price for services is actually much higher. Examining your EOBs, you can see that the "price" for a particular procedure or visit is very high, and then it shows the discounted price for the insurance company. I have paid for a couple of MRIs myself.
On the other hand, most hospitals, if you run up a bill with them, will offer a substantial discount if you pay within a certain amount of time. No doubt this is because people who can't afford insurance can't afford their hospital bill either.
Luckily my son never got dependent. Nevertheless we endured six hellish months. The only child psychiatrist in our state had, on the basis of a single 15 minute conversation with him, decided our son was psychotic, and prescribed a number of horrible medications – none of which, by the way, are ever tested on children, *whose brains are not done developing*.
A book could be written on the complexities of working around the entrenched “health”care system, however, having dealt with super high deductible ($15k at one time) insurance plans for twenty years (my husband is self-employed), I’ve learned a bit. Perhaps the most important is what Bumom suggested, go in up front telling you will pay in full on the spot. They (generally) should not file with insurance. In my experience, every time, we got a +/- a 40% discount. Additionally when the doc knew we were paying out of pocket, they were more conservative with treatment/testing. My favorite example...we had an orthopedic guy we used for years. Having an active family we had a relationship with him. Typical treatment for broken bones was X-ray, cast, return in two weeks, X-ray, new cast. This went on for 6-8 weeks. For every broken bone. After we became “self pay” and I broke my hand, he took an X-ray splinted it, gave me a $175 bill and waved me out. I asked when I needed to return, he said I didn’t...I should wear the splint for 6 weeks and assuming no problems go on with my life. Hmmmmmm...Another time we had an ER bill, $1900ish. I called and asked what the “pay in full today” price was...the response, $1200ish. We have a “healthcare savings account”, tax free money, that we max out every year so we CAN pay in full. Not everyone can do that, most can. We took what we saved in premiums to fund the HSA, but we are financially disciplined. Not everyone is.
Full disclosure, we are in our early sixties and very healthy and active. We take responsibility to stay that way and do not rely on docs or pharma.
And from a professional point of view, I can confirm that more conservative options abound when there are hard boundaries and expressly limited resources on the table, up front. It’s human nature, I suppose, to grab all you can when the pot is bottomless. But it’s unnecessary, and in many cases, worse care for the patient.
If you are caught with a surprise bill on the back end - without having agreed a price up front - a good starting place for negotiation is to look up what Medicare pays for the treatment you received and then offer to pay 10% to 20% more than that in a prompt manner. Most medical offices will be very happy with that level of collections.
Excellent advice, and I can confirm this is the case. Medicare reimbursement is the standard. In many instances, you’ll be able to settle at this price.
There is the "cash price," and then there is the *cash price.*
I think you kind of recognize this.
The "sticker price" isn't the true cash price. If you ask up front you can get to a realistic cash price. If, however, you blindly sign the "financial responsibility" papers before your appointment and never ask about pricing up front you'll get billed the sticker price, which you'll then have to negotiate down to the true cash price after the fact. Which is more annoying than asking up front. I've done it both ways.
It's like dealing with a rug merchant in some Middle Eastern souk. Don't be snookered by the fancy professional offices and the claims to some kind of moral high ground because it's a caring profession and all that. It's just haggling with rug merchants.
I’ve run a private practice and, all due respect to rug merchants, this is true. Doctors would generally prefer cash up front to a delay of 3-6 months to get whatever fraction of their bill the insurance lackeys decide to remit, after denying and delaying as long as they can.
Oh, I’m so sorry to hear this. What a nightmare, and how irresponsible to make a diagnosis like that serious in such a cavalier manner. Glad to hear you’ve come out on the other side okay.
In the course of reading about something else, I was reminded of the drugs that were foisted on my fourth-grader: Prozac, Wellbutrin, and Geodon (the last of which essentially gave him narcolepsy). We were so horrified at the effects, and my kid disliked it so much, that we stopped after just a few weeks. But when I called the psychiatrist's office to beg permission to withdraw the drugs, they got huffy and essentially hung up on me. Probably didn't help that I was in tears by that time.
This story brings out mama bear rage in me. I’m so sorry this happened to your child.
Psychiatrists have so little they can offer in the way of genuine help for suffering, it’s no wonder they’re defensive. When all you have is a hammer, everything’s a nail…
I don't know what the cash prices are around here are anymore. I do know that after Obummercare started, the cash price was astronomical! The people paying cash were charged around 3x the inflated prices billed to insurance companies. No one could afford what they were charging.
Wow! I had no idea. We came to the cash solution later in the game, so I’m not sure what happened. All I know is that it has been pretty reasonable each time we’ve done it, whether for imaging or clinic visits—and until recently I lived in L.A. (and all my medical appointments were in Beverly Hills or elsewhere on the west side) so that’s saying something.
Yeah, the paradigm shift you are looking for is personal responsibility for ones health as well as utilizing "experts" as resources and not obeying them like they are unquestioned , all knowing Gods. That's how it becomes less of an industry. The same shift is needed in just about every realm. Since few people attempted to learn this one on their own, we are all learning it the really, really hard way now. That is, those of us that don't literally drop dead from all of the medical miracles and government mandates forced and inflicted upon us during the process at this late stage in the game. But, It's not like we ourselves didn't nourish and assist this monster's growth every step of the way though. We wanted saviors that took all of our burdens away and we paid them handsomely to do it.
Forgive me for donning my pedant cap, but Fleischer is a hack. He writes: "This begs the question..." NO. No questions have been begged! Questions have been raised! "Begging the question" is when an argument's premises assume the truth of the conclusion. In other words, a circular argument. People use "beg the question" as a substitute for "raise the question" to, I guess, sound more erudite. NO. Don't do it.
I've struggled with that phrase for years, Ben, and understood its definition and intended use as you suggest...however, common usage often changes such phrases and, indeed, our friend Merriam (as in Webster) says it now means "to elicit a specific question as a reaction or response," which can often be replaced with "a question that begs to be answered."
With respect to your definition, they suggest it's "a lesser used and more formal definition" which means 'to ignore a question under the assumption it has already been answered."
I'm not a prescriptivist, I swear. But some lines . . . I refuse to cross, by God. And as an editor, I'll never let that phrase pass on my watch. Longer, more articulate rant coming tomorrow morning at Nice Things and Why You Can't Have Them. Cheers!
I always use the original form "beggar the question" to keep myself from slipping into the popular modern misuse because it makes me think for a moment ("is this what I really mean?").
And nothing crashes nitpicking more than criticising someone else for picking a nit and then proceeding to pick a nit yourself. Oh no wait, something does actually outdo that! That would be: picking a nit that turns out to not exist.
I reread it, and I was wrong. There is no typo. That's what I get for being a smarty pants. I do think, however, that calling someone a hack for misusing a term is pretty harsh!
Kudos. Yaay! God bless you. Amen. Hosannah in the highest! (Obviously, I really don't know what to say, but I am soooooo much in favor of your experience, your obviously independent consideration, and your frankness. -- that I thought I had to make a comment.)
And they're shooting themselves in the foot. It's harder and harder to have actual medical care provided by a doctor (not an ARNP or a PA or a PharmD), let alone covered by insurance, but you can always get your pills. The AMA, etc., have sold their people out, so the only game in town is Big Pharma. If I were a doctor, I'd want to be indispensable for something other than my prescription pad (which is being handed to nurses and pharmacists a bit more every day).
Antibiotics are one of the greatest medical discoveries. Nutrition advice is like voodoo.
Someone had an acute UTI and less acute ongoing sinus issues. Antibiotics for the UTI also fixed the sinus symptoms. A few days after the antibiotic course ended, sinus symptoms returned.
No, the entire anti-biotic reasoning is a ruse, a result of lowering nutritional standards for agriculture, now totally done away with only a statement of nutrition on labels, none on unprocessed foodstuffs. Also, off the top the bacteria adapts and is more lethal as it does.
The entire human body is an immune system full functional with proper nutrition (not readily available any longer) with immunologists promoting the idea the harder an immune system works the better it gets.
If you want to know more study from soil biologists and scientists who have leaned how soil life is instrumental in increasing food nutrition.
Buy local when you can. If you must go to the grocery store, always hit the outer most walls first. The only vegetable you really can’t get non GMO is corn. The rest isn’t that hard to figure out if it is or not.
Eat according to your areas seasons is the best advice I can offer. How did your grandparents and great grandparents eat and follow suit.
A ‘real’ (good) doctor understands that the body will most times heal itself if given proper care. A good listener, some encouragement and a pat on the back is oftentimes more effective than a prescription. But the old fashioned GP who maybe visited you at home and understood this basic maxim is a thing of the past.
Anyone who hasnt read RFK Jr's book, The Real Anthony Fauci, is missing major eye openers. The book is somewhat misnamed as RFK documents decades of abuse and deception by the federal government, Big Pharma, and evil people like Bill Gates. It is absolutely stunning. Childhood vaccination schedules went from about 5 to 90 in 1989, coincident w the 'baffling' rise in autism, ADD, asthma, epilepsy, and other previously rare maladies. Just one example. Please read the book. It's a Rosetta Stone for understanding why our medical system is so corrupt.
Sadly this, as you say, is but a symptom of a more general problem: the belief, quite widely held, that one is entitled to life as a bed of roses, and the only thing preventing that is some evil “oppressor” whose only purpose in life is to deny the pleasures one so richly deserves simply by virtue of having been born.
Vitamin D comes from sunshine and cod liver among other rare foods, these are not pills.
Excellent observations along with the anecdote of children, who are taken care of by their parents and most now never grow up to take care of themselves, instead relying on government and doctors. Of course, its all exploitation to those types.
One more connection you must consider is the same shareholders of the pharma-freak show are the same controlling agribusiness with all the sprays and artificial fertilizers, which produces nutrition less food that makes people sick enough to seek these miracle cures. Pills and injections. Funny how that fits together for high profits.
I've been in trucking for 25 years. In 2013, we almost lost everything we had because of a truck that wouldn't run because of emissions issues. It cost me $50,000 in seven months in repairs and lost revenue. I chronicled my issues on social media as it happened. The bootlickers on the right would cry out against Obama, but when I reminded them that the rules were written during the Bush Administration, they clammed up and didn't know what to say. The Obamabots would tell me to suck it up, "we're saving the planet." in my 25 years, I have forgotten more about trucking and the industry than "the experts" can ever hope to learn, but because I'm not on NPR, my experience and knowledge is useless.
85% of the freight on the highway is carried by companies with 6 trucks or less. It is a true "mom n pop" industry. There are 1 million owner/operators on the road. The huge megafleets can't compete with us (nor can the unions) so they've been trying to use the government to regulate us out of business. See: California AB5. Yes, the rates are down, but we're coming off of the most inflated rate environment in trucking history. We are a fleet of 17 (and growing) are we are still profitable and will continue to be because we run paid-for, non-California-compliant trucks (newest one is a 2007 and they all have over one million miles on them). We will still be here when the rates hit the floor and start back up. The people running the 2008-2022 junk trucks coming from the OEMs are in big trouble. Disobedience and non-compliance is all we have left.
This column is another example of why CB deserves a wider audience than just the choir here at Substack. I for one hope the offer of a gig at American Greatness comes to pass, and leads to bigger and better things for him.
Not only did the dimwitted hypocrite write that an editor approved it. Can't you just see his bobble head colleagues patting him on the back, praising how courageously he endured 12 days of the sniffles, and parroting the injustice of his suffering.
Part of me wants to feel sorry for him but after two years of witnessing the cruelty of this bunch I can't do it.
The fun part about the antidepressants is that huge study showing that there's no link between serotonin and depression. Thus, SSRIs are complete bullshit:
So we have tens of millions of Americans banging down happy pills with fairly severe side effects, in order to help them cope with life in a nightmare dystopia, and the fucking things don't even work.
That's NOT what that study says. There's fairly good evidence that SSRIs (as a class) reduce depression. The study says that however SSRIs work, it's not by changing serotonin levels.
Look, doctors prescribed aspirin for over 100 years without understanding how it works. They just knew *that* it worked.
I think his doctor should have given him the pills. As I used to tell my kids, people should be allowed to experience the consequences of their actions.
I have been following the FLCCC.net protocols for well over a year now. There are more benefits than just the virus. About three weeks after I started to take black seed oil my fasting blood glucose went to normal. I was still taking the diabetic meds, as I have for 20 years, but this had never happened. Black seed oil can improve respiration, lower blood pressure, lower blood glucose and decrease the appetite. Who knew?
I started black seed oil around the first of the year. When I saw my endocrinologist in May my A1C had gone from 6.8 to 5.6. She said all my numbers had improved. I could cut my diabetic medication in half. Two weeks or so later I stopped taking all of it and started a ketogenic (low carb) lifestyle. I discovered Dr. Bikman "Why We Get Sick." It all boils down to an excess amount of carbs in our diet and insulin resistance.
Bottom line COVID has given me the time to learn a lot and delve into health issues. FLCCC.net is a great place to start. They have protocols for boosting your immunity, protocols for what to do if you get it, and what if you get long COVID.
Please, please tell me how you can stand to take black seed oil. (I mean this sincerely.) I bought this tiny little bottle for a good chunk of change. 1/3 of the bottle is what you're supposed to take in a day. I read if you can't stand the taste mix it with honey. I tried that. It probably didn't taste as bad as it might have totally straight, but it took about a quarter cup of honey, which made it toooo sweet, and about 2 hours of trying to get the taste out of my mouth. I can't find the capsules (back to pills) here, I don't order on line. Help!
I read dozens of reviews from several of the black seed oil products for sale on Amazon. I always start with the negatives first. One thing that came across loud and clear is that the liquid tastes horrible. I have been using the capsules. I order from Amazon. I also recently ordered from Life Extension because they had a sale. I have bought quite few different products from them. The shipping is free. Do you have any health food stores near where you live? If you do, see if they have the capsules. If not see if they will order them for you.
Honey is not good for you if you use a lot of it. It contains fructose which is bad for the liver and it will raise your blood glucose. If you are diabetic, or insulin resistant, then that is the last thing you want to do.
No place here sells the capsules. Only 1 place sells the oil. They have been bought out and their extensive vitamins/health department is shrinking by the month. According to the oil you're supposed to take a tablespoon a day. 🤢 Hence the humongous amount of honey. The second time I took it, I used less honey. It was all I could do to choke it down. I've looked for the actual seeds. Can't find them either.
We only have huge corporate entities here, they won't special order anything for a single person. I'll look up Life Extension and see if I can phone in an order.
Where do you live? Can't you find a friend to order it from Amazon or Life Extension for you? My brother lives in the Stone Age, doesn't have a computer, can't use the Internet and has never bought online. When he and his family got COVID I ordered from Amazon and had it delivered to their front door. Find a friend or relative who will do this for you.
I have used three or four brands of Black Seed Oil capsules. I had the best results (lowered blood glucose levels) from Orzax but have used a couple of other brands that were a bit less expensive.
I can ask a friend. They might do it for me. I don't have a computer only my phone, which is obviously not secure. I want it to try and lower my blood pressure.
I just made an emergency dental appointment at the VA Hospital and it used to be you had to arrive to every appointment 30 minutes early for a COVID test. But now if you're boosted, it's 30 minutes, if you're UNBOOSTED you have to come in TWO hours before your appointment for a COVID test. It feels like harassment. And all for a shot that so clearly doesn't work.
How do I get out of this bad dystopian pulp novel???? Is this what life is going to be from here on out -- everything as intensely inconvenient as possible?
Even at the front of the VA, you have to wait in line outside until someone interrogates you about exactly what you're doing there. It makes it feel like a war zone. And then when you're inside you're bombarded by posters telling you how to wear your mask and to stay at least 6 feet away from others.
And then the dentist was wearing a space suit -- a mask with a space suit over it with a tube and a breathing machine so as not to breath the same air as the untested patient (it was for emergency dental so they saw me without a covid test, hence the space suit). This world has become maddening.
I keep commenting on your substack, Chris, because you're sane, and your readers are sane. And substack feels like a small bastion of sanity. The rest of the world I feel like I'm just screaming into the void, the way people won't listen, the way they inform you that "that's just misinformation." Because if I wasn't such an idiot, I'd just believe the posters and people on tv. But since I did my own research -- idiot. And so I deserve to be as inconvenienced as possible, I suppose. Wow, what a world.
I’m a physician, and every word of what you just wrote resonates with me. I retired about 10 years ago—in my early 40s!—because I just couldn’t take it anymore. Medicine had become something I didn’t recognize (thanks, Obamacare!). Heavy reliance on physician extenders (RNs, NPs, etc.—don’t get me wrong, many are good at what they do, but it’s folly to think their training is equivalent to ours), the push to solve every problem with pharmaceuticals, hospital politics, and the constant wrangling with insurance companies turned a job I enjoyed into a grind that, frankly, wasn’t worth it. So I quit to devote all my time toward something where I could really make a difference: raising my kids. It worked out splendidly—both are happy and thriving, and completely free of psychoactive pharma poison. I’m an empty nester now, but I would never, ever go back into practice. I’m not about to put pronouns on my badge or lecture patients about their privilege.
Decades ago, I was almost tossed out of medical school during my 4th year psychiatry rotation for challenging the narrative around SSRIs. At that time, they were being passed out like candy at Halloween. In clinic, I interviewed patient after patient, none of whom seemed any better over the weeks and months they had spent on the drugs. When I questioned this, ooh boy, did those psychiatrists get mad. I had to defend myself in front of a tribunal at the school for challenging what would now be referred to as “settled science.” So I laughed weeks ago when the news reports of SSRI failure finally came out. The jig is up! But don’t hold your breath—it won’t change anything. SSRIs are here to stay, dug into the fabric of our society like an Alabama tick.
I will say that most docs I know, no matter how reflexively they prescribe pills to others, shun them personally. In my own practice, I tried hard to encourage the simplest, and what I have found for decades myself to be a tried-and-true solution to the blues: go outside. There is something instantly uplifting about being outdoors in nature that makes it harder to stay sad. It might not fix everything, but it’s a helluva better place to start than swallowing a pill.
The tragedy is that this kind of sorting is building a medical system in which the people who feel comfortable staying are the people who don't mind solving every problem with pharmaceuticals after a ten-minute office visit.
This is precisely what’s happening, especially to old people. When I was a resident and pregnant with my son, I moonlighted in a geriatrics practice to make extra dough. You cannot imagine the polypharmacy that is perpetrated on these mostly unsuspecting folks, who often have aches and pains and small complaints that would be easily remedied with just a little hand holding and kind attention. Many old people are lonely and just looking for someone to listen to them for a bit. But more often than not, out comes the prescription pad (well, these days, the tablet keyed into the electronic Rx, but you get the idea). It’s dismissive and, in my view, tragic. We don’t understand the interactions between all of these medications, and often the elderly collect prescriptions that are unnecessary and which linger in their medication regimens for months and years past the onset of the initial problem for which they were prescribed.
Patients have come to expect they’ll leave the office with a prescription, and doctors oblige them. But it’s expensive in more ways than we can count.
I wish I could find a doctor like yourself for my family. Our last pediatrician shamed/threatened my child (8) and I for passing on the flu shot after refusing the other shot. "I hope it's not a bad flu season!" Guess what? We are still alive and well.
Oh, that’s awful! If it’s any consolation, my kids (19 and 21) have never had a flu shot, and I haven’t had one since I quit working in the hospital and it was mandatory, years and years ago. If doctors like your pediatrician are to be believed, it’s a miracle we’re all still above ground! My dad is 87, and he never gets a flu shot. He has had COVID twice and sailed right through it, both times, with nothing more than a couple Tylenol and an extra nap or two. He cracks me up—he can’t see what all the hysteria and fuss is about. “It’s a cold.”
Stick to your principles and love your child. There are plenty of good docs out there who will respect that, I promise. Keep looking.
I got 1 flu shot for the birth of my daughter. I had a sore arm and was sick for 2 weeks. For 5 years of her life and 2 of my son's I foolishly allowed them to get the flu shot because I thought "it was the right thing to do." Well fast forward and now I will never allow them to get another after taking the time to research them.. along with the rest of general medical community. My faith in the them has been destroyed starting with the horror I saw what my mother had to endure with chemo and ending with covid. Truly eye opening.
We desperately need more men like your dad and i say that as a fellow man. Most men have been castrated into being weak and having no opinion or spine on anything other than sports.
Sadly I live in los angeles ca so my hope of finding a rational and logical doctor seems like a mythical journey. God bless you and everyone like yourself in the medical profession. I wish there was a place I could go to find good people...
When I came down with covid in July, it was a horrible first day followed by 3 days of cold/flu stuff. My physician asked me why I didn't ask him for Paxlovid and I said , "because I didn't need it and I don't have asthma or COPD." He then replied that it could help anyway. HUH???
He minimized the rebound effect of this untested drug. I am looking for a new doctor.
Good on you! Yes, run from people like this.
It makes me so sad to hear these stories, but hear them often I do.
I had a pretty similar experience when I caught it in February. Afterward I thought: “wow I forgot what it was like to catch a virus”. I figure I’ll get it again, sometime, but I’m not worrying about it and am not getting another Covid shot (or flu shot for that matter).
@bumom
Great comment. My prayer and hope for you and other genuine physicians is that you can be part of a new small town ethic where we all return to local living, where doctors for example, make a good living based on subscription services and pay as you go with insurance relegated to catastrophic health issues. I suspect medical care doesnt have to be crushingly expensive if the middlemen, Big Pharma, and admin expenses are cut out.
From your lips to God’s ears…
There is something to be said for the concierge or subscription model of medicine—in fact, it’s what I recommended to my octogenarian father more than a decade ago when he became frustrated with the standard 10-minute clinic visit at his HMO. It has served him well all this time and, if you factor in all of the trips to the urgent care and ER that he avoided because his primary doc knows him and is reachable easily, it’s probably cheaper in the long run. People have become addicted and entitled to the $10 co-pay, and it has degraded the standard of care.
SSRIs messed with a family member's brain in a way that he was an unrecognizable, suicidal, emotionally deadened person. I still shudder to think of those dark days. He stopped taking them ten years ago and has had to repeatedly decline them everytime he has a new psychiatrist. It turns out when he saw a psychiatrist who actually knew a thing or two, it's a complete disaster to prescribe SSRIs to someone with bipolar disorder. He also had to have neurosurgery five years ago to remove a tumor attached to his pineal gland. I have no scientific evidence that there is a link but it certainly seems strange that the tumor was in the exact part of the brain that produces serotonin.
You are a wise woman Julia. I wonder what would happen if we all said “no” to prescription drugs. It is obvious that my Country Living magazine is funded by big pharma. In the slim September issue, a total of thirteen whole pages was paid for by pharmaceutical companies selling their wares. Most of the rest of the ads were for pet products. So we are a society addicted to “there’s a pill for that” and the priority of pets over people. I am awakened and sad.
"The Evidence for Antidepressants Causing Mass Shootings"
https://amidwesterndoctor.substack.com/p/the-evidence-for-antidepressants
Bravo. I found the saddest and most surprising part of your comment to be: "most docs I know, no matter how reflexively they prescribe pills to others, shun them personally." Good grief. I thought they really believed in this stuff.
Some do believe—the continued, trenchant support for the COVID vaccine by much of the medical community, in spite of mounting evidence it doesn’t work as advertised, demonstrates that. And, of course, there are lots of docs on prescription meds of all sorts for all sorts of reasons (again, it’s just my personal experience, but I will say it seems like psychiatrists tend to get high on their own supply more than docs in other fields. Don’t come at me, shrinks. It’s a small sample!). Deciding to take any medication is a calculus, and one that, more often than not, I personally decide isn’t worth the risks. My bias when I was practicing was always to see if there was a way to *avoid* a pharmaceutical solution. Sometimes there isn’t, obviously. But many things often improve with time and patience, all on their own. We just aren’t content to wait.
Obamacare was not great in many ways, but it did help quite a few people, especially those like me who were self-employed and were totally priced out of the health insurance market. So Obamacare is not good, but neither is what we had before. We need some kind of paradigm shift in the health industry. May be making it less of an industry…
I totally agree with your comments about medications. My young son was a victim, an experience about which I remain bitter.
What Obamacare did was shift the burden of a too-expensive “healthcare” system from one population to another. Our insurance premium, for years a reasonable $366/month for a family of four, soared to more than $2700/month. My husband and I are both doctors, and our kids have always been super healthy—so healthy that we so rarely took them to the pediatrician after they finished their routine childhood immunizations that his practice manager had filed their charts away in storage and he chastised us for not being “more responsible” parents! I sympathize with your plight as a self-employed person, but there has to be a better way. We discovered a neat trick in the midst of all this which, admittedly, isn’t an option in every circumstance: asking for the cash price for services. You would be amazed at what an X-ray or MRI costs if you pay for it upfront vs. the price billed to insurance. Doctors’ fees are often discounted for cash-paying patients, too. It never hurts to ask, and it can save you a bundle.
Sorry to hear about your son. Overprescription of medications, particularly psychoactive ones, in kids and young adults is an epidemic, and too often they struggle to quit them. Dependence, whether physical or psychological, is a real thing. I often counsel friends and relatives to ask their physicians, whenever there’s a new Rx being discussed, “what’s the endpoint, and how will we know when we’re there?” This is a good question, even if the answer is “there isn’t one” (as may be the case for meds for hypertension or diabetes, for instance). If they can’t give you a clear, cogent answer, run.
In many places the cash price for services is actually much higher. Examining your EOBs, you can see that the "price" for a particular procedure or visit is very high, and then it shows the discounted price for the insurance company. I have paid for a couple of MRIs myself.
On the other hand, most hospitals, if you run up a bill with them, will offer a substantial discount if you pay within a certain amount of time. No doubt this is because people who can't afford insurance can't afford their hospital bill either.
Luckily my son never got dependent. Nevertheless we endured six hellish months. The only child psychiatrist in our state had, on the basis of a single 15 minute conversation with him, decided our son was psychotic, and prescribed a number of horrible medications – none of which, by the way, are ever tested on children, *whose brains are not done developing*.
A book could be written on the complexities of working around the entrenched “health”care system, however, having dealt with super high deductible ($15k at one time) insurance plans for twenty years (my husband is self-employed), I’ve learned a bit. Perhaps the most important is what Bumom suggested, go in up front telling you will pay in full on the spot. They (generally) should not file with insurance. In my experience, every time, we got a +/- a 40% discount. Additionally when the doc knew we were paying out of pocket, they were more conservative with treatment/testing. My favorite example...we had an orthopedic guy we used for years. Having an active family we had a relationship with him. Typical treatment for broken bones was X-ray, cast, return in two weeks, X-ray, new cast. This went on for 6-8 weeks. For every broken bone. After we became “self pay” and I broke my hand, he took an X-ray splinted it, gave me a $175 bill and waved me out. I asked when I needed to return, he said I didn’t...I should wear the splint for 6 weeks and assuming no problems go on with my life. Hmmmmmm...Another time we had an ER bill, $1900ish. I called and asked what the “pay in full today” price was...the response, $1200ish. We have a “healthcare savings account”, tax free money, that we max out every year so we CAN pay in full. Not everyone can do that, most can. We took what we saved in premiums to fund the HSA, but we are financially disciplined. Not everyone is.
Full disclosure, we are in our early sixties and very healthy and active. We take responsibility to stay that way and do not rely on docs or pharma.
Yes! We do a HSA, too.
And from a professional point of view, I can confirm that more conservative options abound when there are hard boundaries and expressly limited resources on the table, up front. It’s human nature, I suppose, to grab all you can when the pot is bottomless. But it’s unnecessary, and in many cases, worse care for the patient.
If you are caught with a surprise bill on the back end - without having agreed a price up front - a good starting place for negotiation is to look up what Medicare pays for the treatment you received and then offer to pay 10% to 20% more than that in a prompt manner. Most medical offices will be very happy with that level of collections.
Excellent advice, and I can confirm this is the case. Medicare reimbursement is the standard. In many instances, you’ll be able to settle at this price.
There is the "cash price," and then there is the *cash price.*
I think you kind of recognize this.
The "sticker price" isn't the true cash price. If you ask up front you can get to a realistic cash price. If, however, you blindly sign the "financial responsibility" papers before your appointment and never ask about pricing up front you'll get billed the sticker price, which you'll then have to negotiate down to the true cash price after the fact. Which is more annoying than asking up front. I've done it both ways.
It's like dealing with a rug merchant in some Middle Eastern souk. Don't be snookered by the fancy professional offices and the claims to some kind of moral high ground because it's a caring profession and all that. It's just haggling with rug merchants.
I’ve run a private practice and, all due respect to rug merchants, this is true. Doctors would generally prefer cash up front to a delay of 3-6 months to get whatever fraction of their bill the insurance lackeys decide to remit, after denying and delaying as long as they can.
"Caring" profession. 😂🤣😂🤣
Yes, I know, which is why I mentioned I have paid for a couple of MRIs myself. Your description of a souk is the perfect analogy.
Exactly!! Ask up front, and make it plain exactly what you’re asking for. This has worked well for us for years.
Oh, I’m so sorry to hear this. What a nightmare, and how irresponsible to make a diagnosis like that serious in such a cavalier manner. Glad to hear you’ve come out on the other side okay.
In the course of reading about something else, I was reminded of the drugs that were foisted on my fourth-grader: Prozac, Wellbutrin, and Geodon (the last of which essentially gave him narcolepsy). We were so horrified at the effects, and my kid disliked it so much, that we stopped after just a few weeks. But when I called the psychiatrist's office to beg permission to withdraw the drugs, they got huffy and essentially hung up on me. Probably didn't help that I was in tears by that time.
Yes, I'm bitter :-)
This story brings out mama bear rage in me. I’m so sorry this happened to your child.
Psychiatrists have so little they can offer in the way of genuine help for suffering, it’s no wonder they’re defensive. When all you have is a hammer, everything’s a nail…
And of course, as it turned out, no psychosis.
I don't know what the cash prices are around here are anymore. I do know that after Obummercare started, the cash price was astronomical! The people paying cash were charged around 3x the inflated prices billed to insurance companies. No one could afford what they were charging.
Wow! I had no idea. We came to the cash solution later in the game, so I’m not sure what happened. All I know is that it has been pretty reasonable each time we’ve done it, whether for imaging or clinic visits—and until recently I lived in L.A. (and all my medical appointments were in Beverly Hills or elsewhere on the west side) so that’s saying something.
I found that to be the case before Obamacare, also. The whole insurance paradigm is too prone to corruption to be useful.
Yeah, the paradigm shift you are looking for is personal responsibility for ones health as well as utilizing "experts" as resources and not obeying them like they are unquestioned , all knowing Gods. That's how it becomes less of an industry. The same shift is needed in just about every realm. Since few people attempted to learn this one on their own, we are all learning it the really, really hard way now. That is, those of us that don't literally drop dead from all of the medical miracles and government mandates forced and inflicted upon us during the process at this late stage in the game. But, It's not like we ourselves didn't nourish and assist this monster's growth every step of the way though. We wanted saviors that took all of our burdens away and we paid them handsomely to do it.
Oh my thanks for this! I concur with everything you have written. May God bless you today.
And yes, as commented below, please consider an alternative practice of some sort. We can turn the tide!
And you as well! 🙏🏻
If you had looked into homeopathy maybe you’d still be a doc.
Not a criticism but in my humble opinion an opportunity missed.
Forgive me for donning my pedant cap, but Fleischer is a hack. He writes: "This begs the question..." NO. No questions have been begged! Questions have been raised! "Begging the question" is when an argument's premises assume the truth of the conclusion. In other words, a circular argument. People use "beg the question" as a substitute for "raise the question" to, I guess, sound more erudite. NO. Don't do it.
I've struggled with that phrase for years, Ben, and understood its definition and intended use as you suggest...however, common usage often changes such phrases and, indeed, our friend Merriam (as in Webster) says it now means "to elicit a specific question as a reaction or response," which can often be replaced with "a question that begs to be answered."
With respect to your definition, they suggest it's "a lesser used and more formal definition" which means 'to ignore a question under the assumption it has already been answered."
I'm not a prescriptivist, I swear. But some lines . . . I refuse to cross, by God. And as an editor, I'll never let that phrase pass on my watch. Longer, more articulate rant coming tomorrow morning at Nice Things and Why You Can't Have Them. Cheers!
Why Ben, I guess I’ll just have to check out your “more articulate rant.”
Coming 9 a.m. Pacific tomorrow.
Better late than never: https://nicethings.substack.com/p/brother-can-you-raise-a-question?sd=pf
I always use the original form "beggar the question" to keep myself from slipping into the popular modern misuse because it makes me think for a moment ("is this what I really mean?").
A "hack" for misusing a commonly misused term? That's a nice example of hyperbole. By the way, you have a typo in your antepenultimate sentence.
And nothing crashes nitpicking more than criticising someone else for picking a nit and then proceeding to pick a nit yourself. Oh no wait, something does actually outdo that! That would be: picking a nit that turns out to not exist.
God, I love you.
But if he's a hack anyway, which he very clearly is, doesn't that raise the question of whether his hackiness is worth defending at all?
Where? I don't see it, and the comment hasn't been edited yet.
I reread it, and I was wrong. There is no typo. That's what I get for being a smarty pants. I do think, however, that calling someone a hack for misusing a term is pretty harsh!
Thank you!! I hear "...this begs the question" EVERYWHERE! Very frustrating, but following the rules just "isn't done" now....
I love this kind of thing
Well said! 🙌🏽
I’ve been a health care provider since 1976 and would not prescribe Paxlovid on a bet.
Kudos. Yaay! God bless you. Amen. Hosannah in the highest! (Obviously, I really don't know what to say, but I am soooooo much in favor of your experience, your obviously independent consideration, and your frankness. -- that I thought I had to make a comment.)
They aren’t true doctors. A real doctor would heal you if you went to see him. These folks are simple drug pushers/dealers.
And they're shooting themselves in the foot. It's harder and harder to have actual medical care provided by a doctor (not an ARNP or a PA or a PharmD), let alone covered by insurance, but you can always get your pills. The AMA, etc., have sold their people out, so the only game in town is Big Pharma. If I were a doctor, I'd want to be indispensable for something other than my prescription pad (which is being handed to nurses and pharmacists a bit more every day).
Try to get an antibiotic for sinusitis these days.
Try to find healthy food to eat and firing up an immune system to replace anti-biotics is even harder.
Antibiotics are one of the greatest medical discoveries. Nutrition advice is like voodoo.
Someone had an acute UTI and less acute ongoing sinus issues. Antibiotics for the UTI also fixed the sinus symptoms. A few days after the antibiotic course ended, sinus symptoms returned.
No, the entire anti-biotic reasoning is a ruse, a result of lowering nutritional standards for agriculture, now totally done away with only a statement of nutrition on labels, none on unprocessed foodstuffs. Also, off the top the bacteria adapts and is more lethal as it does.
The entire human body is an immune system full functional with proper nutrition (not readily available any longer) with immunologists promoting the idea the harder an immune system works the better it gets.
If you want to know more study from soil biologists and scientists who have leaned how soil life is instrumental in increasing food nutrition.
Buy local when you can. If you must go to the grocery store, always hit the outer most walls first. The only vegetable you really can’t get non GMO is corn. The rest isn’t that hard to figure out if it is or not.
Eat according to your areas seasons is the best advice I can offer. How did your grandparents and great grandparents eat and follow suit.
Even organic is now tainted, but better than the GMO and all its poisons. Grow your own is the best.
Using Heritage seeds where possible.
Indeed.
A ‘real’ (good) doctor understands that the body will most times heal itself if given proper care. A good listener, some encouragement and a pat on the back is oftentimes more effective than a prescription. But the old fashioned GP who maybe visited you at home and understood this basic maxim is a thing of the past.
I am so glad his op-ed isn't paywalled. Chris didn't even reveal one of the best quotes:
"The gym? No thanks. Fifteen extra pounds was worth it to avoid getting sick."
He actually said that!
If only it were possible to exercise without a gym. I understand they're working on a pill for this.
Anyone who hasnt read RFK Jr's book, The Real Anthony Fauci, is missing major eye openers. The book is somewhat misnamed as RFK documents decades of abuse and deception by the federal government, Big Pharma, and evil people like Bill Gates. It is absolutely stunning. Childhood vaccination schedules went from about 5 to 90 in 1989, coincident w the 'baffling' rise in autism, ADD, asthma, epilepsy, and other previously rare maladies. Just one example. Please read the book. It's a Rosetta Stone for understanding why our medical system is so corrupt.
Sadly this, as you say, is but a symptom of a more general problem: the belief, quite widely held, that one is entitled to life as a bed of roses, and the only thing preventing that is some evil “oppressor” whose only purpose in life is to deny the pleasures one so richly deserves simply by virtue of having been born.
Vitamin D comes from sunshine and cod liver among other rare foods, these are not pills.
Excellent observations along with the anecdote of children, who are taken care of by their parents and most now never grow up to take care of themselves, instead relying on government and doctors. Of course, its all exploitation to those types.
One more connection you must consider is the same shareholders of the pharma-freak show are the same controlling agribusiness with all the sprays and artificial fertilizers, which produces nutrition less food that makes people sick enough to seek these miracle cures. Pills and injections. Funny how that fits together for high profits.
Big Ag, Big Food, and Big Pharma form a leviathan which has developed more or less organically.
I can't decide if Big Finance is part of this or if it's its own beast.
Government is essentially the catspaw of these forces.
Right, big finance and a host of other investments too. I mostly deal with food and kiss.
I've been in trucking for 25 years. In 2013, we almost lost everything we had because of a truck that wouldn't run because of emissions issues. It cost me $50,000 in seven months in repairs and lost revenue. I chronicled my issues on social media as it happened. The bootlickers on the right would cry out against Obama, but when I reminded them that the rules were written during the Bush Administration, they clammed up and didn't know what to say. The Obamabots would tell me to suck it up, "we're saving the planet." in my 25 years, I have forgotten more about trucking and the industry than "the experts" can ever hope to learn, but because I'm not on NPR, my experience and knowledge is useless.
From way out here on the periphery, it seems like a business that gets harder every year.
https://www.freightwaves.com/news/race-to-the-bottom-in-truckload-contract-rates-sets-in
85% of the freight on the highway is carried by companies with 6 trucks or less. It is a true "mom n pop" industry. There are 1 million owner/operators on the road. The huge megafleets can't compete with us (nor can the unions) so they've been trying to use the government to regulate us out of business. See: California AB5. Yes, the rates are down, but we're coming off of the most inflated rate environment in trucking history. We are a fleet of 17 (and growing) are we are still profitable and will continue to be because we run paid-for, non-California-compliant trucks (newest one is a 2007 and they all have over one million miles on them). We will still be here when the rates hit the floor and start back up. The people running the 2008-2022 junk trucks coming from the OEMs are in big trouble. Disobedience and non-compliance is all we have left.
🙌 God bless you! Keep it up!
This column is another example of why CB deserves a wider audience than just the choir here at Substack. I for one hope the offer of a gig at American Greatness comes to pass, and leads to bigger and better things for him.
Not only did the dimwitted hypocrite write that an editor approved it. Can't you just see his bobble head colleagues patting him on the back, praising how courageously he endured 12 days of the sniffles, and parroting the injustice of his suffering.
Part of me wants to feel sorry for him but after two years of witnessing the cruelty of this bunch I can't do it.
The fun part about the antidepressants is that huge study showing that there's no link between serotonin and depression. Thus, SSRIs are complete bullshit:
https://www.psychologytoday.com/us/blog/how-do-you-know/202207/serotonin-imbalance-found-not-be-linked-depression#:~:text=New%20research%2C%20reviewing%20huge%20bodies,SSRIs%2C%20remain%20an%20effective%20treatment.
So we have tens of millions of Americans banging down happy pills with fairly severe side effects, in order to help them cope with life in a nightmare dystopia, and the fucking things don't even work.
That's NOT what that study says. There's fairly good evidence that SSRIs (as a class) reduce depression. The study says that however SSRIs work, it's not by changing serotonin levels.
Look, doctors prescribed aspirin for over 100 years without understanding how it works. They just knew *that* it worked.
I think his doctor should have given him the pills. As I used to tell my kids, people should be allowed to experience the consequences of their actions.
I have been following the FLCCC.net protocols for well over a year now. There are more benefits than just the virus. About three weeks after I started to take black seed oil my fasting blood glucose went to normal. I was still taking the diabetic meds, as I have for 20 years, but this had never happened. Black seed oil can improve respiration, lower blood pressure, lower blood glucose and decrease the appetite. Who knew?
I started black seed oil around the first of the year. When I saw my endocrinologist in May my A1C had gone from 6.8 to 5.6. She said all my numbers had improved. I could cut my diabetic medication in half. Two weeks or so later I stopped taking all of it and started a ketogenic (low carb) lifestyle. I discovered Dr. Bikman "Why We Get Sick." It all boils down to an excess amount of carbs in our diet and insulin resistance.
Bottom line COVID has given me the time to learn a lot and delve into health issues. FLCCC.net is a great place to start. They have protocols for boosting your immunity, protocols for what to do if you get it, and what if you get long COVID.
Please, please tell me how you can stand to take black seed oil. (I mean this sincerely.) I bought this tiny little bottle for a good chunk of change. 1/3 of the bottle is what you're supposed to take in a day. I read if you can't stand the taste mix it with honey. I tried that. It probably didn't taste as bad as it might have totally straight, but it took about a quarter cup of honey, which made it toooo sweet, and about 2 hours of trying to get the taste out of my mouth. I can't find the capsules (back to pills) here, I don't order on line. Help!
I read dozens of reviews from several of the black seed oil products for sale on Amazon. I always start with the negatives first. One thing that came across loud and clear is that the liquid tastes horrible. I have been using the capsules. I order from Amazon. I also recently ordered from Life Extension because they had a sale. I have bought quite few different products from them. The shipping is free. Do you have any health food stores near where you live? If you do, see if they have the capsules. If not see if they will order them for you.
Honey is not good for you if you use a lot of it. It contains fructose which is bad for the liver and it will raise your blood glucose. If you are diabetic, or insulin resistant, then that is the last thing you want to do.
No place here sells the capsules. Only 1 place sells the oil. They have been bought out and their extensive vitamins/health department is shrinking by the month. According to the oil you're supposed to take a tablespoon a day. 🤢 Hence the humongous amount of honey. The second time I took it, I used less honey. It was all I could do to choke it down. I've looked for the actual seeds. Can't find them either.
We only have huge corporate entities here, they won't special order anything for a single person. I'll look up Life Extension and see if I can phone in an order.
Thank-you VERY much for your reply!
Where do you live? Can't you find a friend to order it from Amazon or Life Extension for you? My brother lives in the Stone Age, doesn't have a computer, can't use the Internet and has never bought online. When he and his family got COVID I ordered from Amazon and had it delivered to their front door. Find a friend or relative who will do this for you.
I have used three or four brands of Black Seed Oil capsules. I had the best results (lowered blood glucose levels) from Orzax but have used a couple of other brands that were a bit less expensive.
I used this one. It's the least expensive. https://www.amazon.com/Black-Seed-Oil-Vegetarian-Cold-Pressed/dp/B0714PK8VV/ref=sr_1_5?crid=3MNZK3GE8XHRQ&keywords=Oracz+black+seed+oil&qid=1662584733&sprefix=oracz+black+seed+oil%2Caps%2C108&sr=8-5
I can ask a friend. They might do it for me. I don't have a computer only my phone, which is obviously not secure. I want it to try and lower my blood pressure.
"I want a feast! I want a drug feast!" 🎵
I just made an emergency dental appointment at the VA Hospital and it used to be you had to arrive to every appointment 30 minutes early for a COVID test. But now if you're boosted, it's 30 minutes, if you're UNBOOSTED you have to come in TWO hours before your appointment for a COVID test. It feels like harassment. And all for a shot that so clearly doesn't work.
How do I get out of this bad dystopian pulp novel???? Is this what life is going to be from here on out -- everything as intensely inconvenient as possible?
Even at the front of the VA, you have to wait in line outside until someone interrogates you about exactly what you're doing there. It makes it feel like a war zone. And then when you're inside you're bombarded by posters telling you how to wear your mask and to stay at least 6 feet away from others.
And then the dentist was wearing a space suit -- a mask with a space suit over it with a tube and a breathing machine so as not to breath the same air as the untested patient (it was for emergency dental so they saw me without a covid test, hence the space suit). This world has become maddening.
I keep commenting on your substack, Chris, because you're sane, and your readers are sane. And substack feels like a small bastion of sanity. The rest of the world I feel like I'm just screaming into the void, the way people won't listen, the way they inform you that "that's just misinformation." Because if I wasn't such an idiot, I'd just believe the posters and people on tv. But since I did my own research -- idiot. And so I deserve to be as inconvenienced as possible, I suppose. Wow, what a world.
The dentist has to wear that space suit, or he'd risk getting a cold.