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Monday, February 23, 2015

Doctors Are



When you Google or Bing the words "doctors are" the search engines offer suggestion based upon what other searched. When you type in "doctors are" and add a letter you get even more suggestions.

"Doctors are" renders the following suggestions: Arrogant, Useless, Overpaid, and Dangerous. When you type in Doctors are followed by the letter A Google comes back with: Arrogant, Always Late and A waste of time

People don't have much good to say about Americas MDs and for good reason.`American doctors are members of an industry that is by far and away the biggest killer and the biggest thief the world has ever known.

Adding the letter B gives you: Bad, Broke, Brainwashed, boring.

Adding C gives you. Crooks, Criminals, Corrupt, Cheaters

Adding D gives you. Dangerous, Dumb, Drug Dealers, Douche Bags

Adding E gives you, EVIL.

Adding F gives you, Full of crap, Frauds, Furious, Fat

Adding G gives you  Greedy, Greedy Bastards, Glorified Drug Dealers

Adding H gives you Human, Heroes and Horrible

Adding I gives you, Idiots

Adding J gives you.________

Adding K gives you, Killing us.

Adding L gives you Liars, Lazy, Like gods and Leading Cause of Death

Adding M gives you More Harmful than Germs, Mean, Miserable Murderers

Adding N gives you, Not smart, Not happy Not scientists.

Adding O gives you, Overpaid, Only in it for the Money, Overrated

Adding P gives you, Paid to much, Pill Pushers, Psychopaths

Adding Q gives you, Quacks

Adding R gives you, Rich, Rude, Rude to Nurses, Ripoffs

Adding S gives you, stupid, selfish, scary, scum

Adding T gives you, The Third Leading Cause of Death

Adding U gives you, Useless, Unhealthy, Unhappy

Adding W gives you, Worthless, Weird, Wrong


UPDATE! Here is what comes up when you type "Doctors are" into Bing.

  • doctors are miserable
  • doctors are stupid
  • doctors are killing us
  • doctors are greedy
  • doctors are not god quotes
  • doctors are dangerous
  • doctors are the worst patients
  • doctors are heroes

Add A and you get:

  • doctors are arrogant
  • doctors are awful
  • doctors are attracted to me
  • doctors are angry
  • doctors are always to busy
  • doctors are arrogant
  • doctors are against nurse practitioner
Add B and you will get:

  • doctors are broke
  • doctors are bad husbands
  • doctors are bullies
  • doctors are bastards
Add C and you get:
  • doctors are crooks
  • doctors are corrupt 
  • doctors are contractor and income
  • doctors are cheaters
  • doctors are creepy
  • doctors are central to your life
  • doctors are cold
  • doctors are culpable in mesh lawsuits

Add D and you get:

  • doctors are dangerous
  • doctorsaredangerous.com
  • doctors are dumb
  • doctors are drug dealers
  • doctors are depressed
  • doctors are drug dealers in florida
  • doctors are dropping medicare patients
  • doctors are dumb on purpose.

Add E and you get:

  • doctors are evil
  • doctors are engineers
  • doctors are examining genitals for no reason

Add G and you get:

  • doctors are greedy
  • doctors are giving out to many prescriptions
  • doctors are getting worse
Add H and you get:

  • doctors are heroes
  • doctors are hypocrites
  • doctors are horrible
Add I and you get:
  • doctors are idiots
  • doctors are in
  • doctors are important
  • doctors are in it for the money
  • doctors are irresponsible with antibiotics
Add J and you get:
  • doctors are jerks
  • doctors are just rude
Add K and you get:
  • doctors are killing us
  • doctors are killing people
  • doctors are killers
Add L and you get:
  • doctors are liars
  • doctors are labor induction happy
  • doctors are legal drug dealers las vegas
  • doctors are losing money
  • doctors are lying to you about vaccines
Add M and you get:
  • doctors are miserable
  • doctors are more harmful than germs
  • doctors are men who prescribe medicines
  • doctors are money hungry
  • doctors are mandated reporters
  • doctors are mean to nurses
  • doctors are more dangerous than guns
Add N and you get:
  • doctors are not god quotes
  • doctors are not accepting medicare
  • doctors are nerds
  • doctors are not trained in nutrition
  • doctors are not god
  • doctors are not smart
  • doctors are not scientists
  • doctors are narcissists
Add O and you get:
  • doctors are opting out of medicare
  • doctors are overpaid
  • doctors are opting out of obamacare
Add P and you get:
  • doctors are pricks
  • doctors are poor
  • doctors are paid too much
  • doctors are pill pushers
  • doctors are programmed to kill us
  • doctors are pushers

More to come. 

In the meantime Bing and Google doctors are and use social media to trash doctors 
and their filthy dirty fucking industry!





Thursday, February 12, 2015

Arrogant Doctors



The prerequisite to getting into medical schools in America is to be an arrogant, uncaring and unethical asshole. Here is a more erudite explanation.

Arrogance among physicians is, regrettably, common and violates the benevolent spirit of medicine-its very soul -as well the quality of medical care. The need for humility in the physician warrants greater emphasis in medical training, both in the classroom and, more critically, by example. Arrogance persists because of intersecting and mutually enhancing sociologic and psychological pressures. Regarding the sociologic elements, in earlier times, the great respect and prestige accorded physicians could foster arrogance in some. Today, physicians as a group are less likely to be idealized, but the health care system has depersonalized the doctor-patient relationship and created a kind of "system arrogance" in which the patient is seen not as a person but merely as a job to be done cost-effectively. As for psychological aspects, physicians are sometimes drawn to medicine by their unconscious concerns about illness and mortality-they become health experts in the hope of extending their own lives. Such physicians treat death as the enemy, and may practice unwarranted heroic measures. But the most critical variable in the development of arrogance is a physician's knowledge and thereby his or her power over the patient. This can delude some physicians into imagining that they are all-powerful. Seriously ill or injured patients tend to view the physician as an omnipotent parent and savior, and in this way unwittingly tempt physicians to be arrogant. The author concludes by reminding his fellow physicians that "we should not exaggerate our own importance. we are but an instrument of healing and not its source."



Tuesday, December 30, 2014

Fat People Lie So Fuck em When They Die

The 10 Most Common Lies Fat People Tell

10 lies fat people tell.
After seeing a tweet from Ricky Gervais about how “That bloody Higgs Boson gave me too much mass.” is the Fat persons next excuse. I just had to write this..
How to Gain Weight and Influence People.
There are lies, damn lies and lies fat people tell.  We’ve all done it.  Those little white lies we tell to try to disguise the undeniable fact that we eat too much.  Yet some people seem to have made a science of this art form, to the point that these fibs have become inherent in our language.  We try to explode some of these myths here, and leave the chubsters nowhere to hide.
1) I Don’t Know Why I Put on Weight; I Hardly Eat Anything
When confronted by this whopper, the natural reaction of the recipient is to slap the person.  We marvel at the ability of these people to practice self delusion on such a grand scale.  This is the equivalent statement to, ‘my car’s doing too many miles to the gallon’.  It defies the laws of physics, chemistry and biology.  One down, nine to go.
2) I’m Retaining Water
I think what you’ll find, is that when people try to articulate this particular fraud, they’re actually retaining chocolate.  To retain say 55 pounds of water, you would have to retain nearly 7 gallons.  You would be sloshing and squelching around like a Michelin man full of liquid.  You would have to be the equivalent of a human camel or a giant human sponge.  Do you think I’m some kind of an idiot or something?
3) I’m Big Boned
Bones make up around 15% of a human’s body weight.  An adult weighing 176 lbs, can expect to have a skeletal mass of around 33 lbs.  A person who was 66 lbs overweight, as a result of being big-boned, would have to have a skeletal mass, greater than double the norm.  Whereas this quotient does vary from individual to individual, the differences are generally slight, and medically recorded cases of such extremes are unknown.
4) I Can’t Lose Weight
It’s true that overeating is an addiction.  Let’s face it, if we didn’t eat we’d die.  Nobody’s saying it’s easy to lose weight, but people do manage it all the time.  It takes a certain amount of willpower and commitment.  It also requires that you have to stop lying to yourself.  Saying ‘I can’t lose weight’, is the equivalent of claiming a genetic predisposition to saying no to chocolate cake.  This futile argument could be applied to almost anything.  ‘I can’t clean the dishes.  My dish washing gland was ripped out in a freak accident’.
5) I’m Starting My Diet/training Tomorrow
‘The sun’ll come out tomorrow…’.  No seriously though.  How many times have we heard this one.  More times than we’ve heard, ‘I’m starting my diet right now’.  The shifting sands of future diet starting dates, is about as solid as, ‘the cheque’s in the post’.  It’s an insult to our intelligence.
 6) My Latest Gadget / Fad Diet Will do the Trick
Every year, millions of pudgy suckers are parted with millions of pounds worth of their hard earned money, in exchange for the promise of miracle weight loss by one dodgy means or another.  These are as disparate as reality defying exercise gadgets, and revolutionary drugs and/or diets.  Why are people so willing to give credence to these manipulative racketeers, and why is this practice even legal.  It seems that a weight loss invention doesn’t have to be remotely plausible to be allowed onto the market.  Hang on, I’ve got one, I call it the diet hat.  Just wear this hat, it’s scientifically proven to lose weight for the wearer.  ‘What scientists’, you ask.  Oh, the independent ones who work for me.  Only $199.00 plus shipping and handling, thanks very much.  So long suckers.
 7) I’m Happy With my Current Weight
Yeah right.  It seems there are so many overweight people who are claiming to be happy with their figures, yet not many people who are unhappy having fantastic physiques.  Does it strike these people as odd, that there is a multi-billion pound industry geared towards helping people get into great physical shape, yet no products to help people who are struggling to become obese.  Could it be that these people are like little children lost in the dark, whistling to try to keep their spirits up.  Do we spare these people their blushes, and politely reply, ‘good for you’.  Hell no, you lying tubsters.
8) Things Will Change on their Own
This is about as likely as emptying a tin of alphabet soup out of a 3rd floor window, and expecting it to land on the pavement in the form of a Shakespearean sonnet.  People who are victims of this particular delusion, are like punch-drunk prizefighters, getting knocked down, only to get up back again and endure more punishment.  Reality is cruel.
9) Being Fat Runs in my Family
This is a variation of the ‘I can’t lose weight’ deception.  Did you ever stop to wonder why this is.  Is it that fat people have a combination of chromosomes  that thin people don’t have.  Or, is it that fat parents give their kids huge portions of food.  Do these overfed children then pass this trait on to their own kids, and so the cycle of abuse continues.  Is it easier to blame nature than our parents.  Mmm, let me think about this one.
10) The Only Way is Surgery / Liposuction
I’ve saved the best for last.  This is a very special lie, told only by the pathologically deluded.  If anybody ever tries to pass this one off on you, don’t have anything more to do with them.
In Conclusion
If we are to lose weight, perhaps the first loss, should be the weight of our denial.  We can not hope to shed a single pound, till all of our weight-loss fallacies are debunked.  In truth, there is only one way to lose weight, and this is to create a calorie deficit.  This can only be achieved naturally by a combination of diet and/or exercise.  It is far from quick and easy.  Sorry to burst your bubble porky, but it’s for your own good.  Hey, I care.

Sunday, November 30, 2014

Bristol-Myers Docs Studied Diabetes at Disneyland, 3 Execs Claim

Bristol-Myers Docs Studied Diabetes at Disneyland, 3 Execs Claim

Last Updated Apr 1, 2011 10:22 AM EDT

Bristol-Myers Squibb (BMY)'s payment of gifts and kickbacks to doctors was so thinly disguised that at one point they sent doctors to a "Medical Eduction Diabetes Program" located at Disneyland, according to three former employees suing the company in a California state court.

The whistleblower suit makes the usual claims about the way BMS did business before the industry decided to clean up its act in the mid 2000s. Drug sales reps gave doctors $1,500 "preceptorship" fees, lunches, cognac, cigars, Starbucks gift cards, show tickets and golf outings in order to encourage them to write prescriptions for BMS drugs such as the antipsychotic Abilify and the cholesterol treatment Pravachol, the suit alleges.

But BMS took it a step further, the three former employees allege: "BMS' entire culture encouraged the provision of kickbacks," and reps were encouraged to spend whatever it took, by any means necessary, to get doctors to write BMS prescriptions (click to enlarge):


The company told BNET it denies the allegations:
The overwhelming majority of the allegations in the lawsuit relate to alleged conduct a decade or more old. In fact, some of the conduct is alleged to have occurred in the 1990s.

Bristol-Myers Squibb firmly believes the lawsuit has no merit and intends to defend itself vigorously. The company has been and remains committed to upholding the highest standards of business integrity and ethics and has a robust compliance program.
In Los Angeles, BMS had a special relationship with the LA Lakers basketball team because former sales rep Lucias Allen, one of the plaintiffs in the suit, played for the Lakers and the Milwaukee Bucks from 1969 to 1979. That allowed BMS to send doctors on expensive fantasy basketball trips, where the emphasis was on collecting player autographs than physician education:



On another occasion BMS sent doctors to Puerto Rico where they enjoyed Swedish massages and deep-sea fishing on the company's dime:


But it is the Disney-diabetes trip that, perhaps, takes the biscuit:


The plaintiffs claim the gifts were kickbacks that triggered private insurance companies to pay for prescriptions that otherwise could have been filled with cheap generics or not dispensed at all. The California Insurance Commissioner has intervened in the suit, joining the plaintiffs.

Related:

Monday, November 10, 2014

It's Conclusive! Scumbag Doctors Killed Joan Rivers


Gastric bypass is an inherently dangerous surgery but add to that the greedy scumbag butchers who get filthy rich doing it. Joan Rivers went in for a simple but needed procedure and criminally negligent doctors killed her. Joan Rivers was wealthy. How do you think American doctor, the leading cause of death and injury are going to treat you? THINK ABOUT IT!

New Report Cites Multiple Violations at Clinic Where Joan Rivers Died




View photo
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Joan Rivers (Getty Images)

Joan Rivers (Getty Images)
The clinic where Joan Rivers had a fatal routine surgery "failed to identify deteriorating vital signs and provide timely intervention," an investigation by the Department of Health and Human Services Center for Medicare and Medicaid Services has revealed.
Yorkville Endoscopy also failed to properly document how much of the sedative Propofol was used, and the report confirms that people in the room photographed Joan with a cell phone while she was sedated, according to ABC News.
Rivers, 81, died on Sept. 4, one week after undergoing an outpatient throat procedure at the clinic to treat voice changes and acid reflux. During surgery, Rivers stopped breathing and went into cardiac arrest. Last month, the New York City Office of Chief Medical Examiner ruled Joan ultimately died of a lack of oxygen to her brain.
"The cause of Ms. Rivers's death is anoxic encephalopathy due to hypoxic arrest during laryngoscopy and upper gastrointestinal endoscopy with Propofol sedation for evaluation of voice changes and gastroesophageal reflux disease. The manner of death is therapeutic complication," the OCME said in a statement. "The classification of a death as a therapeutic complication means that the death resulted from a predictable complication of medical therapy."
Following the comedian's death, the New York State Health Department launched a routine investigation of Yorkville Endoscopy, only to find lapses in four categories necessary for accreditation: governing body and management, surgical services, medical staff, and patient rights.
In a statement regarding Monday's findings, attorneys for Melissa Rivers said in a statement: “Our client, Melissa Rivers, is terribly disappointed to learn of the multiple failings on the part of the medical personnel and the clinic as evidenced by the CMS report. As any of us would be, Ms. Rivers is outraged by the misconduct and mismanagement now shown to have occurred before, during and after the procedure. Moving forward, Ms. Rivers will direct her efforts towards ensuring that what happened to her mother will not occur again with any other patient.”
Yorkville Endoscopy issued the following statement regarding the report as well:
"From the outset of the August 28th incident described in the CMS Report, Yorkville has been fully cooperative and collaborative with all regulatory and accreditation agencies. In response to the statement of deficiencies, Yorkville immediately submitted and implemented a plan of correction that addressed all issues raised. The regulatory agencies are currently reviewing the corrective plan of action and have been in regular contact with Yorkville. In addition, the physicians involved in the direct care and treatment referenced in the report no longer practice or provide services at Yorkville. Yorkville will continue its commitment to complying with all standards and accreditation requirements."

Sunday, September 21, 2014

Pharmageddon

Dr. David Healy has spent decades delving into the dark corners of the pharmaceutical industry, where, for instance, drug companies have tried to hide the worrisome connection between antidepressant drugs and suicide. In the psychiatrist’s best-known previous books, The Antidepressant Era and Let Them Eat Prozac, Healy explored the often vexing history of the mental health field and its troubled relationship with Big Pharma. In his latest book,Pharmageddon, he presents an even bleaker picture of the way industry has co-opted medicine in general — not just mental health. Healthland spoke with Healy about his findings.
What do you mean by ‘pharmageddon’?
At the moment, treatment-induced death is the fourth leading cause of death [overall], and within the mental health field, it’s probably the leading cause of death.
It’s a little bit like climate change. It may feel great to have a car, the convenience you get is a thing we appreciate each time we hop in the car and drive down to the market. But the use of cars is contributing to the bigger picture of climate change. In the same way, quite a few medications we take produce good outcomes. But we’ve [had a] climate change in medicine, which runs the risk of completely destroying medicine as we’ve known it.
And the key tool in all of this is how companies use the scientific evidence. They construct trials to get the outcomes they want; they only publish positive trials. The study often shows the opposite of what the data actually shows.
In the book, you look at how drug companies sell us on reducing risks — like say, high cholesterol — that may not actually do much to keep us healthy because high cholesterol itself is just a marker for cardiovascular disease risk, not an illness itself.
If you [look at] statins to lower cholesterol or drugs for osteoporosis, there’s no obvious benefit like there is from wearing a parachute when you jump out of a plane. You often just don’t feel good and you may feel a good deal worse. There isn’t even a proven benefit at the end. What you’ve got is proof in the sense of demonstrating that over a six-week period, you can show a marginal change that we have agreed to call a change for the ‘better.’ [The point is that the measure doesn’t necessarily mean your health will improve, but rather is just a marker linked with a reduction in risk.]
Trials get used as tool to persuade doctors to persuade you to have treatment. [And making drugs] available on prescription only is a means to persuade you to take things that if you were more naturally cautious, you’d be less inclined to take.
But don’t we need clinical trials to eliminate quack remedies and look systematically at the best treatments?
There’s two [situations] where trials are useful. There’s an area were you don’t need trials at all, where the treatment really works, such as antibiotics for serious infections. And they’re also really useful when they show that something doesn’t work.
What we’ve got is what’s in between, where in actual fact [some] people would say, for example, if you take all the trials of antidepressants, they actually show that the drugs didn’t work.
Yet many people say they experience profound changes after taking the antidepressant drugs like Prozac — some positive and some negative.
That’s not saying that they don’t work — a bunch of people swear that they’re working. The problem is that if we had all the data available [including the data that the drug companies hid], we ought to have said, ‘We’re not impressed by these drugs. We need to go to back to the drawing board and find the people who really benefit.’ There’s a bunch of people on [antidepressants] who clearly do well. But the companies have made whatever billions of dollars [selling them to a lot of people who don’t].
What do you think about the link between antidepressants and suicide? You’ve found some pretty damning evidence that healthy people may become suicidal or aggressive when they take these drugs.
There’s a group of people for whom antidepressants in general work awfully well, but there’s also a group for whom they don’t work well and they can become either violent or suicidal. The problem again comes back to the role of the doctor. If doctors can’t see that drugs may be good and may be bad, that they can be useful and problematic — if they aren’t experts and can’t handle a bit of complexity — they’re going to go out of business. The problem with doctors and antidepressants making people commit suicide is when it first came out about some children being suicidal, the American Psychiatric Association said that it believed that antidepressants save lives.
I’ve been trying to say to doctors, this is a professional suicide note. What they should say is, Psychiatry can save lives. We know that these pills are good for some and not others and it takes expertise to manage this. If don’t take that [perspective], well, there are cheaper people like nurses, and if pills have no risk and work well, there are cheaper people going to be prescribing.
Why do you emphasize the issue of prescribing privileges so much?
When you come to me for treatment, in sense you’re my hostage. If I ask you if something is wrong [in terms of side effects, you say], ‘No, things are fine.’ You may be having strange thoughts, you may be getting aches and pains you didn’t have before, but the problem is that you either want to keep me happy and so you don’t mention it, [or you say nothing] because I’ve told you that you have to be on these pills because otherwise you will have a heart attack or stroke. You may not even know that the problem is caused by the pill. As a doctor, I’m not trained to pick up that these things may be going on.
The other I’m thing not trained in is that when things are available by prescription only, it’s me, the doctor that ‘consumes’ the pill. I’m the consumer in the sense that companies market these drugs [to me] — in the case of pharma, they’re spending more on marketing than Apple spends or Microsoft or GM. [While those companies] market to all of us, the amount of dollars per head is small. But pharma markets to doctors. Direct-to-consumer ads are only a small part of budget and they’re designed not [just] to get you to believe in the pill, but get you to bring pressure to bear on doctors.
Wouldn’t a big part of the problem be solved simply by requiring drug companies to release all their data?
There should be a law requiring them to reveal all the data. I think that’s a key thing: there should be access to all of the data from the clinical trials. We take risks with new pills on an understanding that the data is going to be made available to experts to sift through and let us all know what the true profiles of these pills are.
If people entering into trials were asked to sign form saying, ‘Do you agree to have pharmaceutical companies sequester the data from this trial?’ they wouldn’t have signed it. Most assumed that because it appears to be science, that the scientific community will get to scrutinize the trials.
You’re personally working on a project to help bring more of the risks to light.
What we’re trying to do with our colleagues is to open up patient adverse event reporting. It’s called rxrisk.org, which will be a website where both people on pills and their doctors can go to report adverse events that may be happening. The idea is to give you a tool so that if things are going wrong, you can get an expert report from us about what is known about the links between the problem and the pills you’re on and by asking a few questions, try to pinpoint whether the pill actually causing the problem. That will give you a report to take to your doctor to make it easier to overcome the kind of hostage problem most people have when they go to the doctor and want to keep him or her happy. The idea is ultimately to create teamwork between doctors and patients and let them know in real time how many other people have reported this problem also.
We’re trying to put patients and doctors in the kind of position where, if they know that thousands of others have had this problem and then the pharmaceutical company says there’s no linkage, people won’t believe it and will say, This isn’t right. It’s in beta at moment.
So what else can be done?
There are ways to play with the system to get the outcomes we want. At the moment, we have a system that works well for the health of pharmaceutical companies but not so well for our health. I’m just trying to raise these issues. How best we solve them is a different matter, but we can’t begin to try to solve them if we don’t raise them. I’m not hugely hopeful but not entirely pessimistic either.
Maia Szalavitz is a health writer for TIME.com. Find her on Twitter at @maiasz. You can also continue the discussion on TIME Healthland’s Facebook page and on Twitter at @TIMEHealthland.

Wednesday, September 10, 2014

The Criminal Conduct of Most Doctors

Image result for doctors suck

Doctors in the US suck more than most people can even comprehend. Get educated about these greedy thieving butchers! They don't give a shit about you or your health. All they care about is money and prestige.


Big Pharma and Greedy Doctor$

June 28, 2013
By Evan Levine, M.D.

The Combination Is a Prescription for Fraud and Abuse

How does one explain an internist who wrote over 900 prescriptions for the controversial and very expensive drug Lovaza, a drug approved to lower triglycerides, or a geriatric doctor who is the top prescriber of a very expensive heart medication known as Ranexa, or a cardiologist who neglects the less costly and generic statins, and presribes mostly Crestor, a very effective but also very costly drug, or just about any top prescriber of Tarka, an expensive blood pressure medication that combines two generic medications that can be purchased for pennies, into a brand drug that costs around $4.50 a  pill (something I discussed in a previous article “Drug Dealing For Big Pharma“)?

The answer is simple and unsurprising — greed. It’s all about putting more money in the pockets of doctors and the coffers of the big Pharmaceutical companies, but it is finally being exposed. Probublica, “an independent, non-profit newsroom that produces investigative journalism in the public interest”, petitioned under the Freedom of Information Act and obtained records for Medicare’s popular prescription-drug plan Part D. ProPublica has now made public on their website the names of prescribers and the drugs they chose to prescribe to their patients.

Consider this: I am a busy cardiologist and I wrote about 1,500 Medicare scripts in 2010, but a cardiologist practicing in New York City’s Chinatown, wrote 21,000! How is that possible? How can one person write 1,400 % more prescriptions than me? And not by coincidence, he was a top prescriber for one my least favorite drugs, Bystolic, a costly blood pressure medication that competes with generics that cost pennies per pill. Perhaps not by coincidence, he happened to give paid lectures for the company, Forest Labs, that sells Bystolic. Even more troubling is that he was a top prescriber of a drug known as Multaq, a very controversial and also costly drug, used to treat arrhythmias.

I suggest that anyone interested — lay or professional — check out the Prescriber Checkup on the Propublica site. Buried in the data you’ll find a physician, Rohan Wijetlaka, who was arrested last year for essentially selling prescriptions of narcotics, especially oxycodone. It’s easy to see that while his peers, on average, prescribed narcotics to about 4% of their Medicare patients, he prescribed, or as it turns out sold and prescribed, narcotics to 31% of his patients — and he’s a cardiologist. I guess those type of numbers were a big enough red flag to alert the DEA who pounced on him in July of 2012.

And yet there is another physician listed as a cardiologist, a Dr. (initials) V.P., who, according to this site, prescribed narcotics for 36% of her Medicare patients. If the data are correct, you have to wonder if she is being investigated, and if not, why?

For the past two days I have hurried home after work to review this data and found the same outcome – if a doctor wrote a lot of prescriptions for an expensive drug, he was usually a paid speaker for the drug company! Apparently, a simple and disgusting, quid pro quo.

Of course, I anxiously plugged in my name to see if I practiced the way I hoped I did. I found that all my frequently prescribed drugs were generic and that the average cost for each drug was $48 dollars. I compared that with other cardiologists I know and it was, thankfully, among the lowest compared to many doctors, including one that is always on a famous “Top Doctor“ list whose average prescription cost was $86 dollars; don’t be shocked when I tell you he prostitutes himself to Big Pharma.

I looked at physicians whom I knew to be bad docs, as well as bad human beings, and found some of them with an average cost for their prescriptions of almost THREE TIMES the cost of mine. Again, they too were big prescribers of drugs that I would never consider prescribing because they are too expensive and offer no benefit when compared to generics that cost pennies.

While I have been telling people for years that Big Pharma manipulates greedy, cooperative physicians into prescribing their drugs, now anyone can go to ProPublica and see what drugs their physicians prescribe. The list does fall short in identifying some of the king-pins of this Pharma scam, though; in particular, the heads of departments at some of the biggest universities. While these elite may get paid hundreds of thousands of dollars to help sell drugs, they often don’t see patients and prescribe drugs, so you won’t find them on the list.

In one instance I know of, the chief of Medicine at a major New York Medical center accompanied a drug rep bringing lunch to a busy cardiologist’s office. Why? So he might convince doctors there to prescribe the drug Bystolic. But you won’t find his name on the list because he lectures from his bully pulpit and rarely prescribes medications.

So what’s the take-away from all this? Just what I’ve been saying all along: Big Pharma, their “friends” in medicine, and their army of lobbyists, are corrupting the American healthcare system and it’s about time someone put a stop to it. Hello DEA, are you reading this?


Dr. Evan S. Levine is a cardiologist in New York and a Clinical Assistant Professor of Medicine at Montefiore Medical Center – Albert Einstein College of Medicine. He is also the author of the book “What Your Doctor Won’t (or can’t) Tell You”. He lives in Connecticut with his wife and children.

- See more at: http://www.leftistreview.com/2013/06/28/big-pharma-and-greedy-doctors/evanlevine/#sthash.C93DTztf.dpuf