Health Care News Podcast

The U.S. Food and Drug Administration has approved emergency use authorization of the Pfizer and Moderna COVID-19 shots for infants and toddlers six months and older. Should parents get them for their young children? The shots have been in use among the general population for 1.5 years. There have been 60,442 adverse events related to the shots on the FDA’s Vaccine Adverse Event Reporting System. More, millions of people have gotten the shots and COVID is still with us.

Jane Orient, M.D. is the executive director of the Association of American Physicians and Surgeons.  She minces no words, calling the trial used to support approval “a disgrace.” Dr. Orient points out the lack of effort to measure not just efficacy, but safety, in giving the shots to an age group with zero to no risk of dying from COVID-19. 

Jane Orient, M.D. covers a range of questions about the infant and toddler COVID-19 shot approval.  Details of the clinical trial include the fact that 67 percent of participants dropped out. What prompted this interest in wanting to provide these shots to young children and why did the trial reverse this trend in parents?

Orient and host AnneMarie Schieber also go over the history of other childhood vaccines. How long did it take to get those approved and how do those diseases compare to COVID? Why are parents so fearful of COVID-1919 infecting their children even though many have been exposed to it, show antibodies and had few to no symptoms? Orient believes the COVID shots will like be part of the panel of recommended shots for children, perhaps mandated for entry to school, yet there has been no effort to examine whether the shots will cause heart damage, already demonstrated in some trials.

In a recent article, a physician used the terms “assigned male at birth (AMAB)” and “assigned female at birth (AFAB)” instead of male and female. The article was published by The Cleveland Clinic.

Dr. Marilyn Singleton, a board-certified anesthesiologist in California and former president of the Association of American Physicians and Surgeons, discusses why use of such language in health care should set off alarm bells. AFAB, AMAB, and other terms such as “pregnant persons” are increasingly being used by health care institutions, experts, and writers to show deference to woke ideology.

Dr. Singleton also weighs in on the announcement this week that Dr. Anthony Fauci has tested positive for COVID, an ironic development for someone who was the leading champion of vaccines, masks, and other restrictions.

Topics of discussion:

- How widely used are the terms AMAB and AFAB?

- How have physicians have responded to this new terminology?

- What about the use of “pregnant persons” in some bills in California?  Do they believe someday men could be altered to give birth?

- It is easy to joke about woke language, but could patients be at risk?

- What did Supreme Court Justice Kentanji Jackson mean at her confirmation hearing when she said that she couldn’t describe what a woman was because she was not a biologist?

- Will there be any turning back if woke terminology is used more in articles? How about legislative bills? Is the intent to change the public’s thinking?

Dr. Marilyn Singleton’s website: https://marilynsingletonmdjd.com

Hugh McTavish, gubernatorial candidate in Minnesota of the Independence Alliance Party, is an outspoken critic of COVID-19 lockdown measures. These lockdowns prompted him to make a bid to be Minnesota’s next governor, unseating Gov. Tim Walz (D). McTavish, a Ph.D. immunologist, biochemist, patent attorney, entrepreneur, and author, is proposing an innovative “jury democracy” system. Before McTavish signs any important or controversial bill into law, he will submit it to a statistically significant citizen jury of at least 500 people. “If the jury approves the bill, I will sign it into law; if it rejects the bill, I will veto it. Effectively, I will not be governor—WE ALL WILL BE! I will give the power to you!”

McTavish’s inspiration to empower regular Americans comes from Abraham Lincoln. Lincoln said that government should be “of the people, by the people, for the people.” McTavish discusses how “jury democracy” would work and how it could produce better policy outcomes. Juries would be selected in a similar fashion to juries in a court case. He envisions every registered voter would have a chance to weigh in on bills every four years.

McTavish considers himself an out of the box thinker, in line with Jesse Ventura, Minnesota’s governor from 1999 – 2003. Both men are part of the Independence Alliance Party. Incumbent Governor Tim Walz is seeking reelection on the Democrat ticket. There are also a number of candidates seeking the Republican nomination.

McTavish has written several books. His latest, “Covid Lockdown Insanity” was published in June 2021 and makes the case from a scientific point of view why the lockdowns are failures in trying to stop a virus like COVID-19.

Telehealth was allowed in the early days of COVID-19 under the emergency declaration. Josh Umbehr, M.D, a pioneer in free market health care delivery and founder of Atlas MD, believes telehealth is here to stay. He discusses some of the tough questions that may arise as the gates close on telehealth beyond the emergency declaration for the pandemic.  How do we protect patient privacy? How do we stop waste, fraud and abuse? Patients and health care professionals embraced telehealth during the pandemic. What steps must Congress take to make sure it stays and can be successful.

Patient rights are under threat as the emergency declaration enacted during COVID-19 concludes as expected in mid-July. This theoretically leads to the end of telehealth. Josh Umbehr is the founder of Atlas MD, one of the first direct primary care practices (DPC) in the U.S. DPC has long been using telehealth to help patients faster and more affordably. Because DPC is independent and not reliant on third-party payers, it can bypass restrictions on telehealth. Umbehr also talks about tele-care, gathering patient data using high tech devices, sharing the data to help patients and deliver better care, and related privacy concerns. Additionally, he discusses the recent case where a telehealth company was red-flagged for writing an unusual number of prescriptions for a controlled substance.

Dr. Josh Umbehr’s March 3 op-ed on telehealth is in RealClearHealth: https://www.realclearhealth.com/articles/2022/03/03/is_telehealth_here_to_stay_yes_but_only_if_we_stick_the_landing__111324.html

Atlas MD:  https://atlas.md/wichita/about-us/our-team/josh-umbehr-md/

The big hospital healthcare systems have left the rural town of Newaygo, Michigan in the dust. Residents in this small, rural community have had to travel sometimes an hour to get basic primary health care service. In comes Christian Health Care Centers to the rescue.

Newaygo community leaders ask the direct primary care practice (DPC) if it would consider opening a second facility in their town. Christian Health Care Centers is a facility-based DPC that opened in 2017 and has had remarkable success. The community and CHC worked together to make it happen and on May 10, 2022, they celebrated the grand opening of a new 8,150 square foot facility. Residents are thrilled they don’t have to travel for basic health care and they’ll save a bundle of money under the direct-pay, membership model.

Websites:

Christian Health Care Centers: https://www.chcenters.org

Heartland articles featuring Mark Blocker: https://heartlanddailynews.com/?s=blocher

We’ve heard the saying that treatment can be worse than the disease. Sometimes too many choices and treatment options make health outcomes, worse, not better. Every treatment presents a risk. This includes over the counter, self-help measures. It is hard to measure the benefit of doing nothing versus seeking some sort of treatment. Sometimes, conditions resolve more quickly with no intervention.

George Hosu, founding engineer of Eureka Health, joins the show to discuss his recent article on Medium, “Why Doesn’t Healthcare Improve Health?” Hosu cites the extensive work of Robin Hanson, presents several hypothesis on why spending more and increasing access may not improve outcomes, and explains how he personally determines the value of an intervention.

The healthcare industry gobbles up 19.7 percent of the nation’s gross domestic product. According to the Centers for Medicare and Medicaid Services, the U.S. spends about $12,530 a person on health care. Yet there are gaps in outcomes. The U.S. ranked 18^th in highest number of COVID-19 deaths.  Deaths from drug overdoses are on the rise. The U.S. has one of the highest obesity rates in the world. Hosu and host AnneMarie Schieber discuss the value of placebos, the limitations of randomized control trials, and how the third-party payer system impacts personal health care decisions.

Throughout the pandemic, the Centers for Disease Control, the Department of Education, and school districts claimed ordering children to wear masks would keep schools open.  Phil Kerpen, president of American Commitment, along with Emily Burns and Josh Stevenson, looked back to see if that was actually the case. The researchers examined school closure in 500 of the nation’s largest school districts to find out if mask mandates kept schools open more often. What they found was the opposite. The report, “No Masks Don’t Help Keep Kids in School” can be found here.

The most pernicious mask mandates existed in the nation’s public schools.  If schools were open, in many school districts, children were ordered to mask-up. Kerpen has a hypothesis as to why masked schools closed their doors more often than those that made masks voluntary. Kerpen also discusses the work he did on the latest analysis by the National Bureau of Economic Research, A Final Report Card on the States’ Response to COVID 19, that ranked states on economic, health and education outcomes during the pandemic.  At the top of the list, were states that had the least heavy handed COVID policies.

In wake of the opioid epidemic (overdose deaths in 2020, 91,799), doctors and patients are turning to a FDA cleared, non-drug approach to treating pain called photobiomodulation (PBM). PBM uses red and near-infrared light to stimulate cell growth and reduce inflammation. It is increasingly being used at cancer centers, on veterans, and on individuals who want non-drug alternatives. Scot Faulkner is a senior advisor to the PBM Research Foundation. He discusses how there have been over 800 randomized clinical trials showing the effectiveness of PBM and how the treatment is changing the lives of millions of patients.

PBM has been around for about 60 years. It is now getting more attention as patients and physicians seek alternatives to prescription pain medication which can lead to chronic dependence. Since its inception, PBM has been used on 100 million people. Patients can get treated at centers or self-treat at home using FDA approved devices. Faukner discusses how PBM provides a long-lasting solution to pain by repairing the cell structures that lead to pain, how much the treatment costs, how long it takes to be effective, and training providers to use PBM, including a new center that opened at Shepherd University in West Virginia.

 

For more information:
https://pbmfoundation.org

Clinical trials:
https://clinicaltrials.gov/ct2/results?cond=&term=Photobiomodulation&cntry=&state=&city=&dist