I need to complete the chronicle of Keith Alan Lasko, MD, begun last week in my Health Tip Pigs At A Trough with the story of the physician who wrote The Great Billion Dollar Medical Swindle some 35 years ago and then seemed to vanish. But completely disappear? Hardly. Based on what I’ve been reading online, it’s a safe […]
Category: Health Insurance Issues
Pigs At A Trough
I regularly revisit the 2013 Time Magazine Special Report “Why Medical Bills Are Killing Us” with the same conflicted feeling I had at about age six when I learned that something painful, like picking a scab or jiggling a loose tooth, also afforded a secret pleasure that could not be shared with friends. Time’s revelations […]
Functional Medicine 101 + Introducing Dr. Alaina Gemelas
Functional Medicine is without a doubt the fastest growing medical specialty of the 21st century. Public interest in it and public acceptance of it continues to please me. Every day I hear the sentence, “I made this appointment because I wanted a functional approach.” When I ask patients how they learned about it, the answer […]
Meet Our New Naturopathic Doctor: Caley Scott, ND
It wouldn’t surprise me if you didn’t know much about naturopathy. There aren’t many naturopaths in the US and the 5,000 or so we do have are mostly located along the east and west coasts, seriously outnumbered by 800,000 MDs and 100,000 DOs (osteopaths). Just to remind you: these are difficult days for health care […]
Six Super-Devious Big Pharma Tricks
Just about everyone is experiencing the shock of astonishing increases in their health insurance costs, including, interestingly, members of Congress who buy health insurance through Obamacare plans. We tend to forget that all insurance premiums (health, auto, property, life) are pegged to the benefits paid. People are living longer, so life insurance is actually cheaper […]
Health Screening Offers: Should You Bother?
Like most people, you’ve received one of those brochures in the mail with a headline screaming something like “Health Screening Can Save Your Life!” They’re filled with photos of happy, healthy people on golf courses or with their grandchildren and are liberally sprinkled with quotes like, “Dan’s alive today because an ultrasound revealed his aneurysm.”
My Doctor Is A Chiropractic Physician
I’m not setting out to intentionally antagonize my fellow MDs and DOs who read these Health Tips. No acrimonious outrage, please, before I explain. Then feel free to splutter. I’m not writing this for the medical profession. This is for the rest of you, living in a country that spends 17% of its GNP on […]
How To Outsmart Big Pharma
A couple of weeks ago I wrote about the fact that many of us are encountering serious sticker shock at our local pharmacies. This is most apparent when a low-cost generic you’ve taken for years suddenly skyrockets in price, not uncommonly on the order of several hundred percent. I’ve written about the machinations behind this […]
Sticker Shock At Your Pharmacy
It makes little difference if you’re a Democrat or Republican. Every year Big Pharma buys off Washington to the tune of $310 million plus change. Moreover, virtually each Big Pharma company separately makes its own smaller but still significant PAC (political action committee) contribution. Your sticker shock at Walgreen’s or CVS starts with these political […]
Trump’s New American: Sick, Dirty, Dumb, and Homeless
You’ve got to admit the past few days have been Washington nail biters. There was Obamacare (also called the Affordable Care Act, or ACA), slowly mounting the stairs to the guillotine. Up on the platform, blade-release rope in hand, was Donald Trump, quite GQ in his black Brioni and matching hood. The foul and hazy […]
Navigating Your Health Care Without Going Broke
Last week I talked about the problem many of you are facing with skyrocketing insurance premiums and deductibles so astronomical you wonder if you have any health insurance at all. We got into this fine pickle because: US healthcare prices are the highest in the world. With the passage of the Affordable Care Act (ACA/Obamacare), […]
Treacherous Times In Healthcare
Two related ideas come together in this Health Tip and I want to convey why this is all happening. First, a large part of our day at WholeHealth Chicago is spent dealing with insurance companies denying you benefits. Second, many patients have been telling me about the wave of anxiety they feel every time a […]
Rabbit-Hole Medicine: Are Too Many Specialists Dangerous To Your Health?
Many years ago, shortly after I’d finished my residency training, rather than opening a medical office I took a job in a tiny town in northern Minnesota covering a general practitioner’s practice while he took a well-deserved vacation. He was the sort of doctor who could do just about everything, including attending the births of […]
Physician Burnout + Medical Intuitive Skills
Two articles appeared in medical journals and were reported on Medscape over the past few weeks, one on the scary rise of professional burnout among physicians, the other warning about their declining intuitive skills. I’m sure reading them on the same day helped me appreciate how the two are connected. After a quick mull, I […]
Do We Actually Need More Malpractice Attorneys?
Although doctors still stiffen visibly in the presence of the word “malpractice,” today fewer cases than ever are filed. Over the past 20 years, instead of settling claims quickly, malpractice insurance companies fought back. This turned the tide as fewer and fewer cases ruled in favor of the plaintiff. Malpractice attorneys, paid on a contingency […]
The Medical Arms Race and You
With the dissolution of the Soviet Union in 1991, the phrase “arms race” became a less frequently used part of our vocabulary. Before then, both the US and the Russians had been developing, building, and stockpiling larger and more threatening weapons, in the process draining wealth and increasing, rather than decreasing, the odds of armed […]
Behind The Scenes In Healthcare: Your Med Is Denied
Your insurance company sent me a 17-page fax with your name on it. Yes, really, 17 pages, eviscerating my paper tray, guzzling my toner. In its ads, your insurance company cynically crows about its concern for the environment, so I doubt a hard copy will ever arrive in the mail. Your name is on page […]
Obamacare: The Losers
In last week’s Health Tip we reviewed the groups that have done remarkably well with the passage of the Affordable Care Act (ACA), also called Obamacare. Unfortunately, three of the four big winners are industries enjoying record profits as a result of the new law–the health insurance industry, hospitals (and the physician practices they now […]
Obamacare: The Winners and The Losers
Despite the efforts of a few hardliners in Congress, it looks like Obamacare–the Affordable Care Act–is here to stay. After making its best effort to kill the bill at a fetal stage, the big guns of American healthcare (various medical associations, the American Hospital Association, Big Pharma, the health insurance industry) are now enjoying a […]
How Our Health Care System Created The Nazi Doctor
Last week I reported on the chilling story of Farid Fata, the Detroit oncologist (chemotherapy specialist) sentenced to 45 years in jail for fraud after stealing millions of dollars in medical fees because he administered inappropriate chemotherapy to hundreds of patients, many of whom did not have cancer at all. I mentioned that Fata’s crime […]