On Thursday, a panel of medical experts convened by NIH recommended that the word “carcinoma” be removed from the name of a nonmalignant breast tumor called ductal carcinoma in situ because the current terminology can mislead some women into believing they are likely to develop breast cancer, Reuters reports.

(NaturalNews) When people ask why I oppose Obama’s health care reform proposals, I point out what a consumer (and employer) rip-off the current system of pharmaceutical medicine really is. Americans are victims in a monopoly medical scam that’s enforced by the FDA and FTC with lots of propaganda support from the mainstream media and Big Pharma. This fraudulent monopoly system causes Americans to pay the highest prices in the world for pharmaceuticals and health care, even while receiving remarkably poor results in their own health status.

Sadly, even Obama’s health reform plan does little to change this situation: It still traps Americans in a system of overpriced, over-hyped and aggressively marketed pharmaceuticals that harm far more people than they help.

The average American family is right now paying over $1,000 a month for insurance coverage. It’s bankrupting families and driving the American people into an economic wasteland. Meanwhile, other nations are providing superior health care for a whole lot less money. How much less? Get this:

Taiwan’s universal care system provides full coverage for slightly over $21 / month for an individual who is unemployed. A typical family of four where both parents work is paying roughly $75 / month which includes full coverage for both the parents and their two children.

A person who is self-employed pays roughly $45 / month. Someone who is employed at an average income level pays just $10 / month (the employer pays the rest). The out-of-pocket fee for a typical visit to the doctor is roughly five dollars.

Taiwan isn’t some third-world country. This is an advanced, first-world nation with state-of-the-art western medical care. They have high-end technology, world-class physicians trained in western medical schools (I mean, if you believe in western medicine as being useful), and some of the most modern hospitals in Asia. I was actually in a Taiwan hospital just a few months ago, and I got to witness a simple outpatient surgical procedure conducted quickly, efficiently and with amazing medical expertise.

Veterans are provided 100% free health insurance for life. Spouses of veterans get 70% of their insurance paid by the government. All farmers and fishermen only have to pay 30% of their insurance, too, because the other 70% is paid by the government. This means the average Taiwan farmer pays just a few dollars a month for health insurance.

Low-income individuals receive 100% free health care and pay nothing for full coverage. (http://www.nhi.gov.tw/english/webdata.asp?menu=11&menu_id=292&webdata_id=1924)

What’s covered in Taiwan’s universal health care system
Taiwan’s universal health care system covers: (http://www.nhi.gov.tw/english/webdata.asp?menu=11&menu_id=293&webdata_id=1881)

• All doctor checkups and routine medical procedures

• All pharmaceuticals

• All dental care other than cosmetic

• All vision and eye care

• Emergency medicine, including ambulance costs (covers 80%, you pay 20%)

• Physical therapy and rehabilitation services

• All prenatal care and birthing care

• Traditional Chinese Medicine, including acupuncture, herbs and medical massage (Tui-Na)

• At-home care (covers 90%, you pay 10%)

• Long-term chronic care in the hospital (you pay 5% for the first 30 days, then increasingly more the longer you stay, with a maximum of roughly $875 out of pocket per stay, no matter how long)

• All mental health care, including psychiatric medicine

Why Taiwan’s universal care works
If you’re an American reading this, you might be astonished at what has just been presented here. How can Taiwan provide all this universal coverage so affordably?

The answer to this is crucial to understand. It explains why Obama’s health care reform plan is a complete rip-off. One of the main reasons is because Taiwan doesn’t pay monopoly prices for pharmaceuticals (it buys mostly generics). Taiwan doesn’t have an insane system of health insurance companies that deny coverage to patients and deny payments to health care providers. Private insurance companies barely have any role in the system at all, eliminating armies of paper pushers who contribute nothing useful to the health outcome of citizens.

Taiwan also doesn’t have out-of-control medical malpractice lawsuits. This greatly reduces the cost for medical professionals to practice medicine, thereby drastically lowering the end costs to consumers at the same time. There are no “ambulance chasers” in Taiwan, and doctors don’t have to operate out of the constant fear of being sued by some disgruntled patient.

Perhaps most importantly, Taiwan covers preventive medicine and many forms of natural medicine which help keep people healthy at a much lower cost than western medicine. If you need acupuncture or Chinese medicine herbs, just visit an accredited practitioner and your universal health care plan covers most of the cost.

The Taiwan plan isn’t perfect — too many people are using it to hoard prescription drugs that they mail to relatives in China — but it’s so amazingly affordable and efficient that it puts America’s health care system to shame.

In fact, if you happen to know any Taiwanese living in America, you already know that they often travel back to Taiwan for dental work or health care procedures. The costs are so much more affordable there that the difference in price pays for a round-trip air ticket with cash to spare!

So if America supposedly offers “the best health care in the world,” why do people flee the country to get health care services somewhere else? Why do Mexican-Americans go back to Mexico for their dental work and health care? Why do Canadian-Americans cross the border back into Canada for their health care? Why do American corporations send employees to the Philippines on medical tourism jaunts to have heart surgery or knee replacements?

The answer is because American’s health care system is a complete monopoly rip-off, and Obama’s health care reform does nothing to resolve that. It just continues the rip-off and in some ways makes it even worse by forcing everyone to participate in that rip-off. It doesn’t end the health insurance sham or the pharmaceutical cartel. It doesn’t provide nutritional therapies for the people, and it doesn’t meaningfully bring down the cost of health care for the unemployed or self-employed. It just forces everyone to participate in a system that’s ripping off the American people and American businesses. And in doing so, it will put even more American employers out of business, ultimately causing a huge loss of American jobs.

The broken system of health care in America can’t be fixed by fiddling with the details of who pays for monopoly-priced pharmaceuticals. It needs to be discarded and rebuilt from the ground up, with a focus on keeping people healthy rather than fattening the profits of drug companies. Until such a reform proposal comes along that accomplishes that, it doesn’t deserve my support, nor yours.

If Taiwan can provide full, universal health care coverage for $21 / month, why can’t the U.S. figure out a way to make its own health care somewhat affordable? Even getting it down to $75 / month would be a huge achievement, making it affordable for almost everyone. At that price, mandatory participation requirements wouldn’t be so objectionable. Even a minimum-wage worker could afford it.

What’s NOT included in Taiwan’s universal health care system
Taiwan’s universal health care system doesn’t cover everything. Here’s some of what’s not included:

• Cosmetic surgery, including breast enlargement, facial surgery and purely cosmetic dental procedures. If cosmetic reconstruction is necessary due to an accident or injury, then it is covered.

• Vaccinations

• Sex change surgeries

• Infertility procedures or birth control surgeries

• Over-the-counter medications

• Blood (for transfusions) (You have to buy your own blood, or bring a relative who has some to spare)

• Experimental medicine

• Eye glasses and artificial eyes

• Wheel chairs, walking canes

• Hearing aids

• Substance abuse addiction recovery

Those are the big exclusions. Nearly everything else is covered, including dental, prenatal, emergency medicine and medications.

The reason I’m printing all this here is because during this debate about U.S. health care reform, it’s useful to see how other countries have already achieved far more cost-effective and efficient solutions. This indicates that an affordable, quality health care system is possible if only our politicians would find the backbone to create one. If Taiwan can do it, why can’t we?

The differences between Taiwan’s health care philosophy and America’s philosophy is revealingly found in a web-based ad appearing at the Bureau of National Health Insurance for Taiwan (http://www.nhi.gov.tw/). It offers the following advice:

• Exercise
• Drink Water
• Eat a Healthy Diet
• Enjoy Nature
• Be Happy

In the U.S., a similar ad on a U.S. government website would instead say something like:

• Get vaccinated
• Get irradiated with a mammogram
• Take more medications
• Avoid sunlight
• Avoid nutritional supplements and healing herbs

Is it any wonder that the U.S. health care system is failing? The U.S. system pushes pharmaceuticals, surgery and truly bad health advice that just keeps people trapped in a cycle of disease. The Taiwan system, on the other hand, actually encourages people to adopt healthy lifestyle changes and prevent disease. Is it any wonder that Taiwan gets better results?

Of course, even Taiwan’s system is heading for its own troubles, thanks mostly to the influx of pharmaceutical advertising. Big Pharma’s brainwashing ads are convincing more and more Taiwanese that they need pharmaceutical intervention to be healthy, and the increased demand for pharmaceuticals is starting to take a heavy financial toll on the Taiwan system of universal care. To save their health care systems, both Taiwan and the United States will need to end the domination of Big Pharma over modern medicine and re-emphasize the importance of nutrition and disease prevention in supporting the health of any nation.

(NaturalNews) Women who give birth at home do not have any higher rate of complications or death than women who give birth in a hospital, according to a study conducted by researchers from the TNO Institute for Applied Scientific Research in the Netherlands, and published in the journal BJOG.

“We found that for low-risk mothers at the start of their labor it is just as safe to deliver at home with a midwife as it is in hospital with a midwife,” researcher Simone Buitendijk said. “These results should strengthen policies that encourage low-risk women at the onset of labor to choose their own place of birth.”

One-third of women in the Netherlands choose to give birth at home, due to a government encouragement of the policy. Because the Netherlands has one of the highest rates in Europe of infant death during or just after birth, some researchers have suggested that home births might be unsafe.

In the current study, researchers examined data from 530,000 births attended by midwives, and found no difference in the risk of mother or infant death between home births and hospital births.

The study looked only at low-risk women, defined as those going into labor with no known complications. Known complications include a prior cesarean section, a breech baby or a baby with congenital abnormalities.

The study did not include hospital births attended by a doctor rather than a midwife.

The researchers found that a full one-third of women who began their birth at home eventually had to be transferred to a hospital. This might have occurred due to complications such as an abnormal infant heart rate, or simply because the mother chose to opt for pharmaceutical painkillers that could not be administered at home. Even in cases where women were transferred to the hospital, however, neither the mother nor infant was at any higher risk of dying than in any of the other births in the study.

Sources for this story include: news.bbc.co.uk.

(NaturalNews) As the U.S. continues to face economic woes, real estate melt-downs and mounting unemployment, many people worry that their standard of living may suffer. But if you think good health is a far grander treasure than a big house and fat bank account, here’s good news: the recession could turn out to be good for a lot of Americans, both physically and emotionally.

In poor countries where people struggle to live on less than $5,000 per capita a year, it makes sense that economic growth improves health because it increases access to enough food to survive, clean water to drink, shelter from the elements and basic health services for emergencies. However, a paper just published in the Canadian Medical Association Journal (CMAJ) concludes that in countries with a strong per capita income, greater national wealth does not equate with better health for its citizens.

In fact, life expectancy goes up, not down, in developed countries during economic recessions, according to the CMAJ analysis. “In terms of business cycles, mortality is procyclical, meaning it goes up with economic expansions and down with contractions, and not countercyclical (the opposite), as expected,” Dr. Stephen Bezruchka of the University of Washington’s School of Public Health writes in the study. “The United States, with the highest GNP (gross national product) per capita in the world, has a lower life expectancy than nearly all the other rich countries and a few poor ones, despite spending half of the world’s health care bill.’

So how could a recession, with stress-producing unemployment, improve anyone’s health? Dr. Bezruchka’s paper does acknowledge that suicides and mental health woes can increase when people are out of work. However, there is also evidence that smoking, excessive alcohol consumption and overeating are likely to decline during recessions, producing beneficial impacts on health. What’s more, when unemployment rates are high, people have time to develop closer relationships with friends and family (especially children) and that can result in a lower mortality rate, according to the public health researcher.

Writing in the on-line nurses’ blog “Off the Charts”, American Journal of Nursing clinical editor Christine Moffa states that she, too, sees a silver health lining in the current recession. The reason? It may spur people to get more exercise by choosing to walk instead of driving or taking the bus. In fact, Moffa writes she decided to give up her own $80-per-month MetroCard and now walks to and from work.

World War II food rationing provides an important historical example of how economic hardships can actually benefit health. A paper published in the journal Nutrition Today by scientist Carolyn D. Berdanier, Ph.D., points out that food rationing was a challenge to homemakers but a boon to overall health. Folks on the home front cut down on fatty foods because they had to stretch their small allotments of foods like butter and cheese. And to supplement their meager pantries, people turned to growing and eating lots of home-grown vegetables in what became known as Victory Gardens.

In the long run , this new way of eating produced unexpected and remarkable health benefits. Despite the stress of economic hardships and a world at war, obesity rates dropped and new cases of type 2 diabetes dramatically decreased, too.

For more information:
http://www.cmaj.ca/cgi/content/full/181/5/281
http://journals.lww.com/nutritiontodayonline/Abstract/2006/07000/Food_Shortages_During_World_War_II__Can_We_Learn.5.aspx
http://ajnoffthecharts.wordpress.com/2009/04/01/can-the-recession-be-good-for-the-country%E2%80%99s-health/

Instead of the classic scalpel, surgeons can also operate with an electroscalpel. A significant advantage to this technique is that while a cut is being made, blood vessels are closed off and hemorrhaging eliminated. Now another advantage appears to be added as well: a German-Hungarian research team has developed a mass-spectrometry-based technique by which tissues can be analyzed during a surgical procedure. As the team led by Zoltn Takts reports in the journal Angewandte Chemie, it appears to be possible to distinguish between cancerous tumor cells and the surrounding healthy tissue in real time during cancer surgery. Until now, precise histological examination of the removed tissue has followed after tumor surgery, and has mandatory several days. If it reveals that the tumor has not bee…

Eventhough screening for prostate cancer with the Prostate Specific Antigen (PSA) test in men ages 50-70 can detect the cancer before it becomes symptomatic, knowing whether screening is beneficial for these men is uncertain. Recent trials have shown small or no reductions in prostate cancer mortality among those screened. The small potential for benefit must be balanced against the more common and immediate downsides of increasing the chance of prostate cancer diagnosis and therapy-related complications…….. (Source: Medicineworld.org: New Article Alert)

Health officials pause a vaccination program in the English city of Coventry after a 14-year-old girl died after receiving a cervical cancer vaccine. (Source: WDSU.com – Health)

British health authorities are investigating after a 14-year-old girl died a few hours after receiving a cervical cancer vaccine. (Source: CTV Health)

A 14-year-old British girl died after receiving a cervical cancer vaccine made by GlaxoSmithKline, but a link between the death and the drug has not yet been established, health officials said on Monday. (Source: FOXNews.com)

Health authorities in Britain are investigating after a 14-year-old girl died a few hours after she received a vaccination shot to protect against a virus that causes cervical cancer. (Source: CBC | Health)