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A Hospital Charged $1,877 to Pierce a 5-Year-Old’s Ears. This Is Why Health Care Costs So Much.

(ProPublica) This story was co-published with NPR’s Shots blog.

Two years ago, Margaret O’Neill brought her 5-year-old daughter to Children’s Hospital Colorado because the band of tissue that connected her tongue to the floor of her mouth was too tight. The condition literally called being “tongue-tied,” made it hard for the girl to make “th” sounds.

It’s a common problem with a simple fix: an outpatient procedure to snip the tissue.

During a pre-operative visit, the surgeon offered to throw in a surprising perk. Should we pierce her ears while she’s under?

O’Neill’s first thought was that her daughter seemed a bit young to have her ears pierced. Her second: Why was a surgeon offering to do this? Wasn’t that something done free at the mall with the purchase of a starter set of earrings?

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“That’s so funny,” O’Neill recalled saying. “I didn’t think you did ear piercings.”

The surgeon, Peggy Kelley, told her it could be a nice thing for a child, O’Neill said. All she had to do is bring earrings on the day of the operation. O’Neill agreed, assuming it would be free.

Her daughter emerged from surgery with her tongue newly freed and a pair of small gold stars in her ears.

Only months later did O’Neill discover her cost for this extracurricular work: $1,877.86 for “operating room services” related to the ear piercing — a fee her insurer was unwilling to pay.

At first, O’Neill assumed the bill was a mistake. Her daughter hadn’t needed her ears pierced, and O’Neill would never have agreed to it if she’d known the cost. She complained in phone calls and in writing.

The hospital wouldn’t budge. In fact, O’Neill said it dug in, telling her to pay up or it would send the bill to collections. The situation was “absurd,” she said.

“There are a lot of things we’d pay extra for a doctor to do,” she said. “This is not one of them.”

Kelley and the hospital declined to comment to ProPublica about the ear piercing.

Surgical ear piercings are rare, according to the Health Care Cost Institute, a nonprofit that maintains a database of commercial health insurance claims. The institute could only find a few dozen possible cases a year in its vast cache of billing data. But O’Neill’s case is a vivid example of health care waste known as overuse.

Into this category fall things like unnecessary tests, higher-than-needed levels of care or surgeries that have proven ineffective.

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Wasteful use of medical care has “become so normalized that I don’t think people in the system see it,” said Dr. Vikas Saini, president of The Lown Institute, a Boston think tank focused on making health care more effective, affordable and just. “We need more serious studies of what these practices are.”

Experts estimate the U.S. health care system wastes $765 billion annually — about a quarter of all the money that’s spent. Of that, an estimated $210 billion goes to unnecessary or needlessly expensive care, according to a 2012 report by the National Academy of Medicine.

Listen to the Story

ProPublica has been documenting the ways waste is baked into the system. Hospitals throw away new supplies and nursing homes discard still-potent medication. Drugmakers combine cheap ingredients to create expensive specialty pills and arbitrary drug expiration dates force hospitals and pharmacies to toss valuable drugs.

We also reported how drug companies make oversize eyedrops and vials of cancer drugs, forcing patients to pay for medication they are unable to use. In response, a group of U.S. senators introduced a bill this month to reduce what they called “colossal and completely preventable waste.”

But any discussion of waste needs to look how health care dollars are thrown away on procedures and care that patients don’t need — and how hard it is to stop it.

Just ask Christina Arenas.

Arenas, 34, has a history of noncancerous cysts in her breasts so last summer when her gynecologist found some lumps in her breast and sent her for an ultrasound to rule out cancer, she wasn’t worried.

But on the day of scan, the sonographer started the ultrasound, then stopped to consult a radiologist. They told her she needed a mammogram before the ultrasound could be done.

Arenas, an attorney who is married to a doctor, told them she didn’t want a mammogram. She didn’t want to be exposed to the radiation, or pay for the procedure. But sitting on the table in a hospital gown, she didn’t have much leverage to negotiate.

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Christina Arenas of Washington, D.C., went to the doctor for a breast ultrasound but said she was required to get more imaging tests than she needed, including the mammogram on her computer.(Allison Shelley for ProPublica)

So, she agreed to a mammogram, followed by an ultrasound. The findings: no cancer. As Arenas suspected, she had cysts, fluid-filled sacs that are common in women her age.

The radiologist told her to come back in two weeks so they could drain the cysts with a needle, guided by yet another ultrasound. But when she returned she got two ultrasounds: one before the procedure and another as part of it.

The radiologist then sent the fluid from the cysts to pathology to test it for cancer. That test confirmed — again — that there wasn’t any cancer. Her insurance whittled the bills down to $2,361, most of which she had to pay herself because of her insurance plan.

Arenas didn’t like paying for something she didn’t think she needed and resented the loss of control. “It was just kind of, ‘Take it or leave it.’ The whole thing. You had no choice as to your own care.”

Arenas, sure she’d been given care she didn’t need, discussed it with one of her husband’s friends who is a gynecologist. She learned the process could have been more simple and affordable.

Arenas complained to The George Washington Medical Faculty Associates, the large Washington, D.C., doctor group that provided her treatment. Her request to have the bill reduced was denied. Then bill collectors got involved, so she demanded a refund and threatened legal action.

She said she never got to speak to anyone. Her demand was routed to an attorney, who declined her request because there was “no inappropriate care.” She also complained to her insurance company and the Washington, D.C., attorney general’s office, but they declined to help reduce the bill.

Overtreatment related to mammograms is a common problem. The national cost of false-positive tests and overdiagnosed breast cancer is estimated at $4 billion a year, according to a 2015 study in Health Affairs. Some of this is fueled by anxious patients, some by doctors who know that missing a cancer diagnosis can be grounds for a medical malpractice lawsuit. But advocates, patients and even some doctors note the screenings can also be a cash cow for physicians and hospitals.

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With Arenas’ permission, we shared her case with experts, including Dr. Barbara Levy, vice president of health policy for the American College of Obstetricians and Gynecologists and three radiologists.

Levy said there’s a standard way to treat a suspected breast cyst that’s efficient and cost-effective. If the lump is large, as in Arenas’ case, a doctor should first use a needle to try and drain it. If the fluid is clear and the lump goes away there’s no cause for concern or extra testing. If the fluid is bloody or can’t be drained, or the mass is solid, then medical imaging tests can determine if it’s cancerous.

However, doctors often choose to order imaging tests rather than drain apparent cysts, Levy said. “We’re so afraid the next one might be cancer even though the last 10 weren’t,” she said. “So, we overtest.”

Levy and the radiologists agreed that at least some of Arenas’ care seemed excessive. But their opinions varied, which shows why it can be difficult to reduce unnecessary care. Standards are often open-ended, so they allow for a wide range of practices and doctors have autonomy to take the route they think is best for patients.

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The American College of Radiology recommends an ultrasound for a 32-year-old — Arenas’ age at the time of the procedure — with an unidentified breast mass. Mammograms are also an option, but “most benign lesions in young women are not visualized by mammography,” the guidelines state.

Arenas reviews her medical bills. Experts called the care to treat her breast cysts “excessive.” (Allison Shelley for ProPublica)

Dr. Phillip Shaffer, a radiologist who’s practiced for decades in Columbus, Ohio, said he didn’t think Arenas needed the mammogram. “I wouldn’t do it,” he said. “If I did an ultrasound and saw cysts, I’d say you have cysts. In 32-year-olds the mammogram does almost nothing.”

Dr. Jay Baker, chair of the American College of Radiology breast imaging communications committee, agreed that the ultrasound alone would have “almost certainly” identified the cyst. But, he said, maybe something about the lumps concerned Arenas’ radiologist, so a mammogram was ordered.

None of the radiologists consulted by ProPublica could explain why two ultrasounds on the return visit would be necessary. According to Arenas’ medical records, the practice told one reviewer that two were done to make sure the cysts hadn’t changed.

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Shaffer didn’t buy it. “They just billed her twice for one thing,” he said.

Levy, the gynecologist, said it’s “excessive” to do two ultrasounds. And, she said, there was no need to send clear fluid to pathology.

Arenas offered to waive her privacy rights so the practice that provided her treatment could speak to ProPublica. Officials from the practice declined to comment. Her medical records show that in response to reviews by her insurance company and the attorney general’s office, her doctors said the care was appropriate.

Since then she has her cysts drained without images in her gynecologist’s office for about $350. But Arenas said on two occasions she’s used a needle at home to do it herself. (Doctors do not recommend this approach.) She admits it was an extreme choice, but at the time she worried she would be subjected to more unnecessary tests.

“I was taken advantage of because I was a captive audience,” she said.

In a brick-and-glass office park just outside Roanoke, Virginia, Missy Conley and Jeanne Woodward have battled on behalf of hundreds of patients who believe they’ve been overtreated or overcharged. The two work for Medliminal, a company that challenges erroneous and inflated medical bills on behalf of consumers in exchange for a share of the savings.

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The two women excitedly one-up each other with their favorite outrages. How about the two cases involving unnecessary pregnancy tests? One of the patients was 82 —decades past her childbearing years. The other involved a younger woman who no longer had a uterus.

Another case involved an uninsured man who fell off his mountain bike and hurt his shoulder. The first responders pressured him to take an air ambulance to a hospital when it would have been faster for his friends to drive him. He got charged $44,000 for the whirlybird. Such unexpectedly pricey flights — and the aggressive billing that comes with them — have been featured in stories by NPR, The New York Times and The Atlantic.

Medliminal gets dozens of calls a week from consumers who are fed up with the medical system.

Woodward, a nurse and certified medical auditor, regularly sees patients billed for unnecessary lab tests. A man with diabetes may only need his glucose measured, but the doctor may order a bundle of 14 unnecessary tests, she said. The extra tests inflate the tab.

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If there’s a billing dispute it can take months of phone calls and emails to get a case resolved, said Conley, who gained an insider’s knowledge during years working for insurance companies.

Patients fighting bills on their own often give up and pay the bill or let it go to collections, she said. “The whole system is broken,” Conley said.

Saini, president of The Lown Institute, said profit is a major driver of overuse.

“Providers are getting constant messages from superiors or partners to maximize revenue,” Saini said. “In this system we have, that’s not a crime. That’s business as usual.”

Patients aren’t true health care consumers because they typically can’t shop by price and they often don’t have control over the care they receive, Saini said. The medical evidence may support multiple paths for providing care, but patients are unable to tell what is or is not discretionary, he said. Time pressure adds urgency, which makes it difficult to discuss or research various options.

“It’s sort of this perfect storm where no one is really evil but the net effect is predatory,” Saini said.

Once the service or treatment is provided, the bill is on its way, with little forgiveness.

In 2015, Dr. Dong Chang, the director of the medical intensive care unit at Harbor-UCLA Medical Center, a public hospital in Los Angeles, decided to see whether the care being delivered in his ICU was appropriate.

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Resources were scarce in his ICU, and he suspected it might be possible to manage them better. So, he and his colleagues reviewed the records of all the patients in the unit over the course of a year to see whether the patients might have been either too sick, or too healthy, to benefit from intensive care.

The results shocked them. They determined the care may not have been beneficial to more than half of the patients. “ICU care is inefficient, devoting substantial resources to patients less likely to benefit,” their study, published in the February edition of JAMA Internal Medicine, concluded.

Dr. Dong Chang, director of the medical intensive care unit at Harbor-UCLA Medical Center, has found that many patients are too sick or too healthy to benefit from intensive care. (Jenna Schoenefeld for ProPublica)

Chang and his team also reviewed the use of intensive care at 94 hospitals in two states, Maryland and Washington, focusing on four common conditions that can lead to treatment in an intensive care unit.

They found wide variation in the types of patients hospitals determined needed intensive care. One hospital put 16 percent of patients with diabetic ketoacidosis, a serious condition that can result in a coma, in intensive care, while another hospital did so with 81 percent of such patients. The range for patients with pulmonary embolisms was from 5 percent to 44 percent and for those with congestive heart failure, it was 4 percent to 49 percent.

Chang attributes the difference to doctors using intensive care based on their habits, hunches or training. Profit, he said, may also be a motive, but it didn’t appear to be a driving force.

“We really don’t have good standards and a good discussion going on about who should receive ICU care,” Chang said.

The unnecessary intensive care can also be harmful. The study found intensive care patients underwent more invasive procedures, like the insertion of catheters, including central lines, which carry the risk of infection. Overuse of the ICU is bad for patients who don’t need it, Chang said. Survival rates were also no better at the hospitals that used intensive care the most.

Reducing unneeded intensive care stays would save big money. Intensive care costs about $10,000 for a typical stay and accounts for 4 percent of national health care expenditures, according to research cited by Chang’s team.

If the hospitals in Maryland and Washington with the highest rates of intensive care use had behaved more like those with lower use, it would save around $137 million, the study estimated. That’s the savings for fewer than 100 hospitals in two states. There are about 4,000 hospitals nationwide, suggesting that reducing unnecessary intensive care use could save billions of dollars a year.

Chang hesitated to call the overuse of intensive care “wasted” health care spending. He said the medical literature calls it “non-beneficial” care, which is maybe a nicer way of saying the same thing.

For O’Neill, her dispute of the fee for her daughter’s ear piercing was a trip into the hell of medical billing.

O’Neill is an attorney, so she knows how to weed through fine print. But it took her untold hours and phone calls to the hospital and her insurance company to root out the issue. The hospital had initially billed her insurer for the $1,877.86 for “operating room services” related to the ear piercing. The company rightly rejected payment for the cosmetic procedure. So, the hospital billed the family, according to her medical and billing records and correspondence.

The surgeon billed the family an additional $110, which O’Neill paid.

The operative report describes the piercing in obscure technical terms: “The bilateral lobules were prepped with betadine and a 18 gauge was used to pierce the left lobule in the planned position …”

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O’Neill said she got nowhere in several conversations with the manager of the hospital’s team that deals with payments directly from consumers. Then in mid-July, O’Neill wrote a letter to the manager explaining that they were at an impasse and urged the hospital to cancel the bill.

In early August, ProPublica contacted the hospital and surgeon to inquire about the ear piercing. The hospital spokeswoman replied in an email that, generally speaking, ear piercings during surgery are rare and only done at the request of a family. (The medical records say O’Neill requested the ear piercing.) It would not result in a separate operating room charge, she wrote.

The spokeswoman’s explanation didn’t jibe with the hospital’s bill, which even listed the billing code for ear piercing. She declined to discuss O’Neill’s case or explain the discrepancy.

In mid-August, the self-pay manager sent O’Neill a letter saying, “the remaining balance of $1,877.86” would be removed “as a one-time courtesy adjustment.”

The manager added that the hospital hadn’t done anything wrong. The account was “correctly documented, coded, charged and billed according to industry standards,” she wrote.

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And that’s just the problem. The hospital’s $1,877 bill for the ear piercing was within industry standards.

As for O’Neill, she and her daughter had to endure one additional insult. The surgeon’s piercing of one ear was off-kilter so it had to be redone. This time O’Neill had it done at the mall, for about 30 bucks.

Have you seen examples of wasted health care spending? Share them with Marshall.

American Heart Association President Suffers Heart Attack at 52

(Dr. Mercola) In the health paradox of the year, 52-year-old cardiologist John Warner, president of the American Heart Association (AHA), recently suffered a heart attack in the middle of a health conference.^1,² In a statement, the association reported Warner was in stable condition after having a stent placed to open a blocked artery. Part of Warner’s speech at the Scientific Sessions conference in Anaheim, California, centered around his own family’s struggle with heart disease.

“After my son was born and we were introducing him to his extended family, I realized something very disturbing: There were no old men on either side of my family. None. All the branches of our family tree cut short by cardiovascular disease,” Warner said in his speech.³

“Together we can make sure old men and old women are regulars at family reunions, that people live long enough and healthy enough to enjoy walks and fishing trips with their grandchildren and maybe even their great-grandchildren. In other words, I look forward to a future where … children grow up surrounded by so many healthy, beloved, elderly relatives that they couldn’t imagine life any other way.”

The AHA’s CEO, Nancy Brown, said in a statement:⁴ “John wanted to reinforce that this incident underscores the important message that he left us with in his presidential address … that much progress has been made, but much remains to be done.”

Many AHA Recommendations Worsen Heart Health

In all likelihood, Warner followed AHA recommendations, many of which are actually recipes for heart disease disaster. Of the foods scientifically proven to cause heart disease and clogged arteries, excess sugar and industrially processed omega-6 vegetable oils, found in nearly all processed foods, compete for space at the top the list. And what kinds of foods does the AHA recommend to protect your heart?

Flawed Fat Recommendations Have Been Followed With Disastrous Consequences

Since the 1950s, when vegetable oils began being promoted over saturated fats like butter, Americans have dutifully followed this advice, dramatically increasing consumption of vegetable oil. Soybean oil, for example, has risen by 600 percent while butter, tallow and lard consumption has been halved. We’ve also dramatically increased sugar consumption, which has also been implicated as a primary contributor to heart disease and other chronic health problems.¹⁰

While following this advice, Americans have gotten fatter and sicker. Heart disease rates have not improved even though people have been following the AHA’s “heart healthy diet.” Common sense tells us if the AHA’s advice hasn’t worked in the last 65 years, it’s not likely to start working now. Modern research is just now starting to reveal what actually happens at the molecular level when you consume vegetable oil and margarine, and it’s not good.

Vegetable Oils Are Anything But Healthy

Other research confirms such findings by linking fried foods to an increased risk of death. For example, eating fried potatoes more than twice a week has been shown to double a person’s risk of death compared to never eating fried potatoes.¹⁵ Animal and human research has also found vegetable oils promote:

Obesity and fatty liver¹⁶
Lethargy and prediabetic symptoms¹⁷
Chronic pain/idiopathic pain syndromes (meaning pain with no discernible cause)¹⁸
Migraines¹⁹
Crohn’s disease and ulcerative colitis²⁰

According to Dr. Cate Shanahan,²¹ a family physician and author of “Deep Nutrition: Why Your Genes Need Traditional Food,” the idea that PUFAs are healthier than saturated fats falls flat when you enter the field of biochemistry, because it’s “biochemically implausible.” In other words, the molecular structure of PUFA is such that it’s far more prone to react with oxygen, and these reactions disrupt cellular activity and cause inflammation.²² Oxidative stress and inflammation, in turn, are hallmarks not only of heart disease and heart attacks but of most chronic diseases.^23,²⁴

“[T]he folks at the AHA claim saturated fat is pro-inflammatory and causes arterial plaque and heart attacks — but there is no biochemically plausible explanation for their argument,” she told me in an emailed rebuttal to the AHA advisory.“Saturated fat is very stable, and will not react with oxygen the way PUFA fat does, not until the fundamental laws of the universe are altered.

Our bodies do need some PUFA fat, but we need it to come from food like walnuts and salmon or gently processed (as in cold pressed, unrefined) oils like flax and artisanal grapeseed, not from vegetable oils because these are refined, bleached and deodorized, and the PUFA fats are molecularly mangled into toxins our body cannot use.”

Open Letter to AHA President

In an open letter to AHA president Warner, Dr. William Davis, a New York cardiologist and author of The New York Times best seller “Wheat Belly, Lose the Wheat, Lose the Weight, and Find Your Path Back to Health,” writes, in part:

“If you ignore the nonsense that AHA policy dictates, you can absolutely gain control over cardiovascular risk. But you will NOT find the answers in any AHA policy. I learned these lessons practicing as an interventional cardiologist, then abandoning this ridiculous way of managing coronary disease to devote my efforts to early detection and prevention.

So, I thought I would articulate some of these thoughts in an open letter to Dr. Warner as he recovers from his procedure … Dr. Warner — … There are a number of reasons why someone like you — deeply-entrenched in the conventional world of heart disease management and what passes for prevention — highlights the miserable failure that the modern coronary care paradigm represents:

1) We are trapped by the outdated but profitable lipid hypothesis … 2) We know from abundant data that small oxidation- and glycation-prone LDL particles are highly atherogenic … are potent triggers of the inflammation cascade … and are triggered to abundant degrees in some genotypes upon consumption of the amylopectin A of grains …

[Y]es, the food that the American Heart Association advises to fill the diet with — and sugars … I am hoping that, now that this disease has touched you personally, your eyes will be opened to the corrupt and absurd policies of conventional coronary care and the American Heart Association.”

The Magic Pill Myth Needs to End

Davis goes on to note that heart disease is a multifactorial problem that cannot be solved with a pill.

“Thinking that a statin drug … [is] sufficient to prevent coronary events is absurd and overly-simplistic, like thinking that taking Aricept for dementia will stop the disease — of course, it does no such thing,” he writes, adding, “There are no drugs to ‘treat’ many of the contributors to coronary atherogenesis. But there are many non-drug strategies to identify, then correct, such causes.”

Nondrug prevention strategies suggested by Davis include:

•Avoiding any and all dietary factors that provoke insulin resistance, glycation and formation of small, dense LDL particles. Importantly, this would include avoiding the harmful fats recommended by the AHA such as margarine and processed vegetable oils, and keeping your total daily fructose consumption below 25 grams per day.

•Optimizing your vitamin D level.

•Optimizing your omega-3 fat intake: An omega-3 index of 10 percent or greater is associated with “dramatic reduction in cardiovascular events,” Davis notes. Indeed, a 2010 analysis²⁵ found that while diets higher in omega-6 fats (found in ample amounts in vegetable oils) and lower in omega-3s increased the risk of nonfatal myocardial infarction and death from heart disease by 13 percent; a mixed diet of both omega-3 and omega-6 fats reduced these risks by 22 percent.

Meanwhile, the AHA recommends higher intakes of omega-6, saying²⁶ “Aggregate data from randomized trials, case-control and cohort studies, and long-term animal feeding experiments indicate that the consumption of at least 5 percent to 10 percent of energy from omega-6 PUFAs reduces the risk of coronary heart disease relative to lower intakes.

The data also suggest that higher intakes appear to be safe and may be even more beneficial.”This statement runs counter to a large body of research suggesting the converse — specifically, that reducing omega-6 fats and increasing omega-3 is better for your heart.

•Addressing your thyroid function.

•Optimizing your gut microbiome to address dysbiosis caused by excess sugar, chlorinated and fluoridated water, and exposure to antibiotics, pesticides and common heartburn drugs.

Stent Placement No Better Than Placebo

Research also does not support the routine procedure of coronary artery angioplasty and stent placement. In fact, recent research suggests up to 50 percent of all stent placements may be unnecessary.²⁷ Moreover, the effectiveness of this procedure is right on par with placebo. In a recent study published in The Lancet, researchers from Imperial College London investigated the difference between patients who had received a stent for stable angina and those who underwent a placebo intervention.²⁸

In the short video above, lead author and interventional cardiologist Dr. Rasha Al-Lamee, describes the study and its results. Two hundred participants with severe single vessel blockage were recruited from five sites across the U.K.²⁹ During the initial six weeks, all patients underwent an exercise test followed by intensive medical treatment.

At that point, they were randomly assigned to two groups. The first underwent a percutaneous intervention (PCI) during which coronary angioplasty was performed and a stent was placed. The second group also underwent a PCI procedure with an angiogram but without a balloon angioplasty or stent placement.³⁰

For the following six weeks, neither the patient nor the physician knew if the patient received the stent. At the conclusion of the six weeks, patients again underwent an exercise test and were questioned about their symptoms. The researchers found both groups experienced nearly identical improvements in exercise tolerance and no difference in reported improvements of their symptoms.³¹ From the data, Al-Lamee commented:³²

“Surprisingly, even though the stents improved blood supply, they didn’t provide more relief of symptoms compared to drug treatments, at least in this patient group. It seems that the link between opening a narrowing coronary artery and improving symptoms is not as simple as everyone had hoped.”

A New Way of Looking at Heart Disease

Download Interview Transcript

In this interview, Dr. Thomas Cowan, family physician, founding member of the Weston A. Price Foundation and author of “Human Heart, Cosmic Heart: A Doctor’s Quest to Understand, Treat and Prevent Cardiovascular Disease,” reveals how your heart and circulatory system works. This understanding may go a long way toward changing the way you understand heart disease.

He makes a strong case for heart disease being rooted in mitochondrial dysfunction and believes plaque formation alone cannot explain a heart attack.”[Conventionally], it’s all about the plaque,” Cowan says. “My point in the book is that it’s NOT about the plaque.” The conventional view is that your heart functions like a pump — a pressure propulsion system caused by the muscular contraction of the ventricles.

Cowan explains that your heart is actually better described as a hydraulic ram — a vortex-creating machine — where the primary mover of blood is the interaction occurring between the negatively charged vessel walls and the positively charged water in your blood. Importantly, the following three natural energies result in a separation of charges that improve blood flow:

1. Sunlight charges up your blood vessels, which increases the flow of blood. When the sun’s rays penetrate your skin, it causes a massive increase of nitric oxide that acts as a vasodilator. As much as 60 percent of your blood can be shunted to the surface of your skin through the action of nitric oxide.

This helps absorb solar radiation, which then causes the water in your blood to capture the energy and become structured. This is a key component for a healthy heart. The ideal is to be exposed to the sun while grounding, meaning walking barefoot. This forms a biological circuit that makes it work even better.

2.Negative ions from the Earth, also known as earthing or grounding. This also charges up your blood vessels, creates a separation of charges, creates more positive ions and allows the blood to flow upward, against gravity.

3.The field effect or touch from another living being, such as laying on of hands.

A Healthy Heart Is the Result of a Healthy Lifestyle

As noted by Cowan, “The best thing is to be, more or less, with shorts or naked on the beach, with the saltwater, which acts as an electrical conductor, holding hands with somebody you love. That’s how you structure the water [in your blood vessels].” Sun exposure, grounding and skin-to-skin contact are three heart disease prevention strategies that, ideally, everyone should be doing, and it doesn’t get a whole lot easier or less expensive than this.

That said, your heart health is really dependent on your diet — what you eat and when you eat. In my view, the best treatment for heart disease is to work your way up to an intermittent fasting schedule where you’re fasting for 20 hours a day. When you do eat, make sure you eat real food, and consider a cyclical ketogenic diet, high in healthy fats, low in net carbs with moderate protein.

The Robot That Could Revolutionise Home Care for Elderly People

(Independent) Not all robots will take over human jobs. My colleagues and I have just unveiled a prototype care robot that we hope could take on some of the more mundane work of looking after elderly and disabled people and those with conditions such as dementia.

Smarter than smart

But for many people, this type of technology is still extremely limited. For example, how can someone with hearing problems use a conventional smart hub such as the Amazon Echo, a device that communicates exclusively through audio signals? What happens if someone falls and they are unable to press an emergency call button on a wearable device?

Stevie overcomes these problems because it can communicate in multiple ways. It can talk, make gestures, and show facial expressions and display text on its screen. In this way, it follows the principles of universal design, because it is designed to adapt to the needs of the greatest possible number of users, not just the able majority.

We hope to have a version of Stevie ready to sell within two years. We still need to refine the design, decide on and develop new features and make sure it complies with major regulations. All this needs to be guided by extensive user testing so we are planning a range of pilots in Ireland, the UK and the US starting in summer 2018. This will help us achieve a major milestone on the road to developing robots that really do make our lives easier.

FDA, DEA Launch Massive Assault On Kratom – Drug War For Miracle Plant Ramping Up

(Natural Blaze by Bran don Turbeville) To no one’s surprise, the U.S. government, after hysterically declaring a “national emergency” over America’s opioid crisis, is once again setting its sights on Kratom, the non-addictive natural plant that has helped thousands of Americans wean themselves off opioids.

In 2015, the DEA announced its plans to place Kratom on the list of Controlled Substances (in the same scheduling level as heroin to be exact) but, amid public outcry, the agency backed off, deferring to FDA “review” and “advice.” Many optimistic Kratom activists were tempted to rest on their laurels, trusting that the FDA would prove to be more reasonable in relation to Kratom and hoping the testimonials, overwhelming public support for Kratom, and the science itself would win the day.

As is typically the case in life, the optimists were sorely disappointed.

The FDA, long known to be essentially run by Big Pharma, has now joined the ranks of the DEA (which also placed CBD oil on the list of controlled substances on the same level as heroin) in a scathing attack on Kratom, signalling that the end may be nigh for the miracle plant if activists do not succeed in fighting back both behemoth agencies who act as the enforcement arms of Big Pharma, the private prison industry, and the police state.

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As the Washington Post reported,

The Food and Drug Administration issued a strong warning Tuesday to consumers to stay away from the herbal supplement kratom, saying regulators are aware of 36 deaths linked to products containing the substance.
. . . . .

But in a statement, FDA Commissioner Scott Gottlieb said that there is no “reliable evidence” to support the use of kratom as a treatment for opioid-use disorder, and that there are no other FDA-approved uses for kratom.

Rather, he said, evidence shows that the herb has similar effects to narcotics like opioids, “and carries similar risks of abuse, addiction and, in some cases, death.” He said that calls to U.S. poison control centers involving kratom increased tenfold between 2010 and 2015, and that the herb is associated with side effects including seizures, liver damage and withdrawal symptoms.

Virtually none of the scientists who are working with Kratom, however, share the same hysteria and apocalyptic concerns of the FDA, which itself has overseen massive outbreaks of death and addiction as a result of pharmaceuticals it has approved as safe. Indeed, many users of Kratom found the plant in order to ween themselves off the opioids that the FDA so delightfully approved and promoted. Now, with middle America in an alleged “crisis,” the FDA wants to remove one of the few helpful resources to getting clean. The DEA, of course, continues to hunt those same Americans as if they were deer during open season for imprisonment, harassment, fines, and/or on-sight executions.

It should be noted that the FDA’s claims of 36 deaths have been largely disproven before the FDA even made the claims, with many of those deaths attributed to people who had drugs in their system in addition to Kratom or who died of other causes.

Again, as the Washington Post reports,

Jack Henningfield, an addiction specialist who works at the drug policy consulting group Pinney Associates, which has done work for the American Kratom Association, said that surveys have shown that people using opioids to treat pain or satisfy an addiction were able to stop using them by drinking kratom tea. He argued that kratom’s “overall abuse potential and risk of death isn’t anything close to narcotics like opioids” and warned that restricting or banning the substance could drive some people back to opioids or onto the black market to get kratom.

In a study last year for the American Kratom Association, Henningfield, an adjunct professor of behavior policy at Johns Hopkins, found that effectively banning kratom “is not warranted from a public health perspective and is more likely to cause public health problems that do not exist.”

At worst, Kratom is only marginally addictive, with withdrawal symptoms similar to that of caffeine if taken in high doses for long periods of time . . . maybe. The overwhelming majority of Kratom users, however, do not report “withdrawal” symptoms at all.

Scott Gottlieb’s ridiculous rant about the dangers of Kratom is not based on science. It is based on the bottom line for the police state, Big Pharma, and the private prison industrial complex. Kratom threatens to reduce the amount of Americans slated to fill up jail cells, the dependency on pain medications, the use of SSRIs and other anti-depressants. Therefore, like marijuana, Kratom has to be stomped out so the gravy train can continue un-interrupted for the pharmaceutical and prison industries.

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Now, as everyone paying attention to the Kratom debate and the current climate in the United States would have expected, an unelected, non-legislative body of totalitarians who claim non-psychoactive CBD oil is the same as heroin and whose entire existence depends on locking up peaceful people for possessing or consuming plants will likely ensure that thousands of Americans will be denied access to a life-saving plant. Once more, many people will turn to heroin and other opioids and the DEA can continue to arrest them. Thousands of others will be forced to seek out permission and dictatorial authority figures that pass for doctors in order to kill pain and get through the day. And once they need more of those painkillers or seek out illegal alternatives, the DEA will be able to arrest them, too.

The American Kratom Association has responded to the FDA statement with a statement of its own saying that, “For years, the FDA has published scientifically inaccurate information on the health effects of consuming kratom, directly influencing regulatory actions by the DEA, states, and various local government entities. It is inconceivable that the FDA would favor a policy that would foreseeably force a patient who [has] been weaned off of opioid [addiction] back to dangerously addictive and potentially deadly opioid prescription medications.”

Already, the FDA is intercepting shipments of Kratom. The hysterical and, quite frankly, idiotic statement from Gottlieb signals dark days ahead for Kratom users, former drug addicts, sufferers of chronic pain and depression. But these will be dark days for more people than Kratom users. Every American citizen forced to live under the stifling anathema to freedom known as the drug war will have no choice but to continue to reside amid mass incarceration, forced medication, and needless suffering and will most likely do so for years to come.

The U.S. government is making America many things but great isn’t one of them.

Support the American Kratom Association in their upcoming legal battle for civil liberties and health freedom. www.AmericanKratom.org

Ingredient In Cow’s Milk Primary Causal Trigger Of Type 1 Diabetes

(Natural Blaze By Maria Andrade) An ingredient in cow’s milk has now been identified as a type 1 diabetes trigger in those with genetic risk factors, but researchers say they have been frustrated in efforts to make the findings available to the wider public.

The United States is the world’s largest producer of pasteurized cow milk, but oddly enough it is also one of the world’s smallest consumers. The dairy industry thus has a vested interest in eliminating all raw milk suppliers from the market place to enforce and increase per capita consumption of pasteurized milk which is lagging behind most of the world.

Pasteurized milk is perhaps one of the most nutritionally deficient beverages misappropriately labeled as a “perfect food.” Raw milk enthusiasts have known for a very long time that unpasteurized milk is the ONLY milk worthy of consumption.

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Pasteurization destroys enzymes, diminishes vitamin content, denatures fragile milk proteins, destroys vitamins C, B12 and B6, kills beneficial bacteria, promotes pathogens and is associated with allergies, increased tooth decay, colic in infants, growth problems in children, osteoporosis, arthritis, heart disease and cancer.

Seven researchers assessed 71 studies on population epidemiology, animal trials, in vitro laboratory experiments, biochemistry and pharmacology.

Their paper on the findings, originally published in the Journal of Nutrition & Diabetes, said the A1 beta-casein in cow’s milk is a primary causal trigger of the disease.

However, so far there have been no clinical trials on the subject.

Two of the seven researchers, the University of Auckland’s Professor Boyd Swinburn and Lincoln University’s Professor Keith Woodford, explained: “People who are genetically susceptible to developing type 1 diabetes would need to be identified at birth, and half of them randomly allocated to a diet free of A1 beta-casein for many years.”

Related: Foods That Contribute to Diabetes

The Chinese Connection

The paper revealed that the sudden growth in the incidence of type 1 diabetes in China is correlated with the country’s threefold increase in dairy consumption per capita (from 6kg in 1992 to 18kg in 2006, with substantial increases thereafter).

In Shanghai alone, new type 1 diabetes cases among children aged 15 and below increased 14.2% annually between 1997 and 2011. Further south, in Zhejiang, the annual rate of increase in type 1 diabetes cases was 12% among adolescents aged 19 and below.

More worryingly, children below five saw the greatest increase in such cases, at an annual rate of 33.61%. Young children’s dependence on milk consumption could explain the higher prevalence of type 1 diabetes among those below the age of five.

The paper stated: “Accordingly, the ecological epidemiological data, although not proving causation, provide powerful evidence that A1 beta-casein is a causal factor in the pathogenesis of type 1 diabetes.”

Related: Natural Diabetes Cure

Factors and Challenges

The researchers also wrote that though the A1 beta-casein may be a cause of type 1 diabetes in consumers, “there are also likely to be many influencing factors involved in responses to dietary triggers, permissive gut factors and progression towards type 1 diabetes, such as short duration (of) / no breastfeeding, Caesarean delivery rates, and magnitude of exposure to vitamin D.”

They suggested that while it would be possible to change all dairy herds to produce milk without the A1 beta-casein, the process would take 10 years.

The alternative, they said, would be for consumers to opt for goat’s and sheep’s milk instead.

On his WordPress site, Woodford revealed that he and Swinburn had intended to make the paper free for public perusal, but in order to do that, they had to find a sponsor to pay a one-time fee to make the article free of charge.

Commercial Gain

The a2 Milk Company stepped in and paid the US$3,500 required to make the paper free-access. Unlike most cow’s milk brands, the company produces A2 milk free of the A1 beta-casein.

Swinburn and Woodford also wanted online portal The Conversation – an online publisher, sponsored collectively by universities – to publish an abbreviated version of the paper for a wider public audience, but they were turned down.

Related: Diabetes, Endocrine Functions of the Pancreas, and Natural Healing

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The editors told them: “The main reason is the involvement of the a2 Milk Company, for editorial support in this particular paper, but also more directly in funding-related research projects, and the perception that the company would stand to gain commercially.”

Woodford wrote that one of the paper’s authors was a former a2 Milk Company employee, but said none of the authors were paid to write the paper.

He added that despite its financial involvement, the a2 Milk Company did not get to read the paper until it had been published, and therefore, “had no corporate influence over the content or editorial processes”.

This post originally appeared at Prevent Disease

DISCLAIMER: This article is not intended to provide medical advice, diagnosis or treatment.