Three years ago, Dr. Keith Smith, co-founder and managing partner of the Surgery Center of Oklahoma, took an initiative that would only be considered radical in the health care industry: He posted online a list of prices for 112 common surgical procedures. The 51-year-old Smith, a self-described libertarian, and his business partner, Dr. Steve Lantier, founded the Surgery Center 15 years ago, after they became disillusioned with the way patients were treated at St. Anthony Hospital in Oklahoma City, where the two men worked as anesthesiologists. In 1997, Smith and Lantier bought the shell of a former surgical center with the aim of creating a for-profit facility that could deliver first-rate care at a fraction of what traditional hospitals charge.


The major cause of exploding U.S. heath care costs is the third-party payer system, a text-book concept in which A buys goods or services from B that are paid for by C.

Because private insurance companies or the government generally pick up most of the tab for medical services, patients don't have the normal incentive to seek out value.

The Surgery Center's consumer-driven model could become increasingly common as Americans look for alternatives to the traditional health care market - an unintended consequence of Obamacare. Patients may have no choice but to look outside the traditional health care industry in the face of higher costs and reduced access to doctors and hospitals.

The breast cancer industry's holy grail (that mammography is the primary weapon in the war against breast cancer) has been disproved. In fact, mammography appears to have CREATED 1.3 million cases of breast cancer in the U.S. population that were not there.

A disturbing new study published in the New England Journal of Medicine is bringing mainstream attention to the possibility that mammography has caused far more harm than good in the millions of women who have employed it over the past 30 years as their primary strategy in the fight against breast cancer.[i]

Titled "Effect of Three Decades of Screening Mammography on Breast-Cancer Incidence," researchers estimated that among women younger than 40 years of age, breast cancer was overdiagnosed, i.e. "tumors were detected on screening that would never have led to clinical symptoms," in 1.3 million U.S. women over the past 30 years. In 2008, alone, "breast cancer was overdiagnosed in more than 70,000 women; this accounted for 31% of all breast cancers diagnosed."

As we revealed in a previous article,[ii] the primary form of mammography-detected breast cancer is ductal carcinoma in situ (DCIS), also known as 'stage zero' or 'non-invasive breast cancer.' Unlike truly invasive cancer, which expands outward like the crab after which it was named (Greek: Cancer = Crab), ductal carcinoma is in situ, i.e. situated, non-moving - an obvious contradiction in terms.

It's so ubiquitous it's considered an essential part of our culture - but is caffeine dangerous?

America's obsession with caffeine continues to grow by leaps and bounds. We're long past the already absurd domain of Big Gulp-sized frappucinos; the chemical is packaged and sold as energy drinks, pills, dissolvable strips - even caffeine-infused marshmallows.

But we may finally be approaching the limits of our appetites. A spate of recent caffeine-related deaths is challenging the perception that caffeine is a safe and legal high. Over the last four years, 13 people have died in incidents that involve 5-Hour Energy, the 2-ounce drink which boasts in television ads that it's been recommended by 73 percent of doctors. Similarly, the Federal Drug Administration acknowledged in October that five additional people have died in incidents that involve Monster Energy.

Long time practitioners in the natural health industry ask themselves this question on a daily basis. Why do people follow medical authorities who prescribe toxic vaccinations, medications and treatments which only serve as a detriment to human health? The answer lies in a recent report in PLOS Biology.

What we are experiencing today is essentially medical tyranny where government, pharmaceutical conglomerates and medical colleges conspire to produce blind followers of a system that produces more health risks than benefits to any given population.

Professors Alex Haslam and Stephen Reicher explain how followers of such methodologies do so not just through obedience, but enthusiasm too -- challenging the long-held belief that human beings are 'programmed' for conformity.

For example, why do belief systems continue encouraging the routine vaccination of infants with vaccines which contain harmful sterility agents, carcinogenic, neurotoxic, immunotoxic and other chemicals. Some consider the act barbaric and vicious, yet others conform and consider it beneficial based on previous information, however misinformed the facts were that led to the belief.

This belief can be traced back to two landmark empirical research programs conducted by Stanley Milgram and Philip Zimbardo in the 1960s and early 1970s. Milgram's 'Obedience to Authority' research is widely believed to show that people blindly conform to the instructions of an authority figure, and Zimbardo's Stanford Prison Experiment (SPE) is commonly understood to show that people will take on abusive roles uncritically.

New research from the US finds that older people who have a positive view on aging are more likely to recover from severe disability than those who hold negative stereotypes about being older. It calls for more studies to investigate whether promoting positive age stereotypes extends independent living later in life.

Reporting in JAMA this week, the researchers, from Yale School of Public Health, say their study is the first to examine the link between positive age stereotypes and recovery from disability in older persons.

German TV channel ZDF's segment on the Fukushima Health Survey translated by SimplyInfo:

[...] More than 42% of 57,000 tested children have nodules or cyst, reports Dr. Suzuki who leads the examinations. In Chernobyl they found only 0.1 - 1%. nobody of the experts asks for the reasons. [...] He explains the results mainly by improved diagnosis methods, but people don't believe him. [...] There are no refererence [sic] studies, Dr. Suzuki tells us, and maybe the children simply took too much iodine or seafood. He doesn't know if this has something to do with radiation. "We are mainly here to inform the parents of the results of our study." But what do such results mean to parents without proper explanations? The official handling of the disaster is more than questionable. Many people have completely lost trust in government and believe that the disaster is played down to protect the mighty nuclear industry of Japan.

BE WARNED: you may want to reach for your sick bag right about now.

Your airline meal may have been prepared among mice, ants and cockroaches.

That's according to US TV news program 20/20. The show has uncovered the dirt on airline food via a freedom of information act, revealing exactly what the US Food and Drug Administration found when it inspected airlines and their caterers.

More than 1500 health violations were discovered over almost four years, with "significant" problems found at a much higher rather than in other industries.

Food facilities at LSG Sky Chefs, a major provider of airline food, were found to be infested with ants, dead and live flies, and cockroaches "all over".

With the holiday season right around the corner, there is no better time than the present to fortify our diet and cement healthy eating.

Ironically, while healthy eating is our birthright, for many of us it seems like taking the plunge into eating a whole foods-based diet is the equivalent to traveling to some distant land. But it doesn't have to be such a scary or foreign experience.

In my work as a functional medicine doctor, my priority is to guide each patient through a safe, simple, realistic, and pleasurable transition into healthy eating.

Because whole foods-based diets remove all the sugary, fatty, chemical-laden, artificial stuff from the diet, they sometimes get called a detox or a cleanse.

America's new addiction, which I wrote about in June in The Huffington Post, is the epidemic of opiate painkillers, which - aptly named - in recent years resulted in nearly 16,000 overdose deaths annually. This is not the stereotyped drug problem that can be solved by Miami Vice style drug busts of traffickers and periodic roundups of street addicts and pushers. In this epidemic, the traffickers are our respected pharmaceutical companies acting entirely within the law, seeking only to bring legitimate pain relief to sufferers; the addicts are, for the most part, upstanding citizens seeking a medical solution to their pain; and the "pushers" are, with few exceptions, dedicated doctors attempting to alleviate the suffering of their patients. So how can the interaction of decent people, pursuing well-intentioned and legitimate ends, result in a truly disastrous narcotics epidemic?

The answer, as counterintuitive as it may seems, is that in large part the epidemic is an unanticipated consequence of "managed care," which swept the country in the 1980s to contain rising medical costs.

Almost every week, I have received more calls from new patients searching for a pain specialist willing to take on the prescribing of their drug. In each case, the reason given for the need for a new doctor was their previous doctor's retiring or otherwise no longer being available for the task. In each case, a brief interview revealed the nature of the injury or physical problem to be either minor or, at best, partially diagnosed. Further, there is a turn of phrase, an urgency, a worn-thin quality to their stories, which informs the practiced listener that driving the call is addiction. The previous prescriber had created a demon and had withdrawn.

A new report from researchers with the Johns Hopkins Center for Injury Research and Policy finds the majority of the previously reported increase in suicide in the U.S. between 2000 and 2010 is attributable to an increase in hanging/suffocation, which increased from 19 percent of all suicides in 2000 to 26 percent of all suicides in 2010. The largest increase in hanging/suffocation occurred among those aged 45-59 years (104 percent increase). The results are published in the December issue of the American Journal of Preventive Medicine.

"Suicide recently exceeded motor vehicle crashes as the leading cause of injury death in the U.S.; this report is the first to examine changes in the method of suicide, particularly by demographics such as age," said lead study author Susan P. Baker, MPH, a professor with and founding director of the Johns Hopkins Center for Injury Research and Policy, part of the Johns Hopkins Bloomberg School of Public Health. "While suicide by firearm remains the predominant method in the U.S., the increase in hanging and suffocation particularly in middle-aged adults warrants immediate attention."

The researchers also found that the proportion of suicide by poisoning increased, from 16 percent in 2000 to 17 percent in 2010. Much like hanging/suffocation, dramatic increases were seen in certain age groups: the increase was 85 percent in those aged 60-69 years. Taken together, suicide by firearm, hanging/suffocation and poisoning make up 93 percent of all suicides in the U.S.

"In addition to age, detailed examination revealed important differences across gender and race," explained co-author Guoqing Hu, of Central South University, School of Public Health, China. "Suicide rates are increasing faster for women than for men, and faster in whites than in non-whites." The suicide rate increased the most among those aged 45-59 years of age (by 39 percent); in contrast, it dropped by 8 percent among those 70 and older.