With blood oozing from deep lacerations, the two patients arrived at California Pacific Medical Center's tidy emergency room. Deepika Singh, 26, had gashed her knee at a backyard barbecue. Orla Roche, a rambunctious toddler on vacation with her family, had tumbled from a couch, splitting open her forehead on a table.

On a quiet Saturday in May, nurses in blue scrubs quickly ushered the two patients into treatment rooms. The wounds were cleaned, numbed and mended in under an hour. "It was great - they had good DVDs, the staff couldn't have been nicer," said Emer Duffy, Orla's mother.

Then the bills arrived. Ms. Singh's three stitches cost $2,229.11. Orla's forehead was sealed with a dab of skin glue for $1,696. "When I first saw the charge, I said, 'What could possibly have cost that much?' " recalled Ms. Singh. "They billed for everything, every pill."

In a medical system notorious for opaque finances and inflated bills, nothing is more convoluted than hospital pricing, economists say. Hospital charges represent about a third of the $2.7 trillion annual United States health care bill, the biggest single segment, according to government statistics, and are the largest driver of medical inflation, a new study in The Journal of the American Medical Association found.

A day spent as an inpatient at an American hospital costs on average more than $4,000, five times the charge in many other developed countries, according to the International Federation of Health Plans, a global network of health insurance industries. The most expensive hospitals charge more than $12,500 a day. And at many of them, including California Pacific Medical Center, emergency rooms are profit centers. That is why one of the simplest and oldest medical procedures - closing a wound with a needle and thread - typically leads to bills of at least $1,500 and often much more.

Even worse, GMOs are now endangering our food supply by killing off butterflies.

Monsanto, maker of the shockingly toxic herbicide Roundup and developer of the GMO Roundup Ready crop seeds, points to a number of studies that claim their pesticide is safe for the environment - though of course these are mostly studies that Monsanto has funded. Unfortunately, scientists who contradict Monsanto, and seek to expose the dangers of GMO crops and Roundup, face censorship and retraction of their studies.

Gilles-Eric Séralini, of the University of Caen in France, had done a number of studies challenging the safety of genetically engineered foods - yet the food safety journal Food and Chemical Toxicology has decided to retract Séralini's 2012 paper that showed GMO corn and Roundup can cause cancer and premature death in rats. The New York Times said the paper has been criticized as "flawed, sensationalistic, and possibly even fraudulent by many scientists, some of whom are allied with the biotechnology industry" [emphasis ours]. But if the research points to there being even the hint of a danger from GMOs and Roundup, surely this should be explored further rather than pilloried!

Vermeulen R, DT Silverman, E Garshick, J Vlaanderen, L Portengen, K Steenland. Exposure-response estimates for diesel engine exhaust and lung cancer mortality based on data from three occupational cohorts. Environmental Health Perspectives. 2013. http://1.usa.gov/1gcpfX9.

An estimated 6 percent of lung cancer deaths in the United States and the United Kingdom - 11,000 deaths per year - may be due to diesel exhaust, according to a new study.

Emission standards for diesel engines have become more stringent in recent years, but their exhaust still plays a significant role in lung cancer deaths among truckers, miners and railroad workers, the authors wrote. In addition, diesel exhaust still poses a major cancer threat for people living in dense cities or near highways, they said.

Truckers and miners exposed over their careers to diesel exhaust face a risk of deadly lung cancer that is almost 70 times higher than the risk considered acceptable under U.S. occupational standards. The scientists calculated the lifetime risk for these workers at up to 689 extra lung cancer deaths per 10,000 workers exposed. In comparison, one cancer death per 1,000 workers is used to set federal workplace standards.

The recent news articles to hit the mainstream media in the past week finally states what public health officials and epidemiologists have known for some time: those vaccinated against pertussis are carrying and spreading the bacteria and are responsible for most of the outbreaks.

This news raises the question:

Should we hold those vaccinated with the pertussis vaccine, legally liable for outbreaks?

And, if you look up scholarly articles about previous outbreaks of measles, you'll find academic papers on an entity termed "the paradox of measles"; a paradox because those vaccinated are the ones contracting the disease whilst the unvaccinated in many communities with outbreaks, are unscathed.

In addition, the rise in shingles over the past decade or so, is due to the chicken pox vaccine. This link is not denied in academic literature and was even predicted by mathematical biologists and epidemiologists, and was confirmed by another study funded by the CDC.

If vaccinated children and adults are capable of spreading disease, shall we hold them and their parents legally liable for outbreaks? Shall we mandate 'unvaccination' as a requirement for public school? Since we can't 'unvaccinate,' shall vaccinated children be kicked out of public school?

While the above statements seem absurd, they are equivalent arguments bioethicist, Art Caplan has and continues to make.

Caplan believes parents of unvaccinated children should be held legally liable for outbreaks of disease.

Mind you, Caplan is no regular academic bioethicist, he is a bioethicist who has made a good deal of money for writing pro-industry speak.

If you read about Art Caplan and his direct financial conflicts of interest, you'll also read Art believes these financial conflicts can be managed while producing unbiased work. He and his previous institution of employment, the University of Pennsylvania Department of Bioethics received mega fees from major pharmaceutical companies and the department of vaccine bioethics at U Penn was massively funded by the big vaccine producers.

Findings from a unique study underscore need for public health action on pain and disability in the elderly, reports PAIN®. More than half of older adults in the United States -- an estimated 18.7 million people -- have experienced bothersome pain in the previous month, impairing their physical function and underscoring the need for public health action on pain. Many of those interviewed by investigators for a study published in the current issue of PAIN® reported pain in multiple areas.

The interviews, which included assessments of cognitive and physical performance, were completed by trained survey research staff in the homes of study participants living in the community or in residential care facilities, such as retirement or assisted-living communities. "Pain is common in older adults and one of the major reasons why we start slowing down as we age," says lead investigator Kushang V. Patel, PhD, MPH, of the Center for Pain Research on Impact, Measurement, and Effectiveness in the Department of Anesthesiology and Pain Medicine at the University of Washington.

The ADHD label has become too common. While blinding us with science, or, in the case of psychiatry, pseudo-science, the diagnostic criteria for ADHD could describe any child's behavior in school.

That behavior has been redefined by clever manipulation, and corruption of what we know to be normal.

One of the items, describing inattention, used to diagnose ADHD, is: "often avoids, dislikes, or is reluctant to engage in tasks that require sustained mental effort, such as schoolwork or homework." This is descriptive of a normal child, in a normal school or a normal home, on a normal day, in a normal world, but psychiatrists would have us think otherwise.

According to all official health reports, we are now fully in flu season. It is that time of year when public health officials, physicians pediatricians and pharmacists warn that everyone over 6 months of age should protect themselves and get vaccinated. Most Americans, believing the government's propaganda about the safety and benefits of the flu vaccine, are joining the inoculation lines without pausing to consider the accuracy and legitimacy of health officials' and pediatrician claims.

The official government figure for the annual number of deaths caused by influenza infection remains at 36,000. Why this figure has not changed during the course of a decade is anyone's guess. However, there can between 150 and 200 different infectious pathogens - adenovirus, rhinovirus, parainfluenza, the very common coronavirus and, of course, pneumonia - that produce flu-like symptoms. For example, how many people have heard of bocavirus, which is responsible for bronchitis and pneumonia in young children, or metapneumovirus, responsible for more than 5 percent of all flu-related illnesses? This is true during every flu season and it will be no different for the 2013-2014 season.

If we take the combined figure of flu and pneumonia deaths for the period of 2001, and add a bit of spin to the figures, we are left believing that 62,034 people died from influenza. The actual figures determined by Peter Doshi, then at Harvard University, are 61,777 died from pneumonia and only 257 from flu. Even more amazing, among those 257 cases only 18 were confirmed positive for influenza.

A CBS Investigative Report, published in October 2012, exemplifies the unreliable and perhaps intentionally deceptive misinformation campaign steered by the US government health agencies every flu season . After the CDC refused to honor CBS's Freedom of Information request to receive flu infection data by individual state, the network undertook an independent investigation across all fifty states to get their infectious disease statistics. The final report contradicts dramatically the CDC's public relations blitz. For example, in California, among the approximate 13,000 flu-like cases, 86 percent tested negative for any flu strain. In Florida, out of 8,853 cases, 83 percent were negative. In Georgia and Alaska, only 2.4 percent and 1 percent respectively tested positive for flu virus among all reported flu-like cases. If the infection-rate ratios obtained by CBS are accurate, the CDC's figures are significantly reduced and flu season severity is overstated dramatically.

Testbiotech, a nonprofit organization started with independent ('non-biased') biotech research in mind, recently released a report on the spread of genetically altered plants. The organization says GMOs are spreading throughout the world without any controls in place to stop them.

They have escaped their intended areas and are moving into the environment and even infringing on wild plant populations. This is happening everywhere and something must be done to stop it before it worsens.

In the U.S., Canada, Central America, Japan, China, Australia, and Europe, genetically modified organisms are spreading into the food system. This is happening with corn, rice, cotton, flaxseed, bentgrass, and poplar trees, according to the Testbiotech report.

"Coexistence between genetically engineered crops and biodiversity is not possible if crops are spreading into wild populations without control. Industry is contaminating biodiversity and our future seeds - who will hold them responsible?" says Margarida Silva from the GMO-free Platform in Portugal, according to GM Watch.

Just 3 examples of GM contamination can be seen here:

Some people trying to perk up in the morning have turned to energy drinks as an alternative to coffee, but a new study has found that these drinks can have a disruptive effect on heart function.

According to the study, which was presented on Monday at the annual meeting of the Radiological Society of North America (RSNA), drinks with high amounts of caffeine and taurine caused significant increases in heart strain one hour after consumption.

"Until now, we haven't known exactly what effect these energy drinks have on the function of the heart," said study researcher Dr. Jonas Dörner, of the cardiovascular imaging section at the University of Bonn in Germany.

"There are concerns about the products' potential adverse side effects on heart function, especially in adolescents and young adults, but there is little or no regulation of energy drink sales."

The new study comes after a report published earlier this year by the Substance Abuse and Mental Health Services Administration (SAMHSA) found that the number of emergency department visits related to energy drinks in the US essentially doubled, from 10,000 to almost 21,000, between 2007 and 2011.