I want you to know a couple of things about the medical industry. First, the liberal laws being referred to as "Obamacare" are not going to solve a thing and will only make things worse. Second, there are good doctors practicing good medicine who care about their patients but there are increasing numbers of bad doctors who only care about how much money they can take you for without being sued. Third, the current system is severely broken and needs to be fixed, it is extremely corrupt. I want to give you a few examples and let you know that these are not the only problems.

Let's start out with physical therapists (PT's) partly because I not only studied extensive biology in college but also studied athletic training (AT - physical therapy for athletes) or sports medicine. I have spent decades working with athletes and found a long time ago that I could get athletes recovered from any surgery, illness, or injury, back in shape, and back in competition with a minimum potential for relapse in a maximum of 75% of the time it takes physical therapists to just get the same person recovered from the same problem. Forget about the PT's getting athletes back in shape at all because they are not trained to get athletes back in shape.

About 15 years ago I asked a PT friend of mine about that and he voluntarily explained it to me this way. "Every PT is trained to either work for or own a business which makes money based on the number of visits the patients make to their PT business. The more visits the patient makes to the PT business, the more money the business makes from that patient. Therefore, every PT is trained to milk the patient for as many visits as possible by delaying the patient's recovery as long as possible. He told me that this got so out of hand by the late 1980's that the larger insurance companies got together with a team of doctors and they figured out what would be a reasonable number of treatments for each and every illness, injury, and surgery and then added a few visits to each therapy to cover themselves from potential law suits. Today, all PT's have to get the patient recovered within those visits or the patient has to see the doctor to get a new prescription for more physical therapy visits just to get the patient recovered."

Then he said, "Now you, the AT, are trained so that a coach will come to you and say, 'I want that athlete recovered, back in shape, and back on the playing field with a minimum potential for relapse as quickly as possible.'" And he was right.

Now do you see the difference in that? I am trained to get the athlete recovered, back in shape, and back on the playing field with minimum potential for relapse as quickly as possible while they are trained to milk the patient for as long as they can get away with it. In other words, what is best for you is not best for them so that there is a serious conflict of interest which adversely effects your health to make them more money. Please remember that I was informed that the people who are training all PT's to operate this was are your brilliant, highly educated, all knowing, all wise, grossly over paid college professors. There are good college professors but there are also a lot of bad college professors. A Ph.D. and a job at a university don't make you a good person.

Also, if you pay attention, you will notice that insurance companies will refuse to pay for some doctor's expensive prescriptions. The reason for this is that some doctors are getting kick backs from the drug companies so those doctors will write prescriptions for expensive medications the patients don't need. Again, another conflict of interest costing the patient in both finances via increasing insurance costs or out of the patients' pockets and the side affects of the drugs they really don't need.

I first became aware of this in the 1970's when I found out that psychiatrists were getting kick backs for medications they were prescribing for their patients. Then, in the 1980's, I found out about a chiropractor who was sponsoring a number of sports teams with a "free" visit and examination under the condition the athletes had to pay for the lab work she always had done. I also found out that, for 100% of the athletes who had made these visits, they got the exact same prescription for very expensive vitamins costing $30 per month when I knew those vitamins only cost about $2 per bottle or month to make. She was very clearly getting kick backs for every prescription she wrote. If she sponsored 10 sports teams which averaged 10 athletes per team taking those expensive vitamins and she was only getting $10 in kick backs per patient, then she was making an addition $1,000 per month just making their urine expensive. I also found out that this kick back sytem had become quite regular with chiropractors.

I have noticed that, today, the problem seems to have spread into regular medicine with who knows how many doctors getting kick backs for prescriptions for expensive medications the patients don't need but the patients can have very serious side affects from taking.

One of my favorites in bad medicine is a little thing called spinal fusion. It is where you have a blown disc in your back, especially the lower back, and an orthopedic surgeon will remove the disc and fuse the two adjoining vertebrae together to prevent them from moving. Every orthopedic surgeon will tell you that there are not adverse affects to this surgery and that you will even feel much better afterwards. I learned a long time ago to not trust the doctors who make money doing such surgeries but to talk to their patients to see how such surgeries actually turn out.

In the last 40+ years, I have known dozens of people who have had this surgery and have not known one who didn't tell me that having a spinal fusion was the worst mistake they had made in their lives because they were always in constant pain and on pain medication. They have all told me that the pain was so bad, especially on really bad days, that the pain medications they were taking would only, at best, decrease the amount of pain they were having. I had one very good friend who, after years of excruciating agony, he finally gave up and swallowed a shotgun, 12 gauge. I have absolutely never known one patient who told me anything other wise about that surgery.

Now, where do you think all of those patients are getting the prescriptions for those pain medications? From the same surgeons who did the surgery. I dare anyone to convince me that those orthopedic surgeons don't know their surgeries are causing a lot of pain but they still keep selling that surgery because that is how they are getting rich. That is what I call an extreme conflict of interest and I will never have that surgery. Please remember that the people training these doctors to sell these types of surgeries are your brilliant, highly educated, all knowing, all wise, grossly over paid college professors.

A number of years ago, I found out about some very expensive big city orthopedic surgeons who are making a lot of money taking off the legs (amputations) from retired professional football players. The reason? Football causes so much damage to the legs, especially to the knees and for linemen, that, by the time a professional football player retires, there is very little left of their joints, especially the knees. But, hold it, none of these athletes have to have their legs amputated before they retire. Why only after they retire? Why are they able to keep playing and running on those severely damaged legs without all that excruciating pain? Some ignorant people would say drugs provided to the athletes but hold it, if those drugs were able to make their pain bearable while they were still athletes, why don't those drugs make that pain bearable after the athletes retire? After all, they have stopped increasing the damage to their knees.

I am going to teach you something about pain threshold and pain management we have known about in exercise physiology and sports medicine for over 50 years and very few medical doctors even know about. This knowledge would mean that it is not necessary for all those athletes to lose their legs meaning those doctors are making a lot of money unnecessarily chopping off athletes legs, but, hey, it's big money.

In exercise physiology, we were taught over 40 years ago that as your fitness increases so does your pain threshold. Now what is a pain threshold? The pain threshold is the point of stimulation at which a nerve end will send a pain message to the brain. At any point of stimulation below the pain threshold, the nerve will not send a pain message to the brain. Now, as your fitness level increases, so does your pain threshold requiring more stimulation to send a pain message to the brain and this difference is very significant for upper level athletes. The inverse is also true, as your fitness decreases, so does your pain threshold meaning it takes less stimulation to cause the nerve to send a pain message to the brain.

Also, I have learned based on experience and decades of observations that, as your pain threshold increases, the type of pain you feel changes from being a shaper pain to being a duller ache. By the time an athlete gets to a high level of fitness, what would be a very sharp pain for a non athlete or beginning athlete will only be a dull ache which is very tolerable. Also, here again, the inverse is true. As the athlete's fitness decreases, the severity of the pain he feels increases in intensity and sharpness.

This means you have two factors in pain management which decrease the quantity and quality of pain being felt as your fitness increases. These two factors combined have a huge effect on how much and severe your pain is when you are either in shape or out of shape and the difference for upper level athletes is really huge.

In other words, because those professional football players are in shape, they don't get the same pain they do after they retire and get out of shape. This means that the largest part of their pain problem is that they have gotten out of shape and, if they get back in shape, most of that pain will go away and the pain will become tolerable, again. Basically, most of those leg amputations are unnecessary and could be prevented by the athletes simply getting back in shape and staying in shape using low impact activities such as rowing, cycling, skating, cross country skiing, and other such activities. BUT the surgeons wouldn't make all those big bucks doing all those surgeries so you can bet they are not going to use fitness management for pain management. They are just going to hack those legs off and send you the bill. Hey, some one has to pay for that mansion and yacht.

Then there is the question, "Why doesn't the American Medical Association (AMA) better manage the medical industry and prevent such conflicts of interest?" Because the AMA makes its dollars based on the number of registered doctors and, if they start kicking doctors out of the profession, they start losing money. Gee, could that be another conflict of interest? Do the math. Please note that the AMA itself has stated that better than 1/3 of all surgeries being done in this country are not necessary. That is huge.

So, how do you solve this problem? Not with another government bureaucracy!!! You would have to have a firm that does not benefit based on either the number of doctors in the industry or the number of doctors they get rid of but on whether or not there are any doctors who should not be doctors. The only motivation for such an intity has to be to make sure that there are no medical people functioning with a conflict of interest or just doing bad medicine. Either that or find a cure for everything without doctors or drug companies. I heard God has one of those.

If you want to know why God is punishing this country, just look at how corrupt this country has become.