Hi Everyone,
TOXIC HIP REPLACEMENT MATERIALS- A new paper in the British Medical Journal (2012;344:e1410) is reporting that the ever-popular metal on metal joint replacement, which has been done to millions of people around the world, has a high failure rate, and has been linked to cancer and other diseases. To make matters worse, this has been known for quite a while, yet the companies that produce these products kept pushing them anyway.
There are other materials used in hip replacements. When compared to metal on metal, they last longer, have lower breakdown percentages, and do not release toxins in the body like the metal-on-metal hip replacements do. The metal-on-metal devices are made of cobalt and chromium, and when they rub together they release these metals into the bloodstream.
In 2005, the companies producing these hip replacements spoke freely in internal documents about the problems with their products breaking down and leaching toxins into the body. In those documents, they admitted the problem had been known for many years. This did not keep them from pushing their products, to the point that they were able to continually pressure health regulators into allowing their devices.
Just because the FDA has cleared a surgical device doesn’t mean it is safe.
MEDICAL DISSENTER- Dr Otis Brawley, chief medical officer for the American Cancer Society, has written a new book entitled How We Do Harm: A Doctor Breaks Ranks About Being Sick In America. According to Dr Brawley, American Medicine is in bad shape, largely due to all the corruption in the Industry.
Dr Brawley says it makes him furious when the political pundits talk about American health care being the best in the world. He claims if you are absolutely rich, like politicians, healthcare is pretty good here, but if you don’t fit into that category, it is hard to get even basic, decent, consistent healthcare. We have to say we see that first hand on a regular basis.
One of the problems Dr Brawley noted was in the non-evolution of medical doctors towards medical advancements. He noted a story of a man who ended up with colon cancer. The man was rich and went to an oncologist who had a big reputation as a doctor of the rich and famous in Atlanta. When the man lost his insurance, the oncologist dropped him and the man sought help from Dr Brawley at the county hospital. It turns out this famous oncologist was using treatments that were 15 years old. Newer and safer treatments were available that the famous oncologist had not stayed abreast of.
OUR EXPERIENCE- We see this type of thing regularly. This is not an attack on the medical profession only, but on all health practitioners who do not evolve and keep learning. So many practitioners, in every discipline, stop learning when they graduate. And they also seem to get lazy.
Case-in-point: Just the other day, a patient came in and mentioned she had been hospitalized with very high potassium levels. This can be a life-threatening problem. They treated her, gave her medications to bring everything back to normal, and then sent her home. When we asked what the problem had been, she said no one told her. Dr Robin asked her which medications she was on and then crossed referenced them on www.Drugs.com for reactions. It turned out two of the medications she was taking were not supposed to be mixed. They caused high potassium levels which could lead to death. This had caused her high potassium levels. Yet the hospital said nothing of this and simply released her to continue doing what had almost killed her.
A pharmacist we know recently quit his job. He said that part of the pharmacist’s job was to look over your medication list and make sure whatever you were taking, especially if it was new, did not react badly with the other medications. He quit because the pharmacy he was working at wanted him to push people through as fast as possible, too fast to do a thorough check on everyone’s medications. When the doctors are too busy to make sure they are not giving you meds that won’t mix, and the pharmacists are too busy to check behind them, and the hospitals do not catch these reactions, it adds up to trouble.
A good idea is to go to www.Drugs.com and use their ‘interactions checker’ tool. Enter the medications you are currently on and it will give you a list of harmful interactions. You can save this profile for free. Then, if you ever get prescribed a different medication, or even want to see if you can take certain vitamins and supplements with the meds you are currently on, you can simply type them in and the site will tell you if it is safe or not.
Hope this helps,
Dr Matt and Dr Robin
http://barneschiropractic.wordpress.com (newsletter archives)
This week’s bit of Useless Information: The Hoover Dam was built to last two thousand years. The concrete in it will not even be fully cured for another five hundred years.
This email is courtesy of Matthew Barnes, D.C. and Robin Barnes, D.C. Neither this nor any of our emails are intended to be medical advice and should not be taken as such. They are opinion and are for informational purposes only. None of the nutrients discussed here are meant to diagnose, treat, or cure any disease.