Book recommendation: Butchered by “Healthcare” by Robert Yoho, MD

By Carl Nelson

(What to do About Doctors, Big Pharma, and Corrupt Government Ruining Your Health and Medical Care)

“The person who takes medicine must recover twice, once from the disease and once
from the medicine.” – William Osler, MD

            As we age, our physiological frontiers which mark the boundaries between health and un-health move in. I’m reminded of an event which happened when I was still a fair youth. My brother took an acquaintance and myself for a ride in his Cessna. Upon reaching an altitude of 12,500 feet my friend began to turn blue. My brother and I were both fine, but my friend was a smoker. We placed him on oxygen and began a descent. But it was quite a dramatic demonstration of how compromised my friend’s lung capacity had become. Years later, I’d have my own experience of coming up against my own physiological walls having closed in – upon descending from a long hike up Mt. Si in the Cascades east of Seattle and coming quite close to having my quadriceps fail – they just crapped out – to the point where I came very close to having the crawl the final mile to the car.

I’m a gaffer now and have learned to stay within the encroaching lines of limitation, for my own safety. For example, I swore that I was probably going to die someday from a broken hip gotten from trying to get my underwear back on someday in the locker room. So now I pull it on, pants too, …slowly… while sitting down. I also look for encroaching limitations which may not necessarily have announced themselves – or are just whispering.

Years ago I was sent next door to a retired couple’s home to retrieve something from their refrigerator. Opening the fridge door I was astonished to find the whole appliance filled to the gills with supplements and vitamins. I am no longer surprised. Health articles targeting the older constantly beat the drum of possible nutritional “deficiencies”. (“Perhaps THAT’s the problem…”)

Aging is Problems

As you age, everything normal

becomes a problem:

Hearing, Seeing, Walking,

Balance, Sleeping, Peeing,

Shitting, Remembering, (Forgetting)

Driving, Shopping, Chores,

House repairs, Cleaning,

Self-defense, Cooking and Eating,

Showering, Uneven Steps and even

Flights of Stairs are a problem as

Basements and Upstairs become the Outer Territories…

There are all of the basic things to do to maintain your heath: eat properly, exercise regularly, get enough sleep, don’t drink a lot and don’t smoke, drive responsibly, be prudent with your money, and have enjoyable relationships with a number of people – including your wife! In addition to all of this, if you still would like to feel a bit better, or if you currently have a problem, a good place to start would be what I will term a “medicinal audit”.

For example, if you are suffering from symptoms you can’t discover a reason for, a good place to start looking might be to exam the side effects of the medications you are currently taking.

In another recent essay, “Practicing Pharma(cology)” I discussed the son of an in law who had been severely laid up for the past several months with lung problems. He could barely get enough breath to do anything. He was an active, very blue-collar sort of guy who could barely get out of bed in the morning to get to work. His doctor sent him to a pulmonary doctor who sent him to an allergist, and the allergist sent him home with a “bag of drugs”. She pumps him full of both steroids and antibiotics. Which make him feel and breathe better for a couple weeks, and then he reverted to his initial wretched state. This cycle has been repeated a couple times while he awaited being tested for allergies. I suggested looking into the side effects of his current medications.

Lo and behold, by dropping his blood pressure medications his symptoms near disappeared, and his blood pressure was left a respectable 130/90 (with the use of Beetroot Supplements, I believe).

In the book, “Butchered by Healthcare” above, the author notes:

“Doron Garfinkel studied 119 disabled patients in six geriatric nursing departments anda control group of 71 comparable patients. he stopped 332 different drugs that the 119 patients were taking and made no changes in the control group. Forty-five percent of the control group died but only 21 percent of the study group. The emergency hospital admissions were 30 percent in the control group and only 11.8 percent for the study group. Getting our elders off these useless, harmful pills is a specialty. There are articles about how to do it.”

Events of the latter several years, and especially of late, have schooled me that if you would wonder where to begin to improve your health – start by doing a fairly thoroughgoing evaluation of your current healthcare choices. There very well might be a lot of poor choices festering or gathering mold like leftovers in the back of the fridge. And you’ll feel better after you’ve cleaned it out.

Vaccinations, since the Covid-19 pandemic nonsense, certainly would start off the list of probable services to eliminate. And I already touched on this a bit in my previous essay, “On Vaccinations – A Current Event”

Later on, you might consider researching down the list of your prescriptions. Study their side effects. Then study the studies and medical and research opinions from outside our current pharma/medical/insurance cartel arrangements. The above book again, “Butchered by Healthcare” by Robert Yoho, Md would be a good place to start. I’ve found much of his advice reiterated in several other authoritative sources.

The first medication I kicked to the curb was my prescription for Crestor. One of the techniques Pharma uses for pitching the efficacy of their medications is to treat for the “soft targets”, that is lab values – rather than the hard targets which are improvement in patient well-being, symptoms and hard outcomes as proved by studies. So, you might go to your doctor and he might tell you that you are doing well on a medication because your blood values now have fallen in the approved range – without you feeling any better. Statins, for example, (which I’ve discontinued) ”for the vast majority, cause more harm than good”, (including, I’ve read elsewhere, increased Alzheimer’s symptoms).

Another medication I discontinued was an SSRI, which I discovered I had been taking for 17 years, likely unnecessarily. Dropping my Venlafaxin cold turkey was quite a trip in itself (I don’t recommend “cold turkey”) which I wrote about in these two essays, the second of which was rather frightening in retrospect:

Part 1: “Coming Down, Then Back Up”

Part 2: “My Theory About Del Shannon”

I’m sleeping fine currently without Venlafaxin and am emotionally about baseline after a 4-5 month withdrawal.

The third and forth medications Amlodipine and Lisinopril, which I had been taking for high blood pressure I have recently discontinued.

It is common for Pharma to push lab guidelines while will ensnare as many customers as is possible. “The American College of Cardiology (ACC) at one time defined high blood pressure as higher than 160/100. They dropped this to 140/90, and then in 2017to 120/80 for some patients.” This is in spite of the fact that “The Cochrane Collaboration (2012) looked at the studies and saw no evidence that reducing blood pressures below 160/100 improved health.” And, it is hypothesized that a higher blood pressure is necessary for adequate blood perfusion (especially in the brain) for seniors. After quitting medications, my own blood pressure has highs around 155/90, dropping down to 130 over 70 sometimes after exercise, especially outside in hot weather. And I feel much better. I don’t know whether my increased strength is due to better blood perfusion or the elimination of side effects of the medication (some of which are fatigue and dry cough), or some of the other changes I’ve instituted (14-10 fasting, supplements) – but I’m owning it.

Yoho examines the in and outs of our current Healthcare System and isn’t chary of looking up its orifices (of which there are many). Do to them what they do to us! And read this book. One of the criminal endeavors the Pharma industry participates in is to sell medicines to alleviate the symptoms their initial medications create. In this, they are quite like the ultra processed food industry, which is why I provide a link to this essay I wrote, which examines how the monetizing nature of the free market tends to override all other considerations:

“The Sorcerer’s Apprentice and the Loss of Agency”

Our Medical/Pharma/Insurance cartel system operates very much by the same rules. And it’s essential for us consumers to understand these as much as is possible so as to husband our own health and of those we love as well as is possible.

This book will assist you in doing so.