Coronavirus (SARS-CoV-2 / COVID-19) and Tinnitus

Wow - you are right.

Turns out that in Canada it's $185,000 USD (or $256,000 CAD)
https://www.google.com/search?client=firefox-b-d&q=average+family+doctor+salary+in+canada

In Canada we can see the salary of everyone employed in the public sector. I looked up the salaries of the 6 family doctors I know of (in British Columbia and in Ontario), and all of them were above $300,000.

I see that $126,000 in the US is about $85,000 after taxes. Say they put aside $40,000 for their living expenses. This seems to imply that they can pay off their student debt within 5 years of graduation, right?

 

40k for living expenses very much depends on where you live. It can mean the difference between poverty (California Bay Area) and living very well (Oklahoma). But yes, that would be feasible for some states.

 

https://lleo.me/dnevnik/2020/04/18

 

Yeah, us peasants just get added to statistics, the bastards in charge go down in history... and live a long life while doing so!

What's funny is seeing Poots all alone in isolation, the tough guy image all gone. He looks cowardly just sitting there, and has transferred responsibility for lifting lockdown to the regional governors. He can then pass the buck to them.

I overestimated. It's way less the 50%. Went into a shop today and so many people were without masks, and the people working there had masks but only covering the mouth. When I got to the counter the cashier sneezed, and of course, only had the mask over her mouth. No idea why they aren't telling her to stay home. I would order food online, but that option isn't available here.

I don't know how Soviet education compares to Russian education, but this country seems to be full of poorly educated and easily led people. Not surprised there was such a brain drain when the Soviet Union collapsed.

Yesterday I was waiting to cross a road as my wife was lagging a bit behind. People crossed the zebra, and I noticed one man who was dragging his leg. I presumed he had some disease. He passed me and went down the stairs. Then I heard a woman screaming, so I looked around. The man had collapsed in middle of the road at the bottom of the steps; only a little road. I rushed down to help the woman get the man up and off the road as she couldn't manage it. There were no cars. I immediately noticed that the man was well gone (very drunk). We got him up, and I asked him if he was alright. The thing is, is that I had my mask down... the first time i've had it down, even outside. My wife said I didn't need it on outside and should get some fresh air. She's been saying it for ages. This was the first day that I listened to her... the result manhandling a drunk won't have been protecting himself from nothing. Other people just looked on, but I couldn't just leave him there. A good dead that may come back to haunt me...

I tell people to get back in shops. They seem surprised and confused. Don't these people follow the world news? They don't understand what 1.5-2 metres means at all. Really, I wouldn't go to shops if I didn't have to. It's not surprising Russia has so many cases. The death rate will be many times higher than the official report. If you hear of an Englishman falling off of a balcony you know who it was...

 

"Doctors are starting to see many emerging long-term effects of COVID-19 and in Italy, neurologists have already created a separate neuro unit for COVID-19 patients, who are being treated for “stroke, delirium, epileptic seizures, and non-specific neurologic syndromes that look very much like encephalitis,” according to Neurology Today. Dr. Chris Ponting, Chair of Medical Bioinformatics at University of Edinburgh, explained to #MEAction that he would “expect that [of the] people who have COVID-19 symptoms quite severely… about 10% [would] have fatigue-like syndromes after 6 months, given current evidence.”

 

$15.

http://peoplepledge.org/blog/10-rid...eeds-hospital-financial-assistance-in-the-us/

https://leapfroggingsuccess.com/hospitals-charge-shocking-truth/

 

Incredible. How can they get away with it?!

 

We are all too ill to revolt and people keep voting against their own interest due to being misinformed.

 

If you are talking about people voting against getting a Canada-style healthcare, they might be doing so as a result of being informed about its poor performance. You don't need to change your system, you need Senate hearings into getting the hospitals to justify charging $15 for a Tylenol pill (which gives one a sense of how justifiable the rest of the prices are).

 

In polls, the majority of Americans support Medicare for all but don't want it at the expense of legal abortions, etc (pick your wedge issue).

 

Actually, I think the system does need changing, and is in dire need of a major overhaul. $15 for a tylenol pill is nothing in comparison to the trillions of dollars that are wasted on drug and surgical oriented procedures, when in most cases, much less expensive naturopathic treatments would usually lead to much better results. The examples are too many to enumerate, but I'll briefly expound on one.

The most common surgery in the U.S. is for gallbladder removal (500K annually). I've seen prices charged for this procedure to range anywhere from about $8K to over $50K (???). And yet, most of those surgeries could be prevented just by giving the liver and gallbladder a good ol' fashioned cleaning. -- Here's a LINK to a thread which includes a testimonial by a man who suffered miserably for 8 years before giving his own liver/gall bladder a good cleaning. These are his concluding comments:

The ingredients were epsom salt, olive oil, and grapefruit juice. The ingredients for this magic cocktail cost me $6 at the local supermarket. I drank the stuff and went to bed. When I woke up the pain was 90% gone. And then IT started... I started passing some bizarre looking things. Major gallstones some the size of a walnut (and I have no gallbladder). That was a week ago now and the pain is still 90+% gone (I think I'll repeat again this weekend) and my energy level has been THROUGH THE ROOF!. I'm pretty sure I am completely cured!

8 years of pain and fatigue
8 doctors, Mayo Clinic, Holtorf Clinic
4 sonograms, 3 CT scans, 2 MRI's
approx $35k - $50k paid by my insurance
approx $5 - $8k out of my own pocket
$6 for the cure.

Maybe instead of health care reform, we need some medical training that's centered around healing patients instead of maximizing profits.
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For anybody who would be interested, this is a pretty good 6-min. video (note: she makes a pitch for her ebook at the end). -- Instant Gallbladder Attack Relief

 

I assume this price has the externalities of having a nurse administering a drug to a patient baked into it.

Of course the whole thing is a scam, but I think the parasitic insurance industry is the bigger problem. Just saying "hospitals are charging $15 for a tylenol" is misleading when actually they are charging $15 to administer tylenol in a hospital setting which is a different matter indeed.

I'd feel better about that except, of course, this is America so

https://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/books/NBK225187/

 

Another one - varicose vein striping done in the surgical suite. This is an old out of date procedure that's done by older doctors who don't want to change their ways. More modern less invasive procedures such as endovenous closure has faster recovery time with less pain and discomfort. This is often done in a private practice treatment room, not a surgical suite. so hospitals are not involved. Doctors make more money with old fashioned varicose vein striping done in a surgical suite and some do up to eight procedures a day.

 

When a specialist charges a lot to do something simple, the justification is that the specialist needed specialized skills to know what to do. I don't think there are any skills involved in giving another person a glass of water.

I don't know much about US healthcare, but I certainly know that undergraduate tuition would be lower if the students didn't have access to student loans. If the analogy between the healthcare and education systems is true, the fact that the insurance firms are there to pay those ridiculous amounts promotes the hospitals Charging those amounts in the first place. If people didn't have insurance, the hospitals wouldn't be able to charge the high amounts.

 

@Bill Bauer

Just wanted to clarify that not everyone in Sweden pays 44 percent tax. We pay tax depending on our income. Being a degenerate minimalist/student, I don't pay anywhere near that percentage. Closer to 12-20 though I don't really pay attention to that. Most people with a "normal white collar income" pay closer to 44 percent though.

In Sweden, being poor and unemployed pays off. We take care of our own with a social safety net (or we used to, now we take care of immigrants instead). And being ambitious and rich pays off less than other countries because the more you make, the more taxes you pay. Not sure how similar this is to Canada or the US.

A real life example: my best friend during my teenage years became a heroin addict. The state took care of him all the way. Welfare, housing, counseling, substitution drugs. Today he is drug free and has his own arborism company. In many other countries he would probably be dead or still using.

 

If the total tax revenues are 44% of the GDP, then the average citizen is paying 44% of their income in taxes. Of course one might argue that the median person is more appropriate for us to look at than the average person. The more extremely rich people there are, the further apart those two are going to be. It doesn't seem like there would be too many extremely rich people in Sweden, but I admit I know nothing about this, so you tell me.

Could it be that he Began "using" in the first place because he could justifiably say "what's the worst that can happen?!"

Also, is this fair to the person who has controlled him or herself and hasn't "used", and ended up having to pay tribute to the "user"?

 

It sounds to me like what actually paid off for him was finding ambition and a work ethic to provide for himself, and the fact that the state coddled him during his addiction rather than criminalizing him most certainly had a positive impact in that regard.

Many Americans choose to live with the belief that this is one of the few places where "anyone can get rich", but, if you look at the actual statistics on where people end up vs where they start out, as well as the ways money impacts policy decisions and legislation, I myself come to the belief that America 2020 is somewhere between being a kleptocracy with cryptocratic tendencies, and a cryptocracy with kleptocratic tendencies

 

Bingo! Some "health care cost observors" have noted the U.S. never had out of contrtol medical expenses until Medicare came into being in the 1960's. All of a sudden, health care providors could use their clout to influence politicians to enact legislation that would essentially cover bloated health care costs. -- My understanding is insurance companies have little incentive to control health care costs, because they're generally able to maintain their profit margins. So the higher the health care costs, the more money they make, at an annual rate that's 2-5x the rate of inflation. Pretty sweet deal.
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Many people who look at U.S. Federal tax rates fail to take into consideration other taxes that Americans pay. State taxes, property taxes, sales taxes, and hidden taxes and fees everywhere. I'm not convinced Nordic countries who are supposed to have notoriously high tax rates are taking in that much more than Federal, State, and Local governmentsin the U.S. Yet the U.S. safety net is not what it is in most European countries. It's just a simple fact that corporations and rich people generally get most of the benefit of overall wealth in the U.S. Warren Buffet seems to agree with that assessment.

 

If you have insurance, the insurance company doesn't pay the master price of $15 to a hospital for a tablet of Tylenol. They get a charge master discount, but charge does includes nurse wage time to administer it. The patient who pays the $15 charge master price doesn't have insurance. Worse yet, if you get sick out-of-network, you will be paying a lot more than $15. Master prices is a cooked up scheme between hospitals and insurance companies.

 

I am in the process of buying private family insurance (during a pandemic) in a situation where we need to make sure our out of pocket maximum isn't too far north of $10,000, as we blew through that in a hurry in 2018 because Life Happens.

It's total madness; it is vastly more complicated to navigate than income taxes, and, worse, unlike taxes, there's really no such thing as an unbiased personal specialist with no affiliation to any other organization that you can pay to help you understand and manage the specifics of your situation.

So, I am sitting here, with 70 pages of fine-print descriptions of 8 different plans that vary in price by upwards of $800 a month, trying to understand the differences. Ironically, it actually was my tax person who was able to give me some better information than the actual insurance company about the implications of some things.

I generally like to believe I am of at least average intelligence. It has taken me hours and a lot of stress to understand the implications of the insurance decisions I am making, once these things are selected they are more or less set in stone for a year.

If I just assume that I am straight 50th percentile for reading comprehension and math skills, and I am finding it extremely difficult to understand and make correct decisions about insurance, this forces me to think that some significant amount of the country is literally cognitively incapable of understanding these things well enough to make correct decisions.

I do not think this is a reasonable or acceptable situation. Of course, it's possible that I am only 10th percentile, 90% of the country is smarter than me, and most people "just understand this stuff", but that's not the impression I have now.

 

@linearb -- Those numbers are pretty shocking to see; though I guess they shouldn't be. I used to do some work in financial planning (many years ago), and during this time took a close look at the whole health insurance picture. Fwiw, here's a few things I took away from my thoughts and deliberations back then--and now. -- What I came to believe is that, essentially, the whole health care and insurance system(s) are designed for people who don't take of themselves as well as they should, and from which the health care providors and insurance companies can profit from. People who do take care of themselves better than the norm essentially subsidize people who don't. In my mind, the question then becomes how a person might get out of the situation of subsidizing others.

Let's say you took $1,700/month--half-way between the amounts you're looking at. That's $20,400/ year. I don't know exactly what the current laws are for the MSAs (Medical Savings Accounts), but if you were to start putting most of that money into an MSA, if wouldn't take very long until you were able to build it up to $50-100K. -- Something to consider: As I recall, 96% of all outlays by health insurance companies are for claims totalling less than $80K. Which means: you should be able to get a relatively inexpensive health insurance plan for catastrophic claims (>$80K), while at the same time being able to cover less than catastrophic health care costs by tapping into your MSA--if you went that route.

From what I'm able to gather, you and your family do much better than the norm in taking care of yourselves (I think you even keep Vitamin C and DMSO on hand ). So I would say your "risks" of not having a plan with a $1,000-$5,000 deductible is rather small. -- To me, it's all about adequately--and unemotionally I guess--assessing the risks. Are you familiar with the term "insurance poor"? It's where if people insured themselves for every conceivable contingency, they'd end up broke. That's kind of how I look at most health insurance plans that have lower deductibles (very poor value). That's kind of an "insurance poor" choice to me. From what I know (or think I know), it would seem it would be worth your while to consider starting an MSA, and begin building that medical nest egg instead of giving most of it to the insurance companies.

 

Well, some people take care of themselves, some don't. Some take care of themselves but are cursed with rare, extremely expensive genetic disorders. Others don't take care of themselves but eventually get into a car wreck and die fast before any of their chronic problems become expensive.

So, I think a better way of looking at it is "people who by necessity utilize services more are subsidized by those who do not", and I'd say that's the most basic definition of what insurance is supposed to be that I can imagine. It is spreading risk.

I don't want to get out of the situation of subsidizing others; I want everyone to have access to a high quality of healthcare. I think it's a basic human right. The things I am complaining about are the complexity of the systems and the fact that something like 40% of medical spending just goes to "support" the insurance infrastructure. Plus all the problems @Greg Sacramento has brought up about billing private individuals vs insurance negotiated rates.

Erm, if we'd been uninsured, or on a "catastrophic only" plan, in 2018 -- we would have come out of the year with insurmountable medical debt and possibly gone bankrupt. This is because my wife had this misfortune of a fall which broke her arm and led to some issues that needed ongoing treatment, during the same year that our child had an event which required an ambulance ride, ER visit, and overnight stay in the ICU for the three of us.

So -- no matter how well you take care of yourself, I think everyone who does not have some kind of insurance with some reasonable out of pocket maximum, is just at immediate risk of medical bankruptcy, at all times.

If we were lower income, I believe there would be subsidized options on the state exchanges which would mitigate these costs, probably significantly. Based on that, it seems reasonable to say that by buying a more expensive plan, I am likely subsidizing the costs for people who earn less. That doesn't bother me, both for altruistic reasons, but pragmatically because I personally benefit the fewer sick or incapacitated people there are in my town.

Some uninsured driver hitting you, or a bad slip on a stairway at night, can trivially turn into events that lead to $100,000+ bills for people with no health insurance. As soon as you're in an ambulance on your way to a facility you're into four digit territory, and if you're there overnight, you probably edge into five digits pretty fast. Of course this will vary tremendously on what services you need.

I do agree that using HSAs intelligently with high deductible plans to build up actual savings over time is a good goal, but, I am also not willing to put myself in a position where my out of pocket maximum is more than I could afford, because in 2018 I think we "spent" something like $20,000 on services, largely down to those two events.

 

Well, as you know addiction can have a genetic component to it. He has ADD and both parents are alcoholics. We both came from middle class households, and followed the same path until he started doing these harder drugs I had no interest in.

But yes, your analysis is also correct. In fact, he started using heroin because he got addicted to the substitute drug or whatever the correct term is. To get it legally, documented heroin use is required. So in his mind, doing heroin was a way to get a legal steady supply of his preferred drug Subutex. Something about this seems wrong for sure..

Is it fair? I don't know. I'm obviously biased towards this individual, but that's because I know his whole life story. I probably judge heroin addicts in general harsher. Should our taxes go to people like him, or to support older people from Somalia that will most likely stay unemployable their whole life in Sweden? I used to think more about these things until I got tinnitus, been a bit self-centered ever since. It's a lot of work as we all know..

Being extremely rich in Sweden could be considered an act of charity I suppose, and I think most extremely ambitious and wealthy people emigrate to other countries? There are many upper middle class households though. These people probably pay 44 percent or more.

 

I don't know this individual, but I am biased towards believing that societies where more people are out performing useful work and not locked up by the state, are doing something better than societies where more people are locked up by the state.

Then, add in a private prison industry that exists to make profit...

These people would probably pay closer to 30% here, but then we have to look at that other 14%. The healthcare costs we're talking about definitely gobble a chunk of that.

Given my healthcare needs, income, and where I like to live, I would be very interested to try to figure out what my takehome pay in Sweden would be, and what the differential in services would be. Though, I don't wanna come visit you quite yet, until we both get our corona situation rationalized.

 

I have an addictive personality. I can get addicted to a TV show. This is why I don't fool around with "recreational" drugs.

There are more options than that.

Just because you have knees, doesn't mean that someone has to be sitting on them (in waiting rooms or when you take public transport).

At first I thought you were talking about COVID-19 lockdowns.

If the punishments are harsh enough, fewer people will break the law and more people will be out there performing useful work.

 

I have an addictive personality too, but I've never been addicted to any drug except coffee. Quitting cigarettes was easier than I thought. Video games on the other hand..

Yes, of course there are more options than that. Why would I list them all?

 

You said "should our taxes go towards A or towards B". It sounded like in your mind those were the options, but now I see what you had actually meant.

 

I've known a number of people with active and in some cases quite significant opiate addictions who have none the less been successful as lawyers, software engineers, project managers.

Amphetamines, usually in the form of adderrall or Vyvanse, are widely used legally by large numbers of software developers, many of whom may have been on the Ritalin train since their youth in the 90s.

https://qz.com/812604/millennials-t...heyve-taken-their-addiction-to-the-workplace/

I haven't had an Adderall prescription since 2003 and don't take narcotics outside of extraordinary medical circumstances; however, the existence of extremely high-functioning white collar addicts tells me again that this is a social problem more than anything else: there's actually no inherent reason someone can't be high all the time and perform meaningful work. Sure, you might not want your surgeon or pilot high, but half the services you're getting from the service economy are coming from people with THC in their blood at this point, and I can guarantee you that virtually every piece of software you use had an Adderall coder touch it at some point along the way. Cannabis and alcohol use and abuse are fairly prevalent in software as well; the former actually seems to be offsetting the latter to some extent as professional events become more accepting of cannabis (and cannabis devices become ever more discreet); I personally see that as a positive trend. I have, over the years, seen a lot of very boorish behavior from drunks at professional conferences. The stoners never seem to be the ones making the women feel uncomfortable, strange... of course, I am biased in this regard.

I believe alcohol has less utility and is fundamentally worse for society than any of these other three classes of drugs, but, prohibition is stupid and so is a drug war that's heavy on AR-15s, no knock warrants and brutal enforcement. It has not worked to reduce use rates or recidivism in the last 40 years, it's not magically going to start working now. If you end goal is a society that's constantly engaged in bloody class warfare and a set of police forces which are better armed than many world militaries and profits off of keeping people incarcerated through private prisons and labor contracts, then the US model is a smashing success. If your goal is to reduce the number of people in prison or unable to work and increase the number of people paying taxes from useful jobs, well, it's only working out if you want to be a private prison guard or AR-15 carrying SWAT officer, at the expense of the biggest prison population in the "free" world.

Also, as far as "pilots being high on speed", there's a funny disconnect here where the FAA bans ADHD meds for commerical pilots; meanwhile, the military not only encourages them but requires them for some flight applications and also just generally being able to keep killing people for 2 days straight without sleep:

https://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pubmed/22764609

https://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pubmed/15460629

http://www.slate.com/articles/healt...modafinil_and_the_arms_race_for_soldiers.html

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/List_of_psychoactive_drugs_used_by_militaries

The latter document makes me think the military used dextroamphetamine pretty widely until 2017 and has since totally replaced it with modafinal. Makes sense to me; staying awake for long enough will make you hallucinate no matter what, but modafinil is much less stimmy than traditional amphetamines. Whether or not I would want my pilot on it would depend on some peer-reviewed studies; the military frequently requires people to work for 18-36hrs straight, which is not allowed in the commercial flight industry.

 

I just got a disconcerting email from Mercola.com (below), that I think would be disconcerting for others as well who value freedom of speech. Makes me realize even more how much freedoms in America are under threat by the conventional medicine establishment and their allies in the U.S. government. I suspect the only reason they took this action is because Dr. Brownstein's successful non-conventional treatment of COVID-19 is gaining traction, and being viewed with alarm by the status quo.

Just to mention, Dr. Brownstein was very careful in all his videos to stress that he was not claiming his treatments were a cure for COVID-19, only that they helped support the immune system. He posted videos with patient interviews on how they'd been helped. -- It feels unfathomable to me that such simple expressions of free speech are being muzzled at a critical time when such examples of successful treatments should be celebrated and widely disseminated.

"Two Michigan doctors have been ordered to cease discussion about, or use of, natural health treatments for COVID-19 involving vitamins. Dr. David Brownstein had been blogging on various vitamin-based treatment protocols for the virus when the Federal Trade Commission notified him that he can’t blog, post, tweet or even send emails on the topic.

In late April federal law enforcement officials shut down Allure Medical Spa after Dr. Charles Mok announced that he was providing intravenous vitamin C therapy to all essential Michigan workers at risk of contracting COVID-19."

SOURCES: -- Dr. Brownstein’s Holistic Medicine May 2020
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Here's what it says at the link:

Dear CHM Patients-

I want to let you know that we have been ordered by the FTC to stop making any statements about our treatment protocols of Vitamins A, C and D as well as nutritional IV’s, iodine, ozone and nebulization to support the immune system with respect to Coronavirus Diseases 2019 (COVID-19).

According to this letter:

“It is unlawful under the FTC Act, 15 U.S.C Sec. 41 et seq. to advertise that a product or service can prevent, treat, or cure human disease unless you possess competent and reliable scientific evidence, including, when appropriate, well-controlled human clinical studies, substantiating that the claims are true at the time they are made. For COVID-19, no such study is currently known to exist for the products or services identified above. Thus, any Coronavirus-related prevention or treatment claims regarding such products or services are not supported by competent and reliable scientific evidence. You must immediately cease making all such claims.”

What this means is that I will not be able to blog, post, tweet, email, etc. for awhile. I want you to know that CHM is NOT closing. I am still here and so are my colleagues. It is my honor to be your doctor.

To All Our Health! ~DrB​