Prior to going in, my family got a report that she was going to have a test to find out about her lungs.  When they'd heard that she refused the test, they grew disappointed and bewildered.  The point is that here were two incidents in the course of 10 days where I was available to fight for my mom.  How many others occured while I wasn't available to attend to her?  Something in me believes that because my mom refused the expensive CT scan, that the doctor threw up his hands and simply ordered an unending flow of antibiotics in a kind of subconscious revenge that ultimately led to her death.  I feel that they killed her.  

Now I understand the social function of hospital scenes in horror movies, like Halloween II, where Michael Myers murders the hospital staff: it is a revenge fantasy against the medical-military-industrial complex.  Am I overstating it?  The hospital staff gave my mom the antibiotic Zosyn; a nurse friend of mine says that is a standard version.  If that is the case, then my mother got the standard treatment for patients her age: d _ _ th.  The antibiotic killed any good bacteria that comprised her immunity, the one natural advantage she had to defend herself.  

My mom was a fighter, particularly at 89.  But she was sick and, you are right, she or anybody else cannot fight alone against a monstrous system facilitated by very licensed, very Phdeed, very composed, and very legitimate doctors with very nice but obediently calloused minions. 

I greatly appreciate your article and your featuring Ernestine Shepherd at your website. What an inspiration!  Thank you, thank you.

Great article.  Thank you.  

You articulate in a very detailed and precise way everybody's concerns about hospital stays for themselves and for loved ones.  It is truly great.  Your article prepares people for hospital experiences, if in fact that is what is required or desired.  

My mother died in January.  She was sick and in accute pain.  An episode of bleeding alarmed my siblings who lived with her, and they called 911.  An ambulance came out and took her away to the hospital.  She was having difficulty breathing for at least two weeks prior.  The Emergency Room staff claimed she had pneumonia and wanted to place her in a room for further tests.  And the tests with their technicians and computerized equipment rolled in every hour on the hour, since my mother had full coverage.  They put her on antibiotics from day one.  She was in the hospital for 10 days.  By the 10th day, she was fighting for her life.  Exhausted and undernourished and sleep-deprived, I watched my mother fight for each breath.  She fought so hard for each breath that she could never relax enough to get sleep.  

She was sleep deprived by day 8.  She was 89, and the doctor and the hospital staff used her age against her, "Well, she is 89," cautioning us against expecting too much.  So that worries us and puts our focus on the same.  But she was not close to death when she arrived!  

She made it home but in a lifeless condition made more ominous and hopeless by the assistance of hospice care.  The night she arrived home, she didn't have strength to hold a paper cup to sip water from a straw.  She asked me, "Mike, what did they do to me?"  I answered that they gave you antibiotics.  So she knew what they did to her.  SHE KNEW.  I felt helpless, as if someone had robbed me of my defenses so that I could not protect or defend my mother.  

There were two different instances in the hospital where I did defend my mother.  I stayed with her the first night.  A nurse came in and asked for a urine sample.  My mother explained that he had already given a sample in the Emergency Room earlier in the day.  Lying in her bed, she turned to me and in an exasperated voice directed me, "Tell her, Mike," and I did.  The nurse relented for now.  My mother was relieved and desperately grateful.  

She'd had 8 babies; she was familiar with hospitals and doctors.  My mom did not want to be or stay in the hospital.  She begged me to take her home.  So I went to the head nurse and explained that my mom wanted to go home.  The nurse said to me that the doctor is not going to like that, and she persuaded me to wait for the doctor's in-put in the morning.  I agreed, foolishly and sheepishly.  

We waited two days to have a pulmonary specialist check my mom's lungs.  He couldn't find anything wrong with her lungs.  So he ordered a CT scan.  Wouldn't pneumonia show symptoms?  The ordeal of transferring my mom from her stationary bed to a mobile one was disorienting for her.  I walked alongside her, holding her hand, explaining where she was at and where she was going; it was important for her to hear a familiar voice as she was wheeled through cold and unfamilar halls by well-intentioned strangers.  

We arrived at the X-Ray Lab, where we waited outside for the patient in front of us to emerge from the lab.  My mom was making jokes to the orderlies in an attempt to settle her anxiety as well as punctuate the whole arrogance of a system that usurps authority to tell her and her uninformed family what she needs for her body.  We finally wheeled her into the lab, where she sees the tractor wheel-sized donut with two red beams intersecting at the center of it.  My mom grabbed my wrist and rose from the bed, her eyes fixed and wild, "Mike, I don't want to do this.  Get me out of here."

The technician came over to try to consol her and persuade the two of us of the benefits of the of test.  I said, "I want her to have as much authority over her body as possible."  He agreed, but continued to persuade.  Through the intimidating looks of the technicians, I honored my mom's wish and told the orderlies to wheel her back up to her room.  But it is not as easy as it sounds, for I am fighting the stares of the fired-up technicians who are ready to get paid, who receive prop-like, muted support from the orderlies.  

After reading your article on LewRockwell.com entitled, "10 Tips On How To Survive a Trip To the Hospital", I could not ignore some of the atrociously bad (even deadly) advice you espouse in the article. Diets are strickly regimented in a hospital and patterned specifically for each patient. 

If their doctor holds them to be NPO (nothing prescribed) past midnight, then it is because they are going to be incuring a procedure the following morning that contraindicates it or because an accurate assay requires it. Hospital staff are not closet satists gleefully strolling the halls only for the serenade of starved wailings. Furthermore, patients whose doctor has ordered them to be placed on a particular restriction is in danger if that patient should violate it. Ignoring a fluid restriction or sodium limit could–quite literally, have grave reprocussions due to their illness, treatments recieved, and/or interactions with medications. 

Even without those serious health considerations, hospital food has dramatically improved in quality over the years. Arguably, many of our patients consume a superior diet during their stay than they do at home, as most of our patients wind up in hosptials precisely because of their lifetime of miserable dietary choices. 

Do not be confused; I am an anarcho-capitalist true believer. Personal choice is ultimate, but I find that your article contains little regarding that. Your article's many "wisdoms" regarding hospital food are not only ill-informed, but grossly so and even border on malignant and dangerous.

~ Michael Morin

B.S. Biochemistry & Molecular Biology
Cardiology Technologist
Paramedic

Much enjoyed your piece on LRC.

Some time ago, I attended a  meeting of real estate investors [Reading, PA].  The featured speaker of the evening was a local physician — before he was to  become nationally known, Dr.Leo Frangipani.  Having  never heard of him,  I thought, "Who? "Why?"

His talk turned out to be the best I had ever attended of this group.

Dr. Fangipane's message: IF EVER ADMITTED TO A HOSPITAL, NEVER, NEVER BECOME A "GOOD" PATIENT!

Hospitals, he informed us, try to turn us into a number, a statistic,  a data point  …" The Gall Bladder in Room 312"  or … "The Hernia in Room 422."

Further, he urged: "Question everything."  "Accept nothing!"

I know I have benefitted from his advice.

Again,  your article was splendid.

Your ideas on better health through traditional foods of our (African and non-european) ancestors might be well-intentioned but lacking in scientific logic or any historical basis. How is it possible to know what people ate or didn't eat thousands or millions or billions of years ago, when grain or dairy products don't leave behind fossil evidence like meat does? Like Weston A. Price and his followers, your website and its approach to food is superficial and full of junk science and shoddy logic. You are arrogantly ignoring the fact that our ancestors had much shorter life expectancy (30-40 age range), higher rates of infant and child mortality, had poor sanitation, and were vulnerable to parasites and infectious diseases like diptheria, tuberculosis, polio, & measles that have been sharply curtailed through despised methods such as vaccines and cheap, mass-produced food. It is true they did not get heart disease, cancer, or diabetes, but that's because they didn't live long enough to get such ailments. It was not the European world's mass-produced food that negatively affected the health of hunter-gatherer groups, but overindulgence in sweets, sedentary lifestyles, abuse of alcohol, and exposure to European diseases to which these groups had no immunity. Type II diabetes is not caused by sugar itself, but by genetic vulnerability, and these non-european groups and their descendents had, and still have less genetic protection than people of European origin do.

Don't you see the implications of getting rid of all grains, dairy, and "processed foods"? Without grains and rice, much of the world's environment and economy will go up in smoke, especially in poor countries where the people are heavily dependent on grain and rice. Without dairy products, dairy cattle will suffer in agony or go extinct, and anyone who works in the dairy industry will be unemployed. Grass-fed beef and free-range chickens, and other hormone-free meats are worthwhile, and already the norm in kosher and halal meat.

What do you mean by the term "processed food"? If you go on the website www.junkfoodscience.blogspot.com, you'll see that "processing" has been going on since the beginning of time, with frying, roasting, cutting, grinding, salting, pickling, canning, grilling, smoking, freezing, baking, boiling, etc. Preservatives are important to keep the food from spoiling on its way to the supermarket (for the benefit of people who don't live in rural areas, who lack time and money to prepare their own food, and/or who can't hunt due to kosher or halal rules). Modern, factory food production methods can also kill harmful bacteria, add flavor, improve taste & texture, and add nutritional value (such as vitamin-enriched cereals and juices). So processed food is just a snobbish term for mass-produced, cheap food that people of lesser means can afford.

How dare you bash hospitals! For all their faults, hospitals have enabled many more people to survive and improve their health than home-based care. What, you think that everyone in America lives in a spacious, 100% sanitary house in the pristine countryside or a gated community, and that everyone is well-educated and makes at least $100,000 to be able to afford top-flight home care? What about people who live in small houses or apartments in suburbs or urban areas, who have to work long hours, who don't have much money? Since hospitals have to make a profit, they are more likely to be sanitary than private homes, which don't have to face profit-and-loss tests.

I'd also like to add that I worked for about ten years at a hospital in San Diego as a Biomedical Engineer, and I had access to the people in every department (I was good at fixing lots of things besides biomedical equipment). Hospitals are very compartmentalized, and I was able to connect many dots because I wasn't. This was good because I met many nice competent people and learned a lot, but it was also bad because I saw how Administration and Billing were always cutting corners in order to save a buck, at the expense of patient care and employee frustration. I finally got disgusted enough that I left. Somehow I figured that after thirty years the medical profession would have gotten better and smarter, but instead I found just the opposite. Except for the money-making part, of course.

Thanks for the reference to "Confessions of a Medical Heretic". I am adding it to my reading list. Dittos your very interesting website.

Your excellent article on LRC about hospital food hit a chord, and I have a hospital horror story to share that you might find useful for a future article.

My wife has become very intolerant to glutamate, as in MSG. If she has any she will get a "buzz", followed by a headache, and often wakes up the next morning with severe shakes. Even going down the wrong packaged food isle of a food store can affect her somewhat. And glutamate is in nearly everything, hiding under dozens of innocent sounding names; http://www.msgmyth.com/hidename.htm. Add to those names "Unami", which Campbell Soups has begun using.  And then there's the trick wording of "no MSG added". Glutamate is even "hidden" in ice cream, cottage cheese, jello, yogurt, and other common hospital snacks the nurses keep on floor to offer the patients. 

Last year she fell and fractured her hip, which required a hip replacement and a stay at the hospital. I explained her "allergy" to her doctor, the dietitian, and the nurses, and they put her on a "no glutamate diet". It said so right at the top of every "menu" she got. I monitored her food as well as I could, and nearly nearly every item in every meal she got had glutamate in it (was loaded with it)! I tried to explain that to the medical "professionals" and I might as well have been talking to the wall. The Chief Dietitian said it was all glutamate free and that was that, even though some of the food packages that were on her plate clearly listed MSG on them! Unbelievable!

I also explained to them that if she took a couple of capsules of Turmeric before her meals that it would moderate the effects of the glutamate (turmeric seems to help some people, and fortunately it does help Nancy). But of course that wasn't allowed unless it was prescribed by the doctor and came from the hospital's pharmacy. You can guess how far that got. So I took to sneaking it in. Her normal daily vitamins were of course forbidden, save for a doctor prescribed one-a-day vitamin (I wonder how much that cost?). 

I should add that what probably "saved" her is that they had her so doped up on Librium that she pretty much had to be hand fed, and that only happened when I was there. And why was she so doped up on Librium? Because during the admission screening she said she had one beer the day before. The doctor, some foreigner with a stone on her forehead, wrote in Nancy's chart that she'd had ethanol the day before and she might go through ethanol withdrawal (I have a copy of her records, and that's what's entered!). That slipped by me at the time, and I thought her being so out-of-it was due to the pain killers they were giving her.

Fast forward a week and she goes to an assisted care facility they call Rehab (she really hadn't recovered enough that I could even get her into the house, no thanks to the Librium). I explained about glutamate, was assured they didn't even use it, but  it turned out to be the same scenario as at the hospital (though I admit the food looked a lot better than hospital food). About day two she went into severe abdominal cramps to the point she told me she thought she was going to die. 

I demanded she be taken to the hospital, and they said no, not without the doctor's permission. And the doctor wouldn't even come down and see her because the doctor was too busy running Long Term Care patients through her office so she could bill Medicare on her weekly visit to the facility (five minutes max per patient, and that's for new patients). The doctor was just down the hall, and couldn't take a few precious minutes out of her money-making operation. What the doctor did do was instruct the nurses to try and sedate Nancy so she'd shut up, and the nurses lied to me about what they were up to; they said it was a stool softener, which turned out to be a lie after I got my hands on those records. I finally said I was taking her out myself, at which point they relented and called for transport.

After numerous expensive tests they could find nothing wrong. I tried to explain to her now new doctor what the problem might be, and he blew me off, of course. I watched her food very carefully after that, and after a couple of days she was feeling much better. At that point I got her the heck out of there before they killed her, and she's now pretty-much recovered from everything.

My father was hospitalized at the beginning of the year, he basically collapsed according to my sister and had been having severe dizzy spells for a while.

He was there since the morning and they somehow determined that his carotid artery had an 80% blockage and it was limiting blood flow to his brain.

My dad has been taking all manner of drugs and I had been trying to get him clean up his diet for a long time and get off the pills.

Anyway the doctor told him that they had to perform surgery to clear the blockage and that it was an emergency and had to be done the next day or he risked a stroke.

It was in the late afternoon after the doctor left they brought dinner.

Dinner was – wait for it…….. fried chicken and macaroni and cheese!

I didn't know whether to laugh or gag.

I tossed it in the trash disgusted. The nurse was mortified.

I went to the hospital cafeteria and they had a wonderful organic spring mix salad, and I got him a  turkey wrap to go with it, all for about $8. The nurse tried to give me a hard time about bringing food but I glared at her and asked what logic would prompt them to serve such a patient with his condition fried chicken with mac and cheese!

Best to you, I love your site

Alex P

I am beginning my raw milk fast with 5 days of pure raw colostrum, 6 pints a day with an extra two liters of raw milk, which comes to about 5 quarts or so. Then I will be on pure raw milk for 6 weeks. 

So far, my sleep has improved 100%. It's amazing how fast I get to sleep now in just about any position. Some wounds from popped zits (sorry to be graphic) heal overnight practically, and I have some pretty amazing energy levels, although I had a major crash yesturday while out shopping. 

I feel fantastic and I crave nothing. My skin is clearing despite a switch to only washing my face once a day. 

Digestion is good so far, no complaints.

I will keep posting my progress. The areas where I get folliculitis seem calm. I have not broken out in those areas with as much frequency and one of the infected areas has not had any activity at all and seems to be healing. 

What is your opinion on olive oil consumption, and have you written about that topic? I'm asking because of the large amounts of omega-6 in Olive oil, though it is generally considered quite healthful.

Thanks!

http://www.karlloren.com/aajonus/p15.htm#_ftn68

I'm not sure the timeframe, but forty percent doesn't sound like a miracle cure to me. In other cases, I've read lyme disease being cured in several weeks, and other things being cured faster. I thought it was a cure-all. And a quick one. I forget where I read this but I read the body can right itself within a matter of minutes to hours. Since it's more or less similar to how antivenom is made, there must be a lot of promise in this, since antivenom works. But I wonder if there's a difference in diseases from external factors, like bacteria or viruses, something that shouldnn't be in the body, versus something that should be there, like hormones, just in unbalanced amounts?