18 Comments

I was a dentist in an earlier life. My patient was the center of my universe. Today, the patient is a cog in a money making machine. My doctors work for the corporation. Not me. They are still trying to sell me another mRNA shot. This started over a decade ago with Obamacare, which I, as a Congressman, voted against. I believed at the time it would force healthcare into larger and larger organizations for delivery. Covid just sealed the deal. I have no confidence in the healthcare industry any longer. Least of all the government healthcare organizations such as the CDC, NIH, NAIAD and FDA. They lied and people died. All for money.

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It seems part of the collapse we're seeing overall in the present era is the loss of distinction between robust, horizontal cultures of practice, and profit-seeking. It is also the loss of the ability for the government and industry to hold distinct roles and benchmarks (OTHER than constant, desperate growth basically), which are necessary for actual accountability or apparently ethics to happen at all.

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I'd love to see a cross country comparison of long covid prevalence. For example, compare the USA vs Kenya: the neurotic (sorry, but accurate for a large segment of the USA) vs people with no time for such nonsense.

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There is little long covid in nations too poor to buy the mRNA shots.

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Just like Covid... there is no good case definition. Just make some numbers up.

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Just what the CDC did.

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I liked these comments from Guru Prasad. I’m aware of the very distinct resemblance of what these “Long COVID Clinics” are doing to what goes on in the “art and science” of Professional Wrestling: viz. Anybody with half a brain knows what’s going to happen.

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I remember seeing the bupe clinics all pop up (based on the huge financial success of the pain clinics distributing opioids)…I knew before those popped up that real patient care was over. Then seeing these clinics offering big bucks for MD DEA numbers (the basic jist) made me realize just how big $ it is.

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Anyone who has practiced Infectious Disease medicine for more than a few years recognizes “long COVID” as a member of the “chronic Lyme”, “chronic EBV”, “chronic candida syndrome” family of afflictions. Except for the replacement of the small shopping bag with paper notes by messages to the portal, it was once called “maladie du petit papier”

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Not having long Covid or feeling sick after getting Covid makes me pause. I do know family members who have heightened sense of smell ever since and Is at the very least annoying. Our heart Hosp was one of the first in the country to offer coronary calcium scanning . Consumer reports said we were doing Heart scams not Heart scans. I felt comfortable about it, pending the results of the trials because I saw real time that it was changing practice. I also saw patients who refused to get care come in every month and were found to have advanced coronary disease. Their family was able to convince him to get a one minute test. at the very least they ended up on statins aspirin, and got a stress test. There's no doubt that we saved some lives there. The true measure of some of these programs is does it change downstream care? Patients of an appropriate age group who would come into the ER had a negative troponin and if they had a negative scan at the same time, they were sent home without further testing. In the last 20 years, I'm not aware of a single person that suffered an adverse event from that strategy. Getting to long Covid clinics. If patients have symptoms after Covid and I do believe there's a fair amount with some hypotension and these clinics give them access to some physicians who are interested and will listen to them, it's better than the alternative. The alternative is you are a nut job go home. But at the same time there needs to be ongoing data collection.

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I had dinner with a friend last night. She recently had some routine tests done. The doctors office called her to tell her she would need to come in for the results and a $75 office visit charge. Naturally, she was worried. The office visit was just to tell her that everything was normal. They couldn’t even tell her that via email or the phone.

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Reminds me of when Epstein-Barr or fibromyalgia was all the rage.

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VP makes a great point about the importance of RCTs in medicine. Sadly, there is a reality, most of which is financially and ideologically driven, that gets ahead of science. By doing so, any questioning of their actions can be placed under “conspiracy theory”, “wacko”, “naysayer “ labels. In essence, they have already made up their minds and don’t need facts that may jeopardize their self-serving interests.

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No NPI intervention made any difference. I suspect when the garbage computer model predictions are thrown out, neither did the "vaccines".

Winter is coming for the CDC and FDA.

https://x.com/goddeketal/status/1808166035662442721

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But to be fair...you have to find the next statin money from somewhere. And, thank goodness, the tide is turning on views about sex-change operations to children. So Long Covid or Long Vax clinics don't even compare in importance when compared to minor sex-reassignment clinics.

BTW, none of this is new. President Eisenhower's farewell speech (should be a required listening by all.) We lived through the very thing that President Eisenhower warned us about. Not just about the dangers about DIB that's so well known. Where have all the statesmen gone?

...In this revolution, research has become central; it also becomes more formalized, complex, and costly. A steadily increasing share is conducted for, by, or at the direction of, the Federal government....[snip]

Yet, in holding scientific research and discovery in respect, as we should, we must also be alert to the equal and opposite danger that public policy could itself become the captive of a scientific-technological elite.

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Are the long Covid services provided by these clinics typically covered by insurance ?

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That's what I was wondering? Or did the federal govt throw some funding their way?

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