The revolving door      of Traditional Health

From MBA comes another message to you which touches on what we have been saying
about the situations that increase the problems hospitals and the entire Medical
System in America is facing.  This also came to us via email (08-24-02) 
from famous Dr. Mercola.

America is Running Out of Doctors and Nurses 

More than 126,000 nursing positions remain unfilled. 

The shortage has become so severe it is endangering the lives of patients and is a primary reason for overcrowding in emergency departments and cancellation of surgeries, according to a report
 by an Experts Roundtable panel convened by the Joint Commission on the 
Accreditation of Healthcare Organizations. 

Society for Thoracic Surgeons recently warned that a shortage of heart surgeons looms within a few years. A survey of hospitals found pharmacists, X-ray technicians and therapists are leaving
 at such an alarming rate it already is affecting the quality of care patients receive. 

'Serious Retention Issues' Hospitals have serious retention issues. 

A survey, which included 44 hospitals, found those hospitals lost 18 percent to 22 percent of their pharmacists, radiologists and therapists in 2001. This is significantly higher than other
industries, which have average attrition rates of 13 percent to 15 percent, she said. 

'Crisis' 

At least one type of surgical specialty appears to be in trouble as well. Although the shortage of heart surgeons would not become apparent for three to six years, "it's a crisis now. 

There have to be changes now." 

This is because it takes eight to 10 years to train heart surgeons, and there already are drops in residency applications. There were not enough applicants to fill all the available heart surgical resident spots last year. General surgery residencies, the program surgeons must 
complete prior to specializing in heart surgery, also were left unfilled. 

There will not be enough surgeons to perform operations for bypasses, lung cancer and other
heart and lung surgeries, he said.  The situation likely will be compounded by the aging 
Baby Boomers and the fact that people are living longer, so there will be an
 increased need for these types of surgeries, he said. 

Cutting Costs 

The shortages are a result of HMOs and managed care companies attempting to cut costs
 and staff. This has placed an "excessive demand" on health workers, which coupled 
with low salaries has deterred young people from entering these fields. 

The Joint Commission Roundtable concluded solutions to the nursing shortage must involve transforming the nursing workplace, increasing enrollment in nursing training programs
 and paying financial incentives to spur health care organizations to lay 
out necessary expenditures for high quality nursing care. 

"Failure to address this problem aggressively is likely to result in increased deaths,
 complications, lengths-of-stay, and other undesirable patient outcomes,"
 the roundtable said in a written statement. 

No Shortage of Lawyers 

Another issue is soaring costs of malpractice insurance and doctors being forced out of business by costly lawsuits. Obstetricians have been hit particularly hard, and in some parts of the country pregnant women cannot find a doctor. An explosion of medical malpractice litigation has caused many communities to lose family practice doctors, obstetricians and gynecologists. 

From: Joint Commission on Accreditation of Healthcare Organizations August 8, 2002

  DR. MERCOLA'S COMMENT: 

I believe my journalist friend Nick Regush summarized the problem quite nicely earlier this year:

 "There is no way to be nice about this. There is no point in raising false hopes. There is no treatment or vaccine in sight. There is no miracle breakthrough on the horizon. 

Medicine, as we know it, is dying. It is entering a terminal phase. 

What began as an acute illness reached the chronic stage about a decade ago and its progression towards death has been remarkably swift and well beyond anything anyone could have predicted.

 The disease is caused by conflict of interest, tainted research, greed for big bucks, pretentious doctors and scientists, lying, cheating, invasion by the morally bankrupt marketing 
automatons of the drug industry, derelict politicians and federal and state 
regulators - all seasoned with huge doses of self-importance and foul odor." 

As the article above documents, and as many of us have predicted, 
the traditional system is ready to collapse. 

I do not share this to be the purveyor of bad news, but to announce that a new day is dawning.
 As many of you are already aware, the drugs and surgery the existing medical establishment
 has foisted on you are not the solution to better health, but merely their methods of making
 more money off of you by treating only diseases - diseases their paradigm 
helped to foster in the first place. 

Consider that: 

Retail pharmacies filled 3 billion prescriptions in the U.S. in 2000. 

We are currently spending 1.4 trillion dollars for healthcare in the US, or 14% of our current overall budget. That is projected to double in the next 8 years to 3 trillion dollars,
 a staggering 17% of our total national output. 

Folks, those are figures in trillions, not billions. Three trillion dollars is 3,000 billion dollars. 

"The consequences of this shift of resources will be enormous for companies, workers and
the government. It will mean a massive transfer of the nation's income, including profits,
 wages and tax dollars, to disease-oriented traditional medical care. 

"Employees will face an increasingly stark situation: the more money they receive in 
on-the-job benefits, the less they'll receive in wages, pensions, or vacation time." - 

From Business Week August 26, 2002 p 144. 

The sad tragedy is that we are spending all of this money on disease management 
focused on drugs and surgery and our return on this investment is profoundly poor. 

Business Week further comments: 

"Perhaps one-third of all medical spending-some $600 billion dollars-may 
be unnecessary, out-of-date, or even dangerous treatments." 

We are not achieving the high levels of health that we could be. Increasing amounts of 
people do not have the energy they need to get through the day, while millions of 
others are suffering with painful crippling diseases because they have 
violated basic health principles.

 and so on ....       [you're right, this is an "Alert"]

MBA has been "reading the signals" and has been telling our customers [particularly
via our Internet web sites] about the American Health System and we have seen in
a losing of world position as to GOOD QUALIFIED HEALTH CARE

My hope is that YOU benefited from our TELLING YOU ABOUT IT.

We now continue with our WHY web site content.

amicos / webmaster / here