Did you know that if you carry any dietary supplement in your facility and you ship it to people and your facility is not a retail store the FDA considers your operation a food warehouse?
No kidding, the FDA for warehouse purposes considers a dietary supplement in the same category as food. It does not matter that it’s sealed in a plastic container or bottle and received direct from the manufacturer. If you hold it for later shipment, you are in possession of food subject to their regulation. What this means is your “warehouse” – under the FDA’s view of things – has to be registered with them to be in their compliance scheme.
Is there no end to the regulation a government can dream up to control everything? You don’t need to answer that. But it does make me think of what’s been on a lot of people’s minds these days.
Yep, a Lot of Talk About…
Obama Care – or what is more formally known as the ACA or Affordable Care Act – but it’s more like the CCA, which is really the Cartel Continuation Act. It solidifies and continues the monopolistic practices endemic in the medical industry that if they were done in any other business, people would be in jail for violating so many laws.
But as you know, medicine is a government protected domain. Experience has shown the best place to work to be free from prosecution from breaking laws is with the government. And now the government itself is running more of the health care show.
Oh no.
If you are in the natural health care business, or even mildly politically astute, you know darn well that what was proposed by team Obama and the federal bureaucracy was a ruse from the get go and would lead to some pretty ugly things unfolding. We are only scratching the surface of the tip of this titanic sinking iceberg.
So the other day I was talking to…
an ex-registered nurse. One who happens to be in this business of ours – i.e. being a health advocate and using her microscope and showing people how to be healthy – and she told me a story.
It was the Christmas holidays and her father was having what appeared to be a heart attack at home.
Now as many of you know, parents don’t always believe what their children might be involved in and in this case a registered nurse that gave up a license to do some silly thing like teaching people how to be healthy – well what’s up with that?
That’s crazy, “thousands of dollars to send you to nursing school and now you’re doing what?”
Parents, you gotta love ‘em. And when they are elderly and just don’t want to hear about what might be in their better interest for health, well yep, you give them some space and love them just the same because sometimes that’s all you can do and maybe it’s best.
So dad’s definitely having a heart attack.
Ambulance comes, off he goes. Being an ex-trauma RN actually has some privileges, you get to ride in the ambulance and the doctors let you right into their circle of what’s going on.
The trauma team at the hospital do their job. They shine. It is here that medicine excels and these dedicated folks earn their well-deserved kudos. Dad’s still alive.
Now he’s in ICU.
And in walks “THE TEAM”.
The members announce who they are and what they do.
First up, we have the main man, the overall cardiologist. Next to be introduced is the doctor that is the vessel specialist. Then we move on to the electro-physiologist who studies the heart’s rhythms. Then we have the doctor that specializes in the cardio muscle itself, and let’s not forget the over-all doc responsible for the over-all testing that needs to be done.
Oh, and there is also the lung specialist and the specialist for the kidneys.
Yep, count ‘em, that’s seven, SEVEN specialists.
Take the body, slice it, dice it, toss a part to the guy on the left, another to the guy on the right, and few over there.
And to coordinate this team of specialists we have a new member, it’s
The Hospitalist.
Yes, you read that correctly. The hospitalist.
That is the title of a new specialist. It is a new position at this particular hospital.
I am sure this position, if not already filled, is coming to a hospital near you. In fact, as I type this I just noticed my spell checker does not even flag this word as being misspelled – so it must be in the dictionary and a real word. Who knew?
The hospitalist coordinates all the specialists handling the case.
Geesh, who makes this stuff up?
This is a real position. And it’s in our hospitals today.
And what about the nurse? She’s the one doing medication duty.
This is so incredibly sad, you have no idea, or maybe you do. Quite some time ago a nurse told me at a class about the work we were doing, “this is the type of work we used to do right on the floor of the hospital 35 years ago. But no more.”
Yes, that would be measuring the urine, and saliva, and testing the client and keeping up with what was going on. Today keeping up is a little different.
Now everything is looked over by the specialists, tested in remote location, dispensed by the computer, overseen by the hospitalist, with drugs managed by the nurse who’s overseen by the insurance company.
The what? Yes. The insurance company.
So here walks in the nurse to give dad his drugs. There is a list. Yes, the list. Quite a list in fact. Included on the list, is a statin. The ex-RN of our story lets the nurse know dad is not on statins due to a certain situation. To which the nurse at the hospital replied that Lipitor is mandated by the insurance company which provides them the list they have to administer in every case in order to get reimbursement for what they are doing.
Did you get that?
I surmise it can only be someone from central control that could possibly be making all this stuff up. No doubt the NSA has this list as well, because after all, it is a networked world and they’re apparently into everything and God, er, government forbid, if you are not doing the properly mandated thing with your health, like taking your drugs, which the network knows, you might just be violating a law let alone a mandate.
In which case, not only do they not pay your bill, they throw you in jail too.
The big question is, what the heck are insurance companies doing mandating the giving of drugs to patients as a predicate to a hospital’s reimbursement of care?
That is insane.
But of course sanity left what we know of health care some time ago. I’ll leave it to you to ponder the ramifications.
So where are we right now?
We are in a situation that you had better be doing everything you can to be healthy unless you want to be on the receiving end of this madness some day.
If you are in the health advocacy business at some level now, then now is really the time to put your tools to use to show your clients how to healthy so they can avoid as best they can ever finding themselves in situations like this.
I’ll talk more on this next letter – cardio vascular risk – particularly live cell imaging and what it means in the high tech big bucks academic industrial world vs. our little world of showing people how to be healthy.
Right now, you have an opportunity to learn how to use microscopes and toolsets to empower yourself and your clients to new understandings of health.
If you haven’t done it, do it. Come to a Biomedx workshop and get involved.
Till that next letter, may your blessings be.