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Edwin's avatar

Remember (you may not) when they were talking up the benefits of the statin drugs so much there was actually talk of researching a project to consider the addition of it to the community drinking water! Now I had been in pharmacy for long enough to know they were full of crackpot ideas for a buck and I suggested "Why not Valium, since everybody is so frantic anymore, and it is bound to get worse." How prophetic I was on that one!

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Susan's avatar

Good morning Ray,

Catherine Austin Fitts has recently been warning of the weaponization of mental health - it doesn’t take much it seems to institutionalize a perfectly sane person.

From the Solari website This comment from a gal :

You’ve touched on something I’ve been dealing with lately, which is the impossibility of removing embedded but inaccurate diagnoses.

I noticed, on a computer screen in a doctor’s office, that I had a diagnosis of “BRCA Gene” (breast cancer gene). I asked where that diagnosis came from and they couldn’t say.

I called the health information department of my local health system and asked, “who gave me that diagnosis and when?” The rep either couldn’t or wouldn’t say. Shouldn’t this be something I’d know about, if I have such a gene? The rep said I must’ve had genetics testing at some point and I should call the genetics department. I called, and no, I never had any genetics testing. So, it’s a phony diagnosis, and I want it removed. The health information people told me they can’t remove it. Why not? Who is controlling this information so that you can’t remove it. The rep wouldn’t say.

I know from experience that at some point some doctor’s office used that BRCA diagnosis in a claim for reimbursement, and to remove the diagnosis would be an admission of lying in their billing a claim for reimbursement. I wanted to know what doctor did this, and so I started digging.

Back in 2010, I was briefly uninsured. Somehow, my local health system knew this and got word to me that they were offering free mammograms to uninsured people like me. At that time, I still believed that mammograms were a good thing and I was pretty naïve still. I accepted the free mammogram and of course they “saw something”. I let them do a biopsy, which was negative but they told me I had stage 0 breast cancer (what the hell?), that I was at risk for full blown breast cancer, and they offered me free double mastectomy with free new fake breasts and told me I should now take this drug, Tamoxifen, because of my risk, which would also be free. There was a lot of breast cancer grant money flowing at the time and seems they planned to bill all of my “free” surgery and drugs to some grant, probably funded with pink ribbon sales. It was they who gave me the BRCA diagnosis and they did so based on me saying my mother’s great aunt might have had breast cancer in like 1930. That was enough, at the time, for the BRCA diagnosis which would’ve unlocked their access to all the pink ribbon grant money available to them, had I agreed to the surgery and drugs, which I did not agree to. Why would I do all this when I don’t have breast cancer? All the “free” care I’d had to date, including the biopsy, was no longer free once I said “no” to the Tamoxifen, and they billed me $1000’s that I had to pay out of pocket for this manipulation and scare tactics. I understood later, when I was less naïve, that it was only free if I’d taken the Tamoxifen. I never got another mammogram again, and so far am completely healthy. The doctor, like some sort of huckster snake oil salesman, is long gone and I can’t find her to confront her about removing that phony diagnosis. So, I’m stuck with it because it’s out there with the big data now, and embedded in so many systems, most of whom protect my “privacy” from me by refusing to tell me anything about my own data, so that I’ll never get to fighting all of it successfully.

My point in this very long story is that Catherine is right. Whereas 10 years ago the money was in the breast cancer diagnosis, its looking like today the money is in the mental health diagnosis and, in my experience, once you’ve been manipulated into giving the information for a diagnosis that they need to unlock the money, there’s no getting rid of that diagnosis (as happened to me when I gave up information that a great great aunt might’ve maybe had breast cancer in 1930). Doctors are financially incentivized and required to do these current mental health screenings, with patient responses and diagnoses pinging around who knows where out there. Because I’ve told such a long story already, I’ll save this part of the story, for another time, of a doctor recently using my admission of grief over the death of parent to level weird diagnoses to jack up my bill from a level 2 E&M to a level 5 E&M, bringing in a much higher reimbursement payment for himself plus demand a massive out of pocket payment from me, with my high deductible plan. If I didn’t have a high deductible plan, I’d have never known it happened. I’m fighting this, the costs and the phony diagnoses, through the PA attorney general at present, and will update.

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