Playing with your health 

Written by Huib, published Tuesday May 1st, 2018

“In many countries, health is among the most corrupt sectors, which has significant implications for equality and non-discrimination.” – The United Nations Special Rapporteur on the right to health, Dr. Dainius Pūras, presenting his report on corruption to the UN General Assembly. October 24, 2017.

Increasingly more people are becoming puzzled or confused by choices made in healthcare and its governing policies. They seem to find it hard to understand the financial motives dominating healthcare. Profits made by Pharmaceutical companies are skyrocketing. Prices of life-saving devices such as Epipen are increased tenfold overnight with impunity. Insurance fees keep going up. Scientists with integrity are warning that we are facing a “medical misinformation mess”. What’s going on?

If you were invited to a casino to stake your life savings against overwhelming odds, you would not even go. If your company would be declared bankrupt on ‘Non Financial Grounds’, you would easily win that fight in court. If your car is said to have to be demolished for ‘Technically Unexplained Reasons’, you would revolt. Yet when your health insurance refuses to reimburse the costs for the treatment of your suddenly paralyzed child, on the grounds of it being ‘Not Medically Necessary’ while providing you with a fake address to file your complaint, you are supposed to accept this as normal ‘healthcare policy’ and meekly pay your ever increasing insurance fees?

The only good thing about the current healthcare system might be that the main players are becoming increasingly honest about their intentions. A recent Goldman Sacks analysis asked the rhetorical question if ‘curing patients is a sustainable medical business model?’ The fact that a transnational bank is asking this question simply means they give the answer: “of course it is not”. Coincidentally banks own the insurance companies as well. Could this be the main reason why the US health system is now labeled as ‘worst of all wealthy countries’?

My current article is meant to show the scope and the rigged odds of this game. It also shows how the suppression of proper science, valid diagnostics, effective treatment options and actual numbers of Lyme can play a vital role in upholding this eloquent business model. 

A short history of modernizing healthcare

In 1904 the American Medical Association (AMA) created the Council on Medical Education (CME) whose objective was to restructure American medical education. In 1908, the CME asked the Carnegie Foundation for the Advancement of Teaching to survey American medical education, so as to promote the CME’s reformist agenda and hasten the elimination of medical schools that failed to meet the CME’s standards. The president of the Carnegie Foundation chose educator Abraham Flexner to conduct the survey. Flexner was not a physician, scientist or a medical educator, but held a bachelor of arts degree and operated a for-profit school. 

Since the Flexner Report was created in 1910, the healthcare system went through a metamorphosis. Many American medical schools fell short of the standard advocated in the Flexner Report and, subsequent to its publication, nearly half of such schools merged or were closed outright. Homeopathy and natural medicines were derided; some doctors were jailed. The Report became notorious for its harsh description of certain establishments, for example describing Chicago’s 14 medical schools as “a disgrace to the State whose laws permit its existence… indescribably foul… the plague spot of the nation.”

From the point of view of business strategy, this is an interesting case study: could one young player in the global market really kill off its competitors this easily and in such a short time? Indeed it could and is still doing it, given the increasing attacks on individual ‘dissident’ practitioners (especially when they dare to actually cure people with so-called ‘incurable’ diseases such as MS or ALS), slander campaigns against competing philosophies of healing as well as financial mechanismes designed by colluding insurers (banks) to herd billions of people towards the global monopolist. 

In 1971 US president Nixon struck a deal with Kaiser Permanente about inventing ‘health maintenance organizations’ (HMOs): a for-profit deal between government and industry. Kaiser Permanente was founded in 1945 and as of October 2017, had a net income on $64.6 billion in operating revenues. The HMO seems to have been the forerunner of what later became known as ‘managed care’, which is deciding via ‘evidence based policies’ on who lives and who dies in cases of persistent Lyme (LB) infection. 

To top it off, in 1980 president Reagan signed the Bayh-Dole Act, which basically legalised corruption by US State actors such as the Centers for Disease Control & Prevention (CDC). The CDC senior managers were now supposed to still neutrally regulate the very same commercial products, on which they could own personal patent rights. The result was the medical variation to the ‘Oklahoma land grab’, as investigative reporter and producer Kris Newby called it in the documentary ‘Under Our Skin‘.

Denial as a vital driver of an elaborate business model

So why mention Lyme here? How could its systemic and worldwide denial be the driver of a business model? Sixteen years after its first US outbreak in Old Lyme, CT, a 1991 CDC publication described Lyme as the complex, systemic, multi-symptom and sometimes devastating and chronic disease, still experienced by many Lyme patients today. In the 90’s Lyme was still called the ‘Second Great Imitator’; with Syphilis being the first. Because ‘managed care’ is mostly focused on efficiency (of their own costs, which is more easily managed by reverting it onto patient group in order to ‘up’ the bottom line results) rather than effectiveness, six of the largest insurers soon started to do their math and found that the average Lyme patient cost them around $100,000 annually. 

So a nice little gathering was set up with the CDC, NIH, FDA and other stake- and shareholders, including leading IDSA doctors (the 1994 Dearborn conference in Michigan), during which the definition of Lyme was simply changed from the ‘next Syphilis’ into an innocent ‘summer flu that was hard to catch and easy to diagnose and cure’. They also managed to pull off a second stunt: from then on, the restrictive case definition for epidemiological data would have to be used as hard confirmation for clinical Lyme diagnoses, using indirect serological tests that missed over half of the acute infections. De facto this made about 85% of the actual Lyme infections ‘disappear’. Both from the government’s agenda as well as from the insurers’ financial balance spreadsheets. 

This new definition and diagnostic standard also nicely hid the fact that the first Lyme vaccine had produced something that scientists had already publicly warned against, before it was put on the market: that it caused ‘Lyme like’ illnesses for many people. Their Class Action law suit against the manufacturer Smithkline Beecham was settled out of court in 2002. The day after a credible whistleblower, the former lab director of Pastor Merieux Connaught, met with the FDA, the vaccin was quietly pulled off the market, quoting ‘poor sales’. [Source: Cure Unknown, p. 311-317)

Plans to profit from a future vaccine were just closeted for a decade, in order to let things cool down and blame its disappearance on ‘anti-vaxxers’ later. These plans seem to be surfacing now, which probably explains why the CDC is suddenly ‘concerned’ about the Lyme epidemic. After its senior managers denied it even existed since 1994, while personally profiting from that status quo by receiving patent rights on the same serological tests that they were pushing as ‘regulators’. The FDA has ‘fast tracked’ this new vaccine, which simply means that research into safety on human use is skipped. The FDA has also recently deleted all traces to the prior damage, to not disturb the current marketing strategy, yet wary Lyme advocate groups have kept them on record anyway. 

But back to the main business model: the only thing needed still was to get some ‘experts’ to write ‘guidelines’ to make the whole sham look official, legal and ‘evidence based’. This was done by paying a group of IDSA doctors to do just that: they wrote the ‘2006 IDSA Lyme guidelines’. An investigation by Senator Blumenthal of CT was also settled out of court. These disputed guidelines were mentioned by the IOM’s Committee on Standards for Developing Trustworthy Clinical Practice Guidelines (CPGs) in their 2011 publication ‘Clinical Practice Guidelines We Can Trust’. As case study (found on page 56, BOX 3-1) to illustrate many shortcomings, the committee chose the 2006 IDSA Lyme Guidelines that is currently the ‘template’ for LB guidelines in many countries. How to remedy this annoying problem in the future? By getting rid of the whole CPG altogether, simply by cutting its federal funding. 

Competing for the Crime of the Century

Seeing themselves confronted with increasing costs for e.g. disability payments to those who suffer from these so-called ‘incurable diseases’, governments are also starting to show some creativity as well. The 2011 PACE trial, which purported that people with an ME diagnosis should do some more running (while being bedridden) and follow cognitive therapy to ‘think themselves better’, is a brilliant example of what governments are willing to do to revert costs onto a vulnerable group of ill people. With devastating consequences: if they did not ‘run enough or thought themselves better’, they would get cut on benefits and parents would lose custody over their ill children. By funding the researchers with 5 million pound tax money, the British department for Work and Pensions supported staggering research fraud, which is now starting to compete for the prize of Medical ‘Crime of the Century’. 

Frankly, the PACE fraud – with its devastating effects for millions – still seems to pale in comparison to the global systemic denial of Lyme by colluding State, scientific, medical and financial actors. To get back to understanding the business model with denial as its center piece: the current status quo surrounding Lyme has provided multiple streams of revenue for both several specialisations within the medical system as well as for Psychiatry, patent revenues for those ‘regulating’ the disease and got rid of billions of costs for insurers.

The main difference between Lyme and all other ‘emergent’ diseases such as ME /CFS, MS, ALS / MND, Parkinson(ism), Lupus, Alzheimer, CRPS, Fibromyalgia, many psychiatric illnesses and so on is that Lyme actually has a known cause: an infection by a spirochete after the bite of several biting insects and probably also via blood donation and inter-human transmission. All others have the same common aspects: ‘diagnosis based solely on (some) symptoms, no supporting direct diagnostic test, cause unknown, no effective treatment available, more funding needed for research’. In other words: “be patient”.

ME patients, if they actually get tested on Lyme at all, are told they “don’t have Lyme” using an invalid test. A 2016 meta-analysis has shown current serological tests to produce 500 times more false-negatives than current HIV-tests, but they are sold with ‘narratives’ anyway. Or if ME patients do get treated for Lyme, they are simply told they are ‘cured’ after a few days and later on develop the late stage Lyme symptoms (exhaustion after movement, pain, cognitive issues) that are now suddenly labeled as ‘ME’ and claimed to be ‘post viral’. Yet if they have the audacity to doubt if the original bacterial infection was actually really cured, medical journals inform their treating physicians that they believe in ‘invisible garden gnomes‘.

As pathologist Dr. Lee phrased it in a recent interview: “the medical profession has been transformed into a “healthcare industry”. In this world of free market economy, the healthcare providers in the pain management business may arguably have the rights to create public need for their services, just like Apple creating demand for its iPhone.”  In order to keep one’s pipeline for e.g. ‘chronic pain management’ filled to the brim – ensuring full satisfaction of ones shareholders – it makes sense to require a Lyme positive test result to confirm diagnosis (while making sure new valid direct diagnostic methods don’t become available to the general public), to spew semantics such as ‘FDA approved’, to confuse new clients (called ‘patients’) with a lot of Latin jargon to make ‘garbage bin diagnoses’ appear to be real, and to find some opportunistic doctors or psychiatrists to come up with nonsensical ‘syndromes’ – such as Conversion Syndrome, Post Treatment Lyme Disease Syndrome, Medically Unexplained Symptoms, Bodily Distress Syndrome, Functional Neurological Disorders and so on – to push people towards psychiatry.

The sole purpose of ‘Post Treatment Lyme Disease Syndrome’ seems to be to cover up treatment failure and in doing so getting rid of the remaining 15% of chronically ill people in the statistics. ‘MUS’ was actually deleted as a invalid concept from the DSM V by the American Psychiatric Association, yet that does not stop the insurers from having doctors or psychiatrists invent variations to this basic theme. This scenario is not limited to the USA, but has reached global proportions via the IDSA and the WHO. 

Globally coded out of existence and into human rights abuses

By whom? Indeed, by the WHO whose goal it is to “build a better, healthier future for people all over the world”. The paper ‘Updating ICD11 Borreliosis Diagnostic Codes’ was provided to the WHO by the ‘Ad Hoc Committee for Health in ICD11 Borelliose Codes’ and analyzed how, on a global scale, existing ICD10 diagnostic codes are preventing proper diagnosis and treatment of Lyme. Over 260 peer-reviewed scientific articles were included. However, in the ICD11 draft there is no indication that these codes will be updated according to actual science. 

In June 2017, this report was also submitted to the Special Rapporteur on Health and Human Rights, as it showed many different types of health human rights violations as well. These violations are now on record with the United Nations and are listed below.

• for many patients, prevent proper diagnosis and obstruct access to treatment options that meet internationally accepted standards 
• promotes discrimination based on illness manifestations
• misapplies somatic diagnosis to deny medical care
• obstructs treatments based on illness manifestations
• promotes discrimination based on financial status
• supports attacks on human rights defenders —including medical practitioners, scientists and researchers who act on behalf of this vulnerable patient group
• restricts information regarding treatment options that meet internationally accepted standards
• routinely excludes key stakeholders —such as medical practitioners, researchers, patients and caretakers who are concerned with persistent and complicated cases of LB —from decision-making venues, making these stakeholders invisible to policy makers, economists and other practitioners and researchers
• sick children under treatments that meet internationally accepted standards are forcibly removed from their parents —and there are many cases where such parents are falsely accused of poisoning their children or ‘Munchausen by Proxy’ syndrome
• alarming cases where euthanasia is encouraged over treatments that meet internationally accepted standards

These incomplete codes also allow for reported numbers of persistent Lyme cases to be much lower than they actually are. In fact, the reporting of Lyme is ‘maximized’ in Europe. In a 2007 publication ‘Medicine and Infectious Diseases’ (Médecine et maladies infectieuses) the European offspring of the IDSA, EUCALB, recommended that European Union countries use a control group within a geographical area and limit their confirmations of LB infection to ‘at most five percent’ —regardless of the actual numbers or percentage of LB infections. Soon after this was found out, the whole EUCALB website disappeared.

Treating a ‘disorder of unconscientiousness’ 

In their recent ICD versions, the WHO came up with a ‘Disorders of Consciousness’ category. In the ICD11 draft a lobby even tried to move ME from the Neurology section towards this one, yet that decision was reversed after alert ME ‘detectives’ caught the WHO trying to pull this off. I didn’t know consciousness could actually have ‘disorders’, but that’s another matter. The invention of this category may be a fitting example of the literal insanity of the current belief system that now passes for ‘evidence based medicine’ or modern healthcare. 

There seems to be only one single treatment for this general ‘disorder of unconsciousness’: education. Not aimed at those profiting from this system, as they may only be willing to change their minds or ways when confronted with legal suits like Dr. Lee’s case against the CDC over their managers’ active obstruction of a valid direct DNA diagnostic to detect Lyme infection in an early stage. The other potential legal breakthrough may come from the current RICO case. This legal strategy uses a legal framework that was designed in 1961 to attack the original Mafia. The current case focuses on the Medical Mafia: colluding insurers (including Kaiser Permanente), the IDSA itself, specific guidelines authors and possibly also Yale University.

Education only works when people are willing to learn and feel an urgency to do so. The current colluding perpetrators simply don’t qualify, as they have too much to lose. In that sense the current mess called ‘healthcare’ provides a fruitful ground for learning for ‘impatient’ others, like yourself. The real stakes are your own or children’s health and possibly even your lives as well. If those who are currently upholding the system – by buying into its mesmerising propaganda called ‘marketing’ – start questioning their own beliefs and stop making choices based on fear created by marketing and misinformation, transformation can actually happen.

As long as people allow themselves to be called ‘patients’ rather than stand up for themselves as the ‘consumers of healthcare’ or simply as human beings with the right to dignity and care, they will remain nicely stuffed within their own diagnostic boxes. Each group will end up individually pleading for recognition, better guidelines, more funding, better research and future solutions for their own ‘diseases’.

For some reason, most people do allow rigged and often lethal games to be played with their health, while even defending the very same system playing these games with them and attacking those providing information for better informed choice. Fibromyalgia patients for example are told that ‘they cannot have Lyme, because there are no ticks in Ireland’, but fiercely attack anyone who provides information that indicates they just bought into misinformation. I called this the ‘medical variation of the Stockholm Syndrome’ in a recent article. As stated in the introduction to this article: if it would have involved their cars, they would not let this happen so patiently.

Second level education 

The creation of modern medicine over the duration of just one single century ago is actually a perfect example of how much education can impact the philosophy and quality of healthcare. If one single report created by one single educator (Flexner), who apparently mastered the art of shaping public thinking, managed to create the mess we’re in, education also may help us steer ourselves out of it. 

During my career in international (business) education I learned two vital things about my profession. The first is that there are different levels of education. The first level is about knowledge and skills; about telling people what to do or what to think. It’s mostly called ‘training’, which works well in clearly defined, relatively simple fields of knowledge or skills, like a sports or a vocational field such as plumbing. 

However, if this type of education is applied to more complex fields, one ends up in a paradox: “tell me how I should be independent!?”. This is impossible and any proper student of life should resist the lessons anyway. How can anyone tell you what you should do, without taking over responsibility for your life? If you allow that, then you’re no longer independent. 

Second level learning actually shows you how you can think and connects knowledge to deeper layers of experience and consciousness, including ethics. It will provide less security and uses questions rather than lessons, answers or tips. It may actually lead you towards ‘water’, when you’re thirsty. Whether you chose or dare to drink that water, is up to you.

A new language

The human rights angle is a new ‘language’, a platform for second level learning. It will allow you to move from the predefined rhetorical ‘chess board’ of seemingly ‘medical-scientific debate’, with all odds rigged against you. 

The choice is up to you and all future patient clients of this system. If people chose to stay dived and ruled into all kinds of diagnostic boxes, without known cause or solution, this show will go on. Machiavelli would roll over laughing in his grave, probably together with Hegel and Kafka, because current specialized healthcare is the perfect application of his ‘divide & rule’ mechanism to manage billions of people and profit from their diseases.

Your choice to learn is – as always – individual. It’s up to you and you alone. I just provide you with a choice to start playing another game than playing ‘chess’ against this system. A game with all the odds rigged against you and with a pretty predictable outcome. As Søren Kierkegaard stated, that choice is rather simple: ‘There are two ways to be fooled. One is to believe what isn’t true; the other is to refuse to believe what is true.’

Cheers,

Huib Kraaijeveld, MA, social psychologist, author of ‘Shifting the Lyme Paradigm‘, chairman of the On Lyme Foundation and founding member of the Ad Hoc Committee for Health Equity in ICD11 Borelliose Codes

If you like to actively support me continuing my educational work to sanitize healthcare and to provide you with real choices, you can do so by contributing to my Patreon crowdfund campaign. My  educational work is financed as healthcare should be financed: like the old Chinese village doctor, who was paid by the community for keeping people healthy rather than for treating those already ill.

P.S. Inspired by Gerrit Dou’s painting ‘Scientist sharpening his pen’, 1630-1635, The Leiden Collection NY

In: Blog Bureaucracy Inspiration Lyme Human rights Science