Open Letter to Dr. Turnbull of CMA

Dr. Turnbull

I am sure I am not the only one who thinks you need to look into the power structures within the medical practice. GPs trying to help their patients with MS have apparently been threatened by the various Colleges of Physicians and Surgeons across Canada if the patient is interested in having venoplasty done to relieve their symptoms. I say apparently because they will not go on the record for fear of having their livelihood taken away by these groups. It’s a kind of Catch 22 situation that neither the GPs nor the patients can (or possibly in the case of doctors) will be specific about. However, patients looking for aftercare for a venoplasty are most often turned down. Patients wanting to learn if poor blood flow may be their problem are routinely turned down. The various Colleges publicly say they will see that it is given but privately, they appear to do everything in their power to prevent it. I have seen this maneuver before. Not in medical circles but in legal cases – I used to work in a criminal law office. It is a maneuver often used by criminals as part of their various scams. Say one thing but do another, especially if there is no way for the average person outside of law enforcement to prove it. 

It would appear that the Code of Ethics is being rewritten to accommodate  a few doctors who’s power stems more from the money they have and can continue to amass doing nothing viable, than from the knowledge they should have. Medicine is no place for closed minds and it is certainly no place for common scams to be perpetrated on sick people who are desperate after 50 plus years of expensive drugs that apparently do nothing for the patient.

It also appears that there is a misconception, mostly found among our MS neurologists, that MS patients, because they are often hit with ‘cog fog’ are also innately unintelligent and stupid. This is definitely not the case. Just in case you do not understand ‘cog fog’, it is an inability to get the information one knows up front and deliverable at a specific moment in a conversation. It does, inevitably, come forward though quite often too late to use in that particular conversation or, should the other party know or think they know what one is trying to say, they will fill it in and the MS patient will recognize it as what they intended or recognize that it was not what they intended. Stupidity is not having the knowledge in the first place.

You really need to put help and compassion back into medicine, particularly for the MS patient who cannot get simple, less costly treatments that at least return some quality to their lives. You really need to remove the discrimination afforded pwMS – not every little thing that goes wrong with my body is automatically MS related. Treatments that are readily available to everyone else are refused to me and my fellow MSers.You really need to put a leash on the handful of doctors preventing us from having that quality in our lives.

Very Sincerely

Karen Copeland
MS Patient

Pharma and Big Pharma - 2 different things!

The More Things Change, The More They Stay The Same

At one time, as far back as the Ancient Babylon of the Bible, if you were a helpful, decent person Pharma meant natural plant medicines or, if you were an evil sorcerer it meant natural plant poisons. The definitive word was NATURAL. Both apparently worked well. You got better with useful natural plants or you died if someone slipped you a poison concoction - for years hemlock was a favored poison.

So it should not surprise anyone when Marijuana turns out to be one of those ‘good’ plants. Partly that came about because Marijuana became a social fad for fun and games. Of course, so is alcohol a social thing. It is also derived from plants and it can also be helpful medically. What they both have in common is that when over done, they turn people into babbling idiots who say and do stupid things. What alcohol had over marijuana is that it was an ‘adult’ thing and marijuana was a teen thing and everyone knows teens have no control. So we outlawed Marijuana. Takes care of those pesky teens!  NOT!! We also made it impossible to use it both legally and medicinally.

The trouble here is that it is not just Marijuana. There is an effort by the modern Pharmaceutical companies to use their influence (read money) to keep any natural medicine out of the mainstream and off all doctor’s prescription pads and out of their vocabularies. After all, if we find out that natural things like Aloe Ferox or Devil’s Claw or Marijuana relieve pain, then we will not be buying something like Oxycodone  or other synthesized in a factory drugs. Synthesized drugs are patentable and therefore valuable to the patent holder. You cannot patent natural. Perhaps the means of extraction but not the substance. If I hold the patent on some chemical concoction, I can pretty well name my price – and the Pharmaceutical outfits do a pretty good job of that. All they need to make people want it is a good line (read sales pitch), a good salesman – no better salesman for a medicinal concoction than a doctor and a desperate consumer (read Mark) Oh Gee! The standard pattern for a Scam! Now buy your way into the hearts of politicians and you can even run your scam legally.

So now we have doctors, who have learned their lines well (though I swear they have no idea or do not want to have any idea of the scam they are perpetuating) selling drugs of dubious ingredients, dubious results and outrageous side effects for some and for bigger than life amounts of money treating sick people who have often reached the point of desperation – it has been over 50 years since any disease or condition has had a cure for it found.

While this is not true of all doctors, it does appear to be the case for most neurologists dealing with the so called “autoimmune diseases’.  They know no facts about these diseases – there are very few documented facts to know and the ones that are there to learn can only be taught by those doing the suffering. As a good many of us have found out the hard way, they do not listen to us so they have learned nothing from us either. These doctors also act as “experts” for the government. They are not experts. They weren’t taught anything useful and they refused to listen to the only ones who can really tell them anything.

People getting any real relief from the symptoms of MS get it using natural items – enzymes, minerals, vitamins, diet changes. Or they have gone out of country and gotten venoplasty which has nothing to do with drugs. Small wonder those doctors making a better than average income derived from the sale of synthesized chemical drugs are upset. They have nothing medical to turn to anymore – they are so out of touch they could not even pretend to be credible in any other medical situation. Their egos will not allow them to drop that low. If they are middle aged or older, they can maybe retire – if they have handled their ill gotten gains with any wisdom, they should be able to do that. If they haven’t, well they certainly have the background to push drugs on the street. But that is a hell of a blow to their vanity. The ones I know are in for a very hard time after their not so little scam is laid out for the world to see.

It will not be the hard time I would like to see them live through. I would like to see them live with MS or Lupus or Parkinson’s or what ever their main focus is. But you can’t have everything. Gee! Sometimes you can’t have anything. I can’t get any real treatment for my MS but I have found a natural thing or two that alleviates a symptom or two and one of these days I will have the money to trip off to Albany N.Y. No thanks to the Canadian Government or the Canadian Medical system. The thanks will all go to others like myself with MS who have fought for equality and treatment, to Dr. Zamboni for a viable treatment but mostly for the courage to go up against the medical powers that be, to a handful of Canadian doctors and politicians who speak out in spite of the flack they take from other doctors and politicians.

Until that future date, I will continue to track down natural aids. I have no nausea and I have the pain under control so Marijuana is not a likely item on my shopping list but if Marijuana works for you, you won’t get any flack from me. Better that than Tysabri or like that.