The Current Procedural Terminology (CPT) codes clinicians use to report services to health insurers have become a linchpin in the American health care system. These codes are federally mandated, and all health care providers must pay royalties to the AMA to use them. That’s a heck of a cash cow for the AMA.

In 2023, the AMA raked in a staggering $495 million in revenue. A full 62 percent, $308 million, came from royalties tied to the use of CPT codes. And every dollar is paid for by taxpayers, via Medicare and Medicaid, or employers and employees in the private health insurance market.

The AMA’s financial windfall is made possible by the federal government. In 1983, the Centers for Medicare and Medicaid Services (CMS) mandated that CPT codes be used to report services under Medicare Part B. By 1986, Medicaid programs also had to adopt these codes. The 1996 Health Insurance Portability and Accountability Act (HIPAA) then solidified CPT codes as the national standard for electronic health transactions. These federal mandates essentially forced every health care provider to rely on the AMA’s CPT code system, creating a monopoly. Cha-ching!

There is another model out there, though. The diagnoses being addressed by health care providers are tracked using International Classification of Diseases (ICD) codes. But ICD codes are free for use by any entity worldwide. There is no reason a similar system couldn’t be developed for CPT codes. //

The AMA has also publicly advocated against “policies excluding transgender individuals from restrooms and other facilities.” In other words, the AMA is perfectly fine with that weird teacher lurking in your middle school daughter’s locker room.

By promoting the trans agenda, the AMA is using its substantial influence — funded by taxpayer dollars through federally mandated royalties — to advocate for policies that Americans repudiated in the last election and that may not be in line with the views of many doctors or patients across the country.

An 18-year-old woman died this year after complications from her 22-week abortion at a Planned Parenthood in Fort Collins, Colorado. A recent testimony given to the state’s Health and Human Services committee noted she lost a significant amount of blood — a known risk of later abortions — and that she was transported too late for the emergency care she needed. She deserved prompt diagnosis and critical care in her moment of need.

But blue-state legislators, instead of showing concern and protecting women from preventable complications and deaths, are more interested in pushing abortion access than they are in ensuring women’s safety. //

Shamefully, Colorado legislators not only rejected recent legislation that would have implemented common-sense public health and safety standards for facilities performing second and third-trimester abortions, they also shockingly claimed the woman would have died of similar complications in childbirth.

As a board-certified OB-GYN, I can attest that this “medical” conclusion is doubtful since amniotic fluid embolus (AFE), the condition they speculated about, is a unique occurrence in a specific clinical situation. Furthermore, their refusal to truly understand the facts surrounding this young woman’s death distracts from the disastrous risks of unregulated, uninspected, unlicensed dangerous second and third-trimester abortions enshrined into Colorado law.

Tragically, media reaction to this case has been virtually non-existent. When women die in states with any abortion limits on the books, the media is quick to highlight their stories, but when women die where there is unrestricted abortion with no safety protections whatsoever, we hear crickets. //

But countless women who enter abortion facilities are unknowingly denied assurance that they will be cared for by competent, credentialed staff who are prepared to identify and promptly transfer patients suffering complications to nearby hospitals for life-saving treatment when needed or if they are prepared to provide adequate emergency care to the vulnerable women who place their health in the hands of their abortionists.

It seems wildly contradictory that states rightly require other healthcare facilities dealing with maternal care, labor, and delivery to uphold rigorous medical standards but place none on abortion facilities. In Colorado, birthing centers undergo licensing and regulation to define their scope of practice, credential their providers, establish emergency preparedness and staff drills, collect data, and more. Likewise, ambulatory surgery centers may only treat “those that do not generally result in extensive blood loss; require major or prolonged invasion of body cavities; directly involve major blood vessels; or constitute an emergency or life-threatening procedure.”

Hospital labor and delivery units are subject to even more rigorous regulation and inspection, including inspections by the Joint Commission and Center for Medicaid and Medicare Services. These measures are commonsense and exactly what anyone would expect from safe healthcare providers.

Even tattoo parlors are required to prove basic first-aid capabilities and sterilization procedures; yet abortion facilities aren’t even held to these standards.

An international team led by researchers at Colorado State University has found that human contact with wild armadillos — including eating the meat — has contributed to extremely high infection rates of a pathogen that can cause leprosy in Pará, Brazil.

Mycobacterium leprae can cause leprosy, a chronic disease characterized by lesions of the skin and nerve damage, in humans. Other researchers have previously documented transmission of M. leprae to humans by nine-banded armadillos in the southern United States.

The findings from this new research have implications for public health education programs related to these mammals and zoonotic transmission, or the spread of infection between animals and people. //

But the most startling finding was in people who ate armadillo meat frequently — more than once a month and, in some cases, twice a week. The strength of the antibody in these individuals was 50 percent higher than the other groups. //

Spencer recommends wearing gloves when cleaning the carcass, and make sure to cook the meat until it is well-done.

“Your risk of picking up the disease from eating well-cooked meat is almost zero,” he said.

Legal Insurrection readers may recall my post about the recent shake-up at the Food and Drug Administration (FDA). Dr. Peter Marks, the top vaccine official at the U.S. Food and Drug Administration (FDA), resigned, citing significant disagreements with Health and Human Services Secretary Robert F. Kennedy Jr. over vaccine policies.

Marks claimed it was because of Kennedy, and the new HHS Secretary’s viewpoints on the worthiness of vaccines.

However, there is more to the story.

Marks left after refusing to grant Kennedy team unrestricted access to the Vaccine Adverse Event Reporting System (VAERS) database. Marks asserted that such access could lead to manipulation or deletion of sensitive data, which includes unverified reports of vaccine-related adverse events submitted by the public. //

There are a number of reasons that this issue is troubling, especially given Marks’ profanity-infused response to the new HHS team seeking the usual level of access to government databases that the Secretary normally has. To begin with, as I have previously noted, studies have identified a rare but notable link between myocarditis (inflammation of the heart muscle) and mRNA COVID-19 vaccines, such as Pfizer-BioNTech and Moderna.

As a reminder, the Centers for Disease Control (CDC) released 148 blank pages of data in response to a FOIA request for information connecting covid vaccinations to heart inflammation. //

The agency has already released some reports, such as this one in The Lancet, which asserted that virus-caused myocarditis was worse than the one that arose post-vaccination. //

Finally, a recent study conducted by the Cleveland Clinic has raised concerns about the effectiveness of this season’s flu vaccine. Published as a preprint on MedRxiv, the research analyzed data from 53,402 healthcare workers during the 2024-2025 flu season and found that vaccinated individuals had a 27% higher risk of contracting influenza compared to their unvaccinated counterparts.

The calculated vaccine effectiveness was reported as -26.9%, indicating that the vaccine may have increased the risk of infection rather than reducing it. //

BobM | April 11, 2025 at 11:39 pm
As someone with IT experience, especially in DataBase design and admin, I have to advise the reader that there are multiple non-nefarious reasons to allow both raw data access & edit access to a DB. Especially if you suspect the current key holders have been “cooking the books” to make a DB support wanted conclusions. Edit access allows you to look for groupings in the data that may not be obvious because of the way the raw data is currently organized and categorized. Or to look for improper groupings that make conclusions based on them garbage.

As an example, the “sky-is-falling” Covid panic was at least in part supported by “death by Covid” numbers that often assumed if you died and had Covid at the time that it was a Covid death. Washington State DOH, for instance, has since admitted “DOH includes deaths of all persons who tested positive for COVID-19 in its totals, even if the victims died from other causes, such as gunshot wounds.”.

Other examples include crime statistics databases where politicians and law enforcement have played games with crime categories to be able to tout imaginary “decrease in crime X” or “increase in arrests for crime Y” for their own reasons. Most recently, the Biden administration database of border enforcement stats famously was used to tout that Biden was “tough on illegal entries” when in actuality the raw data showed they were touting catch-and-release interceptions the same as actual prevention of illegal entries.

If folks have lost respect for scientific experts, it’s because all too many have taken to treating access to the raw data and descriptions of the data manipulation used to reach their “expert” conclusions as closely held proprietary secrets not be disclosed to the hoi polloi. That is NOT good scientific practice and is a huge red flag. You see it all over in climate “science”, and it’s spread like a cancer thru science in general lately.

Coffee associated with a lower risk of both depression and anxiety | Eric W. Dolan, PsyPost

A large study has found that different types of beverages are linked to the likelihood of developing depression and anxiety disorders. The study, published in the Journal of Affective Disorders, found that higher intake of sugary and artificially sweetened drinks was related to a greater risk of depression among younger adults, while fruit juices and coffee were associated with a lower risk of both depression and anxiety across age groups.

https://t.co/bOAIKnf2hK

For many of us, memories of our childhood have become a bit hazy, if not vanishing entirely. But nobody really remembers much before the age of 4, because nearly all humans experience what's termed "infantile amnesia," in which memories that might have formed before that age seemingly vanish as we move through adolescence. And it's not just us; the phenomenon appears to occur in a number of our fellow mammals.

The simplest explanation for this would be that the systems that form long-term memories are simply immature and don't start working effectively until children hit the age of 4. But a recent animal experiment suggests that the situation in mice is more complex: the memories are there, they're just not normally accessible, although they can be re-activated. Now, a study that put human infants in an MRI tube suggests that memory activity starts by the age of 1, suggesting that the results in mice may apply to us.

Recovering from measles does not protect against cancer or any other disease besides measles. In fact, a measles infection has the ability to wipe out immune responses built up against other infections—a phenomenon called immune amnesia, driven by the destruction of memory T- and B-cells. This leaves people who recover from the measles virus more vulnerable to all other germs.

This is not the only severe risk of measles. In addition to neurological and respiratory complications from measles infections, which can demonstrably turn deadly, measles can cause subacute sclerosing panencephalitis (SSPE), a fatal neurological condition that can flare seven to 10 years after a measles infection. //

Before the development of measles vaccines, the virus infected 3 to 4 million people each year, sending an estimated 48,000 to the hospital. About 1,000 developed brain swelling and 400 to 500 died.

Two doses of MMR vaccine are 97 percent effective against measles, and the protection is considered lifelong.

It took nearly two years for doctors to figure out the cause of his chest pain. //

The doctors were concerned enough that they decided it was time to take the implant out. After removing it, they sent the device and samples to the Florida health department and the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention, which did clinical and genetic testing. They all turned up Brucella suis.

B. suis is an extremely infectious bacteria that's usually found in pigs. The most common symptom in pigs is reproductive losses, such as stillbirths, though they can also develop other symptoms, such as abscesses and arthritis. In humans, it causes an insidious, hard to detect infection called brucellosis, which is used to describe an infection from any Brucella species: B. suis, B. melitensis, B. abortus, and B. canis.

In the US, there are only about 80 to 140 brucellosis cases reported each year, and they're mostly caused by B. melitensis and B. abortus. People tend to get infected by eating raw (unpasteurized) milk and cheeses. B. suis, however, is generally linked to hunting and butchering feral pigs and hogs.

Until recently, the Brucella species were designated as select agents by the US government, a classification to flag pathogens and toxins that have the potential to be a severe threat to public health, such as if they're used in a bioterror attack. The current list includes things like anthrax and Ebola virus. Brucella species were originally listed because they can be easily aerosolized, and only a small number of the bacterial cells are needed to spark an infection. In humans, infections can be both localized and systemic and have a broad range of clinical manifestations. Those include brain infections, neurological conditions, arthritis, anemia, respiratory involvement, pancreatitis, cardiovascular complications, like aneurysms, and inflammation of the spinal cord, among many other things.

In January, federal officials removed Brucella species from the select agents list—a designation that limits the types and amount of research that can be done on a pathogen. According to the US Department of Agriculture, the reason for the removal was to ease those limits, thereby making it easier for researchers to conduct veterinary studies and develop vaccines for animals. //

The man said he wasn't a hunter, but recalled receiving a gift of feral swine meat on several occasions in 2017 from a local hunter. Though he couldn’t recall the specific hunter who gave him the biohazardous bounty, he did remember handling the raw meat and blood with his bare hands—a clear transmission risk—before cooking and eating it. //

The man, meanwhile, finally received the proper course of antibiotics recommended by the CDC for brucellosis treatment, which was a combination of oral doxycycline and rifampin for six weeks. At the end of the course, his blood cultures were negative. A few months later, he had a new AICD placed. A year after the ordeal, lingering signs of the infection had faded. At a routine check-up after more than 3 years, he appeared to remain free of brucellosis.

This strain may have emerged from gain-of-function research conducted at two specific facilities: the USDA Southeast Poultry Research Laboratory (SEPRL) in Athens, Georgia, and the Erasmus Medical Center in Rotterdam, the Netherlands. //

smalltownoklahoman. | March 11, 2025 at 12:42 pm
Why is it being done at all? Who thinks it’s a good idea to take a known virus and amp it up into something that can kill millions? Just to satisfy some scientists curiosity? H1N1 in the late 70’s was a GOF research project that “oops!” just happened to escape. It’s clear that humans just aren’t responsible enough to continue to play these games and any countries that allow it need to be punished severely, including our own. Would Covid exist if we weren’t funding the research and teaching Chinese scientists how to conduct it? //

GWB in reply to Sanddog. | March 11, 2025 at 1:47 pm
Primarily the research exists (ostensibly) for two reasons:
First is to then play around and see how things work. This is research for knowledge’s sake.
Second is the idea that you can then make vaccines and treatments for these things (especially novel ones, yay!) and be better prepared when something appears out of the wild. (Or when something shows up from an enemy’s bioweapons lab.)

I get the first one. And if people could be trusted to be really safe and have only the best motives and all that, it might be supportable for those who place Reason high on a pedestal.

The second one does make sense. Sorta. The problem there is that how do you distinguish between someone making a weapon and someone actually building defenses against a weapon? By what they tell you? Simply by who they work for? Yeah, pull the other one.

Sanddog in reply to GWB. | March 12, 2025 at 12:30 am
There isn’t a single vaccine or treatment that has come out of these experiments. //

During my first term, my Administration took historic steps to correct a fundamental wrong within the American healthcare system. For far too long, prices were hidden from patients and employers, with inadequate recourse available to individuals looking to shop for care or obtain pricing information from a healthcare provider in advance of a visit or procedure. These opaque pricing arrangements allowed powerful entities, such as hospitals and insurance companies, to operate with insufficient accountability regarding their pricing practices, resulting in patients, employers, and taxpayers shouldering the burden of inflated healthcare costs.

While signing the EO, Trump clarified how this EO not only re-established the directive he put into place above, but how this new EO had even more teeth.

The map below displays the locations of 2492 direct primary care (DPC) practices across all 50 states plus Washington, DC.

Direct Primary Care, or DPC, is a new way of providing primary care that's already helped a quarter million people stay healthier and spend less on healthcare. Patients at DPC practices often receive ongoing primary care from their doctor with zero copays, convenient online scheduling options, near-wholesale prices on medications and blood tests, and even their doctor's personal cell number. It's like having a doctor in the family.

So how is this possible? Easy: direct primary care practices cut out middlemen like insurance companies, freeing themselves to provide great care at fair prices. Unlike traditional third party practices that serve the needs of insurance companies, direct primary care is for everybody; most DPC memberships cost less than your monthly cell phone or cable bill, for great care whenever you need it.

Some 2 billion people drink tea on a daily basis worldwide, and numerous studies have suggested various health benefits from regular tea consumption. Most nutrition studies focus on things like polyphenols, caffeine, or other chemicals released during brewing, but such research overlooks a unique aspect of tea: unlike most food and drink, tea leaves are not directly consumed, and the brewing process allows tea leaves to adsorb chemicals as well as release them—most notably heavy metal toxins like lead, arsenic, or cadmium. (Adsorption is when a substance adheres to the surface of something; absorption is when a material takes in a substance.). //

The team found that cellulose tea bags work the best at adsorbing toxic metals from the water while cotton and nylon tea bags barely adsorbed any contaminants at all—and nylon bags also release contaminating microplastics to boot. Tea type and the grind level also played a part in adsorbing toxic metals, with finely ground black tea leaves performing the best on that score. This is because when those leaves are processed, they get wrinkled, which opens the pores, thereby adding more surface area. Grinding the tea further increases that surface area, with even more capacity for binding toxic metals.

But the most significant factor was steeping time: the longer the steeping time, the more toxic metals were adsorbed. Based on their experiments, the authors estimate that brewing tea—using a tea bag that steeps for three to five minutes in a mug—can remove about 15 percent of lead from drinking water, even water with concentrations as high as 10 parts per million.

The cadre of elite disease detectives at the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention is expected to be left in ruin today as the Trump administration continues to slash the federal workforce.

Many members of the CDC's Epidemic Intelligence Service, EIS—a globally revered public health training program—were informed earlier Friday that they were about to be fired, according to reporting from Stat News. Multiple sources told CBS News that half of EIS officers are among the ongoing cuts.

The Trump administration is ousting thousands of probationary federal workers in a wide-scale effort to dramatically slim agencies.

The EIS is a two-year program filled with competitively selected, highly educated and trained experts. EIS officers are the ones deployed in critical public health situations, such as deadly outbreaks or bioterror attacks. The program has a long, rich history since its establishment in 1951, which includes contributing to the eradication of smallpox, among other achievements.

Scanning for data on infections that can arise in the three places she visited and align with her symptoms, they came up with a list of 10 possible infectious causes: eight parasites and two fungal pathogens. They went through them one by one, crossing things off the list that didn't quite fit with everything they knew of her case. They ended with angiostrongyliasis, caused by the nematode (roundworm) Angiostrongylus cantonensis, also known as rat lungworm. //

This nauseating roundworm is a known plague in Hawaii. In fact, it gained attention in recent years after sparking small outbreaks in the state. In 2017, there were 19 confirmed cases, but case totals in each of the years since have remained below 10. //

There are no clear treatment strategies for angiostrongyliasis, and some can recover fully without treatment after the larvae die off. In this case, the patient and her doctors decided to use a 14-day combination of the immunosuppressive steroid prednisone and the anti-parasitic drug albendazole.

Fortunately, the woman's symptoms cleared with the treatment, and she was discharged from the hospital after six days.

" Medical conditions associated with unreactive pupils include brain injury, stroke, and certain neurological disorders
" Seek immediate medical attention if you experience unreactive pupils along with severe headache, dizziness, or loss of consciousness

Nor are American pharmaceutical companies altruistic heroes; they’re in business to make a profit for their shareholders. But profits are the reward for risking capital and producing something of great value. My wife’s Tagrisso is such a product. Tagrisso got approval in the United States before Europe thanks, in large part, to the United States’s robust pharmaceutical industry and the regulatory system that accompanies it.

And yes, the United States has a tragic chronic disease burden, for which medications are probably not the exclusive, or even primary, answer. But Big Pharma is becoming a scapegoat for problems that often originated in, or were compounded by, poor lifestyle choices.

For all its well-documented inefficiencies, the American healthcare system is second to none. And the pharmaceutical industry is an essential part of it. My son and my daughter still have their parents because of Big Pharma. I have a wife because of Big Pharma. And millions of others are alive because a scientist, paid well out of the revenue generated by a company’s previously issued medicines, discovered a new miracle medicine that could save or prolong a life.

Senator Rand Paul delivered what could have been seen as a six-minute Ted Talk on how science works and how delivery of things like vaccines, along with diet and other considerations, change over time, and how parents, not the government, should be making decisions that affect their children.

There's an old joke that goes, "How can you tell if there's a vegan at your party?" The answer: "They'll tell you."

The entire issue of health factors and ethical matters around diet has been battered endlessly. "Ethical vegans," the most strident of the lot — and the most fact-challenged — make all kinds of outrageous claims about animals, their nature, the biology of humans, and how a "vegan" diet somehow causes "less harm" to animals than a diet that includes meat — a claim that they cannot back up.

That's the extreme end of the spectrum, though. There are plenty of people who forgo meat for reasons of their own without being self-righteous about it, and that's fine; live and let live. But there are matters of science involved, especially where pregnant women are concerned. We've known for some time now that excessive alcohol use by pregnant women can damage a developing fetus; this is what Fetal Alcohol Syndrome is. However, a recent study indicates that forgoing animal protein in the diet may be more damaging than moderate alcohol use. //

Realistically, while any cell mutation can happen any time, you are unlikely to get cancer caused by an occasional drink, but US culture always has pregnant women and new mothers on blast, so they are told to abstain from alcohol, coffee, too many foods to count, etc.

What we should really be cautioning pregnant women about is vegetarian diets. While some epidemiological data on alcohol can be critiqued on merit, people who believe claims about PFAS in water, GMOs, pasteurized milk, vaccinated chickens, Scotchguard, or cancer-causing spatulas absolutely cannot deny the risks of a vegetarian diet. This is far more rigorous than any of the epidemiology in those claims. //

It's important to note that the paper cited is not original work; it's what is called a "meta-analysis," an examination of previous peer-reviewed studies. That doesn't make the study any less credible, especially given the size of the data sets that were examined; eight studies, taking in 72,284 participants.

If you understand biology and the human digestive tract, though, the study isn't necessary. This isn't new information. It's been known for literally all of the history of humankind; that women who have a well-balanced diet have healthier babies. //

https://www.sciencedirect.com/science/article/pii/S2589936824000707 //

Eeyore1953
4 hours ago
How is it possible that Baby Boomers were born, with their mothers smoking and drinking through the pregnancy? And how is it that the French even exist?

REMEMBER WHEN the Media laughed and said ivermectin was ONLY for horses and cows? THEY KNEW it was made for people since 1987.

Here’s what they didn’t tell you 👇

1 – It prevents the damage caused by drugs created using mRNA technology, blocks the entry of Spike Protein into cells and, if the person was vaccinated, they can treat themselves for damage already done through Ivermectin.

2 – It only has beneficial effects and no harmful effects in the treatment of the C virus. In fact, even before entering the cell, it has already destroyed the virus in the blood.

3 – It has a very powerful anti-inflammatory action against and has a powerful impact on traumatic and orthopedic injuries, it strengthens muscles and has no side effects like corticosteroids.

4 –It treats autoimmune ailments such as: rheumatoid arthritis, ankylosing spondylitis, fibromyalgia, psoriasis, Crohn's disease, allergic rhinitis.

5 – It improves the immunity levels in cancer patients and treats Herpes Simplex and Herpes Zoster, plus reduces the frequency of sinusitis and diverticulitis.

6 – It protects the heart in cardiac overload. In an embolism for example, it prevents cardiac hypoxia because it stimulates the production of basic energy so that the tissue is not destroyed and thus improves cardiac function.

7 – It is anti-parasitic, anti-neoplastic (anti-cancer). Allegedly, it suppresses the proliferation and metastasis of cancer cells, preserving healthy cells and improving the effectiveness of chemotherapy treatment.

8 - It can kills cancer cells resistant to chemotherapy, defeating the resistance to multiple chemo-therapeutics that tumors develop, and combined with chemotherapy and/or anti-cancer agents, it provides an increase in the effectiveness of these treatments.

9 – It is antimicrobial (bacteria and viruses) and increases immunity.

10 – It reaches the Central Nervous System and regenerates the nerves.

11 – It helps to regulates glucose, insulin metabolism, cholesterol levels and reduces liver fat in steatose.

12 - It can be used as a prophylactic agent and has been associated with a significant reduction in infection, hospitalization and mortality rates due to C-19.

Federal toxicology researchers on Monday finally published a long-controversial analysis that claims to find a link between high levels of fluoride exposure and slightly lower IQs in children living in areas outside the US, mostly in China and India. As expected, it immediately drew yet more controversy.

The study, published in JAMA Pediatrics, is a meta-analysis, a type of study that combines data from many different studies—in this case, mostly low-quality studies—to come up with new results. None of the data included in the analysis is from the US, and the fluoride levels examined are at least double the level recommended for municipal water in the US. In some places in the world, fluoride is naturally present in water, such as parts of China, and can reach concentrations several-fold higher than fluoridated water in the US. //

The inclusion of urinary fluoride measurements is sure to spark criticism. For years, experts have noted that these measurements are not standardized, can vary by day and time, and are not reflective of a person's overall fluoride exposure.