July 25, 2012

10 Reasons to Avoid Your Doctor

Posted in FYI tagged 10 reasons to avoid your doctors, avoid, cancer, Cholesterol, colds, depression, Doctors, Dr Mercola, flu, Heart Disease, high blood pressure, lies, mammograms, omega 6, omega-3, pap smears, perscription drugs, prostate, PSA Test, statins, stroke at 6:33 pm by PCOSLady

http://articles.mercola.com/sites/articles/archive/2012/07/25/ten-reasons-to-avoid-doctors.aspx?e_cid=20120725_DNL_artNew_1
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TOP TEN REASONS to AVOID YOUR DOCTOR
July 25 2012… By Dr Mercola
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By Dr. Mercola
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I’ve long said that the best strategy for achieving health is avoiding a visit to your doctor in the first place. Why? Because in many cases you will simply leave the office with a prescription or two, which will rarely solve your health problem. Most doctor visits result in “solutions” that only suppress your symptoms, often causing other side effects and problems.
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Rather than advise patients about the true underlying conditions and real solutions that lead to health, they are left putting toxic Band-Aids on gaping wounds. As shown in the slideshow above, and as I detail in depth below, there are actually many reasons why avoiding your doctor may be in the best interest of your health …
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1. Annual Pap Smears
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Many physicians still advise women to receive yearly pap smears, but the newest guidelines from the U.S. Preventive Services Task Force specifically recommend against this. The new recommendations call for women to undergo PAP screening only once every three years, beginning at age 21 and ending around age 65.
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2. Mammograms
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Only about 1 in 8 women whose breast cancer was identified during a routine mammogram actually had their lives “saved” by the screening, a recent analysis estimated2 – and this does not accurately account for how many women will fall victim to mammogram-induced breast cancer.
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Using breast cancer data from The National Cancer Institute and The Centers for Disease Control and Prevention, researchers calculated a 50-year-old woman’s likelihood of developing breast cancer in the next 10 years, the odds the cancer would be detected by mammography, and her risk of dying from the cancer over 20 years.
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They found that a mammogram has, at best, only a 13 percent probability of saving her life, and that the probability may actually be as low as 3 percent. No matter what analyses they used, including considering women of different ages, the probability of a mammogram saving a life remained below 25 percent.
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3. Cold and Flu
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Think it’s wise to go to a conventional physician for these? Think again. Thanks to routine over-prescription of antibiotics, and the prescription of inappropriate antibiotics, you’re likely to walk away after being told to take a drug you don’t actually need.
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Antibiotics do NOT work against viruses, hence they are useless against colds and flu’s. Unfortunately antibiotics are vastly over-prescribed for this purpose. If you have a cold or flu, remember that unless you have a serious secondary bacterial pneumonia, an antibiotic will likely do far more harm than good, because whenever you use an antibiotic, you’re increasing your susceptibility to developing infections with resistance to that antibiotic — and you can become the carrier of this resistant bug, and can spread it to others.
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The first thing you want to do when you feel yourself coming down with a cold or flu is to avoid ALL sugars, artificial sweeteners, and processed foods. Sugar is particularly damaging to your immune system — which needs to be ramped up, not suppressed, in order to combat an emerging infection. This includes fructose from fruit juice, and all types of grains (as they break down into sugar (glucose) in your body).
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4. Cholesterol
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Many doctors are unaware that a high-fat diet is NOT the cause of heart disease. They are fooled into believing that total cholesterol is an accurate predictor of heart disease. If you visit your physician and you have high cholesterol, you’re likely to be told two things:
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Take a statin cholesterol-lowering drug and
Don’t eat saturated fat.
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While statin drugs do lower cholesterol very effectively, cholesterol is not the culprit in heart disease. Plus a report by the Massachusetts Institute of Technology claims that no study has ever proven that statins improve all-cause mortality3 — in other words, they don’t prolong your life any longer than if you’d not taken them at all. And rather than improving your life, they actually contribute to a deterioration in the quality of your life, destroying muscles and endangering liver, kidney and even heart function. The best ways to optimize your cholesterol levels and your heart health have to do with lifestyle measures, including eating healthy minimally processed fats and avoid highly processed vegetable fats and oils that are loaded with toxic omega-6 fats.
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5. Depression
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Once again, you’re more likely to leave the doctor’s office with a prescription for a drug that could be more dangerous than the problem itself. Every year, 230 million prescriptions for antidepressants are filled, making them one of the most prescribed drugs in the United States. The psychiatric industry itself is a $330 billion industry—not bad for an enterprise that offers little in the way of cures.
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Despite all of these prescriptions, more than one in 20 Americans are depressed.4 Of those depressed Americans, 80 percent say they have some level of functional impairment, and 27 percent say their condition makes it extremely difficult to do everyday tasks like work, activities of daily living, and getting along with others.
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The use of antidepressant drugs—medicine’s answer for depression—doubled in just one decade, from 13.3 million in 1996 to 27 million in 2005.
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6. High Blood Pressure
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The definition of what constitutes high blood pressure expanded greatly in 2003, so that drug companies could sell drugs loaded with side effects to 45 million extra people. Because the Joint National Committee on Prevention, Detection, Evaluation and Treatment of High Blood Pressure (rife with drug industry conflicts of interest) decided that what were in actuality relatively low blood pressure readings were a risk for heart disease, millions more over the years, were suddenly labeled abnormal, and in need of “treatment” for a condition that didn’t exist in medical literature until that panel met.
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Uncontrolled high blood pressure is a very serious health concern that can lead to heart disease and increase your risk of having a stroke. The good news though is that following a healthy nutrition plan, along with exercising and implementing effective stress reduction techniques will normalize blood pressure in most people.
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7. PSA Tests for Prostate Cancer
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See my Prostate Cancer post or go to the site above for complete article…
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8. Inappropriate and Unwise Dietary Advice
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Most doctors are clueless about what constitutes a healthy diet. As such, they will recommend health catastrophes like artificial sweeteners, vegetable oils in lieu of butter, and fat-free pasteurized dairy products. Most will also neglect to tell you about the foods you could be eating more of to optimize your health, like fermented vegetables, raw dairy products, healthy fats (like saturated and animal-based omega-3s), grass-fed beef and more.
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In addition, most are ignorant about the importance of how to cook your food – most foods are best consumed when raw or only lightly cooked, and this includes animal proteins like eggs and meat.
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9. Prescription Drugs Might Kill You and They Don’t Address the Cause of the Problem
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A drug prescription is usually a Band-Aid that gets nowhere near the root cause of illness. And many drugs are dangerous. Last year an analysis of data from the U.S. Centers for Disease Control CDC) revealed that deaths from properly prescribed drugs now outnumber traffic fatalities in the United States! And when you add in deaths attributable to other medical care modalities, like hospital admissions and surgery, the modern medical system becomes the leading cause of death and injury in the United States.
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10. Your Doctor Might Not Even Tell You the Truth
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A U.S. telephone survey found that 79 percent of Americans trust their doctor.6 But a recent survey of 1,900 physicians revealed that some are not always open or honest with their patients The results were less than impressive, to put it mildly:
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* One-third of physicians did not completely agree with disclosing serious medical errors to patients
* One-fifth did not completely agree that physicians should never tell a patient something untrue
* Amazingly 40% believed that they should hide their financial relationships with drug and device companies to patients
* Ten percent said they had told patients something untrue in the previous year
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When making health care decisions, you should certainly get your physicians’ advice — that’s what you’re paying them for, after all.
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* Please read the entire post and search his numerous topics on his site to be better informed of the “TRUTHS” he has researched for all of you…. *
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REFERENCES:
1 ~ Lancet. 2004 Nov 6-12;364(9446):1678-83. PMID: 15530628
2 ~ Archives of Internal Medicine October 24, 2011
3 ~ How Statins Really Work Explains Why They Don’t Really Work March 11, 2011
4 ~ NCHS Data Brief, No. 7, September 2008
5 ~ New England Journal of Medicine November 25, 2010
6 ~ Rasmussen Reports August 24, 2010

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