Why You’ve Never Heard of HBOT: Part III
The third and final part of Dr. Stoller’s work with Wayne Hawkins and HBOT (Hyperbaric Oxygen Therapy). Dr. Stoller’s post talks about how a big industry – the big multinational pharmaceutical companies – have managed to keep HBOT hidden from the public and left out of qualification for Medicare reimbursement. Wait – does that sound like another coverup we know about? Nah!
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We’ll continue to follow Wayne’s – and George’s – progress over the next months.
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On treating Wayne Hawkins with HBOT 1.5 (Part III)
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By Dr. Ken P. Stoller
What if you found out there was an effective treatment for both acute and chronic brain injuries, but bureaucrats chose to withhold that treatment from those who need it because they can? Is it ethical to withhold the knowledge of effective treatments or not provide reimbursement for said treatments should someone stumble upon them? No, but it sure is legal. Never mind the unnecessary suffering costs to both our health care system and society at large.
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Most people don’t know that western medicine is controlled by multinational pharma companies that make sure doctors-in-training only learn what they want them to learn, and make sure reimbursement is tracked to those therapies that benefits them the most. The control is not airtight but then it never is; still, most physicians are slaves to Big Pharma without even knowing they’re slaves (that makes for the best slaves – mind control).
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So, today in America the most effective treatment for traumatic brain injury is available but almost no one knows about it or has access to it. We – as a society that doesn’t understand its own power – are letting untold numbers of brain-injured individuals and their families suffer as we are conducting an unconscious experiment. It was during the Nixon administration that an order was given to a Naval Officer to make sure most neurological conditions that might benefit from hyperbaric oxygen therapy (HBOT) were excluded from Medicare’s coverage determinations! Here’s an article from Hyperbaric Medicine Today that discusses some of the conditions and treatments that are excluded (we posted this on Scribd for easier reading. Click on the FULL SCREEN button to enlarge it for easier navigation – hit the ESC key to close. You can also click the DOWNLOAD button to save a PDF copy for printing and reading.):
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Medicare’s Noncovered Conditions
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Now, it’s true that we’ve all allowed ourselves to be experimented on with far too much ease by those who would use us despicably for their own agendas but we need to reverse our course on that quickly – a topic for another day to be sure. But before I speculate on why someone from the White House would ask the Naval Officer in charge of determining what would and would not be paid for by Medicare when using HBOT, it might be good to revisit a little bit of our history.
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From 1932 to 1972, scientists from the US Public Health Service conducted the Tuskegee syphilis study on 399 impoverished African American sharecroppers from Tuskegee, Alabama without their consent. They withheld a known effective treatment for syphilis – penicillin – in order to observe what happened over time to those with untreated syphilis even though they knew they could cure it and prevent horrid disability with a few simple shots of penicillin.
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If this were an isolated example, one could chalk this up to some misanthropes at the Public Health Service which is how most history books read today. But it’s not an isolated example.
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Now your well-meaning physicians will do what they know as long as it’s paid for by insurance and I have already stated that what they know and what gets paid is very much controlled by Big Pharma. Ultimately, getting as many people as possible dependent on the products they sell is their only goal. So it should be clear this is about money and someone felt that if HBOT were approved for treating stroke patients for example, then it would either empty nursing homes – which had a very strong lobby back in the 1970’s or it would put too much of a financial drain on the Medicare system. After all, hospital HBOT facilities like to charge $1000 or more per treatment and back then they were the only ones with hyperbaric chambers!
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Hyperbaric medicine is a relatively new field in medicine. It was first used to treat decompression sickness (often a brain injury) in 1937. It was then used by cardiothoracic surgeons to assist them with open-heart operations BEFORE the invention of the heart/lung bypass machine. Thereafter, hyperbaric medicine survived years as the Cinderella of modern medicine. The influence of Naval or ex-Naval physicians kept the field tightly controlled. Those that trained me were all ex-military and I was told they were threatened with loss of reimbursement if they dared to try expanding the “approved” indications for HBOT.
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There were some red-letter events, such as a double-blind study published in the New England Journal of Medicine (1983) showing HBOT to be an effective treatment for Multiple Sclerosis (Big Pharma made sure the author lost his tenured post at his university and MS patients never found out about the study). In 1992, there was another randomized study showing a 60% decrease in mortality for acute traumatic brain injury (TBI) treated with HBOT. Ten years later, a study published in the prestigious Lancet showing HBOT effective in treating children with Cerebral Palsy and I published a paper showing it effective in treating Fetal Alcohol Syndrome. I’ve left out a lot of history but whatever little history there is, you won’t find it in medical textbooks or being taught in medical schools.
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Any therapy that is not making a Big Pharma big money will not be promoted and guided into the system as a standard therapy. Now, if oxygen were a drug that could be patented, I wouldn’t have to be writing this because it would be standard therapy for treating TBI, CTE, CES, CP, MS and a whole host of other conditions that affect the brain. But oxygen is not a patentable drug, no one is getting rich practicing hyperbaric medicine and no one is marketing this benign, humanitarian therapy that could help the brain injuries of so many.
.So where do we go from here? Instead of just George Visger and Wayne Hawkins getting treated, what if every brain-injured NFL veteran demanded they be treated as well? From there, every brain-injured NFL fan demanded they be treated, and so on. That is how HBOT will become standard therapy for treating acute and chronic TBI.
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And so it goes.
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Please feel free to go to the IHMA website to learn more about treating TBI with HBOT: Click HERE.
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Kenneth P. Stoller, MD, is President of the International Hyperbaric Medical Association, a Diplomat of the American Board of Pediatrics, a Diplomat of the American Board of Hyperbaric Medicine, a Fellow of the American College for Hyperbaric Medicine, Medical Director of the San Francisco Institute for Hyperbaric Medicine, the Hyperbaric Oxygen Clinic of Sacramento, and the Hyperbaric Medical Center of New Mexico. A book by Dr. Stoller’s late son will be published at the end of the year (www.dreamtreaderpress.com).
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EDITOR’S NOTE: HBOT treatment is well-established and actually an incredibly cost-effective approach for an expanding range of conditions that should be a no-brainer (pun intended) for Medicare approval. 60 Minutes just ran a feature last night on $60 billion in Medicare fraud that shows how easy it’s been even for simple street criminals to steal huge amounts of money from our healthcare system! Here’s a clip:
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