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Toxic Exposures and our 4th of July Happenings

Conrad and I traveled to Minnesota to visit my parents and family over the 4th of July and I am feeling the call to express our concern with the environmental contaminants we all face each day.  Apart from the common exposures in air, water and food there are some more doozies.
We stayed at a Hampton Inn in Minnetonka near our family home and my parents new digs in senior living.  We have stayed at this hotel many times in the past and like the quality of the water, cleanliness, and location.  On our past trips we noticed no perfume products in the rooms and the sheets and bed clothes had no odors.  Just clean.  This trip was completely different.

I will warn you that I have a nose like a bloodhound…really.  We dropped our clothes and headed out to visit my parents quickly before we took a much needed nap after being up since 3AM.  Our return to the room was a disaster.  A cloud of perfume ambushed us.  I went to the front desk in a huff and found out that they came in sprayed the sheets and bedclothes with  Febreze, yep.  The front desk guys quickly explained to me that when you lie in the bed your body warmth activates the febreze for a lovely perfume experience. It is a corporate policy and every cleaning cart I saw had cans of this stuff.  I explained to them that a reason one does such a thing may be to cover less than fresh sheets.  We talked about the chemical contamination and the problems with headaches, migraines, sinus problems and asthma flare ups they may find their guests suffering from in larger numbers. How about the staff?  (We were in room right by the back door so we never had to walk hall and we do not eat those breakfasts anyway.)   Never mind the fact these products numb the nerves in your nose and you shortly do not smell at all.  Some people wander around wondering why they have a headache and it is these exposures that cause them.  I had a headache with a quick trip into and right out of this room.

The people at this hotel did the right thing, we left while they replaced the bed clothes and aired out the room and when we returned we had no more problems – I posted NO PERFUME signs all over the room.

Just saying… health problems result from this constant, daily barrage. Artificial everything adds up to tooooooo much.  Your liver, your nervous system, your endocrine system and more gets weaker and weaker and soon you feel old and sick before your time.

Avoiding these chemicals, taking the money you save and spending it on organic, high quality, foods is a much better way to live.  We found a great restaurant nearby that served organic and if not organic, local fresh food.  We watched the boats & yachts on Lake Minnetonka go by from a popular restaurant and were able to see some fabulous wood boats from the 30’s and 40’s.  We enjoyed my parents and a wonderful friend from my childhood with her husband in glorious weather of 82 degrees with a Canadian wind blowing a few miles an hour.  Nothing like the land of 10,000 lakes.

I know…I read the Fox article about cocaine and other pollutants in the lakes…Yikes.

You can do this or this.

50 ish? Time to Age Gently

When you consider the fact that you accumulate toxins through out your lifetime including heavy metals and those drugs you did as a kid;  don’t forget all the chemicals in personal care products and manufactured food as well as the out gassing from new homes and fire retardants in furniture…you might being feeling a bit fatigued and ill.  Some of us are downright disease ridden.  This is a great time to do something about all this before you are sitting in a nursing home drooling unable to remember your life.

Gently aging should include a great nutrient supplement list, some exercise and treatments developed to take care of the toxins you are riddled with.  Tiny amounts of lead, not to mention cadmium and antimony, interfere with  your circulation and energy level.  Lead raises blood pressure leading to heart disease and strokes.  Chemicals make you foggy and stupid or worse, give you cancer.  The treatment best at removing metals is intravenous chelation therapy and the treatment best at removing chemicals is a Hubbard Method sauna detoxification program.

One of our recent patient successes is a rave report from a chelation patient who had a cardiac cath revealing three blocked arteries: one 50%, one 70% and another 80% blocked.  He decided after some years of chelation treatments as a maintenance program to have another cath.  Guess what?  No blockages at all on the second cath.  This is a reversal of heart disease.  Reversed.  So for the price of dinner out with friends you can change the course of your aging and have a chelation treatment once a month to continuely remove the lead and cadmium and other metals from your body.  Many of our patients notice their arthritis, dry skin, wrinkles and hair growth improve as a side benefit.  They feel and ARE younger.  The patient with blockages had 84 treatments over 76 months – economical way to reverse the disease process.  Dr. Maulfair conducts a very informative seminar discussing this thoroughly.

A contractor with chronic Lyme disease recently completed our sauna detoxification program and had a great benefit.  A few weeks after completing he is excited because he can work all day, into the early evening, and is not suffering from seasonal allergies that used to result in bad headaches and an inability to work all day.  He gets up every morning excited about his work.  There is more to that story you can find by emailing us for the success stories.  This sauna detoxification program is the exact protocol that delivers every time.

There are a ton of self help actions you can take to age gently and when you need something more intense come to us and we will help you reverse the declines associated with aging.

 

Medical Confusion is About to Take a Turn for the Worst

When you read the following article it will become clear to you why you need to take charge of your health in a center of health like ours, drmaulfair.com.  This website is the place to follow our nation’s health care system takeover.  You will not have the freedom in health care you once enjoyed; although it is flawed, this is not the fix.  Please, please pass this on to your family and friends and investigate how to stay healthy so you can avoid drugs and surgery!!!

 
Go To Original Site
Medicare: The Bundlers Are Coming! The Bunglers Are Coming!
Marilyn Singleton, MD, JD
Medicare: The Bundlers Are Coming! The Bunglers Are Coming!
Feb 26, 2013
By: Marilyn M. Singleton, M.D., J.D.

My long-time self-paying patient opined that the end of fee-for-service payments (payment for what you get) was imminent. I lightheartedly asked her how physicians would be paid. Would they be housed in military barracks and given vouchers for necessaries?

Perhaps she read section 3023 of the “Patient Protection and Affordable Care Act” (PPACA or “ObamaCare”), the National Pilot Program on Payment Bundling, which applies to certain Medicare beneficiaries. The program’s stated goals are to improve access to care, quality, coordination, and efficiency (i.e., reduce costs) of services. Pilot programs, which started this year, will be conducted for 5 years, or longer if extension results in improved quality and reduced spending.

An earlier “pilot program” on payment by diagnosis (DRG or diagnosis related group), regardless of what the patient did or did not receive, simply became national practice in 1983 without looking at the results. Then there’s the HMO method of payment by the head (capitation), regardless of care or lack thereof. How will payment by the bundle be different?

A bundle or an episode of care includes the three days prior to admission to the hospital, the hospital stay, and 30 days (not 31 days) after discharge from the hospital. It comprises “applicable services”: acute inpatient services, all physicians’ services in and outside the hospital, outpatient and emergency room services, all post-acute care services (e.g., skilled nursing facility, rehab, home health), and other services the Secretary deems appropriate.

The amount of payment will depend partly on “quality” measures developed by the Secretary in consultation with the Agency for Healthcare Research and Quality. The measures include: functional status improvement, reducing rates of avoidable hospital readmissions, rates of discharge to the community, rates of admission to an emergency room after hospitalization, incidence of health care acquired infections, efficiency measures, measures of patient-centeredness of care, and measures of patient perception of care.

What do these things mean? Does “functional status” mean ability to perform ADLs (activities of daily living)? What if patient is so disabled that his ability to do ADLs can’t improve? What if he still needs a lift to get to the toilet, but can now beat his grandson at gin rummy? Does that count as an improvement? What about the ultimate measure of functional status—being alive rather than dead? Might a hospital’s “efficiency” rating be better if the patient dies, instead of being readmitted or acquiring an infection?

The bundle will be characterized by a code from the soon-to-be-required U.S. ICD-10CM system. This International Classification of Diseases—Clinical Modification system is based on the 1992 World Health Organization ICD-10 codes. It increases the number of diagnostic codes in the current ICD-9 system from 17,000 to 68,000, including different codes for right or left side. Providers will have to be much more specific in their coding.

Even though providers will have to do much more work to code and do other documentation tasks, the bundled payments cannot be more than what would otherwise be paid for the beneficiary’s care. It is not clear who all will have to share the payment—perhaps the hospitalist, perhaps the patient’s own physician, along with all the team members needed to provide whatever the Secretary deems appropriate.

The changes in “payment methodology” may be seen as a power struggle. Rick Mayes wrote in 2007, “For the first time, the federal government gained the upper hand in its financial relationship with the hospital industry. Medicare’s new prospective payment system with DRGs triggered a shift in the balance of political and economic power between the providers of medical care (hospitals and physicians) and those who paid for it—a power that providers had successfully accumulated for more than half a century.”

Some claim that bundling is a way to save Medicare, previous measures including the Sustainable Growth Rate (SGR) fee cuts having failed. In reality, it simply adds to the opportunity for bureaucratic bungling, while moving payment still further away from the value of care to real live patients.

Instead of more complex formulas, we need more transparency so that beneficiaries can make their own informed decisions about their individualized medical care, without interference from bureaucrats and the special interest groups that feed on the current muddled system.