Tiny update to project: “Dowsing For Water Lines- God, Science, And Small Town Government In Ohio”
Here’s an excerpt….
“…Corruption can be explicit, like the sale of a government agency to a political lobby. The Federal Government’s National Institutes of Health (NIH) was sold to ‘Big Pharma’ lobbying interests for purposes of marketing expensive medications. Remember when a blood pressure of 120/80 was normal? After corporate takeover of the NIH under the Bush administration, the NIH began promulgating new ‘analysis’ showing that 120/80 should be the HIGH LIMIT for blood pressure, and anything below was healthy. The number itself didn’t change, just the wording.
That minor change garnered little attention in the press, but allowed for fundamental changes in vascular care. Now, 90/60 is technically NORMAL, even though it would mean immediate unconsciousness for most ‘healthy’ humans. With 120/80 now being officially abnormal, drug-manufacturers can push physicians to prescribe blood-pressure medication (one of the most lucrative drug-lines ever created, second to cholesterol) to the widest segment of the population, regardless of actual need. This is why physician-insurance and pharmaceutical companies work so closely together. All liability insurers use NIH guidelines to determine wrongdoing in physician practice (for purposes of insurance premium calculations). Any physician who does not follow NIH guidelines to the letter, regardless of validity, can be immediately bankrupted by boosting insurance rates if something happens (regardless of actual fault). So, all physicians intentionally over-medicate patients to keep premiums low. Subsequently, the drug companies sell more drugs than they normally would, rake in record profits, and all with the plausible deniability needed to appear completely innocent in the process. The purchase of a government agency from a willing government is a prime example of explicit corruption.
Corruption can also be implicit, like a Municipal government using those same corrupted NIH standards to knock it’s employees off the municipally-sponsored health insurance, and save money. Knowingly using fake statistics to keep expenditures low at the expense of your own employee’s health may be a more subtle form of corruption, but its effects are more immediately tangible to the average person; especially when that person sees their deductibles rise from $500 to $2000 dollars just for being healthy.”
