My Brush With Death, Hospitalization

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Mr Man
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Re: My Brush With Death, Hospitalization

Post by Mr Man »

Wishing you well.
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Kim OHara
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Re: My Brush With Death, Hospitalization

Post by Kim OHara »

Welcome back, Daniel :hello:
Take care of yourself - don't push yourself too hard in the recovery phase.

:namaste:
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Roland
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Re: My Brush With Death, Hospitalization

Post by Roland »

May you have a smooth recovery
:namaste:
"No tree becomes rooted and sturdy unless many a wind assails it. For by its very tossing it tightens its grip and plants its roots more securely; the fragile trees are those that have grown in a sunny valley."

--Seneca the Younger (57 BCE- 65 AD)
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Sam Vara
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Re: My Brush With Death, Hospitalization

Post by Sam Vara »

I second all the wishes of good will. I hope you get better soon.
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Cittasanto
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Re: My Brush With Death, Hospitalization

Post by Cittasanto »

:woohoo:
glad to hear you are OK, I was starting to wonder where you were!
Hope you do not have any more insurance issues and can take as much time as needed!
Blog, Suttas, Aj Chah, Facebook.

He who knows only his own side of the case knows little of that. His reasons may be good, and no one may have been able to refute them.
But if he is equally unable to refute the reasons on the opposite side, if he does not so much as know what they are, he has no ground for preferring either opinion …
...
He must be able to hear them from persons who actually believe them … he must know them in their most plausible and persuasive form.
John Stuart Mill
beeblebrox
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Re: My Brush With Death, Hospitalization

Post by beeblebrox »

Hi Daniel,

Glad to see you're OK now.

A few years ago, when I broke my leg I had to stay in a hospital for a week. While that wasn't life-threatening, I almost got stuck with a bill for around $80,000 (no kidding!) because of some insurance issues. Luckily it worked out....

:anjali:
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Khalil Bodhi
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Re: My Brush With Death, Hospitalization

Post by Khalil Bodhi »

Welcome back Daniel! I wish you a speedy recovery!
To avoid all evil, to cultivate good, and to cleanse one's mind — this is the teaching of the Buddhas.
-Dhp. 183

The Stoic Buddhist: https://www.quora.com/q/dwxmcndlgmobmeu ... pOR2p0uAdH
My Practice Blog:
http://khalilbodhi.wordpress.com
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Aloka
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Re: My Brush With Death, Hospitalization

Post by Aloka »

Lots of good wishes to you, Daniel.


.
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SDC
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Re: My Brush With Death, Hospitalization

Post by SDC »

Feel better, daniel! Glad you're okay.
“Life is swept along, short is the life span; no shelters exist for one who has reached old age. Seeing clearly this danger in death, a seeker of peace should drop the world’s bait.” SN 1.3
danieLion
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Re: My Brush With Death, Hospitalization

Post by danieLion »

Thanks to everyone who posted after my firtst thanks to everyone. :hug: But I'll wear a mask 'til my cough's gone. ;)
danieLion
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Re: My Brush With Death, Hospitalization

Post by danieLion »

Mawkish1983 wrote:How could an insurance company refuse to pay for that treatment? The world we live in is a strange place. I'm glad you're getting better Daniel.
I've been looking into that and it's not very easy to answer. Here's what I've found so far:

It seems more of a problem in countries like the U.S. where health care is still privatized (there's a quasi-socialized effect here in terms of government partnerships with providers and academic researchers because they usually use tax-payer dollars, but that's created other problems. See C below). In Canada and other countries with socialized medicine (according to Wikiepedia) the antibiotic in question is about 10% of the cost in the States. More specifically:

A: Zyvox (a.ka., linezolid, a.k.a. the $2,500 antbiotic I'm on) is a member of the oxazolidinone class of drugs, and is active against most gram-positive bacteria that cause disease, including streptococci, vancomycin-resistant enterococci (VRE; they gave this one to me by IV in the hospital), and methicillin-resistant Staphylococcus aureus (MRSA). Zyvox is a synthetic antibiotic ORIGINALLY developed by a team at Pharmacia and Upjohn Company. PFIZER bought them out.

I won't list the side effects because I read them once and they're so disturbing I'm trying not to think about them (the only ones I'm experiencing so far are mild: indigestion, nausea, fatigue).

PHARMACIA: Pharmacia is the modern transliteration of the Greek word Pharmakeia which means pharmaceutically making and despensing POISONS, pharmaceuticals or medicines as well as cosmetics, lotions, perfumes etc. The word is used in many places in the world to mean pharmacy. Pharmacia was also the name of a pharmaceutical and BIOTECHNOLOGICAL company in Sweden.

HISTORY OF PHARMACIA AND UPJOHN COMPANY:

Pharmacia company was founded in 1911 in Stockholm, Sweden by pharmacist Gustav Felix Grönfeldt at the Elgen Pharmacy. The company is named after the Greek word φαρμακεία, transliterated pharmakeia, which means 'SORCERY'....

In 1999, the nutrition division was sold to Fresenius. The merged company "Pharmacia & Upjohn" merged with the AMERICAN BIOINDUSTRY and medical company MONSANTO Company (in 2009 OBAMA appointed Monsanto's former VP of Public Policy, Michael Taylor as a Senior Adviser to the FDA; Cf. MICHELLE OBAMA's new School Lunch Camapaign which is basically a bunch of GMOs) in 2000 (Monsanto had acquired the pharma company G.D. Searle & Company in 1985). The resulting conglomerate took the name of "Pharmacia Corp." Monsanto, via its Searle division, had developed celecoxib (an NSAID) which became a blockbuster drug soon after its approval by the FDA at the end of 1998.

The agricultural chemical division under the name Monsanto was spun off in 2002, but Pharmacia retained the original pharmaceutical division from Searle. In July 2002, Pharmacia was bought by Pfizer; control of celecoxib was often mentioned as a key reason for Pfizer's acquisition of Pharmacia.

Sources:
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Linezolid#cite_ref-1" onclick="window.open(this.href);return false;
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Pharmacia" onclick="window.open(this.href);return false;
http://www.washingtonpost.com/blogs/blo ... _blog.html" onclick="window.open(this.href);return false;
http://www.huffingtonpost.com/jeffrey-s ... 43810.html" onclick="window.open(this.href);return false;


B: "Pfizer: In the largest health care fraud settlement in history, Pfizer was ordered to pay $2.3 billion to resolve criminal and civil allegations that the company illegally promoted uses of four of its drugs, including the painkiller Bextra, the antipsychotic Geodon, the antibiotic ZYVOX, and the anti-epileptic Lyrica."

Source: http://articles.mercola.com/sites/artic ... in-us.aspx" onclick="window.open(this.href);return false;

See also: "What did Pfizer do to 'earn' the largest health care fraud settlement in history?

http://articles.mercola.com/sites/artic ... -Fine.aspx" onclick="window.open(this.href);return false;


C: The main reason Big Pharma will give for the cost of any expensive drug is to cover R&D. But this is pure horse pucky, as Harriet A. Washington* has pointed out in her excellent book, Deadly Monopolies: The Shocking Takeover of Life Itself--and the Consequences for Your Health and Our Medical Future. In the chapter, "The High Cost of Living: How Patent-Based Monopolies Inflate Drug Prices," she notes:
The industry's stirring commercials feature earnest young researchers who recount how the ailments of family members or cherished patients sent them on a personal mission to save others from a medical killer. Soaring anthems trumpet the company's humanitarian mission of ameliorating human health at home and abroad.

Yet PHARMACEUTICAL COMPANIES SEEM DRIVEN BY MOTIVES THAT THEY DECLINE TO TRUMPET, FOR THE DRUG INDUSTRY DOES FAR MORE THAN RECOUP IT'S COSTS: IT'S ANNUAL SALES OF $400-600 BILLION SPEAKS FOR THEMSELVES, ELOQUENTLY ANNOUNCING THAT PHARMACEUTICAL MAKERS ARE LIVING LARGE. THE INDUSTRY'S PROFITS, NEARLY 10 PERCENT OF ITS GROSS INCOME, EXCEEDED $65.2 BILLION IN 2008 ALONE.

FOR APPROXIMATELY TWENTY YEARS PHARMACEUTICAL COMPANIES ENJOYED THE HIGHEST PROFITS OF ANY U.S. INDUSTRY. IN 2002 THE COMBINED PROFITS OF THE TEN DRUG COMPANIES IN THE FORTUNE 5000 ($35.9 BILLION) EXCEEDED THE PROFITS OF THE OTHER 490 BUSINESSES PUT TOGETHER ($33.7 BILLION).

If the R&D costs ares so high, and if, as http://www.phrma.org/" onclick="window.open(this.href);return false; claims, five to ten thousand candidate drugs are investigated for every one that ultimately finds its way to the medicine cabinet, HOW CAN AN INDUSTRY BURDENED WITH WITH SUCH ASTRONOMICAL COSTS SEE ANY PROFIT, TO SAY NOTHING OF HAVING BECOME THE MOST PROFITABLE INDUSTRY ON THE PLANET?

IT'S SIMPLE. DRUG COMPANIES DON'T PAY FOR MOST OF THEIR R&D--YOU DO. UNIVERSITY RESEARCH IS TYPICALLY SUBSIDIZED BY YOUR TAX DOLLARS. WETHER THE UNIVERSITY RESEARCHER PARTNERES WITH THE CORPORATION, WHETHER SHE STARTS A BIOTECHNOLOGY COMPANY THAT THE CORPORATION BUYS, OR WHETHER THE CORPORATION ENTERS INTO A CONTRACT DIRECTLY WITH A DEPARTMENT OF THE UNIVERSITY, THE RESULT IS THE SAME. THE CORPORATIONS MARKET, SELL, AND PROFIT FROM A PATENT THAT IS THE PRODUCT OF LARGELY TAX-PAYER FUNDED UNIVERSITY RESEARCH (pp. 80-81).
*Harriet A. Washington is also author of "Medical Apartheid," which won a National Book Critics Circle Award, the 2007 PEN Oakland Award, and the 2007 American Library Black Caucus Nonfiction Award. She has also been a fellow in medical ethics at the Harvard Medical School, a senior research scholar at the National Center for Bioethics at Tuskegee University, a fellow at Harvard Public School of Health, and the recipient of a John S. Knight Fellowship at Stanford University.

So far, then, it looks to me like the main reason Zyvox is so expensive is because Pfizer knows it can get away with exploiting severe suffering and the threat of death. From my perspective, they're exploiting sufferers of MRSA because they know it's one of the most effective drugs for that. Without antibiotics (there are less effective alternatives) MRSA is basically fatal, and in my case (pneumonia with a necrotizing cavity), certain. So Pfizer essentially says, "Pay up or die!" I'm ambivalent about insurance companies (On the plus side, for instance, they've started to justifiably, IMO, pay less for SSRI's and SSNRI's as the efficacy and side efffects research continues to point out the problems with these dangerous designer drugs. They've also started to put limits on sessions for things like Physical Therapy as more and more research begins to reveal how quacky PT is.). But in this case, can you blame them for initially refusing? They're standing up to Big Pharma because if they don't their profits would likely take a huge and hit. Granted, that's like a big bully standing up to an even bigger bully, which goes to say that the main problem is political.
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Cittasanto
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Re: My Brush With Death, Hospitalization

Post by Cittasanto »

yet symptoms such as "death" are seen as reasonable?!

anyway hope you feel 100% soon!
Blog, Suttas, Aj Chah, Facebook.

He who knows only his own side of the case knows little of that. His reasons may be good, and no one may have been able to refute them.
But if he is equally unable to refute the reasons on the opposite side, if he does not so much as know what they are, he has no ground for preferring either opinion …
...
He must be able to hear them from persons who actually believe them … he must know them in their most plausible and persuasive form.
John Stuart Mill
Nyana
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Re: My Brush With Death, Hospitalization

Post by Nyana »

Serious illness. Take care of yourself. Glad to hear that you're on the mend. :smile:
danieLion
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Re: My Brush With Death, Hospitalization

Post by danieLion »

Thanks Cittasanto and Nana.
danieLion
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Re: My Brush With Death, Hospitalization

Post by danieLion »

daverupa wrote:
SN 22.1 wrote:"So it is, householder. So it is. The body is afflicted, weak, & encumbered. For who, looking after this body, would claim even a moment of true health, except through sheer foolishness? So you should train yourself: 'Even though I may be afflicted in body, my mind will be unafflicted.' That is how you should train yourself."
:group:

I had my large intestine removed when I was 15, and learned half of this lesson early. The other half is truly a boon during such times as these.
Thanks for sharing, Dave. I had several moments of weakness, but I persisted in training my mind to be unafflicted. Having my Albert Ellis books to read (when I had energy) was helpful too.
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