Surviving the Medical Meltdown (35 page)

So, what to do? Well, first, is it the gum or the tooth? A piece of stuck popcorn or meat or some foreign particle jammed down into a gum may cause pain or a “periodontal” abscess that is all in the soft tissue – the teeth themselves being healthy. In my world of dental nightmares, I keep an oral irrigator machine in my bathroom that I use for routine periodontal (gum) care. (I like the Hydro Floss super-duty pulse lavage machine.) Most people who lose their teeth later in life do so, not because the teeth rot, but because the gums have chronic disease, recede, and expose the roots of the teeth and cause teeth loosening. I cannot recommend an oral irrigator enough. For an acute problem I recommend doing warm water pulse lavages with a small amount of hydrogen peroxide in the water, and thoroughly rinsing (lavaging) around the offending area. Then do some self-diagnostics. First, push on the gum around the area. Then tap on the teeth one at a time and see if you can find one that causes pain. Try some ice water in the area – does that make it worse? In short, if only the gum causes pain, it may be local inflammation. If ice makes it worse and/or tapping on the tooth hurts (warning: that may send you through the roof), it’s most likely a tooth abscess. A
tooth that is cracked into the root may also be the cause, but this tends to become painful and level off. The bad thing about a tooth abscess is that once it gets started, it produces “pus under pressure” in an area with a ton of nerve endings. “Pain” is such an insufficient word. I asked one dentist to just cut my head off because it hurt so badly. The good news is, with drainage and appropriate dental care, pain is generally relieved right away.

If you have an abscess, you will have to get to a dentist. For pain, try ibuprofen (800 mg) four times a day. This does two things – it relieves the pain, and it helps reduce the inflammation around the tooth. If you have a narcotic at home and need to temporize till Monday or the next morning, you have my sympathy. Take it as recommended and realize you cannot drive or put yourself into any dangerous situations – like climbing on the roof or signing divorce decrees. Lie still. Pain is worsened by activity. It may help to sleep sitting up a bit. If all of that fails and you don’t have an emergency dentist to consult, go to the emergency room.

A permanent tooth that has been knocked out
is an emergency because often the tooth can be replaced. Current recommendations are to pick the tooth up by the crown, avoiding touching the root. If you can rinse it and put it back into the socket, do so. If you cannot, it is best to drop the tooth into a small container of milk or, as a last resort, wrap the tooth in a moist cloth, taking care to protect the delicate soft tissues attached to the root. Call for an emergency dentist.

A bitten tongue
is generally not an emergency unless you cannot stop the bleeding. Pressure for three minutes is the magic treatment. Then just give it time to heal and avoid reinjury.

Preventative dental care
is the best way to avoid these issues. I have “dental religion” after a bunch of root canals and four implants that replace three teeth lost to abscess. My routine is nightly brushing with a non-fluoride toothpaste. (My dad’s research aside, I believe
fluoride is a carcinogen. He didn’t have the statistics on inorganic fluoride in 1945.
¹
) I floss daily, and for flossing after meals, I carry Doctor’s Brush Picks, which work better around my implants. At night I usually use the Hydro Floss with tepid water. While driving, I use whitening trays that are lined with a hydrogen peroxide gel. Typically, you wear a whitening tray for twenty minutes a day. These are not cheap, but neither are the consequences of periodontal disease. Finally, I get my teeth professionally cleaned and checked twice a year. Even if you do it only yearly, it is better than nothing, and it may be adequate if you are compulsive about your gum care and do not accumulate much plaque buildup on your teeth. I don’t chew gum routinely, but when I do, I chew only a xylitol gum that actually decreases bacteria in the mouth. I also try to avoid sweets and simple carbs.

Fortunately, many dentists are still amenable to cash payment, and insurance doesn’t cover everything. But as dental insurance becomes more common and the government pays for more dental care (they do now for indigent children), we will face a dental meltdown, with shortages of dentists and restriction of care. Dentists are already facing the draconian actions of the federal government. Several years ago, the Association of American Physicians and Surgeons – a group that counts Ron Paul and Rand Paul as members and me as a past president – helped free a dentist from jail who had been in nearly solitary confinement
for five years
. He had been charged with “Medicaid fraud,” but at the time of his release, the government could only prove he had overcharged Medicaid around thirty-five dollars. So dentists, welcome to the new world order in which physicians have lived for decades.

29
THE FUTURE OF MEDICINE

W
here do we go from here? I doubt we can return to a true free market in medicine without literally a regime change. Sadly, as Russians and Chinese are in the process of privatizing their medical care, we are sliding down into the rat hole of medical socialism. As more physicians and surgeons opt out of seeing patients on government-paid plans, the politicians will get more complaints from constituents unable to access care. And they will take draconian steps. I doubt our politician overlords will suddenly have a Zen moment of enlightenment and decide to institute free-market reforms. No, sadly, I think they will come down hard on the states – demanding that state medical boards not license physicians unless they take Medicare, Medicaid, Obamacare, Tricare, and any other government program that comes along.

There will be a wave of retirements – myself included – and partial retirements or slowdowns among those a little younger. Following that, we will have a new generation of physicians raised on electronic medical records, inefficiency, shoddy quality of care, and a nine-to-five mentality. These newly minted docs will not remember the great tenets of Osler, and they will take a modern, watered-down Hippocratic oath that fits today’s socialist medical
narrative. Sadly I am watching as my son completes medical school, and I see how little practical training he is receiving – compared to my education in the mid 1970s and 1980s. Had he not come to my hospital for some hands-on skills, he would not have learned to insert an IV catheter. His professors spend more time wrestling with the electronic medical records system than teaching him. He has been told that he should plan on another year of specialty training after a five-year general surgery residency so he will have enough experience to safely practice.

Remember when Obama and Nancy Pelosi said the new health care law would lower prices, improve quality, and increase “access”? What a joke. It is not doing any of these things. It is the last nail in the coffin of our freedom. If you owe your very health to the government, what else is there? At every level of medical care, we are being dumbed down by regulations that keep us from being efficient and effective. The stress put on physicians is causing record suicides and retirements. We are about to fall.

As T. S. Eliot wrote:

This is the way the world ends

This is the way the world ends

This is the way the world ends

Not with a bang but with a whimper.
¹

The whimper is from a patient lying in the hallway in an overcrowded hospital, or a baby in distress, born far from any obstetrician or pediatrician. The whimper is also from the physician who once treated patients the old-fashioned way – with concern, compassion, and competence – in an analog world of individuals, and his psyche cannot take the paradigm shift into Obamacare’s digital medical system that sees patients as faceless ciphers.

What is about to happen is the result, not of too little government, but of too much. You and I have to be prepared. As the genius of practical living, Ben Franklin said, “By failing to prepare, you
are preparing to fail.” People tend to think of history following a gentle sine wave, varying little from day to day. Psychologically we expect tomorrow to be pretty much like today. But a quick look at the world shows a very different picture. Nearly overnight Sarajevo went from being a modern city to a bombed-out shell. Brits sipped gin and tonics and ate crumpets, ignoring Winston Churchill’s warnings against downsizing their army, and overnight they were caught with their proverbial pants down as the world changed with Hitler’s march into Poland. In 1860, America was prospering and developing like no nation on earth, and in the course of a few months was convulsed by a bloody civil war. Flappers danced and tycoons strutted right up until Black Friday and the stock market collapse. Members of the Russian aristocracy were suddenly made serfs to the Bolsheviks. My friend from Cambodia was the daughter of a well-to-do government official until the Khmer Rouge took him, and she was smuggled out of a nation that had devolved into the “killing fields.” In short, if plotted on a graph, the world is not a sine wave but a “fractal landscape,” with sudden, unexpected drop-offs.

I grew up with parents who lived through the Depression. It has always been my habit to be frugal, to conserve, to eat what’s on my plate, and to be prepared for the unexpected financial catastrophe. But now I realize we must be prepared for the medical catastrophe that is of our own government’s making.

I hope to see a future with freedom restored. Win, lose, or draw, I will no longer vote for people who enslave my children and unborn grandchildren to taxes and regulation and forced government-run health care. I plan to be as independent of the collapsing system as possible and to be able to offer my medical services to my neighbors, my friends, and my family, as well as for barter. I pray for God’s blessing on our nation in this troubled time, and I hope this book will facilitate your well-being and even survival in the coming medical meltdown.

APPENDIX A
FURTHER READING AND OTHER RESOURCES

Maltsev, Yuri N. “What Soviet Medicine Teaches Us.”
Mises Daily
, June 22, 2012,
http://mises.org/daily/3650/What-Soviet-Medicine-Teaches-Us
.

Maltsev, Yuri N. “Lessons from Soviet Medicine,”
Journal of American Physicians and Surgeons
, 16, no. 2, (2011),
http://www.jpands.org/vol16no2/maltsev.pdf
.

Hieb, Lee D., MD. “Government Medicine is Hazardous to Your Health.”
AAPS Online
, December 22, 2011,
http://www.aapsonline.org/index.php/site/article/government_medicine_is_hazardous_to_your_health/
.

Hieb, Lee D., MD. “Access to Care: the 3 Cs.”
Journal of American Physicians and Surgeons
, 17, no. 3 (2012): 80-81.
http://www.jpands.org/vol17no3/hieb.pdf
.

Orient, Jane. “Obamacare: What is in It?”
Journal of American Physicians and Surgeons
, 15, no. 3 (2010): 87-93.
http://www.jpands.org/vol15no3/orient.pdf
.

Weber, Ralph.
Medicrats: Medical Bureaucrats that Rule Your Health Care
, ed. Dave Racer (Saint Paul, MN: Alethos Press, 2011).

Hieb, Lee D., MD. “Letter To Hospital Authorities on Mandatory Flu Vaccination.”
Journal of American Physicians and Surgeons
, 18, no. 2 (2013): 47-49.
http://www.jpands.org/vol18no2/hieb.pdf
.

Hieb, Lee D., MD.
Tales from the Surgeon’s Lounge and Collected Writings
, (Tuckahoe, NY: RJ Communications, 2013).

ANTI-AGING REFERENCES

Hieb, Lee D. MD. “Feds Keeping People Sick: The Vitamin D Story.”
WND
, December 12, 2012.
http://www.wnd.com/2012/12/feds-keeping-people-sick-the-vitamin-d-story/
. Once you go to this site you can access the Archives for my older articles. There are many on anti-aging subjects.

Davis, William, MD.
Wheat Belly: Lose the Wheat, Lose the Weight, and Find Your Way Back to Health
. (Emmaus, PA: Rodale Books, 2014).

Perlmutter, David, MD.
Grain Brain: The Surprising Truth about Wheat, Carbs, and Sugar – Your Brain’s Silent Killers
. (New York, NY: Little, Brown and Company, 2013).

Eades, Michael R., MD and Mary Dan Eades, MD.
Protein Power: The High Protein/Low Carbohydrate Way to Lose Weight, Feel Fit, and Boost Your Health – in Just Weeks!
(New York, NY: Bantam Books, 1997).

WorldHealth.net is the site for the American Academy of Anti-Aging Medicine. A4M is a nonprofit organization dedicated to the advancement of technology to detect, prevent, and treat aging-related disease. They have a library of information and a list of doctors you can access.

Cenegenics (Cenegenics.com) pioneered the development of Age Management Medicine (AMM) and has anti-aging medical clinics around the country.

OTHER RESOURCES

Poison Control Center

1-800-222-1222

SUPPLEMENTS

Life Extention Foundation (
www.LEF.org
) is a great source for information and for good quality supplements at a reasonable price. If you use my initials LDH as code, you can get a six-month free membership. They have a wonderful journal that teaches you the latest about anti-aging lifestyle.

Good Health Supplements (
www.goodhealthsupplements.com
) is a trusted source for good nutritional supplements that will help you maintain your health. They offer affordable, leading-edge technology in healthy heart support, breakthrough anti-aging, superior multivitamin, invaluable digestive supplementation and more, including Parent Essential Oils (PEOs). PEOs are probably a better alternative to fish oil.