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Mediscams: How to Spot and Avoid Healthcare Scams, Medical Frauds, and Quackery from the Local Physician to the Major Healthcare Providers and Drug Manufacturers
How to spot and avoid healthcare scams, medical frauds, and quackery, from the local physician to the major healthcare providers and drug manufacturers
Phony cancer treatments, HMO incompetence and greed, useless diet creams, worthless "vitamin" pills, and life-endangering "cures" . . . don't get mad, get informed!
A crusading, award-winning investigative reporter for television newsmagazines Extra, Hard Copy, and Inside Edition, Chuck Whitlock leads you into the underworld of MediScams. Here, medical chicanery, good intentions gone bad, and unrepentant greed combine to consume America's healthcare dollars by the billions. Are you in need? The MediScam artists are there with false promises of therapies, cures, and treatments.
"Provocative, disturbing, and refreshingly not sensationalist, this book offers a hard look inside the world of health care and offers specific tips that readers can use to safeguard their health." - Publishers Weekly
A shocking and unnerving work, MediScams blows the whistle on healthcare "professionals" hawking "scientifically proven" treatments that turn out to be fradulent. Whitlock reveals the dirty secrets of health maintenance organizations and pharmaceutical houses. His exposé of the mistreatment of patients and of Medicaid and Medicare fraud has shed light on the seedy underside of nursing home operations. Whitlock is relentless in his pursuit of those who abuse the public trust. And he isn't afraid of pointing out the serious malpractice that goes on even in the offices of "respectable" physicians.
In MediScams, Whitlock gets in the face
- supplement manufacturers who cite only selective testing labs and portions of legitimate research to back up their fraudulent claims
- bogus plastic surgeons-particularly the enormous number who operate without licenses or medical degrees
- the research charlatans who recklessly dispense compounds, powders, pills, and placebos
- the carnies and hucksters who live off dental MediScams and nursing home rip-offs
- fraudulent doctors-yours may be one of them
MediScams will scare you, but more importantly, it will make you want to take action. It will show you how easily you may be taken in by those who seem to care. All true and all documented, this book is thoroughly annotated, citing the arrests and convictions of the small percentage of those who get caught. An appendix provides a comprehensive resource list of private, professional, and government agencies that offer information and consumer guidance, along with agencies that help victims of fraud.
Phony cancer treatments, HMO incompetence and greed, useless diet creams, worthless "vitamin" pills, and life-endangering "cures" . . . don't get mad, get informed!
A crusading, award-winning investigative reporter for television newsmagazines Extra, Hard Copy, and Inside Edition, Chuck Whitlock leads you into the underworld of MediScams. Here, medical chicanery, good intentions gone bad, and unrepentant greed combine to consume America's healthcare dollars by the billions. Are you in need? The MediScam artists are there with false promises of therapies, cures, and treatments.
"Provocative, disturbing, and refreshingly not sensationalist, this book offers a hard look inside the world of health care and offers specific tips that readers can use to safeguard their health." - Publishers Weekly
A shocking and unnerving work, MediScams blows the whistle on healthcare "professionals" hawking "scientifically proven" treatments that turn out to be fradulent. Whitlock reveals the dirty secrets of health maintenance organizations and pharmaceutical houses. His exposé of the mistreatment of patients and of Medicaid and Medicare fraud has shed light on the seedy underside of nursing home operations. Whitlock is relentless in his pursuit of those who abuse the public trust. And he isn't afraid of pointing out the serious malpractice that goes on even in the offices of "respectable" physicians.
In MediScams, Whitlock gets in the face
- supplement manufacturers who cite only selective testing labs and portions of legitimate research to back up their fraudulent claims
- bogus plastic surgeons-particularly the enormous number who operate without licenses or medical degrees
- the research charlatans who recklessly dispense compounds, powders, pills, and placebos
- the carnies and hucksters who live off dental MediScams and nursing home rip-offs
- fraudulent doctors-yours may be one of them
MediScams will scare you, but more importantly, it will make you want to take action. It will show you how easily you may be taken in by those who seem to care. All true and all documented, this book is thoroughly annotated, citing the arrests and convictions of the small percentage of those who get caught. An appendix provides a comprehensive resource list of private, professional, and government agencies that offer information and consumer guidance, along with agencies that help victims of fraud.
304 pages, Hardcover
First published February 15, 2001
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September 3, 2019
Good intro for the unaware
Chuck Whitlock begins with a horrific tale about John Ronald "Butcher" Brown, whom he dubs "America's worst doctor." Dr. Brown comes to final light in 1998 after butchering an amputation job in a National City, California hotel room. The victim, 79-year-old Philip Bondy, was found dead with blood everywhere and his face "frozen in a twisted mask of pain." (p. 24) Turns out that Bondy was just a stand-in for his Jungian shrink, one Dr. Gregg Furth who first sought the operation for himself. It seems that both he and his patient suffered from "a fetish or paraphilia known as apotemnophilia." Whitlock explains: "The fetish is also referred to as a self-demand amputation, and involves primarily men who wish to have amputation of a lower extremity for psychological and sometimes sexual reasons. Dr. Furth stated he had been aware of wanting his own leg removed since his early childhood." (p. 29)
Whitlock, who has appeared on TV's Oprah, Regis and Kathie Lee, Hard Copy, Extra and Inside Edition, follows this with Chapter 2, "A Brief History of MediScams: From Snake Oil to Cancer Quackery." Then he returns to contemporary times and shares what he has found out about "Dangerous Doctors," managed care, nursing homes, "Dental MediScams," etc. He comes down heavily on incompetent and fake doctors and on the medical profession for not weeding them out. Seems that you have to be a combination of Dr. Dracula and the Son of Sam to get the profession to notice that you've gone astray. He also goes after bogus cures and questions the efficacy of some alternative medical approaches. There's a chapter on the placebo effect including some material about the so-called psychic healers of the Philippines. Chapter 12, which he subtitles, "Buying a Pig in a Poke" is on food supplements. Another chapter is on just how botched things can get in the world of plastic surgery. A chapter on nursing homes is alternately titled, "Warehouses for the Elderly?"
All in all this is a breezy read and a good, if a bit stringent, intro into the dangers that face the unaware in medical land. There is a "resources" appendix with websites and a Bibliography (no index).
Buy this for your medically innocent friends and relatives before they are initiated into the realities of medical science and pseudoscience the hard and expensive way.
--Dennis Littrell, author of “The World Is Not as We Think It Is”
Chuck Whitlock begins with a horrific tale about John Ronald "Butcher" Brown, whom he dubs "America's worst doctor." Dr. Brown comes to final light in 1998 after butchering an amputation job in a National City, California hotel room. The victim, 79-year-old Philip Bondy, was found dead with blood everywhere and his face "frozen in a twisted mask of pain." (p. 24) Turns out that Bondy was just a stand-in for his Jungian shrink, one Dr. Gregg Furth who first sought the operation for himself. It seems that both he and his patient suffered from "a fetish or paraphilia known as apotemnophilia." Whitlock explains: "The fetish is also referred to as a self-demand amputation, and involves primarily men who wish to have amputation of a lower extremity for psychological and sometimes sexual reasons. Dr. Furth stated he had been aware of wanting his own leg removed since his early childhood." (p. 29)
Whitlock, who has appeared on TV's Oprah, Regis and Kathie Lee, Hard Copy, Extra and Inside Edition, follows this with Chapter 2, "A Brief History of MediScams: From Snake Oil to Cancer Quackery." Then he returns to contemporary times and shares what he has found out about "Dangerous Doctors," managed care, nursing homes, "Dental MediScams," etc. He comes down heavily on incompetent and fake doctors and on the medical profession for not weeding them out. Seems that you have to be a combination of Dr. Dracula and the Son of Sam to get the profession to notice that you've gone astray. He also goes after bogus cures and questions the efficacy of some alternative medical approaches. There's a chapter on the placebo effect including some material about the so-called psychic healers of the Philippines. Chapter 12, which he subtitles, "Buying a Pig in a Poke" is on food supplements. Another chapter is on just how botched things can get in the world of plastic surgery. A chapter on nursing homes is alternately titled, "Warehouses for the Elderly?"
All in all this is a breezy read and a good, if a bit stringent, intro into the dangers that face the unaware in medical land. There is a "resources" appendix with websites and a Bibliography (no index).
Buy this for your medically innocent friends and relatives before they are initiated into the realities of medical science and pseudoscience the hard and expensive way.
--Dennis Littrell, author of “The World Is Not as We Think It Is”
Displaying 1 of 1 review