While the World Focuses on the Islamic State, Assad Keeps Bombing Doctors and Civilians

The regime of Syrian President Bashar al-Assad has been bombing hospitals and civilian targets, a situation made worse recently by the arrival of Russian warplanes. Russian airstrikes hit medical facilities at least 10 times during their first month of bombing in Syria, making matters even worse for doctors, nurses, and patients who have already endured repeated bombardment from Syrian government forces, according to a report from the non-profit group Physicians for Human Rights (PHR).

PHR said the Russian strikes, which began on September 30, included several in the vicinity of Aleppo, where 45 healthcare facilities have been hit in the past three years. According PHR, almost all of the city's doctors — 95 percent — have been killed, detained, or fled the area. The group said it documented 329 attacks on Syrian medical facilities through October, leading to the deaths of 687 medical personnel across the country. It attributed 90 percent of those incidents to the Syrian government. "Each attack, whether the bombing of a hospital or the detention and torture of a doctor for providing health care, is a war crime," said the report's authors.

More at VICE News

Price-Gouging The Sick So Shareholders Can Get Richer: That’s Capitalism!

The unethical greed of pharmaceutical companies has recently taken center stage in public discourse following the decision of vulture capitalist Martin Shkreli’s decision to jack up the price of a vital AIDS drug by 5,000% (which he has still failed to rescind), but the problem extends much further than the widely reviled “pharma bro.” Democratic presidential candidate and Vermont Senator Bernie Sanders has spearheaded congressional investigations into the matter, targeting Valeant Pharmaceuticals for their shameless use of similar price hikes.

J. Michael Pearson, CEO of Valeant, readily admits that his company is in it solely for profits, even though they deal in life-saving medications. “[If] products are sort of mispriced and there’s an opportunity, we will act appropriately in terms of doing what I assume our shareholders would like us to do” said Pearson in an interview with CNBC. “My primary responsibility is to Valeant shareholders. We can do anything we want to do. We will continue to make acquisitions, we will continue to move forward.”

Since Pearson took over stewardship of the company, “Valeant has acquired more than 100 drugs and seen their stock price rise more than 1,000 percent with Pearson at the helm…Already this year, they have increased the price of 56 of the drugs in its portfolio an average of 66 percent, highlighted by their recent acquisition, Zegerid, which they promptly raised 550 percent.” reports US UNCUT.

More at occupydemocrats.com

How black slaves were routinely sold as ‘specimens’ to ambitious white doctors

The history of human experimentation is as old as the practice of medicine and in the modern era has always targeted disadvantaged, marginalised, institutionalised, stigmatised and vulnerable populations: prisoners, the condemned, orphans, the mentally ill, students, the poor, women, the disabled, children, peoples of colour, indigenous peoples and the enslaved.

Human subject research is evident wherever physicians, technicians, pharmaceutical companies (and others) are trialling new practices and implementing the latest diagnostic and therapeutic agents and procedures. And the American South in the days of slavery was no different – and for those looking for easy targets, black slave bodies were easy to come by.

There is a rich and rapidly expanding scholarly literature examining the history of human subject research, including studies of the burgeoning bio-medical economy in the US in the 20th century. The Tuskegee experiment and other episodes of medical racism all feature prominently.

The history of the acquisition and exploitation of slave bodies for medical education and research in the US, first explored in depth by historians James Breeden and Todd Savitt, focused primarily on medical schools and the traffic in slave bodies in Virginia. Savitt’s work drew attention to professional medicine’s use of slaves in classroom and bedside demonstrations, in operating amphitheatres, and experimental facilities.

Savitt argued that African Americans were easy targets for ambitious and entrepreneurial white physicians in the slave south. Slaves, as human commodities, were readily transformed into a medical resource, easily accessible as empirical test subjects, “voiceless” and rendered “medically incompetent” through the combined power and authority of the enslaver and their employee, the white physician. Savitt suggested that “outright experimentation upon living humans may have occurred more openly and perhaps more often owing to the nature of slave society,” and also that “the situation may have been (and probably was) worse in the Deep South.”

More by Stephen Kenny, University of Liverpool at disinformation

Also see: usslave.blogspot.com

Teenager Denied Heart Transplant Because Of 'History Of Non-Compliance'

A US teenager with less than six months to live has been denied a life-saving heart transplant because of low grades and previous trouble with police, his family have said.

Fifteen-year-old Anthony Stokes has been told by doctors he does not qualify for a new organ due to a "history of non-compliance",broadcaster WSBTV reported. His mother, Melencia Hamilton, says the procedure is the only thing that will cure his enlarged heart condition.

Huff. Post

Doctor refuses to give woman the pill because she had 'not done her reproductive job' by having at least four children

A young New Zealand woman was refused the birth control pill because she had not yet done her 'reproductive job'.

Melissa Pont, 23, said her family practitioner, Dr Joseph Lee, would not renew her pill prescription, instead lecturing her on a baby's right to live and on using the rhythm method, an unreliable family planning technique that involves having sex only at certain times of the month.

Mail Online

The New Zealand Medical Association (NZMA) says a doctor who refused to prescribe the contraceptive pill to a Blenheim woman was within his rights, but that it was wrong to share his views on the matter. Radio New Zealand

The Indian women pushed into hysterectomies

Thousands of Indian women are having their wombs removed in operations that campaigners say are unnecessary and only performed to make money for unscrupulous private doctors.

Sunita is uncertain of her exact age but thinks she's about 25 years old. I met her in a small village in Rajasthan, north-west India, surrounded by chewing cattle and birdsong. She was covered in jewellery, from a nose-stud and rings to bangles which jangled when she gestured with her hand.

Her face hardens when she tells me about her operation. "I went to the clinic because I had heavy bleeding during menstruation," she says. "The doctor did an ultrasound and said I might develop cancer. He rushed me into having a hysterectomy that same day." Sunita says she was reluctant to have the operation straightaway and wanted to discuss it with her husband first. She says the doctor said the operation was urgent and sent her for surgery just hours later.

When other local women crowded round, I asked how many of them had undergone hysterectomies. More than half raised their hands at once. Village leaders said about 90% of the village women have had the operation, including many in their 20s and 30s.

The doctors generally charge around $200 for the operation, which often means the families have to sell cattle and other assets to raise the money.

More on BBC News

Alf Garnett's Greatest Rant

Clip from an Episode of in "Sickness and in Health," in the hospital. Alf is sick of wheeling around his wife in her wheelchair and wants an electric one for her.

The Greatest Medical Fraud in History

The Pain, Profit and Politics of AIDS

Homs, city of torture

In Bashar al-Assad's Syria, it is not just forbidden to speak, demonstrate and protest: it is also forbidden both to give medical treatment, and to receive treatment yourself. Since the beginning of the uprising, the regime has been waging a merciless war against any individual or institution capable of bringing medical aid to the victims of repression. "It's very dangerous to be a doctor or a pharmacist," a pharmacist from the Baba Amro neighbourhood of Homs tells me.

Medical personnel are imprisoned – like the nurse in the nearby district of al-Qusayr, arrested the day after he showed me around his hidden emergency-care centre, its carpets covered with plastic tarpaulins to protect them from blood – or killed, like Abdur Rahim Amir, the only doctor in that centre, murdered in cold blood in November by military security, while he sought to treat civilians wounded during the army's assault on Rastan to the north. Or tortured.

More on The Guardian

Meanwhile: Military Sends Tanks To Homs (HuffPost)

Hundreds Of Secret Hospitals Treating Injured Protesters In Syria

Hundreds of secret hospitals are operating underground in Syria, treating injured protesters and opposition members, as a brutal crackdown against pro-democracy demonstrators by President Bashar al-Assad's regime enters its eighth month.

Those doctors who agree to treat protesters are themselves being targeted by the regime, and face arrest, torture and even death if they are discovered, a new documentary to be broadcast by Channel 4 reveals.

'Unreported World: Undercover Syria' also shows that the regime is facing a growing number of military defections, as groups of armed soldiers refuse to fire on civilians and join the opposition, leading to a rising tide of violent clashes in what has until now been a peaceful, although brutally repressed, opposition movement.

Huffingtonpost.co.uk

Bahrain medical staff sentenced over protests

Thirteen doctors and nurses who treated anti-government protesters during demonstrations in Bahrain earlier this year have been jailed for 15 years for crimes against the state.

Seven other medical professionals were given sentences of between five and 10 years by a special tribunal on Thursday that was set up during the emergency rule that followed the demonstrations.

The doctors' trial has been closely watched and criticised by rights groups for Bahrain's use of the security court, which has military prosecutors and both civilian and military judges, in prosecuting civilians.

Most of the medics worked at the Salmaniya Medical Centre in Manama, which was stormed by security forces after they drove protesters on March 16 out of the nearby Pearl Square - the focal point of Bahrain's protest movement.

Al Jazeera English

Doctors Of Death