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  1. When I arrived in the new doctor’s office, one of the staff brought an electronic signature pad to me in the waiting room and asked me to sign in. I wasn’t given any forms to look at, to go with the signature.

    The doctor told me he was working with physician’s assistant students from a local school that day and asked would I mind meeting with students to help with their training program.
    The student asked why I’d come, and I said I’d come for my annual well visit. I said that that I’d been only eating organic, non-GMO for two years now, had lost 30 pounds and wanted to check how my blood sugar and cholesterol levels were doing. I’d like to try acupuncture for back issues.

    The student at the computer screen student asked me about having a history of chronic anxiety. I responded that I don’t have any anxiety except maybe the normal worries because my father was very sick, and the way they were treating him in the hospital due to covid rules had been pretty awful to witness.
    The student showed me her computer screen which showed my “medication history” and Valium, which is often given for anxiety. But I don’t take it for that. I get prescribed a single low dose tablet once or twice a year as a back spasm rescue, I said.

    The doctor came into the exam room about the last 10 minutes of a 1-hour visit. He asked a few questions about anxiety and depression, which I answered that I didn’t have any symptoms like that. He asked questions about low estrogen levels. I responded that since I’m 57 years old, I’d expect low estrogen levels.

    The doctor then proceeded to pull on my arms and legs, without any warning. It hurt and I asked him not to do that. He stopped.

    He offered me estrogen hormone supplements, that he sells out of the office. I declined.

    He asked me if I smoked. I said I sometimes smoked, but that I wasn’t interested in quitting and please, no more “quit smoking” counseling. He did it anyway.

    He said they’d do my bloodwork there in the office, and that it’d be covered by my insurance. I assumed he meant the standard well-visit blood sugar and cholesterol checks, so I didn’t question it.

    He told me to come back in two weeks to review the blood work.

    As I checked out, the receptionist asked for my email address, to send me my blood work results. No one let me schedule any acupuncture.

    At home, I found an email request from the doctor’s office to link into a “Mychart” type electronic health information system. I didn’t like the data sharing agreement consent forms, which asked for data sharing with mysterious “partners”. I didn’t sign the consents.

    I returned to the doctor’s office two weeks later to review the blood work.

    I met first with the physician’s assistant student. She went over the blood work, which was a hormone level. Why did the doctor do a hormone panel? I didn’t agree to it and I sure can’t afford it. She said, “we do hormone panels on all of our patients”. The doctor came into the exam room and also told me I have low hormone levels, then told me again about the estrogen supplements he sells out of his office. He told me how much better I was going to feel after I started taking the hormone supplements and that they’d give me energy. Did I ever say I wanted more energy? He pulled on my arms and legs again without warning, and again I asked him to stop. He stopped. I left the office deciding I was never going to come back.

    A bill from this doctor’s office came about a month later and was over $800. I called the doctor’s office and asked why they were sending me this bill for my well visit, which I’d expected insurance covers at 100%.

    The receptionist said they don’t do well visits that they don’t bill insurance that way. I asked the practice for an itemized bill to explain how they came to such an astronomical amount of money.

    I have a high deductible insurance plan, which means that other than an annual well-visit, I pay most bills out of pocket. The doctor’s biller sent the bills to the insurance company, and insurance approved all of his bills, then sent the doctor’s biller a notice to send the bill to me. With any other type of insurance, I’d likely have never known what happened.

    What the doctor and his biller did is often referred to as “upcoding”, which is the exaggerating of diagnoses and services rendered in order to obtain maximum possible reimbursement. They billed a level 5 evaluation and management visit for me, which offers the highest reimbursement rate possible. One description of the requirements to bill a level 5 evaluation and management visit is: “Very sick patients often require level 5 work if they have a high complexity problem such as acute respiratory distress, depression with suicidal ideation, or any new life-threatening illness or severe exacerbation of an existing chronic illness”.
    Because I had no physical illnesses, the doctor and his biller created mental health and “female hormone problems” diagnoses to create a profile of me as having complex mental health and hormonal problems, thus meeting the level 5 reimbursement complexity requirement. By having me sit with a physician’s assistant student for 45 minutes, the doctor met the requirements (in his own and in his biller’s mind), for the time of the visit taking greater than or equal to 60 minutes as required to bill a level 5. Billing a student’s time as being the doctor’s time is not OK.
    By pulling on my arms and legs for a few seconds, he was able to bill $108 each for two sessions of “osteopathic manipulation”. He billed over $120 for the nicotine counseling that I outright refused. But since I gave up the information that I smoke sometimes, I handed him a “nicotine dependance” diagnosis, worth $120 in “counseling” fees to himself, whether I wanted it or not.
    My admission of eating organic, non-GMO for two years, and losing weight, became an “abnormal weight loss” diagnosis, another diagnosis which helped qualify him for the “high complexity reimbursement rate.
    The low estrogen level he found (which seems normal to me at age 57) became yet another diagnosis in his high fee arsenal.
    I had a lot of concerns because I never signed any consent for osteopathic manipulation, plus told him not to do it. When I asked the doctor’s office about it, they told me I signed consent forms in the waiting room when I gave them my electronic signature on a signature pad. Even though I’d never seen any consent forms.
    I filed a complaint with the insurance company, thinking they’d be happy to put a stop a doctor like this. They could not care less, and they did very little about it.
    I next filed a complaint with the Pennsylvania Attorney General, Health Care Division. To their credit, I was taken seriously. They assigned an investigator and requested documents from the doctor. The doctor’s initial written response to the Attorney General was that I was “mentally unbalanced”, that he had the diagnoses and blood work to prove it, and that I shouldn’t be taken seriously. The doctor claimed that I’d signed consent forms. He stated, “I set aside an hour of my time for her”.
    The investigator requested from the doctor the consent forms, copies of the blood work, and documentation to show that the doctor, not a student, had spent an hour on my case.
    The doctor sent back the consent forms and blood work only. He had no proof to show he’d spent any hour with me, himself. The consent forms included very obvious forgeries, both electronic and handwritten. For instance, one handwritten signature that the doctor claimed was my own was not only not my handwriting, but my name was spelled wrong. The electronic forged signatures still had a “square” around them from the signature pad, and was exactly the same form to form, with the same square around each signature. The bloodwork abnormality, on which the doctor was basing his claim that I was mentally unstable and shouldn’t be taken seriously, was the low estrogen level. All else was normal.
    In the end, so far as I’m aware, the Attorney General’s office did nothing about the upcoding, the forgeries, the potentially damaging and inaccurate diagnoses. For the doctor to remove the diagnoses would be to admit to fraudulent billing, which he wasn’t going to do. And no one can make him. He additionally sent these diagnoses out on the health information exchange, despite me NOT signing the consent for that information exchange.
    The Attorney General’s office imposed a resolution that the doctor cease billing me anything, that I pay him nothing, and that he never bothers me or tries to contact me again.
    I haven’t visited a doctor since, and never will again but for an emergency. I manage back spasms with peppermint oil now, which works very well.

    1. Stunning stuff… and yet, comports perfectly with our post Rule of Law out of control data circus.

      The lawlessness just goes deeper and wider, month by month.

      1. I second that. THat doc has been bitten by the greed bug. I would not trust him as far as you can spit in the wind.

      2. Thanks! I’m not the best writer but wanted to use my story as a way to warn others of a few points: 1. in the absence of any physical illness, a profile of mental health diagnoses may be used by a doctor’s office to “upcode” to higher reimbursement rates, and unless one asks either the practice or the insurance company for the diagnoses and procedure codes used, one may not ever know what happened. 2. Once these diagnoses are made, they can and will be used, especially in a legal situation, to discredit a person. Courts and lawyers may defer to the doctor’s judgement and diagnoses, even though the doctors goal in diagnoses may have been a higher reimbursement rate and 3. signatures, especially electronic signatures, can and will be forged onto consent forms or onto acknowledgments of receipt of equipment and services. Electronic forgeries can be spotted by exact same signature from form to form, white out, obliterated sections. I wrote this as a warning and to illustrate how it happens. My situation isn’t unusual. Its just that many don’t realize what is happening to them behind the scenes

        1. This is a recent 2 minute video from UK Column News, talking about a “frailty score”, being used in their National Health System. Many UK patients especially elderly may be unaware of. Of interest to all others as well, as it would not be surprising if this is a model for other countries. (We may have to become very proactive and inform / insist on copies of all notes from medical personnel to be aware of all obscure classifications, subjective opinions, etc.)
          https://www.bitchute.com/video/KSrc2JzmNnRr/

        2. Thanks for your excellent report Carol. I’ve not experienced anything on this scale here in Germany, although the same tendencies are also present.

  2. A big vote of agreement. I poo-pooed the documentary with Thomas Szasz, as I find him tricky, but the general theme was right, and you are SPOT ON WITH THIS COMMENT. I am a mental health practitioner, have been involved in academic medical research, management and development of mental health programs, and what Catherine is saying is true. To be honest, the PHQ9 and GAD7 they ask are a joke, and you can just answer all 0s. But the overall theme is right – you cannot trust medicine to have your best interests at heart. As a wise man I knew, Don Jones used to say, “Organizations (or the medical industry, govt, etc) are like cows – you have to learn how to milk them without getting kicked off the stool.” Thanks for increasing folks awareness of the coming dark cloud.

    1. Very glad to have your insights on this. If you are willing to share more on what tactics we should anticipate and learn how to navigate, I am sure it would be helpful.

      1. On the practical level, it is important to remember that the laws actually favor you when being coerced into mental health restrictions. You cant give someone a diagnosis unless they have “medical evidence” of mental illness. You cannot institutionalize someone or force them to go to an inpatient unit without their consent. No matter how intimidating they may be, remember they cannot force you to do anything on mental health grounds, and they know it. Just stay calm and stick by your guns.

        On the aggregate, any diagnosis that can follow you requires an evaluation by a mental health professional. A psychiatrist, a psychologist, and dependeing on the state, a licensed counselor or LICSW. On the whole, they are not in medical offices, and normally not a part of a medical visit. If you do not take a test, answer a questionnaire, agree to a diagnostic intake, it is hard to get a diagnosis. Virtually all primary care physicians are scared of giving a mental health diagnosis because it can come back and smack them in the face. They hand people off to mental health.

        If you stay away from mental health practitioners, the only way to get a diagnosis without testing or an evaluation is to exhibit behavior that is unstable. Of all things, keep you cool when in a doctors office. Getting mad is acceptable, but do not swear excessively, threaten people, or make a claim of hurting others or yourself. When you do that, you poop the bed. They can and will document that, and it will stick to you like a bad habit, and everyone you see for the next ten years will note it on your chart. The evidence then becomes your behavior, and they can use the system and laws to make things hard for you.

        I make that sound terrible, but the reality is there are people who are unstable and cant help themselves. The laws have good intentions and they are humane and for the common good on the aggregate. And the reality is that the vast majority of people in medical settings are predisposed to be kind, empathic and have a natural sense of how to be ethical. It is helpful to remember that the person got into medicine or behavioral health because they want to be a force for good. We have just had a societal hiccup and people have been deluded and bullied into the covid cult. If you are cool and reasonable, chances are that the medical staff will do the same. Avoid power stuggles with doctors – your power can be to politely refuse taking actions that lead to a diagnosis.

        As far as the questionnaires they give you at the beginning of a visit, my advice is to answer them as all zeros or an occasional 1. If you are suicidal, get help, and from someone you trust, and if you feel you wuld like help from the doctor, circle the suicide quesiton truthfully. They will help you, and I highly doubt that they will hassle you about vaccines, etc. if that is your concern. However, if you are feeling stable, the best course would be to answer all the questions 0.

        Research has shown that most people first go to ther medical doctor for mental health issues. 80% of primary care visits are behavioral health issues – things that are normally outside of what a doctor can treat directly. Smoking, diet, drinking, poor sleep habits, depression, mourning the loss of a loved one, a break up, losing a job, etc. Those things are real stressors, and do take a toll on you. that is why they screen for depression and anxiety – they are the low hanging fruit of distress that people experience that underlie the medical issues that brings them to the doctor like a sour stomach, erectile dysfunction, low energy or a long standing cold or infection.

        Docs live for the opportunity to heal people and thrive on the appreciation that their patients have for their care and expertise. Keep that in the back of you mind when interacting with them. THey may be hollow, slightly autistic, but at the root, they want to be a champion and a healer. However, when docs are challenged, they get their backs up I have seen some power struggles to beat the band when a doctor feels their authority is being challenged. That would be the time I would be scared of being diagnosed. Outside of that, I think it would be rare for a doctor to try and corner someone with a diagnosis outside of a correctional or law setting. I hope that helps, thought I suspect I just muddied the waters!

      2. Quoting from “Big Brother in the Exam Room”, an award winning book by Twila Brase, “The systems of health surveillance are growing. State and Federal agencies are building one database after the next while preparing a national medical-records system for 24/7 access to the private medical, genetic, lifestyle and behavioral details of every American. The public has no idea that the HIPAA privacy rule eviscerated their privacy rights rather than protect them.”
        HIPAA is actually a “disclosure” regulation and they can share your information far and wide. Sometimes a HIPAA signature page is attached to the page for financial payment. You can refuse to sign HIPAA, which I have done and was still seen by my dermatologist. If they refuse service, there is a form that will “rescind” the HIPAA page you signed. To learn all about Health Freedom, you can go to cchfreedom.org. Twila Brase is the co-founder who has won multiple awards for her book and campaigns for health freedom. “The Wedge” is a network of doctors across the country on her website who don’t take insurance and can provide individual healthcare without the overreach of the medical establishment and Insurance companies. In 2021, Scott Atlas was her keynote speaker for her annual dinner and this year it was General Michael Flynn. Throughout Covid she kept her members informed of the “latest and greatest” and most of all accurate and truthful information.

      3. Catherine, I can come up with certain ideas, but the first point that people should realize is that mental health/psychiatry is ontologically bankrupt. I am going to probably be long winded and I hope I dont lose you, but it is important to lay the proper groundwork first.
        The reality is that psychiatry has a serious problem – they define their disorders teleologically, or more simply, defines psychiatric disorders by the symptoms. It is massively flawed. There is no etiology, merely a list of symptoms. Imagine going to your oncologist and having him tell you that you hae or do not have cancer because of symptoms you tell him or her in an appointment. he is defining your cancer based on your self reported symptoms.

        How did this come about? First off, the field is not really that old. for the sake of illustration, we will say it began at the beginning of the 20th century. The first phase was what is known as the Meyerian era, named after Adolf Meyer of Johns Hopkins.Meyer stressed using a complete history and full mental state examination in evaluating and conceptualizing clinical mental health problems and stressed the importance of identifying every theme that might illuminate a mental disorder. Meyer emphasized the need to appreciate slow and deliberate progress in psychological science and aspired to build psychiatry using a deliberate scientific method. In short, he approached psychiatry with the same patience, discipline and rigor that the internists of his time were using advances in biology to identify and treat physical diseases.

        The second phase was the psychoanalytic one (1940 – 1970), dominated by Freud, where motivational drives, libidinal development, and unconscious psychic conflict were seen as the primary causes of psychiatric illness. Psychoanalysis, aside from being a Frankfurt School anti-nomian chestnut, drew out a belief in the similarity of all human beings to each other and thus enlarged one’s sympathy for patients. However, the practices and conceptions of psychoanalysis led to neglecting the important attention to medical and clinical observation that Meyer had stressed as important. What was left was complicated and byzantine theories unique to each psychoanalyst, and if you sent a distressed person to 5 different psychoanalysts, you would get 5 different diagnoses that resembled literary analyses more so than a medical diagnosis.

        The field soon grew tired of this because psychoanalysis began to sound like a parody of itself and did not foster advancement in treating serious illnesses that are tragic like what is called schizophrenia or bipolar disorder. So in the early 1970s, an effort by some academic medicine researchers led to an effort at the medical school of Washington University in St. Louis to improve the research in psychiatry and radically change the nature of psychiatric science and practice. What they did was define a limited number of common disorders like schizophrenia that are clear problems and can manifest in diverse ways. They were hoping that by creating a set of such “research diagnostic criteria,” it would allow research to be conducted across and among separate laboratories across different regions that might lead to discovering the actual etiologies of some of these diseases.

        Their method was to create the DSM that outlined the features of what they thought were the essential elements of these disorders that could be studied across different nationwide hospitals. They were not, and were not intended to be, actual definitions of the diseases. They knew it was a gamble – they realized the criteria had no validity in the scientific sense of defining a disorder, but they hoped it would allow them to aggregate the findings of the numerous studies and lead to the discovery of etiologies.

        The problem was that their effort to accomplish this failed(the field is still largely ignorant about the causes of schizophrenia and bipolar disorder, the two big ones), and their making this move had baleful consequences. In planning DSM-III (1980), the third edition, the APA fell in love with the clarity and reliability that came with the symptom listing and lost interest the truth that comes with stressing scientific validity in defining mental illnesses. As such, what had been developed (i.e., the DSM) at St. Louis U as a tool of scholarly research subtly transformed into a shitty clinical method of diagnosis (and, presumably, treatment) of psychiatric states and conditions of all kinds.

        The result of this has been a disaster, and it has led to all kinds of horrible societal phenomena like transgender pre-teens getting sterilized. I worked under Paul McHugh, and to convey some of his wisdom, I am going to C&P from of his many writings on this subject. If you want an incredible discussion of mental health, his book “the perspectives of psychchiatry” is the best I have ever read – but from an article at American Scholar:

        “The significance of this turn to classifying mental disorders by their appearances cannot be underestimated. In physical medicine, doctors have long been aware that appearances, either as the identifying marks of disorder or as the targets of therapy, are untrustworthy …For all these reasons, general medicine abandoned appearance-based classifications more than a century ago. Instead, the signs and symptoms manifested by a given patient are understood to be produced by one or another underlying pathological process. . . . Internists are reluctant to accept the existence of any proposed new disease unless its signs and symptoms can be linked to one of these processes.

        The medical advances made possible by this approach can be appreciated by considering gangrene. Early in the last century, doctors differentiated between
        two types of this condition: “wet” and “dry.” If a doctor was confronted with a gangrene that appeared wet, he was enjoined to dry it; if dry, to moisten it. Today, by contrast, doctors distinguish gangrenes of infection from gangrenes of arterial obstruction/infarction, and treat each accordingly. The results, since
        they are based solidly in biology, are commensurately successful.

        In DSM-led psychiatry, however, this beneficial movement has been forgone: today, psychiatric conditions are routinely differentiated by appearances alone. This means that the decision to follow a particular course of treatment for, say, depression is typically based not on the neurobiological or psychological data but on the presence or absence of certain associated symptoms like anxiety— that is, on the “wetness” or “dryness” of the depressive patient.

        No less unsettling is the actual means by which mental disorders and their qualifying symptoms have come to find their way onto the lists in DSM-III and
        -IV. In the absence of validating conceptions like the six mechanisms of disease in internal medicine, American psychiatry has turned to “committees of experts” to define mental disorder. Membership on such committees is a matter of one’s reputation in the APA—which means that those chosen can confidently be expected to manifest not only a requisite degree of psychiatric competence but, perhaps more crucially, some talent for diplomacy and self-promotion. In identifying psychiatric disorders and their symptoms, these “experts” draw upon their clinical experience and presuppositions. True, they also turn to the professional literature, but this literature is far from dependable or even stable. Much of it partakes of what the psychiatrist-philosopher Karl Jaspers once termed “efforts of Sisyphus”: what was thought to be true today is often revealed to be false tomorrow. As a result, the final decisions by the experts on what constitutes a psychiatric condition and which symptoms define it rely excessively on the prejudices of the day.

        Nor are the experts disinterested parties in these decisions. Some—because of their position as experts—receive extravagant annual retainers from
        pharmaceutical companies that profit from the promotion of disorders treatable by the company’s medications. Other venal interests may also be at work: when a condition like attention deficit disorder or multiple personality disorder appears in the official catalogue of diagnoses, its treatment can be reimbursed by insurance companies, thus bringing direct financial benefit to an expert running a so-called Trauma Center or Multiple Personality Unit. Finally, there is the inevitable political maneuvering within committees as one expert supports a second’s opinion on a particular disorder with the tacit understanding of reciprocity when needed.

        The new DSM approach of using experts and descriptive criteria in identifying psychiatric diseases has encouraged a productive industry. If you can describe it, you can name it; and if you can name it, then you can claim that it exists as a distinct “entity” with, eventually, a direct treatment tied to it. Proposals for new psychiatric disorders have multiplied so feverishly that the DSM itself has grown from a mere 119 pages in 1968 to 886 pages in the latest edition; a new and enlarged edition, DSM-V, is already in the planning stages. Embedded within these hundreds of pages are some categories of disorder that are real; some that are dubious, in the sense that they are more like the normal responses of sensitive people than psychiatric “entities”; and some that are purely the inventions of their proponents.

        END

        So, realize when they try and diagnose you, they are using bogus concepts that mean nothing. I need to catch my breath, but I will try and come up with approaches you can use when they try and corner you with mental health diagnoses.

        1. Medicine is ontologically bankrupt, because science taken to logical extreme, as grand narrative, is ontologically bankrupt. There is no meaningful definition of pathological states at any level allopthy. Its garbage, pseudo-scientific inventions of the philosophically inept.

  4. HERE IN NEW ENGLAND WE ARE BEING GIVEN A “SURVEY”….QUESTIONS REGARDING DEPRESSION AND ANXIETY…
    AND ALSO REGARDING GUN OWNERSHIP…WHEN ASKED WHO MANDATED THE SURVEY,PA REPLIED:
    “I MAGINE THE STATE SINCE THAT’S WHO PROVIDED THE MONEY!”
    FIRST QUESTION: AT ANY TIME DURING THE PAST 2 WEEKS,HAVE YOU FELT UNHAPPY,CONCERNED…AND ON AND ON…RIDICULOUS!
    AFTER I ASKED WHO MANDATED,SHE DID NOT BOTHER TO ADMINISTER THE REST OF THE SURVEY..THINK SHE JUST TYPED IN A “NO” RESPONSE FOR REST…..

  6. Hi Catherine,

    Thank you for this very important warning. Persecuting political opponents is right up their alley, as we witness all the time – and imprisonment for “mental illness” fits right in.

    Your post reminds me of the movie “Frances”, starring Jessica Lange. The movie was based on the life of the actress, Frances Farmer, who was a big star in Hollywood in the 30’s, but due to her politics and defiance of the powers-that-be, she was eventually committed to mental hospital, where she was beaten, raped by many men, electroshocked.. I saw the movie in the early 80’s, and never forgot it. Later in life, Farmer was able to recover enough to resume her acting career. Brilliant performance by Jessica Lange. Said to be her best. Looks like it can be rented on amazon.

  7. The number of tools in the military and government’s arsenal of bio weapons is quite large and well developed. I urge everyone to watch this brutally honest summary of the state of biowarfare given by Dr James Giordano, speaking to Cadets and faculty at West Point. There is much to be concerned about in this sphere but was especially struck by the ability to access and change one’s health records and the Big Data initiative undertaken by China and other nation states. This part of the lecture starts at ~13:40. BTW, the virus pandemic bio weapon scenario is outlined starting at 33:30. Chilling!

    https://youtu.be/N02SK9yd60s

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