Health
Public coverage of cross-border health care would help reduce waiting times
News release from the Montreal Economic Institute and Second Street
450,000 European patients had surgery outside their country of residence in 2022
Allowing Canadian patients to get reimbursed from the government for care received outside the country – just like Europeans do – would help reduce waiting times, according to an economic note published jointly by the Montreal Economic Institute and SecondStreet.org this morning.
“Long waiting times for surgery in Canada have damaging effects on patients‘ health and quality of life,” says Frederik Cyrus Roeder, health economist and author of the study. “Allowing Canadian patients to seek treatment elsewhere would help them regain their health, while breaking the cycle of constant catching up in Canadian healthcare systems.”
Since 2011, European patients have been permitted to seek treatment in any EU member country and receive reimbursement of their medical expenses equivalent to what their national health insurance plan would have covered at home.
This mechanism is known as the “cross-border directive,” or the “patients’ rights directive.”
Thanks to this arrangement, 450,000 European patients were able to access elective surgery outside their country of residence in 2022. Nearly 80% of the requests submitted that year were approved.
The economist explains that a large part of the voluntary program’s success is due to the fact that it acts as a safety valve when healthcare systems are no longer delivering.
“Such a system is no more expensive for the public insurer, because the reimbursements provided cannot exceed the costs of delivering the same treatment in the local healthcare system,” explains Mr. Roeder. “Where this directive really comes into its own is when a healthcare system can no longer manage to treat patients within an acceptable timeframe.”
“Patients are then free to turn to other alternatives without having to pay a stiff price. It’s important to note that even patients who don’t want to travel for treatment still benefit from this as it helps shorten waiting lists.”
In 2023, more than four out of ten Canadian patients had to wait longer than the recommended time to obtain a knee replacement in Canada. For hip replacements, the figure was one in three.
The joint study by the MEI and SecondStreet.org is available here.
* * *
The MEI is an independent public policy think tank with offices in Montreal and Calgary. Through its publications, media appearances, and advisory services to policymakers, the MEI stimulates public policy debate and reforms based on sound economics and entrepreneurship.
SecondStreet.org launched in 2019 to focus on researching how government policies affect everyday Canadians. In addition to policy research, we tell short stories featuring Canadians from coast-to-coast explaining how they’re affected by government policies.
Health
DMSO Heals the Eyes and Transforms Ophthalmology
DMSO’s unique therapeutic properties reveal the unifying thread between many different “incurable” eye diseases.
Story at a Glance:
• DMSO is an “umbrella remedy” capable of treating a wide range of challenging ailments due to its combination of therapeutic properties (e.g., reducing inflammation, improving circulation, and reviving dying cells).
• DMSO has a unique affinity for the eyes, resulting in it (often spontaneously) treating a wide range of visual disorders that frequently cannot be treated with conventional therapeutic options.
• DMSO’s ability to restore circulation, revive dying cells, and stabilize misfolded proteins allows it to treat a variety of retinal diseases (e.g., macular degeneration, diabetic retinopathy or retinitis pigmentosa—in some cases reversing permanent blindness), eliminate visual obstructions (e.g., floaters and cataracts), reverse glaucoma or Fuchs’ dystrophy, and restore normal focus (frequently eliminating the need for glasses).
• DMSO’s anti-inflammatory and antimicrobial properties allow it to treat dry eyes, inflammatory diseases around the eye (e.g., blepharitis, styes, and psoriasis) or within the eye (e.g., iritis, uveitis, conjunctivitis, keratitis), along with bacterial, fungal, parasitic, or viral eye infections such as shingles.
•DMSO’s healing properties also allow it to heal a variety of eye injuries (including severe ones which would otherwise require eye removal), skin issues around the eye (e.g., burns, skin tags, and under-eye bags), and eliminate eye muscle spasms.
•This article will review the extensive data demonstrating DMSO’s efficacy for eye diseases, along with an examination of the most common protocols used for them and other natural approaches that also aid in the treatment of common eye disorders.
Since 2024, I have been working diligently to present the extensive data that DMSO is a remarkable therapeutic that is uniquely suited to treat many highly challenging medical conditions due to its counteracting many root causes of disease (whereas, in contrast, vaccines cause a myriad of health issues by inducing those key drivers of illness). From this, I’ve compiled a series of articles synthesizing thousands of studies that have shown DMSO effectively treats:
- Strokes, paralysis, a wide range of neurological disorders (e.g., Down Syndrome and dementia), and many circulatory disorders (e.g., Raynaud’s, varicose veins, hemorrhoids), which I discussed here.
- A wide range of tissue injuries, such as sprains, concussions, burns, surgical incisions, and spinal cord injuries (discussed here).
- Chronic pain (e.g., from a bad disc, bursitis, arthritis, or complex regional pain syndrome), which I discussed here.
- A wide range of autoimmune, protein, and contractile disorders, such as scleroderma, amyloidosis, and interstitial cystitis (discussed here).
- A variety of head conditions, such as tinnitus, vision loss, dental problems, and sinusitis (discussed here).
- A wide range of internal organ diseases (discussed here).
- Many different respiratory disorders, including asthma and COPD (discussed here)
- Many different gastrointestinal disorders, such as bowel inflammation, cirrhosis, and pancreatitis (discussed here)
- A wide range of skin conditions, such as burns, varicose veins, acne, hair loss, ulcers, skin cancer, and many autoimmune dermatologic diseases (discussed here).
- Many challenging infectious conditions, including chronic bacterial infections, herpes, and shingles (discussed here).
- Many aspects of cancer (e.g., many of cancer’s debilitating symptoms, making cancer treatments more potent, greatly reducing the toxicity of conventional therapies, and turning cancer cells back into normal cells), which I discussed here.
Since the evidence in those articles (along with one on how DMSO can be synergistically combined with pharmaceuticals and another on how DMSO combines with natural therapies) made a compelling case for the use of DMSO, many readers opted to start using it. Many of them, in turn, had remarkable improvements which caused them to recommend DMSO to their peers, and because of all those successes, a widespread interest in DMSO has now emerged.
On one hand, this has been quite surprising to me as the information I publicized has been widely available for decades, but (possibly due to it being impossible to profit off DMSO because of how little it costs) most of the people exposed to this series were not even aware this therapy existed, let alone what DMSO could do. Conversely, the groundswell of interest is not surprising as it’s nearly identical to what happened when DMSO was first discovered in the 1960s and it rapidly became the most popular drug in America—particularly since relatively minimal progress has been made on most of the “incurable” conditions it cured back then. Consider for example this 1980 segment 60 minutes created, which showed the remarkable results generated from the therapeutic use of DMSO and more importantly, the exact same stonewalling and suppression of DMSO from the FDA that we saw throughout COVID-19:
User DMSO Reports
Because of DMSO’s high degree of efficacy, the moment I began the series, I started being flooded with testimonials from readers of the remarkable improvements DMSO had created for them. Before long, I realized I was in a similar situation to what I’d been in throughout COVID-19.
I have long believed one of the core strategies the ruling class always follows is to establish rigid hierarchical systems that have dominion over critical facets of society and then buy out the top of the pyramid, as that provides a relatively low-cost way to control the entire society. In the case of medicine, this has translated to having pharmaceutical compliant individuals (through industry funding and media complicity) be anointed as experts who reinforce the profitable orthodoxy alongside having medical journals only publish things which cater to the existing vested interests.
Because of this, things that are “controversial” (threatening vested interests) are rarely published in a “credible” medium, and as a result, anyone who tries to advocate for them is not listened to; instead, they are chastised for endorsing “unproven” and unscientific beliefs.
When the COVID vaccines hit the market, I had expected they would cause a significant number of chronic issues that would take years to be recognized—so I was quite shocked to be immediately flooded with reports across the country of severe reactions of all types from the vaccine. Because of this, I felt I needed to log them as I knew injuries like these would never get published in medical journals and I wanted to have some type of proof that vaccine injuries were real, so in the future I could present accurate information to skeptical parties. I hence spent an inordinate amount of time interviewing those involved and compiling all of them and after unexpectedly gaining a Substack audience, I published that log, and it went viral because my small sample accurately represented the pattern of vaccine injuries everyone was seeing around them and because more than a year into the COVID vaccine rollout, no one had done anything similar—despite the massive demand for this type of information.
In the process of doing that, I had also received a lot of reports of individuals who appeared to be being injured by COVID vaccine shedding—despite this being “impossible” based on the purported design of the vaccines. As the reports, like those for the COVID-19 vaccine injuries, were consistent in character (and like the vaccines many affected by shedding were understandably desperate for information on the topic) I decided to spend a year compiling thousands of those reports as I knew there would never be a journal willing to touch the subject. Following this, I then produced a synthesis of that data which showed there were clear repeating patterns to mRNA shedding and provided the critical mechanisms to explain this seemingly inexplicable phenomenon. That, in turn, was an inordinate amount of work to do, but succeeded and made many realize shedding is a real risk of the mRNA technology—something which will be critical for opposing future attempts to inject the population with experimental gene therapies.
In the case of DMSO, as I started receiving all of these reports (at a time when I had essentially finished the shedding project), I realized that I had access to a unique dataset that had not previously been available. More importantly, because there were so many different things that DMSO could treat, a dataset like this would likely be the only place much of that therapeutic data could ever be compiled (as no one would ever get around to conducting studies on many of those uses—particularly since the current academic publishing climate is much more hostile to publishing unorthodox research now than it was fifty years ago).
So, over the last 13 months, one of my primary projects has been to compile all the reports I’ve received (which I did in the comments here), and I presently have 4,721 comments—of which I think roughly 3,000 are unique stories of therapeutic benefit people have experienced. In turn, my plan is to eventually compile and synthesize all of that, but as doing that will take at least a month, I’ve held off until the end of the series (so I wouldn’t have to redo it with new data that was subsequently received).
Note: my general sense from all the testimonials I’ve received is that between 80-90% of users have a positive response to using DMSO (which is frankly extraordinary), with lower rates (50%) being seen for certain issues which are harder to correctly treat with DMSO, and give or take 0% success rates being seen for issues DMSO is not thought to treat (suggesting the sample I’m observing is representative of real life data).
Within those comments, while most of the reports I’ve received are consistent with what DMSO is recognized to do (e.g., rapidly eliminating debilitating pain that nothing else had worked on), some were quite extraordinary and not what I’d expected to come across. For example, after I learned a 75 year old reader who’d been blind since birth had regained their sight after using DMSO to treat a sinus issue, I realized his story needed to be shared:
Note: as fate had it, Murray lived about 3 hours away from Rebecca Cunningham, the Texas-based documentary film maker who cured her neighbor’s terminal COPD with nebulized DMSO, after which millions saw Dan’s COPD story.1,2 As DMSO changed her life, she is currently collecting other DMSO testimonials on her Rumble channel and kindly agreed to travel to Murray to film this. If you have a story to share and are ever passing through Wimberley or visiting the hill country in Texas, please reach out to her.
In compiling these reports, I was struck by how many were for the eyes, by how well DMSO worked across an extensive range of eye conditions, and by the fact that, in the majority of cases, it provided better results than could be expected from existing ophthalmology options.
Note: the only well-recognized ophthalmologic conditions I did not receive reports on were amblyopia, strabismus, diabetic retinopathy, keratitis, optic neuritis, retinal detachment, retinopathy of prematurity, chalazions, central retinal vein occlusion (although a reader’s branched retinal vein occlusion responded to DMSO), and eye cancers—many of which, as I will show in this article, existing data sources suggest do respond to DMSO.
Later, while translating the discoveries of the German community, I learned their data matched that of the readers here:
One of the first new adopters of DMSO (circa 2012), began successfully using highly diluted DMSO for eye treatments in his practice. This led to a network of practitioners using DMSO for eye health, accumulating substantial experience, and, in many cases, treating eye issues where the cause could not be determined.
In general, there are a surprising number of successful reports using DMSO eye drops for a wide variety of eye symptoms and diseases. So many, in fact, that I now consider the DMSO eye solution an exceptional “eye care.”
Many users (especially those with heavy screen time) apply DMSO preventively to maintain eye freshness, improve tear quality, and reduce night glare. Positive effects, including improved vision, better tear film, fresher eyes, and reduced night glare, are often reported after the first few applications, enhancing overall eye comfort and function—including in people whom ophthalmologists did not diagnose with any eye conditions.
The positive effects are often reported after the first few applications, but I consider [low dose eye drops] a longer-term option. Due to the excellent diagnostic results and the complete absence of adverse effects from low dose drops (including results from ophthalmologists for a wide range of eye disorders) I increasingly view DMSO eye drops as a preventative measure, eye care for those with (still) healthy eyes, since modern life, particularly excessive screen time, places significant demands on our eyes.
Note: the above was extracted from an AI-generated summary of hundreds of hours of non-English lectures, then further condensed by me and hence not a direct quote (but one that accurately represents the author’s statements).
While this might be difficult to believe, consider a parallel situation. Another umbrella remedy I have been deeply impressed by, ultraviolet blood irradiation (which has many similar therapeutic properties to DMSO), has a vast volume of literature demonstrating its clinical value—including for numerous immensely challenging to treat diseases. Yet, virtually none of the medical profession even knows this therapy exists.
For this reason, we are currently sorting through thousands of UVBI studies, including dozens of studies (many of which were conducted with hundreds of patients) which show UVBI treats a myriad of challenging ophthalmologic conditions such as:
blepharitis,1 keratitis,1 corneal inflammation,1 herpes zoster ophthalmicus,1 traumatic eye infection,1 uveitis,1,2,3,4,5 iridocyclitis,1,2 choroiditis,1 chorioretinopathy,1,2,3,4 choroidal and chorioretinal dystrophy,1,2 macular degeneration,1 retinitis pigmentosa,1,2 retinal contusion,1 retinal ischemia,1,2 retinal and fundus hemorrhages,1,2,3,4 retinal artery and vein occlusions,1,2,3,4,5,6,7,8,9,1
0,11,12,13,14,15 diabetic retinopathy,1 ischemic optic neuropathy,1,2,3,4,5 optic neuritis,1,2,3 optic nerve atrophy (traumatic or inflammatory),1,2,3 encephalopathic vision loss1
Note: in this article, each superscipt number links to either a reader’s story or an applicable study—like the many I listed above (which the ophthalmology profession does not realize exists).
As such, the purpose of this article will be to highlight exactly how DMSO is transforming ophthalmology, along with the supporting data.
The Forgotten Side of Medicine is a reader-supported publication.
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Note: the best review paper on DMSO’s uses in ophthalmology (which is an excellent resource to provide to physicians who are skeptical of using DMSO for the eyes) can be read here.
Health
For Anyone Planning on Getting or Mandating Others to Get an Influenza Vaccine (Flu Shot)
For anyone contemplating getting an influenza vaccine (flu shot) or planning to pressure or mandate someone else to get one:
A meta-analysis of existing flu shot studies of healthy children by Cochrane (effectively owned by vaccine zealot Bill Gates) concluded that despite decades of published studies, it “could find no convincing evidence that [flu] vaccines can reduce mortality, hospital admissions, serious complications, or community transmission of influenza.”
Read that carefully: no convincing evidence—none—that flu shots lowered the chances of dying, being admitted to the hospital, suffering serious complications from the flu, or transmitting the flu to others.
In fact, studies have found those vaccinated for flu have a statistically significant increased rate of respiratory illnesses. Meaning, it increases the risk of having other respiratory illnesses.
For example, a placebo-controlled efficacy (not safety) study by researchers at the University of Hong Kong compared children receiving influenza vaccine with those who did not receive the vaccine. The study found no statistical difference in the rate of influenza between the groups but did find the vaccinated had a four times increased rate of non-influenza infections (“recipients had an increased risk of virologically confirmed non-influenza infections (relative risk: 4.40; 95% confidence interval: 1.31-14.8)”).
As another example, researchers at Columbia University found that the risk of “influenza in individuals during the 14-day post-vaccination period was similar to unvaccinated individuals during the same period (HR 0.96, 95% CI [0.60, 1.52])” but that the risk of “non-influenza respiratory pathogens was higher [in the vaccinated individuals] during the same period (HR 1.65, 95% CI [1.14, 2.38]).”
A study by the Cleveland Clinic of 53,402 of its employees across multiple states even found an increased risk of influenza among those vaccinated for influenza, explaining that the “cumulative incidence of influenza was similar for the vaccinated and unvaccinated states early, but over the course of the study the cumulative incidence of influenza increased more rapidly among the vaccinated than the unvaccinated.”
I discuss these and other studies in my book, Vaccines, Amen.
That said: get a flu shot, don’t get a fu shot. That’s freedom. Everyone should be free to choose. But nobody should be coerced to get this or any medical product, especially, ironically, when the data reflects it has a net overall increase in infections.
If you do choose to get this product and are injured, you are always free to call our firm to represent you in the Vaccine Injury Compensation Program.
Injecting Freedom by Aaron Siri is a reader-supported publication.
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