Pat Sullivan Blog

Entrepreneur: Being one and raising money

Here are links to 2 talks I have given the past 2 years.  The first one is about things I have learned the hard way being an entrepreneur.  Things you have not read in a book! 

The second is about raising money for a new venture where I reveal a few secrets I have learned along the way. 

I thought these might be useful in these days where people are either trying to find work or are trying to start a business so they can work.  And perhaps create jobs.  Hope you enjoy.

Being an Entrepreneur.

Raising money.

FOXNews.com - Intelligence Officials Warn Attempted Al Qaeda Attack Months Away

FOXNews.com - Intelligence Officials Warn Attempted Al Qaeda Attack Months Away

Now this is good to know but really makes you wish that the Underwear Bomber would NOT have been treated like an American Citizen and given Constitutional Miranda Rights!  What a Jack Bauer type might have learned from him!!  But no, so that Islam won't get MAD at us, we are going to grant them OUR civil rights!  Way to go Bracko!!  Your reaching out to Islam has really helped out soooo much!!

Sooner or later this was bound to happen though.  At least now maybe, MOST Americans will realize once again that they are indeed trying to kill all of us!  And not because of something we have done, other than we have "infidel" practices that they want to kill us for!

What is a Billion?

Hard to imagine how much a Billion is?  Check this out and then imagine a Trillion! 

Download What is a Billion

A typical mold patient

I get emails like this a lot.  I thought his questions and my answer could be useful.

Dear Pat,

 

I'm a former Disney animator who lives in Los Angeles.

 

I will keep this brief.  My health has been declining for 4 years. Problems with digestive system, nervous system, lungs and sinuses. Doctors were unable to find the cause.  Recently, a testing company discovered mold growth behind the walls of my home office where I've worked for the past six years. The office had severe water intrusion problems during this time.

 I've since moved out and have disposed of just about all of my personal belongings.  What's left is sealed and in storage. Unfortunately, I'm unable to be near it at this time.

 

I went to Dr. Shoemaker for diagnosis and treatment.  All tests verified mold illness: double genotype (not the dreaded, thank goodness), MSH of 8, VIP of 10, C4a over 10,000, etc.

 

I've been on the cholestyramine for 7 months.  Some problems have improved such as ADD, confusion, leg and foot cramping and twitching and severe burning in my spine. - however, I'm still experiencing dehydration, fatigue, depression, brain fog ad severe burning sensation in my neck and head.  It's miserable and I'm unable to work.  I've lost everything - health, finances and property.  Shoemaker will not give me Actos or VIP replacement because my biomarkers have not improved in the 9 months he's been treating me.  In fact, my c4a has doubled from 5,000. to 10,000.  I need help.

 

I'm renting a room in a house.  All vents have heppa filters in them and I have a large heppa air cleaner in my room.  I IRMI tested the house though I spend 95% of my time in the sealed room.  The results were 5.28.  Not sure what that means.  Is this still too high?

 

I can't live like this any more.  Can you recommend any other doctors or treatments. And most importantly, can you tell me what companies are researching MSH replacement and possibly how close they are to doing human studies?

 

I'm feeling like it may be my only hope of recovering from this.  I want my life back.

 

Thanks for your time.

Dear Rick,

 

An ERMI of 5.2 is very high actually and means you are still begin exposed to mold.

 

I know this is a very discouraging thing you have been going through for a long time but you can get well.  As you know, while I love Shoemaker's research I don't have much respect for the way he treats, and fails to treat patients.

 

What is your situation?  You say your finances have been drained but do you have some money to see a new doc or buy meds from overseas even if you cannot find a good doc to work with?

 

Actos, Losartan, a good antidepressant, anti-anxiety med, ADD med, hormone replacement would all help you manage your illness.  But these are not cheap.

 

VIP would not help you much IMO.  I have never talked to a single person on VIP that it helped.  In fact, in most cases it caused markers to ALL be worse.

 

aMSH appears to be a long way off.  CLinuvel in Aus is doing trials on it but for conditions not for inflammation etc.  It is unclear when they will get approval, and whether it would benefit us.  So I simply assume it won't be a help and focus on things I can do.

 

Regarding C4a, I am not at all sure it means a lot. There is actually extremely little research about it from anyone other than Shoe,. It appears to be a marker that moves around a lot for no apparent reason, and often does not relate to symptoms at all though Shoe claims it does.  There is only one lab that tests for it and it is a very sketchy lab in my opinion.  I think TGFb1 is a better marker with tons of research about it.  This is also a marker where commercial labs are not yet testing for it.  So I am not even sure it can be tracked effectively.  But at least it is being widely researched and the what it does in the body is far more understood, and the things that can control it are far more understood. 

 

I personally have experienced GREAT relief in bringing it down to normal levels.

 

Pat

 

Government will choose what healthcare you can get!!! Obamacare is a lie!

What Doctors and Patients Have to Lose Under ObamaCare

Changes to Medicare will give the feds control of surgical decisions.

Normally I would post this direct into Facebook as it has become my "blog of choice" due to it's simplicity of linking WSJ articles.  But this article is so critical to understanding what will happen if Obamacare passes both houses (still in question) that I wanted to highlight particular passages.  Enjoy!

By SCOTT GOTTLIEB

Democrats are touting the American Medical Association's endorsement of President Obama's health plan. But there's an important reason why the American College of Surgeons and 18 other specialty groups are opposed.

The plan's most tangible efforts to restrain medical costs are through its controls on specialist physicians. Based on the government's premise that they often make wasteful treatment decisions, the health-care legislation in Congress will subject doctors to a mix of financial penalties and regulations to constrain their use of the most costly clinical options. The penalties and regulations are aimed first and foremost at surgeons and the medical devices that they use, largely because that's where the bulk of spending is.

It all starts with the sweeping power that the Senate bill gives to the Centers for Medicare and Medicaid Services. The agency will be given the authority to unilaterally write new rules on when medical devices and drugs can be used, and how they should be priced. In particular, the Obama team wants to give the agency the power to decide when a cheaper medical option will suffice for a given problem and, in turn, when Medicare only has to pay for the least costly alternative.

The government has already sought to acquire this same power administratively. But on Tuesday the Obama Justice department got swatted down by the U.S. Court of Appeals for the D.C. Circuit, in what the judges described in their opinion as an attempt by Mr. Obama's legal team to "end-run around the statute [Medicare]."

Hays v. Sebelius involved a patient who said Medicare unfairly denied her a prescribed treatment for her serious lung disease. Medicare decided instead to pay for a different drug that bureaucrats argued was a suitable but cheaper alternative.

Now the Obama team will use murky provisions embedded in the Senate bill to subtly attain in law those powers they couldn't more artfully acquire in court. In fact, the bill lets Medicare seek almost any restrictive payment authority it wants from a Medicare Commission established for the purposes of cost control.

If Congress believes Medicare has overreached, it has to pass a separate law to explicitly block the agency's newly acquired powers. These provisions are deliberately designed to leverage Congress's inability to act in a timely fashion.

The Senate health-care bill also exempts Medicare's actions from judicial review, taking away the right of patients to sue the government. Unlike existing Medicare coverage laws, patients won't have the ability to appeal any of the decisions of this new Medicare Commission. Ironically, private health insurers must comply with new patient appeals rights under the Senate bill. The government has exempted itself from the same sort of protections.

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Thus Medicare will have the power to control which medical devices surgeons use. But clamping down on expensive procedures also means the agency will need to have authority over the specialists themselves. The organization of doctors into mostly small, disaggregated practices always made it hard for a central bureaucracy to control individual physicians. ObamaCare tries to fix this by putting doctors on the financial hook for their treatment decisions.

Primary-care doctors who refer patients to specialists will face financial penalties under the plan. Doctors will see 5% of their Medicare pay cut when their "aggregated" use of resources is "at or above the 90th percentile of national utilization," according to the chairman's mark of Section 3003 of the bill. Doctors will feel financial pressure to limit referrals to costly specialists like surgeons, since these penalties will put the referring physician on the hook for the cost of the referral and perhaps any resulting procedures.

Next, the plan creates financial incentives for doctors to consolidate their practices. The idea here is that Medicare can more easily apply its regulations to institutions that manage large groups of doctors than it can to individual physicians. So the Obama plan imposes new costs on doctors who remain solo, mostly by increasing their overhead requirements—such as requiring three years of medical records every time a doctor orders routine medical equipment like wheelchairs.

The plan also offers doctors financial carrots if they give up their small practices and consolidate into larger medical groups, or become salaried employees of large institutions such as hospitals or "staff model" medical plans like Kaiser Permanente. One provision, laid out in Section 3022, allows doctors to share with the government any savings to the government they achieve by delivering less care—but only if physicians are part of groups caring for more than 5,000 Medicare patients and "have in place a leadership and management structure, including with regard to clinical and administrative systems."

While these payment reforms are structured as pilot programs in the legislation, this distinction has little practical meaning. Medicare is being given broad authority, for the first time, to roll these demonstration programs out nationally without the need for a second authorization by Congress.

Regulation of medicine has always been a local endeavor, and it's mostly the province of medical journals and professional medical societies to set clinical standards. This is for good reason. Medical practice evolves more quickly than even the underlying technologies that doctors use. This is especially true in surgery, where advances flow from experimentation by good doctors to try different surgical approaches.

The regulation of medical devices and their pricing will also have consequences for patients by discouraging innovation. Most improvements in medical devices come incrementally, with each generation of a device having small but clinically relevant advance over prior versions. This owes to the underlying hardware, which turns on embedded software and microprocessors that themselves undergo constant upgrades.

But if Medicare starts pricing similar devices off one another—a form of the same "reference" pricing schemes used in Europe—manufacturers will start holding back the small changes. Instead, they will introduce new models every four or five years that are sufficiently unique to fall outside of Medicare's pricing scheme. Meanwhile, patients will have lost the benefit of regular improvements and annual upgrades that characterize medical devices today.

The impact of these provisions won't be confined to Medicare. Private insurance sold in the federally regulated "exchanges" will take cues from Medicare, since they're both managed from the same bureaucracy. Medicare will set the standard for medical care across the entire marketplace.

Mr. Obama promised that under his plan people wouldn't have to change their doctors. But it's clear that doctors will be forced to change how they make their medical decisions.

Dr. Gottlieb, an internist and a resident fellow at the American Enterprise Institute, is a former senior official at the Centers for Medicare and Medicaid Services. He is partner to a firm that invests in health-care companies.

Obama hangs an ornament of Mao the murderer on his Christmas Tree

Mao killed between 50 and 70 MILLION people to force Communism upon China. And Obama features him on his damn Christmas Tree? Does Obama have any sense of what democracy and freedom is? He is not stupid but he deliberately debases and offends everything American. This man can only be described as evil. I am glad he will be a one term president unless someone decides to kill him first. I am NOT saying someone should. But he seems to be almost asking for it.  I am sick to my stomach thinking an American President would do such a thing.

See More

FOXNews.com - White House Christmas Decor Featuring Mao Zedong Comes Under Fire

www.foxnews.com

Critics of President Obama are setting their sights on the official White House Christmas Tree, which features controversial ornaments including an orb depicting Mao Zedong and another showing drag queen Hedda Lettuce.

The biggest problem facing the world is radical Islam

What a great analysis and scary read.  The Islamists are winning in many places in the world and the world is standing by, or worse trying to appease them as they do it.  We have to take a different approach if we are to survive.  Download Emanuel-Tanay - A German View on Islam.

Don't get the Vaccine!

Dr. Russell Blaylock, a retired neurosurgeon and writer of the Blaylock Wellness Report does not like the Swine Flu Vaccine.  I had the good pleasure a few years ago, to have dinner with Dr. Blaylock.  A very reasonable and very smart guy.  He said the following in his most recent Newsletter:

"No one should take the swine flu vaccine – it is one of the most dangerous vaccines ever devised.  It contains an immune adjuvant called squalene MF-59 which has been shown to cause severe autoimmune disorders such as MS, rheumatoid arthritis and Lupus.  This is the vaccine adjuvant that is strongly linked to the Gulf War syndrome, which killed over 10,000 soldiers and caused a 200% increase in the fatal disease ALS (Lou Gehreg disease).  This [swine flu] virus kills by causing a cytokine storm, which means that it causes the body's immune system to overreact and that is why it is killing young people and is a mild disease in the elderly.  (The elderly have weakened immune systems.)  This vaccine is a very powerful immune stimulator and carries the real possibility of making the lethality of the virus much greater."

I was not going to get the vaccine anyway.  Your choice.

Why I take High Dose Vitamin C

I have been a proponent for sometime of the benefits of taking lots of Vitamin C.  I now take close to 10 grams per day of Jigsaw Health's Sustained Release Vitamin C , and am gradually increasing it.  There are tons of studies I can point to that show it has a tremendous impact preventing and even reversing a number of chronic illnesses. There are some studies you see talked about in the press saying Vitamin C does not do much but ALL of those studies were done using very low doses of C.  Like doing a study on birth control pills, giving the women 1 pill per month and then saying "See, birth control pills doesn't work."

C is also the most versatile anti-oxidant you can take.  But these studies are not why I am taking C.  The real reason I take lots of Vitamin C and believe everyone else should too, is because I believe our bodies were designed to make Vitamin C but lost that ability through a disaster to our DNA.  Virtually all mammals make their own C and they make a lot of it.  Up to 3 times more when they are under stress.  It takes 4 different enzymes in mammals to turn glucose into Vitamin C.  Humans all have 3 of the 4 enzymes needed to do the same thing.  But we lost the ability to make the 4th enzyme. And we DO have a non-working gene in our DNA for that 4th enzyme! 

This is a disaster!  Think about it.  If the body could turn excess sugar into Vitamin C instead of only turning it into FAT, no one would be fat.  No one, would likely have diabetes.  Excess sugar and fat impacts virtually all the disease processes.  AND now we no longer have all the wonderful protective, preventive properties of Vitamin C.

Everyone who reads my blog knows that I also believe we were Intelligently Designed by a Creator.  But I also believe in evolution!  No, NOT the kind of evolution that says we all got here by chance.  That is called Macro evolution.  I don't believe in that at all.  Not even close.  But I do recognize that mutations to our DNA absolutely do happen.  The problem is that those mutations are 99.99% of the time damaging to our DNA and to us.  They don't add information to our DNA, they delete information.  Dr. Sanford from Cornell U wrote a book called Genetic Entropy that does a great job of proving that.  I have my own theory of when, where and how this happened to us but suffice it to say that somewhere early on, this gene mutated and all of us lost the ability to make Vitamin C.

That is why I take lots of Vitamin C.  And if you read a bit you will also find lots of scientific reasons to take high dose Vitamin C as well.  This book is a GREAT one to start with.  Or go here to read what Jigsaw says about it.

Why I no longer recommend Dr. Shoemaker - Updated

Update:

I am not retracting anything I say below, in fact I could amplify but won't.  But there could be a few reasons to still go see Dr. Shoemaker.

First, if you need a doctor to help you get disability he could be very helpful at doing this. 

Second, if you need an expert witness in litigation of a mold case you  likely could not find a better advocate than Dr. Shoemaker. I recently read a 47 page letter to an opposing lawyer written by Shoemaker and it is a brilliant piece of work. and will help you understand your own illness better.

Third, if you do go see him you will have a much better appreciation of your illness and understanding of your physiology.  Now it is possible to do much/most of this on your own, but it is not easy.  And you need to go into it understanding that you may well end up primarily as his lab rat but you will learn a lot in the process.  But a lot of it you can act on on your own.

Also, you should read his book "The Mold Warriors".  Though now outdated and poorly organized, you will have a MUCH better understanding of your illness.

______________________________

I wish it were not true but I have come to the conclusion that I can no longer recommend people go to see Dr. Shoemaker.  I still believe that he is totally brilliant.  I believe he has unraveled much of the mystery surrounding Fatigue illness.  I still believe he ought to win a Nobel Prize someday.

There is a whole lot more to this story that I will not write about here.  And Shoemaker would definitely have a different side to tell.  He is welcome to comment if he wants to.

In my opinion,I don't like the way he treats patients.  I have been a patient for over 4 years and my fiance has been a patient (sort of) for the past 6 months.  I learned to walk on eggshells around him and around his staff because they are very easy to offend and will openly get mad at you.  If you ask the wrong questions, if you step a little out of their standard, methodical rituals, they will jump down your throat.  I once was forced to write an apology to Ritchie and his entire staff for canceling an appointment.  He made me feel like I had murdered someone.  I was simply too sick to travel 2,300 miles to see him.  But that did not matter.  I had offended him.  So in order to stay in his good graces I wrote the apology.

There is more to the story but my fiance was forced to wait 3 months before he would bother to talk to her on the phone after he had her blood results and her required history and paperwork, which they demanded she do TWICE.  And then, essentially he would not treat her except very minimally even though she has the "dreaded genotype".  He made her and me feel like asses in the process to boot.

I finally got fed up and true to my nature I blew up at him with several harsh email exchanges.  Needless to say, I am not going to fund his study on VIP.  I believe this study has a whole lot of problems with it and could have significant problems being approved anyway for reasons I won't go into here.

Yesterday, out of the blue, I got a call from a man I did not know, who was a patient of Shoemaker who told me the horror story of how he has been treated.  He said, "he is brilliant but does he always have to be an ass?"  He had been made to feel like dirt and had not been helped after 9 months of "treatment".  It was a very sad story and prompted me to finally report here on my view.

Shoemaker's terrible bedside manner is not my main beef with him.  I stomached his terrible behavior for years.  But it was my feeling that he was not really treating patients in order to get them well that pushed me over the edge.  Shoemaker is primarily a researcher, and God bless him for the research and discoveries he has made.  The problem is his patients end up being his lab rats in my view.  Whatever he is currently studying, that is what you are likely to get.  He knows many things that could dramatically help a patient RIGHT NOW.  But you generally won't get those things. That would mess up his research. 

Most of the time he uses 1 thing at a time and that is usually the one thing he is currently researching.  Patients can go for many months, even years, paying for office visits and repeated blood tests because he wants DATA about what that 1 thing does.  And if you ask for the "good stuff" you are generally refused and may well offend him if you push it at all.  I certainly did. It is not unusual for him to "fire" patients who piss him off.  I think he would have fired me a long time ago if there were not the potential I would give him money for a clinical study.

The problem is that he is really one of a few docs who knows what he knows. He knows that too.  I think he feels he can treat people poorly because where else are the going to go?  That was my attitude.  I would bite my tongue because where else was I going to go? I have since learned that there are others who may well be further down the road than he and are not as myopic in their view of what causes CFS+.  Mold is just one thing.  There are other toxic chemicals, infections, brain trauma's and heavy metals that can kick off the same cytokine storm.  Shoe seems to only recognize mold for the most part.

But I realized that I did not need him.  His work is published for the most part.  It is out there if you look for it.  The meds he uses.  What they do.  Clinical tests he has run.  The Lab tests he uses.  Virtually everything is out there.  Yes, it can be very difficult to find a doctor who will take this info and work with you on it.  But those docs can be found. 

Also, almost all of the labs, and the meds he uses are available for purchase without a prescription.  Most people who have been studying CFS and Mold etc have more knowledge and expertise than 99.9% of the doctors that are out there.  I have grown very used to researching something in depth, going to a friendly, open, doc and telling him what I want to do.  In most cases the doc would agree to work with me simply because he recognized I knew what I was talking about and had data to back me up. 

More and more though. I simply do it myself.  I order my own tests (read the posts below where I tell you where and what), and often I order my own meds from either Canada or overseas.  Meds are cheaper and so far have proven to be as good.  It is legal to import medicines for personal use.  Many people do it. They are true generics and have been approved for use in at least one country, often many countries.  Many of these will never come to the US because it simply is too expensive to get through our FDA.  A problem in and of itself.  I was doing well before but have since experienced additional  significant improvements. 

I know.  I am a risk taker and many people won't be willing to do this and I would never try to convince you that you should.  But I have decided that where I have to, I will take things into my own hands, research very carefully and take a risk.  Fact is, we take risks with anything a doctor gives to us anyway.  The statistics are not great on Doc's giving the right meds all the time.  So that is me.  You have to decide what to do for you. 

It does not make me happy that I can no longer recommend Dr. Shoemaker to anyone.  But I just don't think it is worth the time, trouble, money and frustration.  And I don't believe he gets a high percentage of people well.  Shame is, I think he knows how.  He just won't do it.  It turns out that he is a typical allopathic doctor who, for the most part, wants one drug for one disease.  Shoemaker's hope was that VIP (Aviptadil) was that one med cure.  Trust me, it isn't IMO!  I have used it for 90 days and at best, it offers subtle help.  Worse, in me and others, our biomarkers actually got worse on VIP.  Shoemaker did NOT like me asking him why and WOULD NOT even offer an explanation other than to suggest I must have some exposure to mold.  I have taken huge steps to make sure that is not true.  And if I were, other markers that would move with re-exposure actually got better.  So it made no sense and he would not even try to explain.  I am not sure he knows the answer and that is why he is still researching.  I appreciate the research. I do.  And I don't even mind being a lab rat if he would tell me that I was one.  Often I got the sense he actually could answer my question but either could not be bothered or was too busy.

I take a functional medicine view of chronic illness.  You measure everything you can measure and you try to fix as many of those things as you can ALL AT THE SAME TIME within reason. Then measure again. You won't know exactly which things helped, but in most cases you will feel much better and hopefully be on the way to getting well.  CFS+ is a multi-systemic illness.  You have to attack it from several angles.   The sooner the better. The more the better.

Hopefully, within the next 4-6 months, I will have another place to recommend.  I am working on that diligently right now.  I hope to be a part of bringing real help to the CFS+ community very soon.