Doctors Confessing to Intentionally Diagnosing Healthy People with Cancer to Make Money

Sadly, more often than we would like to admit, doctors overplay an illness or flat out lie about an illness- because of money. For instance, if your illness involves a lot of expensive chemotherapy, that’s quick, fast cash for the doc. After all, preventing disease doesn’t make money, but treating disease certainly does.

And so, now more than ever it’s important to do your research and even get a second opinion. We cannot leave our health up to someone else. We cannot be blind to what’s going on in our own bodies.

Thankfully, more and more doctors are getting caught (even though its sometimes too late for the patient).

Take Dr. Farid Fata [1], for example, who was a prominent cancer doctor in Michigan and admitted a year ago in court to “intentionally and wrongfully diagnosing healthy people with cancer.” Fata admitted to giving patients chemo for the sole purpose of making a profit and was eventually charged with running a “$35-million Medicare fraud scheme that involved billing the government for medically unnecessary oncology and hematology treatments.”

The government says: Fata ran the scheme from 2009 to 2016 with a patient load of 1,200 people, allowing him to receive $62 million from Medicare (he billed for more than $150 million). U.S. Attorney Barbara McQuade plans to seek life in prison for Fata as his case is “the most egregious” health care fraud case her office has seen.

But this isn’t the type of behavior we expect from physicians. And after all, after years of medical education, which does include education on the emotional, mental, and physical condition of human beings, we have the right to expect that physicians are more interested in our health than cash. But what we all too often see is:

Women are often told that hysterectomies lead to many different cures for cancer and other ailments. This is a misrepresentation of the truth; so far, research has shown no improvement in survival regardless of the aggressiveness of many of these unnecessary treatments.
Breast cancer screenings result in an increase in breast cancer mortality and fail to address prevention, despite no evidence ever having supported any recommendations made for regular periodic screening and mammography at any age.
Irresponsible recommendations from the Society of Breast Imaging (SBI) and the American College of Radiology (ACR) on breast cancer screening are now suggesting that breast cancer screening should begin at age 40 and earlier in high-risk patients.
The rate of advanced breast cancer for U.S. women 25 to 39 years old nearly doubled from 1976 to 2009, a difference too great to be a matter of chance and more about diagnoses.
Prostate cancer patients are often given false prognoses by doctors as well; a prostate (PSA) blood test looks for prostate-specific antigen, a protein produced by the prostate gland. High levels are supposedly associated with prostate cancer. The problem is that the association isn’t always correct, and when it is, the prostate cancer isn’t necessarily deadly. Only about 3 percent of all men die from prostate cancer. The PSA test usually leads to over diagnosis — biopsies and treatment in which the side effects are impotence and incontinence. Repeated biopsies may spread cancer cells into the track formed by the needle, or by spilling cancerous cells directly into the bloodstream or lymphatic system. More than 90% of Doctors who encourage cancer treatment for prostate cancer will generate a commission from each treatment the patient receives. In over 97% of the cases, this cancer either never spreads outside of the gland to cause harm or the patient dies of something else long before any evidence of cancer spreading outside of the prostate occurs. In that 3% where cancer is aggressive and harms the patient, it has already spread beyond the limits of surgical resection long before discovery; thus, these men are not helped by surgery either. [2]