Mediscams: Dangerous Medical Practices and Health Care Frauds--and How to Prevent Them from Harming You and Your Family [Abridged, Audiobook] [Audio Cassette]

Chuck Whitlock (Author, Reader), Ben Chandler (Foreword)

Book Description

Publication Date: September 8, 2001

A crusading, award-winning investigative reporter for television and news magazines Extra, Hard Copy, and Inside edition, Chuck Whitlock leads you into the underworld of MediScams. Here medical chicanery, good intentions gone bad, and unrepentant greed combine to consume America's healthcare dollars by the billions. Are you in need? The MediScams artists are there with false promises of therapies, cures and treatments.

A shocking and unnerving book, MediScams blows the whistle on healthcare "professionals" hawking "scientifically proven" treatments that turn out to be fraudulent. Whitlock reveals the dirty secrets of health maintenance organizations and pharmaceutical houses. His expose of the mistreatment of patients and of Medicaid and Medicare fraud has shed light on the seedy underside of nursing home operations. Whitlock is relentless in his pursuit of those who abuse the publics trust. And he isn't afraid of pointing out the serious malpractice that goes on even in the offices of "respectable" physicians.

In MediScams, Whitlock gets in the face of:

- supplement manufacturers who cite only selective testing labs and portions of legitimate research to back up their fraudulent claims

- bogus plastic surgeons - particularly the enormous number who operate without licenses or medical degrees

- the research charlatans who recklessly dispense compounds, powders, pills and placebos

- the carnies and hucksters who live off dental MediScams and nursing home rip-offs

- fraudulent doctors - yours may be one of them

MediScams will scare you, but more importantly, it will make you want to take action. It will show you how easily you may be taken by those who seem to care. All true and all documented, this book is thoroughly annotated, citing the arrests and convictions of the small percentage of those who get caught. An appendix provides a comprehensive resource list of private, professional and government agencies that offer information and consumer guidance, along with agencies that help victims of fraud.

Editorial Reviews

From Publishers Weekly

Maintaining a breathless pace as he relates one horror story after another, Whitlock (Scam School), an investigative reporter for Extra, Hard Copy and Inside Edition, sounds a warning to consumers about the $100-billion-a-year fraudulent medical businessAfrom bogus treatments to unlicensed practitioners, from those who perform unnecessary procedures to bottom-line-oriented managed-care systems that deny care because of cost. These scammers, he says, prey on those who are ill and vulnerable. Particularly interested in exposing fraudulent practices in plastic surgery and dentistry (an area not commonly thought of as being suspect), Whitlock had his teeth checked out by a reputable dental school and was assured that his mouth was in excellent shape. He then went undercover posting as a potential patient whose insurance would soon expire. He received six different estimates (ranging as high as $5,000) from dentists for "preventive dentistry." Whitlock also offers an indictment of profit-making nursing homes that hire unqualified attendants without checking into their background, which leads to serious abuse of the elderly in their care. (Whitlock went undercover again, posing as an inexperienced caretaker with a prison record, and was hired by an elderly-care facility.) Provocative, disturbing and, refreshingly, not sensationalist, this book offers a hard look inside the world of health care and offers specific tips that readers can use to safeguard their health. (Jan.) Forecast: According to Whitlock, 85% of Americans now have health insurance through managed-care organizationsAa huge potential market for this book that will be reached by a national media campaign, including a seven-city author tour. Simultaneous Audio Renaissance release.
Copyright 2000 Reed Business Information, Inc. --This text refers to an out of print or unavailable edition of this title.

From Booklist

Scams involving medicine aren't new: Whitlock sees many vitamin and food supplements as successors to patent medicines, infomercials as the new traveling medicine shows, and much on the Internet as modern old wives' tales. The biggest scam of all is managed care. Part of Whitlock's motivation for the book was his mother's experiences with her HMO, and they make brutal--but familiar--reading. Improvement will come only when patients are able to sue HMOs and force them to do what they have long claimed they are doing. In real life, HMOs' cost-cutting claims are false fronts for greed and control. Watchdog organizations and even Congress are beginning to see through these businesses that believe they are doing well by denying, rather than giving, service. Other "mediscams" include bogus doctors, impaired and incompetent M.D.s, and insurance companies that make false claims, especially about "medigap" and long-term-care policies. Whitlock offers practical advice for suspecting and spotting mediscams and for protecting the patient who is caught by one. William Beatty
Copyright © American Library Association. All rights reserved --This text refers to an out of print or unavailable edition of this title.

See all Editorial Reviews

Product Details

• Audio Cassette
• Publisher: Macmillan Audio; Abridged edition (September 8, 2001)
• Language: English
• ISBN-10: 1559276290
• ISBN-13: 978-1559276290
• Product Dimensions: 7.1 x 5.1 x 0.7 inches
• Shipping Weight: 5 ounces
• Average Customer Review: 3.0 out of 5 stars  See all reviews (3 customer reviews)
• Amazon Best Sellers Rank: #7,090,576 in Books (See Top 100 in Books)

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Most Helpful Customer Reviews

5 of 6 people found the following review helpful:

5.0 out of 5 stars cool book, November 16, 2001

By 

Kyle (Palm Springs, CA) - See all my reviews

This review is from: Mediscams: How to Spot and Avoid Healthcare Scams, Medical Frauds, and Quackery from the Local Physician to the Major Healthcare Providers and Drug Manufacturers (Hardcover)

This book is an unusual combination of amazing stories and very, very practical advice. It is both entertaining while giving excellent warnings and tips on how to avoid being taken advantage of. Some of the information is both shocking and disturbing, but very sound advice. Anyone frustrated with their doctor or an HMO will find it especially enlightening. Some of the examples of quacks literally had me slack-jawed.

1 of 1 people found the following review helpful:

3.0 out of 5 stars Good intro for the unaware, June 17, 2002

By 

Dennis Littrell (SoCal) - See all my reviews
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This review is from: Mediscams: How to Spot and Avoid Healthcare Scams, Medical Frauds, and Quackery from the Local Physician to the Major Healthcare Providers and Drug Manufacturers (Hardcover)

Chuck Whitlock begins with a horrific tale about John Ronald "Butcher" Brown, whom he dubs "America's worst doctor." Dr. Brown comes to final light in 1998 after butchering an amputation job in a National City, California hotel room. The victim, 79-year-old Philip Bondy, was found dead with blood everywhere and his face "frozen in a twisted mask of pain." (p. 24) Turns out that Bondy was just a stand-in for his Jungian shrink, one Dr. Gregg Furth who first sought the operation for himself. It seems that both he and his patient suffered from "a fetish or paraphilia known as apotemnophilia." Whitlock explains: "The fetish is also referred to as a self-demand amputation, and involves primarily men who wish to have amputation of a lower extremity for psychological and sometimes sexual reasons. Dr. Furth stated he had been aware of wanting his own leg removed since his early childhood." (p. 29)

Whitlock, who has appeared on TV's Oprah, Regis and Kathie Lee, Hard Copy, Extra and Inside Edition, follows this with Chapter 2, "A Brief History of MediScams: From Snake Oil to Cancer Quackery." Then he returns to contemporary times and shares what he has found out about "Dangerous Doctors," managed care, nursing homes, "Dental MediScams," etc. He comes down heavily on incompetent and fake doctors and on the medical profession for not weeding them out. Seems that you have to be a combination of Dr. Dracula and the Son of Sam to get the profession to notice that you've gone astray. He also goes after bogus cures and questions the efficacy of some alternative medical approaches. There's a chapter on the placebo effect including some material about the so-called psychic healers of the Philippines. Chapter 12, which he subtitles, "Buying a Pig in a Poke" is on food supplements. Another chapter is on just how botched things can get in the world of plastic surgery. A chapter on nursing homes is alternately titled, "Warehouses for the Elderly?"

All in all this is a breezy read and a good, if a bit stringent, intro into the dangers that face the unaware in medical land. There is a "resources" appendix with websites and a Bibliography (no index).

Buy this for your medically innocent friends and relatives before they are initiated into the realities of medical science and pseudoscience the hard and expensive way.

8 of 12 people found the following review helpful:

1.0 out of 5 stars Mediscams or medibiases?, November 18, 2001

By 

T. Fraser (Texas Hill Country, USA) - See all my reviews
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This review is from: Mediscams: How to Spot and Avoid Healthcare Scams, Medical Frauds, and Quackery from the Local Physician to the Major Healthcare Providers and Drug Manufacturers (Hardcover)

Whitlock examines both "traditional" and "alternative" medical practices with results that are hit and miss. He 'hits' the HMO debacle right on the head, and his discussion of his mother's experience with and subsequent death due to HMO 'mangled care' will certainly hit a resonant chord with many. Unfortunately, his bias towards 'traditional' medicine and the medical establishment is obvious in his discussion of everything from chiropractic care to therapeutic touch. Chiropractors are little more than cheats and charletans, according to Whitlock and his proof that therapeutic touch is bogus? - a ninth grade science fair project. I doubt that had a science fair project had positive results, it would have been cited as proof that an alternative modality works. If you are looking for a balanced, unbiased assessment of both traditional and alternative medical practices, this isn't the book for you.