Oxygen Is Trying to Kill You!

It didn't work so well for him.

Oh, my. Has there ever been a story more perfect for our little endeavor than this one?

Chaunsay Beckwith of Tucker, Ga., was sentenced to nearly five years in prison for health-care fraud in connection with providing hyperbaric oxygen therapy at her International Alternative Medicine Inc. clinic.

God bless the Feds! Of course, Beckwith’s crime wasn’t “pretending treatments in a hyperbaric chamber would cure things it can’t cure,” but rather pretending to cure these things and then billing Medicare for the treatments.

According to United States Attorney Nahmias and other information presented in court: Between 2003 and 2007, Beckwith, an owner/operator who does not hold any type of medical license, provided hyperbaric oxygen therapy to numerous patients in her clinic, International Alternative Medicine, Inc., located at 4450 Hugh Howell Road, in Tucker. None of the patients were diagnosed with medical conditions that made them eligible to receive payments from health care benefit programs. Beckwith submitted $1,577,827 in claims to insurance companies and Medicare, which included false diagnosis codes that enabled her to fraudulently receive $1,035,144 in payments for the hyperbaric chamber treatments.

Hah. An alternative medicine blogger writes up this wonderful story of the efficacy of alternative medicine and the ethics of its practicioners with a link to a site where you can buy your own Hyperbaric Chamber. (My birthday’s coming up, guys!) That would be very useful to have at home, if you were… a diver? If you lived in Atlantis?

Here’s a list of conditions treated with an expensive trip into the chamber. The ones with asterisks are the conditions actually helped with hyperbaric treatment, according to actual scientific studies. The ones without asterisks are mostly… wishful thinking, would be the polite term.

This site also presents a compelling essay explaining why legitimate, “trained” doctors refuse to treat everything with hyperbaric treatments: because it has not been proved effective? No, because BIG PHARMA doesn’t want you to know about it because OXYGEN CAN’T BE PATENTED. Which means Big Pharma is totally the boss of Big Medical Device. Also it’s weird that Big Pharma would allow their doctor-slaves to treat embolisms with hyperbaric chambers but not autism. How did they decide to draw that line? Why does Big Pharma love autism, so much?

But yes, we do highly recommend you buy a hyperbaric oxygen chamber for your house ASAP, because, as Michael Jackson knew, soon we will all live underwater.