In the interests of not being a jerk...
I was pretty hard on Colin Ross about his sloppy and inaccurate suggestions about Dr. .Simka's income from CCSVI. In particular, Ross said Simka's income was at least $500,000/week from CCSVI work.
I posted a sarcastic response (2nd post in this thread, I think) very quickly after reading that because:
1) It would have been easy for Ross to find recent reports that the EuroMedic was actually treating only 6 people a day, 6 days a week - which x $10,000 works out to billing $360,000. This is a big difference - more than an extra third.
and
2) It was fundamentally misleading to suggest Simka was making that much when there were obvious costs in running a large clinic where patients stayed overnight, and when there were several other physicians and surgeons involved as well a large number of nurses and other support staff,
and
3) It seemed to me that before something so very accusatory in a blog called Medical Myths, you might at least get in touch with EuroMedic to verify the facts.
And also because,
4) Ross seems like a big jerk and I believe he would seem that way to me even if I agreed with him
(this is not the best reason of the four, but I'm trying to be honest)
I had hardly posted in or even read TiMS from the date of my procedure in Poland (March 25) until recently, so I had lost the thread of many of the discussions - and clearly I didn't even remember many of my own postings. So when I was doing a search for some other information about the EuroMedic the other day, I was surprised to come across a posting by me dated March 24 in which I said:
tube-time is this afternoon, but have met acol. There is a very pleasant atmosphere about the hotel. It's a good place to stay; it's an interesting place to walk around, and the wireless internet is pretty good. They have now done about 200(!) patients, the director says about 50 a week - and they're taking bookings for 2012.
So that was a casual report of a casual conversation in which the director was trying to emphasize how busy they had become. Other people have written more recently and quite clearly about the 6*6 schedule, and 6/day matches what I remember from observing the operations of the EuroMedic for several days. But if they *were* billing 50 patients a week $10k, then that would be (wait, I can do the math in my head...)$500,000.
So it's possible that the history of that figure began with me back in March.
-d