The horrific effects of fracking continue to grow with doctors in Pennsylvania now caught up in the web of deceit.
Hydraulic fracturing technology, known as fracking, explodes millions of gallons of toxic chemical solutions deep into the ground in order to free natural gas deposits for drilling companies to exploit for massive profit.
Over 5,000 drilling wells have been blasted across the state of Pennsylvania alone, with more added each and every week.
These toxic chemicals being pumped into the ground are making people in relative proximity to the wells sick – very, very sick – even at low levels of exposure.  Over 85% of the 750 chemicals used in fracking are known carcinogens!
While Pennsylvania law requires drilling companies to inform local doctors what chemicals are being used so that they can properly treat the victims of exposure, it also now requires doctors who are briefed to sign a confidentiality agreement to keep them from telling anyone about what exactly is making these people sick.  This includes informing their own patients as well as other healthcare professionals!
Similar fracking laws are already on the books in Ohio, Texas, and Colorado.
Shockingly, it appears that State authorities have completely rolled over on this issue and have prioritized the “proprietary secrets” of the drilling companies ahead of the needs of public health.
Despite its so called dedication to green technologies and businesses, Federal authorities have also shown no desire to reign in this horrifically damaging technology which is akin to strip mining of decades past.
Why can’t the Obama administration simply require the disclosure of exactly what is being pumped into the ground to dislodge natural gas deposits? Â No doubt if such a move were made, the public outrage and outcry would result in the swift cessation of fracking across the nation.
And those hefty campaign contributions from fracking executives and their operatives would come to a screeching halt.
Sarah, The Healthy Home Economist
Source: Â Pennyslvania Law Gags Doctors
I’m trying this to see if i can stop getting these childish replies in my emails. When I first wrote I clicked on the keep me posted …..but oh boy …….I never heard such immature people in my whole entire life as is posting on Sarah’s site today! I hope this is the end. I don’t even read anymore just delete right away.
Dear Cynthia,
I loved your piece on fracking. Don’t let themthem run all over you. (See. Can’t correct anything,here.)………………Anyway, do NOT allow ANYONE to intimidate you where your own land & civil rights are concerned. JUst ram a 357 mg. up their nose……smile & say, “Have a nice day!” They’ll leave you alone. 🙂
But, smile & remain lady-like when doing so. Hey! It’s your land! You’re paying the taxes …..not the gas companies.
My husband & I can tell where our neighbors have forked over their rights for the al-mighty dollar bill because they have new steel roofs on their barns & homes. Some have new tractors & other sorts of farm machinery. Heck. Some of these farmers out here were ready to lose their homes & lively hood til the gas people decided to “help them out”.
Believe me when I say this is not helping. Not in the long run. ~~~~~ Yes. Someday this whole area will be a wasteland & we have greed to blame. That & the desperation our farmers are in. They need money. The gas companies HAVE IT! WOW!!!! Talk about doing the devil’s work. Need I say more??? Didn’t think so.
I wrote yesterday. I never saw it submitted. I’ll try again.
I live in the heart of the once was beautiful Penna. hills. Deep in dairy country. I,also, suffer from Fibromyalgia, Chronic Fatigue Syndrome, heart ailments & so forth. Okay…..enter the fracking gas companies blasting, digging, & basically rapeing the beautiful landscape with their huige machines……causing all kinds of problems from mud slides to cattle drinking the water & becoming ill. Not to mmention drunken truck drivers getting into accidents while not even having licenses to drive in the 1st place.
I believe this chemical fracking in the name of the all-mighty dollar is not helping anyone who is already sick to begin with. Actually, I KNOW it isn’t. ………….Now, I,also see, in this forum, there’s no place to correct one’s spelling,etc. So…..we look like idiots to boot!
A man representing his gas co., knocked on my door a few yrs. back & wanted to buy rights to come onto my property & do whatever. I told him he was lucky I didn’t have my rifle. He got mad. I got madder. ( I’m a 63 yr. old granny.) He left & haven’t seen hide nor hair of the man since! I hope he fell into one of those mud-slides. Besides making this beautiful state look like a bomb hit it…………….it’s, also poisoning the water, the air we have to breathe. Or, do you know someone who will bottle THAT & bring it in for us to use???? Yea. I didn’t think so. Hysteria & fear???? YOU BETCHA!!!! Come visit us in beautiful Penna. sometime & see the facts for yourself.
There is (not surprisingly) very little good solid information on fracking. If it has been done with the chemicals since the 70’s, then why is there not more information? They are putting in wells and fracking sites in our area: 15 within a 15 mile radius of our home. I started researching. Nothing of any solid, trustable use to make any judgement.
So that leads me to believe, as with the pharmaceutical industry, all is not well with the greedy corporation’s leading us to believe fracking is “okay”. How can it be without true scientific testing? There is none. Nothing, Nada. Trust us, we know what we are doing. Right.
We were told, regardless of our feelings on the matter, they were taking our gas. Our neighbors, desperate for money in a depressed area, greedily took their money and allow them to pump chemicals, that we have no idea what they are, into our land, and someday, those chemicals will leave this land a toxic wasteland. Maybe, may not. I side with someday, because they are bullying the neighborhood to sign mineral rights leases. Yes, I said bullying. They bullied us.
And I would bet that when these chemicals start seeping up and destroying the land and water, they will deny it’s their chemicals. Kind of like vaccines don’t trigger autism, but the rates rise with the rise of the amount of vaccines given children. Yeah, I am far from a believer of the “trust us” corporation.
They promise jobs for the area. However, our motels/hotels are overcrowded with oil people from other states. By the time the colleges get their students educated, these people will have raped our minerals, destroyed our properties (sometime in the future), and will be off to rape the next gas pocket somewhere in the country, taking the promised jobs with them, while desperate people spent money trying to get jobs in an industry that had no intention of hiring them in the first place. When good paying jobs are scarce in an area and people want to work, they have to try.
They have been fracking north of us. A co-workers sister works for the range service in regards to water. The water supply is being drained by these operations. The creeks and rivers are lower, some drying up, causing ecosystems to be destroyed. Anyone who has taken earth science knows about the water cycle and how it cycles to keep us with water. How can it continue, when they are stealing our water to toxify it, never to be safe to use again?
Sarah is telling about it, causing people to be aware there is something going on, something to be highly suspect about. This affects more than health of the people, which is very serious, but our water supply and our environment. Gas companies only think of their money, not what they are doing to the land, people and water around them. Afterall, they don’t have to live here. They get their money, who cares about the rest? Someday it will effect the corporation bigwig’s families, but if we don’t attempt to inform the public, it will be too late.
Meanwhile we are supposed to shut up and not say anything negative about the industry. We live in U.S. and we are not supposed to voice our opinion that something might be wrong with a big corporation? Imagine that.
I’m starting to think that we cannot rely on government for ANYTHING – especially to keep us safe. Do people really think these lying scumbag politicians truly care about us and our families? If anyone thinks so, they are definitely kidding themselves. These people don’t think twice about sending our men and women to die in wars that aren’t fought for defense but for our “national interests”. If they don’t even think twice about war, they certainly don’t care about fracing (there isn’t a K in the word – just learned this) or flouride in our water or GMOs. Up until about a week ago, I was all for government forcing companies to say they use GMOs. But now, I can say that the regulation will do nothing. People who do not want to eat GMOs already stay away from them. Labeling is pretty much aimed at shaming the company (which I’m all for) and people who don’t educate themselves on what they buy. This is where my fundamental beliefs come in. The answer to our problems is education, NOT legislation. We, as individuals, need to be moral and educated and caring and lift up our neighbors. We need to share information and band together when injustices happen. It’s high time we quit relying on government to save us from ourselves. If we can band together to petition the government to help us, we can band together to go around the government and petition the companies themselves to quit their nefarious practices whether that is fracing, GMOs, or slave labor. Once we start to move our dollars and our support away from companies that do these things, the quicker we will realize we have the power. I mean look at the commercials lately. Scotch-brite has botanical wipes now because they know people are shifting away from using toxic chemicals on their kitchen counters. Tide has a new detergent that takes out their harmful chemicals that cause allergies. That is just a couple examples. Big companies see the trends. They know people are suspicious now and this is just what we want. We need to constantly be suspicious, especially of entities that want our money like government and big companies. All I am is saying is that WE HAVE THE POWER – not government.
Precisely. You can’t trust government for much of anything, which is precisely why government wasn’t given the power to mandate things like GMO labeling and fracking chemical disclosure in the first place. The people who designed the government didn’t trust it any more than you do, and made sure the Constitution reflected that mistrust. But in the ensuing years, enough people have said that government needs to take care of them (like by clamoring for executive decrees on this or that issue based only on hype from some unsupported fear-mongering newspaper) that it has begun to claim that power. Which is why it can make decrees like “your drinking water shall be flouridated”, “your children need vaccinations for everything we can come up with”, or “you can’t be trusted with raw milk”.
Great post, Brooke…well said!
@Jennifer keeping energy prices reasonable is NEVER an excuse for raping the land and poisoning it for future generations.
@Jennifer “do more research” that’s what folks in support of vaccines, drugs and GMOs say too when they have no moral defense. I don’t need research to see that people are getting very sick from these toxic chemicals being poured into the groun and the land being destroyed from what the gold rush to profits of these companies.
@Amy exactly. If I wrote every post like a term paper or thesis on the subject, I would have about 3 blogs a year. My articles are never intended to be the end all and be all on a topic. Most people have never even heard of fracking and yet it is going on in their communities so they really do need to get on the ball and learn about the dangers and how these companies are raping the land before it’s in their own backyard.
hmmm…. was about to share the link, but when I went to copy a line to post a quote over the top of the share… I’m sorry you’ve had trouble with being plagiarized, but the measures to prevent it or make it harder also just get in the way of getting the word out. I won’t be putting the link on my facebook page now. I am greatly saddened by all this yuck and by your reaction to it….. oh wow, you also can’t even move your cursor back to a different spot in your own comment to help you reword it. I guess I might still see your videos on youtube, but the days of recommending the blog are certainly over.
Hopefully I will find some other resource that helps condense good info.
I’m glad you wrote this post to tell us about this issue. It’s important and something that should be researched further by those interested in it. Thank you! Honestly, the comments on the blog make my head hurt! Like half the people are supporting fracking and there is some lunatic ranting about an ad and criticizing Sarah (for hours, actually). What the hell, crazy lady? Seriously. Thank you, Sarah, for the dedication to providing us all with information, regardless of how short a post is, how much “research” is involved, etc- it’s just a heads up to let us know something you’ve discovered and then it’s up to the individual to read it, not read it, research it, agree with it, disagree with it, click on the ads or ignore the ads. I wish people would just get a grip.
Trust that sarah is glad we are all going on for hours about this – including you – it doesn’t matter what is being said or how many times it is said, so long as we are on her blog saying it- Quite brilliant – traffic is the only thing that matters – toss out a subject every few days ( or whenever) and lets us have at it. Easy peasy!
There is zero “research” involved and there apparantly doesn’t need to be – anything will stick. Do you really think sarah cares about fracking, or julia roberts teeth, or what kind of popcorn we use. Trust that you will never see sarah with a rowboat blocking people from killing whales – trust you will never see her throwing blood on fur coats – She doesn’t really care about what you think either – Operative word being ‘really’.
If you people want to beleive she is the second coming of mother theresa that you’re more naive then i originally thought. Even sarah, unwittingly in one post, admitted it herself; it’s all about the money… U go grrlll !!!
Misty, since you are all hot and bothered about how much traffic the discussion is generating, why don’t you do yourself (and for sure all of us) a favor, take a deep breath, lift up your hands and step awaaaaay from the computer? We won’t miss you or your rude and singularly unhelpful comments, and you can re-direct your energy to some site that will welcome you. You can’t possibly believe you are persuading anyone here, so just write us off as uninformed and UNWILLING to be “informed” by you. You’ve made your points (over and over and ooooover) and we’re not buying. Take that as a hint, and SCRAM. Please.
If you are so hot and bothered by me why don’t you heed your own advice and just ignore me (as you want me to do with the ads). That is not a rhetorical question. Seriously, stop feeding this tigress – let her starve in unanswered post pergatory.
I don’t need to convince anyone of anything. There are plenty of people here who are annoyed for their own reasons and their frustrations are met with generic pat answers from sarah.
The reason i keep repeating my self is because of people like you who don’t get it the first time. DUH It is YOU who keeps making points over and over that others have made – each time to no avail – yet everyone wants to take a shot at trying – and $arah couldn’t be happier at all of this back and forth banter about nothing – much ado about nothing – You are giving me more attention then the fracking topic – Stop responding to me and I might go away.