A great article on Quackwatch by HV

I read this in his site´s forum and decided to post here for it is soooo good!

http://www.boards2go.com/boards/board.cgi?action=read&id=1231923704&u...

I have read Barrett's information for years, and I cannot stand him. In my opinion he is one of the least credible people in the world. Barrett specifically looks for negative information on alternative medicines without even taking in to account as to whether the research was done properly or interpreted properly. And I have yet to see him post any research backing alternatives. This is very misleading. But he makes a living on doing interviews bashing alternative medicines. And even though I have heard over and over that he does not sell anything I have seen publications against alternative medicines sold on the Quackwatch site. If he wants to have any credibility then he should present unbiased information presenting both the good and the bad of alternatives. The fact that he only presents anything negative he can find shows that he has a particular agenda that he is willing to do anything to fulfill.

There is also a lot of quackery in mainstream medicine that he has failed to mention. For example the fact that AIDS and hepatitis testing cannot prove the presence of a virus (antibody testing), nor viral activity (PCR, viral load). The only thing these tests are good for is scaring people in to taking drugs for a condition that may or may not work, and can cause some serious side effects including AIDS, which is not a disease but rather a syndrome. Or the fact that dextromethorphan was found to be no better than a placebo, the first time back in 1969 when the FDA was Court ordered to remove it from the market along with 709 other drugs that the FDA has left on the market despite the fact that they were found to dangerous or worthless. Or the fact that sleeping aids do not work. The drug companies even mention this fact in their ads. They all say their drugs are "non-narcotic". Well the medical definition of narcotic is a sleep inducing agent. Or the fact that they keep pushing antacids and acid blockers for heartburn when the primary cause of heartburn is a lack of stomach acid. Or the fact that they keep telling people that high cholesterol causes heart disease, which was disproven decades ago. And worse they prescribe statins without telling people that these drugs increase the risk of heart failure. Or the fact that they fail to tell patients given Coumadin (Warfarin)that the drug may decrease their risk of thrombic stroke, but it will greatly increase their risk of hemorrhagic stroke. Or the fact that the blood thinner Heparin can cause white blood clots (white thrombus syndrome)that are just as deadly as red blood clots. Or the fact that most chemo drugs have less than a 3% success rate. If they factor in recoccurances after the 5 year period, placebo effect, use of alternatives in conjunction, and changes in diet/lifestyle then this success rate is more like zero. Yet alternatives like ozone, Rife, and Hoxsey with 80-99% success rates are called quackery. That is just a small list of some of the mainsteam quackery that I have never heard Barrett mention.

The reason I left mainstream medicine was the rampant corruption and quackery I personally witnessed when I worked in the field. This is not to say that quackery does not exist in alternative medicine, because it does. All of it is not quackery though, just as not all mainstream medicine is quackery. We need surgery sometimes in emergencies, but it is quackery to give AZT or its analogues to people when they have known all along that these drugs will cause AIDS even in healthy individuals. AZT was originally banned for human use in the early 60s when it was developed due to the fact that it was so deadly. And the largest study ever done on AZT, the Concorde Study, proved that AZT shortened the lives of AIDS patients. Yet it is still being used. And I don't believe in acids causing disease or the olive oil gallbladder flushes.

But I am a big advocate of ozone therapy, which has been proven over an over since it was started in 1892. And herbal therapy has more real research behind it than any pharmaceutical drug on the market. The difference is that pharmaceutical drugs routinely get approved on manipulated studies designed to make the drugs appear effective. And it has been reported for over 30 years that over 150 FDA officials own stock in the drug companies they regulate in violation of insider trading laws. So the FDA has a financial incentive to look the other way as people die or are injured from the drugs. I would call this quackery.

Most of our knowledge of herbal therapy though came from the Chinese, who have the oldest medical system in the world. They did not use manipulated animal and human studies to test the herbs, and there was no financial incentive to do any manipulation. Instead, all things were tested on thousands of human prisoners before anything was ever given to the Emperor. So they made sure what the positive and adverse effects were of all of these substances. On the other hand the drug companies start by choosing a particular animal that will likely respond positively to their drug. This is why when you read a study one study may have use a particular strain or sex of mouse, or a rabbit, monkey, goat, etc. Of course animal studies do not correlate to humans. A sheep can eat arsenic in levels that would kill a human, and chocolate can kill a dog. This is why they are very careful in choosing the animal to experiment on so the drug will appear safe and effective. Then comes the human trials. Again these get manipulated. Patients that die or do not respond are often dropped from studies to make the drugs appear safe and effective. This is a particularly common practice to get chemotherapy drugs approved. And known side effects are often not reported again to get drugs approved. For example, it was only recently that they finally admitted that NSAIDs could increase the risk of heart attack and stroke. Yet this is something that they should have known since day one, especially considering the fact that these drugs work by constricting blood vessels. Same reason that they have been known to be able to cause kidney and liver failure, even with a single recommended dose. In fact ibuprofen (Advil, Motrin, Nuprin) killed 2 dozen people during clinical trials from chemical induced hepatitis. And the FDA estimates that NSAIDs kill over 16,000 people a year, primarily from internal bleeding. Of course this number is going to a lot higher in reality since many deaths are not attributed to the actual cause. Just like if a person dies from the chemotherapy or radiation therapy the cause of death is still listed as the cancer to avoid scaring the public with the truth. So this is quackery, but Barrett does not report on it. I would assume if his site is called Quackwatch and he was really out to protect the public then he would be reporting on all this conventional quackery.