Modern Medicine: How Healing Illness became Managing IllnessModern Medicine: How Healing Illness became Managing Illness by Dquixote1217 ..... News Forum
Date: 1/22/2009 12:45:09 AM ( 15 y ago)
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Part of "The Four Horsemen of the Modern Health Apocalypse" series
Modern Medicine: How Healing Illness became Managing Illness
For over 6000 years, man looked first to nature to heal illness and maintain wellness. As a result of a deliberate and often sinister plan, the past century and a half has seen curing illness with nature replaced with managing sickness and treating the symptoms of illness in a system that places profits far above healing and humanity.
When this country was founded, medical freedom was assumed. Early Americans ran away from intolerance hoping to find religious and political freedom. Medical freedom was simply assumed. It was assumed that the people had the right to choose whatever form of health care they preferred.
Dr Benjamin Rush proposed that these rights should be specifically laid out in our constitution: "The Constitution of this Republic should make special provision for medical freedom. To restrict the art of healing to one class will constitute the Bastille of medical science. All such laws are un-American and despotic."
These freedoms did not make it into the Constitution or our Bill of Rights. How could our forefathers have known that Dr Rush’s words ringing through the convention halls would prophesize the exact state of affairs over two hundred years later?
"Unless we put medical freedom into the constitution the time will come when medicine will organize into an undercover dictatorship and force people who wish doctors and treatment of their own choice to submit to only what the dictating outfit offers."
This is the state of medicine today. It is a sad state of affairs. Our drug-based medicine heals little, poisons many, and still our people are clamoring for access to it.
In 1806 the first medical licensing laws were passed in
Licensing laws were and still are unconstitutional.
Article I, Section 10 of the U.S. Constitution reads: “No State shall enter into any Treaty, Alliance, or Confederation; grant Letters of Marque and Reprisal; coin Money; emit Bills of Credit; make any Thing but gold and silver Coin a Tender in Payment of Debts; pass any Bill of Attainder, ex post facto Law, or Law impairing the Obligation of Contracts, or grant any Title of Nobility.”
Admittedly, this can be confusing (though not as confusing as most legalese today), so let me pull out for you the parts that affect licensing:
“No State shall . . . pass any . . . Law impairing the Obligation of Contracts . . . . “
This has been interpreted by many to mean that no state or federal office can create a licensing law that would restrict free trade. The founding fathers wanted a small government which did not interfere with business. It had a role to protect the consumer against fraud, but could not play favorites or restrict any healing art.
It can be argued that licensing laws protect the consumer against fraud. Some say, “Licensing prevents ery.”
This, however, is absurd since the first medical practices laws licensed the most fraudulent form of medicine, the most dangerous form of medicine, ever to have been adopted by this new country. The first licensing laws licensed ery, and continue to license ery today, as you will soon see.
"I am persuaded that licensure has reduced both the quantity and quality of medical practice.... It has reduced the opportunities for people to become physicians, it has forced the public to pay more for less satisfactory service, and it has retarded technological development.... I conclude that licensure should be eliminated as a requirement for the practice of medicine." Milton Friedman, Nobel Prize-winning economist.
"Licensing has served to channel the development of health care services by granting an exclusive privilege and high status to practitioners relying on a particular approach to health care, a disease-oriented intrusive approach rather than a preventive approach.... By granting a monopoly to a particular approach to health care, the licensing laws may serve to assure an ineffective health care system." Lori B. Andrews, professor of law and Norman and Edna Freehling Scholar, Chicago-Kent College of Law.
The first “regular” physicians licensed to practice medicine in young
If licensing laws protect the consumer against fraud, then this simple question begs for an answer:
Why is it the consumer has never asked for any of these laws?
Historically, it has been the medicos who have pressured the government to create laws protecting their practices. Throughout the first half of the 19th century, nearly every law passed restricting medical practices (licensing) were overturned or completely tossed out by the people.
"Virtually every law restricting the practice of medicine in
During much of the 19th century, licensing laws came and went and the public was free to choose its health care. Their options were wide open: nutritional medicine, hydrotherapy, eclectics, Indian Medicine, homeopathy, herbalism, a combination any of these, midwifery, or a regular physician. By the end of the 19th century, osteopathy, chiropractic, and naturopathy had come into the mainstream.
And then something happened that defines the ruling class in our society, or as J D Rockefeller once said: “Competition is a sin.”
The rich get richer because they form alliances and eschew competition.
The Genesis of the AMA
1847: Regular physicians united and formed the American Medical Association.
The professed reasons for the association sounded worthy enough: to establish standards of medical ethics and medical education; that all doctors should have a "suitable education" and that a "uniform elevated standard of requirements for the degree of M.D. should be adopted by all medical schools in the
The ulterior motives would soon come to light.
A report submitted by the committee on educational standards to the first AMA convention in 1847 was unusually candid:
"The very large number of physicians in the
Regular doctors could not compete with the riffraff practicing “unscientific” medicine. The real program of the AMA, openly discussed, was “to secure a government-enforced medical monopoly and high incomes for mainstream doctors.” [http://www.lewrockwell.com/rockwell/medical.html]
One of the first programs of the newly established AMA was to embark on a " hunt" to hunt down and eliminate competition.
The AMA developed strict standards that its members were to adhere to or else. The Code of Medical Ethics grew and evolved over the next half century. In 1850 it was unethical to engage in competition or underbid another physician. By the turn of the century, free vaccinations were opposed because it was not in the best interests of young medical men and it was considered highly unethical to give free medical services to the wealthy for it would injure other physicians financially.
As reported by Goodman and Musgrave, “By 1901, all states and territories except
Most interesting is the fact that “of the 42 states that had revocation provisions in their medical practice acts in 1907, "incompetence" was grounds for revocation in only two of them.” The rules of revocation (consulting with a “non” regular physician) reached into the absurd and even got to the point where one physician had his AMA membership revoked for buying milk sugar from a homeopathic pharmacist. [Divided Legacy] Another physician was dropped from the ranks of the AMA for consulting with a physician dropped from the ranks of the AMA for consulting with a homeopath.
The AMA could easily call most other practices (Thomsonians, midwifes, eclectics, herbalists, and the lot) unscientific for there was no formal training for any of these healing arts. Homeopathy was much harder to vilify as it was a codified and systematic medical science that not only had a large following, but was taught at major medical schools.
The first women’s medical college in the world,
Homeopathy was more attractive to the average person, and though the AMA claimed that only the ignorant were attracted to homeopathy, it attracted the most respected members of society: William James, Henry Wadsworth Longfellow, Nathaniel Hawthorne, Harriet Beecher Stowe, Daniel Webster, William Seward, Horace Greeley, Louisa May Alcott, William Cullen Bryant, and Susan B. Anthony. Elizabeth Blackwell, the first woman to graduate from an American medical school, and a leading feminist supporter, criticized regular medical science because it was so deadly. Homeopathy was attractive mainly because it did not kill you. Homeopaths actually followed the first rule of medicine, the Hippocratic injunction: “First, do no harm.” [http://www.homeopathic.com/articles/intro/history.php]
The latter half of the 19th century was homeopathy’s heyday. Regular physicians could hardly compete with them. By 1902 homeopaths did seven times the business of allopaths and there were 15,000 practicing homeopathic physicians in the
During the 1849 cholera epidemic, homeopaths from
One story from those days involves a physician by the name of William H. Holcombe. When he graduated from the
Holcombe left and returned the next day, expecting to find a dead baby. Instead, the child – who had been treated by a homeopath – was playing in the yard. Holcombe later wrote that "after having blistered, bled, and drugged my patients for twenty-seven years, I determined to find some more humane mode." He was charged with violating "medical ethics," whose first principle was: "A physician ... should cautiously guard against whatever may injure the general respectability of his profession."
As Rockwell points out, one state senator from
Even with the advent of the germ theory of medicine, the ruling theory of medicine today, homeopaths were much more in demand than regular physicians.
But homeopaths did not unite. In fact, homeopaths broke into two different schools, the ones who worked just as Hahnemann had taught, and other’s who could be called “pseudo-homeopaths.” Later they split into two more groups; those using high potencies and those using low potencies. The amoebic form of medicine did not survive to split again.
For the most part, regular medicine had never been based upon science. Compared to Traditional Chinese Medicine, Western Regular Medicine lacked even the slightest semblance of scientific method. TCM had been based upon the science of observation; six thousand years of observation. In the latter half of the 19th century, western medicine began to take baby steps into empiricism. Interestingly enough, it all came about because of homeopathy. Mark Twain said, “The introduction of homeopathy forced the old school doctor to stir around and learn something of a rational nature about his business.” ["A Majestic Literary Fossil," Harpers Magazine, Feb 1890.]
Physicians began using smaller dosages and kinder methods. The two forms of medicine began to blend and looked very much the same to the average person. The art of medicine became a science when it began testing. Pasteur suggested in 1859 that microorganisms might cause diseases and just six years later Claude Bernard published, Introduction to the Study of Experimental Medicine. Two years later Joseph Lister published his work showing that he could reduce post-operative infections by sterilizing the instruments and operating room.
In the early 1880s Robert Koch isolated both the Tuberculosis microorganism and the cholera microorganism, while Edwin Klebs discovered the diphtheria microorganism. By 1890 an effective diphtheria antitoxin had been developed, and just three years later the first modern American medical school opened in
Parke-Davis soon opened the first pharmaceutical research laboratory in the country, but it was in
In 1910, in
Dr Erlich and his staff created a drug, tested it, modified the formula, and started over by modifying the drug. In 1911 he tested the final drug on patients with syphilis. The medical community stood in awe as patient after patient was cured of this deadly disease. However, three percent died from the drug.
The goal of any form of medicine is to heal the sick and care for the dying: "Guerir quelquefois, soulager souvent, consoler toujours" (To cure sometimes, to relieve often, to comfort always.)
Even though many young physicians enter the profession for ideological reasons, eventually most will have to wake up to the simple fact that even they must make a living. Making a living can eventually win out over any idealism, especially when the physician cannot feed or clothe his family. Even while medicine evolved and changed, it still had to compete with other forms. Not willing to rely on the advent of scientific medicine to win out over superstition and ignorance (perhaps because homeopathy, herbalism, and nutrition were just as scientific if given objective testing) regular medicine relied on forming alliances to became a political organization with great influence. While the science of medicine went through its early growing pains, the politics of medicine rushed to create laws that promoted their agenda and wiped out the competition.
Then came the death blow for all medical competition. It began with a restructuring of the AMA, a new platform, new plans, a study to certify medical institutions, near bankruptcy, salvation as big money entered the picture, and ended with the infamous Flexner Report.
The Rockefellers invested heavily in the pharmaceutical industry and suddenly medical machinery was labeled ery. One machine that gave a slight electrical charge over veins and arteries zapping germs, was shunned as ery never to be thoroughly tested because all the bets were on pharmaceuticals.
The only “machinery” to survive to modern times were those that used radiation (x-rays machines being one). Radium, when discovered, became a very profitable cancer cure, not because it was effective (some feel that as few as one in one thousand actually survived the therapy) but because physicians invested heavily in radium mines.
At the turn of the 20th century, the AMA came right out and admitted that competition was destroying physicians’ incomes. From 1880 to 1903 the number of regular medical schools had grown from 90 to 154. Anyone could hang up a shingle and call himself a doctor. Chiropractic had just been introduced into the mainstream, homeopathy was flourishing, herbalists, nutritionists, and midwives all practiced their art, and regular doctors just could not profit from their practice of medicine.
Though adjusting the spine had been around for over 6000 years (in
From http://www.spineguys.com/why_chiropractic/whatisit.asp#top:
The first recorded chiropractic adjustment was performed on September 18, 1895, more than 100 years ago, by Dr. Daniel David Palmer, a teacher and healer who was born in Port Perry,
With the state governments unwilling to create laws restricting the various healing arts, the AMA hired Joseph McCormack, the secretary of the Kentucky State Board of health, to “rouse the profession to lobby.” [Rockwell]
Additionally, the AMA got Dr G H Simmons to head up its operation, and along with one more, P. Maxwell Foshay, these three men devised a plan for the future. They were so convinced that their plans would succeed, the AMA dropped the “consultation clause” whereby members would be ousted for consulting with a homeopath, from their rules and even allowed homeopaths to become members as long as they stopped practicing homeopathy. Was the AMA opening up its policies? Not in the least. Their plan had more efficient and devious methods of destroying homeopathy and all competition.
The AMA began to bolster their ranks. Preaching ethics (like not competing with other physicians or publishing your prices) and decrying ery (anything that competed with regular medicine), McCormack traveled about the country and increased the membership to the AMA by eight fold in just ten years.
Dr Simmons just happened to be one of the biggest s you could find in those days. His claims of having earned his degree in
In 1904 Simmons helped create the Council on Medical Education. When the 1906 Pure Food and Drug Act was passed, the AMA formed the Committee on Medical Legislation to support the act. The Council on Pharmacy and Chemistry was formed in 1905 to test the claims of medicines.
It was the Council on Medical Education that devised a plan to rank medical schools throughout the country, grading them on a scale from A to C. Working with sate medical boards, by 1910 they succeeded in cutting the number of schools from 166 to 131.
But they ran out of money.
The Rockefellers had joined forces with the Carnegie foundation to create an education fund. They were approached by N P Colwell, the secretary of the AMA’s Council on Medical Education, to finish the job they had started, but could no longer fund.
Simon Flexner, the director of the Rockefeller Institute for Medical Research, proposed that his brother, Abraham Flexner, be hired to finish ranking medical schools. Abraham Flexner owned a bankrupt prep school and knew nothing about medicine. He took his orders from the AMA and the two foundations.
Many historians feel that the Rockefellers were truly the bad guys in this alliance, but Colter (Divided Legacy) and Brown (Rockefeller's Medicine Men) seem to feel that John D Rockefeller had been duped.
John D. Rockefeller believed in homeopathy. He referred to it as “a progressive and aggressive step in medicine.” Rockefeller lived to the ripe old age of 99 using only homeopathy in the latter part of his life.
John D. Rockefeller had made major grants to homeopathic institutions over the years, and gave specific instructions to Fredrick Gates, his financial advisor, to continue to do so. However, Gates was no friend to homeopathy, and all subsequent grants went only to the orthodox medical institutions; some 300 to 400 million dollars. [Brown, Rockefeller's Medicine Men, Berkeley:
No one knows how Abraham Flexner was instructed to conduct his ranking of medical schools. This was all hush-hush. Supposedly he was to give a thorough investigation of all medical schools and grade their curriculums.
With the AMA on the verge of bankruptcy and unable to complete their initial study, in 1908 they met with Henry Pritchett, President of the Carnegie Foundation and heavily invested in the pharmaceutical industry. Pritchett laid out the funding to complete the study, thus becoming Abraham Flexner’s master.
Flexner went through medical schools faster than
And though one cannot know his exact instructions in the conduct of this investigation, one can surely guess with accuracy what he must have been told to do by the outcome of the Flexner Report.
· Schools teaching nutrition, naturopathy, or herbalism did not pass (schools teaching Bernard’s Terrain therapy were in this group).
· Schools teaching homeopathy did not pass.
· Schools that admitted blacks did not pass (except for two that admitted only blacks).
· Schools admitting Jews got lower than average grades (resulting in a 30% reduction in Jews graduating)
· Schools that admitted women got lower than average grades (resulting in a 33% reduction in women graduating). [Paul Starr, The Social Transformation of American Medicine,
· Schools that were “commercial institutions” (able to function entirely by student fees) did not pass.
One might ask why the latter, commercial medical institutions, would be attacked, but you must realize the simple fact that money buys influence. If an institution did not need the Rockefeller/Carnegie money, then the Rockefellers and Carnegie foundations could not influence the curriculum. That would not do. The two foundations had millions of grant dollars to spread around which they regarded not as philanthropy, but rather as investments.
With the release of the Flexner Report, the AMA (now recharged with Carnegie money) lobbied heavily, both at the federal and state levels. The report concluded that: “The chiropractics, the mechano therapists, and several others...are unconscionable s... The public prosecutor and grand jury are the proper agencies for dealing with them.” Within the next 30 years, 1500 chiropractors would be prosecuted for practicing “ery.”
Within three years of the release of the Flexner Report, 25 medical schools closed. Altogether, because of the earlier efforts and then the release of the Flexner Report the number of medical schools dropped from 650 to 50.
Private hospitals declined in number from an estimated 2441 in 1910 to 1076 in 1946.
Homeopaths, splintered and refusing to become political, began to lose favor. Medical schools teaching homeopathy changed their curriculums to follow the guidelines promoted in the Flexner Report, and though they might have produced a better student, their homeopathy studies suffered and they produced second rate homeopaths.
The 22 homeopathic medical schools that flourished in 1900 dwindled to just 2 in 1923. By 1950 all schools teaching homeopathy were closed.
If a physician did not graduate from a Flexner approved medical school, he couldn’t find a job. New licensing laws required that medical schools be certified.
By 1925 10,000 herbalists were out of business.
The AMA’s coordinated efforts to crush competition did not end with the Flexner Report. The Council on Pharmacy and Chemistry’s main purpose was to get rid of all over-the-counter medications and treatments that did not require a doctor’s visit.
Unbeknownst to the public, the AMA had been fixing prices. The sudden drop in certified physicians in the country just wasn’t enough, in the eyes of the AMA. They began ousting physicians working for companies that tried to provide health care for their workers. They outlawed the process of “contracting out.”
Hospitals that did not fix their prices lost AMA accreditation. In
If a patient did not pay his medical bills, especially if he was dissatisfied with the treatment, he was blacklisted and refused further treatment till he paid up.
Charities and churches were attacked by the AMA for giving free medical care to the poor. A huge lobbying effort allowed the AMA to oversee the State Board of Charities, which led to diminished free care; the board could impose fines and jail terms for anyone giving treatment without first getting the patient’s financial status.
The AMA lobbied to stop pharmacists from treating patients and in nearly every state these laws passed. Soon they had to lobby again to stop pharmacists from refilling prescriptions at the request of the patient.
The Rockefeller and Carnegie foundations showered hundreds of millions of dollars on medical schools that followed the AMA model. This buys them control of curriculum. The curriculum is drug based. Students learn nothing about health; they learn about disease and the drugs used to cure them (though the word cure is used lightly since few drugs actually cured an illness but instead suppressed symptoms).
I was, for a period, a professor of Therapeutics and Pharmacology, and I knew from experience that students were obliged then by me and by others to learn about an interminable number of drugs, many of which were valueless, many of them useless, some probably even harmful.... [Dr. David Edsall, former dean of Harvard medical school.]
By 1934, the AMA House of Delegates published this statement: “All features of medical service in any method of medical practice should be under the control of the medical profession. No other body or individual is legally or educationally equipped to exercise such control." Their goal, nearly completely realized, was a total monopoly of medical practices. Through its influence on the government, the AMA had come to control education, licensure, treatment options, and price.
To sum up, by 1935:
1. Homeopathy had fallen from favor not because of science, but because homeopaths refused to unite and one of Rockefeller’s subordinates who controlled grant money did not happen to like homeopathy;
2. Other healing modalities, mechanical devices, nutrition, midwifery, naturopathy, herbalism, hydropathy, had been quashed by Abraham Flexner who had no scientific training, no medical background, but had been equipped with “instructions;”
3. The terrain theory of medicine had lost out to the germ theory of medicine because Abraham Flexner (untrained in the sciences) preferred the latter;
4. Chiropractic had been criminalized for decades (finally winning their case before the Supreme Court in 1987 because of conventional medicine’s own research proving its effectiveness);
5. The only acceptable medicine practiced (licensed, controlled) is based upon the use of morbid drugs, surgery, and, newly discovered, “radiation”, and
6. Medicine had finally become enormously profitable (allowing numerous entrepreneurs to enter the field such as Alfred P Sloan, president of General Motors, and Charles Kettering, automobile genius responsible for ignition systems, starters, lights, etcetera, who together had financial ties to the Rockefellers, chemical companies, pharmaceuticals, and the list goes on).
Americans take pride in the advances science has brought them, and yet, when one looks back on how medicine in this country evolved into what it is today, as outlined above, it becomes apparent that its evolution had nothing to do with science and had everything to do with politics.
Jump ahead to the year 1962.
Few people have ever heard of homeopathy, herbalism, or naturopathy. Dieticians have replaced nutritionists.
Rachel Carson has just published her book, Silent Spring in which, among other things, she questions our use of chemicals and their connection to cancers. Rachel Carson has just been diagnosed with breast cancer.
A new sleeping pill, Thalidomide, is found to have caused birth defects in thousands of babies born in
Big Drug Companies and the FDA:
Drug companies quickly throng to
No one, outside the pharmaceutical circles, expected this, but the amendments passed with ease and suddenly the cost of bringing a new drug to market has skyrocketed.
Perhaps no single statement about the Food and Drug Administration is more revealing than the eye opening one attributed to former FDA Commissioner Dr Herbert Ley: "The thing that bugs me is that people think the FDA is protecting them. It isn't. What the FDA is doing and what the public thinks it's doing are as different as night and day." Dr. Ley has been noted as the last FDA Commissioner who made an attempt to stand up to the pressure and influence of the big drug companies.
Most people labor under the misconception that the sole purpose of the FDA is to serve as a watchdog for the public and protect them against bad drugs. Two recent polls indicated that while 82% of the public surveyed said that they trust the FDA to keep our drugs safe, 2/3 of the FDA’s own scientists said that they didn’t.
Further, about 1 out of 5 of the scientists admitted that they had been pressured to make false statements in favor of drugs they didn’t think were safe. No doubt that is because the FDA’s own scientists are aware of something that most of the public is not: The main role and function of the FDA is to serve as a tool of the pharmaceutical industry, not as its watchdog. Big drugs and big government have been bedmates for over a century now.
The main source of information for the FDA’s regulation of drugs is the pharmaceutical industry itself. In effect, the FDA simply evaluates the test results submitted by these companies in support of their own drugs. That in itself is a clear-cut conflict of interest, but there's more. In much the same manner that the military industrial complex has blurred the lines between the defense contractors being overseen and the military agencies overseeing them, a revolving door has also been established between FDA executives and the large food and drug companies, and it has been going on now for a long, long time.
The cozy relationship between the Big Pharma companies and the FDA, and the tragic results for public health are vividly illustrated with two of the many questionable approvals by the FDA: Vioxx and Aspartame.
Vioxx - Thousands Die so Merck can Profit
Merck's Vioxx was heralded far and wide as the greatest breakthrough for relieving pain in the history of medicine, and any number of studies were presented attesting to its effectiveness and safety. What wasn't told, and what the FDA failed to uncover or else ignored, was the covered up evidence of harm to the heart and cardiovascular system. Neither was the fact that many of the favorable studies were actually authored by Merck who merely paid doctors and scientists to sign their names to the studies.
Then came the reports of heart attacks and deaths. While Merck vigorously denied any connections and the FDA maintained that Vioxx was safe, the body count continued to mount. Even after the death toll became so overwhelming that deniability was no longer an option, the FDA fought to keep Vioxx on the market as long as possible while the deaths and the billions in profits for Merck marched ever onward. By some estimates, over 60,000 deaths are attributable to Vioxx now - more than were lost in the entire
Ominiously, the whispers are growing louder that the death toll from other Merck drugs such as Fosamax, Avandia and Gardasil may end up being even higher.
Aspartame - Sweet Sickness
Natural health authority Jon Barron detailed how Aspartame evolved from as a potential biological-warfare neurotoxin to an FDA approved sweetener in his article "The FDA and Government Regulators":
• Aspartame was once considered (before it was approved as a food) by the Department of Defense as a potential biological-warfare neurotoxin.
• At temperatures of about 85 degrees, aspartame breaks down into its components. These include: methanol (wood alcohol, known to street alcoholics as the alcohol that makes you go blind), formaldehyde (a neurotoxin), formic acid (ant venom), and diketopiperazine (a known carcinogenic that causes brain tumors in animals).
• According to the FDA's own audit on aspartame, the Bressler Report, aspartame triggers brain tumors, mammary tumors, pancreatic tumors, ovarian tumors, pituitary adenomas, uterine tumors, etc. A senior FDA toxicologist, the late Dr. Adrian Gross, who tried to prevent the approval of aspartame, told Congress that it violated the Delaney Amendment because it triggered brain tumors (Congressional Record SID835:131 - 8/1/85)
• Aspartame has also been shown to trigger birth defects and miscarriages -- not just if the mother uses it, but the father also. And now, because of new FDA directives governing the use of aspartame, it has appeared in a whole range of products that we use everyday. (l996, Dr. David Kessler, then head of the FDA, gave blanket approval for aspartame.) This may be a major reason that 50% of first pregnancies in the
• Before aspartame was approved in beverages in 1983, the National Soft Drink Association created a THIRTY PAGE PROTEST (that was later read into the Congressional Record) declaring that aspartame was NOT stable, and that it could actually make unwary users FATTER!
• In 1983, the average annual consumption of artificial sweeteners in the
• The FDA receives more complaints about aspartame (over 10,000 official complaints) than for all other non-drug products or substances put together. In fact, between 78-85% of all complaints the FDA receives concern aspartame.
• Symptoms caused by aspartame include, among many others: chronic fatigue and immune deficiency syndrome; grand mal seizures; decreased vision; pain in eyes; ringing in ears; headache; confusion; etc; etc; and death. The FDA has its very OWN list of 92 SYMPTOMS. Note: Five deaths were reported prior to 1987. Since then, figures have not been made public.
• The FDA itself kept aspartame off the market for 16 years until it suddenly granted approval.
The story of that approval follows.
So how the heck did this neuro-toxin end up becoming one of the most omnipresent food additives of all time? As Deep Throat told Bob Woodward, “Follow the money!”
The story begins in 1974 when aspartame was first approved, but the approval was pulled when issues arose concerning aspartame’s tendency to cause brain tumors. These concerns were verified when in 1977, an FDA task force submitted a 15,000 page document that "uncovered serious deficiencies in Searle's integrity" and "revealed a pattern of conduct which compromises the scientific integrity of the studies." Specifically, the FDA Task Force found that Searle routinely took the test animals that developed tumors (and there were many), cut out their tumors, returned them to the study, and then documented them as non-tumor.
But if the FDA task force did not want to approve aspartame, we are once again faced with the question: how did aspartame get final approval? Again the answer lies in Deep Throat’s advice to Bob Woodward, “Follow the money.”
In 1977, Donald Rumsfeld (former member of Congress and Chief of Staff in the Ford Administration) was hired as president of G.D. Searle, the maker of aspartame, at a salary of $2 million plus $1.5 million in bonuses between 1979 and 1984 -- compensation he more than earned, as you will soon see. Mr. Rumsfeld then proceeded to hire a number of other former government officials and members of the Ford Administration to serve as counsels and representatives for Searle (including: high level spokespeople from the Civil Aeronautics Board, the Ford White House, and the Department of Transportation).
These efforts had an immediate payoff in that Searle was able to convince U.S. Attorney William Conlon, who was assigned to the case, to take no action against Searle or aspartame, despite repeated prodding by Richard Merril, Chief Counsel to the FDA. Interestingly enough, a year later, Mr. Conlon, took a position with the Searle’s legal firm, Sidley and
But the big pay-off came in 1983, when the Commissioner of the FDA, Dr. Arthur Hull Hayes, approved NutraSweet for soft drinks two months before leaving office. A couple of months later, after he had retired from the FDA, he accepted a position as Senior Medical Advisor to Searle's public relations firm, Burson Marsteller -- at the rate of $1,000 per day.
Not mentioned in Barron's article is the fact that favorable studies on the safety of Aspartame used MSG as the placebo!
Today, we see the FDA once again approving a deadly substance even as it is being banned in other countries around the world. At the same time, the FDA has suppressed the natural sweetener Stevia and still prohibits it from advertising itself as a sweetener, despite its approval and use as a sweetener in most of the rest of the world - although the FDA recently did approve patented sweeteners derived from Stevia for the huge Cargill (Coca Cola) and Pepsico companies.
Two recent stories which appeared at Natural News further illustrate the lack of oversight and corruption that exists within the FDA:
"FDA Scientists Complain about Corruption" details how the FDA's own scientists complain about the corruption and pressure within the FDA that results in favorable and hurried approval for drugs that have not demonstrated adequate safety or had damaging safety information covered up.
http://www.naturalnews.com/025314.html
"OIG Reports FDA Approved Drugs without Following Federal Safety Laws" tells how the Office of Inspector General investigated the FDA and found that it ignored rules requiring it to determine conflicts of interest between doctors and scientists who perform drug studies for pharmaceutical companies, such as financial incentives that could result in studies being skewed and rushed to the benefit of the drug companies and detriment to public health.
http://www.naturalnews.com/025312.html
In1969, Congress revealed that out of 49 high-level officials who had left the FDA, 37 of them moved immediately into high-level corporate positions in the companies that they had previously been in charge of regulating. Over the years, about half of all FDA officials end up in executive positions in the companies that they regulate. And, in 1975, the General Accounting Office reported that 150 FDA officials owned stocks in the companies they were supposed to be regulating.
The last two heads of the FDA both left under a cloud of suspicion and scandal after having been caught receiving illegal gifts from drug companies. Any guesses where they ended up being employed after they left?
The Unhealthy History of the World Pharmaceutical Empire
Throughout the 20th century the pharmaceutical industry was built and organized with the goal to control the health care system of nations by systematically replacing natural, non-patentable therapies with patentable and therefore profitable synthetic drugs. The architects of the pharmaceutical industry were entrepreneurs and financiers who, from the very beginning of this industry, had defined the human body and the diseases it hosts as their marketplace. As the result of the systematic take-over of the health care system by nationally and internationally operating pharmaceutical corporations, billions of people in almost all countries of the United Nations have been paying trillions of dollars for pharmaceutical drugs that neither prevent diseases nor cure them (by one measure, fully 95% of modern drugs are without proven efficacy, while virtually 100% have proven side-effects).
The governments, the economic and social sectors of all industrialized countries are currently held hostage by the practices of pharmaceutical corporations. A particular example is the Federal Republic of Germany, the leading export nation of such pharmaceutical products in the world. Throughout the 20th century, the German pharmaceutical corporations Hoechst, Bayer and BASF have determined the fate not only of that country but of the entire world.
In an effort to control the global chemical and pharmaceutical markets, these corporations formed the I. G. Farben Cartel at the beginning of the twentieth century, sponsored the rise of Hitler to power and were the driving economic force behind the Second World War and Hitler’s effort to conquer the world. Hoechst, Bayer and BASF were the organizers of the giant industrial plant I. G. Auschwitz using as their forced labor camp the sister site of the horrific concentration camp I. G. Auschwitz, the largest crime site of human history. At the 1947 Nuremberg Tribunal 24 of the managers of Hoechst, Bayer and BASF and other I. G. Farben executives were accused of the following crimes against humanity: • planning and leading the war • mass murder • conducting criminal experiments on innocent inmates of concentration camps • grand theft and plundering • slavery and other crimes.
The
One might ask: why would the pharmaceutical companies lobby to increase their costs? Some cynics might answer that these costs will be subsidized by the government, and to a degree, they would be correct. But given all things being equal, the simplest answer is the best: raising the bar would prohibit competition.
How many small companies can afford to spend (today) a billion dollars to bring a drug to market?
How many herbalists could afford to prove that something growing alongside the highway or in your backyard might cure cancer?
Who in their right mind would spend a billion dollars to prove an herbal remedy does anything when those costs could never be recouped?
The answer, of course, is that no one would do any of those things.
As a result, competition to drug therapies is virtually wiped out.
Drug companies liked the new regulations, especially because the FDA now took the responsibility for passing their drugs onto consumers. Should a drug make it to market that proves later to be dangerous, the onus would fall on the FDA and not necessarily on the drug company. The passage of Kefauver-Harris allowed the FDA to exert complete control over a smaller, but monolithic drug market.
The Kefauver-Harris Act gave the FDA greater control over prescription drugs, new drugs, and experimental drugs, as well as oversight of prescription drug advertising. With all competition crushed and medicine focusing mainly on pharmaceuticals, this act is considered by many to be the single factor most responsible for the high cost of health care today.
What began as an open door policy between the FDA, the pharmaceutical interests, and the AMA reached its ultimate conclusion in 1962 with all three are in bed together and the medical monopoly firmly established. Henceforth, it would be protected against any and all encroachment by the FDA and AMA, and soon by CODEX ALIMENTARIUS - the pharmaceutical cartel in sheep's clothing.
The recent rise of interest in alternative or complimentary medicine, or a re-discovery, if you please, has been met with all the blockades, hindrances, obstacles, and tactics designed to stop their progression by the well armed fortress of mainstream medicine.
Years of research (very bad research) papers written to debunk nutrition, homeopathy, and naturopathy have been compiled, categorized, and indexed. State medical boards have been their given instructions. If a physician steps outside his tightened circle of practice and uses nutrition or some other form of medicine deemed unworthy by the medical monopoly, s/he is threatened and punished. The state might not be able to prove incompetence or ery, but the medical boards can, using their internal tribunal system, continue to harass the physician and force him into bankruptcy and s/he goes broke defending her/his practice. Medical boards are part of the government. They have very deep pockets and few risks or repercussions when they take on an offending physician.
Outside agencies purportedly representing the consumer, pretending to protect the consumer, but who are financed by the medical monopoly, such as the busters, can initiate a SLAPP suit. A SLAPP suite is a Strategic Lawsuit Against Public Participation, and is used to stop the public from interfering with big business interests. Though the lawsuits filed the by the busters (pots) are ostensibly filed to protect the public, they are in effect SLAPP suits designed to stop a practitioner (and his patients—oddly enough “the public”) from using a therapy that threatens the profits of the medical monopoly.
With the FDA today running a protection racket for the drug companies rather than protecting consumers, safe alternatives are targeted. They've been the target of FDA raids since the fifties.
Prior to the fifties, before the FDA had assumed the roll of the “enforcer,” medicine had to work underground to destroy its competition. In the thirties, when Dr Royal Rife devised an inexpensive, non-drug cure for some of our most dangerous illnesses, Morris Fishbein, a man who ran the AMA and ruled over medicine for nearly 50 years, approached Rife asking for controlling interest in Rife’s technology, or else. Rife turned him down. Soon afterwards, coincidentally, two of Rife’s offices, on opposite sides of the continent, burned down. His research was stolen, his microscopes were destroyed (they were the only microscopes in history to allow one to view a live virus; they have never been rebuilt) and many people who had worked with Rife and dared to use his methods wound up dead. Dr Milbank Johnson, a supporter of Rife, was poisoned. There are sites claiming that he’d died of a heart attack and that he’d split with Rife, but anyone can re-write history today; just buy a web site.
In the fifties, the FDA now had the authority it needed to protect the medical monopoly. Medicine no longer had to surreptitiously destroy careers and dump bodies in the
The FDA Raids:
1950s,
1950s, US: Harry Hoxsey's herbal formulas for the treatment of cancer and his clinic were targeted by the FDA after Hoxsey refused to sell his formula to Morris Fishbein, president of the AMA. The formulas were used in dozens of clinics across the
1958: Max Gerson was just about to publish his evidence that dietary treatments for cancer were successful when the FDA began harassing him; his clinic eventually had to move to
1963: The 1963
To do so, the FDA filed a "libel of information" with a U.S. District Court, after which Judge William B. Jones ordered a warrant authorizing the arrest of the E-meters. Yes, the meters themselves were to be arrested. The warrant also authorized the arrest of "an undetermined number of items of written, printed or graphic matter."
With the warrant issued, armed
"Showing no legal warrant, the agents and … deputies pounded their way up stairways, bursting into confessional and pastoral counseling sessions, causing disruption and violently preventing the quiet pursuit of the normal practice of religious philosophy.
"They seized all the publications and all the confessional aids called E-meters they could find in desks, in ladies' handbags, in students' briefcases and in the session rooms.
"… the agents removed from the church to the waiting vans some tens of thousands of copies of over twenty Church books, texts, recorded sermons; even the Church archives were sacked. The confiscated material was handled roughly, and when ministers of the Church asked that their property be handled more carefully, the 'deputies' from
In all, three tons of materials were seized. In clear violation of both the First and Fourth Amendments, the FDA had illegally used its powers to spread yet more fear and terror through the world -- this time, to raid a church.
Of course, Scientology is not as mainstream as Christianity, Buddhism, or Catholicism, but since when did religions have to be popular to enjoy equal protection under the U.S. Constitution? Besides, various churches have always attributed special healing powers to their particular tools. Roman Catholic churches have Holy Water and other healing elements (Easter wafers, Saint Glaize Candles, Scapulars, and so on). Other religions use prayer cloths, prayer oils, and various pieces of string for which healing benefits are commonly prescribed. Nearly all churches recognize prayer as an effective form of healing. Yet the FDA chose to single out Scientology's E-meter machine, likely because it perceived the device as presenting a genuine threat to psychiatry's monopoly over mental health treatment.
The FDA apparently believes it not only regulates foods, drugs, and cosmetics, but also religions. Only "mainstream" religious practices will be allowed, and any such religions that use alternative symbols, rituals, or scriptures will be prosecuted, regardless of what the Constitution says. The rule of law never interferes with the FDA's campaigns of terror.
The history of the
After nine years of protracted legal battles, and the expenditure of countless millions in taxpayer dollars that funded the prosecution efforts, the
In other words, the
1985,
In January 1982, Dr. Richard J. Crout of the FDA stated: "I never have and never will approve a new drug to an individual, but only to a large pharmaceutical firm with unlimited finances."
1987: The Life Extension Raids. The Life Extension Foundation (www.LEF.org) has long been targeted by the FDA. It is a non-profit organization that publishes information about the healing power of nutritional supplements and genuine anti-aging breakthroughs from the world of natural health. On February 26, 1987, approximately 25 armed FDA agents and
Not surprisingly, the entire legal basis for the raid was fraudulent to begin with. The search warrant, issued by Magistrate Lurana S. Snow, was based on perjured testimony by FDA agent Martin Katz. But the intent to terrorize the Life Extension Foundation worked: Employees suffered nightmares and many were afraid to come to work.
Rather than giving in to the tyranny of the FDA, Bill Faloon and the Life Extension Foundation chose to fight for their First Amendment rights. As explained by Saul Kent of the Life Extension Foundation at www.LEF.org:
"Everyone we consulted, including attorneys who were FDA "experts", told us we had to submit to the FDA's authority to have any chance of surviving. We ignored all this advice and instead decided to wage all-out war against the FDA. We did this knowing that we would not only risk our livelihood, but our personal freedom as well
.
We were told again and again that the FDA had the unlimited resources of the federal government at its disposal, and that an organization with fewer than 5,000 members had no chance of winning an all-out war with them."
To further terrorize the Life Extension Foundation and its founders, the FDA, with the help of various corrupt law enforcement bodies, filed 56 criminal charges against Foundation officers Saul Kent and William Faloon. After an 11-year reign of terror in which the FDA spent millions of taxpayer dollars attempting to prosecute them, Kent and Faloon prevailed. In November, 1995, Federal Judge Daniel Hurley dismissed 55 of the 56 charges, and in February, 1996, the final charge was dismissed.
And thus ended the FDA's campaign of terror against the Life Extension Foundation. It was the first time in 88 years that the FDA had been forced to give up its prosecution efforts and throw in the towel.
As Saul Kent says, "The FDA's dismissal of the charges against me (and Bill Faloon) is an unprecedented victory against FDA tyranny that goes far beyond winning in court. The FDA's historic defeat is a victory for everyone who cherishes freedom in healthcare."
1988
1988
1990
1990,
1990,
1990: The Highland Laboratories raid. In 1990, Ken Scott ran a vitamin business in
This public education effort, of course, would not be tolerated by the FDA Gestapo. The FDA organized an armed raid comprised of nine FDA agents, 11
For the next 11 hours, agents confiscated nearly everything they could find at Highland Laboratories. Ken Scott and his employees were threatened with violence if they tried to set foot in the office, and his daughter, who was located miles away, was illegally detained and held in "house arrest" for 12 hours.
The FDA, you see, would not tolerate Ken Scott mailing scientific literature or articles to his customers. So in order to comply with the FDA, Scott later hired an outside mailing service owned by his daughter to run the article mailing operations.
The FDA's response? See the above raid on the mailing service.
After spending $250,000 in legal fees along with a $5,000 fine, Ken Scott was ultimately forced to cut a deal with prosecutors and plead guilty to selling unapproved new drugs. He eventually served five years on probation for his "crime" of telling the truth about CoQ10.
The message from the FDA to other vitamin companies couldn't be more clear: Don't you dare tell your customers the truth about vitamins, or we'll shut you down and prosecute you!
1990: The Century Clinic "chelation" raids. In
After Century Clinic rebuilt and sued the FDA for the return of its property, the FDA raided it again and conducted a search of the persons and homes of the owners and employees. Patients at the clinic were reportedly interrogated and not allowed to leave without turning over their names and addresses. No charges were ever filed against the clinic or its owners.
1991: The
In March 1991, armed Mexican police officers, with no warrants or charges whatsoever, kidnapped Keller from the
1991
1991:
1991, California: Twelve FDA agents raided Nutricology, seized their bank accounts and shut them down for 2 days, charging them with wire fraud, mail fraud, selling unapproved drugs, unsafe food additives, and misbranded drugs. Twelve armed agents conducted an exhaustive search of the company's offices and warehouse. On May 23, 1991 Federal Judge D. Lowell Jensen denied the FDA's request for a Preliminary Injunction. On Sep. 10, 1991, the FDA appealed to the 9th Circuit Court of Appeals, but was again denied. On Sep. 23, 1993 Judge Jensen denied the FDA's motion for summary judgment and granted Nutricology's motion to eliminate the wire and mail fraud charges. It cost Nutricology half a million dollars to defend itself.
1992,
1992, San Diego, Calif.: The heads of three European vitamin companies, along with their U.S. marketing professional David Halpern, and several of his family members are arrested and charged with 198 counts of conspiracy, smuggling, and violation of the Food, Drug and Cosmetic Act for importing simple nutritional supplements that are freely available in Britain, Germany, and other European countries. The indictments reportedly carried combined prison terms of 990 years.
1992, Texas: The FDA directed the Texas Department of Health and Texas Department of Food and Drug to raid a chain of over a dozen major health food stores known as Ye Seekers. Over 250 products were seized from the shelves, including vitamin C, zinc, herbs, aloe vera, and flaxseed oil. Following a massive public outcry, the health food store owners reported that FDA had threatened them, saying, "Don't talk to the press, or we'll come down on you twice as hard." No charges were ever filed by the FDA and no products were ever returned. Ye Seekers noted that Ginsana was seized from them at the same time it was being advertised on the Larry King TV show.
1992,
1992
, a large manufacturer. They also seized a truckload of primrose oil on the road. The FDA claimed it was an unapproved food additive. Nature's Way filed a lawsuit to get their product back, but was forced to remove the vitamin E from it because the FDA said that Vitamin E has not been approved as a food additive for evening primrose oil.
1992, California: The FDA seized $15,000 worth of Hsaio Yao Tea (in pill form), it is thought, in an attempt to strike back at acupuncturists who are taking a lot of business away from conventional doctors. The seized herbs were shipped back to
1992: The Tahoma Clinic FDA Raid. On May 6, 1992, FDA agents joined armed
The armed agents smashed down the door, rushed into the clinic like a SWAT team with guns drawn, terrorizing the patients and shouting at them to put their hands in the air. Over the next fourteen hours, agents rifled through Dr. Wright's clinic, seizing patient records, computers, vitamin supplies, and various natural therapy products. The FDA illegally held on to confiscated items, including the computers needed to run his clinic, for three years.
But was Dr. Wright really so dangerous as to justify an armed raid? He's a graduate of Harvard and the University of Michigan Medical School. He's a book author, a prolific public speaker, and served as the nutrition editor of Prevention magazine for more than ten years. The purpose of the FDA raid was clearly not to arrest Dr. Wright, who was never charged. Rather, the purpose appears to be conducting a campaign of terror: sending a message to the alternative medicine community that anyone engaged in nutritional treatments could be raided and shut down, with no legal justification.
It was all part of the FDA's campaign against natural health treatments, a campaign that continues to this day.
1993: The health food store raids. In 1993, the war against health freedom reached its peak in Texas, where combined forces of the FDA, DEA, IRS, U.S. Customs, and U.S. Postal Services conducted commando-style raids on nearly 40 different health food stores, vitamin companies, and natural health clinics from May through September. The homes of company owners and employees were also raided, and some raids were conducted with SWAT teams brandishing assault weapons and flak jackets.
In one home, a mother who was breast feeding her infant was reportedly "roughed up and handcuffed for 11 hours while FDA agents ransacked her home." Items seized in the raids included vitamins, minerals, herbs, and nutritional supplements. IRS officials also seized computers, automobiles, and bank accounts. The U.S. Postal Service illegally blocked the mail of some of the targeted companies, denying them the ability to conduct business or even organize a legal defense.
Targeted products included Dr. Kurt Donsbach's nutritional products and Dr. Hans Neiper's German-made health products.
1993, USA: Dozens of natural healing clinics, health food stores and natural product manufacturers throughout the U.S. were assaulted by combined forces from the FDA, DEA, IRS, Customs, and US Postal Service in commando-style SWAT raids. Stocks of vitamins and herbs were confiscated, along with automobiles, and computers. They also targeted the mailing lists of customers and clients. The Postal Service assisted by blocking all mail to some of the businesses, effectively preventing them from continuing any business and from conducting effective legal defense.
1993,
1993,
1993,
1993:
1993, New Mexico: Alleged “misbranding” of “illegal drugs” led 5 FDA agents, a Federal Marshall, and a PR specialist to enter International Nutrition Inc with video cameras, instead of guns, in an effort to prevent a public backlash. The FDA seized $1,000,000 worth of vitamin raw materials and products formulated by Dr. Hans Nieper of
1993,
In 1994, the Life Extension Foundation established the
Two recent articles published at Natural News tell of more recent FDA raids and suppression:
"Chrysalis Nutritionist Stephen Heuer Arrested by Federal
http://www.naturalnews.com/025347.html
"Tyrannical FTC Threatens Christian Church with Imprisonment for Selling Dietary Supplements"
http://www.naturalnews.com/025303.html
None of these raids and actions were necessary; most were far too violent and illegal. Only International Nutrition’s raid was justified, and hardly that. It is illegal to advertise that you have a cancer cure, according to the FDA's own arbitrary rules and definitions. You can list testimonials, give the supplement’s history, but you cannot claim it cures cancer, even if it does or you will likely find yourself in considerable trouble with the authorities.
Looking back at the history of the mainstream medicine and world pharma empires, it becomes clear that profits take precedence over healing and humanity. It is an inescapable fact that their only market place is our bodies, and the cold and cruel economic facts are that it is impossible to maintain and increase profits by prevention, actual healing or allowing natural and alternative competition which may be safer, more effective and far less expensive. This is obviously why our approved system of medical care has no healing and why natural alternatives are suppressed and persecuted.
A further tragic example is the cancer industry, which has grown to an almost $400 billion a year goliath whose profits and the continued existence of treatment centers and scores of agencies depend on not finding a cure. And so, four decades after President Nixon declared the "War on Cancer", mainstream medicine still clings to the failed and barbaric treatments of trying to cut out, burn out or poison out the symptoms of cancer without addressing the underlying causes or prevention. As a result, the way is paved for the continued growth of cancer tumors that are not eliminated and the return of cancer where the tumors are temporarily absent - because the immune system and major organs such as the liver which should be protected and strengthened are usually irreparably harmed by the treatments.
Thus, we have arrived at a state where our system of healthcare has become a system of managed illness where we are turned into individual profit centers to enrich the medical empire instead of having our illnesses healed and prevented.
Managed Illness versus Healing and Healthcare:
There is a great hue and cry for universal access to health care today, but does anyone want or need this form of health care? The masses are calling for universal health care, politicians are calling for universal health care, and our leaders keep making empty promises while pumping money into the pharmaceutical industry.
Everyone has heard that to reduce the price of health care, the cost of healthcare must be reduced. New technology, new research, scientific breakthroughs, and the cost of bringing new drugs to market; these are the fronted reasons for skyrocketing health care costs.
The debate is all consuming, everyone has stake at bringing down health care costs, and everyone has a solution. Or so they would have us believe. In truth, all of the talk is merely a diversion. One can talk costs and prices and research till they require an IV, but it will not change a system that is already sick and dying.
As illustrated earlier, the simplest way to explain the high cost of our health care is because our health care system is costly. This is because it is not a health care system; it is a disease care system, and for the most part the only people who get healthy are those who own and manage the trillion dollar drug and medical industry.
Ninety-five percent of our health care dollars go to urgent care with five percent going to prevention, but if this were turned around where the majority of money was spent on prevention, the overall price of health care would drop at least fifty percent, and it would come down much further if access to natural and alternative healing was not suppressed.
There is, however, an underlying reason why we have this terrible system; why Americans pay the highest health care costs on the planet, yet receive an inferior system of health care in which our longevity rate is ranked 20th world wide and our infant mortality rate is ranked 20th.
The reason: our government has, since 1806, systematically maneuvered to make orthodox, regular medicine (conventional, drug based, allopathic) a powerful and profitable monopoly.
Yet far too many people expect the government to fix a problem it has been creating for over 150 years.
Most people when asked the proper question, will answer that they do want real health care.
What is needed is actual scientific, health care solutions in the true sense of the word "scientific".
CODEX:
There is a new and dangerous enemy to your health encircling the globe, and it’s not Bird Flu. It is called Codex Alimentaris. It purports to protect the public. But, again, as always, the public has never asked for this protection. It purports to have solutions to problems, but they are problems CODEX has invented. For example, CODEX has set out to define the maximum (upper limits) for vitamins and supplements, as defined by “science.” CODEX purports to protect us from dangerous amounts of supplements and vitamins.
The question then becomes how one defines the term “medical science.”
Science is testing. One tests something, against a control, to determine the results. Is science used in medicine? Yes.
One may ask, "Then what’s the problem?"
The problem is that the outcome of a study can be skewed. In fact, mainstream studies have proven that positive results may be as much as eight times more likely when the study is designed and funded by those who stand to gain from a positive outcome versus truly independent studies. One could go so far as to say that it is a virtual law that the result of any study is skewed proportionally to the amount of money to be gained or lost.
There is also the matter of deliberately flawed studies against vitamins, minerals and other nutrients that represent competition to the hundreds of billions in profits of the trillion dollar world pharma empire. The public and our doctors have been told over and over again that natural alternatives such as vitamins, minerals and botanical compounds provided by nature are inferior to what man creates in our labs and such flawed studies are what are often pointed to for justification.
If the studies are flawed, by design or not, the false claim against nature becomes a self fulfilling prophecy. Such suspicions of the motives behind flawed studies are magnified when one looks at the apparent agenda of the FDA and those behind the push for adoption of a North American Union kind of agreement modeled after the European Union model, which limits access to only a select group of natural vitamins, minerals and supplements at dosage levels far below what is effective.
One should never fail to keep in mind that the people behind these studies have a vested stake in a trillion dollar plus annual industry and a track record of taking no prisoners when it comes to competition. These are, after all, the same people who trotted doctors and scientists before congress for four decades to testify that vitamins had no benefit and were even harmful, before finally giving in to a mountain of evidence they could not hide. These are also the same people who assured us of the safety of Vioxx, Bextra, Allieve, Avandia, Gardasil, Fosamax, mercury vaccines, mercury amalgam fillings, and a long, long line of past and present drugs associated with dangerous side effects, including large numbers of deaths.
Recent infamous studies stand as great examples of how far the medical monopoly will go to convince the public that alternatives are worthless at best and deadly at worst.
· Swedish Antioxidant Study: in the early nineties a long term study concluded that antioxidants did nothing to protect people against cancer. Headlines appeared in all major newspapers. However, it soon became clear that the study was so flawed as to be laughable. The dosages were very small and not prescribed according to the subjects life style; vitamins used were synthetic; people who dropped out of the study were included in the stats. The study was designed so poorly, that one conclusion they'd arrived at, that was actually correct, was completely overlooked and had to wait 12 more years to be accepted: If you smoke, do NOT take beta-carotene; it's deadly.
· Echinacea Study: the only form was pill form from a multilevel marketing company; the echinacea was used contrary to years of herbal history. The study was published in JAMA and made all the headlines.
· Deadly Vitamin E: the vitamin E used was synthetic alpha tocopherol. Calling synthetic alpha tocopherol is like calling synthetic vegetable protein filet mignon.
· Women’s Health Initiative study on Dietary Fats: this is the latest bad science to come out of the National Institutes of Health, at a cost of $415 million dollars to you. The conclusion which made the headlines told us that low-fat diets do not protect us against cancer, heart disease, or strokes. The study was a waste of time: the differences in diets were not wide enough to get a statistically significant result, and all fats were considered the same, from beef tallow, to corn oil, to trans fats. This in itself proves the ignorance of our government. Apparently they have no clue about healing fats (coconut, palm, olive, flax, and fish) and the others. The question each of us must ask is: do they want us to know about coconut oil (and how it heals heart disease and prevents cancer) and palm oil, and flax and fish oils? How many statin drugs would be sold if everyone took flax and fish oils?
One illustration of how mainstream studies have been flawed was shown by recent headlines from an
"
http://www.eurekalert.org/pub_releases/2007-09/osu-vet092107.php
In a new study and commentary in Free Radical Biology and Medicine, researchers concluded that the levels of vitamin E necessary to reduce oxidative stress are four to eight times higher than those used in almost all past clinical trials.
This could help explain the inconsistent results of many vitamin E trials for its value in preventing or treating cardiovascular disease, said Balz Frei, professor and director of the Linus Pauling Institute at Oregon State University, and co-author of the new commentary along with Jeffrey Blumberg, at the Jean Mayer USDA Human Nutrition Research Center on Aging at Tufts University.
'The methodology used in almost all past clinical trials of vitamin E has been fatally flawed,' said Frei, one of the world’s leading experts on antioxidants and disease."
Science is blind. True science does not care whether the outcome is positive or negative. True science does not care whether an herb, a food, or a drug is being tested. True science has a scientific foundation.
Modern medicine does not have a scientific foundation. Who in their right mind would try to convince anyone that drugs are good and nutrition is bad? Yet this is what we have been told for generations and this is what the average person believes, however this might be changing.
Because true science is based upon a logical and rational foundation. Fixing non-existent problems (as CODEX plans) is not scientific, it’s political and motivated by greed.
No one gets sick because they have a lack of drugs coursing through their blood stream, just as no one gets sick from a deficiency in radiation or chemo.
People get sick and get diseases like cancer because they do not have the proper nutrition in our bodies to give us a strong enough immune system to ward off disease and illness.
People also get sick because theye have chemicals in our bodies that were never meant to be there; that our bodies were never meant to contain, handle, or use.
Some of the chemicals that make us sick and kill us are the same chemicals that were supposedly created to “cure” us. It is estimated that two hundred thousand American lives are lost yearly due to pharmaceutical medicines. Many consider this to be a low estimate. By the American Medical Association's own admission in the Journal of the American Medical Association, 106,000 people die annually from side effects due to properly prescribed and properly administered FDA approved medications. When one adds the number of unreported and misreported deaths, the deaths due to improperly prescribed and improperly taken approved drugs, and the deaths due to approved over the counter medications, the total could easily top the figure of 200,000.
One paper that everyone should read is Assessing the Efficacy and Safety of Medical Technologies. It was published in 1978 by the government’s Office of Technical Assessment. Its conclusion is simple: of all medical procedures in use at that time (most are still in use) 80% were never tested, and of those 20% that were tested, more than half were tested badly. (For more on those procedures that weren’t tested, and those that have been tested since, see our articles on Medical Fraud.)
When science is done properly, any experiment or study that is repeated will produce predictable results. Science is designed to predict outcome.
One of the greatest frauds pulled off on our public today is the overdosing of our elderly. Give a person three drugs and all double blind studies are out the window; no doctor on earth can tell what the interactions will cause, yet many of our seniors are being forced to take as many as 15 or more prescribed and over the counter drugs daily.
As noted alternative health authority Jon Barron observed in his book "The Miracle Doctors":
Upon reaching the age of 65, "the average male takes a combination of 15 prescribed and over the counter drugs daily, and it all began with one or two conditions which could have been treated successfully naturally."
This is ery; this is fraud; this is murder.
Science tells us that lowering cholesterol will not prevent heart disease, prevent a heart attack, or extend lifespan. Yet cholesterol lowering drugs are one of the drug cartels’ greatest profit makers.
Science has very little to do with our medicine. Our medicine is profit based, not science based.
CODEX is made up of pharmaceutical cartels. Its desire to save us from dangerous vitamins and supplements is self-induced. No one has requested this help. People are dying in droves because of drugs, not because they’ve overdosed on Vitamin C or echinacea.
We are told by FDA talking points that CODEX is not creating laws, but that they are developing only recommendations. However, in
Because we live in a world where corporations matter more than people, we kowtow to the "corporocracy" and continually, acceptingly, put the wolves in charge of the henhouses.
CODEX, in a real and rational world, has no right to study vitamins and supplements. The medical monopoly, in a real and rational world, has no right to define ery.
The government’s job is to protect the people, not profits.
Yet the FDA has already outlawed a food, Red Yeast Rice and is being asked by Wyeth Pharmaceuticals to restrict the sale of bio-identical hormones (plant estrogens and natural progesterone). Why? Women aren't buying into the HRT protocols anymore because the risks are ridiculous. Women are dying from HRT and the FDA, the government, wants to protect Wythe Pharmaceutical's profits, and not women.
Who exactly is this government? What happened to "God given unalienable rights" and “by the people, of the people, and for the people”?
The health care crisis is killing the people. Health care is killing the people. Dr Carolyn Dean MD, ND, author of Death By Modern Medicine, after analyzing government databases and peer review journals concluded thus: "I found that 784,000 people are dying annually, prematurely, due to modern medicine intervention." She adds, that this too is a low estimate due to the medical monopoly under-reporting, or as the adage goes: A doctor buries his mistakes.
However, the main point here is this: Medicine is, in most probability, the leading cause of death in
Clearly our forefathers intended freedom to address our own personal health issues as we see fit and intended no monopoly by a profit-hungry group like today's medical establishment dictating what we can and cannot take or do for our healthcare.
Sadly, their desire to keep the constitution as brief as possible and resultant failure to write a specific healthcare protection into the Constitution enabled mainstream medicine to charge through the loophole and create a virtual monopoly so that the words of one of our noted forefathers have come back to haunt us.
"Unless we put medical freedom into the constitution the time will come when medicine will organize into an undercover dictatorship. To restrict the art of healing to one class of men, and deny equal privileges to others, will constitute the Bastille of medical science. All such laws are un-American and despotic. They are fragments of monarchy and have no place in a republic. The constitution of this republic should make provisions for medical freedom as well as religious freedom." - Doctor Benjamin Rush*
*In 1813, at the time of his death, Dr. Benjamin Rush was arguably one of
Despite the lack of a specific protection, quite clearly the unalienable rights of all men, as declared by our forefathers and secured by our Constitution, should serve as protection against the mainstream monopoly and the agencies who have been corrupted to support that monopoly with unconstitutionally supported codes and enforcement.
Unknown to most people, freedom from mainstream medical monopoly is actually protected by British Common Law, which has stood since our founding as the backbone of virtually all federal and state law.
See:
"Naturopathic Rights were Included in The Founding of America"
http://www.naturalnews.com/022783.html
Any solution to the health care crisis must come from the people, not the government, especially not from a government that has been hell-bent on protecting the moneyed interests and continued protection of the medical monopoly it’s spent 200 years helping to create.
True Health Care
True health care begins with proper nutrition. Nutritional therapies are not an alternative form of medicine. Conventional medicine is the alternative. Nutrition is the first and ultimate medicine. It is the one most important factor of real health.
"Let food be your medicine and medicine be your food." Hippocrates (400 BC)
If you do not believe this, then your life, after thirty, will be filled with trips to the doctor, a degenerative illness (or two or three), lots of drugs to mask the symptoms, and, in far too many cases, a long painful hospital stay ending in death: or you might get lucky and drop dead with a heart attack.
Our health care dollars must be focused on prevention. Are studies required to prove that prevention is successful? Not one bit. Just look at those societies that focus on prevention. Health care costs are a fraction of ours, and longevity in those countries is greater. The quality of those extra years is greater too.
Freedom of choice is a must in true health care. The AMA can license its regular physicians, but naturopaths, homeopaths, nutritionists, herbalists, shamans, hands on healers, and spiritual healers must be free to practice their art with no interference from the government or any “superior” form of medicine. If someone wants a half naked shaman dancing around their room tossing chicken feathers in the air, they must be allowed that choice. A government that forces a medical procedure upon its citizens is tyrannical, period.
When it comes to natural supplements, noted constitutional liberty advocate and friend of natural health congressman Ron Paul had this to say:
"Millions of Americans take dietary supplements every day, and the numbers are growing as the Baby Boom generation ages. More and more Americans understandably are frustrated with our government-controlled health care system. They have concluded that vitamins, minerals, and other supplements might help them stay healthy and less dependent on the system. They use supplements because they can buy them freely at stores and research them freely on the Internet, without government interference in the form of doctors, prescriptions, HMOs, and licenses. In other words, they use supplements because they are largely free to make their own choices, in stark contrast to the conventional medical system.”
But we live in an era of unbridled government regulation of both our personal lives and the economy, and Food and Drug Administration bureaucrats burn to regulate supplements in the same manner as prescription drugs. The health nannies insist that many dietary supplements are untested and unproven, and therefore dangerous. But the track record for FDA-approved drugs hardly inspires confidence. In fact, far more Americans have died using approved pharmaceuticals than supplements. Not every dietary supplement performs as claimed, but neither does every FDA drug." - Ron Paul
We must be protected from fraud, but not by the AMA, conventional medicine, the pharmaceutical cartels, or a government that is in collusion with any of them.
David Bonello, Director of the International Wellness Directory, believes that "In every state, a panel of experts should be created consisting of a representative of the AMA, a representative of the American College for the Advancement of Medicine, a homeopath, an osteopath, a chiropractor, a naturopath, a nutritionist, and an herbalist. Before any lawsuit can be filed against a practitioner, it must pass this panel by a unanimous decision before it can be adjudicated in court of law or sent to an internal tribunal established by the medical boards."
"In other words," Bonello says. "only the clients of a practitioner may file a law suit against that practitioner, and that practitioner will be granted a fair and impartial hearing, which is the right of every individual; a right that no one, no group, no special interest may ever take away or abrogate. This is the only real fix for health care. Anything less is a Band-Aid that will solve nothing, cure nothing, and end only in reinforcing the unscientific, un-American, unholy medical monopoly."
As Bonello wryly notes, "presently we are told we are fighting for freedom in
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Sources:
David Bonello's excellent article "Healthcare for Dummies" served as the foundation and inspiration for this article and the author borrowed heavily from that article with the kind permission of Mr. Bonello.
Other sources included: Natural News, JAMA, "Death by Medicine", Mike Adams, Jon Barron
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