Conventional medicine vs. holistic: A world of difference

Tim O’Shea
Copyright 2001 NewWest

[Following are excerpts from the book. To order book, CLICK HERE ]

“…when you believe in things that you don’t understand,
then you’re suffering… Superstition ain’t the way.”
– S. Wonder

“This is the world that has been pulled over your eyes
to blind you to the truth.”
Morpheus The Matrix

IN THIS CHAPTER:

• Definitions of allopathic and holistic
• The Germ Theory
• The military model of health
• Food vs. drugs
• Side effects
• Media control
• The American Madness Association
• Scientific studies rarely involve science
• Tons of cash – their trough runneth over
• 4th leading cause of death in the U.S.
• Raw statistics on diseases
• The Illusion of Medical Freedom
• Animal Sacrifice

A NORMAL LIFE

Here is what a normal life should be like:

You're born. You get no drugs and no vaccinations. During childhood you have the usual illnesses, but conservative treatment gets you through them without antibiotics or drugs, and you build your natural immune defenses. You don't eat white sugar, white flour, too much meat or cheese, or drink milk or soft drinks. You concentrate on whole grains, fruits, vegetables, and a clean, natural diet. You never learn to drink coffee or to smoke cigarettes. The only pills you take are powerful whole food vitamins and enzymes and minerals, which are part of your daily intake. You drink at least 1 liter of water every day. Into adulthood, you never get sick: no colds, no flu, no headaches, no diabetes, no ADD, no “thyroid problems,” no panic attacks, growing pains, fatigue, or digestive disorders, no high blood pressure. The only pains you experience come from accidental injury. Perhaps you do moderate exercise or sports activity to maintain mobility and general fitness. You look to the care of your spine. Your entire adulthood is spent in this disease-free mode. As you age, your mind gets sharper. You experience no arthritis, cancer, or osteoporosis, no Parkinson's or Alzheimer's. Finally one day after 90 or 100 years, you flicker like a candle and go out.

The above paragraph may be useful in choosing a doctor. Some doctors will say all this is impossible; which for them is true. So don't choose them. All this is possible; moreover, thousands and thousands of people are living it. So listen only to those who can help you achieve such a condition of living health. Because now we've arrived at the threshold of a time when good health and a powerful immune system are not only advisable; they are the very determinants of survival.

**********
Two opposing viewpoints of health and disease have been evident since ancient times. The conventional view, or Allopathic (literally, “other disease”) sees problems coming from outside the body. Or simply, the cause of disease comes from outside, then invades the body and the person gets “sick.” The Germ Theory. Allopathic philosophy says that when the body has symptoms like pain, fever, or nausea, that means the person has caught some bug, some disease and needs to have these symptoms “treated” – i.e., covered up. Usually with drugs. If the disease localizes itself in one certain part of the body and won't go away, then that part of the body may have to be cut out with surgery. That's the allopathic viewpoint: disease, symptoms, drugs, surgery.

The holistic view is different. Holistic philosophy says that the cause and cure of all disease lie within the body. The parts of the body are interrelated in ways that are so complex, so sophisticated, so elegantly orchestrated and exquisitely tuned, as Deepak Chopra says, that all medical technology has only the crudest, faintest understanding of just a few basic mechanisms. In most cases, the body can heal itself if provided with the opportunity. It does this from the inside out – from the brain and spinal cord, outward through the nervous system, to every organ, and cell. For every time you have ever been sick, there have been hundreds of times when your immune system has conquered a disease without any overt symptoms being expressed. The mysteries of the body – its inner workings – are actually the most evolved systems in the universe. We are dealing with the life forces, the life substances – that which can never be viewed in dissection or isolated in laboratory culture. To influence these subtle, delicate interweavings, natural cures seek to nourish and encourage the body back into a condition of balance, by gentle support.

For the sake of clarity, here is a chart that describes attributes of each view:

[see page 8]

PARTS/WHOLE

Allopathic is the medicine of specialists: cardiologists, eye doctors, gynecologists, urologists, gastroenterologists, orthopedists, podiatrists, endocrinologists, neurologists, kidney doctors. They divide up the body and pretend to treat the parts in isolation. Like a car.

Early allopaths, called mechanists, saw the body as a machine that could be separated into component parts, and treated on that basis. Much easier to understand that way. Blame it on Descartes, the mind/body guy. To this end, the mechanists devised powerful potions with specific, quick, sometimes violent effects, which pretended to focus on the one “sick part.”

Before 1880, most medicine consisted of folk remedies, basic herbs, and crude surgery and dentistry. For centuries, there had not been much radical change in the area of medicine. Superstition was as much a part of medicine as the actual remedies themselves. The use of leeches and bleeding was still common, the reason being to “let out the bad blood,” which was in the same category with getting rid of evil spirits. Even drilling holes in the skull – the art of trephination – which had been around since the time of the Pharaohs, was still done.

In Europe and America, the “night air” was thought to bear the noxious spirits of disease. Many a sickroom was sealed off tight, sometimes in the daytime as well. This superstition persists today, in places that might surprise you.

Surgery came about from the mechanistic outlook: if a part became too big a problem, cut it off. Quickly, before it gets a chance to heal. If the patient survives, that means the surgeon “saved his life.” Surgery through the ages has been associated with a surprising lack of scientific foundation. In Europe, from the Middle Ages to the Renaissance, surgeons and barbers were the same people. It was not until the time of the American Revolution that England’s King George the Third decreed that barbers and surgeons were two separate professions. The deification of surgeons, complete with Boxster and villa on the Côte D’Azur – this is only a recent development.

For another view on how civilized and “scientific” surgery is, one might read the descriptions of lobotomies which are graphically cited in Wiseman’s Psychiatry: the Ultimate Betrayal. You won’t believe you are reading about something that has taken place in this country during this century (spike through the eye?) {see p. 9] To treat a body part in isolation can be very dangerous, because of the complexity of interrelationships within the body, and our limited knowledge of the whole picture.

Or a jammed tailbone left out of place for years may cause infertility by interfering with nerve transmission to sex organs – simple biomechanics.

Or antibiotics. As we saw in Chapter 3 on antibiotic resistance ( ANTIBIOTICS ) treating a minor infection with powerful antibiotics can disrupt both the digestive and immune systems, since they require normal bacteria.

Examples are endless, but the point is that if no one is looking at the Big Picture, treatment can easily get sidetracked by chasing symptoms – just treating the part that hurts, in isolation, pretending that only that part is affected. Meanwhile the underlying cause gets a chance to really become entrenched. Lot of wasted time. Couple of years go by, and the patient has an irreversible disease, the simple result of Nobody Driving the Bus.

By contrast, holistic healers, or vitalists, consider the entire body as a group of interrelated, interdependent systems. No single part exists or can be treated in isolation. The whole thing is greater than the sum of its parts. Diseases are seen as general conditions that have localized, after a slow, gradual process, perhaps years of neglect. Vitalists seek to encourage the body’s innate life forces by common sense means – pure air, pure water, pure food, functioning nervous system, clean blood.

The holistic outlook realizes that after centuries of dissecting and treating and theorizing, what we actually know about the body’s innermost workings is only rudimentary, at best. This may account for the abysmal failure of drug therapy for degenerative conditions, which comprise 80% of all disease – arthritis, hypertension, cancer, chronic fatigue, colitis, on and on.

Nobel laureate Alexis Carrel puts it this way:

There are diseases of the stomach, of the heart, of the nervous system, etc., but in illness the body preserves the same unity as in health. It is sick as a whole. No disturbance remains strictly confined to a single organ. Physicians have been led to consider each disease as a specialty by the old anatomical conception of the human being. Only those who know man both in his parts and in his entirety are capable of understanding him when he is sick.

– Man, The Unknown p79

History’s most famous nurse had an even simpler opinion:

The specific disease doctrine is the grand refuge of weak, uncultured, unstable minds, such as now rule in the medical profession. There are no specific diseases; there are specific disease conditions.
– Florence Nightingale, 1860

One of the finest surgeons of his day, Carrel (p75) explains the profound and fundamental difference between the body and a machine, by naming the bridge which allopathy will never cross: embryology. Huh? That’s right. All the cells of the adult body evolved from the union of two original cells, and therefore share a common DNA, a common version of life. The OJ Simpson trial has acquainted the lay public with the implications of DNA identity from the minutest traces. Because of this commonality among the cells of one person’s body, even if the cells are found in totally different tissues, there is a communication and a connection at levels about which science can only guess, at this time. Machines have parts which are made of many different substances, possibly collected from a variety of locations across the face of the earth. The parts of the body all came from exactly the same place and have exactly the same genetic blueprint. No machine can know itself, repair itself, or replicate itself. No machine ever built a human.

THE GERM THEORY

The idea here is that bugs from somewhere outside the body invade it and make it sick and require certain drugs to make the body better again. In the chapter on antibiotics we will see why this idea became so popular so fast. Starting with Louis Pasteur, then to Alexander Fleming, down to modern chemotherapy and the quest for the Holy Grail cure for AIDS, we find that rich rewards have always motivated those licensed to manufacture, sell, and prescribe THEORETICAL cures for disease. Not real actual cures, but drugs that are supposed to cure diseases, because that’s the theory. The Germ Theory. The promise of untold riches then enlisted the opinion makers, those who decide what spin to put on reality – the main ones today being the editors of the New York Times and the Washington Post, the Tavistock Institute, United Press International and Associated Press, who set the tone for the rest of the country. (Ruesch, Coleman, Horowitz)

That’s how we know what the drugs are supposed to do. Because we read it in the newspaper, or a magazine or worse yet, in an AD in the newspaper or magazine. Unsurpassable dog-wagging, par excellence.

Holistic doctors like Dr. Dean Black explain that viruses don’t cause flu any more than freeways cause accidents. The responsible variable for getting the flu is not the presence or absence of virus, but rather the strength or weakness of the individual’s immune resistance. (Health At the Crossroads p18) Obviously two people can be living with the same sick person who has the flu. The virus has the same access to both people, but only the weak one will get the flu. They both got exposed to the virus, and that’s the point: the virus doesn’t cause the flu. A depressed immune system does. The terrain, not the germ, as Pasteur himself finally admitted on his deathbed, when there were no more awards or money to be gained.

MILITARY VS. NURTURING

[See p.12] … enemy pathogens, radium implants, palladium implants, cut out the diseased organ, conquer bacteria, gain victory over illness, annihilate the bad cells, on and on. Except for the 40 years of antibiotic success, now coming to a conclusion, the military approach hasn’t been that successful.

Media hype always talks about the progress we’re making and that “breakthrough” cures are right around the corner, but in reality our nation’s health is one of the worst of all industrialized countries in the world, as we will see. Our infant mortality is appalling. We are #22 on the world list. John Robbins cites that babies in the U.S. have a better chance of survival if they are born in taxicabs than if they make it to the hospital! (Robbins, p. 302)

Cancer incidence, heart disease, and now infectious disease rates are all on the rise in the U.S., when the raw data is confronted. (Chapter 17)

We’re not winning, we’re not overcoming disease. Worse yet, the eradication of disease was never even a goal of organized medicine. Too many natural cures have been suppressed and buried over the past 75 years to entertain the illusion that the goal of medicine is health. (The Cancer Industry) The goal of medicine is more medicine, i.e., wealth. It is a market-driven industry, and any idea that stands in the way of profit is fair game for persecution and attack. This story is told in some detail in works by Ralph Moss and Leonard Horowitz, among many others.

Nurturing, by contrast, is a holistic concept. It means employing methods which are gentle, minute, and slow acting, working to support the innate systems of the body instead of arrogantly overpowering them.

Holistic foods and supplements try to match the low intensity of the natural healing efforts of the body. We’re talking low tech here; less is more. A nurturing approach to heart disease, for example, would be a cleansing diet, low in dairy and harmful fats, along with gentle antioxidant and enzymeA protein that speeds up chemical reactions in the body. supplements to help break down arterial plaque. Holistic methods never have harmful side effects. They work to detox the system, on the cellular level, and support cell nutrition, using whole food vitamins, minerals, enzymes, live foods, and selected herbs. In this way the disease condition is naturally, gradually rejected and not allowed to co-exist in the vitalizing, healing biological terrain.

DRUGS V. FOOD

Dr. Dean Black talks about two things that happen every time we take a drug:

• what the drug does to the body
• how the body adapts to the drug.

This is called the Bi-Phasic Effect. For example, there are two main types of heart drugs: beta blockers and calcium channel blockers, but they both do the same thing: inhibit the heart muscle from “pumping too hard.” That’s the first phase: block the muscle. What happens next is the body’s response: it slows down. The body’s overall oxygen demands haven’t changed, but the drug is preventing those demands from being met. The tissues can’t get the oxygen they need for normal cell nutrition, so they stop building and they stop repairing normally, as the body learns that it’s not going to be getting any more oxygen from the blood. That’s Phase Two. Result: gradual overall loss of strength, tissue breakdown. Ever know any people who got healthier or stronger or got completely better while they were taking heart medication?

[See p.14] …the pancreas shuts down totally since it no longer senses any sugar in the blood which would require it to make insulin. Short-term benefit, long-term weakening.

A third example: chemotherapy. The theory of this powerful toxin for “attacking” tumors is the illusion used as The Closer every time the procedure is sold to a frightened, panicked cancer patient: that this poison will kill the tumor. Two problems with that. First, no chemotherapy has ever been invented that is specific for the tumor. The whole body is poisoned. That’s why people get sick, lose their hair, and their digestive systems. Second problem is exactly the Bi-Phasic Effect: the tumor regresses a little, but when the chemo wears off, the tumor returns with a vengeance. By now many, many people have had some family experience with this phenomenon. Know what we’re talking about? (CANCER)

Medical history up until the late 1800s is a long list of bizarre, toxic poisons, with a healthy sprinkling of incantation and superstition for good measure. An amazing chronicle by Morris Bealle documents a pharmacopeia of wacky concoctions that allopaths through the ages tricked their gullible patients into swallowing:

• pigeon dung
• grasshopper sputum
• antimony (a poison)
• pitch
• nutmeg
• dried beetles (given to George Washington the night he died)
• hog’s lice
• sheep droppings
• dried skunk bellies
• powdered fox lungs
• powdered human skull
• viper’s flesh
• human urine
• saliva from a fasting person
• lead
• mercury
• rhinoceros skin
• putrid elephant flesh

– Bealle, p154 ff

This is just a partial list. Makes Shakespeare’s reference to “eye of newt and toe of frog” in Macbeth appealing by comparison. The above items were mainstays of practice, not weird oddities somebody looked up. About half the items on this list are from a Pharmacopeia that is less than two hundred years old, so it’s not all from the Dark Ages. But look at the modern similarities:

• gold salts for rheumatoid arthritis – only recently given up
• Premarin, the #1 synthetic estrogen drug in the world, made from horse urine!
• vaccines still made from pus from horses, cows, sheep,
  rabbits and monkeys (Horowitz)
• synthetic cyanocobalamin (Vit. B12) from deactivated
  sewage
• vast majority of pharmaceuticals derived from coal tar and petroleum (Bealle)
• chemotherapy drugs from nitrogen mustard
  (like the poison gas)
• the 4,000 poisons tested to find the 50 or so modern
  chemotherapy drugs (Moss)

How far have we really progressed?

Pharmaceutical drugs artificially alter the systems of the body in one of two primary ways:

• slow down system operations
• accelerate system operations.

Does this have anything to do with a return to health? Rarely.

[See p. 16] In Morris Bealle’s amazing narrative, we find that the idea of JD Rockefeller to create an entire industry of “medicines” from industrial waste heaps – this notion was inspired by his father William Rockefeller, way back in the 1860s. The original snake oil salesman complete with travelling wagon, “Old Bill” used to sell country people bottles of raw petroleum as a cure for cancer! (Bealle p5) A New York farmer, William had himself listed as a physician in the Cleveland directory when he moved there from upstate in 1850. (Chernow)

OLD BILL AND NUJOL

The bottled petroleum was variously hawked as a cure for liver problems, cholera, TB, bronchitis, and of course, cancer. Rockefeller called the product Nujol. It cost $2 a barrel to make Nujol from crude petroleum. Incredibly, this product continued to be manufactured and sold until the late 1940s by a branch of Standard Oil called Stanco, Inc. in New York. At one point they actually added carotene to Nujol because someone figured out that drinking this crude petroleum derivative depleted the body of vitamins! Royal Copeland, health commissioner of New York City, made a fortune selling Nujol on the radio, and later became a US Senator. (Bealle)

Most modern pharmaceuticals are made from coal tar and petroleum derivatives, as well as are many over the counter “medicines,” like Vaseline Petroleum Jelly, and also many synthetic supplements. So there is a natural historical progression from William Rockefeller’s Nujol to JD Rockefeller’s drug empire, in all its convoluted intertwinings, linking coal, railroads, oil, and gasoline with medical education, drug manufacturing, the insurance cartel, and international banking. Before the antitrust decision of 1911, Rockefeller controlled 90% of the country’s oil industry. This is the subject of Chernow’s work: Titan: The Life of John D Rockefeller. Oil to drugs, oil to drugs – for them, it was a natural.

THE POLITICS OF HEALTH

Let’s go back a little further. Since the time of the earliest shamans and witch doctors and healers, it became apparent that the control of health and sickness was a position of power. [See p. 17]

What happened? How did the allopathic drug-and-surgery approach gain such an ascendancy over holistic medicine in such a short time? Why do people today think that only pharmaceutical drugs and expensive, dangerous hospital procedures and surgeries are the only “scientific” health care? Because one school of thought competed for acceptance, and ultimately gained the upper hand, by the usual means: representing the big money, lobbying for influence, patronage, kickbacks, hiding the failures, and extolling the successes, and most of all, by controlling the publishing industry and the lawmakers.

Allopathic mindset controls American health care today. The largest medical budget in the history of the world – $1.2 trillion per year – is controlled by powerful interests who have a drug for every symptom and multiple drugs for every illness. The story of how allopathic power gained ascendancy over natural healing methods is a fascinating, colorful story, perhaps one of the best-kept secrets of modern times. The story has been kept out of mainstream media and therefore out of mainstream awareness. But the evidence is there, right below the surface and can be uncovered with just a little research and persistence. For more historical background, please refer to the chapter on antibiotics.

SHORT VERSION OF WHY THINGS STAY THIS WAY

Down through the decades, clear-thinking authors who can’t be bought are routinely suppressed and forgotten, “dashed to bits on the rocks,” as Goethe would put it. Henry Lindlahr, JH Tilden, Antoine Bechamp, Edward Howell, Harvey Wiley, Weston Price, Gunter Enderlein, Max Gerson, Royal Lee, Alexis Carrel, Otto Warburg, Stan Bynum – who knows these names today? These guys were some of the finest doctors who ever drew breath, for the simple reason that they really lived in pursuit of health for their patients, not money and fame for themselves or new ways of brainwashing people to act as guinea pigs for the latest drugs. In general, their work was buried with them. The boys who were running things, with profit as their only goal, had no use for doctors whose main concern was the health of their patients.

Today health is not the focus of health care. With Managed Care taking over in the 90s, the whole system is no longer run by doctors. It's run by corporate execs, MBAs, trained to one objective: profit. Today the researcher who advances is the one who comes up with new drugs or new tests or new “proof” for existing drugs. Today the name of the game is Crowd Control. An art mastered.

A very powerful summary of how the Whole Enchilada was set up may be found in a 1992 masterwork that is already out of print and difficult to find: The Naked Empress by Hans Ruesch. It is no accident that this book and its predecessor Slaughter of the Innocent cannot be found in bookstores at the mall. Ruesch tells the story that the puppeteers don’t want people to know about, with meticulous documentation and undeniable backup. It is the story of the original alliance among

• the German and American chemical giants
• the Swiss and American pharmaceutical giants
• the Rockefeller/Hearst media and publication empire
• and supporting acts like the AMA, Congress, the FDA,
  the FTC, British Parliament, and the WHO

Morris Bealle further explains how Rockefeller saw his chance to shape the entire infrastructure

• by standardizing the content of medical education throughout the country
• by giving huge grants to the major drug companies
• by taking control of Hearst’s publishing empire, which was then on the verge of bankruptcy

WINDOW OF OPPORTUNITY

When looking at the evolution of the American “health care” system, we see that an opportunity arose, never before available to any other gang in history. From the beginning, organized medicine, i.e.:

• Rockefeller oil interests
• medical education
• hospital groups
• medical doctors
• drug companies
• and the AMA

sought to be exclusionary of all other health care systems, and to destroy them whenever possible. No monopoly of this magnitude had ever been possible before on such a scale. Why? Medicine was something that could be used, that could be plugged right into the colossal Rockefeller infrastructure and be fed by the imponderable financial and political resources available to the greatest fortune ever assembled in the history of the world at that time. It couldn’t miss!

Were people less healthy 100 years ago? Not really. Cancer was practically unknown in the 1800s, with an incidence of less than 5 per 100,000. Heart disease had a similar incidence: the word “heart attack” was unknown. Degenerative diseases were a tiny fraction of what they are today. Infectious diseases, like smallpox and tuberculosis, that had been the scourge of the human race for so many centuries were on the decline, long before mass inoculations were required, primarily because of improvements in sanitation. (Michael Alderson)

During most of the past 100 years now, the prevailing allopathic view has been able to convince people that it is normal to be born in a hospital, get an array of childhood diseases that require treatment with drugs and vaccines, experience any number of mysterious “growing pains” until maturity, then gradually begin a process of degeneration and decline, punctuated by the appearance of specific “diseases” which each demands one or more drugs to “keep it under control,” experience any number of mysterious “old age” pains, and then finally when the body has endured all these diseases, it ultimately collapses in decay and ruination, a victim of its ‘natural’ course of decline.

The allopathic view has convinced American women that menopause is a medical condition, that childbirth is a medical emergency, and that the uterus and the ovaries have no use after child-bearing years. The allopathic view has convinced parents that antibiotics should be given to children at the slightest sign of a cold, even though there are no drugs for viral infections, which cause the vast majority of colds. The allopathic view has convinced most people that death itself is a medical emergency, a medical condition that must be monitored, controlled, and regulated; in America today people may not die without their doctor’s permission, because so many procedures may be billed for right up to the end. The gateways to and from life itself seem to have been claimed as the private property and domain of one special type of health care.

All these ideas are insane.

WHY ARE DRUGS ALWAYS SYNTHETIC CHEMICALS?

The word synthetic in this context means two simultaneous things:

• manmade
• found nowhere in nature

If a natural substance, such as the progesterone found in the wild yam, for example, is found to have some therapeutic value, a chemical copy of it will be derived, usually from completely unnatural, synthetic chemical sources. Despite its obvious therapeutic superiority, the natural compound itself will virtually never be used by drug companies, for one and only one reason: it is not patentable.

This is the central focus of the entire pharmaceutical industry: patentability. Huge profits only come from a product for which ownership can be claimed. If a compound occurs naturally, it is easily available and inexpensive, and no one can say he invented it. To understand this simple idea is to get a first glimpse of the most controlled, organized system of legislated drugging in the history of the world. Fortunes are amassed at the expense of our national health, our individual health, our children’s health, and the lives of those hundreds of thousands who die every year from prescription drugs.

[See p. 23]

Great care was taken to camouflage big German money tied up with Rockefeller interests, what with WWII in full swing. But Bealle tells one unforgettable story that leaves no doubt of the alliance. (p9) Right before the American invasion of Germany, American bombers were flying nightly raids on Germany’s big industrial cities. American aviators were under strict orders to ‘surgically’ protect the huge IG Farben chemical plant in the middle of Frankfurt. Indeed, when our grounds troops went in, they found the plant untouched, even though all around it, the rest of Frankfurt was in total devastation from thousands and thousands of American bombs.

Think of the power behind such an order – from the industrialists to the Cabinet to the military commanders to the pilots.

After the war, the real gravy train began between the chemical and the pharmaceuticals industries, as orchestrated by the Rockefeller organization. Huge endowments were made to some 200 major drug companies by the Rockefeller circle (Ruesch), among them:

• Lever Brothers
• Colgate Palmolive
• Procter & Gamble
• Sterling Drug
• Swift & Company
• Miles Laboratories
• Bristol Meyers

– Bealle, p 31

As the war was winding down, Operation Paperclip was set into motion under Henry Kissinger – a program of smuggling the best scientific minds of the Third Reich into the U.S., giving them new identities and new positions in American biomedicine and science. (Horowitz)

Bealle lists the following universities endowed by Rockefeller between 1915 and 1945:

• Harvard Medical School
• Johns Hopkins
• Stanford
• Columbia University
• Duke
• Tufts
• New York University
• Cornell

With all this money floating around, it is notable that in all this century, not one dime of all Rockefeller’s billions was ever given to a school or a researcher involved with natural healing methods, those that did not sell drugs.

Any more questions why drugs are always synthetic chemicals? These are interlocking empires. Bealle goes on further to list the directors of many of these drug companies, chemical companies, universities, and banking institutions and shows what a spider’s web can be drawn. The set-up is very complex, but with an overriding control. This chapter only hints at the extent of the forces involved. The reader is directed to Ruesch and Bealle and Horowitz for a reality check you won’t find in Reader’s Digest.

SIDE EFFECTS

Just another Medspeak term. Chemicals don’t have side effects in the human body; they just have effects. Using the term ‘side effect’ is pretending that the drug actually had the one main effect it was supposed to have, and all these other responses are just extraneous, minor reactions. The body doesn’t think like that. All its systems work together in a complex symphony of sophisticated chemical reactions and defenses. When a drug comes in, everything happens at once: most of the energy is expended trying to neutralize the drug and to isolate it and get rid of it. The reason for this is simple: drugs don’t cure disease. No matter what you read, diseases are not drug deficiencies. In the body, drugs are simply toxic, foreign chemicals.

According to the Journal of the American Medical Association, Apr 1998, side effects to prescription drugs are now at least the FOURTH leading cause of death in the United States! (Lazarou) This amazing study escaped the attention of mainstream media, for obvious reasons. The researchers did a meta-analysis, comparing 39 different studies of drug side effects. This was only the second meta-analysis ever done in mortality from drug side effects. Their findings:

• At least 106,000 Americans die from drug reactions every year
• At least 2.21 million Americans have adverse drug reactions requiring hospitalization.

The researchers emphasized that these figures are only for drugs which are “properly prescribed and properly administered,” and only takes into account hospitalized patients! This does not even include the thousands of other deaths from wrong prescriptions and errors in administration, or patients who are at home.

The study probably does not portray an accurate picture of the true numbers involved, according to JAMA’s own editor David Bates, in an editorial appearing on p.1216 of the same issue. Why not? Because of routine underreporting of adverse incidents by hospital staff, in order to avoid scrutiny from regulators and patient attorneys. Stands to reason. Bates actually estimates that as few as 1 in 20 adverse drug reactions actually gets reported! Using stats like that could easily make adverse drugs reactions the #1 cause of death in the US, which may actually be true. But since there’s really no way to track it, they backed off and just stuck with fourth place. And this is JAMA, not the Chiropractic Report or some New Age newsletter from Santa Cruz.

Different studies give different figures. The famous Ralph Nader study of 1993 put the figure at 168,000, saying the same thing, that this was a minimum estimate. Whatever the figures, we’re starting to get the idea that drugs may not be conducive to longevity.

Any doctor will tell you that all drugs have side effects. What he may not tell you is that most drugs have only side effects. Except for life-threatening conditions, most drugs impose an additional burden upon the body which usually hinders its efforts to cleanse itself. Rarely is it a good trade to exchange the side effect for the shaky, short-term benefit of a body on drugs.

Another problem is cross side effects, also called interactions. Let’s say a person is taking medications for two separate conditions, each being treated by a separate physician. The side effects of the two drugs together may not be simply additive – just piling on top of each other.
They may be geometric – meaning that in the presence of the second drug, the first drug’s side effects are multiplied by a factor of many times. The result may be death.

In an article called “Deadly Drug Duos” the author gives several examples of potentially fatal interactions:

• Viagra + nitroglycerine = death
• Warfarin (an anticoagulant, or blood thinner) + NSAIDS
  (Tylenol, Advil, etc.) = internal bleeding
• Tagamet + digoxin (a heart drug) = heart attack
• Erythromycin + Halcion (antidepressant) = overdose
• Erythromycin (a common antibiotic) + Seldane (an
  antihistamine) = heart attack

This combination killed so many people that Seldane was finally removed from the market in Dec 97.

[See p.26]
What does the Hippocratic Oath really mean, when you reflect that Hippocrates, the Father of Medicine himself said,

“I will give no deadly medicine to anyone if asked, nor suggest any such counsel.”

Anyone ever look at the Physicians’ Desk Reference? 3200 pages of side effects. There seems to be some conflict here, what do you think?

FAIR WARNING? INSERT THIS

The newest trick in the Deniability Department is the insert. Here's how it works: there are so many side effects and so many new drugs coming out that doctors cannot possibly keep up with all the data. Many drugs have deadly effects if used in combination with other drugs, or if used on people who have certain conditions. So the FDA has given the drug companies a break, which is the quite the same as saying they're giving themselves a break, because the FDA members ARE the drug companies. They have decreed that if the manufacturer prints all the dangerous information – the side effects, interactions, and other warnings – in a #1 font on a tiny piece of paper that folds up into the bottle of drugs – this constitutes Fair Warning. Oh yes, and the manufacturer must also send each doctor a letter telling about the insert.

The problem is that less than 1% of physicians ever read the insert! (Rubin) Four major drugs had to be pulled off the market in the past two years because too many people were dying who would not have died had the physician read the insert. These drugs are:

• Rezulin
• Posicor
• Duract
• Propulsid

The last of these remained on the market until Aug 2000, even though many deaths had occurred from its use. The same happened with the other three drugs – they remained on the market for up to a year after FDA had found out that people were dying by taking them. Why?

“There are very strong economic and political pressures when a company has spent hundreds of millions of dollars to develop a drug.”
– Jerry Avorn, Brigham and Women's Hospital, Boston
USA Today,, 3 May 00

Always the money – what a shock.

These drugs represent a pattern of economic behavior that now controls FDA policy: i.e., as long as all the complicated instructions are in microprint on the label insert, the drug will be put out on the market, even though it may cause liver failure, aplastic anemia, heart failure, or death. Then when enough people have died or have required liver transplants or other serious interventions, the drug is SCHEDULED to be pulled off the market. And then months or a year later, the drug actually comes off the market. (Rubin) But often only the domestic market – the drug may still be sold abroad!

This insane system is actually the vehicle by which so many drugs come and go every year in the American drug market.

THE SECRET HORROR OF DRUG RESEARCH

In Chapter 16 on synthetic estrogen, HRT you will read about the barbaric, infernal torture to which millions of horses continue to be subject at this time, in the preparation of the dangerous and unproven drug Premarin.

In sales, this is one of the top five drugs in the U.S. – a billion dollars per year. Reading that chapter and then checking its sources, the reader is better prepared to suspect the truth of the prodigious research conducted by Hans Ruesch and presented in his books Naked Empress and Slaughter of the Innocent.

Ruesch proves with hundreds of references that the standard research method in the pharmaceutical industry, since the time of Louis Pasteur and Claude Bernard, has been vivisection. Vivisection is a collective term that means the cutting and poisoning and shocking and beating and starving and decapitating and denervating and any other torture that man has ever devised, of defenseless animals, for “medical research.” No anesthetic. We call them “laboratory animals” so that we can pretend they are somehow lesser beings than our own household pets.

With unrelenting data, Ruesch tells the shocking story of how animal research has always been the Prime Alibi for testing drugs, for the past century. It’s a regulatory, legal thing – before drugs can be approved by the FDA, they have to be “tested” for certain periods of time and to certain specifications. And since these are potentially toxic chemicals, we wouldn’t want to test them on humans, now would we?

So that leaves animals: rats, horses, dogs, mice, cats, monkeys, apes, etc. Millions and millions of all these species have been sliced, diced, caged, poisoned, etc. in specific “studies” which have specific “conditions” that will supposedly teach us all about a drug and what it will do to a human once it is approved and marketed. We are brainwashed to accept such a set-up with mindless mantras like “better sacrifice a rat than a child” etc.

Ruesch exposes the follies and fallacies of the whole monstrous system, with facts and principles which cannot be challenged. In the first place, animal physiology is entirely different from human. No one in his right mind would give a household pet a human drug, because it might kill the animal or make it sick, right? And why is that? Different physiologies. Ruesch gives example after example of substances that are harmless to animals but fatal to humans, and vice versa. That much is obvious.

Next, Ruesch explains about the money. It’s billions, and it’s all over the place. It’s in procurement of the animals from nature, or raising them in the labs. It’s in research grants for drug “testing.” It’s in medical publications. It’s in careers for hundreds of thousands of researchers. It’s in sweetheart arrangements with regulating agencies, who control a drug’s approval. It’s in politics, and legal arrangements which control drugs and their “safety” and “proof of efficacy.” It’s in the billions in profit a drug company can make once a drug has been approved and effectively marketed. It’s in advertising. It’s in medical education and training.

It’s in vaccines.

Any moron knows that animal testing of drugs for humans is meaningless and a waste of time because of different physiologies. This simple fact is borne out by the dozens of drugs that are taken off the market every year once it becomes impossible to hide the number of deaths and side effects occurring in humans. Ruesch cites many researchers who state the exact same thing – that the tests they have conducted are irrelevant to the effect of a drug on humans. They also state how the same tests are often conducted over and over, year after year, killing more and more animals, even though the outcomes are already known. Redundancy, legal CYA stuff. Or else just padding or extending a research grant.

NOT NICE TO FOOL WITH MOTHER NATURE

What is less commonly known, but becoming more and more undeniable, is that nature is beginning to balance itself, to reciprocate, to retaliate against us for having gone against her for so many decades by killing all these innocent animals. To cite just one example, there’s SV-40. For the complete story, look in Chapter 2 – The Sanctity of Human Blood ( VACCINES ). SV-40 is a virus which is normal in monkeys, but not in man. Different physiology, remember? In the 1950s, polio vaccines were being prepared how? In Africa, using the kidneys of 50,000 monkeys. Those monkey kidneys had SV-40, which never bothered the monkeys. But though we may be descended from the ape, we have evolved major differences in physiology. Researchers estimate a minimum of 10 million doses of that polio vaccine were given to people before anyone even knew what SV-40 was. (Horowitz) SV-40 has a latency period in humans of about 25 years. So let’s see, what new disease popped up in the human species in the 1980s, which now is present in some 30 million people? (See Horowitz)

THE STANDARD COVER-UP: THE INFILTRATORS

Now PC tells us how uncool it is to be mean to animals. In some places you can be arrested for shooting a cat with a BB gun. Hollywood actors get a lot of mileage protesting this or that animal cause or spotted owl crisis, or this or that media event. [See p. 28]

Ruesch points out how anti-vivisectionist views are dealt with by the Thought Police who control publications and media in this country. First of all, his books, which are pivotal works in the area of drugs and animal testing, are out of print and can only be found with difficulty. Big surprise.

But worse, Ruesch shows how those whose fortunes are dependent on vivisection – the systematic killing of lab animals – have insidiously infiltrated the animal rights organizations and de-fused them by a very effective method. (p 39) These infiltrators ally themselves with the anti-vivisectionists. And since they are better trained and better funded, they beat the real animal rights people at their own game. The infiltrators pretend they’re on the side of the poor animals, and they actually disagree with animal experimentation in every way except medical. From a moral standpoint, from an ethical standpoint, from an economic standpoint, these phony “animal rights” people will object to animal experimentation. But they’re very well trained, and they will never object from a medical standpoint. They won’t talk about different physiologies, and endless repetition of tests and falsified data and how the test outcomes don’t mean anything. That way when the mainstream speakers come in and talk about how animals are humanely treated, and always put to sleep painlessly, and how important it is to test animals instead of people, most listeners will just be confused and figure that animal testing is a necessary evil, if they care at all in the first place. In this way the real issues of mass torture and mutilation which continue year after year, are never brought forward. It is brilliant.

In the movie Wall Street, Gordon Gekko tells Bud that he should always remember something about WASPS. They love animals, but they hate people. Maybe Gordo should stick to LBO’s.

Just because we invented Palm Pilots, violins, Honda RC30s, Best of Greens, laser surgery, and Cabo San Lucas doesn’t necessarily mean that we are the superior species on this planet, and that we can do whatever we want and get away with it. We also invented global war, AIDS, lawyers, sewage, county government, thalidomide, HMOs, Muzak, commuter lanes, and TV sitcoms.

In the area of mass murder of animals, Ruesch’s works stand alone in scope and verifiability. And they’re buried. These days few people know the whole story, and those who do simply have no platform from which they may be heard. Don’t believe this chapter at face value; follow up. Check references.

1000 ROTTING BUFFALOES

The guy they named Seattle after, Chief Sealth had his own ideas:

The white man must treat the beasts of this land as his brother. I am a savage and I do not understand the other way. I have seen a thousand rotting buffaloes on the prairies, left by the white man who shot them from a passing train….What is man without the beasts? If all the beasts were gone, man would die from great loneliness of spirit, for whatever happens to the beast, also happens to man. All things are connected. Whatever befalls the earth befalls the sons of earth.

– quoted by Dufty, p. 116

Think we’re going to get away clean? Mother Nature Always Bats Last.

FOOD,

is a much safer healing remedy than drugs, with rare exception. Hippocrates also said:

“Let food be thy medicine and medicine be thy food.”

Fairly straightforward – nothing about Prozac or fen-phen in there. Maybe they didn’t have Taco Bell in ancient Athens…Or Long’s Drugs…

With food, there is no rebound Bi-Phasic Effect. There’s only one single nurturing effect. Instead of altering body systems the way drugs do, nutrients activate and support those systems.

Don’t let’s complicate things – let’s keep it on a cellular level. Humans are groups of a few trillion or so cells. Cell membrane, cytoplasm, DNA, organelles – these are the cooperating parts of a living cell. A cell needs two things in order to operate indefinitely: nutrients and waste removal. Diminish either, and cell life is shortened. Obviously we will last only as long as our cells. Remember the famous Alexis Carrel experiment where he kept chicken liver cells alive in a petri dish for 28 years just by adding nutrients and removing wastes, every day.

So the food that we take into our mouth should contain nutrients, to feed the cells. Nutrients include vitamins, minerals, enzymes, water, oxygen – cool stuff like that. Real food has all these, carried on a framework of fiber. Thus is the cell nourished. The only wastes in our body should be cellular wastes: the by-products of cell metabolism, cell life-functions. These small waste molecules can easily be removed through the blood and lymph systems, with virtually no stress on the body. There should be no wastes left over from the food itself. Waste like that is the big problem – the cause of aging and degeneration and cell breakdown. With modern processed food, the foods of commerce, often more than half of it is indigestible, inert, clogging waste, which lodges anywhere it can:

• the joints
• the blood
• any organ
• the skin
• the colon
• the muscles

Real food nourishes and cleanses. Real medicine. No side effects; no debris left over, no toxicity.

Food is a different kind of medicine from drugs. Food is medicine we take when we’re well – in order to stay well, in order to build our reserves of immunity and resilience. Its effects are slow and mild and cumulative. Each day of health is an opportunity to load up on vitamins, minerals, enzymes, and usable nutrients and to make deposits in the Health Account. Following this paradigm, people get healthier as they get older, not sicker, the way we’ve been led to believe through Rockefeller-type media control.

Classical Chinese herbology, which is the basis for acupuncture, has always divided herbs into two groups:

• food herbs, (kingly or superior)
• medicinal herbs (assistants)

Food herbs, like echinacea, carrots, radishes, etc., can be eaten all the time, with no Bi-Phasic Effect where the body reacts. Medicinal herbs, like goldenseal and a thousand others, produce a mild controlling effect, and therefore are only to be used temporarily. (Black p87) Herbology is a very complex subject, and has been around for several millennia longer than modern synthetic pharmaceutical theory. When you hear somebody talking “about the dangers of herbs” implying they should be avoided entirely, it generally seems to be someone with no background whatsoever in herbalA product made from a plant that is thought to be useful in treating a disease or staying healthy. Herbal supplements are taken by mouth. therapy.

If we should get sick, that’s the time to stop eating and give the body a chance to catch up with its detoxification efforts. Years ago, Colorado’s famed JH Tilden, MD put it this way:

It is a crime to feed anything to the sick. No food should be given until all symptoms are gone…The life of the patient depends upon getting rid of the putrid food still remaining in the bowels, before enough putrescence is absorbed to cause death.

– Toxemia Explained p 99

…

Hippocrates himself concurs:

As in the blood, so is the man – he is just as weak, just as strong.

The big difference between foods and drugs, especially when talking about chronic, degenerative disease is that only foods can heal because only foods rely on the inner healing systems of the body by providing simple gentle, support in physiologic doses. Drugs which overpower the delicate interwoven systems of the body can never bring health long-term, because they come in huge powerful pharmacologic doses, toxic by their very nature.

THE AMERICAN MADNESS ASSOCIATION

The political branch of the allopathic powers in the U.S. is called the AMA. The American Medical Association is the second largest lobby in Washington, right behind oil. (AMA News, 8 Jun 79) Researching its history, one is taken by the idea that the AMA is not concerned with health, longevity or improved quality of life for the American people. The AMA is a political body, a trade lobby, nothing more. Its pretension in presenting itself as a synonym for the medical profession, or the power that governs American medicine is something John Robbins says would be like the American Bar Association calling itself the American Justice Association. (Robbins p96)

The AMA is a voluntary organization and has no legal authority over medical doctors. The AMA, as any trade lobby, is focused on one thing and one thing only: increased profits and power for its constituents – its members, the drug cartels and the hospital associations. The AMA is a media octopus, whose control is pervasively felt in newspaper opinions, magazines, medical journals, medical textbooks, TV, the FDA, the FTC, the insurance industry, and in especially in Congress. We’re not talking about influence here; we’re talking about control. Big difference.

Media octopus? That’s right. Every day the AMA sends one minute messages to 5,000 radio stations; every week the AMA sends news releases to some 4,000 “scientific” journalists. (Robbins, p182). JAMA is the most widely read and accepted of all U.S. medical journals, with a circulation of over 750,000. Quite a feat for a trade union publication, wouldn’t you say? Think this type of pervasive influencing has anything to do with the constant stream of “breakthrough” drugs and procedures we’re always hearing about on radio, TV, and the newspapers, disguised as hard news?

[See p33]
The AMA’s first real leader, Morris Fishbein, never graduated from medical school and never practiced medicine a day in his life. His credentials were all political. (Bealle) His focus was simple: end medical freedom in the U.S. Any natural cure, or holistic therapies that did not involve the sale of pharmaceuticals or the advancement of surgery were suppressed, maligned, and actively persecuted by Fishbein’s attack dogs – the FDA and the FTC. For decades holistic healers and cures were vilified and crushed. That story is told in some detail in Lisa’s Assault on Medical Freedom, and also in Bealle’s The Drug Story. This is a dark chapter in mankind’s history; the more you find out about it the less you want to know. It’s not really paranoia or fostering negativity but more a spirit of history that pushes us to try and understand the forces in play today, and the fundamental upheaval that strives to achieve some equilibrium from the treachery of the past.

It was Fishbein who arranged the marriage of the medical profession to the tobacco industry, which cozy liaison was to last some forty years. Mr. Fishbein along with Philip Morris, set up the program of cigarette advertising in JAMA which lasted for over 20 years. Also found in old issues of any popular magazine, like Life and Time in the 30s, 40s and 50s, these ads have medical doctors constantly extolling the various benefits of tobacco: good digestion, relaxation, on and on. Ads like

nine out of ten doctors recommend ______ cigarettes

were ubiquitous, as any old timer can tell you.

Here’s an ad run in the Journal of the American Medical Association in 1933:

Patients with coughs were instructed to change to Philip Morris cigarettes. In three out of four cases the coughs disappeared entirely.

Even after studies in 1925 and again in 1938 very clearly showed the link between tobacco and cancer, Fishbein continued to run the ad campaign for many years. (Robbins, 204) That is power. For this favor Fishbein was paid more per year than his salary as director of the AMA. (Rorty)

In Chapter 11 of Reclaiming Our Health, John Robbins has masterfully summarized the meretricious partnership between medicine and tobacco.

Even with lung cancer leading the list of cancers in America today, it’s still easy to see the power of the tobacco/medical industry by reading the disclaimers in cigarette ads. Remember just a few years ago where they had to put “The Surgeon General has determined that smoking is dangerous to your health”? Notice how that has been recently downgraded to the current:

Surgeon General’s Warning: Quitting Smoking Now Greatly Reduces Serious Risks to Your Health

These words are very carefully chosen, and change with the winds of politics and compromise. What’s next? “Surgeon General says you really shouldn’t smoke”?

In 1963, the AMA formed the little club which they called “The Committee on Quackery,” [See p. 36]

…
It’s still taking place today with the ongoing 1998 Koren case, in which the Federal Trade Commission, as a front for “unidentified” parties, is trying to change what chiropractic has been for the past 100 years and to muzzle chiropractors from describing the proven benefits of their art. The FTC will probably lose, but with the unlimited funds of the taxpayers’ dollars, the FTC really doesn’t care whether it wins or not. The allopathic political goal is the same as it has always been: to harass and eliminate the purveyors of holistic medicine – anyone involved in the health care field who does not employ drugs and surgery. After this lawsuit is settled, they’ll certainly come up with something else – it hasn’t changed since 1847.

UNSCIENTIFIC? GET SOME NEW MATERIAL!

Allopathic medicine has always criticized holistic medicine with the same complaint down through the years, persisting intact to the present time: the same thing over and over – alternative medicine is unscientific, unproven, not supported by controlled clinical trials, undocumented in peer-reviewed journals, and anecdotal. They don’t really say Alternative doesn’t work; just that it’s unproven. What this implies of course is that mainstream allopathy is objectively scientific and proven by clinical research.

There are two big problems with such claims:

1. it’s apples and oranges
2. “science” is really not that scientific

Apples and oranges. Two different things, totally different paradigms. Alternative medicine is not just a different way to cure the diseases we might get. It is not competing with anyone in the Disease Care market. Holistic medicine doesn’t cure diseases. It promotes a healthy condition which is not conducive to disease, by purifying the biological terrain, to allow the body to express its natural potential. All the time.

Healthy people don’t get sick. No colds, no headaches, no arthritis, no diabetes, no heart disease, no cancer… they don’t get sick. Holistic medicine doesn’t wait around for some disease or other to show up. Holistic medicine is something you do every day whether you feel good or bad. It’s not a cure – it’s a lifestyle. Improved quality of life.

Dean Black talks about empirical data being just as valid as controlled studies. Empirical means that what is commonly apparent and successful over a number of years does not need to be “proven.”

Here’s an example: For centuries, horse owners have customarily put goldfish in their horses’ watering troughs in order to keep algae from forming. Now, no one may have ever conducted formal studies to prove it works, but anyone with a brain in his head knows empirically that the water stays cleaner and has to be changed less often if goldfish are kept in the troughs.

Much of allopathy is also empirical. Aspirin, for example. Probably the most common drug in the world, but it has never been proven in scientific trials. Controlled tests for aspirin’s effectiveness have never been done. But it’s a drug, with very consistent results: 20,000 tons of aspirin are consumed every year. (Limits to Medicine)

For that matter, surgery itself has never been subjected to clinical trials! It’s just a tradition – empirical. And with modern elective, exploratory surgeries and the latest ‘prophylactic’ surgeries (not the Trojan kind; the just-in-case kind), the mood seems now to be frivolous, cavalier about whacking off this or that body part.

In a different way, the strength of holistic methods often lies in their empirically demonstrable value. Chiropractic, for one, has been around for over 100 years, with millions of people being cared for. The benefits of spinal correction are easily shown and easily understood. Chiropractic doesn’t have to be “proven” except to a defense lawyer or someone with a political agenda to attack it. Same way with acupuncture. The 12 meridians and the thousands of herbs employed by acupuncturists – none of this has been “proven” by strict “scientific” studies. After 4000 years, acupuncture is still around, and people still choose it as a helpful treatment. Also for the minute dilutions employed by homeopathic medicine – these have never been written up in NEJM after double blind studies showed their effectiveness.

Allopathic posturing pretends that all drugs and procedures have been thoroughly tested in objective scientific research studies, which guarantees both safety and effectiveness. There are some basic problems with such a wish.

First of all, in the “controlled” study, scientists pretend they are testing some drug by isolating just one single variable, and holding all other factors the same, in order to prove the effectiveness of the drug. The only way to do this is to place the subjects in a position of uncertainty and helplessness: the “double-blind” study. That means that supposedly neither the researchers nor the subjects know who’s getting the drug and who’s getting the placebo sugar pill. The point is, the whole structure of such a design is flawed. Why? Because we’re dealing with the innate healing systems of the human body. It doesn’t respond normally in a situation of helplessness and uncertainty. That’s not its normal condition. That’s not how people live their lives. So the outcomes of such artificial situations as the sacred double blind study are going to be essentially meaningless when applied to the normal everyday physiology of a healthy human.

Rene' Dubos saw through this mirage back in 1957:

Ideally, the experimenter works in a closed system, affected only by the determinants that he has introduced, under the conditions he has selected. Naturally, however, events never occur in a closed system. They are determined and modified by circumstances and forces that cannot be foreseen, let alone controlled.
– The Mirage of Health

That’s the first problem.

Then there’s the problem of the politics of reporting data. Fraud in reporting of data used in medical journal articles is rampant. John Braithwaite, MD, a UN researcher and the author of a study entitled “Corporate Crime in the Pharmaceutical Industry” has meticulously documented the indigenous type of phony data associated with “studies” in many countries, even those that are reported in the “peer-reviewed” journals:

“Data fabrication is so widespread, that it is called ‘making’ in the Japanese pharmaceutical industry, and ‘graphiting’ or ‘dry labeling’ in the United States…Pharmaceutical companies face great temptations to mislead health authorities about the safety of their products….Inquiries into scientific fraud in the US have shown that there is a substantial problem of safety testing of drugs in the US, just as has been documented in Japan.”

You don’t even have to think about it to realize why. A drug company may spend $100 million and five years doing testing to try and get a drug approved by the FDA. Since they are paying for the “research” themselves, guess what happens to data that is coming out unfavorable to their expectations? Often the study is cancelled. With the researchers trying to get funding for the next phase of research – are they going to be rewarded for positive or negative data about the drug being studied? Which one?

CLINICAL EXPERIENCE IS ANECDOTAL

Anecdotal is another favorite word used to slam holistic medicine. Allopaths say that holistic methods are unscientific because results are simply anecdotal, meaning case by case. The real meaning of anecdotal, however, is case history. In actuality, in the practice of medicine nothing is more important than the case history. That’s how people’s lives really are affected by illness and by health; case history is what really happens to people, real people – the patients who really walk in the door. The point here is that actual case histories cannot be controlled by studies bought and paid for by those whose interests are best served by a certain outcome. “Scientific” studies and reporting can be controlled by political and economic consideration – unwanted research topics never get funding; unwanted data often is ignored or not reported. By contrast, patients who actually walk in the door are not subjects in a research project.

Hundreds of case histories, anecdotal individual cases, year after year accumulate to give a doctor the most valuable source of information possible: clinical observation. The years of experience and clinical observation – these are not to be trivialized as something intrinsically inferior to the “real science” that gets published in medical journals.

Mainstream medicine may use this “anecdotal” ploy not only against holistic ideas, but also against any medical ideas or research that is beginning to stray outside the fold of Pharmaceutical Economics. New ideas are not welcome until the Angle has been figured out. For now, just remember this – the word “anecdotal” is a red flag that means “probable snowjob ahead.”

SCIENTIFIC?

At least 100,000 deaths a year from prescription drugs that were correctly prescribed and administered – wait a minute. All these drugs are tested by randomized, double blind controlled clinical trials, right? So they’re all “scientifically proven” to work, right? Employing the most rigorous of scientific testing procedures, only the drugs that have made it through all that are allowed to be put on the market, right? So what’s all this posturing about, that alternative medicine isn’t reproducible in clinical trials, LIKE REAL MEDICINE IS. Here we have the finished products of their own scientific processes, so I want to know, why are 160 of them taken off the market every year only to be replaced by about the same number? And why are they killing all these people? Many are starting to notice this!

Here’s a recent example. The FDA recently approved a new vaccine for Lyme Disease. (M2 Presswire 12/23/98) Only problem is, they’re admitting it’s only 50% effective. Now think about that! This is a new drug that has successfully passed through the whole ritual of tests and approval, and now doctors are allowed to prescribe it and sell it. At 50% efficacy! What about the other 50%? But this vaccine is now “scientifically” tested! No wonder side effects of correctly prescribed prescription drugs is now the FOURTH leading cause of death.

Here’s another example of science. Ciba-Geigy, the Swiss drug giant who brought Ritalin to the world, was ordered by a Tokyo court to pay $17 million in damages when it was proven that their drug Oxychinol had caused at least 100 deaths and 30,000 cases of blindness or paralysis. (Ruesch, p 18) What was the drug for? Indigestion when travelling! The drug was sold under 168 different names in Japan alone. After they were fined, Ciba-Geigy continued to market the drug all over the world! (Geneva Press Conference on SMON)

It comes down to this: if allopathic medicine is so scientific and meticulously proven, why does it have such a deplorable showing when it comes to effectiveness? How are we doing with disease? Are we getting healthier or sicker year by year? If it’s working so well why are people spending now $30 billion dollars out of their own pockets for alternatives (JAMA, Apr 98) many of which are really shaky.

Especially now, with the Internet in operation, it is getting much harder to cover up the inability of allopathic medicine to deliver the goods:

• Continual increase in degenerative diseases
• 1 in 12 babies born in America with birth defects (Lesso, p5)
• U.S is #22 in infant mortality compared with other nations
  (UNICEF)
• largest health budget in history – $1.2 trillion
• Increased numbers of deaths from cancer and heart disease
  every year (Vital Statistics 1950-1994)
• Access to non-mainstream uncontrolled media sources like the
  Internet
• Increase in iatrogenic disease and deaths (caused by hospitals)
  (Jonas, p 1616)
• Increase in deaths and complications from standard childhood vaccinations
  (Sanctity of Human Blood)

THEIR TROUGH RUNNETH OVER

Now I don’t want to belabor the idea, but it’s fundamental in any discussion of modern American health care not to get too warm and fuzzy about philosophical issues without acknowledging what really determines the direction of mainstream medical policy: profit. The Coin, not the Quonh. Today’s HMOs are no longer run by doctors; they’re run by corporate execs. As you try to understand how things could have gotten this out of hand, try and keep the following in mind:

• between 1959 and 1979 the consumer price index rose by 74%. In that same period, the cost of medical care went up by 330%
• Limits to Medicine, p.2
• in 1939, the medical budget was $3.5 billion (Carrel, p 80)
• In 1985,the medical budget was at $360 billion per year
  (Alan Levin)
• In 1991, the medical budget was at $750 billion per year
  (Alan Levin)
• In 1999, the medical budget was over $1.2 trillion per year

Ideas that get in the way of this Machine get opposed by any and every means.

WHAT DO AMERICANS DIE FROM?

Every year 2.3 million Americans cash in their chips, buy the ranch, go to meet Elvis… (Vital Statistics, 1999) Here’s why:

TOP 10 CAUSES OF DEATH IN THE U.S.

1. heart disease—- 720,000
2. cancer———- 539,000
3. stroke———- 159,000
4. pulmonary disease—109,000
5. accidents——- 95,000
6. pneumonia/influenza–84,000
7. diabetes——– 62,000
8. suicide——— 30,000
9. kidney disease—– 25,000
10. liver disease—— 25,000

Adding up these top ten causes comes to about 1.8 million. According to Vital Statistics, the standard publication of the National Health Service and the Centers for Disease Control, the other half million deaths come from miscellaneous causes like homicide, AIDS, snakebites, and less common diseases.

But watch how statistics are twisted. From the following sources, we now know that at least 400,000 deaths are caused by prescription drugs and medical error.

150,000 to 300,000 Americans are injured or killed each year because of medical negligence (i.e., mistreated diseases, surgeries, drug reactions, misprescribed drugs.)
–Wall Street Journal, Jan. 13, 1993.

Right up there with deaths from medications come deaths from medical error. Besides the 100,000 people dying from drugs every year an additional 180,000 patients die each year from medical mistakes, being injured while in the hospital, and another 1 million are injured. This is from Journal of the American Medical Association, July 5, 1995, 274:29-34.

A more recent source is the startling admission of David Lawrence, MD, the Chief Executive of the nation’s largest HMO – Kaiser Permanente. In the 15 July 1999 issue of the Oakland Tribune, Dr. Lawrence states that medical mistakes now kill some 400,000 Americans every year, more than all the deaths from alcohol, firearms and tobacco combined. (Rosenblatt)

Different sources different figures – Ralph Nader, JAMA Apr 98, JAMA, July 5, 1995, Wall St. Journal, Oakland Tribune Jul 99. But all agree on one idea: more Americans are dying of prescription drugs every year than died in the entire Vietnam War (55,000) and the Battle of Gettysburg (50,000) put together. Probably way more. Where is the objection? Where is the outcry?

Anybody clocking this? The most conservative medical estimates put the total deaths per year from prescription drugs and hospital errors together at 300,000 per year. It’s probably 10 times more, as the editor of the Apr 98 JAMA stated in his editorial on p 1216. If the number of deaths from these two causes combined is only twice as many as these lowest conservative figures, that puts medical error and drug side effect deaths as the Number One cause of death in the U.S. today, which is more than likely.

Now going back to the top ten causes of death above, see the overlap? Medical error is not even listed by Vital Statistics as a cause of death. How many of these medical mistakes and drug effects caused the heart attacks or strokes, which are listed? Nobody knows – they don’t track it. But again, it’s very possible that medical error and prescription drugs are the number one cause of death in the U.S. today, especially considering the estimate of the JAMA editor that only 10% get reported.

No wonder your grandfather doesn’t want to go to the hospital. That’s called the Survival Instinct.

A DOUBLE STANDARD

Allopaths want holistic cures to be subject to the same “rigors” of scientific testing as “real drugs” must go through.

Allopaths hope to give the impression that mainstream pharmacology and standard hospital procedures are “backed by scientific research” and are therefore not only safe, but superior to any procedures of Alternative Medicine. In this way, with the help of the legislature and the twin Doberman FDA and FTC, natural cures will be forced out of the market. $5.8 billion every year is spent reinforcing the inaccurate notion of the “scientific validity” of mainstream medicine into the public awareness: in commercials, medical publications and general media. (CLA, Jan 99)

Scientific? Fully 80% of surgical procedures have never been tested for safety or efficacy in clinical trials. As for The Machines glittering all throughout the hospital, there are no standards of efficacy for an instrument to be introduced into practice, except incorporation into the insurance billing codes. No machine ever has to be proven to be of any value whatsoever. The patient’s long-term welfare is not an issue. In addition, it is an

…amazing fact that physicians are not required to be certified by any independent professional organization to show they know the proper use of the medical devices they operate…

– Medicine on Trial p 47

Did I mention that drugs are now the leading cause of death in the U.S.?

Science stopped being scientific when the legislature started being controlled by the drug and oil lobbies. And that was a while ago. Why then does the public instinctively regard alternative methods as less scientific than drugs and surgery, even though paradoxically, holistic methods are being chosen more and more?

It’s a one-word answer:

CONDITIONING

First of all, commercials. Drug advertising is the largest single source of revenue to TV, most medical journals, and many nonmedical publications. How long can you watch TV without seeing a drug ad? Five minutes? Ten? Whose commercials do you see at the breaks in the “expose¢s” on some natural health technique? Three guesses. Only logical – the drug advertisers are TV’s bread and butter. Do you think the drug companies want to see shows that illustrate the value of some holistic natural cure?

Second, medical publications. This is becoming a really embarrassing. The two most respected medical journals in the U.S. are Journal of the American Medical Association and the New England Journal of Medicine. Get any issue of either of these and start leafing through it. You will notice that the full color drug ads literally crowd out the articles. So what point of view do you think is going to be supported in the few articles that actually get printed in between all these centerfolds? It’s not uncommon even to see full-page ads for MacDonald’s in these top two medical journals! Talking about nutrition! Peer-reviewed? What good is that when all the “peers” are fighting for crumbs off the same plate?

The third area we see the Drug Cartel’s advertising millions is in the popular press: newspapers, magazines, books. Anyone who thinks a newspaper exists to report the news has not been paying attention. All this First Amendment stuff is phony posturing – the printed media is the only business that tries to pretend that it’s not a business. Newspapers exist to make money. They make money by selling newspapers, by advertising, and by presenting favorable images for those in power. Ever notice how at least once a week, there is a feature story about the latest “breakthrough” drug or procedure? It may be real general, or might even be a teaser, like it’s ‘coming soon,’ often with very tentative or shaky research. But these articles, even though they look like reporting, are not reporting. They are advertising, and are paid for. Dictated by the press releases of the AMA. Check out the credentials of the “Health Science” editor. His last assignment was probably movie reviews.

More than a century ago, Leo Tolstoy put it like this:

All newspaper and journalistic activity is an intellectual
brothel from which there is no retreat.
– Letter to Prince V. 1871

No different in Time, Newsweek, The New Yorker, or any of the giant glossy magazine conglomerates like Conde' Nast – look at the big ads. These ads are an indicator of the point of view you’ll see represented in the “objective” reporting in the articles. It’s all there, just below the surface.

In the past couple of years, a bold step was taken in magazine advertising: marketing new drugs directly to the consumer, so they’ll know which drugs to ask the doctor for. Ads that formerly only appeared in medical journals are now popping up in magazines found at any newsstand. (Life, June 1999, pp 13, 60, 117) Take a step back from this brazen commercialism and see what the industry is actually doing. They’re cutting out the middleman. Now we have lay people with no medical training or credentials whatsoever who think they are informed enough to self-prescribe a drug just because they saw a two-page ad in Life or Newsweek. What about case history, side effects, drug interactions, or the opinion of an experienced physician in deciding the appropriateness of a medication for a given patient? What’s wrong with this picture? Any doubts about who’s really running the show?

WHITE PUNKS ON DOPE

With some 12,000 drugs remaining on the market at any one time (Gorman), almost 100 new drugs are approved every two years. (FDA Medical Officer’s Report, 1998) Let’s see – why would that be? Why after all those millions and all those years of scientific testing would a company not be absolutely certain that a drug would be safe and effective? Why? Why are there always new drugs? They’re not getting better and better every year; our health is not improving because of the increased quality of our drugs. Here’s why: the real testing is done on human patients, after the drug hits the market. When enough people die or get major side effects, as with DES, chloramphenicol, thalidomide, fen-phen, Seldane, rotavirus vaccine, and dozens of others, AND a drug gets bad press, only then will the FDA pull it off the market. Even then the drug often continues to be sold in Europe, Asia, or South America!

Take a guess how many drugs are found to have major side effects after they are placed on the market:

Overall, 51 percent of approved drugs have serious adverse
effects which are not detected prior to approval.

– JAMA 1998; 279:1571-1573

Who are the lab rats here? Is this the high standard to which allopaths would hold holistic cures? The point is, they demand that the scientific proof they pretend to have for pharmaceuticals should be required for alternative therapies as well, but without all the false reporting and manipulation of data. Standards, anyone? Make mine a Double.

HERE’S HOW WE’RE REALLY DOING:

The following tables document the increase in several leading killer diseases, and tell the story about infant mortality as well:

Cancer continues on the rise. From the cancer chapter, (CANCER ) you’ll remember this chart:

Mortality from Cancer in the U.S.
Year — Deaths / 100,000

• 1967 — 157.2
• 1970 — 162.9
• 1982 — 187.3
• 1987 — 198.2
• 1988 — 198.4
• 1989 — 201.0
• 1990 — 203.2
• 1991 — 204.1
• 1992 — 204.1
• *source: Vital Statistics of the United States vol.II 1967-1992

In 1994, mortality went to 220 per 100,000. (CA Journal for Cancer Clinicians Jan 97)

Seen these figures in Newsweek lately? How about the Chronicle?

Heart disease, of course, is the #1 killer of Americans. The most common kind is called chronic obstructive pulmonary disease, or COPD. Look at these death rates:

COPD
Year — Deaths / 100,000

• 1970 — 15
• 1980 — 24
• 1900 — 34
• 1993 — 39
• 1994 — 39
• *source: Statistical Abstracts of the U.S. p. 94

Let’s see how we’re doing with diabetes, the seventh leading cause of death in the U.S.

DIABETES
Year — Deaths / 100,000

• 1900 — 11
• 1940 — 26
• 1970 — 18
• 1992 — 19.8
• 1994 — 21.2
• *source: Historical Abstracts of the U.S. p58

How about asthma incidence? Are all those kids walking around with inhalators getting better?

Here is a graph from the National Health Interview Survey, ADR 277 NIH. Top line shows asthma prevalence. Bottom line shows office visits for asthma. [See p50]

Think asthma has declined since 1994? Check out the headline story on the front page of the San Jose Mercury on 4 Sep 99: “Asthma at Epidemic Levels.” This article quotes CDC figures stating that asthma incidence has risen from 6.7 million cases in 1980 to 17.3 million cases in 1999. Every year, 5000 of these cases are fatal, despite over $14 billion per year currently spent on treatment. (Borenstein)

Septicemia, or blood infection, is also moving up the ladder:

SEPTICEMIA
Year — Deaths / 100,000

• 1970 — 1.7
• 1980 — 4.2
• 1990 — 7.7
• 1993 — 8.0
• *source: Statistical Abstracts of the U.S. p.94

I don’t think Semmelweis, Pasteur, or Alexander Fleming would be too impressed by these modern figures of Americans dying from blood infections every year in the 1990s.

Our babies aren’t doing that great either:

INFANT MORTALITY RATES AND RANKS:

[ See p.52]

Slovenia? We’re behind them? And Italy? Half of Italy is Third World. And Greece spends one tenth of our medical budget PER CAPITA!

Now we could go on and on with this, but I think you may be getting the idea. People are getting tired of watching their grandparents die, and then a generation later, watching their parents die of the same diseases. It’s only fancy dancing and playing with statistics that is vainly trying to keep up the illusion that everything’s fine. You can spin it any way you want, but one immutable fact is just sitting there like the elephant in the living room: we don’t have health care in this country; we have Disease Care, and it’s NOT WORKING.

The above charts are the unadorned figures, kept well hidden by confusing analyses of dozens of other factors. Age, race, sex, and geographic area data can easily obscure the bottom line: that as a nation we’re getting sicker, not healthier.

The true miracle of modern medicine is diabolical. It consists in making not only individuals but whole populations survive on inhumanly low levels of personal health.
– Ivan Illich, Medical Nemesis

Medical researcher John Lesso also is less than taken by the effectiveness of the mainstream approach:

Allopathic medicine, also known as ‘modern medicine,’ has unfortunately been largely ineffective in dealing with most diseases, and more than often it introduces further problems. Ironically, most of our present-day afflictions are the direct result of inappropriate lifestyle and environment, and therefore can usually be prevented.
– “Health In Crisis,” intro

People are beginning to spend several billion dollars per year out of their own pockets for simple, natural healing methods not covered by their “health plans.” Each year, it’s more. The dwarfing of natural medicine by mainstream medicine is becoming less apparent year by year as the failures of drugs and surgery become more difficult to hide. A study that appeared in JAMA, Nov 1998, showed that the American people now make 629 million visits to alternative practitioners every year, compared with 386 million visits to their primary doctors! (Eisenman) The entire budget for alternative care is between $21 and $32 billion. And 46% of the population are going to alternative medicine practitioners these days. A fundamental shift has started.

Doesn’t really sound like “alternative” is quite the right word any more, does it?

ALLOPATHIC SUPERIORITY

In fairness, the allopathic approach does have its areas of supremacy and brilliance, however. If I am in a motorcycle accident on the freeway and get opened up or broken up, don’t take me to a holistic healer. Allopathic mainstream medicine has evolved the most advanced emergency trauma procedures in history. For truly life-threatening situations, as long as they don’t get carried away when they see four-star coverage, the mainstream approach should be chosen.

Other areas of advanced and valuable technology include eye surgery, wart removal, teflon joint replacements, and arthroscopic procedures, after holistic supports and nutritional approaches have failed.

CHRONICS

Almost 80% of medical treatment in this country however is for chronic conditions: in 1995, the number or people with 1 or more chronic illnesses was estimated to be almost 100 million. (JAMA, November 13, 1996) The authors of this study concluded that medical treatments are often not effective for chronic conditions, which is obvious when looking at the above statistical charts. So we’re talking about $800 billion out of the $1.2 trillion medical budget that isn’t really doing its job. Some re-vamping may be in order. That was your money!

Q & A

With just a faint glimmer of doubt cast upon any given medical situation and diagnosis, perhaps now the reader will be motivated to get a second opinion, not a second medical opinion, but a second health opinion, a holistic one – an opinion based not on what is good for the doctor or the hospital or the insurance company, but what is best for the patient’s long term health. Apply the following simple principles to any medical decision that must be made:

…

THE ILLUSION OF MEDICAL FREEDOM

Medical freedom is the idea that the individual should have a choice of any therapeutic system he feels will restore health. Unfortunately this freedom was left out of the Constitution. The father of American psychiatry, Benjamin Rush, a signer of the Declaration of Independence, had wanted to include it, realizing the problems its omission might spawn. Rush said that if medical freedom were not guaranteed and specified, it was likely that one group of doctors would monopolize health care by passing legislation to outlaw their competition – other types of health care.

He sure called that one.

Dr. Schulze points out:

Over the past 80 years, organized medical groups and pharmaceutical companies, using lawyers, bribes, lobbies, insurance companies, and the strong arm of the FDA, have been very busy. They have corrupted elected officials to pass laws to remove any competition. They have crushed Natural Doctors, Natural Medicine, and Self-Care. Their goal is to monopolize health care and make us dependent on medical doctors and drugs. They have made many healing herbs, foods, and even nutrients illegal…Organized medicine has …outlawed words for other health professionals to use, such as Diagnose and Cure. Just by using these words you can be arrested for “Practicing Medicine Without a License.

Examples are endless. Under the guise of “protecting the public” laws are passed and the twin Dobermans of the AMA – the FDA and the FTC – may be commanded to attack any natural healing method that doesn’t promote drugs and surgery. To cite just a few:

• The 150-year war against homeopathy, the AMA’s first rival, whose destruction was targeted in the AMA’s founding charter.
• The 11-year antitrust suit against the AMA won by chiropractors in 1989 proved a short-lived victory. Since then, DCs have been systematically pushed out of a large portion of insurance coverage in the country. (Lisa)
• The FTC’s recent attack on a definition of chiropractic that has been in effect for over 100 years
• The recent attack by the FDA on holistic nutrition companies which claim specific health benefits
• Systematic persecution of doctors who have had extensive clinical success treating cancer with natural, non-drug medicines: Burzynski, Donsbach, Kelley, Anderson, Schulze, Hoxsey, Naessens (Options)

PRACTICING SANITY WITHOUT A LICENSE

To question a system of disease care that is too market-driven to be interested in health – that’s a sane course. Step back from the whole picture a moment and look what has happened here: the triumvirate of Disease Care that rules America today – the AMA, the FDA, and FTC – have been empowered by the legislature to make it a capital crime to “practice medicine without a license” or to claim to cure disease without a medical license. OK. So tell me, where did they derive that power from? Who gave them the right to determine what constitutes “medicine” and what doesn’t? Where were we when we gave them permission to determine what branches of the healing arts should be available to us any time we wish? How is science able to be legislated? How can any real scientific progress take place?

The illusion the allopaths have sold the people is that such legislation is “for the protection” of the people, to protect them from fraud, and that people might be distracted by wacky unscientific quacks who will deter them from getting the real “scientific” medicine they need. But which is the more sacred trust – medical freedom of choice or protecting the people from fraud? The people can protect themselves from fraud. In fact that’s exactly what medical freedom is: to have the right to decide for oneself what is fraud and what is useful. Otherwise it’s the Fox guarding the Chicken Coop.

For true medical freedom to exist, a wide range of health options must be available at all times, even wacky ones. The effective ones will survive. The choice should not be subject to legislation for the obvious reason that politics and big money control the legislators. That’s what we’ve seen all through history – people dying by being forced to take medications that were deemed the most scientific at the time, which coincidentally meant the ones researched and paid for the powers who controlled both the medical research facilities AND the legislature that enforces the findings of that research.

In America today, there is only the most grudging type of medical freedom in effect. Peripheral alternative therapies are allowed to flit around the perimeter, subject to being targeted and attacked any time the Triumvirate gets a notion to make an example of somebody. Control of the media, “science,” and the court system can put a stop to practically any holistic practitioner or company, as evidenced in Walters’ book of vanished, suppressed technologies (Options).

Illegal for anyone but an MD to claim to cure disease? Who are the quacks? Look at allopathic cure rates for degenerative disease, cited above, in the past 75 years. Their primary “cure” – prescription drugs – is now the fourth leading cause of death, by their own statistics! Who’s making false medical claims here? Are they pretending nobody notices this? Ever notice the only types of “fraud” charges ever levied by the Triumvirate are against natural non-drug non-surgical cures? The true fraud runs rampant.

But today with the online flow of information as yet ungoverned in this country, allopathy is looking around for something to change into. And it’s coming soon to your town: Alternative Lite. Refer to that chapter.

BOTTOM LINE?

Just remember this: holistic medicine says the body can usually heal itself. Allopathic medicine says it can’t, and requires powerful interventions. Allopathic is constantly posturing that it “understands” the body well enough to chemically take control “for its own good.” Unfortunately our disease statistics prove otherwise.

…

QUICK CURE VS. LIFESTYLE CHANGE

The illusion of allopathy is that diseases are just drug deficiencies: menopause is an estrogen deficiency, headache is an aspirin deficiency, diabetes is a fake insulin deficiency, thyroid disease is a fake thyroid hormone deficiency, depression is a Zoloft deficiency… We’ll diagnose your disease and give you the drug that cures it. Many people want an immediate cure, and they’d rather not participate in the process if at all possible, thank you. What they really want is something to stop the annoying symptoms – the cough, the joint pain, the fatigue, the bloating, the cancer – that at the same time will allow them to continue their present course of self-abuse.

Allopathic medicine has no problem with such a mindset.

Allopathic medicine is more than happy to reinforce the notion of Don’t Worry About It, We’ll Take Care of Everything. Allopathy wants people to abdicate responsibility for their own health. More compliant drug customers. How many times have you heard your doctor tell one of your family not to worry about a serious side effect of some drug or procedure, with the reasoning that our “cure rates” for that side effect are “very good.” Go ahead and eat whatever you want; diet has nothing to do with this disease… Uninformed people buy this sales pitch every day.

The holistic cure is slower, less dramatic, and unfortunately requires some effort on the part of the patient. Since the holistic cure doesn’t chase symptoms, it’s really not over when the patient “feels better.” Since the holistic cure is from the inside out – from the nervous system and the blood on out – symptoms come and go day by day as the body retraces its steps back to health. Some days the patient feels fine, other days he may feel like hell – doesn’t really matter if it’s part of the healing process. The difference is that it’s a lifestyle change. A mental paradigm shift opens up the world of a hundred possible daily boosts to overall health, always asking – how can I support the immune system, how can I reduce fatigue, how can I maximize nerve flow, how can I build up my nutrient reserves, how can I improve detoxification, how can I improve stamina… Everything the patient puts in his mouth, everything he does is a health decision that takes these questions into consideration. Finally the patient can say – OK, I’ve got it from here, and takes back the wheel of the Bus. Until that line is crossed, the patient will always be playing catch-up, by pretending to think that someone else can know his own body better than he does.

Many people are getting tired of seeing their parents die from the same diseases their grandparents died from.

They're turning in desperation to safer, more sensible, less insurance-driven methods, such as homeopathy, perfect diet, acupuncture, massage, chiropractic, chelation, colonic therapy, whole food supplements, exercise, stress reduction, and blood detoxification. Many medical doctors are incorporating holistic methods into their practices, as they see the obvious failures of too many drugs.. The focus is on wellness, continually improving health. In Chapter 5, Alternative Lite, you will see how some medical doctors and the drug companies are trying to pretend like Alternative Medicine was their idea all along, instead of jumping off the pharmaceutical Titanic, like they’re doing now.

LET’S GET REAL

It’s amusing when super-optimistic holistic people think that General Enlightenment is coming, that soon everyone is going to be taking enzymes and antioxidantsProtects cells from damage caused by free radicals (unstable molecules made by the process of oxidation during normal metabolism). Free radicals may play a part in cancer, heart disease, stroke, and other diseases of aging. Antioxidants include beta-carotene, lycopene, Vitamins A, C, and E, and other natural and manufactured substances. instead of Prozac and Synthroid, and that those evil allopaths are going to see the error of their ways and suddenly realize that health can only come from inside, not outside the body: wow, sorry, you guys were right all along! How obtuse of us! Here, you chiropractors and homeopaths, take charge of our hospitals!

And then will follow the great transformation to gentle, natural methods, supplements, and procedures, replacing the $1.2 trillion drugs-and-surgery show. And our health will skyrocket!

The truth is, allopaths will never get it. They can’t get it. Why not? Simple: different objectives. The objective of allopathy is not, never has been, and cannot be the promotion of health as a normal condition. Allopathy cannot accept the idea that the universal intelligence inside the body, which evolved our species from the ocean, and developed every body system over countless millennia, that this intelligence is wiser and more powerful than manmade chemicals. Chemicals which are marketed by the merchants who control both law and medicine.

Allopathy needs the merchants, and the merchants need allopathy.

For a reality check, take a walk around your local hospital. Look at all that concrete, all that glass, all those floors, all the cars in the parking lot. Think how many hospitals are in your town. How many are in your state, in the U.S.? This is a system that has to be fed, that will defend itself. The financiers who run the whole allopathic setup are not predicting its demise any time soon, just because a few people are realizing it doesn’t work. They’ve had bigger problems than that before. The $1.2 trillion budget of 2000 is projected to be $2 trillion by the year 2010. The 3 billion Rx's written this year will climb to 4 billion by 2004. (USA Today, 3 May 00)

…

Here’s what’s really going to happen, actually it’s already happening: organized medicine must respond to the exploding popularity of Alternative therapies. They’ve already started, and the message is loud and clear: natural methods do work, we’ve always known that, and we have the best natural medicines, which won’t interfere with your heart medication, your estrogen, your allergy shots, or your antidepressants. Feel good naturally, and safely! And consult your doctor.

Wow, I should write commercials! Point is, the push to subsume Alternative Medicine is already in full operation. Organized medicine will use the huge information machine at its disposal in order to confuse, dilute, and obscure the basic principles of natural healing methods, with the goal of trying to engulf Alternative Medicine into its own sphere. I have tried to put some perspective on this phenomenon in the chapter entitled Alternative Lite (HOME )

This is not to say that the holistic movement isn’t growing. Of course it is. Chiropractic, the third largest health care service, behind dentistry, now cares for about 10% of the population, and shows consistent improvement in quality of life. Herb sales alone account for $4 billion. Acupuncture is being incorporated into many major medical plans. The real Alternative Medicine will do what it has always done: convert people to a more holistic lifestyle, one by one, by sheer attrition. Brick by brick.

Something founded on universal healing principles appeals to people on a level outside and above the influence exerted by loud, expensive, blatant advertising. People sense the truth of the holistic way: nurture the body, encourage it, support its own wisdom, remove interference and toxicity, and it will heal. Considering the comparative size and strength of the two opposing forces, expanded awareness will continue to be a slow, uphill progression, whose trajectory will depend on the ability of holistic teachers to demonstrate universal principles of healing, growth, and life.

Some 300 years ago, the German philosopher Wilhelm Leibniz predicted all this. He said there would be a scientific revolution, a long period of scientific analysis and overspecialization in which “science” would be worshipped over all else. No universal thinking would be considered. Then finally, Leibniz said, the wheel would turn and there would be an awakening to a holistic view, and many of the “scientific” approaches would be abandoned as barbaric and obsolete.

This chapter celebrates that new awakening.

HOME

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[See p63]

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– 65 –