Dr. Carolyn Dean MD -- The Good, Bad, and The Ugly Events of 2005

I wholeheartedly agree with Bell that Carolyn�s is the top health book of the year, and could write an entire article about its virtues, but I will offer just two comments.

One: I believe publication of Death by Modern Medicine is a watershed moment in the political fight for health freedom. For the first time, actual facts about the effects of modern medicine have been documented from official records of modern medicine. Not only that, it provides commentary to explain how modern medicine gained a stranglehold on the medical and health industry at the expense of access to lower-cost, more effective and vastly safer methods of dealing with human maladies.

Two: The numbers of ANNUAL DEATHS from modern medicine speak for themselves. (p321-322 Death by Modern Medicine).

Hospital Adverse Reaction � 106,000
Deaths Medical Error � 98,000
Deaths Bedsores � 115,000
Deaths Infection � 88,000
Deaths Malnutrition - - 108,800
Deaths Outpatient Adverse Reaction � 199,000
Deaths Unnecessary Procedures � 37,136
Deaths Surgery-Related � 32,000 Deaths

Total Annual Deaths by Modern Medicine � 783,936

RISK OF NATURAL MEDICINE

If those numbers don�t shock you, compare them with two others. According to statistician, Ron Law�s, �Analysis of Relative Risks and Levels of Risk in Canada,� use of dietary supplements caused only an average of five confirmed deaths per year over the past 25 years in the USA. Most of these deaths related to a single batch of tryptophan introduced in the late 1980s and were not due to the nutrient but to a genetically-engineered synthetic binder. The source of this information comes from actual CDC/FDA records and can be found on page 111 of Death by Modern Medicine.

In addition, Law found it difficult to obtain a statistically accurate figure to measure the actual deaths of Canadians caused by natural products and services. He could not use the one-to-one-million risk factor numeric scale for natural products and services because they are so ultra-safe and can�t be measured by one-in-a-million. He had to bump his numeric scale to one-to-one-BILLION possible deaths. So�the grand total of POSSIBLE deaths by statistical averages for those Canadians who actually use natural healing arts products and services in Canada is 14 deaths PER BILLION.

It is important to note that the million-to-one risk ratio he tried to use was based on the World Health Organization�s acknowledgement that a one-in-one-million risk is a threshold below which the risk is generally considered INSIGNIFICANT.

Death by Modern Medicine gathered the evidence up to 2005, then there were plenty of specific scandals in 2005 to confirm modern medicine is not only on the wrong track, but is also thoroughly devoid of humanity and caring about the customers the industry purports to serve �the sick.

THE VIOXX SCANDAL

Early in 2005, the ongoing Vioxx scandal from the year before continued to unfold and make new headlines. Taken off the market in 2004 for killing at least 27,785 people and causing 160,000 heart attacks and strokes, the first of the Vioxx victim death court cases took place in 2005 in which the victim�s surviving spouse was awarded $250 million.

During a different victim's trial, attorneys for the plaintiff asked for a mistrial when one of the defense witnesses testifying on behalf of Merck, claimed that the drug company had not withheld information about the drug. As it turned out, this witness was one of the authors of the Vioxx study published in The New England Journal of Medicine that ignored several deaths which had occurred during the study. It actually took six years before this correction was made. A financial analyst at Merck estimates the cost of the remaining Vioxx litigations range between $8 and $25 BILLION. At the time of the Texas lawsuit, there were approximately 4,200 lawsuits covering over 7,500 plaintiff groups.

Also part of the Vioxx scandal was the revelation that the FDA went out of its way to protect the product. Its own associate director of the Office of Drug Safety, David Graham, was ultimately named �2004 Face of the Year� by Forbes magazine for standing up to his superiors at the FDA, who had �ostracized� him and subjected him to �veiled threats� for doing his job. He was not the first honest FDA official to have such problems -just the latest.

GHOST WRITING SCIENCE

Late in 2005, two additional scandals broke, the first illustrates how the academic world protects its source of income provided by the drug industry. At Sheffield University in Britain, $252,000 was offered to one of its senior medical professors, Dr. Aubrey Blumsohn. This payment, along with a contract, was to secure his silence about his claim that scientific misconduct had occurred when Proctor & Gamble Pharmaceuticals (P&G) refused to allow him access to key data and then attempted to ghostwrite his analysis the study. He also claimed P & G had done this before. Please note here that everybody is now in the highly lucrative drug business - even your favorite soap company.

THE MYTH OF STEM CELL RESEARCH

The other scandal turned the Korean national science industry upside down when it was learned that their top scientist, DNA researcher, Hwang Woo-suk, had faked results of at least nine of the eleven stem cell lines he claimed to have created in the paper published in the May 2005 issue of Science. The Korean government, wanted to join the big boys in scientific research, so they sunk $65 million into research and facilities since 1998 for Hwang Woo-suk�s various projects making Hwang the darling of the stem cell research industry worldwide.

In a New York Times article about this scandal, it was revealed that Hwang had been able to create his own celebrity by several means including inviting key co-authors to sign on, even though they had done none of the work. The lead researcher, listed in the senior researcher on the June 2005 paper, was American Dr. Gerald Schatten, a stem cell expert at the University of Pittsburgh, is now under a shroud of suspicion. The idea was that by having an American co-author, it would make it easier to attract prestigious journals such as Science and Nature to publish his article. Meanwhile, back in Korea, Hwang invited Dr. Park Ky Young to co-author his 2004 report on human cloning. Dr. Park, a botanist, who the Times reporter speculated is not an expert on human cloning and of little scientific help, but he is the science advisor to the president of South Korea.

The listing of names of people as co-authors of science studies who have nothing to do with the actual work is common and obviously has political ramifications that add to the questionable reliability of science articles.

If Hwang Woo-suk�s name doesn�t ring a bell to you, he�s the fellow who claimed to have cloned the first human embryos and just this past August, published another paper in the journal Nature, claiming the first-ever cloned dog.

To add salt to this wound, it was also learned that two members of the vaulted stem-cell research team may have given $30,000 to a former whistleblowing member of the group in an attempt to get him to retract his comments about fabricating research data.

For the uninitiated in the battle between modern medicine and natural healing arts, it is important to keep in mind at all times that modern medicine has always used a club over the heads of its competition, claiming that �science� �proves� that modern medicine works. They argue that through �science� the true legitimacy of modern medicine can be seen and measured and that natural healing arts, based on an entirely different set of assumptions and basic philosophy which do not bow easily to the assumptions of �modern science� are, therefore, not legitimate. Proof that natural healing arts work, which can be found in whole libraries of medical knowledge around the world going back centuries, is somehow not considered and condemned as �anecdotal.� Large numbers of anecdotes, by any other name, are �clinical evidence.�

So, in the year 2005, we compiled concrete evidence available for anyone to see that modern medicine not only kills 784,000 every year in America but that its scientific swagger is nothing more than a big fat lie.

A MONSTER CALLED CODEX

While, throughout 2005, modern medicine was caught in headlights and headlines, the health freedom movement found itself in a full blown crisis and on a collision course with a monster called Codex.

From Codex we learned that there truly is an unseen force of global power elite that can insinuate itself in all the nooks and crannies of our lives.

We also came face to face with the fact that many nutritional supplement companies have been sold to holding companies or bought out completely by global corporations including Big Pharma, looking to join the bandwagon of bigtime sales. These former allies in the fight no longer can be counted on to support access to products and the principles of health freedom. These globalist companies really don�t care if they sell millions of low dose, low quality products or fewer numbers of high dose, expensive, high profit and by-prescription-only pills. Their only goal is to answer to their stockholders. These same globalist pill pushers now heavily influence, if not actually control, the several trade associations who supposedly represent the industry as a whole.

Worse yet, rank and file health freedom advocates now know they must deal with the UN, and its various associated international bodies including the World Trade Organization. Codex was never about health. Like the UN and the other similar treaty-created world governance outfits, there is no public representation, as it is the realm of corporations and other �groups� with an interest in signing trade deals that make the rules for these quasi-government entities.

We also learned about the Delphi Technique, a scheme to organize and run meetings like Codex so participants feel like they have participated but really haven�t. Those unseen powerbrokers have already decided what the end results will be. The meetings are merely for show.

What we do know is that Codex is going to get a lot worse and may never get better. Finalizing the dosage level of supplements that will be available on the over-the-counter market will come in a meeting scheduled for next year and conveniently located in Thailand, to make it difficult for ordinary people to even send witnesses to the event.

The passage of the Central American Free Trade Agreement (CAFTA) was another example of brute force being used in the cloakroom. One of the key beneficiaries of the deal is Big Pharma, who are celebrating yet another victory in their ability to influence the best Congress that money can buy. Prices for drugs in Central America are bound to go up.

While we health freedom advocates felt a double whammy defeat with the events at Codex and CAFTA, there is something in the human spirit that does not accept defeat. Hope springs eternal.

Not wanting to lose something so basic as our ability to maintain our health, particularly with effective and low cost products and services, we now see a reinvigorated health freedom movement.

In the fall of 2005, Diane Miller and her National Health Freedom Action/Coalition group held its second international health freedom meeting in Minneapolis. Grassroots health freedom leaders came from as far away as France at their own expense to meet and learn from the great and the near great leaders in the now international health freedom movement. Heretofore, Diane�s group has focused on helping grassroots groups in some 40 states set up their own, independent health freedom groups to fight for passage of state health freedom laws to make sure practitioners of these healing arts are not overly burdened with regulations designed to put them out of business. [Read]

Animal owners' rights alliances are cropping up all over and networking to protect the rights of pet owners to provide natural healing arts services to their pets without getting arrested. [Read]

A gallery owner in Santa Fe, New Mexico, may find himself in the middle of a national versus state�s rights power struggle when all he and his fellow citizens want is hearings about the safety of aspartame and to pass a law to create a permanent state agency to review the safety of foods. Ironically, he may have stepped into a major political fight that citizens in California started thanks to passage of Proposition 65, which requires warning notices on products that contain ingredients known to cause cancer or birth defects. You can send letters to Governor Richardson as a new bill has just been introduced to ban aspartame even beyond the Nutrition Council we talked about in a previous NewsWithViews.com article.

A contrary group of congressmen now want to pass federal legislation to pre-empt state laws since over 100 state laws having to do with carcinogen labeling, seafood safety, as well as food allergens and additives are in the pipeline. In short, it is obvious that when ordinary citizens have the power to protect themselves from dangerous things, they use that power when they can to get the job done. And, as expected, there is always that corporate interest that takes exception to people trying to run their own lives. [Read]

Still another sign that the health freedom movement is not only alive and well, but growing, is the birth of The Health Keepers Alliance, an organization financed and run by a network of mom and pop Nature�s Sunshine nutritional supplement venders, many of whom also provide nutritional counseling services. One of the principle projects of this organization is to stage large Health Freedom Expos in major cities around the US to invite the general public to learn all about natural healing arts products and services, listen to lectures about health freedom provided by some of the greats in the health freedom movement, and help people network with like-minded activists. [Read] [Read]

And yet another inspiring effort, launched at the tail end of 2005, was the organization of the Coalition to End FDA and FTC Censorship. The purpose of this national committee is to promote passage of H.B. 4282 The Health Freedom Protection Act. [Read]

What is particularly inspiring about this effort is that it finally addresses the core issue that has plagued the dietary supplement industry for decades � the ability to tell the public what the product is used for. It is currently against the law for manufacturers to tell potential buyers of their products that use of their products can actually cure specific diseases as well as prevent them!

As Jonathan Emord, the leader of the group as well as one of our nation�s top experts on the meaning of the First Amendment, explained:

Dr. Carolyn Dean is a medical doctor, naturopathic doctor, herbalist, acupuncturist, nutritionist, as well as a powerful health activist fighting for health freedom as president of Friends of Freedom International. Dr. Dean is the author of over a dozen health books, the latest of which is "Death By Modern Medicine".

Elissa Meininger, is Vice President of Friends of Freedom International and co-founder of the Health Freedom Action Network, a grassroots citizens' political action group. She is also a health freedom political analyst and can be heard on the natural health radio show SuperHealth, broadcast weekly on station WKY (SuperTalk AM 930) in Oklahoma City.