GANGSTERS IN MEDICINE
By
Thomas Smith
December
23, 2002
NewsWithViews.com
The Journal of the American Medical Association
recently reported that as many as 106,000 deaths occur annually in US
hospitals due to adverse reactions to prescription drugs that are properly
prescribed by physicians that use them as directed by the drug companies.
Even worse, the National Council for Patient Information
and Education reported that an additional 125,000 deaths occur annually
due to adverse reactions to drugs that the physician never should have
prescribed. In these deaths the doctor did not follow the instructions
on proper administration of the drugs. For example, Glucophage, a diabetic
oral hypoglycemic, should never be prescribed for patients with Kidney
disease or Congestive Heart Failure because it can cause fatal Lactic
Acidosis in these patients. A warning label is prominently placed on the
medication container to warn of this potential misuse.
However, JAMA reported that almost 1/4 of the patients
who had been prescribed Glucophage had Kidney damage or Congestive Heart
failure or both.
The annual death toll from synthetic prescription
drugs, both from the correctly prescribed and the incorrectly prescribed,
amounts to about 231,000 deaths every year. To put this into perspective,
this is the equivalent of a world trade center disaster every week for
over a year and a half or the crash of two fully loaded 747 aircraft every
day of the year.
No information was reported on the number of outpatient
and doctor's office deaths caused by these very same drugs when prescribed
by these very same doctors. The reported figures alone, however, make
drug deaths caused by physicians the third leading cause of death in the
US. It is far ahead of accidents, drunk driving, homicides, airline accidents,
as well as all other disease with the sole exceptions of cancer and heart
disease.
Many of these drugs responsible for the death statistics
cited are diabetic drugs. None of these drugs cure or even were intended
to cure diabetes. During the time a patient is on the drugs his body is
suffering great damage due to the uncontrolled progress of the disease.
This is in addition to the risk and damage caused by the drug itself.
According to Dr. Mendelsohn, author of "Confessions
of a Medical Heretic", 2.4 million unnecessary operations are performed
every year and they cost over 12,000 lives. When the records of six New
York hospitals were examined it was found that 43% of the Hysterectomies
that were performed were medically unnecessary.
No one should ever submit to any surgical procedure
without first obtaining several unrelated medical opinions, at least not
here in the United States. Women are particularly vulnerable to this type
of victimization.
Disease in America.
According to the World Health Report 2000 the United
States ranks twelfth, that is second from the bottom, in their thirteen
country survey of sixteen available health indicators. We are dead last
for low birth weight and neonatal and infant mortality. We rank between
ninth and twelfth for all life expectancy categories between one year
and 40 years. Another study ranked the United States as fifteenth in the
twenty-five industrialized countries studied.
Diabetes, Hypoglycemia, Hyperinsulinemia are so
widespread in the United States that it is estimated that over half the
population exhibits one or more symptoms of these life destroying diseases.
Symptoms of Adult onset diabetes are now being routinely noted in six
year old children. Obesity and it's related Endocrine dysfunction are
commonly observed in teenagers. Heart Failure, a symptom of advanced Type
II Diabetes, remains in the top three killer diseases in the Westernized
countries.
Although the cause and cure for Type II Diabetes
and related endocrine failure has been increasingly well understood in
the scientific community for the last forty years, this disease is not
being cured by todays orthodox treatment regimens. In order to find a
cure it is necessary to seek alternative medical approaches to this disease.
Some of the economics of Medicine.
A large part of this medical disaster that the United
States currently experiences is due to the way our medical community is
organized. Basically it is not organized to heal and to cure disease;
the medical community, particularly at its upper levels, is a commercial
venture organized to make money for its practitioners.
Although the record of the United States Medical
community in the cure of disease is deplorable, the same cannot be said
for its ability to produce income and profit. For example, for the top
fifteen pharmaceutical companies, including such names as Abbot, Wyeth,
Hoffman-La Roche, Merck and others, the second quarter revenue for 2002
was reported as $63,520.6 million and the corresponding reported income
was 11,731.8 million respectively. This is second only to the defense
industry in the United States.
In 1997, the latest year for which we have the figures,
the earnings of physicians were reported by Broad as averaging around
$200,000 per year. The lowest reporting specialty, Rheumatology reported
$158,500 and the highest, cardiovascular surgeon, reported $363,300. When
examining the numbers, we noted that the high salaries seemed to be concentrated
in members of the AMA. Those belonging to less powerful trade unions did
not fare nearly so well even though they did most of the actual patient
care work. For example, the median staff salary of registered nurses was
$35,256
The Cardiac surgeon, for example, does nothing whatsoever
to cure cardiac disease. Three to five percent of the heart surgery patients
die on the operating table. Cardiac surgery provides no better three year
survival rate than no treatment at all. A Harvard survival study of 200,000
patients revealed that the long term survival rate of patients subjected
to surgery was no better than the survival rate of those that had no surgery.
Of course, your cardiac surgeon will not tell you
this when you need to make a decision on whether or not to elect cardiac
surgery.
Never in history have so many accumulated so much
wealth for providing their customers or clients or patients with so little
real benefit.
Exceptions to the rule.
Many doctors of integrity are as much victims of
the system as are their patients. Todays doctor is not free to treat disease
as his conscience dictates. He is forced to administer approved protocols
whether they are known to work or not. To deviate from these approved
protocols invites law suits, peer criticism and censure from State medical
licensing boards.
This writer knows of two local doctors who tried
to buck the establishment and really help their patients. Both lost their
license to practice medicine. One is currently working as an administrator
in a California hospital and the other has started a nutritional clinic.
Takeover of the American medical
Association.
This sad state of affairs is directly traceable
to the takeover of the American Medical Association by the Carnegie and
Rockefeller foundations in the early part of the twentieth century.
At the turn of the century the medical community
was in a sad state of disrepair. There were no qualifications to become
a doctor. If one wanted to be a doctor it was only necessary to hang out
a shingle and start the practice of medicine. Medical schools were poorly
financed, often taught contradictory medical philosophies and had little
impact on the practice of medicine. In 1910 the American Medical Association,
todays AMA, was on the verge of bankruptcy. Few doctors belonged to it
and even fewer paid any attention to it. Quackery of all kinds was rampant.
The market was flooded with fake cancer cures and 80 proof liver tonic.
It was in this environment that Rockefeller and
Carnegie moved in and bought the AMA and then used it to take control
of the entire United States medical establishment. In 1910, Henry Prichard
president of the Carnegie foundation, bought control of the AMA for the
sum of $10,000. He then financed the publication of the Flexner report,
as it was then called, to gain popular support for the changes that were
to be made in the medical community. With public backing secured by the
publication of the Flexner report, Carnegie and Rockefeller commenced
a major upgrade in medical education by financing only those medical schools
that taught what they wanted taught. Predictably, those schools that had
the financing churned out the better doctors.
In return for the financing, the schools were required
to teach course material that was exclusively drug oriented. That is why
today our doctors are so heavily biased toward synthetic drug therapy
and know little or nothing about nutrition.
Dr. David Edsall, former dean of Harvard medical
school, said "I was, for a period, a professor of Therapeutics and Pharmacology,
[at Harvard] and I knew from experience that students were obliged then
by me and by others to learn about an interminable number of drugs, many
of which were valueless, many of them useless, some probably even harmful...."
For a time, these changes actually improved the
practice of medicine in the United States. Then, as the distorted medical
curriculum began to churn out doctors whose only concern was prescribing
synthetic drugs, things began to deteriorate into what we see today.
Today the average medical doctor receives 3 hours
or less training on nutrition despite the fact that our bodies are constructed
entirely of what we eat and drink. Todays doctor receives much of his
ongoing education from detail men. The detail man is the drug company
salesman whose job it is to teach the doctor how to use the latest drugs.
Treatment instead of cure.
Even with all of this history the medical doctor
retained a great deal of his autonomy through the 1930's and into the
late 1940's. In 1949 another major change took place in the medical community
that set the stage for the disaster we see today. It was in 1949 that
the medical community reorganized itself into the competing medical specialty
groups we see today. Prior to 1949 a doctor was a doctor; he dealt with
all disease and injury. After 1949 this was not so.
The reorganization established many of the specialties
that we know today. It was then that the Cardiac Specialist, the Endocrinologist,
the Hepatic and Biliary Specialist and many other professional specialty
groups were formed. The symptoms of the then raging epidemic of Type II
Diabetes were divided among the specialty groups so that each group had
their own set of proprietary symptoms.
The story given out for the reorganization was that
it would help to focus more attention on the then current Diabetes epidemic.
However, in practice it caused the entire medical community to treat their
own proprietary symptom set and nobody focused on curing the disease anymore.
This was the origin of the "treat the symptom" and "ignore the cause"
philosophy that now dominates the entire medical community.
This was the turning point event that led to the
removal of the word "cure" from the medical vocabulary. Today, if you
mention the "c" word around your doctor he will usually glaze over and
pretend not to hear you. He only responds to the word "treatment".
Under the Rockefeller and Carnegie influence their
pharmaceutical firms started to pour out the vast array of synthetic drugs
that the doctors trained to their medical school standards now prescribed
almost to the exclusion of any other remedies. Among the first drugs to
be marketed this way were the oral hypoglycemic agents. They were deliberately
designed to treat the symptom while not curing the disease.
Insurance fraud.
Since the name of the medical game was money, a
means had to be devised to provide the patient with money that could only
be used to pay for approved medical treatment. Enter the insurance company
concept. Today employees have, as an important part of their remuneration
for their work, a health insurance policy. This health insurance policy
does not pay for all health related needs; it only pays for those health
related services that are approved. These, of course, are the synthetic
drug therapies that are known to work poorly, if at all.
In order to secure effective medical treatment from
the alternative sector of the economy the patient must pay for it himself;
insurance companies specifically exclude virtually all alternative treatment.
One wonders why so many continue to pay for an insurance program that
cannot, even in principle, be of any real benefit to them.
Government coercion in medical
practice.
In the ordinary course of events, good medicine
would eventually drive out bad medicine. As more and more people discover
ways to maintain and improve their health, without drug therapy, they
will simply abandon bad medicine and resort to alternative therapies.
Indeed, this is happening. Also happening is a concerted
government effort to discredit and declare unlawful those effective therapies
that represent the greatest threat to orthodox medicine. In the last fifty
years many effective cures have been developed for many of the major killer
diseases that we have. In each instance the developer has been branded
a quack, his business has been ruined and in some cases he has been sent
to jail.
Even with outright governmental attacks on those
that would promote effective therapies in America, the tide is turning.
More and more Americans are waking up to the reality of our medical community.
More and more they are finding it to be a fraud and they are turning to
less conventional treatments and modalities.
Informed Americans that require effective medical
treatment for anything more serious than a head cold are turning away
from orthodox drug quackery in droves. The medical community is trying
hard to make it illegal to refuse their treatment. A major effort is currently
underway (Codex) to severely restrict the availability of nutritional
supplements to those that use them throughout the world. Our government
is seriously considering mandatory vaccination programs.
Many believe that our Food and Drug Administration,
FDA, represents the American people and that the FDA acts to insure that
our food and drugs are safe and effective. Nothing could be further from
the truth. The FDA acts entirely to restrain and manage competition between
and among those that manufacture our food and drugs. They do this only
for the purpose of minimizing competition in business. Rockefeller is
famous for proclaiming the only sin is competition.
Willy Ley, a former head of the FDA, said it best
when he said "What the Food and Drug Administration does and what the
public thinks that it does are a different as night and day".
Today in America the practice of medicine is not
free. It is one of the most tightly controlled commercial enterprises
in the world. That is why it produces such extraordinary income for it's
favored and such misery, disease and death for its victims.
What to do.
Given the growth of the medical monster that ate
the United States, what can we who live here do to effectively manage
our own health.
Perhaps the single most important thing that we
all must do is to recognize that our health is our most important possession.
We have no choice but to accept total responsibility for our own health.
To leave such an important consideration to someone who clearly has much
to gain by lying to us just does not make sense. Typically, we buy our
cars and houses with a great deal more wisdom than we bring to the doctor's
office when we go there.
The modern orthodox medical community treats symptoms;
they do not cure disease. When you visit the doctor, it is perfectly in
order for you to ask bluntly whether or not the treatment he wants to
give you will cure the disease you have.
Some years ago, when I had a serious case of Type
II Diabetes, I asked my doctor that question about the treatment he offered
me. First he pretended he did not hear me. When I persisted and made eye
contact and repeated the question he replied "this is the prescribed treatment".
Such an evasive answer to such a direct question sent me to the library
where I did the research to get a better answer. I quickly discovered
that the drug he offered me would not only not cure the disease, but that
it was guaranteed to put me on the road to becoming an invalid long before
my time.
Fortunately I rejected his treatment. I went on
to search the scientific literature where I quickly found what I needed.
It had nothing to do with synthetic drugs. It took me about 3 1/2 months
to fully reverse my diabetes. That was seven years ago. The disease remains
in full remission to this day.
There is one important caveat that must be mentioned
at this point. If you are currently under a doctors care and are dissatisfied
with the results you are getting, do not just stop taking the prescribed
medication. Get your doctor, or another doctor if yours will not cooperate,
to help wean you off prescription drugs and to help you to devise a workable
alternative therapy. Many of these synthetic drugs will produce serious
side effects if they are abruptly discontinued. When I had the problem
I had not yet taken prescription medication.
After accepting full responsibility for your own
health, the second most important consideration is to do your homework
and learn about the disease or disability that you have. Buy books, attend
seminars, subscribe to newsletters, search the internet, learn about what
it takes to actually reverse the disease that afflicts you. Investigate
alternative medical practitioners. Many Naturopaths and Chiropractors
can be of great help in actually curing disease. Do not fall for the idea
that only doctors are smart enough to understand these things.
Look for that unusual doctor that will risk really
trying to help you; and, realize that he is taking a substantial risk
when he does so. In other words, do the best you can to find something
better for yourself than what your doctor offers. Help each other. If
you discover something important, don't be afraid to share the information.
Be vocal when government organizations attempt to restrict or deny your
access to natural nutritional supplements.
If you are fortunate to find a doctor with this
kind of integrity, understand the importance of what you have found and
give him all of the support that you can give. There is a medical doctor
in California, we will call him Doctor Q, that refused to compromise his
integrity in his practice of medicine. He ended up in jail, put there
by his fellow doctors. His patients got together, got him out of jail
and had a special bill passed in the State legislature to protect his
practice of medicine. Today he still runs a flourishing practice where
he ministers to patients from all over this country. He is actually curing
disease not just treating it.
Third, after accepting responsibility for your own
health and becoming informed, recognize that medicine is a business. Your
doctor is a paid consultant just like your electrician or plumber and
he is listed in the same yellow pages. You have every right to get the
information for which you are paying. When your doctor retreats into arrogance
and refuses to provide direct answers to direct questions, consider getting
another doctor. There really are many safe and effective therapies that
go far beyond drugs. However, we must demand them on the firing line,
in the doctor's office, when we need them.
© 2002 Thomas Smith -
All Rights Reserved
Thomas Smith is a reluctant medical investigator
having been forced into seeking a cure for his own Diabetes because it
was obvious that his doctor would not or could not cure it. He has published
the results of his successful Diabetes investigation in his special report
entitled "Insulin: Our Silent Killer" written for the layman but also
widely valued by the medical practitioner. This report may be purchased
by sending $25.00 US to him at PO Box 7685 Loveland, Colorado 80537. He
has also posted a great deal of useful information about this disease
on his web page www.Healingmatters.com
He can be reached by telephone at: 1 (970) 669-9176 E-Mail: Valley@healingmatters.com
