Dr. Carolyn Dean MD -- Are You Mad Enough to Become a Health Freedom Fighter?

ARE YOU MAD ENOUGH TO BECOME A HEALTH FREEDOM FIGHTER?
PART 1 of 2

Dr. Carolyn Dean, MD, ND and
Elissa Meininger
September 22, 2005
NewsWithViews.com

As we watch the tragedy unfold in the aftermath of Katrina, if we have learned one thing, it is that individuals and small volunteer groups are the ones who single handedly have been more responsive to the needs of the people displaced by the storm than the fat, well-funded government agencies and their anointed private sector �humanitarian� associates who collect lavish cash donations to fund their activities.

At the same time we have heard endless stories of bureaucrats, particularly those running FEMA, have repeatedly and sometimes rudely put a stop to the efforts of those who had the means at hand to literally save lives and provide other aid and comfort to the suffering without charging the taxpayer.

As we have now learned, this Katrina crisis came about thanks to another government intervention after the New York Trade Center attack. The powers that be-namely our elected officials-based on the findings of a government-appointed fact-finding group, decided that central planning, not local planning, would protect us from terrorists and natural disasters. Congress put FEMA under the great and grand new Department of Homeland Security so they could add even more layers of bureaucracy to a system that already had trouble responding efficiently.

This group-think that government bureaucrats know best has literally killed hundreds of people and displaced tens of thousands more. We can only hope that as the Gulf Coast gets rebuilt that government planners don�t end up compounding the problem by pre-selecting yet another favored few in what could turn out to a 21st Century carpet bagging scandal.

For anyone who understands the modern medical-industrial complex, the failure of government to provide appropriate help is not news. The refusal to allow real healers to meet our needs is not news, either. While modern medicine�s backers brag we have the finest medical system in the world and these same backers have control of our government officials, millions of us have run as fast as we can away from the dangers of modern medicine. In the process we have created a spontaneous army of political activists to fight tooth and nail to free us from the same mindless management that FEMA and elected officials are providing to victims of Katrina. What we want is to be free to control our own bodies and to contract with the people we choose to provide the health services we really need and use the natural health products we have been depending on for generations that we already know are safe and effective�not to mention cheap!

Each of us who have found ourselves actively fighting for health freedom has a reason why we became politically active. My own fight began when I was in medical school. I was interested in nutrition and read every book I could lay my hands on even before I went into medicine. There was a little voice inside of me that didn�t agree with the mantra �better living through chemistry� and the suppression of Mother Nature. Proper diet, exercise and nutritional supplementation to augment the nutritionally depleted food supply (thanks to modern growing and manufacturing techniques) seemed to be the best medicine I could provide my patients. The idea that synthetic pills, which did nothing but mask symptoms and provide possible adverse reactions including death, didn�t make sense to me as a person or a professional healer. However, in the drug industry run medical schools across the US and Canada, my interest in practicing acupuncture and simply eating home made yogurt at lunch, ostracized me and everyone like me. And by simply practicing natural medicine I was labeled a maverick when all I was trying to do was practice safe and effective medicine and use my common sense to avoid dangerous therapies.

These days, MDs in most states who, like me, want to branch out and provide homeopathy, herbal medicine, dietary supplements and other natural healing arts services not taught in medical schools, must first check the political climate of their state licensing boards. There are no laws against MDs providing such services but licensing boards are fierce fiefdoms of their own, just like FEMA, and they �know it when they see it� when it comes to those unwritten rules called �code of ethics� or �standard practice of medicine� violations. Whatever the local climate is, suddenly becomes an unwritten law and many an MD has been dragged up to his or her licensing board with the threat of being de-licensed for promoting homeopathy and all manner of other safe alternatives to drugs.

Thanks to the political actions of literally thousands upon thousands of ordinary citizens across America since the early 1990�s, there are some 16 states with laws now on the books to protect MDs from harassment for providing non-modern medical (aka non-allopathic) services. The process of getting these laws on the books pretty much boils down to an incident where some poor MD gets caught up in a political fight with his or her licensing board. Angry citizens organize and start campaigning at their state legislature to pass a law to protect MDs and after a while they succeed. That�s because the patient who wants access to safe health care services that work is often in a life and death struggle whereas the modern medical-industrial complex can�t outvote voters at the ballot box. They can only buy influence in the cloakrooms.

Elissa�s path to political action started after suffering chronic illness for 35 years. I can�t imagine the suffering she went through knowing that from the first grade something was wrong and no MD seemed to understand what she was talking about. By the time she was an adult, she insisted that somebody pay attention to her ever-worsening symptoms (by this time she had fatigue so profound she could barely get out of bed some days and she had mental fogginess that at times prevented her from carrying on coherent conversations, to name a few of the more overwhelming symptoms).

Her first �official� modern medical diagnosis for her mysterious symptoms was that she had a �neurotransmitter disorder�, the disease de jour that was being written up in all the medical journals at the time of her diagnosis, due, no doubt, to development of drugs to treat it. Then, when the drug she was prescribed was taken off the market thanks to the efforts of Ralph Nader as it was found to be killing people, her diagnosis was switched to �bipolar disorder� a popular name for what we used to call �manic-depression�. Actually, the official National Institute of Mental Health (NIMH) description of this condition is:

Elissa�s family physician, hardly an expert on psychiatric diseases, was more than happy to ignore the fact that he�d already prescribed a deadly drug in what Elissa thinks was actually a clinical trial he had neglected to mention to her when he first gave her the drug. He supplied her with the drug and there was no package insert to describe what it was. When he stopped giving her the deadly drug, he merely suggested he could prescribe lithium instead as she really didn�t have a neurotransmitter after all, but actually had a bipolar disorder.

Fortunately, Elissa is a trained lay therapist and had many psychiatrist professor friends at the local medical school so, aside from five years of training in the mental health field (as opposed to her MD�s four months training during his internship in the mental ward of the same medical school), she knew he didn�t know what he was talking about.

Rather than just jump to a new MD, she decided to go to the competition for a second opinion -a naturopath, to see what he might have to say. This decision to obtain a real �second opinion� from someone of a different practice-point-of-view saved her life. She not only learned that the true nature of her lifelong suffering came from mercury fillings in her teeth, placed there when she was a child, but that the NIMH definition of bipolar disorder/manic depression is identical to the description of the neurological distress caused by amalgam fillings.

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What she also learned was that mercury poisoning from dental amalgams was not a recognized disease in America and that countless numbers of sufferers have been wrongfully locked up, misdiagnosed with other diseases and drugged to suppress symptoms and some have even had needless surgeries due to the same MD ignorance of the problem. As a point of information, NIMH claims that two million Americans have bipolar disorder. One wonders how many of these two million people actually have mercury poisoning from their dental fillings causing their �bipolar disorder� symptoms.

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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.