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