| Ilena Rose 2005-07-31, 11:52 am |
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Authors, Filmakers, and Physicians Shine the Cold Light of Truth on
the Dangers of Our Modern Food and Medicine Supply
http://www.vitalitymagazine.com/node/297
EXCERPT: Two important legal victories will doubtlessly give natural
medicine a break at last: the infamous industry front organization
“Quackwatch” had their key “expert witnesses,” such as Stephen Barrett
and his colleagues, totally discredited by several U.S. courts, so
they can’t testify against homeopathic and naturopathic doctors
anymore
~~~~~~~~~~
By Helke Ferrie
“I say: Fear not! Life still leaves human effort scope.”
— Matthew Arnold
Looking back over the events of 2004, I was reminded that intertwined
with all the terrible events of the year were the beginnings of a new
world to which human effort, working with and for nature, may yet give
birth. As I began to make a list of those events that invoke the
“Wow!” response, the image of the Christmas carol, “The Twelve Days of
Christmas” came to mind repeatedly. In it, each item “my true love
gave to me” appears in ever-increasing multiples, and all are
re-connected to the original gift — the partridge in the pear tree —
which unites this profusion of gifts into one celebration. The year
2004 brought us many such gifts, and each is already in the process of
rapidly multiplying itself. These gifts all share one important
characteristic: they tell the truth so compellingly as to be
jaw-droppers.
If I were to pick that “partridge in the pear tree” for 2004 to which
the carol always returns and which unifies all that follows, I would
say it was the documentary “Supersize Me”. It conveys the central
truth to which all other healing developments are connected. It is the
year’s great gift to humanity. The fact that documentaries have become
blockbusters in movie theatres shows that the public’s appetite for
facts, and a corresponding boredom with spin, are bringing about a new
public mind. The message of this film is terrible and often downright
disgusting, but the truth and the solutions it offers are healing and
nourishing — and we are all hungry for real food, for the truth.
“Supersize Me” serves literally as an index for all the core problems
with health and the environment. The metaphor “you are what you eat”
becomes physical reality as Morgan Spurlock, the hero of the film —
and he is a hero if ever there was one — decides to eat only
McDonald’s food for 30 days. His decision is prompted by a suit filed
against that corporation a couple of years ago on behalf of two
children claiming that their horrendous obesity and attending health
problems stemmed from this food. The court dismissed the case saying
that proof was needed that McDonald’s food “is dangerous to health.”
This film provides that evidence, and in doing so changes our
perspective on health and what medicine ought to be.
Morgan’s dietary adventure was supervised by a cardiologist,
gastroenterologist, general practitioner, and a nutritionist who
monitored his weight, the functioning of his liver, heart and brain,
and regularly checked his blood for vitamin and mineral levels.
By day three of the diet, Morgan feels sick and throws up, but he
perseveres. By day nine the addiction response sets in with general
depression and headaches as soon as he gets hungry, and which
disappear when he eats at McDonald’s. By day 18 he has chest pain and
palpitations, feels weak, and the vitamin and mineral levels in his
blood are down to less than half of the bare minimum standard medicine
considers necessary for survival. His doctors tell him to stop the
experiment. On day 21 Morgan has what his doctors consider “obscene
and outrageous liver values,” stating that they, “never thought it was
possible to get into such a state with this diet! You are as sick as a
binge alcoholic!” One of his doctors doubts such damage is reversible.
Yet, Morgan persists and by day 29 can barely go up the stairs to his
apartment where he finds his girlfriend, a professional vegetarian
gourmet chef, at the computer working out his “detox diet” starting
the next day. It took eight months to restore his health — with decent
food.
The final medical assessment reveals that he gained about eight pounds
a week, sustained serious liver damage, raised his bad cholesterol
such as to double his chances of heart disease, developed central
nervous system problems such as palpitations, addiction, headaches and
depression, and his sex life has been “non-existent” since week two of
the experiment, indicating serious hormonal imbalances. All this was
caused by a pound of refined sugar a day, 12 pounds of fat a week, and
an unknown quantity of artificial food additives, growth hormones,
antibiotics and pesticides which are all part of fast foods and their
flavouring and preservatives.
At the beginning of his experiment he placed each of the McDonald’s
menu items in a separate glass jar to observe their rates of decay.
Serving as controls were a hamburger and French fries made from fresh,
organic ingredients. The McDonald’s foods decayed very slowly in
comparison to the “real stuff.” The french fries did not decay at all
and looked exactly the same as on the day they were purchased 12 weeks
later!
Woven into the 30-day experiment are interviews with addiction,
nutrition, and medical experts, visits to school cafeterias, prisons
and institutions for emotionally disturbed and violent teenagers
(organic food calms them down completely), and the offices of industry
lobbyists who, in one case, readily admitted that they were “part of
the problem.” The problem being that America is the fattest nation on
earth, with 60% of the population now being dangerously obese; every
fourth child is now expected to become diabetic. The film’s opening
credits gave a list of all the diseases currently known to be caused
by this type of nutrition; they include cancer, heart attacks,
diabetes, and most chronic diseases. Thus, the film takes you through
the causes and prevention of all these illnesses: everything boils
down to the quality of the food, and that quality involves the way the
food is grown, the animals are treated, the processing, packaging, and
delivery. Food is an organic labyrinth where the dead-ends are
disease.
Hippocrates stated two and a half millennia ago: “Let food be your
medicine.” This film’s demonstration of the truth of food as the
foundation of health was greatly amplified by the revelations about
drugs in this summer’s bestsellers by Marcia Angell’s The Truth About
The Drug Companies and Merrill Goozner’s The $800 Million Pill.
Time Magazine listed Angell as one of the 25 most influential people
in the U.S. For 20 years she was the editor of the world’s most
prestigious medical journal, the New England Journal of Medicine.
Angell’s book is an earthquake for medicine, and Goozner’s is a
hurricane for its corporate counterpart, Big Pharma. Frankly, I have
never read anything like these two books. Angell describes an almost
surreal world of deception and corruption, from which drugs emerge to
treat those very diseases caused by the standard North American fast
food diet. This corrupt approach to human health is so vast as to
engulf everything from the original research (usually a good
discovery) to the totally distorted programs for the continuing
medical education of the prescribing doctors, who are as duped as
their patients.
Goozner, a financial analyst, reveals how the drug industry’s mantra
about the high cost of drugs supposedly being a function of R&D costs
(research and development) is a Big Lie: Big Pharma developed none of
the drugs currently on the market. All were developed at taxpayers’
expense by government labs or universities, and were then taken over
by the industry with obscene profits for themselves and their
shareholders.
Light of Truth Shines on Drug Industry
Truth once released, like the proverbial genie escaping from the
bottle, is out for good. Truth has the quality of purifying fire and
moves as fast now as it did in the 1980s when it was impossible to
keep up with political change and the re-drawing of national
boundaries. Truths have been emerging this year about drugs and
medicine at a similarly breath-taking pace: one German study showed
that only 6% of all drug advertising is based on any kind of
verifiable fact, scientific or clinical. That really tells it all.
In rapid succession the public learned that the world’s pricey
medicine cabinet is filled with chemicals of deception, and Health
Canada and the FDA struggled mightily (and unsuccessfully) to keep up
with world-renowned researchers blowing whistles on three continents.
Only a few samples can be mentioned here for reasons of space:
• We learned that anti-depressants increase the risk of suicide and
cancer;
• That the cancer-drug Tamoxifen increases the risk of liver cancer
and is not protective against breast cancer after all — a fact
well-known at the time the drug came to market.
• Ritalin is bad for kids because its cocaine-like chemistry literally
shrinks their brains over time.
• Both U.S. presidential candidates called for the removal of
neurotoxic mercury preservative from all vaccines within only weeks of
all those official denials about the dangers of vaccines.
• The Cox-inhibitor Vioxx turned out to be deadly for the heart and no
good for arthritis after all, sending its manufacturer Merck into a
financial tailspin it may never recover from.
• Top FDA officials testified before the U.S. Congress that there are
lots of equally and even more dangerous drugs on the market that
should never have been released. These include the cholesterol drug
Crestor, the weight-loss Meridia (which is actually Prozac), the
painkiller Bextra, the liver-toxic acne drug Accutane, and the asthma
drug Serevent.
Even the comparatively less corrupt part of medicine — high-tech
surgery — was not spared: as reported in the New York Times in
September, some of the world’s leading heart surgeons confessed that
by-pass surgery, angioplasty and stents “do not benefit” patients
after all, and that those arterial plaques aren’t the real problem
after all. This information was too late for junk-food addict former
president Bill Clinton who was put through this useless surgery.
Hopefully, he has by now seen “Supersize Me.”
The editor of the Journal of the American Medical Association, Dr.
Drummond Rennie, observed in the Los Angeles Times on April 9:
“Research is going down the toilet if nobody can believe it, or if it
has been distorted.” Yes, indeed and well — wow! — what a bunch of
exploding supernovas we have seen this year!
Physicians and Medical Editors Bring New Integrity to the Table
As in our Christmas carol, there have also been a lot of ‘lords
a’leaping” and “maids a’milking,” which is to say, the medical
profession has admirably begun to meet these challenges and started to
strut their combined creative stuff. Led by the editor of the Canadian
Medical Association’s Journal, Dr. John Hoey, the editors of the
world’s medical journals decided that their initiative of 2001 just
wasn’t enough to stop the corruption. Back then, they had ordered all
authors to declare their financial connections with industry. But as
Dr. Hoey explained in a CBC radio interview, this didn’t really get to
the heart of the matter, which was the industry itself.
So, in September of this year, in “A Statement from the International
Committee of Medical Journal Editors,” the industry was informed that
from now on at the onset of all clinical trials all participants must
be registered. That way there can be no phantom patients anymore such
as in the case of the original trials for the anti-depressant Prozac
(there never were some 10,000 patients involved, but less than 300
healthy people carefully selected for not having ever had a history of
depression). Furthermore, Big Pharma won’t be able to stop a trial and
release drug, but not the information, when too many people get nasty
side-effects (as in the case of Tamoxifen and many other drugs — see
Goozner’s book). Finally, all the names of the researchers conducting
the trial will be known from now on, so they can no longer be bought
or intimidated. The World Medical Association followed this lead and
in November published their ethical guidelines for MD-pharma
relations. Trouble is, this fair new world of transparency doesn’t
start till March 2005. On April 1, the fools and the geniuses will at
last begin to become distinguishable. This will not improve Big
Pharma’s stock market value.
Emerging in celebratory unity, Ontario’s college of Family Physicians
published their impressive report condemning pesticides, and laying
out in meticulous detail the proof of how they cause asthma and
cancers, and advocating organic food. The Italian government, relying
on their own doctors, made 100% organic food mandatory in all
educational institutions from kindergarten to university. The U.S.
Centre for Disease Control published their report demonstrating that
everybody on this continent carries at least 13 carcinogenic
chemicals, none of which should be there, all of which come from an
industry that makes money over all our dead bodies, and to all of
which the regulatory authorities turn a blind eye.
Two important legal victories will doubtlessly give natural medicine a
break at last: the infamous industry front organization “Quackwatch”
had their key “expert witnesses,” such as Stephen Barrett and his
colleagues, totally discredited by several U.S. courts, so they can’t
testify against homeopathic and naturopathic doctors anymore. In
British Columbia, the Strauss Herbal Company scored a total court
victory over Health Canada whose 73 charges were all dismissed. Funny,
this didn’t make the front page of the Globe and Mail. In Ontario
great tidings of joy include the fact that the college of Physicians
and Surgeons, following enormous public and governmental pressure, did
not renew the contract of their Deputy Registrar, Dr. John Carlisle,
who for the past 20 years had masterminded the many improper
persecutions of environmental, alternative, and pain physicians.
There are 78 items in “ The Twelve Days of Christmas”, and my list is
even longer. As my cup runneth over, I shall close with one delightful
item that has wonderful and far-reaching implications for the toxic
drink industry, and dims the outlook for the pesticide industry in a
most unexpected way: Farmers in India noticed that Coca-Cola and other
carbonated soft drinks are a most effective and cheap pesticide, the
UK’s Guardian reported on November 9. One litre of concentrated
pesticide costs 10,000 rupees (about $200 — a horrendous amount of
money in such a poor country), but one and a half litres of “the real
thing” costs only 30 rupees. It kills the bugs just fine without
ruining the water supply anywhere near as badly. While spokespeople
for Coca-Cola were not amused, leading Indian agricultural analyst,
Devinder Sharma observed, no doubt tongue firmly in cheek, “I think
Coke has found its right use.”
Happy New Year!
Resources:
• Marcial Angell, The Truth About The Drug Companies: How They Deceive
Us and What to Do About It, Random, 2004 (the book of the decade)
• Merill Goozner, The $800 Million Pill, university of California
Press, 2004 (the ultimate indictment)
• Harold Kushner, The Lord is My Shepherd, Random, 2004 (everybody
needs this book)
• Helke Ferrie, Dispatches from the War Zone of Environmental Health,
Kos, 2004 (a roller-coaster ride through the politics of medicine)
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