Never Be Sick Again (36 page)

10
T
HE
M
EDICAL
P
ATHWAY

“[T]he greatest danger to your health is the doctor who
practices Modern Medicine.”

Robert Mendelsohn, M.D.
Confessions of a Medical Heretic

O
ne spring morning, more than twenty years ago, I received a call from my father's physician telling me that my father, hospitalized for emphysema, was dying of kidney failure. I raced to the hospital almost two hundred miles away. My brother and I found our father in a deep coma. He looked as if he were dead.

The doctors advised us to disconnect his life-support systems and allow him to slip away peacefully. We knew our father would not choose to live hooked to machines in a vegetative state. We knew his own decision would be to pull the plug. We consented. All life-support measures were terminated.

Late that evening, our father was still alive but in a deep coma. In the morning, my brother and I returned to the hospital with anxiety and grief. We thought that he might have died during the night. Instead, we found our father sitting up and telling jokes to the nurse!

A miracle? No. The doctors had been giving our father “life-saving” prescription drugs that put a lethal load of toxins on his kidneys. When the drugs were stopped, his body was able to rebalance and begin to repair itself. A night without the drugs was sufficient. Our decision to “let him die” saved him.

Had he died, his death would have been attributed to kidney failure, not the prescription drugs that were causing his kidneys to fail.

My father's story is extreme, yet all too common. The vast number of medically caused deaths is underreported and underestimated. Prescription errors, surgical mistakes and missed diagnoses do not even begin to describe the scope of the problem. The truth is lost in prescription pads, health charts and death certificates, which do not reflect the true causes of death and disease. We pride ourselves on the accomplishments of modern medicine without acknowledging its failures. Actually,
medical intervention may be the leading
cause of death in the United States.

Conventional medical treatments can be both a blessing or a curse. These treatments are good, even excellent, in crisis intervention and treatment of injuries. But conventional medicine does not prevent nor cure disease; it manages symptoms. We wait for disease to happen, wait for the damage to be done and then try to control the problems by “treating,” using assembly-line techniques that are currently fashionable, expensive and usually dangerous. These techniques cause cellular malfunction—often cavalierly called “side effects”— which lead to unnecessary suffering, disease and death. Even so-called preventive medicine usually is only early disease detection, rather than real prevention.

The present system suffers from a disease-care bias. Very few medical resources are devoted to disease prevention by helping people to maintain cellular health through diet, nutritional supplements, detoxification, exercise, healthful environment, state of mind and lifestyle. Instead, resources are devoted toward treating the effects of disease. Our modern medical system fails to find cures for chronic diseases despite vast sums of money spent on research every year. The late Emanuel Cheraskin, M.D., D.M.D., at the University of Alabama Medical Center, said, “American medical care is the fastest-growing failing business in Western Civilization.”

The Truth and the Consequences

Many people maintain total and unquestioning trust in modern medicine. They get advice and treatments from only one school of thought and willingly surrender their personal health responsibilities to the hands of their doctor. This approach is not sensible.
Educate yourself before you follow anyone else's
advice, including your physician's.
Health is the responsibility of the individual.

Rarely do most people realize that certain aspects of medicine might harm their health, or that better alternatives might exist. Instead, they do what is familiar and conventional. Confronted with a health problem, they go to the doctor either because they do not know how to solve the problem or they are intimidated by alternatives. This was certainly my experience.

The medical pathway teaches you how all kinds of medical treatments affect your body at the cellular level, the benefits and the dangers. With this understanding, and if you are not blinded by unquestioning trust in modern medicine, you can evaluate the evidence and make the best choices about medical care for yourself and for your family. With the right health choices, you should not become sick. But if you do, you must take an active part in your care which means more than blindly following someone else's advice. You need to learn how to take charge—relying on medicine alone is not a sensible long-term solution.

Like most people in our society, I grew up wholeheartedly trusting modern medicine. When I became sick I took my physicians' advice without question and believed that I was benefiting from the most advanced medical science and the most effective treatments. I unwittingly waited in line at the pharmacy for my toxic drugs. Not until I almost died as a direct result of my medical treatments did I question the validity of this approach, and then it was almost too late. Before choosing any medical treatment, consider both benefits and risks. Understand your choices and how they are supposed to benefit you, and find out the risks.

What Is Not on the Death Certificate

A physician may actually guide your movement along the pathways toward disease rather than away from it. That happened to Harry, a delightful seventy-two-year-old man and a dear friend. I was shocked to hear that Harry had died of pneumonia. His story is important to relate.

Although Harry's pneumonia was caused by a bacterial infection, healthy people rarely develop infections, especially serious ones. Generally, infections occur in people who are already unhealthy, whose cells are malfunctioning and whose immunity is already compromised. Harry had always been a strong, healthy person who rarely succumbed to colds or flu. That pneumonia caused his death seemed suspicious. Something must have happened to make him susceptible to the infection that killed him. I sadly surmised that, most likely, modern medicine killed Harry.

Harry had been suffering pain in his hip from a congenital problem. His doctor prescribed a steroid hormone, cortisone. This drug helps alleviate pain and inflammation, but it has nasty side effects. Cortisone damages the immune system by inhibiting the production of antibodies and “killer” T-cells. In addition, this damage makes localizing infections difficult if they develop. The cortisone made Harry vulnerable to infection. He developed pneumonia in one lung and was hospitalized, where he was given large doses of antibiotics—presumably to kill the “germs” causing the pneumonia. Pneumonia, like any infection, is caused by malfunctioning cells and depressed immunity, not by germs alone. Normalizing cell function and rebuilding immunity, rather than trying to kill germs, is needed for recovery. But that is not what happened in Harry's case: After a few days on antibiotics, he was discharged, supposedly “cured.”

In reality, the antibiotics had increased Harry's problems because they further compromised his immunity. His already depressed immune system was now in worse shape than before. Shortly after returning home Harry developed another infection. This time the pneumonia affected both lungs, and shortly thereafter he died. During his first hospitalization, Harry became infected with a “superbug,” an antibiotic-resistant germ that is now common in hospitals. Antibiotics were useless against this infection, as was Harry's damaged immune system. In all likelihood, the state-of-the-art medical establishment both destroyed Harry's immune system and subjected him to the untreatable infection that killed him. Yet, the death certificate stated the official cause of death as pneumonia.

At my sickest, I was dying from liver failure that resulted from the toxic effects of a prescription drug. If I had died, guess what cause would have been listed on my death certificate? Liver disease. Period. No mention of the drug that made me sick would have been recorded.

Only in the most blatant and obvious cases does modern medicine consider or take responsibility for the damage it causes. Fears of malpractice claims only enhance the resolve of the medical community to keep listing causes of death as resulting from the sickness of the patient, rather than the treatments of the doctor. Physicians usually assume that the health problems they cause would have happened anyway. The general belief is that the negative effects of drugs and procedures are worth the risk. Little wonder that the cause of death on death certificates often has to do with the specialty of the doctor treating the disease.

Prescriptions for Trouble

To understand the extent of the damage caused by the medical establishment, consider how the patient can be sent toward disease along the six pathways:

• Medical treatments can cause nutritional deficiencies. Antibiotics, anti-inflammatories and steroid prescription drugs seriously damage the human digestive system, impairing the ability to digest food and absorb nutrients. Diuretics strip nutrients such as magnesium, calcium, potassium, zinc and iodine.

• Drugs work because they are toxic; they interfere with normal cell function, in order to suppress disease symptoms. Both prescription and over-the-counter drugs produce a vast variety of disease symptoms referred to as
side effects.

• Often physicians inflict psychological damage on their patients. When doctors estimate how long a patient will live, or predict that the patient will never walk or see again, they can create a self-fulfilling prophecy. Often physicians don't even listen to their patients' thoughts and opinions, interrupting them less than a minute after the patients start describing symptoms. Such practices sabotage one of the physician's primary goals: to help and support the patient throughout the entire healing process.

• Many medical procedures, including surgery, medical X rays and radiation, physically damage the body and ultimately cause malfunction and disease. This physical damage can lead to genetic damage. Genetic mutations can cause cancer and other diseases, and may be passed to future generations.

Managing Symptoms
Instead of Curing Disease

If you seek medical treatment, your physician asks you a series of questions and, perhaps, runs a series of tests to determine your symptoms. The purpose of this activity is to diagnose— to match your set of symptoms with specific named categories, also known as diseases. Diagnosed in this manner, a disease is nothing more than a set of symptoms. After diagnosis, modern medicine (also known as “allopathic” medicine; “allo” = against, and “pathic” = disease) literally seeks to “go against” the symptoms of disease.

Symptoms are significant only because they attract your attention; they are unpleasant and interfere with your ability to function, but they have nothing to do with the essence of health and disease. Disease ensues when cells malfunction. The symptoms may vary, the solution is always the same: Normalize cell function through the six pathways.

Perception is everything. Perceived symptoms become the “problem” that medicine seeks to stop. For example, if the perceived problem is high blood pressure, medicine aims to lower pressure with a variety of toxic drugs. If the perceived problem is a germ, medicine aims to kill the germ with toxic antibiotics. Meanwhile, both of these problems are merely symptoms of malfunctioning cells. Using drugs to lower the blood pressure, therefore, does not solve the problem that is causing the elevated pressure. And likewise with drugs used to kill germs. Germs can contribute to cellular malfunction, but germs are present constantly and everywhere in our environment. Killing the germs that are causing an infection does not make the person healthy, nor does it make the person more resistant to subsequent infections. In fact, they become less resistant because the drugs that kill the germs also damage and weaken the body.

When one has an infection, masking the symptoms of the sickness (fever, etc.) serves little purpose other than making the sick person more comfortable. For example, treating fever with over-the-counter drugs is a common practice. Yet, fever is natural and beneficial; there is no reason to use drugs for this purpose, especially because the drugs inflict harm.

By focusing on symptoms and taking drugs, we do not cure disease; we merely invent ways to allow sick people to continue living their lives more comfortably. Short-term relief has its place but is not a long-term solution. For example, angioplasty may prevent the immediate death of a patient by increasing blood flow to the heart; however, only by eliminating deficiency and toxicity can the heart disease be reversed, and this will not happen under the guidance of a conventional physician.