Never Be Sick Again (38 page)
Money is at stake, and competition from less expensive, natural treatments is discouraged. The FDA is supposed to regulate drugs to assure that they are safe and effective. In practice, FDA-approved, properly prescribed drugs kill about four hundred people every day. Why? Because the FDA has become an instrument of the pharmaceutical companies. The drug industry is among the most profitable in the world, and Americans pay more for the same drugs than people in other countries. To help protect these economic interests, about one-half of the senior officials at the FDA formerly were employed as key executives in the drug industry. After leaving the FDA, about half eventually return to executive positions in drug companies. This practice is termed “the revolving door.” The FDA is very biased in favor of drugs, and people are denied free access to the documented health benefits of nutritional supplements. Needless to say, these people are not in favor of treating diseases with vitamins. Both manufacturers and retailers of supplements have been subjected to FDA seizures and harassment.
One of the supposed justifications for modern medicine's suppression of alternative approaches is that they have not been properly tested for safety and effectiveness. In truth, many alternative approaches (such as the use of vitamin supplements) are supported by thousands of sound studies, while, ironically, up to 90 percent of the techniques and procedures used by modern medicine have never been proven to be safe or effective.
Medical Malpractice
According to a 1995 issue of the
Journal of the American
Medical Association,
more than 1 million people per year are injured in hospitals, and 180,000 die from those injuries. Illnesses caused by prescription drugs are estimated to cost more than $136 billion a year. A 1981 study published in the
New
England Journal of Medicine
concluded that at least one-third of hospital patients suffered some ill effect during their stay, and that 9 percent suffered major injury. Consider what the late Robert Mendelsohn, M.D., author of the 1979 book
Confessions
of a Medical Heretic,
wrote: “I believe that more than ninety percent of Modern Medicine could disappear from the face of the earthâdoctors, hospital, drugs, and equipmentâand the effect on our health would be immediate and beneficial.”
Normally, one might think that if doctors went on strike the public would suffer serious health problems. Yet, Mendelsohn noted cases when doctors went on strike and the death rate declined. In 1973, doctors were on strike in Israel for a month, and this coincided with a decline of 55 percent in the death rate. In 1976, a fifty-two-day doctor strike in Bógota, Colombia, coincided with a decline in mortality of 35 percent. The same year, in Los Angeles, doctors staged a slowdown, and the death rate dropped by 18 percent. In each case, when the doctors' labor actions ended, mortality rates shot back up to prior levels.
In recent years, a number of medical journals, such as
Pediatrics, Lancet, Annual Review of Public Health,
and particularly the July 26, 2000,
Journal of the American Medical
Association,
have been filled with statistics on injuries and deaths caused by modern medical practice. The most recent annual estimate of hospital-caused deaths is:
⢠106,000 deaths from “properly” prescribed drugs.
⢠80,000 deaths from hospital-caused infections.
⢠12,000 deaths from unnecessary surgery.
⢠7,000 deaths from medication errors.
⢠20,000 deaths from other errors.
These numbers total 225,000 deaths per year, but the real total is far greater. These numbers do not include unreported medically caused deaths. Why take responsibility for a death if another plausible explanation can be given? Even in good hospitals, only one “adverse event” out of four is reported; some studies have placed the reporting as low as one out of twenty. Medicine-caused deaths in outpatient settings have been estimated as an additional 200,000 per year. Again, this figure is conservative. Perhaps one of the biggest problems, though, is X rays.
The Threat of X Rays
One of the most serious threats to our health may be caused by one type of medical testing: medical and dental X rays. There is no safe radiation level; any amount of radiation can cause our cells to malfunction. The radiation levels from medical and dental X rays (though supposedly within “safe limits”) contribute to both cancer and coronary heart disease. Evidence was published in 1999 by John Gofman, a medical doctor and a Ph.D. nuclear physicist, who is one of the world's leading authorities on radiation damage. Dr. Gofman's book,
Radiation from Medical Procedures in the Pathogenesis of
Cancer and Ischemic Heart Disease,
presents a compelling argument for reconsidering how we understand disease and death rates in our society and modern medicine's responsibility for them. Gofman's research caused him to conclude that medical radiation was probably the single largest cause of cancer mortality in the twentieth century.
Gofman's evidence suggests that medical X rays are a necessary cofactor, meaning that while other factors are involved, the X ray is necessary for both cancer and heart disease to develop. Dr. Gofman found that more than 60 percent of deaths from cancer and more than 70 percent of deaths from coronary heart disease involved X rays. To cite just one example, Gofman found that in 1990, medical X rays were a necessary causal factor in 83 percent of all breast cancer. In other words, chest X rays and mammograms are the leading cause of breast cancer.
Fortunately, thermography is a safe and effective alternative to mammograms. Thermography measures temperature and appears to be a far more accurate way of detecting tumors at a much earlier stage. A cancerous tumor, as it begins to receive its own blood supply, is warmer than the surrounding tissue and can be discerned when the temperature of the breast is measured.
Modern medicine is responsible for about 90 percent of our exposure to man-made radiation, and about 90 percent of that exposure is the result of diagnostic X rays. A level of radiation less than that produced by ten bitewing dental X rays can produce thyroid cancer, and not surprisingly, an epidemic of thyroid cancer is now being found in people who had upper chest, neck and head X rays decades ago.
Nevertheless, X rays are performed with alarming frequency. Gofman estimates that more than half are not necessary. Other researchers have placed the percentage of X rays of “little to no medical value” as high as 90 percent. Even low-level X rays are capable of inflicting genetic damage, presenting a hazard to both existing and future generations. For example, correlations have been found between the number of abdominal X rays a mother had received in her lifetime and the birth of a baby with Down's syndrome.
The public worries about radiation from nuclear power plants, yet a more common hazard is radiation from medical X rays. Decline X rays unless they are absolutely necessary, which is not often. Children are especially vulnerable to radiation and need to be protected by their parents.
Applying Dr. Gofman's data on medical X rays to 60 percent of the deaths from cancer and 70 percent of the deaths from ischemic heart disease in this country, I calculated that X rays cause about 650,000 deaths every year. Combining these deaths with the acknowledged number of medicine-caused deaths (250,000 inpatient and 200,000 outpatient per year) reveals an estimated total of more than 1 million deaths per year caused by modern medical practice. This figure amounts to about half of all deaths in America, making modern medicine our leading cause of death.
Should You Have Medical Testing?
Among the treatments that cause patients harm are diagnostic tests, everything from ultrasound to X rays, from blood tests to barium enemas. Many of these tests are inaccurate, present more risk than benefit and alternatives often are safer and more effective. The only time these tests are justified are when safety is clearly in question and only when the results of the test would require action. Avoid tests that simply provide information. For example, avoid ultrasounds during pregnancy, which do little more than inform parents about their child's development and rarely lead to any meaningful action. Always question your doctor carefully about whether a particular medical test is necessary, especially if the test is invasive. All tests need not be avoided, but ask about potential risks as well as benefits. Be aware that most doctors downplay risks. Remember, a diagnostic test precipitated my own health crisis.
Most often doctors order tests to measure symptoms in order to make a diagnosis. Such testing is not especially useful because it is not designed to measure the causes of disease: deficiency and toxicity. Doctors should be ordering tests that measure, directly or indirectly, levels of deficiency and toxicity and what is causing them. If the tests are not for these purposes, they may be unnecessary. Many diagnostic tests are ordered solely for defensive purposes, so that physicians can prove they considered every possibility in the event of legal action. Decline tests if the doctor is unable to explain how it will help to measure and correct your cellular deficiency and toxicity.
Every invasive test poses some risk. Even a simple blood test poses the danger of an infection developing at the puncture site. Punctures for removal of fluid from the joints, bone, spinal column and womb pose greater risks. Be especially wary of signing an informed consent for a diagnostic test, tip-off about the degree of risk involved.
If the accuracy of test results seems questionable, seek a second opinion. Be skeptical of any diagnosis based solely on a test. If something is found abnormal and the doctor wants to prescribe, request to have the test repeated before doing something that could cause damage, be it needless surgery, biopsies, medications, anxiety or financial cost. Suppose that a particular medical test is 95 percent accurate. For every twenty tests given, one false result will occur, usually a false positive. If a person has this test twenty times in a lifetime, the odds are in favor of at least one false result. In fact, many diseases can be “cured” simply by redoing the test. In 1975, the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention surveyed medical testing labs nationally and concluded that more than 25 percent of all test results were wrong; for certain clinical chemistry tests, the error rate was 50 percent. Not a lot has changed since then.
A study in the May 1997 issue of
Hippocrates
examined 169 different kinds of medical diagnostic tests and concluded that only nine of them actually did anything for the patient for reducing the incidence of disease. According to the article, many of these tests regularly led to faulty diagnoses, resulting in unnecessary treatments the patients did not need, and people with passing chest or back pain were “being marched off to surgery to get their hearts repaired or spines fixed.”
About 70 percent of all pregnant American women undergo ultrasound evaluations, yet studies published in medical journals including
Lancet
and the
Canadian Medical Association
Journal
show that ultrasound may affect fetal growth, resulting in babies with lower birth weight. In addition, children are twice as likely to have delayed speech development if they were examined via ultrasound as a fetus. A 1995 study done at the Massachusetts Institute of Technology and reported in
Science
found that low-frequency ultrasound increases the permeability of human skin, allowing proteins to pass through more easily. Ultrasound definitely affects the body's tissues, yet it is presented to patients as a procedure free of risks and side effects.
Should You Have Surgery?
Modern surgery certainly is one of the crowning achievements in modern medicine. Surgery works very well to correct physical problems, such as those sustained in accidents, sports injuries and from birth defects, but surgery does not solve disease problems. Unfortunately, most surgery is performed to address disease problems, wasting resources and permanently damaging the patient. Every part of the human body is important to the functioning of the whole; removing malfunctioning body parts does not solve the real problem. Surgery should not be performed unless there is absolutely no alternative, and there is almost always an alternative.
Most conventional cancer treatmentsâespecially surgeryâ are directed by the mechanistic belief system described earlier. Cancer is regarded as affecting a specific location or body part that should be removed physically or otherwise poisoned and killed. Completely forgotten is that cancer is a systemic disease affecting the entire body, and that a sounder approach is to restore cancerous cells to normal by addressing their deficiency and toxicity.
Cancer patients who properly address their deficiency and toxicity may experience what is termed “spontaneous remission.” A study by Dr. Harold Foster at the University of British Columbia in 1988 found that virtually every one of two hundred cancer patients who had experienced a spontaneous cancer remission had actually done something to improve their cell chemistry. Eighty-seven percent had made major changes to their diet, while others had used nutritional supplements and detoxification programs. Currently, numerous alternative treatments for cancer are available (see appendix D).
A heart bypass operation is another example of unnecessary surgery. In 1992, Nortin Hadler, M.D., a professor of medicine at the University of North Carolina Medical School, concluded that 95 to 97 percent of the coronary bypass surgeries done that year were unnecessaryâeven though patients usually are told that without the surgery they will die. In truth, almost all coronary disease is preventable with diet, supplements and exercise. Likewise, coronary disease is reversible, as pioneers like Nathan Pritikin, more recently Dean Ornish, M.D., and others, have proven.