How The AMA Hooks You on Drugs,
Harms Your Health, and Hurts the Earth
Wednesday, 16 March 2011
This article was written by Shane Ellison, M.S., an award-winning organic chemist and a two-time recipient of the prestigious Howard Hughes Medical Institute Research Grant for his studies in biochemistry and physiology. Known as “The People’s Chemist,” Ellison abandoned his career as a drug-design chemist and founded Thepeopleschemist.com, a science-based natural-health information website. He has a master’s degree in organic chemistry from Northern Arizona University and is the author of Over the Counter Natural Cures.
Founded in 1847, the American Medial Association (AMA) set out to “promote the art and science of medicine for the betterment of public health.” But the benevolent veil is wafer thin. The AMA has relentlessly hounded alternative medicines and therapies, forcing them out of business or keeping them at the margins. It has ignored good health and prevention in favor of pushing less safe and less effective—though more profitable—treatments, primarily surgery and drugs. And some startling facts show that it has done all of this at the expense of our health and that of the environment.
The Rise of AMA Tyranny
In the beginning, there was natural healing—botanical, Chinese, eclectic, homeopathic, nutritional and Native American medicine, as well as chiropractic, to name just a few. But in the eyes of the AMA, that was too much competition. It had to be minimized, which meant removing the glut of choices so that only AMA-approved treatments could be positioned as the cure-alls they are considered today.
Early on there were skeptics. In 1833, the New York Evening Star wrote: “Medicine [allopathic], like every useful science, should be thrown open to the observation and study of all.… We should at once explode the whole machinery of mystification and concealment—wigs, gold canes and the gibberish of prescriptions—which serves but as a cloak to ignorance and legalized murder.” But over time, the AMA mystification proved too complex, while the public ultimately relinquished control and became guinea pigs, which AMA doctors could use to “practice” allopathic medicine.
From their early vision of a one-size-fits-all medicine, in 1904 the AMA established the Committee on Medical Education (which later became the Council on Medical Education). Without government intervention, they singlehandedly used this branch to standardize medical education in America under their belief system, which was hailed as a “scientific breakthrough” with all others labeled “quackery, charlatanism or, at best, alternative medicine.”
In 1910, with support from John D. Rockefeller and the Carnegie Foundation for the Advancement of Teaching, the AMA awarded a grant to Abraham Flexner to travel with the secretary of the AMA Council on Medical Education to all US and Canadian medical schools then in existence. This tour resulted in Flexner's famous report, "Medical Education in the United States and Canada," which became a catalyst for a historic shift in thinking, ultimately positioning the AMA’s medical ideals as scientifically superior to all others. The birth of the AMA tyranny, known technically as “allopathic medicine,” was officially born—and surgery, vaccines and drugs became the primary health option for Americans.
Medical schools were forced to comply with the new standards—by removing other modes of healing from their curriculum—or lose AMA support. Under these restrictions, their numbers dwindled from more than 400 US medical schools in the 19th century to 148 by 1910 and just 76 by 1930. AMA spokesman, Robert Mills, excuses the AMA’s pressure on schools as necessary at the time because, “the medical education system churned out an overproduction of uneducated and ill-trained medical practitioners, who in general practiced with an absolute disregard for the public welfare and without any serious thought of the interests of the public. Flexner noted that there were five times as many US physicians in proportion to population than in European nations such as Germany. What drove this oversupply was commercial exploitation by a large number of schools whose mission was profit, not education. For these diploma mills, the expense of setting up a laboratory to aid didactic instruction took away from the bottom line, and the quality of education suffered as a result.”
The Allopathic Occult
With all competition weakened or removed, the AMA quickly established a “knowledge monopoly” in medicine, primarily with the intentional use of Latin bio-babble. This successfully gave rise to a gap in scientific literacy, which removed health education from the reach of the layman and placed it into the self-serving hands of the AMA, and their “approved” medical schools. This paved the way for the allopathic, drug model of healing, which was to benefit AMA supporters John D. Rockefeller and the Carnegie Foundation via their interests in chemical manufacturer IG Farben—infamous for its manufacture of Zyklon B, a pesticide used for human extermination in the gas chambers of Nazi death camps during the Holocaust.
Attacks on Chiropractic
With the dwindling of all other forms of medicine, only chiropractic remained a challenge. In an effort to suffocate the profits of that industry, AMA secretary Morris Fishbein led an anti-chiropractic campaign in medical journals and public media. He portrayed them as members of an unscientific cult—caring about nothing but money—despite chiropractic’s proven health benefits. The war against chiropractic continued into 1987 when, in the case of Wilk v. American Medical Association, the AMA was found guilty under the Sherman Antitrust Act of conspiring to destroy the profession of chiropractic.
According to Mills, since 1992 the AMA’s official stance on chiropractic has been that, “It is ethical for a physician to associate professionally with chiropractors provided that the physician believes that such association is in the best interests of his or her patient. A physician may refer a patient for diagnostic or therapeutic services to a chiropractor permitted by law to furnish such services whenever the physician believes that this may benefit his or her patient. Physicians may also ethically teach in recognized schools of chiropractic.” However, the AMA’s earlier propaganda campaign has had staying power. Chiropractic continues to reel from the bad press and is still seen by many as quackery.
To this day, there is no opposition to the allopathic occult. The Journal of the American Medical Association admitted as much when it published a 2004 article by Andrew Beck, which stated that “all accredited US medical schools strive to apply Flexner's ‘uniformly arduous and expensive’ brand of medical education…” And the monopoly is fully supported by the Food and Drug Administration (FDA), the Federal Trade Commission (FTC) and even mandated by the US court system, as seen by the myriad charges against parents who opt out of vaccines, psychiatric meds, surgery or traditional chemotherapy for their children. “As long as science shows these to have public health value,” Mills asserts that the AMA will continue to “endorse mandating certain medical treatments.”
A Drug-Addicted Nation
Prescription drugs have become more popular than McDonald’s hamburgers. In 2008, there were 3.9 billion prescriptions written—about 14 per American—compared to 560 million Big Macs sold—just two per American.
Drug spending is projected to top $445.9 billion by the year 2012. This drug addiction is the result of two tactics designed to spread AMA’s beloved allopathic “scientific breakthroughs” to hundreds of millions.
The first tactic is the creation of mini-sagas culminating in a miracle answer: drugs. This is direct-to-consumer (DTC) advertising, and one of the most potent ways to get unsuspecting patients to ask their doctors if a drug is “right for” them. Whether you’re reading a magazine, watching television or listening to the radio, it is guaranteed that you’ll be bombarded by these types of slick drug ads. No surprise, the concept of DTC ads was created by the AMA, FDA and the Pharmaceutical Manufacturers Association. Officially, this was done as a means of “promoting health awareness among consumers to ensure their health and safety.” Unofficially, it was done to sell more drugs under the medical umbrella of allopathic medicine.
In a 2010 American Association of Retired Persons (AARP) survey, 90 percent of respondents said they had seen a drug ad, 10 percent asked their doctor for the drug, of which two-thirds received either a prescription or a sample. Former US Senate Majority Leader, Bill Frist (R-Tennessee), is seen in the film, Big Bucks, Big Pharma, clearly identifying the DTC advertising threat: “Let there be no mistake: drug advertisements fuel America’s skyrocketing prescription drug costs. They influence consumer behavior. And they influence physician behavior. They cause more people to take prescription drugs. They create an artificial demand.”
Mills insists the AMA is strictly against today’s rampant DTC advertising, but that they do support it when the ads meet AMA standards, which ultimately help to, “improve the communication of health information; enhance the patient-physician relationship; and contain accurate and reasonable information on risks, precautions, adverse reactions and costs.”
Billing Code Extortion
The second tactic, standardized billing codes, is much more clandestine. The AMA isn’t dependent on membership to flex their allopathic muscles among doctors. Members or not, physicians who accept insurance or Medicare are forced to prescribe drugs for payment via billing codes—known as Current Procedural Terminology (CPT)—established by the AMA as a “universal language” to help practitioners communicate to insurers. A matrix of slick computer technology, CPT codes are matched to AMA-approved treatments—generally prescription drugs—and thus don’t allow for payment toward preventive, complementary or alternative medicine. Mills offers that other organizations are free to provide their own codes. But whether a new set of codes could make any inroads against the entrenched CPT ones is highly questionable.
CPT codes are the result of a covert agreement between the AMA and the US government’s Health Care Financing Administration (HCFA). The long-secret agreement was exposed in 1997. The US Court of Appeals, Ninth Circuit, ruled that the AMA’s exclusivity agreement with HCFA for using CPT code “gave the AMA a substantial and unfair advantage over its competitors” and “constituted a misuse of the copyright by the AMA.” But the codes are still in full force. In 2009, the AMA made $70 million in revenue courtesy of physicians using their payment codes.
Payment codes coupled with DTC advertising ensures that the masses are hypnotized into a prescription drug addiction, in the name of health. But it’s health in name only. Americans are sick, sick, sick. The United States ranks 12th among the top 13 countries in the ill health of its citizens—at least 80 percent of seniors have at least one chronic disease and 50 percent have at least two. Relative to children in other industrialized countries, the health of US children is worse in virtually every category. But more worrisome than declining health is the overt toxicity of using drugs as prescribed by doctors. And until the AMA puts a stop to it, they are just as much an accomplice as the industry making the drugs.
Doctors of Death
You don’t have to dig deep to know that allopathic medicine has become risky as hell. A Levitra ad recently showed me that a drug-induced erection may be accompanied by blindness. That’s serious. My college roommate used party drugs that were more fun—with half the side effects—and he had to buy them illegally. Yet, following doctor’s orders has become synonymous with danger.
Legal drugs prescribed through the wisdom of allopathic medicine kill an estimated 105,000 people per year. That equates to one individual dying about every five minutes from an “approved” drug—almost 300 deaths daily—that is, almost twice as many fatalities in a single year from approved drugs as the total number of US deaths (58,000) from the nine-year Vietnam War. And this does not include the 98,000 killed every year by physician medical error. Illicit drugs, on the other hand, directly and indirectly kill an estimated 17,000 people annually. Paradoxically, the US government spends nearly $50 billion every year to “fight a war” against illicit drugs in an effort to ameliorate this death toll. Yet America’s more deadly allopathic drug problem continues to be ignored.
If not killed, an estimated two million people are victims of prescription-drug-induced illnesses, according to the New England Journal of Medicine. These include drug-induced obesity, diabetes, cancer, kidney disease, autism, depression and heart failure, as well as the super-bug phenomenon that is sweeping the nation due to overuse of antibiotics. This troubling trend is ignored by lazy thinking and myopic physicians who dismiss the symptoms as “worsening health.”
Then there are the staggering hospital-death numbers. Even the AMA's own, probably conservative, statistics paint a bleak picture. They show that more than 12,000 people are killed every year by unnecessary surgeries. About 7,000 die from hospital medication errors. And 20,000 more lose their lives thanks to non-medication-related hospital-staff mistakes.
Environmental Evils
Besides making us sicker in many cases, allopathic medicine—with its reliance on chemical drugs—also harms the ecology. Realizing that prevention in most cases can eliminate the need for prescription drugs, and that many are counterproductive to our overall health, the negative environmental impact of their widespread use is even more troubling.
Pharmaceutical manufacturing plants expend energy and release toxic wastewater. Their global shipments create a large carbon footprint. And vast quantities of their products pass through our bodies—or are flushed down toilets—and end up in our rivers, lakes and groundwater. Health facilities alone flush an estimated 250 million pounds of drugs annually. A 2008 Associated Press investigation discovered “a vast array of pharmaceuticals including antibiotics, anti-convulsants, mood stabilizers and sex hormones… in the drinking-water supplies of at least 41 million Americans.”
While allopathic medicine has become a disaster for both the environment and many individuals, the AMA, US government and the drug-giant descendants that have grown from IG Farben continue to amass huge sums of wealth at their expense. As long as the AMA holds the medical monopoly and refuses to act against the atrocity, this holocaustic trend will continue. Every man, woman and child will become enslaved by surgery, vaccines, drugs and more drugs, or whatever else the AMA chooses to label a “scientific breakthrough.” And ecosytems, waterways and aquifers worldwide will continue to be fouled by the chemical pollutants flowing from both the manufacture and use of pharmaceuticals.
[The American Medical Association was contacted for a response, but declined. – Ed.]
Additional resources:
What You Need to Know about Drugs and Chemicals in Your Drinking Water
Hoxsey: How Healing Becomes A Crime DVD
There’s Something in the Water...and It Shouldn't Be There
The Top 10 Things You Can Do to Save the Earth—and Recycling’s NOT One of Them
The Best EcoHearth Pieces of 2010
The cancer industry is no exception. In Naked Empress - the Great Medical Fraud, Hans Ruesch quotes what Dr's Robert Houston and Gary Null wrote in the late 1970s, after studying the policies, activities, and assets of the major US cancer institutions. Houston and Null concluded that these institutions had become self-perpetuating organizations whose survival depended not on the state of a cure, but rather on the state of no cure. They wrote:
"A solution to cancer would mean the termination of research programs, the obsolescence of skills, the end of dreams of personal glory, triumph over cancer would dry up contributions to self-perpetuating charities and cut off funding from Congress. It would mortally threaten the present clinical establishments by rendering obsolete the expensive surgical, radiological and chemotherapeutic treatments in which so much money, training and equipment is invested. Such fear, however unconscious, may result in resistance and hostility to alternative approaches in proportion as they are therapeutically promising. The new therapy must be disbelieved, denied, discouraged and disallowed at all costs, regardless of actual testing results, and preferably without any testing at all."
As we shall see, this very pattern has in actuality occurred repeatedly, and almost consistently. In Medical Demystification (M.D.) Report, Dr. Sydney Singer writes:
"Researchers are like prostitutes. They work for grant money. If there is no money for the projects they are personally interested in, they go where there is money. Their incomes come directly from their grants, not from the universities. And they want to please the granting source to get more grants in the future. Their careers depend on it."
Many of us who live under the capitalist economic system like to act as if the health industry is not profit driven. We ignore how big business controls our health choices. In the April 1998 issue of AOK Magazine, Dr. Matthias Rath sets the record straight: He writes, "Throughout the 20th century, the pharmaceutical industry has been constructed by investors, the goal being to replace effective but non-patentable natural remedies with mostly ineffective but patentable and highly profitable pharmaceutical drugs. The very nature of the pharmaceutical industry is to make money from ongoing diseases. Like other industries, the pharmaceutical industry tries to expand their market--that is, to maintain ongoing diseases and to find new diseases for their drugs. Prevention and cure of diseases damages the pharmaceutical business and the eradication of common diseases threatens its very existence."
"Therefore, the pharmaceutical industry fights the eradication of any disease at all costs. Big Pharma, itself, is the main reason why today's most widespread diseases are further expanding, including heart attacks, strokes, cancer, high blood pressure, diabetes, osteoporosis and many others. Pharmaceutical drugs are not intended to cure diseases. According to health insurers, over 24,000 pharmaceutical drugs are currently marketed and prescribed without any proven therapeutic value."
According to medical doctors' associations, the known dangerous side-effects of pharmaceutical drugs have become the fourth leading cause of death after heart attacks, cancer and strokes. (Journal of the American Medical Association (JAMA), April 15, 1998)
Millions of people and patients around the world are defrauded twice. A major portion of their income is used up to finance the exploding profits of the pharmaceutical industry. In return, they are offered a product that doesn't even cure.
Tens of BILLIONS of dollars have been raised and spent on cancer research, early diagnosis, attempted prophylaxis, the incredible resources of surgery, the revolutionary advances in the physics of radiation, the development and evolution of toxic chemotherapy (excellent poisons that, in virulence, put the medics to shame), and the most advanced hospitals in the world. Yet, at this very moment, more people of all ages are dying from cancer than at any other time or place in the history of the human race! Something is wrong with this picture!
In the May 6, 1986 edition of the prestigious New England Journal of Medicine, a study titled, "Progress Against Cancer," authored by Bailar of Harvard and smith of the University of Iowa concluded, In the past 50 years, there has been no progress in the treatment of cancer, and the billions of dollars spent on cancer research over the past 50 years have been totally wasted. Alas, in the last 20 years (1966-1986) the death rate has increased substantially, because patients now die from the treatment, in addition to the condition.
In 1987, Dr. Dana Levi of the University of California wrote, "Most cancer patients in this country die from the chemotherapy--it does not eliminate breast cancer, colon or lung cancer--women with breast cancer are likely to die faster with chemotherapy than without it."
According to Dr. Julian Whitaker, MD, one of America's most trusted and respected authors, researchers, and personal physician, "Cancer has reached epidemic proportions, especially among people over 50. Every 45 seconds, someone dies of cancer--over 500,000 every year. Truth be told, we're losing ground." In an article he wrote in 1999, he pointed out that the five-year survival rate for people who have received conventional cancer treatments has remained the same since 1950, nearly 50 years. DR. Whitaker states the reason this is so is that, "For nearly 50 years, our weapons for fighting cancer have remained the same: surgery, a variety of cellular poisonings called 'chemotherapy,' plus a host of techniques for blasting the body with toxic radiation."
DR. Whitaker further states, "Never in the history of medicine have such toxic therapies been so widely used with such futility. These 'cut, burn and poison' treatments have been pitifully ineffective for one simple reason: they presume the body's own God-given immune system cannot be galvanized to heal itself. This approach is an abject failure, and it's time we went back to the drawing board."
While on one hand, the Medical Establishment is nearly unanimous is stating that nobody knows what causes cancer, so how can they be expected to know a cure, according to the International Agency for Research in Cancer: “80-90 per cent of human cancer is determined environmentally and thus theoretically avoidable. Lifestyle factors such as smoking; a diet high in animal products and low in fresh fruit and vegetables; food additives and preservatives; alcohol; workplace hazards; air and water pollution; electromagnetic radiation; microwave radiation; and certain pharmaceutical drugs and medical procedures are well known environmental causes of cancer."
Furthermore, In his book, ‘Naked Empress - the Great Medical Fraud,’ medical historian Hans Ruesch wrote: "Despite the general recognition that 85 per cent of all cancers is caused by environmental influences, less than 10 per cent of the US National Cancer Institute budget is given to environmental causes. And despite the recognition that the majority of environmental causes are linked to nutrition, less than 1 per cent of the National Cancer Institute budget is devoted to nutrition studies. And even that small amount had to be forced on the Institute by a special amendment of the National Cancer Act in 1974."
I am aware of dozens of progressive medical doctors that have come to believe in battling cancer the same way they battle arthritis, heart disease, high blood pressure and other maladies. Instead of destroying the immune system's power to heal, they harness it by incorporating changes in lifestyle and diet, and utilizing powerful nutritional supplementation, in other words, fitting the body for battle.
It's now pretty well accepted that the often-referred-to "spontaneous remission" among cancer patients is nothing more than a return of a healthy immune system. There is virtually no hope of defending against or permanent recovery from cancer without the benefit of a healthy immune system. For the remission to become permanent, it is absolutely necessary to maintain a vibrant immune function, and to remove the cause(s) of the cancer condition.
Unlike the general Medical Establishment, the progressive Cancer Treatment Centers of America have taken this philosophy to a new level. They understand that cancer affects all aspects of our life. They deliver a comprehensive care plan to support the body, mind and spirit. They combine the best of long-established conventional cancer treatments, combined with sophisticated complimentary medicine therapies, and treat the whole person, not just the disease. At each CTCA cancer hospital, they provide the latest technologies and cancer treatments, including surgery, radiation therapy, chemotherapy, but also pain management, nutrition therapy, naturopathic medicine, oncology rehabilitation, mind-body medicine, and spiritual support—all in one location. I hope that's a sign of things to come. If I developed cancer, and couldn't deal with it, successfully, on my own, I would want to go to a facility like this.
Unfortunately, the more typical response from the cancer industry is one that is much more recent, 2007, to be exact, and its very telling.
That year, exciting new research conducted at the Creighton University School of Medicine in Nebraska revealed that supplementing with vitamin D and calcium can reduce your risk of cancer by an astonishing 77 percent. This includes breast cancer, colon cancer, skin cancer and other forms of cancer. This research provides strong new evidence that vitamin D is the single most effective medicine against cancer, far outpacing the benefits of any cancer drug known to modern science.
The study involved 1,179 healthy women from rural Nebraska. One group of women was given calcium (around 1500 mg daily) and vitamin D (1100 IU daily) while another group was given placebo. Over four year, the group receiving the calcium and vitamin D supplements showed a 60 percent decrease in cancers.
Considering just the last three years of that study revealed an impressive 77 percent reduction in cancer due to supplementation. Note that these astonishing effects were achieved on what many nutritionists consider to be a low dose of vitamin D. Exposure to sunlight, which creates even more vitamin D in the body, was not tested or considered, and the quality of the calcium supplements was likely not as high as it could have been (it was probably calcium carbonate and not higher-grade calcium malate, aspartate or similar forms of inorganic calcium, and certainly not liquid, ionic, organic calcium, the only calcium supplement we would personally use).
What does all this mean? It means that if you take high-quality calcium supplements and get lots of natural sunlight exposure or take supplements with naturally occurring vitamin D-3 (such as those made from pure, Wild Alaskan Sockeye Salmon oil softgels), you could easily have a greater reduction than the 77 percent recorded in this study. How did the cancer industry respond to this wonderful news?
An ACS spokesperson, Marji McCullough, Strategic Director of Nutritional Epidemiology for the American Cancer Society, flatly stated that nobody should take supplements to prevent cancer.
If it seems surprising to you that the American Cancer Society -- which claims to be against cancer -- would dissuade people from taking supplements that slash their cancer risk by 77 percent, then you don't know much about the ACS. Many believe that the ACS is an organization that actually prevents prevention and openly supports the continuation of cancer as a way to boost its power and profits. The ACS is the wealthiest nonprofit in America and has very close ties to pharmaceutical companies, mammography equipment companies and other corporations that profit from cancer. Notice the name, too: It isn't the American Anticancer Society, it's the American Cancer Society! What they really stand for is right there in the name!
I could go on and on, and on but I think you get my point. I have great respect for cancer survivors and others who pour time and energy into raising funds for cancer research, but the next tine you are tempted to walk or run or to give to some "find the cure" event sponsored by Susan G. Komen or some other fundraising organization to fight cancer, at least think consider this information. Not that there aren't sincere, well-intentioned people, working in and out of this effort, but I believe a thoroughly dishonest, unscrupulous industry is using these wonderful, well-intentioned ladies (and men), for their own financial interest, not in the interest of "finding a cure," a cure that I know already exists, and has for a hundred years.
Personally, I feel better when I donate to one of the many wonderful charitable organizations in which I have the utmost confidence, and know of the good they do: groups like The Salvation Army, the Christian Appalachian Project, Running Strong for American Indian Youth, Feeding America (formerly America's Second Harvest), Food For The Poor Inc., Disabled American Veterans, Wounded Warrior Project, Haven of Rest Ministries (Akron), and the Ron Hutchcraft Ministries, specifically their On Eagles Wings ministry to American Indian youth, and many others, I'm sure. In these charitable organizations, 90% to 98% of every dollar they receive goes to serve the poor, hungry, disadvantaged, and disabled people of the world, primarily here in America.
I invite you to contact me for additional information at
ultrahealth@cs.com or 800-829-9913. To your very best health. Lyle
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