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Organic, natural health-care is under attack. If the current trend continues, say Helen Fullerton and Martin Walker, the world’s health may soon be entirely in the pockets of the mighty pharmaceutical corporations. These are the opening lines to an article published in March 2000, but still a very interesting read.

We now are in the midst of an all-out concerted attack on natural remedies, supplements, non conventional cures - anything that could compete with the pharmaceutical paradigm in medicine. That outdated paradigm is dear to the hearts of both investors in pharmaceutical fortunes and those in government who are supposed to promote public health but have ended up promoting pharmaceutical profits instead.

How did we get into the current pickle? The article by Helen Fullerton and Martin Walker brings us up to speed on the events of the last two decades leading up to the current confrontation.

Health Ltd.

(The original is here)

Date Published: 22/ 03/ 2000
Author: Helen Fullerton and Martin Walker

Organic, natural health-care is under attack. If the current trend continues, say Helen Fullerton and Martin Walker, the world’s health may soon be entirely in the pockets of the mighty pharmaceutical corporations.

Health and its maintenance, in contemporary ‘developed’ society, is complex. Perhaps the most important part of this complexity, however, is the ongoing conflict between individual health-care and the professional, pharmacological response to disease which has come to dominate society.

General levels of health in developed societies have steadily improved over the last hundred years, broadly because of developments in the life sciences and public health. This progress, however, seems to bear little relationship to the delivery of medicine. While scientific medicine has generated some solutions, it has also bequeathed deadly problems. Crucially, it has led to a virtual takeover of ‘healthcare’ by pharmaceutical corporations and an acceptance that pharmaceutical medicine is primary and best. Yet the extent of the damage done by drugs is enormous. In the US in 1994, it was estimated that there were over two million severe adverse drug reactions, of which 106,000 were fatal(1). Similar calculations suggest that in England, adverse drug reactions are the third most common cause of death(2).

Drug companies have always supported ‘orthodox’ medicine. Medicine’s high-ranking professional bodies were themselves set up with help from pharmaceutical companies, and still receive grants for running costs, hospitality, building and printing. The Royal College of GPs, for example, received £105,000 from Glaxo, Wellcome and Beecham when it was set up in the early 1950s. The Royal College of Physicians has received funding from the pharmaceutical industry, as has the Royal Society of Medicine. Given this funding, is it surprising that reports sponsored by such bodies so often lambast the use of vitamins, food supplements, nutritional and alternative medicine?

Today, however, the corporatisation of medicine is gaining speed and reaches far beyond the professional institutions of medicine.

THE MEDICAL RESEARCH COUNCIL

The Medical Research Council (MRC), a public body, is the closest thing to a national research institute in Britain. Originally independent, funded entirely by government and concerned with public health, it has veered wildly away from its original purpose. Today, while most of its £282 million a year funding is public money from the Department of Trade and Industry, the direction of its research is strongly influenced by commercial interests. From 1997 to 1998, eight of the 16-person MRC Council declared vested interests, four of them in the largest pharmaceutical and chemical companies. The MRC’s 1996 Annual Report stated that 96 industrial consultancies are held by MRC staff, and that the MRC itself holds equity in five life-science companies.

MRC earnings from collaboration with industry in 1995 and 1996 were £6.2 million. A considerable part of the MRC’s work involves carrying out lucrative pharmaceutical trials for the big drug companies. For example, the ‘ISIS-4’ trial conducted by the Clinical Trials Unit at Oxford, supported by the MRC and the British Heart Foundation (BHF), compared the effect of tradi-tionally used magnesium in heart attack patients with that of Capitrol, a drug produced by Bristol Myers Squibb (BMS). The results of ISIS-4 suggested that magnesium was ineffective compared with Capitrol. As a consequence of this study, NHS policy shifted away from the use of the cheap and effective magnesium and towards expensive pharmaceutical drugs.

This new clinical policy was accepted despite the fact that it was BMS which paid $6 million for the study and the trial came under considerable critical review because of its methods; especially the use of high doses of magnesium. While collaborative projects with big drug and chemical companies earn money for the MRC, they also help the drug companies make huge profits when drugs given the MRC stamp of approval are sold to the NHS.

THE MOVMEMENT FOR REAL DOCTORS

In the mid-1980s, national campaigns against ‘health fraud’ were set up in the US, Canada and Britain. Although these organisations maintained that they were principally concerned with the delivery of ‘effective health-care’, in fact they constituted aggressive campaigns against the use in health-care of vitamins and food supplements, and against ‘alternative’ health therapies and their practitioners. In Britain, the Campaign Against Health Fraud (HealthWatch) was set up in 1987. Financed initially by medical insurance and pharmaceutical companies, HealthWatch waged an aggressive and very public campaign against alternative, complementary and natural medicines.

A number of its original members were associated with the Wellcome Foundation drug company and its charitable arm the Wellcome Trust. The inauguration of the campaign in the US and Canada, as well as in Britain, began with the licensing and testing of Wellcome’s anti-AIDS drug AZT. The marketing of AZT set a new gold standard for aggressive, covert drug marketing strategies. Every possible influence was used to sell AZT, nationally and internationally both to governments and direct to consumers. Five out of the 25 members of the Medicines Commission which eventually licensed AZT in Britain had connections with Wellcome.

Following the licensing, Wellcome placed money and representatives wherever they could sway opinions. A year after the drug had been licensed, Wellcome gave £10,000 to the UK’s All-Party Parliamentary Group on AIDS, the gatekeeper for information on AIDS treatments in the House of Commons. Representatives of Wellcome’s PR firms were placed on committees which allocated AIDS funding; the funding went only to groups that were uncritical of AZT. In a move deliberately intended to promote AZT among GPs, Wellcome granted £144,000 to an AIDS foundation set up by the British Medical Association (BMA). Between 1987 and 1993, when the ‘Concorde’ trials helped hammer several nails into AZT’s coffin by demonstrating that it actually worsened the health of asymptomatic individuals who had tested HIV positive, the drug earned over £200million for Wellcome.

Contrast this with the case of germanium. In 1988, a highly-qualified bio-science researcher, Dr Sandra Goodman, compiled a literature review of organic germanium. Discovering that researchers from the 1920s onwards had investigated its anti-viral properties, and believing that the substance might help people who tested HIV positive, Dr Goodman pressed the MRC to carry out trials. Despite sending papers to all the relevant committees, meeting with scientists, doctors and politicians, Goodman got nowhere.

Soon after Goodman began to press for the testing of germanium, items began to appear in the media about its dangers to health. The hardest-hitting article(3) carried quotes from Professor Vincent Marks, a founding member of HealthWatch. Marks’ department at Surrey University was in receipt of half a million pounds’ funding from the Wellcome Foundation, some for HIV-related work. Marks called germanium ‘a worthless and dangerous poison’, and said that ‘they [germanium, cadmium and other natural drugs] were killing people by the thousands from kidney failure’. Not long after this article appeared, germanium was banned from sale by the UK Department of Health.

Dr Goodman wrote to the Japanese researchers whom Marks had quoted as reporting kidney damage due to germanium. She found that these researchers had been referring to germanium sesquioxide, a mineral form of germanium. In their return letter, the scientists told her that in recent research they had found organic germanium to be completely non-toxic.

SUPPLEMENT WARS

Pharmaceutical interests have battled fiercely for the last 20 years to restrict the public’s use of vitamin and mineral supplements which pose a threat to their patented, chemical stranglehold on the medicines market. As with the ‘Health Fraud’ episodes, they have employed various strategies. They have claimed that vitamins and food supplements are hazardous to health; that there is no nutritional need for them; and that the public has to be protected against ‘quacks’ who peddle them. In their battle against natural remedies, corporations have succeeded in enshrining in law the principle that nutritional supplements cannot be associated with claims for better health. Finally they have tried to squeeze supplements out of the market by harmonising international trade regulations.

Controlling regulations is the key to killing off natural medicines, and the battle to rationalise them continues. In the UK, a government working group on Dietary Supplements and Health Foods, set up in response to ‘concern about the potential hazards of dietary supplements’(4), produced a highly flawed report which was later used by the EU Commission to prepare a 1992 draft Directive on dietary supplements.

The EU draft Directive ruled that dietary supplements should only be available on the basis of ‘nutritional need’. In Britain, outraged nutritional therapists, organised by Lin