Foul Play - How Corporate Medicine Strikes Back
Corporate Medicine, also called Academic Medicine by some, has been very attentive to its image of being highly scientific, while managing to instill deep distrust in the public mind of anyone challenging its predominance. The campaign against externally proposed changes in the medical paradigm and against any dissent in its own ranks has been highly successful.
It appears that Corporate Medicine's "defensive" actions are well organized. University research is funded through pharmaceutical channels, pre-determining outcomes to be favourable to the pharma paradigm. Medical doctors are trained in those same universities to prescribe the pharmaceutical drugs. They are also organized in associations which strictly exclude - and thereby prevent from practicing - those doctors who would deviate from accepted medical orthodoxy. But even more effective seems to be the establishment, in each country, of an institute or association that is routinely attacking "quackery" (anything that is not strictly pharma oriented) in a very direct and decidedly foul play manner.
In a report of the CIVIS foundation, Hans Ruesch, author of numerous books and one of the first to expose the scam, describes the situation with the following quote:
The medico-drug cartel was summed up by J.W. Hodge, M.D., of Niagara Falls, N.Y., in these words: "The medical monopoly or medical trust, euphemistically called the American Medical Association, is not merely the meanest monopoly ever organized, but the most arrogant, dangerous and despotic organization which ever managed a free people in this or any other age. Any and all methods of healing the sick by means of safe, simple and natural remedies are sure to be assailed and denounced by the arrogant leaders of the AMA doctors' trust as fakes, frauds and humbugs. Every practitioner of the healing art who does not ally himself with the medical trust is denounced as a 'dangerous quack' and impostor by the predatory trust doctors. Every sanitarian who attempts to restore the sick to a state of health by natural means without resort to the knife or poisonous drugs, disease imparting serums, deadly toxins or vaccines, is at once pounced upon by these medical tyrants and fanatics, bitterly denounced, vilified and persecuted to the fullest extent."A brilliant article, published in 1998 in Archives of Internal Medicine (Vol. 158, Nov 9, 1998) by James Goodwin and Michael Tangum states that
"[t]hroughout the 20th century American academic medicine has resisted the concept that supplementation with micronutrients might have health benefits. This resistance is evident in several ways:
(1) by uncritical acceptance of news of toxicity, such as the belief that vitamin C supplements cause kidney stones;
(2) by the angry, scornful tone used in discussions of micronutrient supplementation in the leading textbooks of medicine; and
(3) by ignoring evidence for possible efficacy of a micronutrient supplement, such as intermittent claudication."
Goodwin and Tangum go on to explain that Galileo's crime was not challenging the orthodoxy of his days, but writing up his ideas in Italian, so everyone could read it. Their conclusion:
"There are only 3 important questions when evaluating a potential treatment. Does it work? What are the adverse effects? How much does it cost? Ideally, such issues as the theory underlying the treatment or the guild to which the proponents of the treatment belong should be irrelevant to the fundamental questions of efficacy, toxicity, and cost. The history of the response of academic medicine to micronutrient supplementation suggests that we have not attained that ideal."
Not only has Corporate Medicine very efficiently kept the virus of change at bay in its own ranks, it has actively maligned and persecuted those outside its ranks who do not agree with its precepts, calling them 'dangerous quacks' 'charlatans' or worse. Corporate medicine's shocktroops, sometimes calling themselves "quackbusters" in allusion to the ghostbusters of movie fame, appear in many countries, suggesting that there may be a world wide network.
Without trying, we find information on the operation of these troops in the US, Canada and Italy. Eve Hillary describes - with reference to a real case - how the shocktroops of medical orthodoxy operate in Australia. An interesting read, although the file (download in PDF format) is 23 pages long. Just to remind ourselves that the phenomenon is not something distinctly Anglo-saxon, we find the same attitudes in France, as detailed by Emma Holister in her article "Healing Language". Sylvie Simon, in her book "Healing, an Illegal Practice", describes with typical French eloquence, how similar things of medical import are treated in the land of liberte', egualite' and fraternite'. An excerpted translation from a chapter of the book follows below.
I am sure each country could tell its own tale of human tragedy, harassment and forceful suppression of alternatives to pharma-dominated medicine, but there seems to be a wee bit of light at the end of the tunnel. A movement towards evidence based medicine is forming, and might in time overcome the obvious bias of the medical community towards a variety of different approaches.
Evidence-based medicine is the conscientious, explicit and judicious use of current best evidence in making decisions about the care of individual patients. The practice of evidence-based medicine means integrating individual clinical expertise with the best available external clinical evidence from systematic research. Excerpted from "Evidence-Based Medicine: What it is and what it isn't".
A Veritable Dictatorship
Excerpted and translated by Emma Holister
from the book 'Healing: An Illegal Practice'
by Sylvie Simon
France
“We have grown accustomed to believing that no illness can be cured without medicine. However, this is just a superstition. Medicines are always dangerous”.
Gandhi
According to Plato, Socrates was condemned to death because he did not believe in the gods recognised by the State. Today, these gods have been replaced by bureaucrats and experts. Like Socrates, a great number of doctors who refuse to idolise the thought processes of these new masters are brought before a ‘tribunal of exclusion’, Le Conseil de l’Ordre (the Council of the Order of Doctors), who have assigned to themselves a regal power and abuse it with total impunity, all with the complicity of the health insurance organisations.Throughout the centuries, unable to tolerate the deviations of those who drift from the established way of thinking, men of power have always found various methods to gag or prevent from ‘causing damage’ those who have dared to think and act differently.
In this country, ‘exporter’ of human rights, most people feel that the Inquisition is a practice of the past as we no longer torture in the name of God. However, we continue to torture doctors and patients in the name of a so-called medical science whose limitations and misdeeds can be constantly observed.
All doctors should have the freedom to act according to their conscience as the Hippocratic Oath declares. Furthermore, article 7 of the Code of Medical Ethics states: “The doctor is free to prescribe that which he considers the most appropriate according the circumstances”. As for the Helsinki declarations (1964) and those of Tokyo (1975) that prohibit the Huriet law, the international conventions taken to national law are very clear: “In the treatment of a sick patient, the doctor must be free to resort to a new diagnostic or therapeutic method if he considers that it offers a hope of saving the life of a sick patient, returning them to health, and relieving their suffering.”
In reality, however, therapeutic freedom does not exist in the land of human rights, of citizens’ rights, despite certain declarations by our politicians who unanimously claim their adherence to freedom of therapeutic choice. Thus, during a dinner debate organised on February 5th 1998 at the Hotel Concorde Saint-Lazare by the association of friends of L’Evénement du Jeudi, without fear of ridicule Bernard Kouchner, the then Secretary of State for Health, declared before more than eighty people that in France “we have therapeutic freedom”. Several people, suffering from illness, who were present at the debate were surprised to hear this as they had seen their medicines - not approved in France but liberally sold elsewhere - confiscated by the police a few months earlier by order of the Ministry of Health.However, Bernard Kouchner has not always delivered this type of speech. In June 1995 he confided to the Revue des deux mondes, in an article entitled: “Medicine and Cruelty”:
“ . . . Our medical system has become perverse to the point that the interests of doctors can sometimes be at variance with those of the sick . . . And I will not even mention here the staggering number of appendixes that have been removed for no justifiable pathological reason in French clinics during a certain period. Nor the bladders that the surgeons - but do they still deserve that name? - have removed simply to increase their business figures, nor the trafficking in prostheses amongst certain dishonest orthopaedists who attempt to profit from a diabolical system . . . We have made great progress in medical science but we have lost sight of the most important thing: people! . . . The social security system that the French hold so dear will soon crumble if we don’t seriously modify it. Small reforms will only slow down the decline. A critique of the beliefs and medical practices is necessary in our country. Let us reform medical training, where too many statistics are learned (most of which, moreover, are falsified, full of lies, erroneous and fallacious!), and not enough humanism; the CHU must give priority to the human and social sciences! . . .”
We can only agree, but why two different speeches as time goes by and circumstances change? The reality is very different from all these nice declarations we hear from the irresponsible ‘people of responsibility’.
As a prosecutor once claimed back in 1930 during the trial of a healer: “It matters little that the guilty have cured their fellow beings! The only thing that interests me is if they have the right to cure. Only people holding diplomas have the right to heal and even to kill. Get a diploma, you the guilty, and you will have the right over life and death.”
It is currently the case that doctors are stricken from the register and thus accused of the illegal practice of medicine, whilst still in possession of an incontestable diploma, but once removed from the register they find themselves forbidden to practise medicine and are often treated as “charlatans”. So nothing has really changed since 1930 and the indictments of the modern-day prosecutors strangely resemble those of their forefathers, every time that a doctor is brought before a tribunal for having treated his patients with a substance that is ‘not authorised’ by the Faculty (Order) and hence considered dangerous, even if the evidence of its efficacy is manifest. These indictments produce the same litany: “The question is not whether you have cured but that you did not have the right to do so!”. An accusation which could well be replaced by “non-assistance of a person in danger”, if the censured doctor had not intervened.
The discrimination to which hundreds of doctors are victim is not unknown to any of the political parties, but the subject is carefully avoided by our elected representatives who wish to remain, above all, ‘politically correct’...
posted by Sepp Hasslberger on Wednesday November 12 2003
updated on Thursday December 2 2010URL of this article:
http://www.newmediaexplorer.org/sepp/2003/11/12/foul_play_how_corporate_medicine_strikes_back.htm
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