The Journal of the American Medical Association recently reported that as many as 106,000 deaths occur annually in US hospitals due to adverse reactions to prescription drugs that are properly prescribed by physicians that use them as directed by the drug companies.

    Even worse, it was reported that an additional 125,000 deaths occur annually due to adverse reactions to drugs that the physician never should have prescribed.  In these deaths the doctor did not follow the instructions on proper administration of the drugs.  For example, Glucophage, a diabetic oral hypoglycemic, should never be prescribed for patients with kidney disease or congestive heart failure because it can cause fatal lactic acidosis in these patients.  This  warning label is prominently placed on the medication container to warn of this potential misuse.

    However, JAMA reported that almost 1/4 of the patients who had been prescribed Glucophage had kidney damage or congestive heart failure or both.
 
    The annual death toll from synthetic prescription drugs, both from the correctly prescribed and the incorrectly prescribed, amounts to about 231,000 deaths every year. To put this into perspective, this is the equivalent of a world trade center disaster every week for over a year and a half or the crash of two fully loaded 747 aircraft every day of the year.

    No information was reported on the number of outpatient and doctor's office deaths caused by these very same drugs when prescribed by these very same doctors. The reported figures alone, however, make drug deaths caused by physicians the third leading cause of death in the US.  It is far ahead of accidents, drunk driving, homicides, airline accidents,  as well as all other disease with the sole exceptions of cancer and heart disease.

    Heart disease is known to be directly caused by the unimpeded progress of diabetes while being treated by conventional diabetes medication.

    Many of these drugs responsible for the death statistics cited are diabetic drugs.  None of these drugs cure or even were intended to cure diabetes. During the time a patient is on the drugs his body is suffering great damage due to the uncontrolled progress of the disease. This is in addition to the risk and damage caused by the drug itself.
   
    According to Dr. Mendelsohn, author of  “Confessions of a Medical Heretic”, 2.4 million unnecessary operations are performed every year and they cost over 12,000 lives. For example, when the records of six New York hospitals were examined it was found that 43% of the hysterectomies that were performed were medically unnecessary.  

    No one should ever submit to  any surgical procedure without first obtaining several unrelated medical opinions, at least not here in the United States. Women are particularly vulnerable to this type of victimization.

Disease in America.

    According to the World Health Report 2000 the United States ranks twelfth, that is second from the bottom, in their thirteen country survey of sixteen available health indicators.  We are dead last for low birth weight and neonatal and infant mortality. We rank between ninth and twelfth for all life expectancy categories between one year and 40 years.  Another study ranked the United States as fifteenth in the twenty-five industrialized countries studied.  

    Diabetes, hypoglycemia, hyperinsulinemia are so widespread in the United States that it is estimated that over half the population exhibits one or more symptoms of these life destroying diseases.  Symptoms of adult onset diabetes are now being routinely noted in six year old children. Obesity and it's related endocrine dysfunction are commonly observed in teenagers.  heart failure, a common symptom of advanced  type II diabetes, remains in the top three killer diseases in the westernized countries.

    Although the cause and cure for type II diabetes and related endocrine failure  has been increasingly well understood in the scientific community for the last forty years, this disease is not being cured by todays orthodox treatment regimens.  In order to find a cure it is necessary to seek alternative medical approaches to this disease.

Some of the economics of Medicine.

    A large part of this medical disaster that the United States currently experiences is due to the way our medical community is organized.  Basically it is not organized to heal and to cure disease; the medical community, particularly at its upper levels, is a commercial venture organized to make money for its practitioners.

    Although the record of the United States medical community in the cure of disease is deplorable, the same cannot be said for its ability to produce income and profit. For example, for the top fifteen pharmaceutical companies, including such names as Abbot, Wyeth, Hoffman-La Roche, Merck and others, the second quarter revenue for 2002 was reported as $63,520.6 million and the corresponding reported income was 11,731.8 million respectively.  This is second only to the defense industry in the United States.

    In 1997, the latest year for which we have the figures, the earnings of physicians were reported by Broad as averaging around $200,000 per year. The lowest reporting specialty, rheumatology reported $158,500 and the highest, cardiovascular surgeon, reported $363,300.  When examining the numbers, we noted that the high salaries seemed to be concentrated in members of the AMA. Those belonging to less powerful trade unions did not fare nearly so well even though they did most of the actual patient care work. For example, the median staff salary of registered nurses was $35,256

    The cardiac surgeon, for example, does nothing whatsoever to cure cardiac disease. Three to five percent of the heart surgery patients die on the operating table. Cardiac surgery provides no better three year survival rate than no treatment at all. A Harvard survival study of 200,000 patients revealed that the long term survival rate of patients subjected to surgery was no better than the survival rate of those that had no surgery. The only known really effective cure for occluded coronary arteries is chelation therapy. However, it is extremely unlikely that you will be offered this as an option during the surgical decision making process, at least not by your cardiac surgeon.

    Never in history have so many accumulated so much wealth for providing their customers or clients or patients with so little real benefit.

Exceptions to the rule.

    Many doctors of integrity are as much victims of the system as are their patients. Todays doctor is not free to treat disease as his conscience dictates. He is forced to administer approved protocols whether they are known to work or not. To deviate from these approved protocols invites law suits, peer criticism and censure from State medical licensing boards.

    Many States have laws that hold that any contract entered into between patient and doctor, for private treatment specified by the patient, is null and void. Thus, no legal protection exists for the doctor or the patient that would want to avoid approved therapy that is widely known to not work. The courts have held that, regardless of the patients desires or the doctors, and totally irrespective of any contractual relationship that may exist between them, the doctor must apply only approved, read drug, protocols. The doctor, when in court must be able to demonstrate that the treatment he gives is consistent with the medical community standards that apply.

    Thus the doctor that kills the patient is without legal liability as long as he prescribes appropriate synthetic drugs. The one who treats his patient with unapproved protocols may be successfully sued without regard to whether or not the unapproved protocols worked or not. This abuse of legal and licensing authority is so bad that it has become almost impossible to secure desirable medical treatment in America. This is why so many well informed patients patronize foreign doctors and hospitals.
    
    This writer knows of two local doctors who tried to buck the establishment and really help their patients. Both lost their license to practice medicine. One is currently working as an administrator in a California hospital and the other has started a nutritional clinic. The one that started a nutritional clinic was one of the top specialists ion the country on diseases of the thyroid.  He lost his license for weaning people off of Armour thyroid instead of addicting them to it. The other doctor offered
intravenous EDTA therapy that impacted the market for heart surgeons.

Takeover of the American medical Association.

    This sad state of affairs is directly traceable to the takeover of the American Medical Association by the Carnegie and Rockefeller foundations in the early part of the twentieth century.

    At the turn of the century the medical community was in a sad state of disrepair. There were no qualifications to become a doctor. If one wanted to be a doctor it was only necessary to hang out a shingle and start the practice of medicine. Medical schools were poorly financed, often taught contradictory medical philosophies and had little impact on the practice of medicine. In 1910 the American Medical Association, the forerunner of todays AMA, was on the verge of bankruptcy. Few doctors belonged to it and even fewer paid any attention to it. Quackery of all kinds was rampant. The market was flooded with fake cancer cures and 80 proof liver tonic.

    It was in this environment that Rockefeller and Carnegie moved in and bought the AMA and then used it to take control of the entire United States medical establishment. In 1910, Henry Prichett on behalf of the Carnegie foundation, bought control of the AMA for the sum of $10,000. He then financed the publication of the Flexner report, as it was then called, to gain popular support for the changes that were to be made in the medical community. With public backing, secured by the publication of the Flexner report, Carnegie and Rockefeller commenced a major upgrade in medical education by financing only those medical schools that taught what they wanted taught. Predictably, those schools that had the financing churned out the better doctors.

    In return for the financing, the schools were required to teach course material that was exclusively drug oriented. That is why today our doctors are so heavily biased toward synthetic drug therapy and know little or nothing about nutrition.

    Dr. David Edsall, former dean of Harvard medical school, said “I was, for a period, a professor of Therapeutics and Pharmacology, [at Harvard] and I knew from experience that students were obliged then by me and by others to learn  about an interminable number of drugs, many of which were valueless, many of them useless, some probably even harmful....”

    For a time, these changes actually improved the practice of medicine in the United States. Then, as the distorted medical curriculum began to churn out doctors whose only concern was prescribing synthetic drugs, things began to deteriorate into what we see today.

    Today the average medical doctor receives three hours or less training on nutrition despite the fact that our bodies are constructed entirely of what we eat and drink. Todays doctor receives much of his ongoing education from detail men. The detail man is the drug company salesman whose job it is to teach the doctor how to use the latest drugs. This is a classic case of one salesman teaching another how to push product.

Treatment instead of cure.

    Even with all of this history the medical doctor retained a great deal of his autonomy through the 1930’s and into the late 1940’s.  In 1949 another major change took place in the medical community that set the stage for the disaster we see today. It was in 1949 that the medical community reorganized itself into the competing medical specialty groups we see today. Prior to 1949 a doctor was a doctor; he dealt with all disease and injury. After 1949 this was not so.

    The reorganization established many of the specialties that we know today. It was then that such professional specialty groups as the cardiac specialist, the endocrinologist, the hepatic and biliary specialist and many others were formed. The symptoms of the then raging epidemic of type II diabetes were divided among the specialty groups so that each group had their own set of proprietary symptoms.

    The cover story given out for the reorganization was that it would help to focus more attention on the then current diabetes epidemic. However, in practice it caused the entire medical community to treat their own proprietary symptom set and nobody focused on curing the disease anymore. This was the origin of the “treat the symptom” and “ignore the cause” philosophy that now dominates the entire medical community.

    This was the turning point event that led to the removal of the word “cure” from the medical vocabulary. Today, if you mention the “c” word around your doctor he will usually glaze over and pretend not to hear you. He only responds to the word “treatment”.

    Under the Rockefeller and Carnegie influence their pharmaceutical firms started to pour out the vast array of synthetic drugs that the doctors, trained to their medical school standards, now prescribed almost to the exclusion of any other remedies. Among the first drugs to be marketed this way were the oral hypoglycemic agents used for the control and treatment of diabetes.  They were carefully designed to treat the symptom while deliberately not curing the disease.

Insurance fraud.
    
    Since the name of the medical game was money, a means had to be devised to provide the patient with money that could only be used to pay for approved medical treatment. Enter the insurance company concept. Today employees have, as an important part of their remuneration for their work, a health insurance policy. This health insurance policy does not pay for all health related needs; it only pays for those health related services that are approved. These, of course, are the synthetic drug therapies that are known to work poorly, if at all.

    In order to secure effective medical treatment from the alternative sector of the economy the patient must often pay for it himself; insurance companies specifically exclude virtually all alternative treatment. One wonders why so many continue to pay for an insurance program that cannot, even in principle, be of any real benefit to them.

Government coercion in medical practice.

    In the ordinary course of events, good medicine would eventually drive out bad medicine. As more and more people discover ways to maintain and improve their health, without drug therapy, they will simply abandon bad medicine and resort to alternative therapies.

    Indeed, this is happening. Also happening is a concerted government effort to discredit and declare unlawful those effective therapies that represent the greatest threat to orthodox medicine. In the last fifty years many effective cures have been developed for many of the major killer diseases that we have. In each instance the developer has been branded a quack, his business has been ruined and in some cases he has been sent to jail.

    Even with outright governmental attacks on those that would promote effective therapies in America, the tide is turning. More and more Americans are waking up to the reality of our medical community. More and more they are finding it to be a pretentious fraud and they are turning to less conventional treatments and modalities.

    Informed Americans that require effective medical treatment for anything more serious than a head cold are turning away from orthodox drug quackery in droves. The medical community is trying hard to make it illegal to refuse their treatment. A major effort is currently underway (Codex) to severely restrict the availability of nutritional supplements to those that use them throughout the world. Our government is seriously considering mandatory vaccination programs.

    Many believe that our Food and Drug Administration, FDA, represents the American people and that the FDA acts to insure that our food and drugs are safe and effective. Nothing could be further from the truth. The FDA acts entirely to restrain and manage competition between and among those that manufacture our food and drugs. They do this only for the purpose of minimizing competition in  business. Rockefeller is famous for proclaiming  "the only sin is competition".

Dr. Herbert Ley, former head of the FDA, during testimony before a senate investigation committee said it best when he said “What the Food and Drug Administration does and what the public thinks that it does are a different as night and day”.

    Note how free competition has been completely removed from this sector of the economy. Insurance has been rendered worthless to the patient that pays for it. It's principal function is to facilitate the huge price increases so characteristic of American medicine. The constitutional right to engage in private contracts has been repealed by the courts. Doctors that do not conform are branded as quacks and worse. The word cure has been removed from the American dictionary and you may be prosecuted as a felon if you dare to use it too freely in the wrong place.
    
    Today in America the practice of medicine is far from free. It is one of the most tightly controlled commercial enterprises in the world. That is why it produces such extraordinary income for it's favored and such misery, disease and death for its victims

What to do.

    Given the growth of the medical monster that ate the United States, what can we who live here do to effectively manage our own health.

    Perhaps the single most important thing that we all must do is to recognize that our health is our most important possession. We have no choice but to accept total responsibility for our own health. To leave such an important consideration to someone who clearly has much to gain by lying to us just does not make sense. Typically, we buy our cars and houses with a great deal more wisdom than we bring to the doctor's office when we go there.

    The modern orthodox medical community treats symptoms; they do not cure disease. When you visit the doctor, it is perfectly in order for you to ask bluntly whether or not the treatment he wants to give you will cure the disease you have.

    Some years ago, when I had a serious case of type II diabetes, I asked my doctor that question about the treatment he offered me. First he pretended he did not hear me. When I persisted and made eye contact and repeated the question he replied “this is the prescribed treatment”. Such an evasive answer to such a direct question sent me to the library where I did the research to get a better answer. I quickly discovered that the drug he offered me would not only not cure the disease, but that it was guaranteed to put me on the road to becoming an invalid long before my time.

    Fortunately I rejected his treatment. I went on to search the scientific literature where I quickly found what I needed. It had nothing to do with synthetic drugs. It took me about 3 1/2 months to fully reverse my diabetes. That was seven years ago. The disease remains in full remission to this day.

    There is one important caveat that must be mentioned at this point. If you are currently under a doctors care and are dissatisfied with the results you are getting, do not just stop taking the prescribed medication. Get your doctor, or another doctor if yours will not cooperate, to help wean you off prescription drugs and to help you to devise a workable alternative therapy.  Many of these synthetic drugs will produce serious side effects if they are abruptly discontinued. When I had the problem I had not taken any prescription medication.

    After accepting full responsibility for your own health, the second most important consideration is to do your homework and learn about the disease or disability that you have. Buy books, attend seminars, subscribe to newsletters, search the Internet, learn about what it takes to actually reverse the disease that afflicts you. Investigate alternative medical practitioners. Many naturopaths and chiropractors can be of very great help in actually curing disease. Do not fall for the pseudo-religious idea that doctors are infallible icons of integrity and nobody else has enough brains understand medical things. The truth is quite often the reverse.

    Look for that unusual doctor that will risk really trying to help you; and, realize that he is taking a substantial risk when he does so. In other words, do the best you can to find something better for yourself than what your doctor offers. Help each other. If you discover something important, don’t be afraid to share the information. Be vocal when government organizations attempt to restrict or deny your access to natural nutritional supplements.

    If you are fortunate to find a doctor with this kind of integrity, understand the importance of what you have found and give him all of the support that you can give. There is a medical doctor in California, we will call him doctor Q, that refused to compromise his integrity in his practice of medicine. He ended up in jail, put there by his fellow doctors. His patients got together, got him out of jail  and had a special bill passed in the State legislature to protect his practice of medicine. Today he still runs a flourishing practice where he ministers to patients from all over this country. He is actually curing disease not just treating it.

    Third, after accepting responsibility for your own health and becoming informed, recognize that  medicine is a business. Your doctor is a paid consultant just like your electrician or plumber and he is listed in the same yellow pages. You have every right to get the information for which you are paying. When your doctor retreats into arrogance and refuses to provide direct answers to direct questions, consider getting another doctor. There really are many safe and effective therapies that go far beyond drugs. However, we must demand them on the firing line, in the doctor's office, when we need them.

Thomas Smith is a reluctant medical investigator having been forced into seeking a cure for his own Diabetes because it was obvious that his doctor would not or could not cure it. He has published the results of his successful Diabetes investigation in his special report entitled “Insulin: Our Silent Killer” written for the layman but also widely valued by the medical practitioner. This  report may be purchased by sending $29.00 US to him at PO Box 7685 Loveland, Colorado 80537. He has also posted a great deal of useful information about this disease on his web page www.Healingmatters.com