MEDICAL JOURNALS PIMP FOR BIG PHARMA
By Jon Christian Ryter
June 19, 2010 NewsWithViews. com
http://www.newswith views.com/ Ryter/jon321.htm
PLoS Medicine a peer review journal for the Public Library of Science claimed in an article that the most respected medical journals have become much too dependent on revenue from the pharmaceutical industry from two sources. First, advertising revenue which, according to PLoS, is the least corrupting form of revenue since the pharmaceutical industry should have the right to reach their potential customers in the periodicals their customers-doctors- read. What is the bigger problem, and what corrupts the integrity of the advertising process in about 25 different medical journals according to PLoS in an article published by the Public Library of Science five years ago (but never read by the general public which does not generally subscribe to it) is the second source of "advertising" revenue. The PR firms hired by the pharmaceutical giants pay fees to the journals to print well-edited capsulated synopsis of the drug trials.
The PR firms know that when the drug trials are published in any medical journal, the drug and the test tacitly carry that journal's stamp of approval simply by appearing in it. According to PLoS, a favorable review in a periodical like the Journal of American Medicine and the British Medical Journal and Lancet which have global distribution is worth thousands of pages of advertising. The PR companies will sometimes pay upwards of a million dollars for reprints of the articles to send to drug distributors, pharmaceutical wholesalers and medical professionals. While the PR firms admit the recipients of the reprints seldom read them, what they rely on is the name of the prestigious journal printing the review of giving a new drug credibility in the marketplace it has not earned from evidence of their curative abilities. The more important the medical journal, the more credibility the drug receives in the eyes of the physicians who receive the reprints.
Many times the whole content of the written clinical tests are not all that favorable to the drug but that, of course, is not reflected in the capsulated, controlled synopsis that appears in the medical journals. In 1994, Dr. Paula Rochon, adjunct scientist for the Kunin-Lunefeld Applied Research Unit and several of her colleagues wrote a paper examining the impact of journals which were paid to publish controlled excerpts of clinical studies had on the medical community's acceptance of the drugs compared to actual medicinal value of the drugs examined. The study focused on one class of drugs only: nonsteroidal anti-inflammatory drugs designed to combat arthritis. They found 56 trials. Not one of the published reports on the clinical studies presented any facts that were detrimental to the drugs tested.
The group came back a decade later, in 2003, and did a follow-up study on the 56 trial drugs to see if the drugs were living up to their clinical claims. The article was published by Richard Smith, the CEO of UnitedHealth Europe. Smith was Editor-in-Chief of the British Medical Journal for 13 years and held that job when the aforementioned study on the new arthritis drug was done. In many cases the reality of the drugs did not match the printed rhetoric of the promises of the clinical study conducted a decade earlier.
The question raised by the Public Library of Science a decade later was: how do pharmaceutical companies get the results they want once the drug is approved and recommended by physicians to their clients. When we go to our HMO or PPO physicians and they prescribe medication, we assume-and have every right and expectation to assume-that the prescription our physician prescribes will relieve or cure whatever the prescription is taken for. According to Smith, the pharmaceutical companies and their PR firms get the results they want not by fudging the facts but by asking the right questions and providing the right answers. This comes from hiring the right PR top guns who know how to stay a step ahead of the peer review groups. They do this by isolating positive parts of the clinical studies and forcing the dialogue into those positive aspects while ignoring negative ones. Or they combine the results from different centers in multiple combinations to obfuscate negative results in some facet or facets of the clinical study.
These strategies, Smith noted, have been exposed in the cases of risperidone and odansetron. However, with the 56 clinical studies the PLoS were attempting to evaluate, there was an impossible amount of work to examine in order to ascertain how many of the trials were truly independent and not biased on behalf of the fees paid by the pharmaceutical company. Clearly, what the Big Pharma wants is their drugs approved and used, and the PR firms they hire are paid to get positive "reviews" from the medical journals and paid advertising and advertorial (paid editorial copy) in the form of capsulated clinical studies.
What it comes down to, if the world's most prestigious medical journals-which medical professionals read as the Bible of the industry-have sold their souls for money, it is no more factually believable than magazines like The Onion or Mad magazine, the satirical comic book most Americans of read as teenagers back in the 1950s and 1960s. Smith further noted that "...Journal editors are becoming increasingly aware of how they are being manipulated and are fighting back. But, I must confess it took me almost a quarter of a century editing for the BMJ to wake up to what was happening... [E]ditors ask for other related data [related to] the studies submitted to them...But editors do not know what other unpublished studies exist."
Editors generally do not know if they are doing an honest peer review on one product or on a gigantic clever marketing jigsaw. More than likely one or more editors have commented that the material they get, regardless if it's a precise document or a jigsaw puzzle will always be of high technical quality.
The question raised by Smith and investigators like Dr. Rochon is how do we prevent the most prestigious medical journals in the world from selling their editorial souls for money? How do we prevent them from becoming no more credible than Mad Magazine or The Onion? How do we prevent them from becoming an extension of the marketing arm of the pharmaceutical industry? Smith thinks the editors can demand the right to review the protocols, and insist that all trials be registered; and most of all, demand that all clinical studies are completely transparent.
That won't happen because the journal publishers and shareholders know those clinical studies are worth millions of dollars in revenue, and bring additional millions in print advertising dollars from the pharmaceutical industry to reward them for publishing the clinical studies. Meaning, of course, that the medical journals are not going to risk that revenue. So, if you're a doctor who generally reads the New England Journal of Medicine, the Annals of Internal Medicine, JAMA or BMJ or Lancet in England, Canada or Australia for the latest life saving drugs, you might as well read something that will give you a chuckle.
Mad magazine was my magazine of choice as a kid. Give it a try. You have to say one thing about Mad. If you're older than 8 or 10 years of age, you'll always know when Mad's story line is an out-and-out lie or is colouring the truth. According to Smith and the editors of several other medical journals, you can't tell that from clinical studies published in the medical journals until you read the histories of the drugs about a decade later. By then, for some, it's too late. I guess that's why class action lawsuits are still in vogue.
Tuesday, November 30, 2010
For several years now, reading medical/scientific journals, I came to the conclusion, that science/medicine is dogmatic in their approach and life threateningly flawed. Various research methodologies in statistical analysis, (I studied research methods and various statistical methodology and analysis using SSPS sofware some years ago now), led me to conclude that there were serious flaws in medical research. Its like a disease spreading through academia.
The whole structure of how research is conducted is shockingly flawed. A rebellion last year at Harvard University from medical students - against flawed theories heavily weighed on by Big Pharma. They wanted to study how to heal, not to maim!! A module at Kings College Medical School in London, teaching medical students how to interpret skewed statistical methodologies!!! That does not go far enough. Many of us, with a deep insight and mistrust of science, not only medical is pervasive.
Thanks to scientists such as Dr Ioannidis, making it possible for us, to understand and prevent further health disasters.
I came across this article (below) about a scientist, one of many, articulating succinctly what I found throughout my own hazy research on my quest for health.
My own observations is that most are ill because of medical interventions, and that, we have the an internal healing mechanism. The less it is interfered with, the more healing will take place. Tapping into the healing mechanism through means excluding medical intervention and prevention is of paramount importance. Its a personal choice. We are under constant assault from the time of conception. Parents who took vaccines and meds, environmental toxins, etc.. The mapping of the human genome proving to be a huge white elephant, and bla bla bla. My usual rant here.... ;D Anyhow, read this excellent article which mirrors my own and many of you there, thoughts on science, healing and so forth.
The article below encapsulates my own findings:
Lies, Damned Lies, and Medical Science
By David H. Freedman http://tinyurl.com/26olese
Cont/....
hat question has been central to Ioannidis’s career. He’s what’s known as a meta-researcher, and he’s become one of the world’s foremost experts on the credibility of medical research. He and his team have shown, again and again, and in many different ways, that much of what biomedical researchers conclude in published studies—conclusions that doctors keep in mind when they prescribe antibiotics or blood-pressure medication, or when they advise us to consume more fiber or less meat, or when they recommend surgery for heart disease or back pain—is misleading, exaggerated, and often flat-out wrong. He charges that as much as 90 percent of the published medical information that doctors rely on is flawed. His work has been widely accepted by the medical community; it has been published in the field’s top journals, where it is heavily cited; and he is a big draw at conferences. Given this exposure, and the fact that his work broadly targets everyone else’s work in medicine, as well as everything that physicians do and all the health advice we get, Ioannidis may be one of the most influential scientists alive. Yet for all his influence, he worries that the field of medical research is so pervasively flawed, and so riddled with conflicts of interest, that it might be chronically resistant to change—or even to publicly admitting that there’s a problem.
In poring over medical journals, he was struck by how many findings of all types were refuted by later findings. Of course, medical-science “never minds” are hardly secret. And they sometimes make headlines, as when in recent years large studies or growing consensuses of researchers concluded that mammograms, colonoscopies, and PSA tests are far less useful cancer-detection tools than we had been told; or when widely prescribed antidepressants such as Prozac, Zoloft, and Paxil were revealed to be no more effective than a placebo for most cases of depression; or when we learned that staying out of the sun entirely can actually increase cancer risks; or when we were told that the advice to drink lots of water during intense exercise was potentially fatal; or when, last April, we were informed that taking fish oil, exercising, and doing puzzles doesn’t really help fend off Alzheimer’s disease, as long claimed. Peer-reviewed studies have come to opposite conclusions on whether using cell phones can cause brain cancer, whether sleeping more than eight hours a night is healthful or dangerous, whether taking aspirin every day is more likely to save your life or cut it short, and whether routine angioplasty works better than pills to unclog heart arteries.
But beyond the headlines, Ioannidis was shocked at the range and reach of the reversals he was seeing in everyday medical research. “Randomized controlled trials,” which compare how one group responds to a treatment against how an identical group fares without the treatment, had long been considered nearly unshakable evidence, but they, too, ended up being wrong some of the time. “I realized even our gold-standard research had a lot of problems,” he says. Baffled, he started looking for the specific ways in which studies were going wrong. And before long he discovered that the range of errors being committed was astonishing: from what questions researchers posed, to how they set up the studies, to which patients they recruited for the studies, to which measurements they took, to how they analyzed the data, to how they presented their results, to how particular studies came to be published in medical journals.
......./
David Gorski, a surgeon and researcher at Detroit’s Barbara Ann Karmanos Cancer Institute, noted in his prominent medical blog that when he presented Ioannidis’s paper on highly cited research at a professional meeting, “not a single one of my surgical colleagues was the least bit surprised or disturbed by its findings.” Ioannidis offers a theory for the relatively calm reception. “I think that people didn’t feel I was only trying to provoke them, because I showed that it was a community problem, instead of pointing fingers at individual examples of bad research,” he says. In a sense, he gave scientists an opportunity to cluck about the wrongness without having to acknowledge that they themselves succumb to it—it was something everyone else did.
......../
If a study somehow avoids every one of these problems and finds a real connection to long-term changes in health, you’re still not guaranteed to benefit, because studies report average results that typically represent a vast range of individual outcomes. Should you be among the lucky minority that stands to benefit, don’t expect a noticeable improvement in your health, because studies usually detect only modest effects that merely tend to whittle your chances of succumbing to a particular disease from small to somewhat smaller. “The odds that anything useful will survive from any of these studies are poor,” says Ioannidis—dismissing in a breath a good chunk of the research into which we sink about $100 billion a year in the United States alone.
....../
And so it goes for all medical studies, he says. Indeed, nutritional studies aren’t the worst. Drug studies have the added corruptive force of financial conflict of interest. The exciting links between genes and various diseases and traits that are relentlessly hyped in the press for heralding miraculous around-the-corner treatments for everything from colon cancer to schizophrenia have in the past proved so vulnerable to error and distortion, Ioannidis has found, that in some cases you’d have done about as well by throwing darts at a chart of the genome. (These studies seem to have improved somewhat in recent years, but whether they will hold up or be useful in treatment are still open questions.) Vioxx, Zelnorm, and Baycol were among the widely prescribed drugs found to be safe and effective in large randomized controlled trials before the drugs were yanked from the market as unsafe or not so effective, or both.
“Often the claims made by studies are so extravagant that you can immediately cross them out without needing to know much about the specific problems with the studies,” Ioannidis says. But of course it’s that very extravagance of claim (one large randomized controlled trial even proved that secret prayer by unknown parties can save the lives of heart-surgery patients, while another proved that secret prayer can harm them) that helps gets these findings into journals and then into our treatments and lifestyles, especially when the claim builds on impressive-sounding evidence. “Even when the evidence shows that a particular research idea is wrong, if you have thousands of scientists who have invested their careers in it, they’ll continue to publish papers on it,” he says. “It’s like an epidemic, in the sense that they’re infected with these wrong ideas, and they’re spreading it to other researchers through journals.”
.../
Though scientists and science journalists are constantly talking up the value of the peer-review process, researchers admit among themselves that biased, erroneous, and even blatantly fraudulent studies easily slip through it. Nature, the grande dame of science journals, stated in a 2006 editorial, “Scientists understand that peer review per se provides only a minimal assurance of quality, and that the public conception of peer review as a stamp of authentication is far from the truth.” What’s more, the peer-review process often pressures researchers to shy away from striking out in genuinely new directions, and instead to build on the findings of their colleagues (that is, their potential reviewers) in ways that only seem like breakthroughs—as with the exciting-sounding gene linkages (autism genes identified!) and nutritional findings (olive oil lowers blood pressure!) that are really just dubious and conflicting variations on a theme.
Most journal editors don’t even claim to protect against the problems that plague these studies. University and government research overseers rarely step in to directly enforce research quality, and when they do, the science community goes ballistic over the outside interference. The ultimate protection against research error and bias is supposed to come from the way scientists constantly retest each other’s results—except they don’t. Only the most prominent findings are likely to be put to the test, because there’s likely to be publication payoff in firming up the proof, or contradicting it.
..........That we’re not routinely made seriously ill by this shortfall, he argues, is due largely to the fact that most medical interventions and advice don’t address life-and-death situations, but rather aim to leave us marginally healthier or less unhealthy, so we usually neither gain nor risk all that much.
Read the whole article here: http://tinyurl.com/26olese
The whole structure of how research is conducted is shockingly flawed. A rebellion last year at Harvard University from medical students - against flawed theories heavily weighed on by Big Pharma. They wanted to study how to heal, not to maim!! A module at Kings College Medical School in London, teaching medical students how to interpret skewed statistical methodologies!!! That does not go far enough. Many of us, with a deep insight and mistrust of science, not only medical is pervasive.
Thanks to scientists such as Dr Ioannidis, making it possible for us, to understand and prevent further health disasters.
I came across this article (below) about a scientist, one of many, articulating succinctly what I found throughout my own hazy research on my quest for health.
My own observations is that most are ill because of medical interventions, and that, we have the an internal healing mechanism. The less it is interfered with, the more healing will take place. Tapping into the healing mechanism through means excluding medical intervention and prevention is of paramount importance. Its a personal choice. We are under constant assault from the time of conception. Parents who took vaccines and meds, environmental toxins, etc.. The mapping of the human genome proving to be a huge white elephant, and bla bla bla. My usual rant here.... ;D Anyhow, read this excellent article which mirrors my own and many of you there, thoughts on science, healing and so forth.
The article below encapsulates my own findings:
Lies, Damned Lies, and Medical Science
By David H. Freedman http://tinyurl.com/26olese
Cont/....
hat question has been central to Ioannidis’s career. He’s what’s known as a meta-researcher, and he’s become one of the world’s foremost experts on the credibility of medical research. He and his team have shown, again and again, and in many different ways, that much of what biomedical researchers conclude in published studies—conclusions that doctors keep in mind when they prescribe antibiotics or blood-pressure medication, or when they advise us to consume more fiber or less meat, or when they recommend surgery for heart disease or back pain—is misleading, exaggerated, and often flat-out wrong. He charges that as much as 90 percent of the published medical information that doctors rely on is flawed. His work has been widely accepted by the medical community; it has been published in the field’s top journals, where it is heavily cited; and he is a big draw at conferences. Given this exposure, and the fact that his work broadly targets everyone else’s work in medicine, as well as everything that physicians do and all the health advice we get, Ioannidis may be one of the most influential scientists alive. Yet for all his influence, he worries that the field of medical research is so pervasively flawed, and so riddled with conflicts of interest, that it might be chronically resistant to change—or even to publicly admitting that there’s a problem.
In poring over medical journals, he was struck by how many findings of all types were refuted by later findings. Of course, medical-science “never minds” are hardly secret. And they sometimes make headlines, as when in recent years large studies or growing consensuses of researchers concluded that mammograms, colonoscopies, and PSA tests are far less useful cancer-detection tools than we had been told; or when widely prescribed antidepressants such as Prozac, Zoloft, and Paxil were revealed to be no more effective than a placebo for most cases of depression; or when we learned that staying out of the sun entirely can actually increase cancer risks; or when we were told that the advice to drink lots of water during intense exercise was potentially fatal; or when, last April, we were informed that taking fish oil, exercising, and doing puzzles doesn’t really help fend off Alzheimer’s disease, as long claimed. Peer-reviewed studies have come to opposite conclusions on whether using cell phones can cause brain cancer, whether sleeping more than eight hours a night is healthful or dangerous, whether taking aspirin every day is more likely to save your life or cut it short, and whether routine angioplasty works better than pills to unclog heart arteries.
But beyond the headlines, Ioannidis was shocked at the range and reach of the reversals he was seeing in everyday medical research. “Randomized controlled trials,” which compare how one group responds to a treatment against how an identical group fares without the treatment, had long been considered nearly unshakable evidence, but they, too, ended up being wrong some of the time. “I realized even our gold-standard research had a lot of problems,” he says. Baffled, he started looking for the specific ways in which studies were going wrong. And before long he discovered that the range of errors being committed was astonishing: from what questions researchers posed, to how they set up the studies, to which patients they recruited for the studies, to which measurements they took, to how they analyzed the data, to how they presented their results, to how particular studies came to be published in medical journals.
......./
David Gorski, a surgeon and researcher at Detroit’s Barbara Ann Karmanos Cancer Institute, noted in his prominent medical blog that when he presented Ioannidis’s paper on highly cited research at a professional meeting, “not a single one of my surgical colleagues was the least bit surprised or disturbed by its findings.” Ioannidis offers a theory for the relatively calm reception. “I think that people didn’t feel I was only trying to provoke them, because I showed that it was a community problem, instead of pointing fingers at individual examples of bad research,” he says. In a sense, he gave scientists an opportunity to cluck about the wrongness without having to acknowledge that they themselves succumb to it—it was something everyone else did.
......../
If a study somehow avoids every one of these problems and finds a real connection to long-term changes in health, you’re still not guaranteed to benefit, because studies report average results that typically represent a vast range of individual outcomes. Should you be among the lucky minority that stands to benefit, don’t expect a noticeable improvement in your health, because studies usually detect only modest effects that merely tend to whittle your chances of succumbing to a particular disease from small to somewhat smaller. “The odds that anything useful will survive from any of these studies are poor,” says Ioannidis—dismissing in a breath a good chunk of the research into which we sink about $100 billion a year in the United States alone.
....../
And so it goes for all medical studies, he says. Indeed, nutritional studies aren’t the worst. Drug studies have the added corruptive force of financial conflict of interest. The exciting links between genes and various diseases and traits that are relentlessly hyped in the press for heralding miraculous around-the-corner treatments for everything from colon cancer to schizophrenia have in the past proved so vulnerable to error and distortion, Ioannidis has found, that in some cases you’d have done about as well by throwing darts at a chart of the genome. (These studies seem to have improved somewhat in recent years, but whether they will hold up or be useful in treatment are still open questions.) Vioxx, Zelnorm, and Baycol were among the widely prescribed drugs found to be safe and effective in large randomized controlled trials before the drugs were yanked from the market as unsafe or not so effective, or both.
“Often the claims made by studies are so extravagant that you can immediately cross them out without needing to know much about the specific problems with the studies,” Ioannidis says. But of course it’s that very extravagance of claim (one large randomized controlled trial even proved that secret prayer by unknown parties can save the lives of heart-surgery patients, while another proved that secret prayer can harm them) that helps gets these findings into journals and then into our treatments and lifestyles, especially when the claim builds on impressive-sounding evidence. “Even when the evidence shows that a particular research idea is wrong, if you have thousands of scientists who have invested their careers in it, they’ll continue to publish papers on it,” he says. “It’s like an epidemic, in the sense that they’re infected with these wrong ideas, and they’re spreading it to other researchers through journals.”
.../
Though scientists and science journalists are constantly talking up the value of the peer-review process, researchers admit among themselves that biased, erroneous, and even blatantly fraudulent studies easily slip through it. Nature, the grande dame of science journals, stated in a 2006 editorial, “Scientists understand that peer review per se provides only a minimal assurance of quality, and that the public conception of peer review as a stamp of authentication is far from the truth.” What’s more, the peer-review process often pressures researchers to shy away from striking out in genuinely new directions, and instead to build on the findings of their colleagues (that is, their potential reviewers) in ways that only seem like breakthroughs—as with the exciting-sounding gene linkages (autism genes identified!) and nutritional findings (olive oil lowers blood pressure!) that are really just dubious and conflicting variations on a theme.
Most journal editors don’t even claim to protect against the problems that plague these studies. University and government research overseers rarely step in to directly enforce research quality, and when they do, the science community goes ballistic over the outside interference. The ultimate protection against research error and bias is supposed to come from the way scientists constantly retest each other’s results—except they don’t. Only the most prominent findings are likely to be put to the test, because there’s likely to be publication payoff in firming up the proof, or contradicting it.
..........That we’re not routinely made seriously ill by this shortfall, he argues, is due largely to the fact that most medical interventions and advice don’t address life-and-death situations, but rather aim to leave us marginally healthier or less unhealthy, so we usually neither gain nor risk all that much.
Read the whole article here: http://tinyurl.com/26olese
Thursday, November 25, 2010
Many suffer from the inability to metabolize compounds from meds, foods, detergents, solvents, air pollution and so forth. The proposed theory concerns liver pathways. Other related mechanism includes the NO-ONOO theory from Dr Pall, NMDA, vanilloid, and TRPV receptors. Lack of digestive enzymes, dysfunctional pancreas, and detoxification pathways.
Although it advises eating certain foods, such as broccoli for instance, many cannot eat most foods. Likewise, it advises taking oxidants, which risk turning pro-oxidants.
See article below:
This document was provided by
Continuum Magazine
VOL. 5 No. 1
Once thought to be the seat of courage, love etc., the liver is central to our bodies’ endless process of removing unwanted chemicals. Leading British nutritionist and Director of the Society for the Promotion of Nutritional Therapy LINDA LAZARIDES takes a closer look.
One of our body’s most vital functions is to convert metabolic products and toxins into safe, soluble substances which can be eliminated via the urine or the gall bladder into the intestines. The liver plays an all-important role in this process – known as detoxification or biotransformation. Recent research has shown that many patients with chronic illnesses have a disordered liver biotransformation ability.
We simply don’t know all the diseases and health disorders which may be promoted by a toxic overload resulting from such dysfunction, but progress is beginning to be made in looking at specific detoxification pathways and relating underfunctioning of these to the development of disease.
Pathways
A number of biochemical ‘pathways’ – sequences of chemical changes – are involved in liver biotransformation. These are normally grouped into oxidation, reduction or hydrolysis reactions (Phase I) and conjugation reactions (Phase II). Phase I reactions are catalysed by a group of liver enzymes scientifically known as cytochrome P450 oxidases (or P450 oxidases or cytochrome p450s). These enzymes introduce oxygen into the chemical structure of toxins or metabolites. Typically, by this process the toxins are converted into intermediate substances – alcohols and aldehydes – then into acids, which are water-soluble, and can be excreted via the urine.
Phase I detoxification
The intermediate substances created during Phase I detoxification, which include – far more so than the original toxins. Their harmful effects are primarily controlled by antioxidant nutrients/enzymes: a plentiful supply of these substances is essential. Apart from free radicals, intermediate metabolites include chloral hydrate (which is identical to the knock-out drug often known as a ‘Mickey Finn’), epoxides, and endogenous benzodiazepines – substances similar to Valium and other tranquillisers and sleeping pills. This makes it easier to understand how chronic fatigue, for instance, can develop when a toxic overload is present.
The more P450 enzymes are induced in the liver, the more of the toxic intermediates will be present in the body. P450 enzymes are induced by caffeine, alcohol, dioxin and other pollutants, exhaust fumes, high protein diets, oranges and tangerines, organophosphorus pesticides, paint fumes, steroid hormones, and a variety of drugs including paracetamol (acetaminophen), diazepam tranquillisers and sleeping pills, the contraceptive pill and cortisone.
Aldehydes
Substances which can inhibit the action of P450 enzymes include carbon tetrachloride, carbon monoxide, barbiturates, quercetin and naringenin (found in grapefruit). The oxidation reaction can also be blocked by an excess of toxic chemicals, a lack of enzymes, lack of nutrients and/or loss of oxygen. Cant tolerate any of those either.
Such blocking results in a build-up of more toxic substances such as formaldehyde and other aldehydes in tissue. This can in turn lead to a spreading phenomenon, with increasing sensitivity to more chemicals such as ketones and alcohols, and eventually even to natural chemicals occurring in foods, pollen and mould. A build-up of aldehydes can in severe cases lead to tissue cross-linking, causing vasculitis with possible seizures and brain damage.
Although most aldehydes in the body are thought to occur as intermediate metabolites, external sources include exposure to formaldehyde gas (which is given off by new carpets, curtains and other furnishings) and breakdown products of ethylene glycol and methanol.
Two known sources of aldehydes are intestinal overgrowth with Candida albicans, as well as the peroxidation of polyunsaturated fats. The fatigue, foggy thinking and ‘brain fag’ linked with candidiasis may be due to an overloading of the detoxification system with aldehydes, which can even lead to a reverse reaction of aldehyde to alcohol. Extreme intolerance to alcohol consumption may occur in these individuals, as it does in those diagnosed with ME or chronic fatigue syndrome.
Amines
Cytochrome P450 and other oxidizing enzymes also oxidize amines such as phenylethylamine found in chocolate, tyramine found in cheese, and adrenaline, noradrenaline and dopamine. These are oxidized into aldehydes by the enzyme mitochondrial monoamine oxidase (MAO) – if this enzyme is blocked, for instance by MAO inhibitor drugs used to treat depression, tyramine, for instance, cannot be metabolized and hypertension can develop as a chemical sensitivity reaction.
Phase II detoxification (conjugation) There are five main conjugation categories, including acetylation, acylation (peptide conjugation with amino acids), sulphur conjugations, methylations and conju-gation with glucuronic acid. Some substances enter Phase II detoxification directly, others come via Phase I pathways.
Conjugation involves the combining of a metabolite or toxin with another substance which adds a hydrophilic (or water-reactive) molecule to it, converting lipophilic (or fat-reactive) substances to water-soluble forms for excretion and elimination. Individual xenobiotics and metabolites usually follow a specific path, so whereas caffeine is metabolized by P450 enzymes, aspirin-based medications are conjugated with glycine, and paracetamol with sulphate.
Acetylation
Acetylation requires pantothenic acid to function. It is the chief degradation pathway for compounds containing aromatic amines such as histamine, serotonin, PABA, P-amino salicylic acid, aniline and procaine amide. It is also a pathway for sulphur amides, aliphatic amines and complex hydrazines.
A proportion of the general population – perhaps up to 50 per cent – are slow acetylators. This rises to as high a level as 80 per cent among the chemically sensitive population. Their N-acetyltransferase activity is thought to be reduced, and this prolongs the action of drugs and other toxic chemicals, thus enhancing their toxicity.
Acylation
Acylation uses acyl CO-A, with the amino acids glycine, glutamine and taurine. Conjugation of bile acids in the liver with glycine or taurine is essential for the efficient removal of these potentially toxic compounds. Disturbed acylation by pollutant overload decreases proper levels of bile in the gastrointestinal tract, resulting in poor assimilation of lipids and fat-soluble vitamins, and disturbed cholesterol metabolism.
Toluene, the most popular industrial organic solvent, is converted by the liver into benzoate, which like aspirin must then be detoxified by conjugation with the amino acid glycine (glycination): large doses of glycine and N-glycylglycine are used in treating aspirin overdose. Benzoate itself is present in many food substances and is widely used as a food preservative.
Glycine is a commonly available amino acid, but the capacity to synthesize taurine may be limited by low activity of the enzyme cysteine-sulfinic acid decarboxylase. Damage can occur to this enzyme directly by pollutants, or by overload/over-use resulting in depletion.
Both taurine- and glycine-dependent reactions require an alkaline pH: 7.8 to 8.0. Environmental medicine specialists may alkalinize over-acidic patients by administering sodium and potassium bicarbonate in order to facilitate these reactions.
Glutathione conjugation, using the amino acid glutathione in its reduced form, is used for the transformation of xenobiotics such as aromatic disulphides, naphthalene, anthracene, phenanthacin compounds, aliphatic disulphides – and the regeneration of endogenous thiols from disulphides. There is a cycle of replenishment for glutathione, allowing it to be reformed after conversion to glutathione reductase. Heavy metals can inhibit this cycle, thus preventing replenishment.
Sulphur conjugation (sulphation)
Neurotransmitters, steroid hormones, certain drugs and many xenobiotic and phenolic compounds such as oestrone (one of the forms of oestrogen), aliphatic alcohols, aryl amines and alicyclic hydroxy-steroids employ sulphation as their primary route of detoxification. Steventon at Birmingham University (UK) has found that many sufferers from Parkinsonism, motor neurone disease and Alzheimer’s disease as well as environmental illness, tend to have a reduced ability to produce sulphate from the amino acid cysteine in their body, and instead accumulate cysteine.
Sulphate may be ingested from food, but is also produced by the action of the enzyme cysteine dioxygenase on cysteine. This process is known as sulphoxidation.
The body’s ability to conjugate toxins with sulphate is ‘rate limited’ by the amount of sulphate present; if there is inadequate sulphate, toxins and metabolites can accumulate, perhaps building up to levels which cause degeneration of nervous tissue after several decades.
Steventon’s findings are a matter for serious concern. How many individuals are given the opportunity to find out whether they are poor sulphoxidizers and to reduce their chances of developing the above mentioned diseases by improving their sulphoxidation ability?
Methylation
According to environmental medicine specialist William Rae, the process most often disturbed in chemically sensitive people involves methylation reactions catalysed by S-adenosyl-L-methionine-dependent enzymes. Methionine is the chief methyl donor to detoxify amines, phenols, thiols, noradrenaline, adrenaline, dopamine, melatonin, L-dopa, histamine, serotonin, pyridine, sulphites and hypochlorites into compounds excreted through the lungs. Methionine is needed to detoxify the hypochlorite reaction.
The activity of the methyltransferase enzyme is dependent on magnesium, and, due to the frequency of magnesium deficiency, supplementation with this nutrient will often stabilize chemically sensitive patients.
Glucuronidation
Glucuronic acid is a metabolite of glucose. It can conjugate with chemical and bacterial toxins such as alcohols, phenols, enols, carboxylic acid, amines, hydroxyamines, carbamides, sulphonamides and thiols, as well as some normal metabolites in a process known as glucuronidation.
For most individuals glucuronidation is a supplementary detoxification pathway. It is a secondary, slower process than sulphation or glycination, but is important if those pathways are diminished or saturated. Obese people seem to have an enhanced capacity to detoxify molecules that can use the glucuronidation pathway. However, damage to the capacity for oxidative phosphorylation which takes place in the mitochondria, is likely to diminish the capacity for glucuronide conjugation.
Overload
If the liver’s detoxification pathways are excessively stimulated and overly utilized, they eventually become depleted or begin to respond poorly – being suppressed by toxic chemicals. Once breakdown of the main pathways occurs as a result of pollutant overload, toxins are shunted to lesser pathways, eventually overloading them, and disturbing orderly nutrient metabolism. Chemical sensitivity may then occur, followed by nutrient depletion and finally fixed-name disease. Depleted immunity is also a potential outcome of a toxic overload.
Interesting facts
• Dr William Rae of the Environmental Health Centre in Dallas says that the most severely ill chemically sensitive patients not only have abnormally low antipollutant enzymes, in addition to toxic suppression and nutrient depletion, but in some instances antibodies are produced against cytochrome P450 and these may inhibit or decrease its effectiveness.
• Environmental medicine specialists have found that almost 35 per cent of chemically sensitive patients are deficient in intracellular sulphur. Not only can this hinder the detoxification of some sulphur-containing and other toxic chemicals, it can enhance the harmful effects of exposure to cyanide from foods such as cassava and almonds as well as from tobacco products. The hereditary disease known as Leber’s optic atrophy involves a defect in the ability to detoxify cyanide, and leads to sudden, permanent blindness on first exposure to cyanide in small amounts such as those ingested from smoking cigarettes.
• Many multimineral supplements in the UK omit iron and copper due to theories that individuals may already be overloaded with these nutrients. However if no overload is present, an unbalanced supplement may promote depletion of the minerals. The Environmental Health Centre in Dallas finds that intravenous infusions to replenish iron stores brings dramatic improvements for the chemically sensitive patient as part of their detoxification process. Copper is also found to help catalyse the cytochrome systems. (NB: self-supplementation with iron and copper should be cautious, to avoid iron and copper overload conditions).
• Although the liver is the primary site for oxidation of xenobiotics, the cytochrome P450 system is found in other tissues that are exposed to environmental compounds like the skin, lungs, gastrointestinal tract, kidneys, placenta, corpus luteum, lymphocytes, monocytes, pulmonary alveolar macrophages, adrenals, testes and brain, in both the mitochondria and in the nuclear membrane.
• Always rinse your washing-up carefully. Pollutants in the form of solvents and detergents can damage and penetrate cell membranes and damage the contents of the cell.
• Vitamin B3 has been shown to accelerate the clearance of aldehydes in some chemically sensitive patients.
• Molybdenum, although an essential element, competes with sulphate in its activation step to the important enzyme PAPS and can thus lower sulphate levels and impair sulphation ability. Environmental medicine experts warn that molybdenum supplementation may be contraindicated in individuals with poor sulphation ability.
• The substance naringenin, found in grapefruit, can significantly inhibit Phase I detoxification, as can grape-fruit itself. This may prove clinically useful in some situations where Phase I activity is too high, (as shown in liver function tests available from nutritional therapists).
• Persons who have been exposed to toxic chemicals, drugs and other xenobiotics, have increased requirements for some vitamins. Functional nutritional assays for vitamins B1, B2, B3, B6, B12 and folate, and serum levels of vitamins A, D, C and beta carotene were performed in a random sample of 333 environmentally-sensitive patients prior to treatment. 57.8% were found to be deficient in B6, 37.7% in vitamin D, 34.9% in B2, 32.2% in folate, 27.7% in vitamin C, 21.4% in niacin, 14.9% in B12, 5.6% in vitamin A and 4.6% in beta-carotene. (Ross GH et al: Evidence for vitamin deficiencies in environmentally-sensitive patients. Clinical Ecology 6(2):60-6, 1989.)
Adapted from the Nutritional Health Bibleby Linda Lazarides (Thorsons, £9.99). Published September 1997. Available from all good bookshops or by mail order from SPNT Books (see address below).
Foods to aid detoxification
Beetroot helps with liver drainage
Broccoli, cauliflower and other cruciferous vegetables these aid cytochrome P450 activity
Protein
Radish, watercress rich in sulphur.
Supplements to aid liver detoxification
B complex vitamins
Digestive enzymes may be necessary to ensure that protein is adequately digested and glycine is readily available
Essential fatty acids
N-acetyl cysteine (NAC)
Reduced glutathione
Selenium, zinc, magnesium and manganese possibly iron and copper if used with caution
Taurine (a useful combination product is magnesium taurate)
Vitamins C and E and beta carotene.
Liver herbs to aid detoxification
(traditionally known as ‘blood cleansing’ herbs)
Dandelion root cholagogue (stimulates liver secretions and bile flow)
Globe artichoke leaf promotes regeneration of the liver and promotes blood flow in that organ
Silymarin according to recent research, this herbal extract stabilizes the membranes of liver cells, preventing the entry of virus toxins and other toxic compounds including drugs. Promotes regeneration of the liver.
Turmeric a cholagogue like dandelion, but may irritate the gastric mucosa. Its advantages are its cheapness and ability to be used in cookery.
These herbs are best combined with wild yam, which helps to prevent liver spasms caused by gall bladder stimulating herbs.
For help with a liver detoxification programme, it is best to consult a nutritional therapist, who can arrange for (non-invasive) tests to determine which pathways need boosting.
For a list of nutritional therapists and other natural medicine practitioners in your area, send £1 plus sae to: Society for the Promotion of Nutritional Therapy (SPNT), PO Box 47, Heathfield,
Glossary
acetylation – combination with acetic acid
alveolar macrophages – rounded granular phagocyte cells in the alveoli of the lungs that ingest inhaled particulate matter
aldehydes – a class of organic compounds containing the atomic group C(Carbon)H(Hydrogen)O(Oxygen)
amines – organic compounds containing nitrogen
amino acids – the chief constituents of proteins; the “building blocks” of life
biochemical pathway – a series of chemical enzyme reactions, that converts one biological material into another
Candida albicans – a quite common fungus in humans, which when unchecked can cause illness
catalyse – speeding up of a chemical reaction by a substance which remains after the reaction
conjugation – the joining together of two compounds to form another
corpus luteum – a yellow glandular mass in the ovary
dioxins – a group of chemicals present as trace contaminants in herbicides
endogenous – arising from within the organism
epoxides – compounds containing one oxygen atom bound to two different carbon atoms
ethylene glycol – a solvent used as an antifreeze
gall bladder – the reservoir for bile, on the surface of the liver
hydrolysis – the splitting of a substance’s molecules by adding water (H 2 0): a hydrogen-oxygen molecule (HO-) being added to one fragment, and the hydrogen atom (H) to the other
hydrophilic – readily interacting with water
intracellular – within cells
ketones – a class of organic compounds containing the molecule C=O
lipids – fats and fat-like substances
lipophilic – readily reacting with fat
lymphocytes – an immune-system cell generated by lymph tissue
metabolic, -ism – all the processes which create and maintain, and use up, organised living matter
metabolites – any substance produced by metabolism
methanol – a solvent
methylation – the addition of a methyl, i.e. a molecule of C(Carbon) and three H(Hydrogen) atoms
mitochondria – small cell organelles, with their own nucleic acids, that through synthesis of adenosine triphosphate (ATP) produce most of the energy for cells
monocytes – cells formed in bone marrow that travel to tissues, e.g. lungs and liver, to develop into macrophages
oxidation – the removal of electrons from the atoms of a substance; often by combination with oxygen
pantothenic acid – a member of the vitamin B complex
peptide – a compound of more than two amino acids
peroxidation – a chemical reaction creating an oxide with more oxygen than any other
polyunsaturated – denoting a chemical compound, particularly a fatty acid, having two or more double or triple bonds in its hydro-carbon chain
reduction – the addition of electrons to the atoms of a substance; often by combination with hydrogen
thiol – the univalient – S(sulphur)H(hydrogen) group
vasculitis – inflammation of a (usually blood) vessel
xenobiotics – substances foreign to the body
Although it advises eating certain foods, such as broccoli for instance, many cannot eat most foods. Likewise, it advises taking oxidants, which risk turning pro-oxidants.
See article below:
This document was provided by
Continuum Magazine
VOL. 5 No. 1
Once thought to be the seat of courage, love etc., the liver is central to our bodies’ endless process of removing unwanted chemicals. Leading British nutritionist and Director of the Society for the Promotion of Nutritional Therapy LINDA LAZARIDES takes a closer look.
One of our body’s most vital functions is to convert metabolic products and toxins into safe, soluble substances which can be eliminated via the urine or the gall bladder into the intestines. The liver plays an all-important role in this process – known as detoxification or biotransformation. Recent research has shown that many patients with chronic illnesses have a disordered liver biotransformation ability.
We simply don’t know all the diseases and health disorders which may be promoted by a toxic overload resulting from such dysfunction, but progress is beginning to be made in looking at specific detoxification pathways and relating underfunctioning of these to the development of disease.
Pathways
A number of biochemical ‘pathways’ – sequences of chemical changes – are involved in liver biotransformation. These are normally grouped into oxidation, reduction or hydrolysis reactions (Phase I) and conjugation reactions (Phase II). Phase I reactions are catalysed by a group of liver enzymes scientifically known as cytochrome P450 oxidases (or P450 oxidases or cytochrome p450s). These enzymes introduce oxygen into the chemical structure of toxins or metabolites. Typically, by this process the toxins are converted into intermediate substances – alcohols and aldehydes – then into acids, which are water-soluble, and can be excreted via the urine.
Phase I detoxification
The intermediate substances created during Phase I detoxification, which include – far more so than the original toxins. Their harmful effects are primarily controlled by antioxidant nutrients/enzymes: a plentiful supply of these substances is essential. Apart from free radicals, intermediate metabolites include chloral hydrate (which is identical to the knock-out drug often known as a ‘Mickey Finn’), epoxides, and endogenous benzodiazepines – substances similar to Valium and other tranquillisers and sleeping pills. This makes it easier to understand how chronic fatigue, for instance, can develop when a toxic overload is present.
The more P450 enzymes are induced in the liver, the more of the toxic intermediates will be present in the body. P450 enzymes are induced by caffeine, alcohol, dioxin and other pollutants, exhaust fumes, high protein diets, oranges and tangerines, organophosphorus pesticides, paint fumes, steroid hormones, and a variety of drugs including paracetamol (acetaminophen), diazepam tranquillisers and sleeping pills, the contraceptive pill and cortisone.
Aldehydes
Substances which can inhibit the action of P450 enzymes include carbon tetrachloride, carbon monoxide, barbiturates, quercetin and naringenin (found in grapefruit). The oxidation reaction can also be blocked by an excess of toxic chemicals, a lack of enzymes, lack of nutrients and/or loss of oxygen. Cant tolerate any of those either.
Such blocking results in a build-up of more toxic substances such as formaldehyde and other aldehydes in tissue. This can in turn lead to a spreading phenomenon, with increasing sensitivity to more chemicals such as ketones and alcohols, and eventually even to natural chemicals occurring in foods, pollen and mould. A build-up of aldehydes can in severe cases lead to tissue cross-linking, causing vasculitis with possible seizures and brain damage.
Although most aldehydes in the body are thought to occur as intermediate metabolites, external sources include exposure to formaldehyde gas (which is given off by new carpets, curtains and other furnishings) and breakdown products of ethylene glycol and methanol.
Two known sources of aldehydes are intestinal overgrowth with Candida albicans, as well as the peroxidation of polyunsaturated fats. The fatigue, foggy thinking and ‘brain fag’ linked with candidiasis may be due to an overloading of the detoxification system with aldehydes, which can even lead to a reverse reaction of aldehyde to alcohol. Extreme intolerance to alcohol consumption may occur in these individuals, as it does in those diagnosed with ME or chronic fatigue syndrome.
Amines
Cytochrome P450 and other oxidizing enzymes also oxidize amines such as phenylethylamine found in chocolate, tyramine found in cheese, and adrenaline, noradrenaline and dopamine. These are oxidized into aldehydes by the enzyme mitochondrial monoamine oxidase (MAO) – if this enzyme is blocked, for instance by MAO inhibitor drugs used to treat depression, tyramine, for instance, cannot be metabolized and hypertension can develop as a chemical sensitivity reaction.
Phase II detoxification (conjugation) There are five main conjugation categories, including acetylation, acylation (peptide conjugation with amino acids), sulphur conjugations, methylations and conju-gation with glucuronic acid. Some substances enter Phase II detoxification directly, others come via Phase I pathways.
Conjugation involves the combining of a metabolite or toxin with another substance which adds a hydrophilic (or water-reactive) molecule to it, converting lipophilic (or fat-reactive) substances to water-soluble forms for excretion and elimination. Individual xenobiotics and metabolites usually follow a specific path, so whereas caffeine is metabolized by P450 enzymes, aspirin-based medications are conjugated with glycine, and paracetamol with sulphate.
Acetylation
Acetylation requires pantothenic acid to function. It is the chief degradation pathway for compounds containing aromatic amines such as histamine, serotonin, PABA, P-amino salicylic acid, aniline and procaine amide. It is also a pathway for sulphur amides, aliphatic amines and complex hydrazines.
A proportion of the general population – perhaps up to 50 per cent – are slow acetylators. This rises to as high a level as 80 per cent among the chemically sensitive population. Their N-acetyltransferase activity is thought to be reduced, and this prolongs the action of drugs and other toxic chemicals, thus enhancing their toxicity.
Acylation
Acylation uses acyl CO-A, with the amino acids glycine, glutamine and taurine. Conjugation of bile acids in the liver with glycine or taurine is essential for the efficient removal of these potentially toxic compounds. Disturbed acylation by pollutant overload decreases proper levels of bile in the gastrointestinal tract, resulting in poor assimilation of lipids and fat-soluble vitamins, and disturbed cholesterol metabolism.
Toluene, the most popular industrial organic solvent, is converted by the liver into benzoate, which like aspirin must then be detoxified by conjugation with the amino acid glycine (glycination): large doses of glycine and N-glycylglycine are used in treating aspirin overdose. Benzoate itself is present in many food substances and is widely used as a food preservative.
Glycine is a commonly available amino acid, but the capacity to synthesize taurine may be limited by low activity of the enzyme cysteine-sulfinic acid decarboxylase. Damage can occur to this enzyme directly by pollutants, or by overload/over-use resulting in depletion.
Both taurine- and glycine-dependent reactions require an alkaline pH: 7.8 to 8.0. Environmental medicine specialists may alkalinize over-acidic patients by administering sodium and potassium bicarbonate in order to facilitate these reactions.
Glutathione conjugation, using the amino acid glutathione in its reduced form, is used for the transformation of xenobiotics such as aromatic disulphides, naphthalene, anthracene, phenanthacin compounds, aliphatic disulphides – and the regeneration of endogenous thiols from disulphides. There is a cycle of replenishment for glutathione, allowing it to be reformed after conversion to glutathione reductase. Heavy metals can inhibit this cycle, thus preventing replenishment.
Sulphur conjugation (sulphation)
Neurotransmitters, steroid hormones, certain drugs and many xenobiotic and phenolic compounds such as oestrone (one of the forms of oestrogen), aliphatic alcohols, aryl amines and alicyclic hydroxy-steroids employ sulphation as their primary route of detoxification. Steventon at Birmingham University (UK) has found that many sufferers from Parkinsonism, motor neurone disease and Alzheimer’s disease as well as environmental illness, tend to have a reduced ability to produce sulphate from the amino acid cysteine in their body, and instead accumulate cysteine.
Sulphate may be ingested from food, but is also produced by the action of the enzyme cysteine dioxygenase on cysteine. This process is known as sulphoxidation.
The body’s ability to conjugate toxins with sulphate is ‘rate limited’ by the amount of sulphate present; if there is inadequate sulphate, toxins and metabolites can accumulate, perhaps building up to levels which cause degeneration of nervous tissue after several decades.
Steventon’s findings are a matter for serious concern. How many individuals are given the opportunity to find out whether they are poor sulphoxidizers and to reduce their chances of developing the above mentioned diseases by improving their sulphoxidation ability?
Methylation
According to environmental medicine specialist William Rae, the process most often disturbed in chemically sensitive people involves methylation reactions catalysed by S-adenosyl-L-methionine-dependent enzymes. Methionine is the chief methyl donor to detoxify amines, phenols, thiols, noradrenaline, adrenaline, dopamine, melatonin, L-dopa, histamine, serotonin, pyridine, sulphites and hypochlorites into compounds excreted through the lungs. Methionine is needed to detoxify the hypochlorite reaction.
The activity of the methyltransferase enzyme is dependent on magnesium, and, due to the frequency of magnesium deficiency, supplementation with this nutrient will often stabilize chemically sensitive patients.
Glucuronidation
Glucuronic acid is a metabolite of glucose. It can conjugate with chemical and bacterial toxins such as alcohols, phenols, enols, carboxylic acid, amines, hydroxyamines, carbamides, sulphonamides and thiols, as well as some normal metabolites in a process known as glucuronidation.
For most individuals glucuronidation is a supplementary detoxification pathway. It is a secondary, slower process than sulphation or glycination, but is important if those pathways are diminished or saturated. Obese people seem to have an enhanced capacity to detoxify molecules that can use the glucuronidation pathway. However, damage to the capacity for oxidative phosphorylation which takes place in the mitochondria, is likely to diminish the capacity for glucuronide conjugation.
Overload
If the liver’s detoxification pathways are excessively stimulated and overly utilized, they eventually become depleted or begin to respond poorly – being suppressed by toxic chemicals. Once breakdown of the main pathways occurs as a result of pollutant overload, toxins are shunted to lesser pathways, eventually overloading them, and disturbing orderly nutrient metabolism. Chemical sensitivity may then occur, followed by nutrient depletion and finally fixed-name disease. Depleted immunity is also a potential outcome of a toxic overload.
Interesting facts
• Dr William Rae of the Environmental Health Centre in Dallas says that the most severely ill chemically sensitive patients not only have abnormally low antipollutant enzymes, in addition to toxic suppression and nutrient depletion, but in some instances antibodies are produced against cytochrome P450 and these may inhibit or decrease its effectiveness.
• Environmental medicine specialists have found that almost 35 per cent of chemically sensitive patients are deficient in intracellular sulphur. Not only can this hinder the detoxification of some sulphur-containing and other toxic chemicals, it can enhance the harmful effects of exposure to cyanide from foods such as cassava and almonds as well as from tobacco products. The hereditary disease known as Leber’s optic atrophy involves a defect in the ability to detoxify cyanide, and leads to sudden, permanent blindness on first exposure to cyanide in small amounts such as those ingested from smoking cigarettes.
• Many multimineral supplements in the UK omit iron and copper due to theories that individuals may already be overloaded with these nutrients. However if no overload is present, an unbalanced supplement may promote depletion of the minerals. The Environmental Health Centre in Dallas finds that intravenous infusions to replenish iron stores brings dramatic improvements for the chemically sensitive patient as part of their detoxification process. Copper is also found to help catalyse the cytochrome systems. (NB: self-supplementation with iron and copper should be cautious, to avoid iron and copper overload conditions).
• Although the liver is the primary site for oxidation of xenobiotics, the cytochrome P450 system is found in other tissues that are exposed to environmental compounds like the skin, lungs, gastrointestinal tract, kidneys, placenta, corpus luteum, lymphocytes, monocytes, pulmonary alveolar macrophages, adrenals, testes and brain, in both the mitochondria and in the nuclear membrane.
• Always rinse your washing-up carefully. Pollutants in the form of solvents and detergents can damage and penetrate cell membranes and damage the contents of the cell.
• Vitamin B3 has been shown to accelerate the clearance of aldehydes in some chemically sensitive patients.
• Molybdenum, although an essential element, competes with sulphate in its activation step to the important enzyme PAPS and can thus lower sulphate levels and impair sulphation ability. Environmental medicine experts warn that molybdenum supplementation may be contraindicated in individuals with poor sulphation ability.
• The substance naringenin, found in grapefruit, can significantly inhibit Phase I detoxification, as can grape-fruit itself. This may prove clinically useful in some situations where Phase I activity is too high, (as shown in liver function tests available from nutritional therapists).
• Persons who have been exposed to toxic chemicals, drugs and other xenobiotics, have increased requirements for some vitamins. Functional nutritional assays for vitamins B1, B2, B3, B6, B12 and folate, and serum levels of vitamins A, D, C and beta carotene were performed in a random sample of 333 environmentally-sensitive patients prior to treatment. 57.8% were found to be deficient in B6, 37.7% in vitamin D, 34.9% in B2, 32.2% in folate, 27.7% in vitamin C, 21.4% in niacin, 14.9% in B12, 5.6% in vitamin A and 4.6% in beta-carotene. (Ross GH et al: Evidence for vitamin deficiencies in environmentally-sensitive patients. Clinical Ecology 6(2):60-6, 1989.)
Adapted from the Nutritional Health Bibleby Linda Lazarides (Thorsons, £9.99). Published September 1997. Available from all good bookshops or by mail order from SPNT Books (see address below).
Foods to aid detoxification
Beetroot helps with liver drainage
Broccoli, cauliflower and other cruciferous vegetables these aid cytochrome P450 activity
Protein
Radish, watercress rich in sulphur.
Supplements to aid liver detoxification
B complex vitamins
Digestive enzymes may be necessary to ensure that protein is adequately digested and glycine is readily available
Essential fatty acids
N-acetyl cysteine (NAC)
Reduced glutathione
Selenium, zinc, magnesium and manganese possibly iron and copper if used with caution
Taurine (a useful combination product is magnesium taurate)
Vitamins C and E and beta carotene.
Liver herbs to aid detoxification
(traditionally known as ‘blood cleansing’ herbs)
Dandelion root cholagogue (stimulates liver secretions and bile flow)
Globe artichoke leaf promotes regeneration of the liver and promotes blood flow in that organ
Silymarin according to recent research, this herbal extract stabilizes the membranes of liver cells, preventing the entry of virus toxins and other toxic compounds including drugs. Promotes regeneration of the liver.
Turmeric a cholagogue like dandelion, but may irritate the gastric mucosa. Its advantages are its cheapness and ability to be used in cookery.
These herbs are best combined with wild yam, which helps to prevent liver spasms caused by gall bladder stimulating herbs.
For help with a liver detoxification programme, it is best to consult a nutritional therapist, who can arrange for (non-invasive) tests to determine which pathways need boosting.
For a list of nutritional therapists and other natural medicine practitioners in your area, send £1 plus sae to: Society for the Promotion of Nutritional Therapy (SPNT), PO Box 47, Heathfield,
Glossary
acetylation – combination with acetic acid
alveolar macrophages – rounded granular phagocyte cells in the alveoli of the lungs that ingest inhaled particulate matter
aldehydes – a class of organic compounds containing the atomic group C(Carbon)H(Hydrogen)O(Oxygen)
amines – organic compounds containing nitrogen
amino acids – the chief constituents of proteins; the “building blocks” of life
biochemical pathway – a series of chemical enzyme reactions, that converts one biological material into another
Candida albicans – a quite common fungus in humans, which when unchecked can cause illness
catalyse – speeding up of a chemical reaction by a substance which remains after the reaction
conjugation – the joining together of two compounds to form another
corpus luteum – a yellow glandular mass in the ovary
dioxins – a group of chemicals present as trace contaminants in herbicides
endogenous – arising from within the organism
epoxides – compounds containing one oxygen atom bound to two different carbon atoms
ethylene glycol – a solvent used as an antifreeze
gall bladder – the reservoir for bile, on the surface of the liver
hydrolysis – the splitting of a substance’s molecules by adding water (H 2 0): a hydrogen-oxygen molecule (HO-) being added to one fragment, and the hydrogen atom (H) to the other
hydrophilic – readily interacting with water
intracellular – within cells
ketones – a class of organic compounds containing the molecule C=O
lipids – fats and fat-like substances
lipophilic – readily reacting with fat
lymphocytes – an immune-system cell generated by lymph tissue
metabolic, -ism – all the processes which create and maintain, and use up, organised living matter
metabolites – any substance produced by metabolism
methanol – a solvent
methylation – the addition of a methyl, i.e. a molecule of C(Carbon) and three H(Hydrogen) atoms
mitochondria – small cell organelles, with their own nucleic acids, that through synthesis of adenosine triphosphate (ATP) produce most of the energy for cells
monocytes – cells formed in bone marrow that travel to tissues, e.g. lungs and liver, to develop into macrophages
oxidation – the removal of electrons from the atoms of a substance; often by combination with oxygen
pantothenic acid – a member of the vitamin B complex
peptide – a compound of more than two amino acids
peroxidation – a chemical reaction creating an oxide with more oxygen than any other
polyunsaturated – denoting a chemical compound, particularly a fatty acid, having two or more double or triple bonds in its hydro-carbon chain
reduction – the addition of electrons to the atoms of a substance; often by combination with hydrogen
thiol – the univalient – S(sulphur)H(hydrogen) group
vasculitis – inflammation of a (usually blood) vessel
xenobiotics – substances foreign to the body
Wednesday, November 24, 2010
Opponents of nutrition, epigenetics (vits & supps ability to switch on/off genes), herbal and indigenous medicine, herbal, phytochemistry, WATCH OUT...
The very medical journals promoting toxic meds, adhered to, in most instances, ineffective, are now investing billions in research (nothing new and done before) ;D promoting Vit D3, Fish Oil, and more.
Previously dismissive of research and studies by independent institutions, they are now preparing for a take over vits and supps etc... Every day, as if on cue, articles being published concerning therapeutic properties for these. [image]
The article below, is really nothing new!! Nutritionists have known for decades about nitrates contained in beet juice (and other fruits & vegs) promotes energy by less oxygen in take. It is claimed that athletes, those suffering from cardiovascular and respiratory diseases and the elderly would benefit.
Eating foods containing high content of nitrates, to increase endurance. NOT, cured bacon, ham, meats, hotdogs, INSTEAD, spinach, lettuce, and leafy vegetables.
Beetroot juice reduces high blood pressure too.
Those who continue to take toxic meds, do your home work, take a close look at compounds in those meds, and read up, simply does not make sense and does not cure!!
J Appl Physiol. 2009 Aug 6. [Epub ahead of print]
Dietary nitrate supplementation reduces the O2 cost of low-intensity exercise and enhances tolerance to high-intensity exercise in humans.
Bailey SJ, Winyard P, Vanhatalo A, Blackwell JR, Dimenna FJ, Wilkerson DP, Tarr J, Benjamin N, Jones AM.
Exeter University.
Pharmacological sodium nitrate supplementation has been reported to reduce the O2 cost of sub-maximal exercise in humans. In this study, we hypothesised that dietary supplementation with inorganic nitrate in the form of beetroot juice (BR) would reduce the O2 cost of sub-maximal exercise and enhance the tolerance to high-intensity exercise. In a double-blind, placebo-controlled, crossover study, eight males (aged 19-38 yr) consumed 500 mL per day of either beetroot juice (BR, containing 11.2 +/- 0.6 mM of nitrate) or blackcurrant cordial (as a placebo, PL, with negligible nitrate content) for six consecutive days, and completed a series of 'step' moderate-intensity and severe-intensity exercise tests on the last 3 days. On days 4-6, plasma [nitrite] was significantly greater following dietary nitrate supplementation compared to placebo (BR: 273 +/- 44 vs. PL: 140 +/- 50 nM; P<0.05) and systolic blood pressure was significantly reduced (BR: 124 +/- 2 vs. PL: 132 +/- 5 mmHg; P<0.01). During moderate exercise, nitrate supplementation reduced muscle fractional O2 extraction (as estimated using near infra-red spectroscopy). The gain of the increase in pulmonary VO2 following the onset of moderate exercise was reduced by 19% in the BR condition (BR: 8.6 +/- 0.7 vs. PL: 10.8 +/- 1.6 mL(.)min(-1)(.)W(-1); P<0.05). During severe exercise, the VO2 slow component was reduced (BR: 0.57 +/- 0.20 vs. PL: 0.74 +/- 0.24 L.min(-1); P<0.05) and the time-to-exhaustion was extended (BR: 675 +/- 203 vs. PL: 583 +/- 145 s; P<0.05). The reduced O2 cost of exercise following increased dietary nitrate intake has important implications for our understanding of the factors which regulate mitochondrial respiration and muscle contractile energetics in humans. Key words: VO2 kinetics, exercise tolerance, exercise economy, slow component.
http://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pubmed/19661....Pubmed_RVDocSum
The very medical journals promoting toxic meds, adhered to, in most instances, ineffective, are now investing billions in research (nothing new and done before) ;D promoting Vit D3, Fish Oil, and more.
Previously dismissive of research and studies by independent institutions, they are now preparing for a take over vits and supps etc... Every day, as if on cue, articles being published concerning therapeutic properties for these. [image]
The article below, is really nothing new!! Nutritionists have known for decades about nitrates contained in beet juice (and other fruits & vegs) promotes energy by less oxygen in take. It is claimed that athletes, those suffering from cardiovascular and respiratory diseases and the elderly would benefit.
Eating foods containing high content of nitrates, to increase endurance. NOT, cured bacon, ham, meats, hotdogs, INSTEAD, spinach, lettuce, and leafy vegetables.
Beetroot juice reduces high blood pressure too.
Those who continue to take toxic meds, do your home work, take a close look at compounds in those meds, and read up, simply does not make sense and does not cure!!
J Appl Physiol. 2009 Aug 6. [Epub ahead of print]
Dietary nitrate supplementation reduces the O2 cost of low-intensity exercise and enhances tolerance to high-intensity exercise in humans.
Bailey SJ, Winyard P, Vanhatalo A, Blackwell JR, Dimenna FJ, Wilkerson DP, Tarr J, Benjamin N, Jones AM.
Exeter University.
Pharmacological sodium nitrate supplementation has been reported to reduce the O2 cost of sub-maximal exercise in humans. In this study, we hypothesised that dietary supplementation with inorganic nitrate in the form of beetroot juice (BR) would reduce the O2 cost of sub-maximal exercise and enhance the tolerance to high-intensity exercise. In a double-blind, placebo-controlled, crossover study, eight males (aged 19-38 yr) consumed 500 mL per day of either beetroot juice (BR, containing 11.2 +/- 0.6 mM of nitrate) or blackcurrant cordial (as a placebo, PL, with negligible nitrate content) for six consecutive days, and completed a series of 'step' moderate-intensity and severe-intensity exercise tests on the last 3 days. On days 4-6, plasma [nitrite] was significantly greater following dietary nitrate supplementation compared to placebo (BR: 273 +/- 44 vs. PL: 140 +/- 50 nM; P<0.05) and systolic blood pressure was significantly reduced (BR: 124 +/- 2 vs. PL: 132 +/- 5 mmHg; P<0.01). During moderate exercise, nitrate supplementation reduced muscle fractional O2 extraction (as estimated using near infra-red spectroscopy). The gain of the increase in pulmonary VO2 following the onset of moderate exercise was reduced by 19% in the BR condition (BR: 8.6 +/- 0.7 vs. PL: 10.8 +/- 1.6 mL(.)min(-1)(.)W(-1); P<0.05). During severe exercise, the VO2 slow component was reduced (BR: 0.57 +/- 0.20 vs. PL: 0.74 +/- 0.24 L.min(-1); P<0.05) and the time-to-exhaustion was extended (BR: 675 +/- 203 vs. PL: 583 +/- 145 s; P<0.05). The reduced O2 cost of exercise following increased dietary nitrate intake has important implications for our understanding of the factors which regulate mitochondrial respiration and muscle contractile energetics in humans. Key words: VO2 kinetics, exercise tolerance, exercise economy, slow component.
http://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pubmed/19661....Pubmed_RVDocSum
The role of Epigenetics, rather than DNA, is involved in disease process.
Moreover, it puts the emphasis on compounds in nutrients (eg foods) that is often a determinant factor. (See vid below)
Basically, Epigenetics is about altering cell function with without changing DNA sequencing, and this is achieved by altering diet rich in methyl donors. I am now making a U-Turn, ;) and will be going back to reading up again on Methylation.
There are tons of evidence to show that the Genomics can't be used to determine if one will develop a particular disease. Furthermore, it has failed miserably to design medications specific to Genomics. Add to that, that gene polymorphisms are often open to interpretation and stats.
This means that a gene polymorphism for one type of particular cancer, is also associated with other disease process, but through Epigenetics, in this case, nutrients, can alter the course of disease process (if not too advanced).
Medical doctors are not trained in this field. Nutritionist, biochemists, biomolecular and molecular biology are much more knowledgeable concerning Epigenetics.
That is what it means to me, to prepare the terrain, right at cellular activity. Anything else, IMHO, is superficial, and will not bring long term healing.
This is why I chose Ayurvedic Medicine, which can be compared to Phytochemistry, and closest to repairing to methylation and damaged DNA. In essence. It uses various compounds (60% from fruits) to alter the course of cellular activities. To research methylation and Epigenetics would be too absorbing and time consuming, Ayurvedic, for me, right now is a short cut.
Various acclaimed Institutions and Teaching Hospitals, Vitamins and Supplements, and Sports Companies, as well as a Swiss Pharmaceutical Company are using Ayurvedic Medicine, the latter patented an excellent compound for cardiac dysfunction. Ayurvedic use different terminology, but overall, it is far more than just being a monotherapy. It works on all systems and functions in the body, applying diet and nutrition, psychology, meditation, breathing, spirituality etc..
Ayurvedic Medicine is becoming Westernized, and are slowly selling out. It is leading to being trivialized and corrupted.
Inevitably, this leads to a schism between purists and westernized Ayurvedic Practitoners. But then again, Western Science and Allopathic Medicine is not without polemics.
Professor Jeremy Nicolson has been working on metabolomics since 1980s and other scientists. Concluded was that there are far more metabolism variation than genetic variations.
From MIT:
About the Lecture
Forget cigarette smoking (well, not completely). The really bad news, says Leona Samson, is that by virtue of the act of living, a human body will be exposed to destructive threats from the environment, and from within itself. Charbroiled burgers, sunlight, pollution, and even how our bodies use oxygen all pose what Samson calls “insults” to the DNA of our cells.
Our success in fending off these inevitable DNA-damaging agents in the environment depends a lot on inheritance, Samson tells us. For instance, victims of the rare disease Xeroderma pigmentosum don’t have the capacity to repair DNA that’s been corrupted by UV radiation from the sun. Children with Xeroderma pigmentosum develop skin cancers. In the larger population, such cancers tend to occur much later in life. The reason, Samson says, is that most of us have a formidable array of mechanisms within our cells for detecting and mending defective DNA. Cells with flawed DNA that goes unrepaired must either die, or go on to mutate in often dangerous ways.
Samson wants to figure out how to protect cells against carcinogenic effects in the environment, and whether a tumor cell will be susceptible to treatment. She has been painstakingly studying the Saccharomyces cerevisiae yeast organism, trying to identify all the factors that determine whether or not DNA damaging agents kill or mutate cells. She interrogated each of this organism’s 5,800 genes, “asking one by one, which of you is making a product that’s important to helping a cell recover from damage.” In what was a “huge surprise,” Samson learned that there are more than 2,000 gene products involved in helping a yeast cell repair itself, “from areas of the cell never suspected before for being important” in this way. Now Samson must elucidate the complex cellular pathways that “talk to each other” when DNA is damaged -- and figure out “how to extend to humans, ultimately.”
Moreover, it puts the emphasis on compounds in nutrients (eg foods) that is often a determinant factor. (See vid below)
Basically, Epigenetics is about altering cell function with without changing DNA sequencing, and this is achieved by altering diet rich in methyl donors. I am now making a U-Turn, ;) and will be going back to reading up again on Methylation.
There are tons of evidence to show that the Genomics can't be used to determine if one will develop a particular disease. Furthermore, it has failed miserably to design medications specific to Genomics. Add to that, that gene polymorphisms are often open to interpretation and stats.
This means that a gene polymorphism for one type of particular cancer, is also associated with other disease process, but through Epigenetics, in this case, nutrients, can alter the course of disease process (if not too advanced).
Medical doctors are not trained in this field. Nutritionist, biochemists, biomolecular and molecular biology are much more knowledgeable concerning Epigenetics.
That is what it means to me, to prepare the terrain, right at cellular activity. Anything else, IMHO, is superficial, and will not bring long term healing.
This is why I chose Ayurvedic Medicine, which can be compared to Phytochemistry, and closest to repairing to methylation and damaged DNA. In essence. It uses various compounds (60% from fruits) to alter the course of cellular activities. To research methylation and Epigenetics would be too absorbing and time consuming, Ayurvedic, for me, right now is a short cut.
Various acclaimed Institutions and Teaching Hospitals, Vitamins and Supplements, and Sports Companies, as well as a Swiss Pharmaceutical Company are using Ayurvedic Medicine, the latter patented an excellent compound for cardiac dysfunction. Ayurvedic use different terminology, but overall, it is far more than just being a monotherapy. It works on all systems and functions in the body, applying diet and nutrition, psychology, meditation, breathing, spirituality etc..
Ayurvedic Medicine is becoming Westernized, and are slowly selling out. It is leading to being trivialized and corrupted.
Inevitably, this leads to a schism between purists and westernized Ayurvedic Practitoners. But then again, Western Science and Allopathic Medicine is not without polemics.
Professor Jeremy Nicolson has been working on metabolomics since 1980s and other scientists. Concluded was that there are far more metabolism variation than genetic variations.
From MIT:
About the Lecture
Forget cigarette smoking (well, not completely). The really bad news, says Leona Samson, is that by virtue of the act of living, a human body will be exposed to destructive threats from the environment, and from within itself. Charbroiled burgers, sunlight, pollution, and even how our bodies use oxygen all pose what Samson calls “insults” to the DNA of our cells.
Our success in fending off these inevitable DNA-damaging agents in the environment depends a lot on inheritance, Samson tells us. For instance, victims of the rare disease Xeroderma pigmentosum don’t have the capacity to repair DNA that’s been corrupted by UV radiation from the sun. Children with Xeroderma pigmentosum develop skin cancers. In the larger population, such cancers tend to occur much later in life. The reason, Samson says, is that most of us have a formidable array of mechanisms within our cells for detecting and mending defective DNA. Cells with flawed DNA that goes unrepaired must either die, or go on to mutate in often dangerous ways.
Samson wants to figure out how to protect cells against carcinogenic effects in the environment, and whether a tumor cell will be susceptible to treatment. She has been painstakingly studying the Saccharomyces cerevisiae yeast organism, trying to identify all the factors that determine whether or not DNA damaging agents kill or mutate cells. She interrogated each of this organism’s 5,800 genes, “asking one by one, which of you is making a product that’s important to helping a cell recover from damage.” In what was a “huge surprise,” Samson learned that there are more than 2,000 gene products involved in helping a yeast cell repair itself, “from areas of the cell never suspected before for being important” in this way. Now Samson must elucidate the complex cellular pathways that “talk to each other” when DNA is damaged -- and figure out “how to extend to humans, ultimately.”
Kiwis could protect DNA from damage, says pilot study
By Stephen Daniells, 26-Jul-2006
Related topics: Science & Nutrition, Fruit, vegetable, nut ingredients
Two to three kiwis a day could keep cancer at bay by helping to repair damaged DNA, suggests a pilot study from the home of the fruit.
A pilot study from New Zealand has reported that a daily "prescribed" kiwifruit, in tandem with dietary advice and improved physical activity, led to a significant increase in repair of damaged DNA.
""Prescription" of daily kiwifruit may provide a sustainable population intervention that could reduce some of the risk factors associated with cancer," wrote lead author Elaine Rush from AUT University in Auckland.
Studies from the same university have reported that kiwifruit have laxative effects and could help combat serious cases of constipation, while studies from the University of Oslo have reported that two to three kiwifruit a day significantly reduced blood clotting in human volunteers and could offer protection from strokes and deep vein thrombosis.
The new randomised controlled trial recruited 12 healthy volunteers (six men, six women, average age 43, average BMI 27.5 kg per sq. m). For the first three weeks the subjects were left to live 'normally' with no dietary intervention. After week 3, all subjects were given lifestyle advice, including eating habits and physical activity.
After week 6, the subjects were randomly assigned to either the control (no kiwifruit) group, or to receive a daily dose of kiwifruit equivalent to one kiwi for every 30 kg of body weight.
Blood samples were taken at the start and at subsequent three week intervals to measure blood lipid levels (cholesterol, triglycerides) and to assess DNA damage markers.
No significant changes were observed for weight, blood pressure, or blood cholesterol and triglyceride levels for either of the groups.
This last result is at odds with the Oslo research that reported a drop of 15 per cent for triglyceride levels, although the intervention times are not the same, which limits the ability to directly compare.
http://www.foodnavigator.com/Science-Nutrition/Kiwis-could-protect-DNA-from-damage-says-pilot-study
By Stephen Daniells, 26-Jul-2006
Related topics: Science & Nutrition, Fruit, vegetable, nut ingredients
Two to three kiwis a day could keep cancer at bay by helping to repair damaged DNA, suggests a pilot study from the home of the fruit.
A pilot study from New Zealand has reported that a daily "prescribed" kiwifruit, in tandem with dietary advice and improved physical activity, led to a significant increase in repair of damaged DNA.
""Prescription" of daily kiwifruit may provide a sustainable population intervention that could reduce some of the risk factors associated with cancer," wrote lead author Elaine Rush from AUT University in Auckland.
Studies from the same university have reported that kiwifruit have laxative effects and could help combat serious cases of constipation, while studies from the University of Oslo have reported that two to three kiwifruit a day significantly reduced blood clotting in human volunteers and could offer protection from strokes and deep vein thrombosis.
The new randomised controlled trial recruited 12 healthy volunteers (six men, six women, average age 43, average BMI 27.5 kg per sq. m). For the first three weeks the subjects were left to live 'normally' with no dietary intervention. After week 3, all subjects were given lifestyle advice, including eating habits and physical activity.
After week 6, the subjects were randomly assigned to either the control (no kiwifruit) group, or to receive a daily dose of kiwifruit equivalent to one kiwi for every 30 kg of body weight.
Blood samples were taken at the start and at subsequent three week intervals to measure blood lipid levels (cholesterol, triglycerides) and to assess DNA damage markers.
No significant changes were observed for weight, blood pressure, or blood cholesterol and triglyceride levels for either of the groups.
This last result is at odds with the Oslo research that reported a drop of 15 per cent for triglyceride levels, although the intervention times are not the same, which limits the ability to directly compare.
http://www.foodnavigator.com/Science-Nutrition/Kiwis-could-protect-DNA-from-damage-says-pilot-study
Extract from article:
"Think you’re being healthy by choosing a veggie burger instead of red meat? Think again.
...In an effort to make their products as low-fat as possible, many veggie burger manufacturers are turning to a potentially harmful chemical, according to an investigation by the non-profit Cornucopia Institute. It revealed in a recent report that most non-organic veggie burger brands contain a chemical called hexane, which is an EPA-registered air pollutant and neurotoxin.
This lovely chemical is traditionally reserved for shoe glue, leather products and roofing. ...
...So, they soak soybeans in hexane so they can separate the fat from the protein.
According to the Cornucopia Institute’s report, “if a non-organic product contains a soy protein isolate, soy protein concentrate, or texturized vegetable protein, you can be pretty sure it was made using soy beans that were made with hexane.”
...The Cornucopia Institute also revealed some popular veggie burger brands that absolutely do use hexane: Amy’s Kitchen, Boca Burger, Franklin Farms, Garden Burger, It’s All Good, Lightlife, Morningstar Farms, President’s Choice, Soy Boy, Taste Above, Trader Joe’s and Yves Veggie Cuisine.
Brands that do not use any hexane in their veggie burgers are: Helen’s Kitchen, Superburgers by Turtle Island, Tofurky, Wildwood and Morningstar “Made with organic”...+Sunshine Burger"
http://yourorganicgardeningblog.com/health-warningneurotoxin-in-veggie-burgers/
"Think you’re being healthy by choosing a veggie burger instead of red meat? Think again.
...In an effort to make their products as low-fat as possible, many veggie burger manufacturers are turning to a potentially harmful chemical, according to an investigation by the non-profit Cornucopia Institute. It revealed in a recent report that most non-organic veggie burger brands contain a chemical called hexane, which is an EPA-registered air pollutant and neurotoxin.
This lovely chemical is traditionally reserved for shoe glue, leather products and roofing. ...
...So, they soak soybeans in hexane so they can separate the fat from the protein.
According to the Cornucopia Institute’s report, “if a non-organic product contains a soy protein isolate, soy protein concentrate, or texturized vegetable protein, you can be pretty sure it was made using soy beans that were made with hexane.”
...The Cornucopia Institute also revealed some popular veggie burger brands that absolutely do use hexane: Amy’s Kitchen, Boca Burger, Franklin Farms, Garden Burger, It’s All Good, Lightlife, Morningstar Farms, President’s Choice, Soy Boy, Taste Above, Trader Joe’s and Yves Veggie Cuisine.
Brands that do not use any hexane in their veggie burgers are: Helen’s Kitchen, Superburgers by Turtle Island, Tofurky, Wildwood and Morningstar “Made with organic”...+Sunshine Burger"
http://yourorganicgardeningblog.com/health-warningneurotoxin-in-veggie-burgers/
Black Rice Is Cheap Way to Get Antioxidants
Authors and Disclosures
Information from Industry
Bacterial RTIs: Consider the importance of broad-spectrum coverage See coverage in community-acquired pneumonia (CAP) Read more
August 27, 2010 — Inexpensive black rice contains health-promoting anthocyanin antioxidants, similar to those found in blackberries and blueberries, new research from Louisiana State University indicates.
"Just a spoonful of black rice bran contains more health promoting anthocyanin antioxidants than are found in a spoonful or blueberries, but with less sugar and more fiber and vitamin E antioxidants," Zhimin Xu, PhD, of Louisiana State University Agricultural Center, says in a news release. "If berries are used to boost health, why not black rice and black rice bran?"
Xu and colleagues analyzed samples of black rice bran from rice grown in the Southern U.S.
He says black rice bran would be a unique and inexpensive way to increase people's intake of antioxidants, which promote health.
Black rice is rich in anthocyanin antioxidants, substances that show promise for fighting cancer, heart disease, and other health problems, Xu says.
He adds that food manufacturers could use black rice bran or bran extracts to boost the health value of breakfast cereals, beverages, cakes, cookies, and other foods.
Black Rice vs. Brown Rice
The most widely produced rice worldwide is brown. Millers of rice remove the chaff, or outer husks, from each grain to make it brown.
White rice is made when rice is milled more than is done for brown rice; the bran is also removed, Xu says.
The bran of brown rice contains high levels of one of the vitamin E compounds known as "gamma-tocotrienol" as well as "gamma-oryzanol" antioxidants.
Many studies have shown that these antioxidants can reduce blood levels of LDL "bad" cholesterol and may fight heart disease.
So black rice bran may be even healthier than brown rice, Xu says.
He and his colleagues also showed that pigments in black rice bran extracts can produce a variety of colors, from pink to black, and may be a healthier alternative to artificial food colorants that manufacturers now add to some foods and beverages.
He writes that several studies have linked some artificial colorants to cancer, behavioral problems in children, and other adverse health effects.
Currently, black rice is used mainly in Asia for food decoration, noodles, sushi, and pudding, and Xu says that he would like to see it eaten by more Americans.
Black rice bran could be used to boost the health value of foods, such as snacks, cakes, and breakfast cereals, Xu and his colleagues suggest.
This study was presented at a medical conference in Boston. The findings should be considered preliminary because they have not yet undergone the "peer review" process, in which outside experts scrutinize the data prior to publication in a medical journal.
Authors and Disclosures
Information from Industry
Bacterial RTIs: Consider the importance of broad-spectrum coverage See coverage in community-acquired pneumonia (CAP) Read more
August 27, 2010 — Inexpensive black rice contains health-promoting anthocyanin antioxidants, similar to those found in blackberries and blueberries, new research from Louisiana State University indicates.
"Just a spoonful of black rice bran contains more health promoting anthocyanin antioxidants than are found in a spoonful or blueberries, but with less sugar and more fiber and vitamin E antioxidants," Zhimin Xu, PhD, of Louisiana State University Agricultural Center, says in a news release. "If berries are used to boost health, why not black rice and black rice bran?"
Xu and colleagues analyzed samples of black rice bran from rice grown in the Southern U.S.
He says black rice bran would be a unique and inexpensive way to increase people's intake of antioxidants, which promote health.
Black rice is rich in anthocyanin antioxidants, substances that show promise for fighting cancer, heart disease, and other health problems, Xu says.
He adds that food manufacturers could use black rice bran or bran extracts to boost the health value of breakfast cereals, beverages, cakes, cookies, and other foods.
Black Rice vs. Brown Rice
The most widely produced rice worldwide is brown. Millers of rice remove the chaff, or outer husks, from each grain to make it brown.
White rice is made when rice is milled more than is done for brown rice; the bran is also removed, Xu says.
The bran of brown rice contains high levels of one of the vitamin E compounds known as "gamma-tocotrienol" as well as "gamma-oryzanol" antioxidants.
Many studies have shown that these antioxidants can reduce blood levels of LDL "bad" cholesterol and may fight heart disease.
So black rice bran may be even healthier than brown rice, Xu says.
He and his colleagues also showed that pigments in black rice bran extracts can produce a variety of colors, from pink to black, and may be a healthier alternative to artificial food colorants that manufacturers now add to some foods and beverages.
He writes that several studies have linked some artificial colorants to cancer, behavioral problems in children, and other adverse health effects.
Currently, black rice is used mainly in Asia for food decoration, noodles, sushi, and pudding, and Xu says that he would like to see it eaten by more Americans.
Black rice bran could be used to boost the health value of foods, such as snacks, cakes, and breakfast cereals, Xu and his colleagues suggest.
This study was presented at a medical conference in Boston. The findings should be considered preliminary because they have not yet undergone the "peer review" process, in which outside experts scrutinize the data prior to publication in a medical journal.
Walnuts, walnut oil, improve reaction to stress
October 4, 2010
A diet rich in walnuts and walnut oil may prepare the body to deal better with stress, according to a team of Penn State researchers who looked at how these foods, which contain polyunsaturated fats, influence blood pressure at rest and under stress.
Previous studies have shown that omega-3 fatty acids -- like the alpha linolenic acid found in walnuts and flax seeds -- can reduce low density lipoproteins (LDL) -- bad cholesterol. These foods may also reduce c-reactive protein and other markers of inflammation.
"People who show an exaggerated biological response to stress are at higher risk of heart disease," said Sheila G. West, associate professor of biobehavioral health. "We wanted to find out if omega 3-fatty acids from plant sources would blunt cardiovascular responses to stress."
The researchers studied 22 healthy adults with elevated LDL cholesterol. All meals and snacks were provided during three diet periods of six weeks each.
The researchers found that including walnuts and walnut oil in the diet lowered both resting blood pressure and blood pressure responses to stress in the laboratory. Participants gave a speech or immersed their foot in cold water as a stressor. Adding flax seed oil to the walnut diet did not further lower blood pressure. They report their findings in the current issue of the Journal of the American College of Nutrition.
"This is the first study to show that walnuts and walnut oil reduce blood pressure during stress," said West. "This is important because we can't avoid all of the stressors in our daily lives. This study shows that a dietary change could help our bodies better respond to stress."
A subset of the participants also underwent a vascular ultrasound in order to measure artery dilation. Results showed that adding flax oil to the walnut diet significantly improved this test of vascular health. The flax plus walnuts diet also lowered c-reactive protein, indicating an anti-inflammatory effect. According to West, that could also reduce risk
http://www.physorg.com/news205387690.html
October 4, 2010
A diet rich in walnuts and walnut oil may prepare the body to deal better with stress, according to a team of Penn State researchers who looked at how these foods, which contain polyunsaturated fats, influence blood pressure at rest and under stress.
Previous studies have shown that omega-3 fatty acids -- like the alpha linolenic acid found in walnuts and flax seeds -- can reduce low density lipoproteins (LDL) -- bad cholesterol. These foods may also reduce c-reactive protein and other markers of inflammation.
"People who show an exaggerated biological response to stress are at higher risk of heart disease," said Sheila G. West, associate professor of biobehavioral health. "We wanted to find out if omega 3-fatty acids from plant sources would blunt cardiovascular responses to stress."
The researchers studied 22 healthy adults with elevated LDL cholesterol. All meals and snacks were provided during three diet periods of six weeks each.
The researchers found that including walnuts and walnut oil in the diet lowered both resting blood pressure and blood pressure responses to stress in the laboratory. Participants gave a speech or immersed their foot in cold water as a stressor. Adding flax seed oil to the walnut diet did not further lower blood pressure. They report their findings in the current issue of the Journal of the American College of Nutrition.
"This is the first study to show that walnuts and walnut oil reduce blood pressure during stress," said West. "This is important because we can't avoid all of the stressors in our daily lives. This study shows that a dietary change could help our bodies better respond to stress."
A subset of the participants also underwent a vascular ultrasound in order to measure artery dilation. Results showed that adding flax oil to the walnut diet significantly improved this test of vascular health. The flax plus walnuts diet also lowered c-reactive protein, indicating an anti-inflammatory effect. According to West, that could also reduce risk
http://www.physorg.com/news205387690.html
Sunday, November 21, 2010
Interesting observation - MDs recently writing about restrictive application of therapies, and confusion about prescription drugs. In addition, there was also an article criticizing "Evidenced based medicine." These two will be added to the post as references.
The medical establishment in collusion with Big Pharma continues unashamedly, to discredit attempts by their ethical peers choosing less harmful modalities, or dare to expose fraudulent claims of prescribed
medications, and futile, avoidable surgery/butchery? Surgery is sometimes necessary, overall, far too prescriptive. Likewise, in a matter of life and death, medical intervention can be life saving.
Overall, The Hippocratic Oath matters little....
Informative vid from You Tube:
Excellent article written in the late 1970s, it speaks for itself, read on.
The Devil’s Priests
CONFESSIONS OF A MEDICAL HERETIC
By Robert S. Mendelsohn, M.D.
Published by Contemporary Books
ISBN Number 0-8092-4131-5
Available from Amazon Books and elsewhere.
The Devil’s Priests
CONFESSIONS OF A MEDICAL HERETIC
By Robert S. Mendelsohn, M.D.
Published by Contemporary Books
ISBN Number 0-8092-4131-5
Available from Amazon Books and elsewhere.
Dr. Robert Mendelsohn, known to millions through his nationally syndicated column as “The People’s Doctor”, was the national medical director of Project Head Start and chairman of the Medical Licensure Committee for the state of Illinois, USA. Among the many faculty and hospital posts he held, he was an associate professor at the University of Illinois Medical School and a director of Chicago’s Michael Reese Hospital.
Dr. Mendelsohn, world-famous physician and patient advocate, was a pioneer in the movement toward truth in the medical profession. Here he explains why Modern Medicine’s methods are often more dangerous that the diseases they are designed to diagnose and treat.
Although Dr. Mendelsohn’s book, ‘Confessions of a Medical Heretic’ was published in 1979, what he has written is even truer today. Dr. Mendelsohn writes about the doctors in the USA. The same parallels can be equally applied in many cases to other parts of the world.
One Click publishes an extract from Dr. Mendelsohn’s book entitled ‘The Devil’s Priests’. In relation to what is transpiring with the MMR Vaccine and ME/CFS patients in the UK, publication of this chapter would seem to be extremely pertinent at this time. The next time that any of you encounter a doctor such as Michael Fitzpatrick or a psychiatrist from the ‘Wessely school’, we suggest that you remember this chapter and use it to good effect.
The One Click Group
I always laugh when someone from the American Medical Association or some other doctors’ organization claims that doctors have no special powers over people. After I finish laughing, I always ask how many people can tell you to take off your clothes and you’ll do it.
Because doctors are really the priests of the Church of Modern Medicine, most people don’t deny them their extra influence over our lives. After all, most doctors are honest, dedicated, intelligent, committed, healthy, educated, and capable, aren’t they? The doctor is the rock upon which Modern Medicine’s Church is built, isn’t he?
Not by a long shot. Doctors are only human — in the worst ways. You can’t assume your doctor is any of the nice things listed above, because doctors turn out to be dishonest, corrupt, unethical, sick, poorly educated, and downright stupid more often than the rest of society.
My favorite example of how doctors can be less intelligent than the situation calls for is a matter of public record. As part of the hearings before the Senate Health Subcommittee, Senator Edward Kennedy recalled a skiing injury to his shoulder, suffered when he was a young man. His father called in four specialists to examine the boy and recommend treatment. Three recommended surgery. The advice of the fourth doctor, who did not recommend surgery, was followed, however. He had just as many degrees as the others. The injury healed. Senator Kennedy’s colleagues then proceeded to question Dr. Lawrence Weed, Professor of Medicine at the University of Vermont and originator of a highly popular patient record system for hospitals. Dr. Weed’s reply was that the “senator’s shoulder probably would have healed as satisfactorily if the operation hadn’t been performed.”
When doctors are formally tested, the results are less than encouraging. In a recent test involving the prescribing of antibiotics half of the doctors who voluntarily took the test scored sixty-eight percent or lower. We’ve already seen in the previous chapters how dangerous it is to have a doctor work on you. All of that danger doesn’t necessarily derive from the inherent risks of the treatment itself. Doctors simply botch some of those procedures. When I meet a doctor, I generally figure I’m meeting a person who is narrow minded, prejudiced, and fairly incapable of reasoning and deliberation. Few of the doctors I meet prove my prediction wrong.
Doctors can’t be counted on to be entirely ethical, either. The dean of Harvard Medical School, Dr. Robert H. Ebert, and the dean of the Yale Medical School, Dr. Lewis Thomas, acted as paid consultants to the Squibb Corporation at the same time they were trying to persuade the Food and Drug Administration to lift the ban on Mysteclin, one of Squibb’s biggest moneymakers. Dr. Ebert that he “gave the best advice I could. These were honest opinions.” But he also declined to specify the amount of the “modest retainer” Squibb Vice-President Norman R. Ritter admitted paying him and Dr. Thomas. Dr. Ebert later became a paid director of the drug company and admitted to owning stock valued at $15,000.
In 1972, Dr. Samuel S. Epstein, then of Case-Western Reserve University, one of the world’s authorities on chemical causes of cancer and birth defects, told the Senate Select Committee on Nutrition and Human Needs that “the National Academy of Sciences is riddled with conflict of interest.” He reported that panels that decide on crucial issues such as safety of food additives frequently are dominated by friends or direct associates of the interests that are supposed to be regulated. “In this country you can buy the data you require to support your case,” he said.
Fraud in scientific research is commonplace enough to keep it off the front pages. The Food and Drug Administration has uncovered such niceties as overdosing and underdosing of patients, fabrication of records, and drug dumping when they investigate experimental drug trials. Of course, in these instances, doctors working for drug companies have as their goal producing results that will convince the FDA to approve the drug. Sometimes, with competition for grant money getting more and more fierce, doctors simply want to produce results that will keep the funding lines open. Since all the “good ol’ boy” researchers are in the same boat, there seems to be a great tolerance for sloppy experiments, unconfirmable results, and carelessness in interpreting results.
Dr. Ernest Borek, a University of Colorado microbiologist, said that “increasing amounts of faked data or, less flagrantly, data with body English put on them, make their way into scientific journals.” Nobel Prize winner Salvadore E. Luria, a biologist at the Massachusetts Institute of Technology, said “I know of at least two cases in which highly respected scientists had to retract findings reported from their laboratories, because they discovered that these findings had been manufactured by one of their collaborators.”
Another now classic example of fraud occurred in the Sloane-Kettering Institute where investigator Dr. William Summerlin admitted painting mice to make them look as though successful skin grafts had been done. A predecessor to Dr. Summerlin in the field of painting animals was Paul Kammerer, the Austrian geneticist, who early in the twentieth century painted the foot of a toad in order to prove the Lamarckian theory of transmission of acquired traits. When he was later exposed in Arthur Koessler’s book, The Case of the Midwife Toad, Kammerer shot himself.
Dr. Richard W. Roberts, director of the National Bureau of Standards, said that “half or more of the numerical data published by scientists in their journal articles is unusable because there is no evidence that the researcher accurately measured what he thought he was measuring or no evidence that possible sources of error eliminated or accounted for.” Since it is almost impossible for the average reader of scientific journals to determine which half of the article is usable and which is not, you have to wonder whether the medical journals serve as avenues of communication or confusion.
One method of judging the validity of a scientific article is to examine the footnote for the source of funding. Drug companies’ records regarding integrity of research are not sparkling enough to warrant much trust. Doctors have been shown not to be above fudging and even fabricating research results when the stakes were high enough. Dr. Leroy Wolins, a psychologist at Iowa State University, had a student write to thirty-seven authors of scientific reports asking for the raw data on which they based their conclusions. Of the thirty-two who replied, twenty-one said their data either been lost or accidentally destroyed. Dr. Wolins analyzed seven sets of data that did come in and found errors in three significant enough to invalidate what had been passed off as scientific fact.
Of course, research fraud is nothing new. Cyril Burt, the late British psychologist who became famous for his claims most human intelligence is determined by heredity, was exposed as a fraud by Leon Kamin, a Princeton psychologist. It seems that the “coworkers” responsible for Burt’s research findings could not be found to have actually existed! There is even evidence that Gregor Mendel, father of the gene theory of heredity, may have doctored the results of his pea-breeding experiments to make them conform more perfectly to his theory. Mendel’s conclusions were correct, but a statistical analysis of his published data shows that the odds were 10,000 to one against their having been obtained through experiments such as Mendel performed.
Doctors’ unethical behavior is not limited to the medical business. A doctor whose name is practically synonymous with development of a major surgical procedure was convicted of five counts of income tax evasion for omitting more than $250,000 from returns for 1964 through 1968. A few years ago the chairman of the Board of the American Medical Association was indicted, convicted, and sentenced to eighteen months in jail after pleading guilty to participating in a conspiracy to misuse $1.8 million in bank funds. According to the FBI, he and his codefendants had conspired to “obtain unsound indirect loans for their own interest. . .paying bank funds on checks which had insufficient funds to back them. . .and defrauding the government. . .”
Keep in mind that these shenanigans are going on at the highest levels of the medical profession. If this kind of dishonesty, fraud, and thievery is going on among the bishops and cardinals of Modern Medicine at Yale and Harvard and the National Academy of Sciences and the AMA, imagine what is going on among the parish priests at the other medical schools and medical societies!
Perhaps the most telling characteristic of the profession that is supposed to deliver health care is that doctors, as a group, appear to be sicker than the rest of society. Conservative counts peg the number of psychiatrically disturbed physicians in the U.S. at 17,000 or one in twenty, the number of alcoholics at more than 30,000, and the number of narcotics addicts at 3,500 or one percent. A thirty-year study comparing doctors with professionals of similar socio-economic and intellectual status found that by the end of the study nearly half the doctors were divorced or unhappily married, more than a third used drugs such as amphetamines, barbiturates, or other narcotics, and a third had suffered emotional problems severe enough to require at least ten trips to a psychiatrist. The control group of non-doctors didn’t fare nearly as badly.
Doctors are from thirty to one hundred times more likely than lay people to abuse narcotics, depending on the particular drug. At a semiannual meeting of the American Medical Association in 1972, surveys cited showed that nearly two percent of the doctors practicing in Oregon and Arizona had been disciplined by state licensing authorities for drug abuse. An even larger percentage got into trouble for excessive drinking. Even the AMA admits that one and one-half percent of the doctors in the United States abuse drugs. Various reform and rehabilitation measures over the years have not changed these percentages. Keep in mind that these figures represent only the identified cases. In Illinois, for example, Dr. James West, chairman of the Illinois Medical Society’s Panel for the Impaired Physician, reported that four percent rather than two percent of Illinois doctors are narcotics addicts. He further estimated that eleven-and-one-half percent were alcoholics - one in nine.
Suicide accounts for more deaths among doctors than car and plane crashes, drownings, and homicides combined. Doctors’ suicide rate is twice the average for all white Americans. Every year, about 100 doctors commit suicide, a number equal to the graduating class of the average medical school. Furthermore, the suicide rate among female physicians is neatly four times higher than that for other women over age twenty-five.
Apologists for the medical profession cite several reasons for doctors’ high rate of sickness. The drugs are easily available to them; they must work long hours under severe stress; their background and psychological makeup predisposes them to stretch their powers to the limits; and their patients and the community make excessive demands on them. Of course, whether or not you accept these reasons, they don’t explain away the fact that doctors are a very sick group of people.
Nonetheless, I prefer to look for more reasons. Fraud and corruption in the research process comes as no surprise to anyone who witnesses the lengths to which drug and formula companies go to doctors to their way of thinking. Free dinners, cocktails, conventions, and subsidized research fellowships still are only superficial explanations. When you examine the psychological and moral climate of Modern Medicine, you begin to get closer to understanding why doctors are so unhealthy.
Medical politics, for example, is a cutthroat power game of the most primitive sort. I much prefer political politics, because there you have the art of the possible, which means you have to compromise. Medical politics is the art of sheer power. There is no compromise: you go right for the jugular vein before your own is torn out. There’s no room for compromise because churches never compromise on canon law. Instead of a relatively open process in which people with different interests get together to try to get the most out of the situation that they can, in medical politics there is a rigid authoritarian power structure which can be moved only through winner-take-all power plays. Historically, doctors who have dared to change things significantly have been ostracized and have had to sacrifice their careers in order to hold to their ideas. Few doctors are willing to do either.
Another reason why doctors are less prone to compromise is because doctors tend to restrict their friendships to other doctors. Close friendships between doctors and non-doctors are nowhere near as frequent as among other professions. Consequently, doctors rarely have to defend their opinions among people who don’t share their background and who might offer a different point of view. Doctors can develop their philosophy in relative privacy, foray at intervals into the public scene to promote these ideas, and then rapidly retreat to the security of other doctors who support the views of the in-group. This luxury is not available to others in influential positions in public life.
Of course, doctors do see their patients. But they don’t see them as people. The doctor-patient relationship is more like that between the master and the slave, since the doctor depends on the complete submission of the patient. In this kind of climate, ideas can hardly be interchanged with any hope of the doctor’s being affected. Professional detachment boils down to the doctor rendering the entire relationship devoid of human influences or values. Doctors rarely rub elbows with non-doctors in any other posture but the professional.
Furthermore, since the doctor’s ambitions project him into the upper classes, that’s where his sympathies lie. Doctors identify with the upper class and beyond, even. They view themselves as the true elite class in society. The doctor’s lifestyle and professional behavior encourage autocratic thinking, so his conservative politics and economics are predictable. Most doctors are white, male, and rich—hardly in a position to relate effectively with the poor, the non-white, and females. Even doctors who come from these groups rarely return to serve and “be with” them. They, too, become white, male, and rich for all practical purposes and treat their fellows with all the paternalistic contempt other doctors do.
When asked where doctors learn these bad habits, I used to reply that doctors learned them in medical school. Now I realize they learn them much earlier than that. By the time they get to premedical training, they’ve picked up the cheating, the competition, the vying for position — all the tricks they know they need if they want to get into medical school. After all, our university system is modeled after the medical schools, and our high schools are modeled after our universities.
The admissions tests and policies of medical schools virtually guarantee that the students who get in will make poor doctors. The quantitative tests, the Medical College Admission Test, and the reliance on grade point averages funnel through a certain type of personality who is unable and unwilling to communicate with people. Those who are chosen are the ones most subject to the authoritarian influences of the priests of Modern Medicine. They have the compulsion to succeed, but not the will or the integrity to rebel. The hierarchy in control wants students who will go through school passively and ask only those questions the professors can answer comfortably. That usually means they want only one question at a time. One of the things I advise my students to do in order to survive medical school is to ask one question but never ask two.
Medical school does its best to turn smart students stupid, honest students corrupt, and healthy students sick. It isn’t very hard to turn a smart student into a stupid one. First of all, the admissions people make sure the professors will get weak-willed, authority-abiding students to work on. Then they give them a curriculum that is absolutely meaningless as far as healing or health are concerned. The best medical educators themselves say that the half-life of medical education is four years. In four years half of what a medical student has learned is wrong. Within four years of that, half again is wrong, and so on. The only problem is that the students aren’t told which half is wrong! They’re forced to learn it all. Supervision can be very close. There is no school in the country where the student-teacher ratio is as low as it is in medical school. During the last couple of years of medical school, you frequently find classes of only two or three students to one doctor. That doctor has tremendous influence over those students, through both his proximity and his life-and-death power over their careers.
Medical students are further softened up by being maliciously fatigued. The way to weaken a person’s will in order to mold him to suit your purposes is to make him work hard, especially at night, and never give him a chance to recover. You teach the rat to race. The result is a person too weak to resist the most debilitating instrument medical school uses on its students: fear.
If I had to characterize doctors, I would say their major psychological attribute is fear. They have a drive to achieve security-plus that’s never satisfied because of all the fear that’s drummed into them in medical school: fear of failure, fear of missing a diagnosis, fear of malpractice, fear of remarks by their peers, fear that they’ll have to find honest work. There was a movie some time ago that opened with a marathon dance contest. After a certain length of time all the contestants were eliminated except one. Everybody had to fail except the winner. That’s what medical school has become. Since everybody can’t win, everybody suffers from a loss of self-esteem. Everybody comes out of medical school feeling bad.
Doctors are given one reward for swallowing the fear pill so willingly and for sacrificing the healing instincts and human emotions that might help their practice: arrogance. To hide their fear, they’re taught to adopt the authoritarian attitude and demeanor of their professors. With all this pushing at one end and pulling at the other, it’s no wonder that doctors are the major sources of illness in our society. The process that begins with cheating on a biology exam by moving the microscope slide so that the next student views the wrong specimen, that continues with dropping sugar into a urine sample to change the results for those who follow, with hiring others to write papers and take exams, and with “dry labbing” experiments by fabricating results, ends with falsifying research reports in order to get a drug approved. What begins with fear and fatigue over exams and grades ends with a drug or alcohol problem. And what begins with arrogance towards others ends up as a doctor prescribing deadly procedures with little regard for the life and health of the patient.
My advice to medical students is always to get out as soon as possible and as easily as possible. The first two years of medical school are survivable because the students are relatively anonymous. The student should try his or her best to remain so, since if the professors don’t know him they can’t get to him. The last two years are more personal, but the student has more time off to recover from the assaults. If a student simply does enough work to pass and doesn’t get all wrapped up in the roller derby mentality, he or she can make it to the finish line relatively unscathed. Then, as soon as the student is eligible for a state license, I advise him to quit. Forget residency and specialty training because there the professionals have the student day and night, and he can really be brainwashed. That’s when the real making of the Devil’s priests occurs.
Doctors are only human. But so are the rest of us, and sometimes we need the services of all-too-human doctors. Because the doctor-priest acts as a mediator or a conduit between the individual and the powerful forces the individual feels he cannot face alone, a faulty conduit can result in some very powerful energy flowing into the wrong places. For example, when doctors are compared with other people in evaluating retarded and other handicapped persons, those who always give the most dismal predictions and the lowest evaluations are the doctors. Nurses are next lowest, followed by psychologists. The group that always gives the most optimistic evaluation is the parents. When I’m faced with a doctor who tells me a child can’t do certain things and parents who tell me that the child can do them, I always listen to the parents. I really don’t care which group is right or wrong. It’s the attitude that counts. Whatever attitude is reinforced and encouraged will prove true. I know doctors are prejudiced against cripples and retarded people because of their education — which teaches that anyone who is handicapped is a failure and is better off dead — so I can protect my patients myself against the doctors’ self-fulfilling prophecies of doom.
Yet doctors continue to get away with their attitude and their self-serving practices. Even though doctors derive a great deal of their economic status and power from insurance companies, the doctors are in control. So much in control, in fact, that insurance companies generally act against their own interests when the choice is that or weaken the power of doctors. Blue Cross and Blue Shield and other insurers logically should be searching for methods of decreasing unnecessary utilization of medical services. Occasionally, we see half-hearted attempts in this direction, such as the flurry of rules requiring second opinions before elective surgery, or the every-so-often policy of discontinuing reimbursement for procedures long fallen into oblivion. These efforts are more window dressing than anything else. They are introduced with considerable fanfare, rapidly generate a groundswell of controversy, and then quietly slip away. Regardless of how well-intentioned they are, they still address themselves only to the peripheral aspects of medical care and not to the areas where real money is to be saved. If insurance companies really wanted to cut costs, they would promote reimbursement for a wide range of simpler, more effective, cheaper procedures — such as home birth. And they would allow reimbursement for measures that restore and maintain health without drugs or surgery — such as diet therapy and exercise.
One of the most fascinating statistics I’ve ever run across is one that was reported by the Medical Economics Company, the publishers of the Physician’s Desk Reference. Among other questions, they asked a representative sampling of more than 1,700 people, “If you learned that your doctor had lost a malpractice suit, would it alter your opinion of him?” What amazes me is that seventy-seven percent of the people said NO!
Now I don’t really know if that means that people expect their doctors to commit malpractice or if they don’t care whether he does or not!
I do know that the insurance companies are bamboozled by the doctors into spending more money than they have to. I also know that only about seventy doctors lose their licenses every year — despite all the obvious corruption, sickness, and dangerous malpractice. Here we come to one of the truly wondrous mysteries of Modern Medicine. Despite (or because of?) all that fear and competition among medical students, doctors are extremely reluctant to report incompetent work or behavior on the part of their colleagues. If a hospital, for example, discovers malpractice by one of its doctors, the most that will happen is the doctor will be asked to resign. He won’t be reported to state medical authorities. When he seeks employment elsewhere, the hospital will most likely give him a shining recommendation.
When the famous Marcus twin-brother team of gynecologists were found dead of narcotics withdrawal during the summer of 1975, the news that the doctors were addicts came as a surprise to everyone but their colleagues. When the brothers’ “problems” were noticed the year before by the hospital staff, the twins were asked to take a leave of absence to seek medical care. When they returned to New York Hospital-Cornell Medical Center, they were watched for signs that they had improved. They had not. Were they then whisked off the staff and kept out of touch with patients before anyone was seriously harmed? Were they reported to state licensing authorities? No. They were told in May that as of July 1, they would not be allowed to work in the hospital. They were found to have died within days after they lost the privilege to admit patients to the hospital.
Another favorite example of doctors allowing their colleagues to commit mayhem on unsuspecting patients occurred in New Mexico. A surgeon tied off the wrong duct in a gall bladder operation and the patient died. Although the error was discovered at autopsy, the doctor was not disciplined. Apparently, he wasn’t taught the right way to do the operation, because a few months later he performed it again, wrong — and another patient died. Again, no punishment and no surgery lesson. Only after the doctor performed the operation a third time and killed another person was there an investigation resulting in the loss of his license.
If I had to answer the question of why doctors are so reluctant to report negligence in the practice of their colleagues yet so cutthroat when it comes to medical politics and medical school competition, I go back to the basic emotions engendered in medical school: fear and arrogance. The resentment doctors are taught to feel for each other as students is transferred to the patients when the doctor finally gets into his own practice. Other doctors are no longer the enemy as long as they don’t threaten to rock the status quo through politics or research which doesn’t follow the party line. Furthermore, the old fear of failure never goes away, and since the patient is the primary threat to security — by presenting a problem which must be solved, much like a medical school test — any mistake by a single doctor threatens the security of all doctors by chalking one up for the other side. Arrogance on the part of any professional group is always directed at the outsiders that the group fears most — never at the members of the same profession.
Obviously, doctors get away with more arrogance than any other professional group. If Modern Medicine weren’t a religion, and if doctors weren’t the priests of that religion, they wouldn’t get away with anywhere near so much. Doctors get away with substantially more than priests of other religions, because of the peculiarly corrupt nature of Modern Medicine.
All religions promote and relieve guilt. To the extent that a religion is able to encourage useful behavior by promoting guilt and relieving it, that religion is “good.” A religion which promotes too much guilt and relieves too little, or which encourages the wrong kind of behavior—behavior which will not result in the improvement of the welfare of the faithful — is a “bad” religion. An example of how a religion promotes and relieves guilt is the almost universal proscription against adultery. Obviously, if religions didn’t try to make people feel that adultery was “wrong” and encourage them to feel guilty about it, more and more people would do it and necessary social structures would weaken. People wouldn’t know who their parents were, property could not be orderly transferred from generation to generation, and venereal disease could threaten the existence of an especially energetic culture.
Doctors are so powerful precisely because they have, as priests of the Church of Modern Medicine, removed all the old guilts. Modern Medicine invalidates the old guilts which, strangely enough, held people to their old religions. Nothing is a “sin” anymore, because there is a physical consequence, the doctor has the power to fix you up. If you get pregnant, the doctor can perform an abortion. If you get venereal disease, the doctor can give you penicillin. If you are gluttonous and damage your heart, the doctor can give you a coronary bypass. If you suffer from emotional problems, the doctor has Valium, Librium, and other narcotics to help you get by without caring, or feeling. If those don’t work, there are plenty of psychiatrists.
There is one “sin” that Modern Medicine will make you feel guilty about: not going to the doctor. That’s OK, because the doctor is the priest who takes away every other guilt. How much harm can there be in guilt that drives you to the doctor every time you feel sick?
The doctor-priest gets away with a lot because he can claim to be up against the very Forces of Evil. When a priest is in a touchy situation and the probability for success is dismal, he escapes blame by saying that he’s up against the Devil. The doctor-priest does the same thing. When the prognosis is not good, he retreats into his mortality and admits that he’s only a man up against the Devil Then, if he wins, he’s a hero. If he loses, he’s a defeated hero — but still a hero. Never is he seen in his true light—as the agent of the Devil.
The doctor never loses, though he plays both sides against the middle and takes bigger risks than necessary. That’s because he has succeeded in identifying his rituals as sacred and potent regardless of their real efficacy. He uses his holiest implements to raise the ante and make the game more ominous than it really needs to be. If a mother comes into the hospital with her baby in the breech position and the fetal monitor says the baby is in distress, the doctor loses time in declaring it a life-and-death situation — which, indeed, becomes once he starts to perform a Caesarean-section delivery. Biologically, the doctor knows the C-section is dangerous. But game is no longer being played by biological rules. It’s a religious game, a ceremony, and the priest calls the shots. If mother and child survive, the priest is a hero. If they die, well . . . it was a life-and-death situation anyway.
The doctor never loses: only the patients lose. The adage that a doctor buries his mistakes still applies. We used to refer mistakenly to doctors as airplane pilots. If the plane goes down, the pilot goes down with it. But the doctor never goes down with the patient.
Doctors also escape blame by claiming that their failures are caused by their successes. If you point out, for example, that a disproportionate number of premature babies seem to be turning up blind in premie nurseries, the doctor will say that it’s the price you have to pay. “Gee, we managed to save these little I- and 2-pound babies. Of course they all end up blind and deformed. They’d be dead if we didn’t save them.” Doctors use the same excuse with the problem of diabetic blindness. The reason we have so much diabetic blindness, they say, is because we have succeeded in keeping so many diabetics alive longer. Doctors will use this “we managed to keep them alive longer” excuse for every disease they have trouble treating successfully — which includes all the major causes of non-accidental death. They absolutely ignore the biological facts that creep in and point the finger at Modern Medicine’s mismanagement of both health and disease. Doctors even manage to get away with blaming their own disease on their successes. When you point to the large numbers of dishonest, unhappy, and just plain sick doctors, the excuse usually runs something like this: “The reason for the psychological disability is our tendency to be compulsive, perfectionistic, easily given to a sense of guilt if our clinical efforts fail.” A president of the American Medical Association offered that one.
Doctors protect themselves further through the sacred language of the priest. A religion must have a sacred language to separate the discourse of the priesthood from the lowly banter of the masses. After all, the priests are on speaking terms with the powers that seep the universe on course. We can’t have just anyone listening in. Sacred language of doctors is no different from jargon developed by any elitist group. Its main function is to keep outsiders ignorant. If you could understand everything your doctor was saying to you and to other doctors, his power over you would be diminished. So when you get sick because of the generally filthy conditions in the hospital, he’ll call your infection nosocomial. That way, you’ll not only not get angry at the hospital, but you’ll feel privileged to have such a distinguished sounding disease. And too scared to get mad.
Doctors use their semantic privileges to make you feel stupid and convince you that they are genuinely privy to powers that you’d better not mess with. As long as their rituals are mysterious, as long as they don’t have to justify them biologically, they can get away with anything. They’re not even subject to the laws of logic. Doctors will, for example, justify coronary bypasses by saying that everyone who has one feels better. But if you ask to be treated for cancer with laetrile because everyone you know who has been treated with it feels better, your doctor will tell you that it hasn’t been scientifically proved effective.
Semantic isolation also serves to disenfranchise the individual from the healing process. Since the patient has no hope of knowing what’s going on, let alone assisting, why allow him or her any part in the process at all? The patient gets in the way of the ritual, so get the patient out of the way. That’s one reason why doctors aren’t interested in helping patients maintain their health. To do that, they’d have to inform them rather than work on them. Doctors aren’t going to share information, because that means sharing power.
To back them up, doctors have an enormous tonnage of technological gadgets which proliferates alarmingly. First of all, the patient must stand in awe of the array of machinery the doctor assembles to attack his problem. How could any single person — other than the doctor, who has the power — hope to control such forces? Also, the electronic wizardry adds weight to the doctor’s claim that he “did everything he could.” If it’s just a doctor standing there with a black bag, “all that he could” doesn’t mean very much. But if the doctor throws the switches on $4 million worth of machinery that fills three rooms, that means he did “all that he could” and then some!
Typical of any developed religion, the ceremonial objects in which the most power is concentrated reside in the Temple. The higher the status of the temple, the more machinery within the walls. When you get to the cathedrals and the little “Vaticans” of Modern Medicine, you are up against priests who have the weight of infallibility behind them. They can do no wrong, so they are the most dangerous.
The reforms that have been introduced in an effort to solve some of the problems I’ve talked about in this chapter don’t impress me as doing very much good. Rehabilitation programs, for example, don’t really attack the roots of the sicknesses doctors seem to fall prey to. That may be a result of their shying away from exposing the problem as a disease of the core of Modern Medicine. Of course, doctors are not trained to attack the core of any problem, merely to suppress the symptoms.
Attempts to keep doctors’ knowledge up-to-date also do little good, since what doctors don’t need is more of the same kind of information they received in medical school. That’s precisely what they get in most continuing medical education programs. They’re taught by the same people who taught them in medical school. Who’s responsible for keeping them properly informed?
As I’ve already said, you have to protect yourself. To do that, you need to remember the two major attributes of doctors: fear and arrogance. What you have to do is learn how to work on his fears without challenging his arrogance until you have the winning hand. Since doctors are scared of you and what you can do to them, you shouldn’t hesitate to use that fear. Doctors are scared of lawyers, not because lawyers are so powerful but because lawyers can ally themselves with you, whom the doctor really fears. If a doctor does you dirty, sue him. It is in courts and juries that you’re most likely to find common sense. Find a good lawyer who knows a lot about medicine and who is not afraid to put a doctor through the ringer. If there’s one thing a doctor doesn’t like it’s to be in court on the wrong end of a lawyer — because that’s one place where the patient has allies that can effectively challenge the doctor’s priestly immunity. The increase in malpractice suits is encouraging, since it means more and more people are being radicalized to the point where they challenge the doctor’s power to determine the rules.
If your doctor gives you trouble but not enough to take him to court, you need to be careful about how much you challenge him —not because of what he can or cannot do to you, but because how far you go will determine your effectiveness. If a doctor threatens you and becomes angry, you should stand up to him. Don’t back down. Threaten him back. When a person really threatens a doctor, the doctor almost always backs down if the person shows that he means it. Doctors back down all the time because they figure, “What do I need this one kook for?”
It’s important, though, not to threaten a doctor unless you are prepared to carry through. In other words, don’t reveal your rebellion until you have to, until you have the emotional commitment and the physical capability to carry on a successful campaign. Don’t get into an argument with a doctor with the hope of changing his mind on anything. Never say to the doctor who’s treating you for cancer with traditional chemotherapy, “Doc, what do you think about laetrile?” You won’t get anywhere, and you won’t get any laetrile, either. Don’t say to the doctor who recommends a security bottle for your baby, “But I’m breastfeeding and I don’t want to do that.” Don’t bring your doctor columns from the newspaper expecting him to change his mind or try something new. Don’t challenge him until you’re ready with an alternative action. Do your own homework.
What does a Catholic do when he decides that his priests are no good? Sometimes he directly challenges them, but very seldom. He just leaves the Church. And that’s my answer. Leave the Church of Modern Medicine. I see a lot of people doing that today. I see a lot of people going to chiropractors, for example, who wouldn’t have been caught dead in a chiropractor’s office a few years ago.
I see more and more people patronizing the heretics of Modern Medicine.
CONFESSIONS OF A MEDICAL HERETIC
By Robert S. Mendelsohn, M.D.
Published by Contemporary Books
ISBN Number 0-8092-4131-5
Available from Amazon Books and elsewhere.
The medical establishment in collusion with Big Pharma continues unashamedly, to discredit attempts by their ethical peers choosing less harmful modalities, or dare to expose fraudulent claims of prescribed
medications, and futile, avoidable surgery/butchery? Surgery is sometimes necessary, overall, far too prescriptive. Likewise, in a matter of life and death, medical intervention can be life saving.
Overall, The Hippocratic Oath matters little....
Informative vid from You Tube:
Excellent article written in the late 1970s, it speaks for itself, read on.
The Devil’s Priests
CONFESSIONS OF A MEDICAL HERETIC
By Robert S. Mendelsohn, M.D.
Published by Contemporary Books
ISBN Number 0-8092-4131-5
Available from Amazon Books and elsewhere.
The Devil’s Priests
CONFESSIONS OF A MEDICAL HERETIC
By Robert S. Mendelsohn, M.D.
Published by Contemporary Books
ISBN Number 0-8092-4131-5
Available from Amazon Books and elsewhere.
Dr. Robert Mendelsohn, known to millions through his nationally syndicated column as “The People’s Doctor”, was the national medical director of Project Head Start and chairman of the Medical Licensure Committee for the state of Illinois, USA. Among the many faculty and hospital posts he held, he was an associate professor at the University of Illinois Medical School and a director of Chicago’s Michael Reese Hospital.
Dr. Mendelsohn, world-famous physician and patient advocate, was a pioneer in the movement toward truth in the medical profession. Here he explains why Modern Medicine’s methods are often more dangerous that the diseases they are designed to diagnose and treat.
Although Dr. Mendelsohn’s book, ‘Confessions of a Medical Heretic’ was published in 1979, what he has written is even truer today. Dr. Mendelsohn writes about the doctors in the USA. The same parallels can be equally applied in many cases to other parts of the world.
One Click publishes an extract from Dr. Mendelsohn’s book entitled ‘The Devil’s Priests’. In relation to what is transpiring with the MMR Vaccine and ME/CFS patients in the UK, publication of this chapter would seem to be extremely pertinent at this time. The next time that any of you encounter a doctor such as Michael Fitzpatrick or a psychiatrist from the ‘Wessely school’, we suggest that you remember this chapter and use it to good effect.
The One Click Group
I always laugh when someone from the American Medical Association or some other doctors’ organization claims that doctors have no special powers over people. After I finish laughing, I always ask how many people can tell you to take off your clothes and you’ll do it.
Because doctors are really the priests of the Church of Modern Medicine, most people don’t deny them their extra influence over our lives. After all, most doctors are honest, dedicated, intelligent, committed, healthy, educated, and capable, aren’t they? The doctor is the rock upon which Modern Medicine’s Church is built, isn’t he?
Not by a long shot. Doctors are only human — in the worst ways. You can’t assume your doctor is any of the nice things listed above, because doctors turn out to be dishonest, corrupt, unethical, sick, poorly educated, and downright stupid more often than the rest of society.
My favorite example of how doctors can be less intelligent than the situation calls for is a matter of public record. As part of the hearings before the Senate Health Subcommittee, Senator Edward Kennedy recalled a skiing injury to his shoulder, suffered when he was a young man. His father called in four specialists to examine the boy and recommend treatment. Three recommended surgery. The advice of the fourth doctor, who did not recommend surgery, was followed, however. He had just as many degrees as the others. The injury healed. Senator Kennedy’s colleagues then proceeded to question Dr. Lawrence Weed, Professor of Medicine at the University of Vermont and originator of a highly popular patient record system for hospitals. Dr. Weed’s reply was that the “senator’s shoulder probably would have healed as satisfactorily if the operation hadn’t been performed.”
When doctors are formally tested, the results are less than encouraging. In a recent test involving the prescribing of antibiotics half of the doctors who voluntarily took the test scored sixty-eight percent or lower. We’ve already seen in the previous chapters how dangerous it is to have a doctor work on you. All of that danger doesn’t necessarily derive from the inherent risks of the treatment itself. Doctors simply botch some of those procedures. When I meet a doctor, I generally figure I’m meeting a person who is narrow minded, prejudiced, and fairly incapable of reasoning and deliberation. Few of the doctors I meet prove my prediction wrong.
Doctors can’t be counted on to be entirely ethical, either. The dean of Harvard Medical School, Dr. Robert H. Ebert, and the dean of the Yale Medical School, Dr. Lewis Thomas, acted as paid consultants to the Squibb Corporation at the same time they were trying to persuade the Food and Drug Administration to lift the ban on Mysteclin, one of Squibb’s biggest moneymakers. Dr. Ebert that he “gave the best advice I could. These were honest opinions.” But he also declined to specify the amount of the “modest retainer” Squibb Vice-President Norman R. Ritter admitted paying him and Dr. Thomas. Dr. Ebert later became a paid director of the drug company and admitted to owning stock valued at $15,000.
In 1972, Dr. Samuel S. Epstein, then of Case-Western Reserve University, one of the world’s authorities on chemical causes of cancer and birth defects, told the Senate Select Committee on Nutrition and Human Needs that “the National Academy of Sciences is riddled with conflict of interest.” He reported that panels that decide on crucial issues such as safety of food additives frequently are dominated by friends or direct associates of the interests that are supposed to be regulated. “In this country you can buy the data you require to support your case,” he said.
Fraud in scientific research is commonplace enough to keep it off the front pages. The Food and Drug Administration has uncovered such niceties as overdosing and underdosing of patients, fabrication of records, and drug dumping when they investigate experimental drug trials. Of course, in these instances, doctors working for drug companies have as their goal producing results that will convince the FDA to approve the drug. Sometimes, with competition for grant money getting more and more fierce, doctors simply want to produce results that will keep the funding lines open. Since all the “good ol’ boy” researchers are in the same boat, there seems to be a great tolerance for sloppy experiments, unconfirmable results, and carelessness in interpreting results.
Dr. Ernest Borek, a University of Colorado microbiologist, said that “increasing amounts of faked data or, less flagrantly, data with body English put on them, make their way into scientific journals.” Nobel Prize winner Salvadore E. Luria, a biologist at the Massachusetts Institute of Technology, said “I know of at least two cases in which highly respected scientists had to retract findings reported from their laboratories, because they discovered that these findings had been manufactured by one of their collaborators.”
Another now classic example of fraud occurred in the Sloane-Kettering Institute where investigator Dr. William Summerlin admitted painting mice to make them look as though successful skin grafts had been done. A predecessor to Dr. Summerlin in the field of painting animals was Paul Kammerer, the Austrian geneticist, who early in the twentieth century painted the foot of a toad in order to prove the Lamarckian theory of transmission of acquired traits. When he was later exposed in Arthur Koessler’s book, The Case of the Midwife Toad, Kammerer shot himself.
Dr. Richard W. Roberts, director of the National Bureau of Standards, said that “half or more of the numerical data published by scientists in their journal articles is unusable because there is no evidence that the researcher accurately measured what he thought he was measuring or no evidence that possible sources of error eliminated or accounted for.” Since it is almost impossible for the average reader of scientific journals to determine which half of the article is usable and which is not, you have to wonder whether the medical journals serve as avenues of communication or confusion.
One method of judging the validity of a scientific article is to examine the footnote for the source of funding. Drug companies’ records regarding integrity of research are not sparkling enough to warrant much trust. Doctors have been shown not to be above fudging and even fabricating research results when the stakes were high enough. Dr. Leroy Wolins, a psychologist at Iowa State University, had a student write to thirty-seven authors of scientific reports asking for the raw data on which they based their conclusions. Of the thirty-two who replied, twenty-one said their data either been lost or accidentally destroyed. Dr. Wolins analyzed seven sets of data that did come in and found errors in three significant enough to invalidate what had been passed off as scientific fact.
Of course, research fraud is nothing new. Cyril Burt, the late British psychologist who became famous for his claims most human intelligence is determined by heredity, was exposed as a fraud by Leon Kamin, a Princeton psychologist. It seems that the “coworkers” responsible for Burt’s research findings could not be found to have actually existed! There is even evidence that Gregor Mendel, father of the gene theory of heredity, may have doctored the results of his pea-breeding experiments to make them conform more perfectly to his theory. Mendel’s conclusions were correct, but a statistical analysis of his published data shows that the odds were 10,000 to one against their having been obtained through experiments such as Mendel performed.
Doctors’ unethical behavior is not limited to the medical business. A doctor whose name is practically synonymous with development of a major surgical procedure was convicted of five counts of income tax evasion for omitting more than $250,000 from returns for 1964 through 1968. A few years ago the chairman of the Board of the American Medical Association was indicted, convicted, and sentenced to eighteen months in jail after pleading guilty to participating in a conspiracy to misuse $1.8 million in bank funds. According to the FBI, he and his codefendants had conspired to “obtain unsound indirect loans for their own interest. . .paying bank funds on checks which had insufficient funds to back them. . .and defrauding the government. . .”
Keep in mind that these shenanigans are going on at the highest levels of the medical profession. If this kind of dishonesty, fraud, and thievery is going on among the bishops and cardinals of Modern Medicine at Yale and Harvard and the National Academy of Sciences and the AMA, imagine what is going on among the parish priests at the other medical schools and medical societies!
Perhaps the most telling characteristic of the profession that is supposed to deliver health care is that doctors, as a group, appear to be sicker than the rest of society. Conservative counts peg the number of psychiatrically disturbed physicians in the U.S. at 17,000 or one in twenty, the number of alcoholics at more than 30,000, and the number of narcotics addicts at 3,500 or one percent. A thirty-year study comparing doctors with professionals of similar socio-economic and intellectual status found that by the end of the study nearly half the doctors were divorced or unhappily married, more than a third used drugs such as amphetamines, barbiturates, or other narcotics, and a third had suffered emotional problems severe enough to require at least ten trips to a psychiatrist. The control group of non-doctors didn’t fare nearly as badly.
Doctors are from thirty to one hundred times more likely than lay people to abuse narcotics, depending on the particular drug. At a semiannual meeting of the American Medical Association in 1972, surveys cited showed that nearly two percent of the doctors practicing in Oregon and Arizona had been disciplined by state licensing authorities for drug abuse. An even larger percentage got into trouble for excessive drinking. Even the AMA admits that one and one-half percent of the doctors in the United States abuse drugs. Various reform and rehabilitation measures over the years have not changed these percentages. Keep in mind that these figures represent only the identified cases. In Illinois, for example, Dr. James West, chairman of the Illinois Medical Society’s Panel for the Impaired Physician, reported that four percent rather than two percent of Illinois doctors are narcotics addicts. He further estimated that eleven-and-one-half percent were alcoholics - one in nine.
Suicide accounts for more deaths among doctors than car and plane crashes, drownings, and homicides combined. Doctors’ suicide rate is twice the average for all white Americans. Every year, about 100 doctors commit suicide, a number equal to the graduating class of the average medical school. Furthermore, the suicide rate among female physicians is neatly four times higher than that for other women over age twenty-five.
Apologists for the medical profession cite several reasons for doctors’ high rate of sickness. The drugs are easily available to them; they must work long hours under severe stress; their background and psychological makeup predisposes them to stretch their powers to the limits; and their patients and the community make excessive demands on them. Of course, whether or not you accept these reasons, they don’t explain away the fact that doctors are a very sick group of people.
Nonetheless, I prefer to look for more reasons. Fraud and corruption in the research process comes as no surprise to anyone who witnesses the lengths to which drug and formula companies go to doctors to their way of thinking. Free dinners, cocktails, conventions, and subsidized research fellowships still are only superficial explanations. When you examine the psychological and moral climate of Modern Medicine, you begin to get closer to understanding why doctors are so unhealthy.
Medical politics, for example, is a cutthroat power game of the most primitive sort. I much prefer political politics, because there you have the art of the possible, which means you have to compromise. Medical politics is the art of sheer power. There is no compromise: you go right for the jugular vein before your own is torn out. There’s no room for compromise because churches never compromise on canon law. Instead of a relatively open process in which people with different interests get together to try to get the most out of the situation that they can, in medical politics there is a rigid authoritarian power structure which can be moved only through winner-take-all power plays. Historically, doctors who have dared to change things significantly have been ostracized and have had to sacrifice their careers in order to hold to their ideas. Few doctors are willing to do either.
Another reason why doctors are less prone to compromise is because doctors tend to restrict their friendships to other doctors. Close friendships between doctors and non-doctors are nowhere near as frequent as among other professions. Consequently, doctors rarely have to defend their opinions among people who don’t share their background and who might offer a different point of view. Doctors can develop their philosophy in relative privacy, foray at intervals into the public scene to promote these ideas, and then rapidly retreat to the security of other doctors who support the views of the in-group. This luxury is not available to others in influential positions in public life.
Of course, doctors do see their patients. But they don’t see them as people. The doctor-patient relationship is more like that between the master and the slave, since the doctor depends on the complete submission of the patient. In this kind of climate, ideas can hardly be interchanged with any hope of the doctor’s being affected. Professional detachment boils down to the doctor rendering the entire relationship devoid of human influences or values. Doctors rarely rub elbows with non-doctors in any other posture but the professional.
Furthermore, since the doctor’s ambitions project him into the upper classes, that’s where his sympathies lie. Doctors identify with the upper class and beyond, even. They view themselves as the true elite class in society. The doctor’s lifestyle and professional behavior encourage autocratic thinking, so his conservative politics and economics are predictable. Most doctors are white, male, and rich—hardly in a position to relate effectively with the poor, the non-white, and females. Even doctors who come from these groups rarely return to serve and “be with” them. They, too, become white, male, and rich for all practical purposes and treat their fellows with all the paternalistic contempt other doctors do.
When asked where doctors learn these bad habits, I used to reply that doctors learned them in medical school. Now I realize they learn them much earlier than that. By the time they get to premedical training, they’ve picked up the cheating, the competition, the vying for position — all the tricks they know they need if they want to get into medical school. After all, our university system is modeled after the medical schools, and our high schools are modeled after our universities.
The admissions tests and policies of medical schools virtually guarantee that the students who get in will make poor doctors. The quantitative tests, the Medical College Admission Test, and the reliance on grade point averages funnel through a certain type of personality who is unable and unwilling to communicate with people. Those who are chosen are the ones most subject to the authoritarian influences of the priests of Modern Medicine. They have the compulsion to succeed, but not the will or the integrity to rebel. The hierarchy in control wants students who will go through school passively and ask only those questions the professors can answer comfortably. That usually means they want only one question at a time. One of the things I advise my students to do in order to survive medical school is to ask one question but never ask two.
Medical school does its best to turn smart students stupid, honest students corrupt, and healthy students sick. It isn’t very hard to turn a smart student into a stupid one. First of all, the admissions people make sure the professors will get weak-willed, authority-abiding students to work on. Then they give them a curriculum that is absolutely meaningless as far as healing or health are concerned. The best medical educators themselves say that the half-life of medical education is four years. In four years half of what a medical student has learned is wrong. Within four years of that, half again is wrong, and so on. The only problem is that the students aren’t told which half is wrong! They’re forced to learn it all. Supervision can be very close. There is no school in the country where the student-teacher ratio is as low as it is in medical school. During the last couple of years of medical school, you frequently find classes of only two or three students to one doctor. That doctor has tremendous influence over those students, through both his proximity and his life-and-death power over their careers.
Medical students are further softened up by being maliciously fatigued. The way to weaken a person’s will in order to mold him to suit your purposes is to make him work hard, especially at night, and never give him a chance to recover. You teach the rat to race. The result is a person too weak to resist the most debilitating instrument medical school uses on its students: fear.
If I had to characterize doctors, I would say their major psychological attribute is fear. They have a drive to achieve security-plus that’s never satisfied because of all the fear that’s drummed into them in medical school: fear of failure, fear of missing a diagnosis, fear of malpractice, fear of remarks by their peers, fear that they’ll have to find honest work. There was a movie some time ago that opened with a marathon dance contest. After a certain length of time all the contestants were eliminated except one. Everybody had to fail except the winner. That’s what medical school has become. Since everybody can’t win, everybody suffers from a loss of self-esteem. Everybody comes out of medical school feeling bad.
Doctors are given one reward for swallowing the fear pill so willingly and for sacrificing the healing instincts and human emotions that might help their practice: arrogance. To hide their fear, they’re taught to adopt the authoritarian attitude and demeanor of their professors. With all this pushing at one end and pulling at the other, it’s no wonder that doctors are the major sources of illness in our society. The process that begins with cheating on a biology exam by moving the microscope slide so that the next student views the wrong specimen, that continues with dropping sugar into a urine sample to change the results for those who follow, with hiring others to write papers and take exams, and with “dry labbing” experiments by fabricating results, ends with falsifying research reports in order to get a drug approved. What begins with fear and fatigue over exams and grades ends with a drug or alcohol problem. And what begins with arrogance towards others ends up as a doctor prescribing deadly procedures with little regard for the life and health of the patient.
My advice to medical students is always to get out as soon as possible and as easily as possible. The first two years of medical school are survivable because the students are relatively anonymous. The student should try his or her best to remain so, since if the professors don’t know him they can’t get to him. The last two years are more personal, but the student has more time off to recover from the assaults. If a student simply does enough work to pass and doesn’t get all wrapped up in the roller derby mentality, he or she can make it to the finish line relatively unscathed. Then, as soon as the student is eligible for a state license, I advise him to quit. Forget residency and specialty training because there the professionals have the student day and night, and he can really be brainwashed. That’s when the real making of the Devil’s priests occurs.
Doctors are only human. But so are the rest of us, and sometimes we need the services of all-too-human doctors. Because the doctor-priest acts as a mediator or a conduit between the individual and the powerful forces the individual feels he cannot face alone, a faulty conduit can result in some very powerful energy flowing into the wrong places. For example, when doctors are compared with other people in evaluating retarded and other handicapped persons, those who always give the most dismal predictions and the lowest evaluations are the doctors. Nurses are next lowest, followed by psychologists. The group that always gives the most optimistic evaluation is the parents. When I’m faced with a doctor who tells me a child can’t do certain things and parents who tell me that the child can do them, I always listen to the parents. I really don’t care which group is right or wrong. It’s the attitude that counts. Whatever attitude is reinforced and encouraged will prove true. I know doctors are prejudiced against cripples and retarded people because of their education — which teaches that anyone who is handicapped is a failure and is better off dead — so I can protect my patients myself against the doctors’ self-fulfilling prophecies of doom.
Yet doctors continue to get away with their attitude and their self-serving practices. Even though doctors derive a great deal of their economic status and power from insurance companies, the doctors are in control. So much in control, in fact, that insurance companies generally act against their own interests when the choice is that or weaken the power of doctors. Blue Cross and Blue Shield and other insurers logically should be searching for methods of decreasing unnecessary utilization of medical services. Occasionally, we see half-hearted attempts in this direction, such as the flurry of rules requiring second opinions before elective surgery, or the every-so-often policy of discontinuing reimbursement for procedures long fallen into oblivion. These efforts are more window dressing than anything else. They are introduced with considerable fanfare, rapidly generate a groundswell of controversy, and then quietly slip away. Regardless of how well-intentioned they are, they still address themselves only to the peripheral aspects of medical care and not to the areas where real money is to be saved. If insurance companies really wanted to cut costs, they would promote reimbursement for a wide range of simpler, more effective, cheaper procedures — such as home birth. And they would allow reimbursement for measures that restore and maintain health without drugs or surgery — such as diet therapy and exercise.
One of the most fascinating statistics I’ve ever run across is one that was reported by the Medical Economics Company, the publishers of the Physician’s Desk Reference. Among other questions, they asked a representative sampling of more than 1,700 people, “If you learned that your doctor had lost a malpractice suit, would it alter your opinion of him?” What amazes me is that seventy-seven percent of the people said NO!
Now I don’t really know if that means that people expect their doctors to commit malpractice or if they don’t care whether he does or not!
I do know that the insurance companies are bamboozled by the doctors into spending more money than they have to. I also know that only about seventy doctors lose their licenses every year — despite all the obvious corruption, sickness, and dangerous malpractice. Here we come to one of the truly wondrous mysteries of Modern Medicine. Despite (or because of?) all that fear and competition among medical students, doctors are extremely reluctant to report incompetent work or behavior on the part of their colleagues. If a hospital, for example, discovers malpractice by one of its doctors, the most that will happen is the doctor will be asked to resign. He won’t be reported to state medical authorities. When he seeks employment elsewhere, the hospital will most likely give him a shining recommendation.
When the famous Marcus twin-brother team of gynecologists were found dead of narcotics withdrawal during the summer of 1975, the news that the doctors were addicts came as a surprise to everyone but their colleagues. When the brothers’ “problems” were noticed the year before by the hospital staff, the twins were asked to take a leave of absence to seek medical care. When they returned to New York Hospital-Cornell Medical Center, they were watched for signs that they had improved. They had not. Were they then whisked off the staff and kept out of touch with patients before anyone was seriously harmed? Were they reported to state licensing authorities? No. They were told in May that as of July 1, they would not be allowed to work in the hospital. They were found to have died within days after they lost the privilege to admit patients to the hospital.
Another favorite example of doctors allowing their colleagues to commit mayhem on unsuspecting patients occurred in New Mexico. A surgeon tied off the wrong duct in a gall bladder operation and the patient died. Although the error was discovered at autopsy, the doctor was not disciplined. Apparently, he wasn’t taught the right way to do the operation, because a few months later he performed it again, wrong — and another patient died. Again, no punishment and no surgery lesson. Only after the doctor performed the operation a third time and killed another person was there an investigation resulting in the loss of his license.
If I had to answer the question of why doctors are so reluctant to report negligence in the practice of their colleagues yet so cutthroat when it comes to medical politics and medical school competition, I go back to the basic emotions engendered in medical school: fear and arrogance. The resentment doctors are taught to feel for each other as students is transferred to the patients when the doctor finally gets into his own practice. Other doctors are no longer the enemy as long as they don’t threaten to rock the status quo through politics or research which doesn’t follow the party line. Furthermore, the old fear of failure never goes away, and since the patient is the primary threat to security — by presenting a problem which must be solved, much like a medical school test — any mistake by a single doctor threatens the security of all doctors by chalking one up for the other side. Arrogance on the part of any professional group is always directed at the outsiders that the group fears most — never at the members of the same profession.
Obviously, doctors get away with more arrogance than any other professional group. If Modern Medicine weren’t a religion, and if doctors weren’t the priests of that religion, they wouldn’t get away with anywhere near so much. Doctors get away with substantially more than priests of other religions, because of the peculiarly corrupt nature of Modern Medicine.
All religions promote and relieve guilt. To the extent that a religion is able to encourage useful behavior by promoting guilt and relieving it, that religion is “good.” A religion which promotes too much guilt and relieves too little, or which encourages the wrong kind of behavior—behavior which will not result in the improvement of the welfare of the faithful — is a “bad” religion. An example of how a religion promotes and relieves guilt is the almost universal proscription against adultery. Obviously, if religions didn’t try to make people feel that adultery was “wrong” and encourage them to feel guilty about it, more and more people would do it and necessary social structures would weaken. People wouldn’t know who their parents were, property could not be orderly transferred from generation to generation, and venereal disease could threaten the existence of an especially energetic culture.
Doctors are so powerful precisely because they have, as priests of the Church of Modern Medicine, removed all the old guilts. Modern Medicine invalidates the old guilts which, strangely enough, held people to their old religions. Nothing is a “sin” anymore, because there is a physical consequence, the doctor has the power to fix you up. If you get pregnant, the doctor can perform an abortion. If you get venereal disease, the doctor can give you penicillin. If you are gluttonous and damage your heart, the doctor can give you a coronary bypass. If you suffer from emotional problems, the doctor has Valium, Librium, and other narcotics to help you get by without caring, or feeling. If those don’t work, there are plenty of psychiatrists.
There is one “sin” that Modern Medicine will make you feel guilty about: not going to the doctor. That’s OK, because the doctor is the priest who takes away every other guilt. How much harm can there be in guilt that drives you to the doctor every time you feel sick?
The doctor-priest gets away with a lot because he can claim to be up against the very Forces of Evil. When a priest is in a touchy situation and the probability for success is dismal, he escapes blame by saying that he’s up against the Devil. The doctor-priest does the same thing. When the prognosis is not good, he retreats into his mortality and admits that he’s only a man up against the Devil Then, if he wins, he’s a hero. If he loses, he’s a defeated hero — but still a hero. Never is he seen in his true light—as the agent of the Devil.
The doctor never loses, though he plays both sides against the middle and takes bigger risks than necessary. That’s because he has succeeded in identifying his rituals as sacred and potent regardless of their real efficacy. He uses his holiest implements to raise the ante and make the game more ominous than it really needs to be. If a mother comes into the hospital with her baby in the breech position and the fetal monitor says the baby is in distress, the doctor loses time in declaring it a life-and-death situation — which, indeed, becomes once he starts to perform a Caesarean-section delivery. Biologically, the doctor knows the C-section is dangerous. But game is no longer being played by biological rules. It’s a religious game, a ceremony, and the priest calls the shots. If mother and child survive, the priest is a hero. If they die, well . . . it was a life-and-death situation anyway.
The doctor never loses: only the patients lose. The adage that a doctor buries his mistakes still applies. We used to refer mistakenly to doctors as airplane pilots. If the plane goes down, the pilot goes down with it. But the doctor never goes down with the patient.
Doctors also escape blame by claiming that their failures are caused by their successes. If you point out, for example, that a disproportionate number of premature babies seem to be turning up blind in premie nurseries, the doctor will say that it’s the price you have to pay. “Gee, we managed to save these little I- and 2-pound babies. Of course they all end up blind and deformed. They’d be dead if we didn’t save them.” Doctors use the same excuse with the problem of diabetic blindness. The reason we have so much diabetic blindness, they say, is because we have succeeded in keeping so many diabetics alive longer. Doctors will use this “we managed to keep them alive longer” excuse for every disease they have trouble treating successfully — which includes all the major causes of non-accidental death. They absolutely ignore the biological facts that creep in and point the finger at Modern Medicine’s mismanagement of both health and disease. Doctors even manage to get away with blaming their own disease on their successes. When you point to the large numbers of dishonest, unhappy, and just plain sick doctors, the excuse usually runs something like this: “The reason for the psychological disability is our tendency to be compulsive, perfectionistic, easily given to a sense of guilt if our clinical efforts fail.” A president of the American Medical Association offered that one.
Doctors protect themselves further through the sacred language of the priest. A religion must have a sacred language to separate the discourse of the priesthood from the lowly banter of the masses. After all, the priests are on speaking terms with the powers that seep the universe on course. We can’t have just anyone listening in. Sacred language of doctors is no different from jargon developed by any elitist group. Its main function is to keep outsiders ignorant. If you could understand everything your doctor was saying to you and to other doctors, his power over you would be diminished. So when you get sick because of the generally filthy conditions in the hospital, he’ll call your infection nosocomial. That way, you’ll not only not get angry at the hospital, but you’ll feel privileged to have such a distinguished sounding disease. And too scared to get mad.
Doctors use their semantic privileges to make you feel stupid and convince you that they are genuinely privy to powers that you’d better not mess with. As long as their rituals are mysterious, as long as they don’t have to justify them biologically, they can get away with anything. They’re not even subject to the laws of logic. Doctors will, for example, justify coronary bypasses by saying that everyone who has one feels better. But if you ask to be treated for cancer with laetrile because everyone you know who has been treated with it feels better, your doctor will tell you that it hasn’t been scientifically proved effective.
Semantic isolation also serves to disenfranchise the individual from the healing process. Since the patient has no hope of knowing what’s going on, let alone assisting, why allow him or her any part in the process at all? The patient gets in the way of the ritual, so get the patient out of the way. That’s one reason why doctors aren’t interested in helping patients maintain their health. To do that, they’d have to inform them rather than work on them. Doctors aren’t going to share information, because that means sharing power.
To back them up, doctors have an enormous tonnage of technological gadgets which proliferates alarmingly. First of all, the patient must stand in awe of the array of machinery the doctor assembles to attack his problem. How could any single person — other than the doctor, who has the power — hope to control such forces? Also, the electronic wizardry adds weight to the doctor’s claim that he “did everything he could.” If it’s just a doctor standing there with a black bag, “all that he could” doesn’t mean very much. But if the doctor throws the switches on $4 million worth of machinery that fills three rooms, that means he did “all that he could” and then some!
Typical of any developed religion, the ceremonial objects in which the most power is concentrated reside in the Temple. The higher the status of the temple, the more machinery within the walls. When you get to the cathedrals and the little “Vaticans” of Modern Medicine, you are up against priests who have the weight of infallibility behind them. They can do no wrong, so they are the most dangerous.
The reforms that have been introduced in an effort to solve some of the problems I’ve talked about in this chapter don’t impress me as doing very much good. Rehabilitation programs, for example, don’t really attack the roots of the sicknesses doctors seem to fall prey to. That may be a result of their shying away from exposing the problem as a disease of the core of Modern Medicine. Of course, doctors are not trained to attack the core of any problem, merely to suppress the symptoms.
Attempts to keep doctors’ knowledge up-to-date also do little good, since what doctors don’t need is more of the same kind of information they received in medical school. That’s precisely what they get in most continuing medical education programs. They’re taught by the same people who taught them in medical school. Who’s responsible for keeping them properly informed?
As I’ve already said, you have to protect yourself. To do that, you need to remember the two major attributes of doctors: fear and arrogance. What you have to do is learn how to work on his fears without challenging his arrogance until you have the winning hand. Since doctors are scared of you and what you can do to them, you shouldn’t hesitate to use that fear. Doctors are scared of lawyers, not because lawyers are so powerful but because lawyers can ally themselves with you, whom the doctor really fears. If a doctor does you dirty, sue him. It is in courts and juries that you’re most likely to find common sense. Find a good lawyer who knows a lot about medicine and who is not afraid to put a doctor through the ringer. If there’s one thing a doctor doesn’t like it’s to be in court on the wrong end of a lawyer — because that’s one place where the patient has allies that can effectively challenge the doctor’s priestly immunity. The increase in malpractice suits is encouraging, since it means more and more people are being radicalized to the point where they challenge the doctor’s power to determine the rules.
If your doctor gives you trouble but not enough to take him to court, you need to be careful about how much you challenge him —not because of what he can or cannot do to you, but because how far you go will determine your effectiveness. If a doctor threatens you and becomes angry, you should stand up to him. Don’t back down. Threaten him back. When a person really threatens a doctor, the doctor almost always backs down if the person shows that he means it. Doctors back down all the time because they figure, “What do I need this one kook for?”
It’s important, though, not to threaten a doctor unless you are prepared to carry through. In other words, don’t reveal your rebellion until you have to, until you have the emotional commitment and the physical capability to carry on a successful campaign. Don’t get into an argument with a doctor with the hope of changing his mind on anything. Never say to the doctor who’s treating you for cancer with traditional chemotherapy, “Doc, what do you think about laetrile?” You won’t get anywhere, and you won’t get any laetrile, either. Don’t say to the doctor who recommends a security bottle for your baby, “But I’m breastfeeding and I don’t want to do that.” Don’t bring your doctor columns from the newspaper expecting him to change his mind or try something new. Don’t challenge him until you’re ready with an alternative action. Do your own homework.
What does a Catholic do when he decides that his priests are no good? Sometimes he directly challenges them, but very seldom. He just leaves the Church. And that’s my answer. Leave the Church of Modern Medicine. I see a lot of people doing that today. I see a lot of people going to chiropractors, for example, who wouldn’t have been caught dead in a chiropractor’s office a few years ago.
I see more and more people patronizing the heretics of Modern Medicine.
CONFESSIONS OF A MEDICAL HERETIC
By Robert S. Mendelsohn, M.D.
Published by Contemporary Books
ISBN Number 0-8092-4131-5
Available from Amazon Books and elsewhere.
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