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By Helke Ferrie 1999 was an important year in the politics of medicine. The events set in motion then have caused fundamental changes in the way people perceived food, drugs, doctors, and government, and I reported on many of these changes. I had no clue then about the scams underpinning Big Medicine and that it was focused on symptom control and profit from disease and death, nor did I know then about Big Agriculture being hell-bent on profits - never mind the health of soil, water, and essential bacteria. I knew nothing about the abysmal ignorance of our doctors who are super-educated in mostly what doesn’t much matter to human survival. I knew hardly anything about nutrition and its primary roles of preventing and curing illness. As for environmental toxins, I had to get sick myself first. I groan when I remember having allowed in the early 1980’s my own kids to have their fluoride treatments in school, never having worrying about mercury amalgam fillings, and trustingly followed medical advice I would now classify as bordering on the criminal: I was on Premarin hormone replacement therapy for 17 years, following an unnecessary hysterectomy during which the surgeon removed my ovaries for good measure! Thanks to my discovery of mega-vitamin therapy, after reading Linus Pauling, I did not become a HRT statistic, and thanks to an environmental medicine physician, I found out about non-toxic bio-identical hormones. That’s how I also learned that doctors who cure patients and protect them from harm tend to wind up in disciplinary investigations and even lose their licenses. When somebody once mentioned to me at the Consumer Health of Canada office that the cure for almost all cancers was known since about World War II, I smiled and said, “Oh, really…” as one does with a nutcase from whose company one wants to escape quickly. That same guy handed me a copy of Dr. Max Gerson’s 1958 book, A Cancer Therapy – Results of Fifty Cases. I read it, and everything I had once believed evaporated. I had no idea that nutritional medicine worked. Journalism works with the 5 W’s and the 1 H: Who? Where? When? What? Why? and How ? Investigative journalism adds a crucial 7th question: Is it true? Working for Vitality started in the summer of 1999 with a call from editor Julia Woodford who asked me if it was really true what she had read in an Alive issue about the Ontario College of Physicians and Surgeons. She, who had by then worked for over a decade for the promotion of natural medicine, knew a thing or two about scams. Nevertheless, she was floored by my story about how the College of Physicians and Surgeons of Ontario (CPSO) had, a decade earlier, deceived its own physician membership by sidestepping all discussion about scientific evidence for chelation therapy and then asserting to the government, that there was no scientific of clinical justification for it; this resulted in chelation therapy, without the CPSO membership’s knowledge, being outlawed in Ontario. Using it, instead of drugs for heart disease cases and to prevent the loss of limbs from diabetic neuropathy, cost some doctors their licenses. In 1999, the new Regulated Health Professions Act had just come into force and suddenly chelation was no longer illegal; the Ray government had cut that odd section. Julia wanted the documentation on which my Alive article had been based. I provided it to her, and she asked me to write for Vitality about chelation and the CPSO’s determination to silence doctors who then had begun to take Multiple Chemical Sensitivity seriously. Pesticides were still good for us, and doctors stating otherwise were in deep trouble. It is only ten years ago that doctors were routinely expected to refer people complaining about feeling sick from pesticide or perfume exposure to psychiatrists. Today, even the CPSO offices have a no-scent policy! Quebec, Ontario, and a few other provinces now have bans on the use of cosmetic pesticides. But dinosaurs are a hardy bunch whose predatory-focused brains resist anything new: now the CPSO is after doctors diagnosing and treating chronic Lyme disease which, in contrast to the rest of the world, is for them not a “proper diagnosis”. See my new book at the EXPO: Ending Denial – The Lyme Disease Epidemic – Canada’s Public Health Disaster (order from 519-927-1049). In June of 1999, the CPSO, after an investigative process and trial that had begun in 1988, found environmental medicine physician Dr. Jozef Krop “guilty” of diagnosing and treating environmental illness. Ironically, that was the same day on which the international medical journals published the diagnostic criteria for MCS, developed jointly by Canadian university professors and doctors with medical researchers at Johns Hopkins medical school and MIT in the US. This needed publicity and the defense needed financial support, both of which Vitality contributed to consistently. I was one of Dr. Krop’s patients, having been poisoned by pesticides, specifically Roundup from our neighboring golf course and DDT while growing up in
In 1999,
The Kwinter Bill became law in 2000, amending Ontario’s Medicine Act. Many provinces have since then made the same legislative change which, essentially, decriminalizes progress and change in medicine and protects the doctor-patient relationship from third party interference (i.e. from the interests of political and financial bottom lines). In each province, the Establishment powers fought to the last to prevent it. That same year, Dr. Shiv Chopra, then still with Health Canada, and his colleagues Drs. Gerard Lambert and
Also in 1999, in Europe, that infamous semi-secret multi-national brotherhood of government bureaucrats and corporate honchos, which we all know as Codex, was startled when the public finally got it and mounted a series of successful legal challenges over the next 10 years to that stealthy corporate take-over of food, drugs, water, genes, medicines, and farming. I kept you informed on those unfolding stories; the war is not over, but it will be. Unlike wars with guns and bombs, wars for truth and liberty leave behind deeper understanding and transformed minds even among those who once were enemies. In 1998, I met Dr Abram Hoffer for the first time, and in 2005 was privileged to publish his scientific memoirs. He died in his nineties on May 27 this year. All my articles, one way or another, over the past decade, reported on what he and Linus Pauling called “orthomolecular medicine”, meaning the “right molecule” (nutrient, not synthetic toxin) which sets healing in motion. The conceptual basis applies to everything from farming, to disease, to mental health. Orthomolecular thinking is reality-based, not profit-based. That is the challenge of our time. For me the most important development in the past ten years, regarding food and drugs, was the Human Genome Project. Big Business was certain that “cracking” the DNA code would lead to enormous wealth and control. Well, undoubtedly lots of people are trying, and in part succeeding, to making money out of this project. However, the big surprise was that most of the regulatory genes (which control entire systems) are exquisitely vulnerable to environmental toxins, and so those toxins will have to go if we want to keep those genes working. Not much profit there. Furthermore, the nice, neat fit hoped for between genes and specific diseases did not materialize either. Testing people for their allegedly genetically-anchored disease is a pipe dream, too. Every disease, with or without a genetic anchor, needs a trigger to start it, and those triggers are: (1) environmental toxins and (2) lack of the right molecules decreed by nature as essential, namely nutrients. Indeed, the genetic code cracked us. In June 2008, the Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences reported that taking vitamins and minerals can actually “fix genetic defects”. Well, the ghosts of Linus Pauling and Abram Hoffer must be having a great belly laugh! Looking back on the letters I received over the years from Vitality readers, I notice that they used to be requests for information on “good” doctors or dentists. While those are still in high demand and still often embattled, now the letters are far more often about specific nutrients, how they work, which alternative cancer therapy clinic I recommend - not: whether “alternative” is a good idea; that’s taken for granted in such inquiries. Collective attitudes have undoubtedly changed. Blind faith in medical authority is diminishing rapidly. Back in 1998, when a University of Toronto and FDA research project investigated how many people were using “alternative medicine”, the answer was about 50%. Today, about 92% of Canadians find especially herbal medicine acceptable and two thirds use it and other forms of alternative (to synthetic drugs) therapies. Indeed, within just a decade, Canadians understood the fraud involved with genetically engineered foods, and polls consistently show that close to 98% of us don’t want the stuff, and for all the right reasons, namely immune dysfunction and cancer. It is, therefore, interesting that the government’s main worry about the H1N1 vaccine (unnecessary, untested, and dangerous) is that most people might not want it. Politically, that new skepticism in the public mind is reflected in the recent letter many of us received from the federal Minister of Health assuring Canadians that there are absolutely no plans for implementing a program of compulsory vaccinations. The public has become rather like a mouthy teenager – impossible to control, but sometimes can be persuaded to comply. In this case, however, the teenage “f-off” approach might be the wiser choice. Another astounding development over the past decade has been the phenomenal increase in medical fraud – and its relentless public exposure and equally determined pursuit by the courts. Big Pharma cannot make drugs that heal and must resort to pretense, fraud, and glitzy propaganda. Dictatorships and tyrannical systems are always the most vulnerable in their propaganda departments. Public opinion shifts when the lies become obvious. The giant pharmaceutical companies have been crippled by multi-billion dollar liability rulings that have run out of appeals. True, they are explicitly protected from liability with regard to the H1N1 vaccine – but our government remains liable and answerable to the courts, should this become a public health disaster. Indeed, the courts even rule frequently against patents for genetic engineering, making the whole GMO food enterprise increasingly vulnerable to collapse. World-class researchers, who were once duped into cooperating with Big Pharma scams, spill the beans, blow the whistle, come out of their laboratory closets, and raise hell. Corruption is as old as human institutions. I am sure Neanderthals cheated each other over choice mammoth steaks. Nothing new there. What is new today is the hunger for truth – no, for not scandal, but for the truth, facts, verifiable information. In this context I find one of the most helpful developments the rise of the documentary film. Documentaries have become truly educational. I am thinking of the 2001 with the National Film Board’s “The Genetic Takeover” which made a splash around the world. One of the greatest ones surely is the 2004 film, “The Corporation”. Most of the scientists featured in it I got to interview and report on their work in Vitality. Since then, we have had fantastic revelations through “Supersize Me”, the various GMO and Monsanto films, and now “Food Inc.” Ten years ago, the medical, dental, regulatory Establishment was firmly in charge and – like most of us, myself included – often were innocently unaware of the fact that they were in the most horrendous conflicts of interest between their duty to their patients and the industries that got rich on product lines which we now, without any irony, correctly call the Death Industry. When awakening strikes, everybody ceases to slumber, one way or another. Two hundred years ago we lived in a world in which human beings were sold in open markets. Those who questioned such practices were harshly treated because slavery was perceived as indispensable to a thriving economy. When slavery was outlawed in 1832 in Britain, it still took the American Civil War to stop it in this hemisphere, and I was in high school when African Americans finally got the vote. Yet, the change that began in 1832 is inexorably continuing. We are in the midst of such a fundamental change of perception with regard to food and medicine. The Sickness Industry will cease to be the basis of our economy. We have millions of years ahead of us because we are getting smarter.
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