Postcard from the Road Less Travelled
Vitality Feb. 2004

By Helke Ferrie

“Two roads diverged in a yellow wood,
And sorry I could not travel both
And be one traveler, long I stood
And looked down one as far as I could
To where it bent in the undergrowth ….

I shall be telling this with a sigh
Somewhere ages and ages hence:
Two roads diverged in a wood, and
I took the one less traveled by,
And that has made all the difference.”

Frost’s famous poem is cited usually in support of decisions made in opposition to a prevailing worldview and by people who stood their ground against the pressure of conventional wisdom. But this great poem also has the power to illuminate the very darkest corners of the human heart where decisions were made to travel roads once less traveled and which became highways of misery and death for untold numbers of people.

Consider the fact that the wealth of the pharmaceutical industry is based primarily on three classes of drugs: cholesterol lowering drugs to prevent and treat heart disease and stroke, synthetic hormone therapy, and anti-depressants. Furthermore, remember that cancer therapy has become an industry focused on chemotherapy and radiation (with or without surgery). Yet, the historical fact is that there once were two roads. Medicine chose the one we now know as the standard approach to cancer, heart disease, menopause and mental illness. That choice powerfully reinforced assumptions about causes as well. Indeed, the road chosen will inevitably unfold an environment that determines an entire world view. If you always travel in mountains, you cannot imagine the ocean.

Now let us suppose that the other road had been taken instead and had revealed that cholesterol has nothing much at all to do with the causation of heart disease and stroke; that synthetic hormone replacement therapy is a potentially fatal mistake; that treating cancer with toxic drugs and toxic rays stems from a fundamental misunderstanding of the nature of cancer; that anti-depressants do not restore the mind but actually can cause worse depression, suicide and violence as well as cancer, diabetes and irreversible brain damage.

This is a bit like imagining what would have happened if America had never been discovered. Then the tobacco industry would never come into being. While history cannot be switched into reverse like a movie, science can return to a previous bifurcation and start all over again – now full of important knowledge gained from enormous past mistakes. Since the time of the ancient Greeks, Western civilization has held that learning tends to come through suffering, and modern medicine is currently once again on that steep learning curve. This time, the task is not to control infection, find new surgical methods, discover the trick of anesthesia, and invent the concept of public health. This time, medicine needs to recognize how perilously close it is to moral bankruptcy. Only good medicine can undo the damage of bad medicine, and there are some amazingly good doctors out there working to renovate their profession.

The Road to Fame and Fortune

When Dr. Max Gerson provided the proof to US Congressional Committees in the early 1950’s that even metastasized cancer can be cured through dietary regimes, alone the American government appears to have been primarily motivated by agonized idealism: they chose to give financial support for the development of radiation therapy, hoping that after the nightmare of Hiroshima there would be something beneficial in radiation for humanity. It took over 40 years before the National Institutes of Health finally was forced to acknowledge that no advance had been made in all that time in prevention, cure, or mortality rates, and serious research into the Gerson therapy is finally starting (see www.dr-gonzalez.com.

Turning to look briefly at the standard therapies for depression, cardiovascular disease, menopause, and asthma, we find that here the emperor is not only naked, but armed and dangerous. Two books show us how medicine was led down the garden path some 50 years ago. The first is b y Dr. David Healy, the internationally renowned pharmacologist and psychiatrist whose expert testimony in law suits against various drug companies including Eli Lilly, the manufacturer of Prozac, resulted in that drug’s dirty laundry finally becoming public knowledge. His book, Let Them Eat Prozac, published a few months ago by the Canadian Association of University Teachers and Lorimer, is so spell-binding a medical who-dunit, that it was appropriately reviewed by the master of spy novels, John Le Carre who wrote: “This very important book will demonstrate beyond your worst dreams that the commercial needs of Big Pharma are the natural-born enemy of independent scientific research.”

Dr. Healy observes that the development and use of antidepressants followed the same path as that of the cholesterol-lowering drugs both based on a choice of assumptions favoring patents, rather than scientific integrity and patient outcome. He writes that: “ the net effect of control” over science by business is that “certain aspects of the field (of research) are selected over others. A premium is put on certain data in a manner that builds up bandwagons and skews the field. This process is not confined to psychiatry. The cardiovascular field, for instance, contained in the late 1960’s competing views as to what were important factors in preventing heart attacks. One lead suggested that blood homocysteine levels were important, another that blood lipid levels were the critical factor. The homocysteine hypothesis suggested a range of dietary approaches … such as taking folate or B vitamins. The lipid-lowering approach gave rise to a generation of patented drugs” which are “among the most profitable agents ever made. Rival evidence for homocysteine was effectively buried for almost 30 years.” (He cites the prestigious journal The Lancet No. 354. 1999 and a new textbook published in 2000 which is finally leading us out of the toxic mess of lipid-lowering drugs; their worst property is that they deplete the body of CoEnzyme Q 10, the very substance upon which the health of the heart depends, thereby causing heart attacks.)

Dr. Healy’s book describes how scientists who came up with evidence showing how dangerous the Selective Serotonin Reuptake Inhibitor (SSRI) class of drugs really might be, were silenced through classic, criminal dirty tricks . They didn’t work on him, thank god, for here we have drugs like Paxil, which carry a 750% risk of cancer – compared to a daily pack of cigarettes a 400%. (The older antidepressants “merely” doubled that risk.) Increased risk of suicide, diabetes, irreversible neurological damage, weight gain, loss of sexual libido and homicidal violence are among SSRIs other devastating side-effects. A group of pharmacists decided to publish an entire 600-page compendium on the nutrient depletion of all synthetic drugs, published it in plain language for their victims and with all the biochemistry for the doctors duped into prescribing them.

How does this system work? An internet search under the heading “financial conflicts” locates for the past decade more than 3,000 articles in The Lancet alone, with the new England Journal of Medicine, the Journal of the American Medical Association and the British Medical Journal not far behind with about a thousand more between them. These articles focus on profit and deception. Thus, the profit margin on Prozac is 224,973 % per bottle of 240 pills (FDA figures). The deception is found in the fact that less than 50% of all research published is written by the researchers whose names are in the by-line; they are ghost written by industry hacks hired by Big Pharma. Dr. Healy calls this “the slippery slope” that gives a senior researcher an “extensive publication record very little of which he actually produced”; indeed, he or she “may actually get to the point of expressing surprise that people still write their own articles”. This is how “control of what is said passes from the clinician to the companies.” The result is that “big names become big names in this field [as chosen by the companies] because they are pushed forward by pharmaceutical company support.” These big names then also sit on the committees that draft the standards of practice for the doctor treating us (JAMA Feb. 6, 2002)

And the money is good: “The returns for those at the top of this pyramid, including consultancy fees, fees for being principal investigators in trials, speaker’s fees, chairman’s fees, and other fees, may be substantial”, some being “in the range of US $ 800,000 a year.” But money is never the only incentive, and companies know that and make all this “personally gratifying. These players will be seen as the opinion leaders in the field … [they] may be too busy to do hands-on scientific work or even see patients, and may never observed the effects of the drug they are talking about, will be the ones informing others about that drug in some exotic location, by delivering a message worked out by the pharmaceutical company beforehand. All that is really required of the big name is to remember the brand name of the drug and to stick to the script.”

Speaking about the trail of suicides, Dr. Healy estimates that the SSRI Zoloft increases the risk of suicide 2,000 times, or 1 per every 10 prescriptions. He concludes by observing that “one of the many chilling things about the Prozac story is that a mistake or a conspiracy would probably have cost fewer lives. Instead, a sequence of historical events [a path made into a highway] made a poor drug fashionable … and removed the natural cautions and safeguards...” He wonders, “Could key employees in a company like Eli Lilly have been expected to appreciate the scale of the public health disaster ahead of them … and that, ultimately more harm than good would be done?”

The similar story can be told about synthetic hormones about which it was known since 1973 that they and those also containing estrogen from pregnant horses are potentially carcinogenic. But menopause had been made into disease like depression, and soon manufacturer made profits of US $ 37 million annually on just Premarin; it seemed not to bothered them that the yellow dye used in the sugar coating was listed as a separate, additional carcinogen by the FDA since the early 1980’s. How many doctors read FDA reports? In 2002 the facts finally became public in the Journal of the American Medical Association. Since then, in Canada alone, the use of synthetic estrogens dropped by 65%. Everything we were told turned out to be the opposite: HRT does not appreciably protect against osteoperosis (vitamin D does the job properly), memory loss (natural-source testosterone does that nicely), but it does dramatically increase the risk of cancer, heart attack, stroke and blood clots, and in combination with synthetic progesterone it’s even worse. Inevitably, the medical profession will now begin to learn about the natural-source hormones.

Meanwhile, the drug industry is facing litigation on an astronomical scale: Bayer in Germany is currently fighting 11,300 lawsuits world-wide. Monsanto is facing liabilities in the range of US $ 2.3 billion. Merck downsized by thousands of employees last year; international financial institutions consider them poor risks. Finally, the medical profession in 2001 drew up a new international Physicians Charter to revive basic rules of ethical conduct known since Hippocrates. The leading journals now insist that articles must actually be authored by the person submitting them. Last September, the World Health Organization informed Britain’s National Institute for Clinical Excellence that they better sever their ties to the drug industry if they wish to remain credible, as did the Canadian Association of University Teachers in 2002 to all our medical schools. That’s some progress.

A skullduggery tale of equally tragic scope is found in Dr. Felix Ravikovich’s book The Plot Against Asthma and Allergy Patients published by my company past November. Coming from the former Soviet Union, where no Big Pharma existed and no highway into Drug Hell was therefore paved, doctors struck out on a different path developing effective and safe low-tech methods for the treatment of asthma and allergy that naturally carry none of the toxic side-effects and growth-stunting properties of cortisone therapy. His book, like Dr. Healy’s, reads like a detective story as he takes us through the scientific discoveries made in Europe and North America about the self-healing properties of the body’s own histamine which can reverse asthma and allergy when used therapeutically. Yet, this information published in the leading medical journals world-wide remains hidden from patients. Indeed, the very scientists who made these great discoveries, remain mysteriously silent and do nothing to support clinical application, even though the World Health Organization in 2002 declared asthma to be a world-wide epidemic. Every 5th child in Canada suffers from it.

Worse even is the fact that the standards of practice enforced by the regulatory agencies, such as the Ontario College of Physicians and Surgeons, expressly forbade Dr. Ravikovich in 1994 the use of histamine in treating asthma – in spite of the protest of hundreds of patients on a CBC Fifth Estate show in the late 1990’s. No patient was harmed, thousands were helped, and his research is found in the leading journals - not good enough for Ontario, it seems. In December, the head of immunology of the Swiss government’s medical research institution in Davos, Professor Cezmi Akdis, wrote to Dr. Ravikovich: “Today I received your book and read most of it with great enthusiasm. My congratulations for bringing out such a good book which covers your life-time experience in a very critical area …. It will hopefully awake some clinical allergists.”

Dr. Healy’s and Dr. Ravikovich’s exposes of the dark side of medicine will eventually make a difference. This valuable information is not lost. Dr. Ravikovich is fond of quoting a Russian saying, “If the door is bolted against the truth, it will come in by the window.”

These books will assist patients and the doctors.

Alternative Medicine Guide, Heart Disease, Stroke and High Blood Pressure, Future Medicine Publishing 1998

Dr. E.M. Cranton, Bypassing Bypass Surgery, Hampton Roads 2001.

Dr. M. Gerson, A Cancer Therapy, 6th ed., (1958) Gerson Institute, 1999

Dr. G. N. Grob, The Deadly Truth: A History of Disease in America, Harvard University Press, 2002

Dr. D. Healy, Let Them Eat Prozac, Lorimer, 2003

Dr. J.M. Larson, Depression-Free Naturally, Ballantine, 1999

Dr. J.R. Lee, What Your Doctor May Not Tell You About Breast Cancer, Warner Books, 2002

R. Pelton et al, The Nutritional Cost of Prescription Drugs, Morton Publishing, 2000 (edition for non-medical readers) and/or Drug-Induced Nutrient Depletion Handbook, Lexi-Comp & American Pharmaceutical Association, 2001,
ISBN 1-930598-45-9 (for doctors and health care professionals)

Dr. F. Ravikovich, The Plot Against Asthma and Allergy Patients, KOS, 2003 (the appendix to this book contains advice on how to become politically involved to restore this therapy to Canadians)

Dr. U. Reiss, Natural Hormone Balance for Women, Pocket Books, 2001

Dr. J. Whitaker, Reversing Heart Disease, Warner Books, 2002