Seperating the Wheat From the Chaff
Vitality April 2002

By Helke Ferrie

The most frequently asked question put to me by my readers is: “How can one tell the difference between fact and lies in medicine?” Knowing how to identify reliable information about therapies is vital to your health. By not reading the fine print, today’s health care consumers can get killed in the supermarket of modern medicine. Illness is a growth industry: bypass surgery costs US $ 10 billion annually. The six largest pharmaceutical companies are worth US $ 500 billion. With advertising telling us how they all are determined to cure us, the fact is that annually illness increases: thyroid disease by 14%, depression 23%, hypertension 20%, gastric ulcers and pain each 10%. (The only good news is that antibiotic use has decreased in one year by 17%.) Impotence must be a really rampant (and fabulously lucrative) condition - how else to explain the astounding decision to let Viagara be advertised on television? Worst of all, many doctors fit the bumper sticker: “Don’t follow me, I’m lost too.” That is nothing new. However, today we do have options. Being sick and faced with conflicting information from “experts” was always hell, not taking charge of one’s life always potentially fatal. Anybody who still clutches the baby-blanket-thought, “But isn’t my doctor supposed to know?” better grab a soother too. This article is not for the faint-hearted.

Examples:

On April 9, 1998 the world’s premier science journal, Nature, reported that Vitamin C might promote improper cell mutations - i.e. may cause cancer. This was front-page news worldwide only because Vitamin C’s importance in prevention and treatment, from cancer to the common cold, is so well established. In order for this “news” to be true, patients and scientists worldwide would have to find a new explanation for their thousands of main-stream reported positive results with Vitamin C. It’s rather like somebody suggesting that the earth may be flat after all; continuously verified experience to the contrary is universal. Anthropologists tell us that hunter-gatherers get on average 20,000 mg of Vitamin C daily. They have none of our chronic diseases nor cancer which the World Health Organization warns, every second person is now expected to get. Yet, those Vitamin C-stuffed bushmen replicate their DNA without cancer-causing mistakes. Interestingly experimental monkeys and apes are given 50,000 mg of the stuff daily to ensure their optimal health. Fortunately, medical scientists from universities all over the world demolished this report in a joint response published in Nature on September 17 that same year. So what’s wrong?

Simple: the experiment was conducted in a test-tube, not in a living organism. Vitamins function as catalysts in complex living systems. At any moment some 100,000 chemical events take place in a cell, all inter-related. Vitamin C speeds up antioxidation, affecting the whole system. Removing the entire living context of a bio-chemical event leads to irrelevant results. Some 80 years of real-life, real-time experience with Vitamin C is not affected by a test-tube abstraction. Later, it was reported (not on the front page, of course) that the graduate student who handled the DNA samples made some mistakes his boss didn’t notice. Ooops. (Another report suggested that it clogs arteries – later shown to be an interpretation mistake: Vitamin C causes the walls of blood vessels to become thicker and stronger, thereby preventing nutrient loss into surrounding tissue.)

The Medical Post reported on November 20, 2001, the results of a study involving 3,654 diabetics randomized to be given 400 IU of Vitamin E or a sugar pill (placebo). Not surprisingly, the first group did no better than the second. Since the blood vessels of diabetics slowly turn to stone through calcification, Vitamin E is essential prevention. Where is the mistake? Simple: the daily recommended allowance (RDA) of this vitamin for healthy people until 2001 was 400 IU (now it is 1,000 IU). Diabetes is characterized by an inability to maintain adequate levels of nutrients. Giving such patients the previous RDA (measured to be just enough to keep healthy people ticking), is like putting out a house fire with a garden watering can. Did the researchers who designed this study not know Vitamin E’s known mode of action? Why didn’t they bother to check those diabetics’ blood levels of this vitamin and compare them with the norms for healthy people? Why did they not check the current medical literature on Vitamin E in diabetes and give them amounts known to make a dramatic difference? Were they persuaded/paid to mis-design the study?

The (in-)famous arthritis drug Celebrex provides a good example for industry’s corrupting influence. The Journal of the American Medical Association warned in 2001 that taking this drug increases a person’s chance to get a heart attack by 55%. While reducing arthritic inflammation, it increases blood pressure and frequently causes “rhabdomyolysis”, i.e. rotting away of the heart muscle causing death. In the US this drug is now under FDA review – the body count made it necessary. In Canada it is still celebrated in full-page color ads in most major national magazines. (For an excellent overview of Big Pharma’s deadly effect, read the transcript of CBC Ideas of March 13, 2001.) What Third World countries achieve in death tolls with civil wars, we do just as effectively with drugs. While the former ruin their economies, we make deadly medicine central to our economy.

Chelation therapy is a non-surgical intravenous procedure that removes arterial plaques; it is cheap and has never had a fatality. By-pass surgery is expensive and has a mortality rate of ca. 20% and doesn’t last. A report tabled before the US Congress in 1993 by chelation doctors revealed that many heart surgeons, when they or their families become sick with heart disease, prefer chelation. On January 23, 2002 the journal of the American Medical Association published a study showing chelation doesn’t work. Yet, what about the many studies showing the opposite published in equally reputable journals and involving much larger cohorts? Chelation therapy was developed by US military medical researchers in World War II and is now taught by the American Academy for Advancement in Medicine. It isn’t a skill a doctor acquires by reading a manual. The protocol is some 50 years old and, through experience with close to 2 million patients has been much refined. Reading the details of the treatment protocol used in the above study reveals that its wasn’t even approximated. Especially serious is the omission of vitamin E supplementation, central to chelation therapy. Of course, the study was sponsored by Pfizer, the world’s largest manufacturer of cholesterol-lowering drugs – a huge market threatened very seriously by chelation therapy. Since mainstream doctors rarely know about chelation, they sadly tend to believe this nonsense.

Happily, the best and most thorough research exposing stupidity and corruption currently comes from the mainstream. There are at least as many truth-seekers as there are paid liars. Last year a large international study was published by one of the world’s top journals, The Lancet (vol. 358, 2001), re-evaluating the usefulness of mammography for breast cancer screening. The Canadian Medical Association (CMAJ March 5, 2001) did the same for prostate-specific antigen (PSA) testing used for early detection of prostate cancer. Both concluded that these testing methods have done nothing to reduce mortality, but a lot for increasing unnecessary surgery and radiation because of the frequent false positive results. The evidence also has considered undeniable that radiation exposure from repeated mammography causes breast cancer. These studies are challenging a multi-billion dollar industry. (For radiation-free breast screening call Cycle of Life Technologies in Toronto)

The November 2000 issue of Geriatrics and Aging reported that movement disorders in elderly patients are generally caused by the cocktail of drugs they get without anybody bothering to check how these chemicals interact. They impair the central nervous system seriously, which then causes broken hips and loss of independence. This tragic situation is primarily the result of carelessness. Most elderly are on drug plans. Giving them yet another prescription (without checking the readily available information on adverse effects and interactions) is the fast way out. In January of this year, The Annals of Emergency Medicine reported that adverse effects due to drug interactions in the elderly is the primary reason for their hospitalization.

The Detective's Tools:

If we ask ourselves: “What do the great detectives of literature - Sherlock Holmes, Hercule Poirot, Miss Marple, Judge Dee, Father Brown, and Chief Inspector Morse - have in common?” we get three answers that apply equally to medicine and murder. Their seemingly extraordinary powers are founded on one mental quality: doubt in what appears obvious. Secondly, their success comes from one carefully considered question: “Who benefits?” Third, and most important, they never shrink from the truth, however awful it may turn out to be, when they find it at last.

The days are gone where medical knowledge was inaccessible to lay persons. We have the Internet and there are many excellent newsletters and books written by doctors who find curing patients more exciting than pharmaceutical company perks. Fortunately, corruption is neither absolute nor uniform, and as its activities, in the long run, inevitably must self-destruct. In 1998 the American Medical Association reported that over the last 30 years the side-effects from properly prescribed and correctly taken drugs cause annually more deaths than from AIDS, suicide and homicide combined: the equivalent of a jumbo jet going down daily. That statistic caused the tide to turn.

The Turning Tide

Mainstream medical research is as fed-up as patients with the spin doctoring, the Big Pharma bullying, and the shoddy science designed to deceive. (On February 6 this year the Globe & Mail reported that 87% of doctors have ties to the industry and that CMA ethical guidelines are being drastically revised.) In September last year all the medical journals of the world joined forces and announced new guidelines for research submissions. Big Pharma is reeling. The Canadian Association of University Teachers published the Olivieri Report providing hard-hitting recommendations which show how deep the rot has become. The editorials in the Canadian Medical Association’s journal often sound like the outraged articles in the alternative medical press. The CMAJ of Sept. 18, 2001: “The duty of universities is to seek truth. The duty of pharmaceutical companies is to make money for their shareholders… universities that subordinate the disinterested search for truth to other ends, lose credibility … research can either serve or subvert the public interest.” The war has begun.

How to Protect Yourself

In North America, according to the FDA and the Journal of the American Pharmaceutical Association, the cost of serious drug side effects is now annually US $ 177 billion. For every US $ 1.11 spent on a prescription drug another US $ 1.77 is needed to treat the harm it does. Here is what you can do to protect yourself during times when you must use a prescription drug or need to wean yourself off one.

Adverse side effects are caused by their toxicity and because they cause depletion of vital nutrients. When supplemented during periods when some of those drugs might be unavoidable, you can prevent getting even sicker while the drug does its work. No known adverse interactions are known with these. If you want to know more about interactions between drugs and neutraceuticals: www.NaturalDatabase.com . To see for yourself what the drug industry must admit to regarding serious side- and long-term effects, consult the Compendium of Pharmaceuticals and Specialties, updated annually and available for you to see at any pharmacy; take a photostat copy of the info on the prescription drug home to consider carefully. Never take a drug merely on the basis of the short blurb handed to you with your prescription: that and the 30-second explanation (if any) your doctor gave you is NOT “informed consent”, as federal law requires.

Antibiotics are vitally important emergency drugs, but they deplete good bacterial gut flora and knock out your Vitamin C and Magnesium reserves very fast. Always take these at the same time as well as acidophilus and other probiotics. None of these interfere with the antibiotics’ desired activity.

Antidepressants, also sometimes a necessary emergency drug, deplete B vitamins, Selenium, Zinc, L-Gluthathione, Calcium, Magnesium, Vitamin C, and essential fatty acids. Take all of these at the same time.

Drugs for ADHD reduce brain blood flow patterns and need to be supplemented with Vitamins B complex, C, Selenium, Magnesium, essential fatty acids and Ginko Biloba. These are especially important when weaning a person of these drugs.

Diabetic medications deplete Chromium, Vitamin C, Magnesium, Vitamins B6 and B12, Folic Acid and essential fatty acids must be supplemented.

All hormones (synthetic only!) such as estrogens, progesterone, the Pill deplete B-complex vitamins, Calcium, Magnesium, Vitamins C, E, Beta-Carotene and essential fatty acids. Why take the synthetic stuff when the natural stuff is available in compounding pharmacies everywhere and without depleting any of the above? Indeed, the natural stuff increases absorption of all of the above as well as Melatonin production, so you sleep well again.

Arthritis medications deplete Calcium, Magnesium, Vitamin C and B-Complex, Folic Acid, Glocosamine sulfate and essential fatty acids and need to be supplemented.

Corticosteroids should be used as an emergency drug only; long-term use frequently causes osteoporosis, growth problems in children, and depression. It depletes and needs supplementation with the following even short-term: Vitamin C, B Complex, Potassium, Zinc, Selenium, Calcium, Magnesium, Co-Enzyme Q 10 and essential fatty acids.

Diuretics and all the “statin” drugs used for cardiovascular disease drastically reduce: potassium, Calcium, Magnesium, the B- complex, E and C vitamins, zinc, Co-Enzyme Q 10 and essential fatty acids.

Note: Any drug that reduces the B-complex vitamins has the potential for serious mood-alterations ranging from depression to suicide and homicide (see David Healy’s book). Hence so many suicides and homicides are associated with drugs like Prozac, a classic B Vitamin enemy; it has had more adverse reactions recorded by the FDA than any other drug in pharmaceutical history. Similarly, any drug that lowers Vitamin C levels has the potential to be carcinogenic.

S. Epstein, et al. , The Breast Cancer Prevention Program: What the Cancer Establishment Won’t Tell You And Why, Macmillan, 1999

J.Thompson et al., The Olivieri Report, Canadian Association of University Teachers, Lorimer Ltd., 2001

D. Haley, Politics in Healing, Potomac Valley Press, Washington DC, 2000

D. Healy, The Anti-Depressant Era, Harvard, 1997

A.Hoffer, Vitamin C and Cancer: Discovery, Recovery, Controversy, Quarry, 2000

A. Hoffer, Factoids: Or Lies Some People Tell You About Vitamins, $10, e-mail: hoffer@IslandNet.com

T. Moore, Deadly Medicine, Simon & Schuster, 1995

T. Moore, Prescription Disaster, Simon & Schuster, 1999

J. Robinson, Prescription Games, McClelland & Stewart, 2001

M. Zimmerman, Science, Nonscience, and Nonsense, Johns Hopkins University Press, 1995

Resources:

1. croft@cwhealth.com join his e-mail list for information on drugs, therapies, medical politics
   
   
2. Center for Health and Policy Studies, University of Calgary, sj.lewis@home.com and ask for information
   
   
3. National Network on Environments and Women’s Health for safety issues on drugs nnewh@yorku.ca
   
   
4. International information on medical safety hai@hai.antenna.nl
   
   
5. A website devoted entirely to Vitamin C : www.orthomed.com/#point as is www.abic.net .
   
   
6. For the monthly goldmine of information on medicine, medical politics, and therapies that work, nothing beats the Total Wellness newsletter by Dr. Sherry Rogers: 1-800-846-6687 or www.prestigepublishing.com
   
   
7. For the best (guranteed bull-shit-free!) medical journal accessible to the general reader, written by doctors and researchers subscribe to The Townsend Letter for Doctors and Patients, 360-385-6021 or www.tldp.com, e-mail: tldp@olympus.net
   
   
8. Canadian Schizophrenia Foundation, 16 Florence Ave., Toronto, M2N 1E9 for booklets containing mainstream studies showing the beneficial effect of vitamins and minerals for mental health problems.