Medicine Gone Wrong?

[sustain...@gmail.com]

“If it be misconduct to use methods and techniques that are unknown
to, or disapproved of, by the vast majority in the [medical]
profession, the profession might never progress.”
— Justice O’Leary, Ontario Court of Justice (Brett et al v. Board of
Directors of Physiotherapy, 1991)

The road to Hell is paved with good intentions. Hell is the place
where people are sacrificed on the altar of corporate greed, a
situation cleverly disguised by assurances of the best of intentions.
Government and industry usher us onto that altar insisting that they
are “serving the public interest,” often perhaps believing it
themselves, as they too can be misled. To stop the mindless
cooperation of our governments with those determined to turn
everything (plants, animals, people, the earth itself) into profit is
the task of our time. Consider the following examples that have now
become urgent:

1) ANTIBIOTIC RESISTANCE has made many infectious diseases
uncontrollable, warned the World Health Organization this year on
World Health Day. “Antibiotic resistance is driven by the
inappropriate and irrational use of antimicrobial medicines, including
in animal husbandry,” the WHO announced, observing that the world may
return to “the pre-antibiotic era” because none will work anymore.

2) ONTARIO'S COLLEGE OF PHYSICIANS AND SURGEONS (CPSO), started to
produce their Non-Allopathic Draft Policy last year. If adopted, it
will regulate complementary medicine physicians right out of
existence, and completely control what treatments patients may get –
all with the stated noble aim of “protecting the public.” Apparently,
informed consent legislation did not give them a moment’s pause, nor
did all that case law which protects the new and non-traditional, the
most famous of which is the Brett decision cited at the top. The
assumptions underlying this policy are appalling and the rules
proposed are absurd, formally defined as “being at variance with
reason.” Doctors who actually are trained in something other than drug
therapy, (i.e. members of the Ontario Medical Association’s Section on
Complementary Medicine) were not included in the CPSO’s policy
committee, so health professionals who effectively know nothing about
complementary medicine came up with this policy.

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3) EARLIER THIS YEAR, a Bill proposed in the U.S. Congress died on the
order papers after a two-year battle. The U.S. Food Safety Enhancement
Act proposed 10-year jail sentences for “misbranding,” defined as
“citing peer-reviewed science about a dietary supplement.” Could the
CPSO have taken its cues from the same guys who drafted that U.S. Bill
in 2009? Their draft policy is not just science-challenged, but devoid
of science. It seems Health Canada also has taken its guidance from
that extinct Bill, since their latest acts include restrictions on the
sale of certain types of Oil of Oregano (the one plant-derived
antibiotic that works against antibiotic resistant bugs), along with
probiotics and various enzymes of central importance to alternative
cancer therapy.

Meantime, Health Canada’s insupportable pronouncements on the safety
of antibiotics in animal feed, its periodic messing with effective
natural health products, the recurring attacks on natural health
products in the U.S., the CPSO’s non-allopathic policy review – are
all justified as diligently serving the public interest. And we are
assured that these initiatives are all supported by exhaustive reviews
of the peer-reviewed scientific literature. The problem is, these
regulators are about as transparent as a brick wall: they won’t reveal
just which literature they did review!

ANTIBIOTIC RESISTANCE
In August 2011, following over four years of hearings, former Health
Canada scientists Shiv Chopra and Margaret Hayden lost their appeal
for wrongful 2004 dismissal by then Prime Minister Paul Martin who
fired them for “insubordination.” The case is now headed for the
Supreme Court. Martin had overruled the legal immunity granted to the
subpoenaed scientists when testifying before the Senate on how bovine
growth hormone and various antibiotics cause cancer and trigger
antibiotic resistance in bacteria, viruses and some parasites. The PM
had also ignored the 1978 Supreme Court decision that had established
the “obligation” for every public service employee charged with
protecting citizens’ health and safety to make public (blow the
whistle on) inappropriate pressures to ignore law and science.

Though Chopra was recognized for his “35-year record of exemplary
service” at Health Canada, he was fired because he refused to obey the
Privy Council order to “allow mass scale use of antibiotics in food-
producing animals.” (The use of antibiotics in food-producing animals
gobbles up about 70% of all antibiotics produced – the animals are
thereby fattened up (antibiotics cause profitable weight gain), and
Big Pharma’s profits remain prosperously fat as well.)

Chopra refused, as he describes in his book Corrupt to the Core,
because this would “lead to the widespread emergence of ‘superbugs,’
causing untreatable food-borne disease and death in people.” As the
WHO informed us recently, this is exactly what happened.

After Chopra and Hayden were fired, the government immediately
approved all those deadly antibiotics – the very ones that had been
outlawed two decades ago in Europe. As a result, many Canadian
hospitals, unlike European ones, are now unsafe because of antibiotic
resistant superbugs.

Antibiotic resistance was discovered in 1961. By 1997 the WHO
recommended a ban on antibiotic use in food-producing animals, and the
FDA wanted major restrictions; the next year Europe adopted these
measures and Chopra and Haydon were commanded to testify before the
Senate about the government’s pressure to ignore the evidence on
antibiotic resistance and carcinogenic hormones. (For the mechanism
involved see Nature, October 28, 2008.) We know what antibiotic
resistance is and how it works, yet the Canadian government does
nothing to stop the irrational use of antibiotics.

David Hutton, of the Federal Accountability Initiatives for Reform,
observed in his excellent article on Chopra and Haydon in the Toronto
Star, August 13, 2011, that Canada’s unconscionable support of
corporate interests despite scientific warnings of harm to human
health is now endangering the safety of the planet’s food supply.
(Visit http://bit.ly/rsR9Eh to read the full story.)

THE CPRSO'S DRAFT POLICY ON NON-ALLOPATHIC MEDICINE
In 2010, the CPSO commenced a review of the existing CAM
(complementary and alternative medicine) policy first formulated in
1997. There is, of course, no such thing as CAM – therapies that work
are measurable events and open to scientific investigation. CAM was a
term coined by Big Pharma. In 1997, the CPSO came up with this policy
as a public relations effort to neutralize the constant public outrage
over the (then ongoing) prosecution of Dr. Jozef Krop for diagnosing
and treating multiple chemical sensitivity (MCS). One of that first
policy’s silliest provisions was that every doctor had to arrive at a
“conventional diagnosis first” before venturing forth into the
supposedly murky territory of nutritional and environmental therapies.
The following year, a bombshell hit when the U.S. FDA released data
showing that the fourth leading cause of death was properly prescribed
pharmaceutical drugs. Today, further analysis by Johns Hopkins Medical
School has shown that drug therapy is the leading cause of death.

The original 1997 CPSO policy was a bastion of bizarre logic since it
prevented any new illness from being officially recognized. Multiple
Chemical Sensitivity is an immune system crash caused by synthetic
chemicals and especially pesticides – chemicals also used in many Big
Pharma drugs. Successful treatment requires detoxification from
pesticides and many common drugs. Thus, MCS can never become a cash
cow for the pharmaceutical and environmental toxin industries whose
profits depend on obtaining patents for synthetics.

In the past decade, the anti-pesticide and anti-perfume campaigns
worked so well that prosecuting a doctor for taking MCS seriously has
become less likely because of growing public awareness. In 2008, the
Canadian Human Rights Commission recognized this condition and ordered
accommodation and availability of treatment. Today, in the CPSO
building where only a decade ago Dr. Krop was judged to have “fallen
below the standard of practice” for recommending total avoidance of
synthetic scented products for his asthmatic MCS patients, posters in
the building’s bathrooms show a canary wearing a gas mask – the
explanation states that scented products can cause a potentially life-
threatening asthma attack, and to please be considerate.

Also, over the past decade, those medical groups that the CPSO tended
to dismiss as unscientific (homeopathy, naturopathy, Chinese medicine)
got themselves organized with their own colleges under the Regulated
Health Professions Act. This evidently alarmed the CPSO, especially as
more and more of their member physicians began to study scientific
journals and take training in new medical approaches. The elephant in
the room is the fact that so-called alternative medicine actually
arises from mainstream medical research. There is nothing alternative
about alternative medicine. This development is, however, a problem
for the profit-generating engine run by Big Pharma, whose fuel is –
us.

So the CPSO, which staunchly defends whatever the status quo of the
day may be, went in for the kill on three fronts:

1) In 2009 they persuaded the Ontario Liberals to pass a “snitch
law” (Bill 171) which requires every doctor to rat on any other
doctors if he/she thinks that a colleague is doing something
potentially weird. We know what that leads to (from all the secret
police activities that were supported by such snitch laws in those
totalitarian regimes of recent history). It means that the ignorant
are in charge, and the CPSO can shoot first and not ask questions if
it doesn’t want to.

2) In July 2011, the CPSO had the Ontario Liberals remove a vitally
important legal safeguard which states: “The fact that a member uses
or recommends a non-traditional treatment is not, by itself,
determinative of deficientclinical ability.” (Section 26 (2) of
Regulation 114/94). That gives the CPSO the freedom to go after any
doctor who, in their irrefutable opinion, is recommending non-
traditional treatments.

3) The third action is this current draft policy. It is an attack on
medical science itself, and will, if adopted, ensure that at least in
Ontario nothing new can happen. This draft policy requires that any
non-allopathic diagnosis and treatment (as arbitrarily defined by the
CPSO) must be supported by randomized controlled studies (RCTs). So
determined is the CPSO to “protect the public and guide the
profession,” they didn’t notice that this key requirement is not the
universal medical gold standard they pretend it is. RCTs compare
synthetic drug therapies with each other usually for chronic
conditions. RCTs are virtually impossible to design for nutritional
interventions because no ethics committee would permit a control group
to be deprived of such essentials to survival. Worst of all, about 80%
of all medical practice has no RCT’s or even regular studies to
support it – a fact the CPSO is on record as having recognized in
various disciplinary investigations. Most of what happens in everyday
medical interventions is based on tradition and adjusted as outcomes
show what can be improved. In fact, most drugs are only partly
understood and used in a trial-and-error fashion, usually off-label.

University of Toronto’s Dr. Ross Upshur has published his research on
these types of studies and observes that RCTs are fundamentally flawed
because their methodology is vulnerable to bias, fraud, plain errors
of interpretation, and inappropriate assumptions. If done well (i.e.
with patient outcome not money as the goal), they are of course very
useful. But if current medical practice was compelled to have such
RCTs first before doing anything, this is what would happen, according
to Upshur: “Evidence of the optimal combination of agents to treat
Alzheimer’s disease would require 127 randomized trials, 63,500
patients and 286 years.” As for trials for the treatment of stroke,
one would need at least 31 RCTs and require an enrollment of 186,000
patients, all of which would last 155 years. If standard medicine were
forced to wait for RCTs to justify action, people would simply have to
die first.

THE RAGING GRANNY RESPONDS

The CPSO’s review committee also simply ignored that huge amount of
mainstream published research on nutrition, toxicology, and related
areas (see Vitality, March 2011) and won’t tell anybody just exactly
what research they did rely on. In my response, available on the CPSO
website, I observed: “By what authority this working group believes
they can just assert having studied some unspecified non-allopathic
information and then tell [doctors] how to do their work, is beyond
comprehension. The term that springs to mind is bullying.”

When asked what was missing in this policy I replied: “The science! …
Given that the policy clearly insists that [doctors] must abide by
allopathic standards … it is frankly amazing that there is no
reference … to that master guide of allopathic medicine, namely the
current 2008 edition of the Users’ Guides to the Medical Literature –
A Manual for Evidence-Based Clinical Practice, published by the
American and Canadian medical associations and edited by McMaster
University’s Gordon Guyatt (who coined the term “evidence-based
medicine”) and JAMA’s Drummond Rennie. The editors and … contributors
are among the world’s most luminous allopathic medical lights … well-
known … for exposing the wave of fraud in current medical research and
for their commitment to restoring the ethical and scientific
credibility of medicine. Editor Drummond Rennie states that the
purpose of this Guide is to “… free the clinician from practicing
medicine by rote … to put a stop to clinicians being ambushed by drug
company representatives … to end [doctors’] dependence on out-of-date
authority.”

That definitely does not seem to be the purpose of this ill-conceived
CAM draft policy!

If you wish to get involved, first browse the CPSO website, then come
and hear my talk at Whole Life Expo about this topic, and buy my new
book – the proceeds of which will hopefully establish a medical
defence fund. This battle for good medicine has reached such heights
of absurdity and lows of deception, it is becoming outright
entertaining. When we laugh at the irrational we begin to transcend
the darkness and will become creative warriors.

Catch Helke Ferrie at the Whole Life Expo on Saturday, Nov. 26 at 6:00
pm when she will give a presentation on freedom of choice in health
care.

http://vitalitymagazine.com/article/medicine-gone-wrong/